The Land of Milk and Honey

[TheMann]

New York Times Magazine
August 18, 2020

Seventy-Five Years Of American Progress

"Our World is Today One of Unrivalled Peace, Prosperity and Happiness." These were the words of President Barack Obama, speaking at the rededication of the WWII memorial in Tokyo, Japan, but he could have been saying that about his own country. Mind you, few with any sense would argue that Japan is one of the world's most prosperous nations, but when people talk about nations that have reached the greatest of heights of prosperity and happiness, there is but one nation which is most of the time mentioned in such a statement. And that is indeed the United States of America.

And yet, one does not have to look hard to see that it could have been very different. But what has guided this nation and its three hundred and seventy million residents is both great men and solid principles, a willingness to experiment, learn, ask questions and look out both for ourselves and our fellow man, creating a ground where all of us could rise from any depth and become whatever we seek, given the willingness to do so. As it was said so eloquently by Senator DeGrasse Tyson, we "Choose to build on our knowledge, fording into the depths of ignorance and darkness, not at all afraid to admit what we do not know. There is no shame in that. The only shame is to pretend we have all of the answers."

Indeed, one may say that the story began seventy-five years ago today....

Discussion Thread

 

[TheMann]

Chapter One: The Aftermath of World War II

On August 15, 1945, the greatest conflict in human history came to a merciful end with the announcement by Japan's Emperor Hirohito of the end of the Second World War, that Japan, after eight years of warfare in the Pacific, had surrendered to the Allies. Coming after the atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki days before, this came as a massive relief to all - both the Allies, who did not relish the expected-to-be-monstrous task of invading the Japanese Home Islands, and to Japan, which by this time was suffering badly from the effects of the Allies' blockades and bombing during the war. But what the war had done in many ways was change people, both Japanese and American. Japan's long-held sense of racial superiority had been manifestly shattered, but indeed so had America's.

World War II had forced millions of women into workplaces to allow the men to go off to war, and had also done the same to millions of minorities. Indeed, one of the first American Medal of Honor recipients of World War II was a black cook from USS West Virginia [1], and throughout the war the conflict proved the comradeship of the men of various backgrounds and skin colors. Even as Japanese-Americans found themselves in internment camps, the actions of the nearly all Asian-American 442nd Regimental Combat Team, one of the most decorated American units of World War II, and many black units, most famously the Tuskegee Airmen, made themselves quite justifiably famous. It was a shock to many, and it made the desegregation of the Armed Forces, done by way of an executive order signed by President Roosevelt in April 1944 [2], that much more a reality and a benefit to America's fighting men. Millions of fighting men returned home changed themselves, and many of these sought to change the world they returned home to. This was first seen in cities with large African-American populations both in the South and in the great Industrial cities of the Midwest - Detroit, Chicago, Buffalo, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, Cincinnati - but it did not take particularly for this to take hold across other areas of the nation. And one of the places this was first seen, perhaps logically enough, was in the area of police forces.

The first black WWII veteran policemen began to become junior officers in several cities' police forces in 1946 and 1947, starting in the great industrial cities, several of which had had instances of near race riots during the war. It didn't take long before black police officers were soon being assigned to black neighborhoods, most of the time with white superiors (and in some cases with white partners), but having an easier time patrolling these neighborhoods than many white police officers would have had. This has the effect of also much sooner showing off the problems that racial segregation was having on major communities in the United States. This was less common in the Jim Crow states, but it began making an impact even there. It was also notable that while the world changed, much of America had as well.

The G.I. Bill of 1944, which was used extensively after the war, was meant to allow soldiers easier re-entry into the civilian world, and the cheap mortgages provided by the bill, when combined with many of the new "War Plants" being built on sites further outside major cities, resulted in vast housing development outside of existing cities, though by the late 1950s the cities were following suit with urban redevelopment plans and work to draw back many of those who left for the suburbs. The existence of these depended on cheap transportation - and indeed a massive system of roadways were built to allow easy travel into and out of urban areas, an idea advanced by urban redevelopment plans which focused on the use of cars everywhere.

But that plan got stopped cold in the most unlikely of places - Detroit. And it got stopped in Detroit through a number of unlikely circumstances, one of them being that the largest automaker in the world, General Motors, was massively expanding its transportation operations, wanted not only to dominate the world of automobiles - where it faced stiff competition from rivals Ford, Chrysler and (after 1954) American Motors - but also public transport. To that end, GM had begun advancing public transport companies in the 1950s, seeking advancement of many existing streetcar and railcar systems but also seeking to have bus use expand as much as possible. In Detroit, though, major plans to undertake urban renewal ran into stiff citizen opposition, which resulted in the scrapping of the Chrysler Freeway. GM's movements to advance the city's transport network and its decision to publicly back those who fought to save the Black Bottom community paid massive dividends in the long term, and in the short term it led to many changes of its own. As Detroit began to lose middle-class whites, it gained instead middle-class blacks and whites who had little fear of blacks, as many had fought with them during the war.

GM's efforts also got noticed in another place - Washington. When GM's boss, Charles Wilson, went to Washington as President Eisenhower's Secretary of Defense in 1953, and he felt strongly that America needed a first-class transportation system consisting of all kinds of transport - road, rail, public, water and air. Eisenhower, who had been part of the 1919 Army Convoy crossing the country on the Lincoln Highway and one of those who had been appreciative of the German Autobahns after the war and who recognized many factors. An effective highway system could be highly beneficial to national defense and commerce, but Eisenhower well knew that America's mass transit systems had picked up the slack and then some from fuel rationing during the war and that America's freight railroads had taxed themselves to the limit during the war as well. Both Eisenhower and Wilson advanced the idea of building a highway network, but also establishing ways of keeping rail transit in major cities alive and kicking and providing funds to railroads to combat the problems they faced. Thus, the Transport America Act of 1955 was born, which began the building of the Interstate Highway System and also began the modernization of American rail transport, both public transport and long-distance rail transport of both freight and passengers.

In a bit of an odd twist, one of the first major backers of this was New York's famous (or infamous, depending on the perspective) master builder, Robert Moses. Like most, he had seen what mass transit could do, and after the war his transport proposal frequently added ways of adding public transport systems. Moses' power in New York was nearly unlimited from the immediate post-war era, and he had long seen the automobile as a vehicle more for pleasure than business, though he was not blind to the obvious uses for the car for everyday life. Moses, however, continued his wishes to see many of his major automobile thoroughfares seen more as scenic parkways and less as brutish concrete highways. Moses didn't help himself when he ran the Brooklyn Dodgers out of town in 1957 and made a number of foolish enemies in the early 1960s. Moses did, however, redeem himself in 1962 when he was one of the leaders of the campaign to save Pennsylvania Station, to the point that he organized the takeover of the station by the TBTA in 1963, and the building of the Manhattan Connector between Pennsylvania Station and Grand Central Terminal (completed in 1971) [3] and the Long Island Sound Bridge (completed in 1980) were projects that shaped the faces of New York.

Transport America proved to be a godsend for many communities, but it didn't take long before many of the advantages of smaller-scale redevelopment began to be obvious. One of the largest major urban renewal projects of the post-war era, St. Louis' Pruitt-Igoe projects, was completed in 1954 but had by the early 1960s already started to be known as a bad place, and by the mid-1960s was becoming infamous for its social ills. It would not be long before other projects became much the same, and the problems began to be known. But before then, much was to change....

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in the Brown v. Board of Education decision that de jure racial segregation was a violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. Prior to this decision, two states (Maryland and Missouri) had chosen voluntarily to overturn racial segregation in civic services, but the decision made such discrimination explicitly illegal and paved the way for the civil rights movement. Through the 1950s and 1960s, the Civil Rights Era was to shape America in ways that few could have imagined in 1954....

[1] This is Doris Miller, who had a rather different WWII here, lived through the war and has a rather different life after the war.

[2] IOTL this was done by President Truman in July 1948, but here the actions of Doris Miller and others get rather more attention, and so this happens four years sooner, while the war is still on.

[3] The Manhattan Connector is a rail tunnel just over one mile long that runs directly between the lower-most levels of the two stations. Electrified, it's only used for Amtrak movements. The Long Island Rail Road serves both stations, while New Jersey Transit uses Pennsylvania Station and Metro-North uses Grand Central Terminal.

