Drone Command

The labor secretary had delivered more bad news earlier in the day about current employment stats, especially labor participation rates. They were continuing to fall. More and more Americans were simply giving up looking for work, and the great middle class was shrinking. The growing income disparity wasn’t merely a social-justice issue, it was a matter of grave political and economic concern. A thriving capitalist democracy depended on a thriving middle class. A few wealthy people standing on a wide base of impoverished masses was a formula for social unrest, economic catastrophe, and maybe even revolution.

It was the Texas congresswoman Dolly Waddlington who had been giving him the most hell on the subject of the middle class in the last few weeks. The fiery little Republican was infamous for the safari trophy heads hanging on her office walls, each identified with a brass plaque listing the location and date of her kill. Her favorite was the giant snarling javelina. She claimed to have shot the four-hundred-pound charging pig between the eyes with a .357 Magnum revolver less than three yards away before it might have ripped her to shreds with those big yellow tusks. She named the fearsome beast ISIS.

But it was the political hides she’d skinned over the years on both sides of the aisle that impressed Lane. An unapologetic nationalist, Waddlington had been blistering his ear on the phone for weeks now about the pernicious Chinese trade deficit that ran in the hundreds of billions of dollars year after year. Besides locking out U.S. firms from their markets with unfair regulations, manipulating the yuan-dollar relationship, and their virulent industrial espionage program, it was cheap Chinese labor and bad American tax laws that really fueled the trade disparity. No wonder China’s economy was now the largest in the world.

As a Democrat, Lane bristled at the idea that his party continuously put the interests of multinational corporations over the average American worker, hiding behind the gilded skirts of the big labor unions who themselves should have been fighting against America’s crippling trade deficits with China and the rest of the world. But most of the big union bosses were as corrupt as many of the congressmen he’d worked with on both sides of the aisle. Some of the very biggest corporations making the most obscene profits from cheap overseas labor were the Democrats’ biggest contributors. Historically, the Democratic Party had been the champion of labor, but in the last two decades, the labor they were championing was foreign, particularly Chinese.

Many of the same millionaires and billionaires in his party who complained — rightly — about gross income inequality were partly to blame for the crisis. The middle class was being decimated by so-called free-trade agreements and, worse, the pursuit of profits at the expense of people and the nation. High-tech corporations like HP, Facebook, and Microsoft decried the shortage of American engineering talent, which simply wasn’t true. Lane had seen the numbers. Every year, twenty-five thousand freshly minted American engineering graduates couldn’t find STEM employment. But the high-tech companies kept clamoring for H-1B visas — fast-ticket entry for lower-wage technical talent from abroad — even as they were laying off tens of thousands of high-wage American employees year after year, exporting their jobs to lower-paying foreign labor markets.

Just like the Republicans, too many Democrats gladly signed on to legislation that incentivized job exports and eagerly encouraged unfettered immigration, legal and otherwise. Those two policies alone were enough to decimate the great American middle class and trap the working poor. Lane was proud to be an old-school Kennedy Democrat, the party that used to work hard for working Americans instead of working hard to get reelected. He was determined to right the ship.

Lane took a swig of his beer. The sweet bite of the Revolver’s blood orange peel was a perfect match to his savory grilled cheese.

He thought about his meeting back in the Tank. Something nagged at him. The United States was spending tens of billions of dollars every year preparing for a potential war with China. So why in the hell are we even trading with them? The answer sickened him.

By locating their operations in China for the cheap labor — and in order to avoid the labor regulations that protected American workers — too many American corporations had unintentionally helped fund China’s massive military expansion, including the Wu-14 that now threatened America’s carrier fleet, which, ironically, protected the sea-lanes that enriched those American corporations and their officers in the first place.