THE OVERTON WINDOW Read Online Free PDF Page A

debt-fueled economy is entering a spiraling free fall, yet your first reaction was to ignore the needs of the voting public and reward the perpetrators themselves. While foreclosures of your citizens’ homes are breaking all records and unemployment is exploding in every state you’ve been busy dodging audits and nationalizing the mountainous gambling losses ofthe Wall Street elite. For heaven’s sake, you nationalized
General Motors
just to get your union friends off the hook. As you know, those union pensions you just took over are severely underfunded, adding another seventeen billion dollars to your tab. Seventeen billion, I might add, that you don’t have.”
    Arthur Gardner’s silvery voice had been gathering strength until it filled the room to the rafters, point upon point with the swelling command and cadence of a tent-revival preacher calling down the Rapture.
    “Just to stay afloat the government is borrowing five billion dollars every day at ever-rising interest rates from our fair-weather friends in Asia. But that will all come to an end as they see the waters receding from the beach. Sooner or later the truth will be undeniable, that these massive debts can never be repaid, and there’ll be a panic, a worldwide run against the dollar, and through your actions you’ve ensured that the results will be fatal and irreversible.
    “It’s not only happening here, it’s everywhere. Carroll Quigley laid open the plan in
Tragedy and Hope:
the only hope to avoid the tragedy of war was to bind together the economies of the world to foster global stability and peace. And that was done, but with unintended if predictable consequences. Instead of helping each other, these international bankers have all used their power for short-term gains, running up unimaginable debts on the backs of the public. We’re all shackled together at the wrists and ankles as the ship goes down, and, once it begins, this mutually assured destruction will come on us not over months, but overnight. A depression that makes the hell of the 1930s look like heaven on Earth will sweep across this country in a tidal wave of ruin, the scale of which has never been imagined. And when that happens, who do you think the masses will come for? Here’s a little hint: The people who will be held responsible are sitting around this table.”
    The room fell silent. The humming of the projectors was the only discernible sound.
    “Yes, they will come for you. All of you. You built this system; youtold them everything would be fine. It is your lies they will remember when they realize that their money is as worthless as the promises you made them. It is your deceit they will recall when they realize that the future of their children has vanished. And, trust me when I tell you, it is your faces they will picture when they realize that forty-hour weeks at minimum wage have replaced their retirements.
    “How do I know all of this? Simple: When things go wrong, there must always be someone to blame; a villain, if you will. As they say in your neck of the woods, ‘If you’re not at the table, then you’re on the menu.’ If you walk out of here today with the same arrogance you came in with, then you, my friends, will all soon be the special of the day.”
    He paused to take them in again, a half circle of understandably pale, stricken faces lit only by the cold proofs of impending doom projected on the screens around them.
    “But all is not lost,” the old man said. His features softened with the tiniest hint of a knowing smile.
    “Tell us what we need to do.” It was the woman who’d spoken up earlier. Judging by the breathy reverence in her voice, she’d already entered the early stages of baptism into the cult of Arthur Gardner.
    He stepped to a neat stack of identical folders at the near corner of the table and took the top copy in his hands. “Your answer is in here,” he said. “I am a strategist, and a man of some modest renown in that