 

[TheMann]

Part 2 - The Beginnings of the "Times of Change"

The decision by the Warren Court in Brown v. Board of Education made clear something that by 1954 was already well known to many - minority groups in America were now starting to show that they had power and influence, too. Economic prosperity meant that many of the WWII veterans quite open in saying that the Black, Hispanic, Native American and other visible minority groups should have the right to pursue their freedom and prosperity just as much as any other person in the world. The support of many people was embodied in a comment by UAW president Walter Reuther in 1956, after GM was the first company to begin desegregation procedures with the UAW's support: "In America, we hold it as an unshakable truth that all men have rights. This statement does not, can not, just apply to those who have white skin. We are better than that." Despite this, the Civil Rights Movement was most certainly at times not exactly a smooth process, and the social changes would not always go through without nastiness.

While the ugliness in the South was quite notable, in many of the industrial cities the situation was rather better. While difficulties between the police and many minority communities would remain a problem for many years to come, there was not the violence as in many areas of the South. Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee and Pittsburgh by 1960 could boast of a sizable number of black members of local government. Desegregation was already happening steadily by the time of the Little Rock Nine in 1957. In that case, nine black students attempted to go to Little Rock's Central High School because of excellent grades but had to deal with extensive racism as a result, but in this case several local white students took notable efforts to defend them, and Arkansas governor Orval Faubus drew extensive mocking and criticism, first for his decision to call out his state's National Guard to stop students from attending school and then for allowing Little Rock to be one of a number of school districts in the south which chose to close the schools rather than integrate them. The Buffalo News put it rather well in an issue on September 10, 1957:

"This is a stand by a man for the most ludicrous of purposes. After years of trying to avoid desegregation, when the time came to truly integrate children of color into the schools which all the people of Little Rock paid for, this man [Faubus] says that he would rather send the National Guard to make sure that a Federal Court ruling is not enforced. The nine students were chosen for their excellent achievements at school, something even those who run this school admit. So what excuse does the Governor have to justify this?"

Racism was not by any means non-existent in the northern states, it must be said. It was still common in most cities for blacks to be congregated in their own neighborhoods, with communities like Black Bottom in Detroit, Harlem in New York, Bayview-Hunters Point in San Francisco, Watts in Los Angeles, Fairfax in Cleveland and the Fifth Ward in Houston becoming both benefits and curses in their own way. In modern times, few debate that the concentration of African-Americans in such communities almost certainly allowed the creation of their own cultures and social systems, but it also created in many cases a lingering distrust of whites, a point that became very obvious through the early 1960s. But with many of these cities also increasing growing employment and a steady rise in the number of middle-class jobs, when combined with the relatively low wages in these areas, created substantial disposable income for many of these people. This began to manifest itself in the standards of living for many in these communities in the 1950s and 1960s, and while nearly all of these communities would face serious issues with crime and drug abuse in the 1960s, the community structures born during the segregation times would hold strong through the Times of Change.

A new twist to the civil rights movement began in October 1957 in Monroe, North Carolina. This came after NAACP member Dr. Albert Perry and friend Dr. Michael Elliott were attacked by members of the Ku Klux Klan, but local NAACP chapter head Robert Williams' Black Armed Guard group was ready when that happened and exchanged fire with the Klan members, driving most of them off. That incident would be the first of many, culminating in a battle in Uniontown, Alabama, in September 1959 where an armed guard group of the NAACP and members of the KKK - supported by two members of the local police force, a fact learned when their bodies were recovered - resulted in nine people dead and sixteen injured. The local police force attempted to claim that the NAACP members had opened fire on the police and outlawed the organization in the state, but it was discovered that the two dead officers had fired weapons which had resulted in black protesters being killed, and questions about the local police's involvement with the Klan started being asked. In the meantime, the NAACP was debating tactics, namely as the actions of men like Williams were soon proven to have wide support in many portions of the Civil Rights Movement, who claimed that armed resistance to terrorist groups like the Klan would make the job of nonviolent protest easier as they would be less likely to face violent reprisals. This had a significant impact on the Civil Rights Movement's progress in the years to come.

Back north, the spirit of innovation had caught hold at General Motors in a big way, with the company advancing new transit and truck designs, with the articulated NTSC streetcar design, the gas turbine-powered Turbo Titan series of trucks and the radical Chevrolet Corvair compact car. The Corvair would prove to be the big one - the Corvair would be one of the best-selling cars of the early 1960s and introduced a whole generation of American drivers to a car with far better handling than that of the brutes of Detroit's past. Where GM went the rest of Detroit tended to follow, and its rivals in the car industry soon scrambled to catch up with the lead that the company on West Grand Avenue was building. GM's other actions also got noticed - Chrysler bought into the struggling American Locomotive Company in 1964, and Chrysler's internal electrical divisions soon began improving both the design and durability of Alco's products. Ford entered into the transit business as well with their own line of buses, the General series, which launched in 1961 as a rival to GM's New Look series of buses, which launched in 1959.

The first commercial jet airliner services, which began in the winter of 1958-59, added another element to the transport changes in America. The Boeing 707 and its archrival Douglas DC-8 were the first airliners to see service in this field in America (though they were beaten in Europe by the De Havilland Comet), and they rapidly and easily outclassed their propeller-driven counterparts, rapidly shuttling them out of service in the 1960s. They also caused a massive drop-off in the usage of passenger railroads, a problem would would become a massive issue for many such railroads in the 1960s. The Interstate Highway System, begun within weeks of the passage of the Transport America Act in 1955, began to have operational sections as early as 1962, and the growing network of interstate highways made travel easier for all those seeking to move long distances - and part of the act also approved major improvements to many of the US Highway System roads. Travel was becoming easier, and that would make for many changes in demographics in America, as many of the new arrivals in America over time would steadily migrate from the densely-populated Eastern states to more sparsely-populated Western ones. It was a major shift, but how big was not truly known just yet....

 

[TheMann]

Chapter Three: Into the 1960s

1960 saw the third of a series of small but sharp recessions that hit America in the midst of the prosperous post-war period. This was most heavily felt in areas dependent on exports of raw materials, particularly the still heavily-agrarian South and the coal fields of Pennsylvania, the latter struck hard by the recession. While the recession was short, GDP contracted by 3.9% in just ten months, and it was clear that it had had an impact. The election of Democrat John F. Kennedy to replace the term-limited Eisenhower was a tight race, but Kennedy in many ways blew it wide open when civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested in Macon, Georgia, leading a civil rights march. Kennedy leapt on that, calling multiple officials - including, to the surprise of many, the Governor of Georgia - to get him released. Kennedy's close victory over Vice-President Richard Nixon was close enough that it was contested in several states, but in his acceptance Speech, Kennedy made it clear that he felt it critical that he had to work with all Americans in order to advance the nation's interests, and that he felt that the 1960s would be a challenging time in America.

He was more right than he knew.

The election was focused on the economy and the growing geopolitical differences of the Cold War - a 1960 opinion poll found that over half of Americans felt that conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union was inevitable - but in many areas, one of the major issues was indeed civil rights. The President's powerful brother Robert relished the opportunity to make the election about civil rights, believing strongly that he could use this to pick up a vast share of the African-American vote, a number that was growing in most parts of America, including several huge states, including the key states of Illinois and Texas, were helped to go to Kennedy by the support of African-American voters in those states, with one of the key moments of that being the support of Vice-President Lyndon Johnson's campaigning in Texas by famed black war veteran Doris Miller, who was himself seeking election to the House of Representatives. (He was elected as a Democrat with a considerable majority, to the stunned shock of many Texas Democrats.) Kennedy's economic policy was sound, though his decision to continue to attempt to balance government budgets was against the advice of his economic advisors, who felt that tax cuts, which were eventually passed in any case in 1963, would be much more advisable to return the economy to growth. Perhaps most notable of Kennedy's early actions was the creation of the Peace Corps, which began in 1962, and his announcement of the plan by the United States to put a man on the Moon by the end of the decade. That goal, at first seen as madly ambitious, would be accomplished in May 1969.

The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 would prove to be a turning point in the nation and not just that for Kennedy's Administration. The crisis, which saw more than a few people believe that nuclear war was very close to happening, saw a victory for the United States in a way - they got the Soviet Union to withdraw the SS-4 Sandal missiles that the Soviets had wanted to deploy in Cuba in return for the removal of American missiles from Cuba. This led to a rise in the approval rating of the President, but it also more importantly gave confidence that the United States could handle its own affairs in the world, which meant it could also do so at home if they wished to. This saw a sizable uptick in the number of movements to fight for civil rights, both in the South and elsewhere. At the same time, knowledge that the Soviets were working hard on advancing their technological advancements saw America begin many of the same programs, and true to form the Space Race, advancing science in aerospace industries and new ideas in many other fields led to spillover effects. General Motors' Vice-President John DeLorean commented in 1965 that "We will let no manufacturer of automobiles, anywhere on Earth, create a lead on us in the fields of design, technology and performance." America's utilities almost to a man invested heavily in the development of nuclear energy, and advancements in the fields of computer science, communications, electronics and manufacturing expanded significantly in the 1960s. Traditional brick and mortar industries began to introduce greater methods of automation and innovation, and while in this cases it caused job losses, it massively improved the profitability of many of these industries and allowed new development.

Martin Luther King's massive "March on Washington" on August 28, 1963, was another turning point in the civil rights movement. The March, which was entirely peaceful - not one arrest was made at it - was one of the largest protest marches in history, with a crowd of over half a million people - of which it was estimated a third were white or hispanic - marching through Washington to the Lincoln Memorial, where Dr. King gave his world-famous "I Have a Dream" speech. The march was impressive to all who saw it, and Dr. King's televised speech made him famous worldwide. It also was a poignant kick in the nuts to the Kennedy Administration in more ways than one. Dr. King and his colleagues in the SCLC had repeatedly called for Kennedy to issue a "Second Emancipation Proclimation", but Kennedy, mindful of the Southern Democrats he still had to deal with, refused to do so out of a need to continue to get work done. But leading up to the march, those opposed to the March - and in many cases indeed the idea of civil rights for all - massively overplayed their hand. J. Edgar Hoover made a massive political goof when he rejected the contents of a report he ordered on the march that discovered - against Hoover's beliefs - that the march had been infiltrated by communists. He then fired William Sullivan, who had authored the report. Sullivan, more than a little angered, then went on television on August 26 to explain the report, which made Hoover look like a complete fool. Hoover then got embarassed a second time when the march was peaceful, and then a third time on September 2 when the Washington Post ran a massive in-depth piece about Hoover's opposition to the civil rights movements and his directly contradicting the Kennedy Administration on its civil rights programs. That was enough for Kennedy, who fired the legendary FBI boss on September 15, 1963. Hoover's attempt to fight this was nailed again - this time by the loudly anti-segregation (though politically conservative) Chicago Tribune, which exposed the existence of COINTELPRO in a series of articles in 1964, which looked doubly bad against Dr. King's rising profile and his earnest attempts to keep the movements fighting for civil rights as peaceful as possible. Years later, it would be proven that Sullivan was one of the key sources to the Tribune's stories, and it became clear that the vast empire built up by Hoover both for national purposes and his own had gotten rather far out of hand.

On the transport front, the introduction of Japan's built-for-the-purpose Shinkansen high-speed trains just in time for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics was a stunner to American railroads, who had for some time held the belief in most cases that passenger trains were an uneconomic enterprise against competition from airliners, which could easily outrun any train. But some railroads thought otherwise - scenic roads like the Denver and Rio Grande Western and Western Pacific long held the belief that they could continue to make significant revenue through passenger service, and companies which were becoming reliant on fast freight services such as the New York Central and Erie Lackawanna felt that on middle-distance runs that they could be competitive with airliners due to the need to load the airplane at a farther-out airport and then move their way into the city itself, whereas most major cities had been built around their major train stations, and these stations had vast capacity and could easily be adapted to faster passenger train services. The 0 Series Shinkansen's operational speed of 130 mph and top speed of 150 mph was something no American railroad could match, though the Pennsylvania Railroad's Metroliners, which began operation in 1969, could nearly match it with in-operation speeds of 125 mph on the Northeast Corridor between New York and Washington, DC.

But it was the Erie Lackawanna which advanced the science, in a way few imagined.

The EL, formed by a merger in 1960, was blessed with one big advantage - it had the shortest route between New York and Chicago, crossing through northern Indiana and Ohio, branching to the cities of Cleveland, Columbus and Indianapolis rather running right through them, as well as being built south of the Finger Lakes of upstate New York, it has a lower gradient than the rival Pennsylvania Railroad's mountainous crossing of the Appalachians and was shorter than the New York's Central's congested Water Level Route north running parallel to the Erie Canal. Knowing this, EL invested its share of the Transport America funds in improving its trackage and signalling, with the EL installing cab signals west from New York, with the signals active from there to Youngstown, Ohio, by 1966. But that year, the power-wanting EL took a gamble which would end up making history.

Erie Lackawanna's motive power shops in Binghamton, New York, bought six examples of Union Pacific's massive General Electric-built gas turbines, which UP was retiring because of fuel costs. But EL that same year did a deal with Amerada Hess to supply the company with propane fuel, and bought new turbines from General Electric (who supplied them for peanuts in return for access to test data) and built new fuel tenders with stainless-steel containment compartments for the propane and traction motors to take advantage of the massive 11,000-horsepower turbines. Returned to service in the fall of 1968, they handled trains from Port Jervis, NJ, to Youngstown and Cleveland, OH, at speeds of over 80 mph in service, and as the cars used in the service were upgraded, so were the speeds. In 1970, the company made a last-ditch effort to see if its Lake Cities and Erie Limited passenger trains could work, and assigned two of the mighty turbines to them, geared for 100+ mph speeds. It also scoured many of the retired passenger cars around the country for good equipment. Thus done, the newly-outfitted trains began operations on Monday, March 2, 1970.

To the surprise of the company, the new trains proved to be much better patronized than the older ones. With the turbines only needing to be refueled once (this was done at Jamestown, NY), the train was able to make a astonishingly-quick schedule, covering the distance from Hoboken, NJ to Chicago in eleven hours and thirty minutes, an average speed of 85 mph including stops and the refueling. The train's high standard of service didn't hurt matters, and the substantially-increased ridership on the route that resulted from this convinced the company that there was hope in the route yet. Erie Lackawanna was bankrupt by 1973, but despite this its flagship passenger trains continued to advance services on the line, proving to some of the freight railroads that life remained in the old passenger train - and the move of the trains from Hoboken Terminal to Penn Station in New York itself added to the ridership, as passengers didn't have to use commuter services to get to their train. While other railways were having the same ideas, the advancing use of heavy-gauge rail, concrete ties, cab signalling and lower grades, all used to expand freight traffic capacity, were all also used to allow passenger trains to go faster. Many passenger trains from the railroads that maintained them - Erie Lackawanna, Rio Grande, Western Pacific, Rock Island, Santa Fe and Southern, among others - would soon find themselves with greater and greater amenities and higher speeds. EL's experiment with propane-fueled turbines was so successful that Santa Fe bought six of their own new from General Electric in 1973, and four more would be bought by Rio Grande and Rock Island for the California Zephyr which they and the Western Pacific operate.

The country was shattered by Kennedy's November 22, 1963, assassination - but what got attention the most was the subsequent discovery by now-President Lyndon Johnson that Kennedy had indeed written an executive order much like the one Dr. King had asked for repeatedly and spoken of on the Lincoln Memorial three months earlier, and one of his first major pushes was to get it passed into law. He rejected the executive order approach, instead using his legislative experience and the ability to use the Presidency as a bully pulpit to shove it through the house. It took a considerable amount of procedural trickery (one major holdup was that the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, James O. Eastland, was very much opposed to any civil rights proposal and was not at all shy about saying so) to get the bill through, but regardless it did pass both houses, and was signed into law by President Johnson on July 2, 1964.

As ugly as the voting rights situation was before the Act, with the government now obliged to allow them to vote, the ugliness of the situation got out of hand. On March 7, 1965, a march organized by the SCLC and SNCC, led by John Lewis and Hosea Williams, to march from Selma to Birmingham, Alabama, was met just blocks into it by local law enforcement. The crowd of 2,500 marchers was attacked with clubs, bats, tear gas, bullwhips, dogs and rubber pipes wrapped in barbed wire. One of the dogs mauled a nine-year-old girl in the march, who later died from her injuries. Lewis was knocked unconscious, but was dragged to safety. TV crews got an eyeful, too - and one of the scene was that of Robert Evans, a white Pearl Harbor survivor, trying to talk reason to three police officers shortly before a cop armed with one of the rubber pipes smashed him in the face with it. Two days later, after a march to the Bloody Sunday site, two local policemen were involved with KKK members beating Rev. James Reeb and local actress Victoria Bennett. Both died of their injuries, Reeb two days later and Bennett two weeks later. The day after Bennett's death, Detroit homemaker Viola Riuzzo and Buffalo factory worker Casey Woodhouse were shot dead by Klansmen as they drove marchers back to Selma after the second attempt at a march. The deaths did nothing to stop voting legislation from passage, and the Voting Rights Act was passed into law on August 6, 1965. The two cops responsible for killing Rev. Reeb and Bennett were charged with murder, but the local authorities did not press it all the way to the limit. It didn't end up mattering, as both officers had only returned to duty days before their cruiser was struck by an eighteen-wheeler at an intersection in Birmingham on December 14, 1965, killing both instantly.

Even as the situation in America was troubled, it got worse abroad. President Kennedy's decision to get involved in Vietnam wasn't going well, and indeed the situation there didn't get better. Kennedy had been planning to begin pulling out of South Vietnam, but Johnson reversed that decision. The Gulf of Tonkin incident on August 2, 1964, ultimately was the spark that ignited the Vietnam War, a conflict that would do much to shape the coming times in America....

 

[TheMann]

Chapter Four: Vietnam, The "Gates of Hell" and Those Who Would Not Fail

The Vietnam War, which had begun long before but for America escalated very rapidly in 1964, was a major turning point for American culture. It did have to be said that the overwhelming majority of Americans feared the spread of communism and wanted it stopped, but there was depths to which support would not go. The Gulf of Tonkin incident wound up being a useful cover for the escalation of the war, but later on it would also prove to be a driver behind one of the biggest political messes in American history. But in 1964, that was all to come, and America had enough problems at home.

The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was matched with a wave of violence in the Deep South as those opposed to the dismantling of segregation fought desperately to stem the tide of black voters. The "Freedom Summer", as it was called, saw violence in considerable amounts as both southern local and state governments and law enforcement agencies fought desegregation while federal agents quite openly supported it, and President Johnson was perfectly willing to use the National Guards of several states, as well as the FBI, to make sure the law was enforced. Clarence Kelley, the director of the FBI after Hoover's sacking in 1963, was also part of this - a WWII Navy vet and survivor of the destroyer he was on being struck by a kamikaze off of Okinawa, Kelley was a dedicated supporter of the peaceful elements of the Civil Rights Movement and saw to it that the FBI didn't mess about when dealing with those who conspired to harm those fighting peacefully for their rights, including a famous incident where Kelley himself traveled to Neshoba County, Mississippi, to confront the county's Sheriff, Lawrence A. Rainey, and bark at him "You had better believe that those boys will be found. And if you know about it, Sheriff, you had best speak up now, because we will turn this town all the way over if we must. You don't want that, you don't want to know what us Hoover's Boys can do." (In the end, Rainey never did go to prison, but eleven people were imprisoned for the murders of the civil rights workers in Neshoba County in 1964.) The Civil Rights Movement was unable to register enough people to make a vast impact on the 1964 presidential election, but it proved to be immaterial.

The 1964 Presidential election between President Johnson and Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater started nasty and went downhill from there. Goldwater, very much a Conservative, easily won the Republican nomination on the first ballot at the convention, and then went on to utter his famous quote "I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." That speech caused a massive problem for the Republicans, as it divided the ranks of the GOP, and Goldwater's actions, including voting against the Civil Rights Act, earned him no friends among moderate Republicans, despite Goldwater's support for 1957 and 1960 civil rights bills. His decision to call the previous Republican presidency (Eisenhower's) a "dime store New Deal" bit him in the backside, and Johnson's campaign's slick pointing out of his flaws (Goldwater's campaign slogan "In Your Heart, You Know He's Right" being turned into "In Your Guts, You Know He's Nuts" was just one example of many) made the election a runaway in favor of Johnson. He claimed 486 electoral votes and 61% of the popular vote, both numbers yet to be beaten. Thus, Johnson was easily elected president and sworn in for his first full term on January 20, 1965. Goldwater came out narrowly ahead in his native Arizona, but outside of that only came out ahead in the southern states, most of which still seethed from Johnson's loud support of the Civil Rights Movement.

Vietnam, however, was to destroy Johnson. The failure of South Vietnam to be able to counter the Viet Cong in a series of ugly battles in 1965 led to direct American involvement in the war, involvement that grew nastier and nastier as time went on. Making matters worse was the fact that social movements in the country grew rapidly against the war, and Johnson's decision to try avoid dealing with the media led to them trying to figure out the situation on their own, and this resulted in events and reporting that were not exactly to Washington's satisfaction. This was laid bare with the Tet Offensive, which came after two years of both Johnson and the commander of American forces in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, which was a massive shock to the Americans, even though it was ultimately a sound defeat for the Viet Cong forces. That event ultimately caused Johnson a sizable amount of grief on multiple fronts.

Back home, the fact that the Civil Rights Act hadn't even come close to fixing the problems with race in America was laid bare in Los Angeles on a hot August evening in 1965. After a police traffic stop in the Watts district that did not go well to say the least, a rather unruly mob grew out of the area, a situation which devolved into a week-long riot. But what made more of an impact was that, in the middle of the riot, there were multiple massive demonstrations in the city that were peaceful outside of areas damaged by rioting, and hundreds of cases of civilians of all colors assisting police and firefighters - all well documented by police statements and media reports - was just as well known. The Watts Riots ultimately spread out as far as Pasadena, Long Beach, Anaheim, Inglewood and Santa Monica, causing over a hundred million dollars in damage and claiming nineteen lives, injuring over eleven hundred. Dozens of the injured were helped by many of the good samaritans, and while the riot was at first seen as criminals ruining their own neighborhood, many of the interviews of the good samaritans. Most of these people explained that while Los Angeles was not Alabama, it was not paradise either, and while the riot had been uncalled for, Los Angeles still needed to fix a number of its own issues. California Proposition 14, passed in elections the previous November by a narrow margin, had in effect allowed for racial discrimination in housing (it would be declared unconstitutional in 1967 and removed entirely in 1970) and hadn't helped matters with the problems with housing supply in Los Angeles.

The following years were, however, a watershed. After the California courts declared it unconstitutional in March 1966, and over the second half of the 1960s the crowded zones in Los Angeles saw major changes. By 1970, integration across a massive swath of Los Angeles was becoming a reality, as blacks previously confined to crowded neighborhoods in Watts, Inglewood, East Los Angeles and Compton spread out into Long Beach, Torrance, Anaheim, Gardena, Lawndale, Redondo Beach, Culver City and Santa Monica, forming a vast network of communities where people of all races, both WWII veterans and Baby Boomers, fought to preserve racial harmony. They were not always successful, but the efforts were not unsuccessful in practice and were noticed across the nation, with San Francisco up the coast being one of the next to begin such actions, with a similar situation there as the overcrowded Bayview-Hunters Point district began to have its black population spill out into the neighboring Bernal Heights, Portola, Potrero Hill, Visitacion Valley and Inner Mission neighborhoods.

A similar situation, this time involving a police raid on an unlicensed bar on 12th Street in Detroit, caused the just-as-infamous 1967 Detroit Riots. In this case, the situation was even more odd, as there were few attacks on whites in the first day, and on the second day of the riot, rioters and those seeking peace in the streets openly battled. Nine of these people were killed in the violence, but ultimately these groups, who were by no means entirely peaceful, did end up assisting the Detroit police and Michigan National Guard in fighting back against the rioters. One of the most infamous incidents of that was a crowd badly beating the owner of one of the Detroit's best-loved black-owned clothing stores early in the evening on the second day of rioting, and that owner subsequently returning with a sizable number of people - including Detroit Tigers left fielder Willie Horton, who stood on the top of his car to get the crowd to back off - he was only partially successful. The Detroit claimed 52 lives and caused over $75 million in damage. Coming just days after a similar riot in Newark and Plainfield, New Jersey, the rioting led to more of people trying to fight the riots.

On Friday evening, August 25, 1967, over seventy thousand people took to the streets of Detroit, protesting both the continued problems with race relations in the city and the rioters who had done such damage and taken lives the month before. Detroit mayor Jerome Cavanagh proudly spoke to these people, with several of the leaders - including Horton, Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown Records, and Marcus Wilson, the popular owner of Detroit clothing store Wilson Streetwear, talking directly to Cavanagh, and speaking frankly about the problems faced by the black communities in Detroit, and giving frank solutions on how to face them. The crowd, estimated to be 75% African-American, did not commit a single crime, and in one instance captured by the Detroit Free Press, three young black men and a black woman knocked down a man who had stolen two handbags from a porch of a restaurant on Woodward Avenue. The "Detroit March" would be one of the first such events, and over the winter of 1967 and into 1968 would be seen as a case of people trying to show that they wanted action without violence. Cavanagh had said after the July riots "Today we stand amidst the ashes of our hopes. We hoped against hope that what we had been doing was enough to prevent a riot. It was not enough." To which Gordy said to the crowd during the August March "We will never be truly free if what we seek to achieve is burned to ashes. We do not hope against hope. We act to make sure hope lives." Gordy, already famous for Motown's success, became known as a community leader as well as a leader. He would years later say "I had never intended to become a leader for Detroit, I just wanted to make sure that the people here know that we want better for all of us. They all knew me, so I had to be one of these. They gave me my success, I wanted to give back. The pain of the past has brought us to the Gates of Hell, and now it is our time to step back from that fate."

The Detroit March was often compared in the media to the March on Washington in 1963, noting that the latter had been instrumental in forcing along the Civil Rights Movement. Such marches would through 1967 and 1968 appear in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Washington, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Miami, Pittsburgh and St. Louis, the series of Marches got the attention they deserved, and the organizers of these marches over and over emphasized that violence would be counter to the whole point of the march, and so those interested in causing a ruckus would not be welcome. The Marches got the attention they deserved, and sure enough most of the common themes - better education and employment prospects, improved public housing, better health care and improved community-police relations - became the cries of the movements themselves, which ended up dovetailing with the Civil Rights Movement itself.

Johnson's Great Society initiatives ought to played well into this, but Vietnam put a stop to that. New Left activism and the massive Civil Rights Movement had made it difficult for the Democratic Party to play to this base, despite Johnson's loud and overt support for the Civil Rights Movement and the Marches of 1967 and 1968 playing into the narrative that taking to the streets peacefully could end up making a stronger statement than rioting, if the authorities knew that the riot alternative was there if things went downhill. There was a sizable gap in what the Mayors thought, too - progressively-minded ones like Jerome Cavanagh in Detroit and John Lindsay in New York were rivals to conservative ones like Chicago's Richard Daley, who would be infamous in the run up to the 1968 Democratic National Convention, held in Chicago.

Before that, however, there was more political madness. The confidence of the Johnson Administration towards the war in Vietnam was completely shattered by the Tet Offensive, and that was just the beginning. On April 4, Martin Luther King Jr. survived an attempt on his life in Memphis, Tennessee, by Klansman (and escaped convict) James Earl Ray as a result of the efforts of friend Ameila Shannon, a white woman originally from Boston who was hit three times from the rounds from Ray's rifle. She survived the incident but died of her injuries in a Memphis hospital seven weeks later. Notably, King was at her funeral and offered to be a pallbearer, but the family respectfully denied this. King didn't forget her sacrifice, and pushed for (and ultimately received) the ability to name an award after her. Not so lucky was Robert Kennedy, who was the front-runner for the Democratic Presidential nomination for the 1968 election. Kennedy was shot dead by Palestinian-born immigrant Sirhan Sirhan in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5, thus causing an additional uncertainty in the middle of the 1968 Presidential election.

The 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago was insanity itself. Mayor Daley had only tolerated the Chicago Marches (despite their being peaceful) and he had warned after King's assassination attempt that police weren't to be kind to any rioters, the famous "shoot-to-kill" order which Daley would later claim didn't exist at all. The protests outside got out of hand both due to protesters and the police, but it was the police roughing up Dan Rather on television while trying to interview a departing delegate (an act which led Walter Cronkite to famously mutter on air "I think we've got a bunch of thugs here, Dan"), the pictures taken by an AP photographer of Chicago police officers wailing on a 15-year-old white boy who had hauled down a flag at a protest and the pictures of the rioting outside the Chicago Hilton Hotel (where the quantity of tear gas used was so substantial that it disturbed eventual Presidential nominee Herbert Humphrey) became the public image of the scene. Making matters worse was the fact that nearly all the actual votes (82%) in the primary process had been for anti-war candidates, the peace plank had been soundly defeated in the convention process. This did not sit well, and sure enough the news media turned quite caustic on both the war and the politicians.

The appearance of George Wallace and his American Independent Party on the ticket made the 1968 election a total crapshoot, and unbelievably to most Wallace succeeded in preventing any candidate from having a majority in the House after Humphrey pulled off incredibly narrow wins in Ohio and Illinois (the latter almost certainly influenced by Daley, who was still smarting from the 1968 convention and Abraham Ribicoff's comments about him at that convention), with the Electoral College vote ending up at 249 Nixon - 243 Humphrey - 46 Wallace. Wallace immediately jumped into the role of kingmaker, but his chief demand - a repeal of the Civil Rights Act - would not even be considered by either Nixon or Humphrey, and indeed many of Wallace's supporters would claim that he overplayed his hand too early. Wallace fought bitterly to try to get federal efforts against segregation stopped, but the Democrats could hardly turn their back on one of their signature accomplishments and the Republicans, well aware that doing so would almost certainly do serious damage to themselves in California and many of the northern states, refused this.

Into this stepped many of the most publicly influential Civil Rights and City Marches leaders. Most of these people hated Wallace and knew well what he was trying to do. Dr. King pushed publicly for Wallace to walk away and let his electors decide for themselves, regardless if the Democrat-controlled House then chose Humphrey. Regardless, Wallace and his supporters kept up the fight, but an interview by Wallace on television on November 27, 1968, sealed his fate.

The interview, done by Chet Huntley, did not go well for Wallace at all, and he got in particular trouble when he was asked by the interviewer if he had run in the election truly to help the nation or just to seek another Compromise like that which had ended Reconstruction. Wallace answered that they are one and the same, and that the problem with desegregation was that "the Negroes are not fools, but they have no education, no understanding of what America is and stands for. They think that they can get Washington to give them everything, not work for anything. The people of Alabama, indeed all the South, don't live like that. America doesn't live like that. They don't understand that. That's why we still need to segregate the races. It is for their own good. And we are those who will not fail."

The comment was such a racist response that King, interviewed the next day, lost his temper on television. "Who does this man think he is?" Dr. King growled at ABC's Bill Lawrence the next day. "We are asking for nothing but the ability to have the same rights as all Americans." The day after that, President Johnson popped into the mix, commenting "Wallace is just doing what we all knew he would, but usually these days racists know better than to say they are racists on television." Ted Kennedy was even more blunt: "This man is vermin, the low-grade suit-wearing bigot who tried to keep two worthy black students out of the University of Alabama by standing in the damn doorway. His cause is lost, but he wants to blackmail Senators Humphrey and Nixon into being the man who allows Jim Crow to come alive again. I should hope that both of them know better than this." Perhaps most scarring of all was Berry Gordy, speaking at a rally in Detroit, "George Wallace says that we are not ready to be citizens. Well, Governor, if you and so many other honkies like you hadn't spent two hundred years trying to stop us from being citizens, maybe we wouldn't have this problem. But no, that never occurs to him, because clearly in his mind we're all just a bunch of dumb Negroes who can't be Americans. I would dare say that we are all better than that. Despite generations of people like you, we are citizens, we are Americans, and you will not take our rights away. We have shed blood for these, Mr. Wallace. We will shed blood for them once again if we must."

Eventually, the Democratic-controlled House had a decision to make. The standoff lasted too long as it was, and while the Democratic-controlled House would be more likely to support Humphrey, the Southern Democrats who made up most of Wallace's voting bloc knew that the cause was dying, and they decided to abandon Wallace after the interview, and they supported Nixon. All but five of Wallace's 46 electors chose to vote for Nixon on December 11, 1968, and that was enough for Nixon to be put over the top. He was sworn into office on January 20, 1969, into a country where vast divisions had opened up as a result of 1968's actions and events. Much was to change in the future, but the new President had huge jobs to do right from Day One....

 

[TheMann]

Chapter Five: Tricky Dick Nixon and The Start of the "New America"

When Richard Milhous Nixon was sworn in as President on January 20, 1969, he inheirited a situation not faced by a President since maybe FDR. George Wallace's use of his 46 electoral votes won (combined with dedicated support for him by the House members in those states) to attempt to stop the federal government to stop enforcing laws and court ruling against segregation. Nixon wasn't exactly a liberal, but he was a long-time supporter of civil rights (his voting record as a Congressman showed such support as early as 1948) and he knew quite well that the South would undoubtedly continue to combat civil rights in many areas. Nixon was keen to both make sure a repeat of 1968's presidential race did not happen again and he was also keen on trying to take over as much of the now-rapidly-rising black voting bloc as possible. Nixon inheirited an economy which had very little unemployment but was showing signs of stagflation, with rising inflation and interest rates a their highest in a century. Needing to fix this, the first task - and one which did earn him plenty of accolades early on - was to limit the Vietnam War. But Nixon, aware that the country still needed vast work at home to counter the civil rights issue, was careful in adjusting the economy. He was helped by the fact that by that time the mania among American manufacturers for using improvements in technology to advance their businesses and improve their profits was getting into high gear, and so the economy remained strong early on. As inflation grew to be a real problem, Congress passed laws allowing the President to enact wage and price controls, aware that Nixon had long opposed the use of such controls. But in August 1971, Nixon enacted the use of those controls and ended the convertibility of American dollars into gold, in large part forced into this by the actions of the governments of France, West Germany and Switzerland, all aware that by this point the US dollar was rather overvalued. The "Nixon Shock" did what it had been designed to do and cause a devaluation of the US dollar, but it had its own problems. But as Vietnam began to wind down, Nixon shifted his focus.

Aware that American education systems were massively unequal, and knowing that continuing to let that be would invariably cause many of the problems that existed at that point to be maintained, Nixon in January 1971 announced the introduction of the American Education Improvement Act, which created the Department of Education. This shocked stupid many conservatives, but the Act included anti-discrimination provisions at all educational levels and created federal standards for which education for American children had to meet. While somewhat at odds with his "New Federalism" ideals, Nixon was aware that this was necessary - one of the key complaints of literally hundreds of protests and demonstrations across the country was the differences in quality of education. America's business community was almost entirely in support of it, aware that with America's economic lead being rapidly eroded by other industrial nations, particularly Japan and West Germany and the need to be able to keep up with them in terms of educated employees. Nixon publicly proclaimed that America would "would provide its children with a better education than any other nation on Earth", but in a very real sense, the anti-discrimination provisions and the ability for the federal government to control the standards of education was a giant middle finger to Wallace, who loudly demanded that provision be removed. (There was little chance of that and Wallace knew it, but he made the attempt in any case.) Wallace's run for re-election as Alabama governor in 1972 is widely considered to be one of the most mean, nasty campaigns for political office in American history, with racist imagery from his side being pretty much universal, trying (sadly, successfully) to keep Alabama frightened of the black man. Nixon, however, used both the usual political tactics to discredit Wallace and indeed very not-so-legal ones, the latter becoming part of his undoing years later.

The Equal Rights Amendment also became a watershed. Passed by the House and Senate in 1971, it progressed rapidly through many states, becoming law upon the ratification of it by the 38th state to do so (in this case, North Carolina) in May 1977. Nixon quite openly supported it, and his support for civil rights laws, and enforcement of court orders he did not agree with (namely desegregation busing orders), earned him plenty of support from minority communities. This proved to be useful in the 1972 Presidential elections, but it would not be a long-term lasting trend, thanks to a rising political rival of the time - Ronald Reagan.

In Vietnam, American involvement began to ease, with instead the plan being to reinforce the South Vietnamese to the point where they could defeat the communists on their own. But the Anti-War protest movement now had massive momentum, and the news of the My Lai Massacre and the Green Beret Affair in 1969 made matters worse. Vietnam veterans, including decorated future Senator John Kerry, were by now making massive noises about ending the war as fast as possible, and the anti-war movement could very quickly and easily draw crowds in the tens of thousands in pretty much any major city. After the bombing of Cambodia in April 1970, massive student protests broke out on numerous campuses, and at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio on May 4, nations guardsmen fired into a crowd, killing four and wounding nine. A week after that, at Michigan State University on May 12, another anti-war protest turned into a bloody riot, resulting in two dead and hundreds of injuries. These events, as well as the highly-publicized Hard Hat Riot in New York City on May 8, added to the PR problem that Vietnam had become. Worse still, multiple attempts by the South Vietnamese Armed Forces to fight the war on their own ended disastrously, and by the time the last American ground troops left Vietnam in August 1972, it was clear that the South Vietnamese were only able to survive because of American air power - the Easter Offensive by the North Vietnamese had only been stopped by massive Operation Linebacker air attacks. By this point, drug and alcohol abuse was endemic among American soldiers, racial problems were real, the practice of "fragging" unpopular officers was becoming much too common and South Vietnamese morale was in the basement.

The 1972 elections started with a massively divisive Democratic primary campaign, not helped by the presence of Wallace, who sought a third time to run for President. While popular in the South as expected, his momentum of 1968 had evaporated - he was roundly hated pretty much everywhere else, with rivals Edmund Muskie and Shirley Chisholm unwilling to be on the same stage as him and New York mayor John Lindsay angrily calling Wallace a "stupid bastard". The actions by Nixon staffers to cause messes for many candidates, most famously the "Canuck Letter" didn't help matters. Having come so close to the Presidency in 1968, Humphrey ran again and ultimately was victorious (barely) in the popular vote in the primary, he lost the primary to George McGovern. Making matters worse was that the new rules massively reduced the influence of many prominent Democrats in the process, and a number of these people backed Nixon in the general election.

The 1972 election went about as badly for the Democrats as 1964 had for the Republicans. The fact that Wallace had run was used by the Republicans, though this tactic had mixed results. McGovern loudly proclaimed that he would end American involvement in Vietnam altogether on his first day in office, was both outmaneuvered and outshot throughout the entire campaign. Hoping to tap into the massive anti-war sentiment went nowhere as the troops came home in big numbers, and Nixon's aggressive keeping tabs on political opponents was no help. The replacement on McGovern's ticket of Vice-President Thomas Eagleton didn't help, either. Nixon comfortably won the election, with McGovern only coming out ahead on Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Rhode Island and the District of Columbia, the electoral vote ending up at Nixon 496 - McGovern 42.

Nixon's triumph, however, was short-lived. The Watergate burglary did not make too many headlines early on or during the Presidential race, but the scandal was blown wide open in letters from burglar James McCord, reporting by Washington Times reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and Congressional investigations. One of the Congressional testimonies, covered live on television, blew open the recording system in the White House, and President's Nixon's repeated attempts to use executive priviledge to hide the tapes of the recordings ultimately was felled by the Supreme Court on July 24, 1974, and on July 30 the tapes were released. The contents were explosive, making it clear that Nixon knew of the Watergate burglary and its objectives. Knowing that, and facing certain impeachment, Nixon resigned from the presidency in a televised speech on the evening of August 8, 1974. A month after Vice-President Gerald Ford was sworn into office, he controversially pardoned Nixon, saving the former President the near certainty of being hauled in front of a jury for lying and obstruction of justice. This did not at all sit well with the public, and despite Nixon's Administration seeing over a dozen of its senior members go to prison, Ford's presidency would be nastily tainted with the scars of Watergate, and the loss of South Vietnam to a full-blown North Vietnamese assault in 1975, ending with the dramatic Operation Frequent Wind to rescue people from Saigon, didn't help matters. The Republicans, shattered both internally and with the American public, were battered to hell and back in the 1974 and 1976 elections, handing the Democrats their largest influence since the 1930s in these elections. The Church Committee, which began calling witnesses in September 1975, added to the mess by exposing the numerous actions done by all forms of government to scrutiny.

This could have been a hallmark for the Democrats, but divisions existed all over the map here, too. The 1976 Democratic primaries were groundbreaking in the number of primaries open to be competed in, and the best placed to take advantage of this were Governors Jimmy Carter of Georgia and Jerry Brown of California. Several big-name candidates, including Ted Kennedy, Lloyd Bentsen, Martin Luther King Jr. and John Glenn, all of whom had other ideas - King was seeking to build minority voting blocs and the other three were seeking major changes to the Senate. In the end, Carter won, but left deep divisions with the Democrats and facing a possibility of an independent candidacy by Brown, which never materialized. The Republicans, meanwhile, went through a nasty battle of their own, as Ford faced off against former California Governor Ronald Reagan in the primaries. The Republicans ultimately chose President Ford to seek re-election, and Ford asked New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller to be his VP - and got a huge shock when Rockefeller declined. Two other candidates did so as well, leaving Ford with former Texas Governor John Connally to be his VP. Connally, however, proved to be more than capable at campaigning and rather successfully fought off accusations of him being a political opportunist. The general election was brutal, but Carter led it from start to finish, and while Ford and Connally did close the gap, Carter and running mate Henry M. Washington easily chased down many of the talking points. The televised debates of 1976 are often cited by many as some of the best ever, as both the Ford-Carter and the Connally-Washington debates proved to be spectacular successes in terms of policy developments. Divisions within the party about the conservative-leaning ticket when viewed against a liberal-leaning Democratic Congressional delegation and an increasingly-liberal public.

In the end, Carter won the electoral vote with 388 EVs to Ford's 150. In a move considered startling by many, Carter swept the South, including Connally's home state of Texas. It was a huge victory, but it left Carter with formidable challenges. But at his inauguration on January 20, 1977, Carter spoke of the election being the opening of a "New America" which would correct many of the problems of the past. But as optimistic as Carter was, things would not go quite as he planned....

 

[TheMann]

Chapter Six: Watergate Aftermath, President Carter, the Ottawa Treaty and the Human Rights Doctrine

The Presidency of Jimmy Carter brought with it a whole new set of a challenges - a restless Congress, continuing economic issues, social divisions that despite the progress of the 1960s and early 1970s just wouldn't die, a deep distrust of government institutions and problems with foreign policy as America and its armed forces recovered from the disaster that Vietnam had been. As Carter entered office, he did have a bunch of things going for him right from the start, namely that his political opposition had been largely defanged by Watergate and its ensuing problems, and the continued efforts of Senator Frank Church and the United States Senate Select Committee on Misconduct by Officers of the Civil Service made sure that Carter, a relative unknown before the 1976 Presidential primaries, was able to have the nastiest of his political opposition kept occupied by the Church Committee. Carter also had a big advantage in the choice of his Vice-President, as Henry M. Jackson largely took over the direction of America's foreign policy and armed forces while Carter dealt with massive social issues at home. This constructive division would indeed by seen by both men as being enormously helpful to what they sought to do in office.

Carter was a fiscal conservative but very much a social liberal, and the expansions in funding for education and health care that began under Lyndon Johnson and continued by Nixon and Ford continued unabated under Carter, who was well aware that America's improving schools were starting to show results by the middle of the 1970s, particularly in poorer neighborhoods. Carter, however, dismissed many of the ideas of Nixon's New Federalism and sought to forge partnerships between Washington and the states on many of these issues, and indeed Carter's reforms created three Cabinet positions out of one - the Department of Education and Human Advancement, Department of Health and the Department of Social Services, as well as the creation of the Department of Energy and Science in 1977 and the elevation to a full cabinet position of the Department of Veterans Affairs in 1979. The expansion of departments did not come at huge cost, as in most cases the existing staff were simply moved into the same jobs in new departments. The government's expansion of health care and education funding was steady through the times, even in the context of the changes to tax codes and laws that Carter sought from Congress. His differences with Congress sometimes boiled over, but often as not the differences got settled, even in the context of the Democratic-controlled Congress which Carter had to work with. Left out in the political wilderness by the aftermath of Watergate, the Republicans spent the late 1970s reforming themselves, largely focusing their efforts around former California Governor (and 1976 primary challenger) Ronald Reagan, who would be seen as a new way forward for the Republicans.

In the context of the times, Carter's difficulty with economic problems was little surprise. While economic growth for most of his term was strong, inflation continued to be a massive headache and growing concern over energy supplies and the environment didn't help matters. Carter did, however, start revolutions in a few ways in economic terms. His steady hacking down of capital gains and higher-income tax rates earned him support from many wealthy interests, but it was his open support for co-operatives and employee-owned enterprises and the passing of the Employee Free Choice Act in 1977 which cemented many of the changes to come in the United States. 1977 saw one of the biggest employee takeovers of a firm ever, as the employees of the Chicago and North Western Railroad bought it from parent company Northwest Industries in a landmark deal which saw the railroad be run through democratic decisions and a competent leadership. The company had little difficulty gaining profitability in the 1980s and would be a template for things to come in this field. The EFCA also was a major landmark, as industrial unions, very well aware of their new ability to unionize without management interference, went on a tear to do that in the late 1970s. As unionization in American workplaces (particularly industrial ones) grew, greater understanding of the needs of both sides began to show in both union leadership and senior management. The American automakers, whose labor animosity went back to the 1930s, were among those to first show the beginnings of work between the two sides. The process would not always be smooth on either side, but it would catch on in a rather big way as the baby boomer generation began to make a greater and greater impact in management fields in the 1970s and 1980s.

One sad result of Vietnam was a massive problem in the United States with drug abuse in many areas, particularly major cities. With an estimated one in five Vietnam veterans suffering from alcohol or drug abuse problems, the Department of Veterans Affairs began to show strains, and the War on Drugs began by Nixon in 1971 began to reform under Carter. Seeking greater treatment options and less locking up drug users, the Departments of Health and Social Services began expanding federal drug treatment programs in 1978, with the goal of reducing recidivism among minor drug offenders. As that happened, though, Carter expanded the penalties for smugglers, and after the anti-Castro group Alpha 66 was outed as a being deeply involved with the drug trade in a series of articles in the Miami Herald in the summer of 1978. (One of the reporters most involved in this, Jose Bonaficio, was made famous when he was badly burned and somewhat disfigured by a car bomb outside his home in August 1978 that killed his wife and daughter and left his son in a wheelchair. Bonaficio would spend the rest of his life fighting vocally against both the Anti-Castro groups and drug smugglers.) The smugglers would rapidly find out that Uncle Sam very much disapproved of their actions, and a nationwide battle against them was well underway by 1980.

The drug problem, however, coincided with issues in many of the cities where the drug problems were worst. Several police departments were notorious for corruption problems, and yet others still had massive community issues, which in the cases of New York in 1977, San Francisco in 1979 and Miami in 1980 blew up into full-blown riots and in San Francisco's case led to the first incident in American history where a major city's mayor requested National Guard to take over law enforcement in place of the city's police force. That happened as a result of the infamous murders of Harvey Milk and George Moscone in November 1978 by ex-police officer Dan White. The murder of gay rights pioneer Milk by an ex-cop exasperated enormous divisions between San Francisco's massive gay community and the SFPD, which after White's light sentencing erupted into the White Night Riots on May 24, 1979, which resulted in nine days of tit-for-tat battles between the SFPD and members of the gay community in San Francisco, ultimately resulting in sixteen deaths, thousands of injuries, four hundred million dollars in damage and the reorganization of the SFPD in 1981. As controversial as it was at the time, White Night ultimately came to be seen as a battle between the police, those who violently hated homosexuals and the gay community fighting back against them, and indeed some compared it to Robert Williams' Black Armed Guard and its actions and battles with the Ku Klux Klan and members of southern police forces who collaborated with them. The differences in police department views on drug policy and approaches to crime didn't help matters, and so while drug policy in Washington was quite obvious, it was not always as well enforced on the streets of major cities.

The environmental movement was also running in full swing by this point. The Clean Air Act of 1970 and the Clean Water Act of 1972 were the first steps, but as enforcement of them was tightened by Carter - both laws gave the President the right to do this by executive order, and Carter was not afraid to use that power - but it was further expanded through the Toxic Substances Control Act in 1976 and then the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Remediation and Liability Act of 1980, the law most commonly known as Superfund. That law, a direct result of the explosions and fires at the Chemical Control site in Elizabeth, New Jersey in December 1978 (that resulted in considerable contamination of New York Harbor) and the Love Canal crisis in Niagara Falls, New York (which resulted in 900 families being evacuated from a neighborhood built over top of a 1950s-era toxic waste dump) resulted in much greater public awareness of the problems posed by industrial waste and contaminated sites. The Superfund Law made it illegal to dispose of liquid hazardous waste by dumping, requiring incineration, and set very high standards for disposal facilities to meet, as well as a creating a trust fund that the chemical and petroleum industries had to pay into to deal with the waste - in return for that, once wastes were transferred to a firm licensed to deal with them, producer responsibility for them ended. This arrangement was loudly criticized in some circles but was accepted by others as an acceptable tradeoff.

Carter's decision to have Henry M. Jackson be his Vice-President proved to be a stroke of genius on two fronts. As Carter worked on his domestic policy proposals and Church worked on kicking over every rock imaginable - and in the process intimidating most of those would harshly fight back - Jackson focused his own considerable energy on working on repairing America's foreign policy restructuring the country's armed forces. Jackson was careful and intelligent with this job, with him first gaining credibility within the administration for negotiating out Carter's well-known wish to remove American troops from South Korea - ultimately, America's nuclear weapons and some troops were removed, but the troops that remained there were reformed both to be a competent fighting force themselves and train with the ROK Army, which helped them improve their fighting abilities considerably in the second-half of the 1970s and into the 1980s. Jackson and Carter also differed on the hope by Carter to transfer the Panama Canal back to Panama, a proposal that proved to be unpopular with the public and was bitterly opposed by Congress to such a degree that Carter backtracked on the idea, saving his foreign policy capital in Congress for the Middle East peace processes.

Korea may have seen disagreements between Carter and his VP and his generals, but on two key areas - Carter's human rights foreign policy focus and the Camp David Accords - Jackson not only agreed with Carter but made many of his movements possible. Assisted by King Hassan II of Morocco (who acted as intermediary between Arab interests and Israel), Romanian President Nicolae Ceaucescu (who acted in a similar role between the PLO and Israel) and eventually Canadian Prime Minister Robert Stanfield (who worked with nearly all Muslim interests in negotiating the deal). Stanfield managed to get the PLO to agree to a ceasefire in their fight against Israel, which went into effect in March 1978, and while Carter mediated the differences between Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat and King Hussein of Jordan, Washington fought for military support for Israel to ensure their security. Eventually, Carter and Jackson invited four leaders - Begin, Sadat, Hussein and PLO leader Yasser Arafat - to Camp David, the Presidential Retreat in Maryland. While the leaders argued, Carter had a bright idea and took the four leaders to visit the Civil War battleground of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, giving a history lesson of the bitter, brutal American Civil War, emphasizing that all four men sought the same thing for their peoples and saying that it could happen if that part of the world could be peaceful. Carter also pointed out that all sides had suffered murderous costs in both money and lives from the wars that had blighted their lands, a point that had never been seen by one side towards any of the others.

As they did that, Jackson was with Congress, hammering out what would be provided to support the nations involved, which all sides agreed would be substantial. As America had vast quantities of military equipment left over from Vietnam, this wasn't all that terribly expensive, and economic support all agreed could be very useful in many ways. The moves by Carter broke the deadlock and convinced all four that an agreement needed to be signed.

Three weeks after that, Stanfield made a breakthrough with a way of figuring out how to fix the problem that Jerusalem represented to both sides, with an idea that was proposed by one of his political rivals and agreed to by all sides. Jerusalem would be a territory were any side could live anywhere they wished and engage in any activity they wished save military or security installations, and the city's leadership would be formally run by three very senior clerics - one Jewish, one Muslim, one Christian - who would govern the city, while two civil service leaders - one Israeli, one Palestinian - would be responsible for carrying out their orders. Any defendants in civil matters or criminal trials in the city would have the right to be tried by the laws of either nation, and the job of protecting the city would be assigned to a nation agreeable to both sides. The system was fair as it could get, and the Israelis made a rather big concession when they agreed that the Jerusalem borders would be the rather-expanded ones that Israel had proposed in legislation in 1977. Israel's demand that their government facilities remain in the city was - much to the surprise of many in Israel's government - agreed to by the Palestinians, Arafat pointing out that he could then demand all of the same rights.

Begin and Sadat also threw a bone to Arafat by allowing the Palestinian territories in Gaza to be expanded substantially south through the Sinai, which gave the Palestinians ports on the Gulf of Aqaba at Nuweiba and Bir Taba, was made a condition of the deal by Begin, which Sadat agreed to - and with the new land more than doubling the land area of Palestine, Arafat of course supported it. (This also had the bonus of putting Palestinian between Israel and Egypt, making any conflict between the two harder, a point that Washington made quite clear to Carter.) In the West Bank, Israel and Jordan negotiated out a number of border changes, with the PLO's approval.

The deal in late 1978 got two very big and very public supporters. The first was newly-elected Pope John Paul II, who had for many years supported the idea of alliances between all men of faith before God and publicly supported the negotiations in the Middle East, offering to personally assist the negotiations if it would assist and promising "the finest man that exists in the Church today" to be the Christian representative in Jerusalem if the Jews and Muslims would agree to it. The second, who got into the act in January 1979, was Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran. Ambitious but facing a somewhat-restless population and wanting to make sure the Arab world knew of his position, The Shah proposed that the costs of the economic rehabilitation of the Palestinians be carried by other Muslims in the world. He promised $17 Billion up front and publicly challenged King Khalid of Saudi Arabia to match his promise, a challenge which Khalid rose to.

With momentum working pretty much across the board, those involved all gathered in Ottawa on March 27, 1979, to begin the final setup of the treaty. (Ottawa had been chosen because of Stanfield's dedicated efforts to work out the differences between all sides and because Canada was seen as an honest broker in the Israel-Palestine debates. The signatories of the Ottawa Treaty were:

- Menachem Begin, Prime Minister of the Israel
- Anwar al-Sadat, President of Egypt
- King Hussein bin Talal of Jordan
- Yasser Arafat, Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization
- Jimmy Carter, President of the United States

The treaty was signed on June 5, 1979, and was to enter into force on April 1, 1980. Much was to be done in the meantime, but much was done. Pahlavi and Khalid were both largely true to their word, but Khalid's influence waned after the Grand Mosque Seizure in Mecca in November 1979 and the Palestinians, already more liberally-minded than the Saudis, largely became friends with Iran. All sides in August 1979 agreed on the three clerics to take over, and true to the Eastern Orthodox leader that was agreed upon was loudly supported both by these leaders and back by John Paul II, who quite openly spoke of how he couldn't wait to visit the other men of God in Jerusalem. The sides also agreed that the first impartial group to protect Jerusalem should be Canadians, owing to their efforts to get the deal together. Canada answered this by raising a new Regiment to do the job, selected the finest people from their armed forces and sending one of their best colonels, Colonel Michael Robertson, to take lead the Regiment, and Robertson brought along one of his best young officers, Major Romeo Dallaire, to be his senior commanders on the ground. Israelis living in settlements on Palestinian land were allowed to stay until replacement homes for them had been built, a process which was done quickly, with the last settlers departing in the spring of 1982. The treaty signed and its logistics set up, the Canadians arrived to begin their mission in March 1980, and on the morning of April 1st, 1980, the clerics began their job by issuing their first requests to Israeli civil leader Teddy Kollek, his Palestinian counterpart Amin Majaj and Colonel Robertson. Both Begin and Arafat were in the city on this day, and Arafat proudly proclaimed Palestine's independence on April 6, 1980. Israel recognized it the next day, with the Palestinians recognizing the State of Israel on April 9. Throughout 1980, American units began setting up in Israel, and a massive training zone, Base Negev, began to be set up, becoming fully operation on June 1, 1981.

As that happened, as expected, Egypt turned away from the Soviet Union and towards the West, and all the nations around it both received economic and military support. Hussein was quick to see the advantages of being friendly with both Israel and the Palestinians, and so road and rail links were built and expanded between the two nations and Jordan in the early 1980s, with one of the world's largest engineering projects, the building of a heavy-duty rail line from Tel Aviv to Amman, begun in 1982 and completed in 1988, transforming the trade between the nations and allowing direct imports of goods and major exports. Likewise, Israel's transport nets and those of both Palestine and Jordan became inseparably linked. This part of the world would see immense economic growth in the 1980s and 1990s, in part because of the aid provided (which was substantial) but also because peace led to greater trade between the nations and their peoples, and Israel's highly-advanced tech and engineering sectors began to both direct and teach their Arab counterparts, and Palestinian shopkeepers and businessmen soon proved that they had some expertise of their own. Begin, Arafat, Sadat and Hussein shared the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize, and the successful implementation of it in 1980 saw the prize awarded to Carter, Jackson and Stanfield.

Outside of the region, Pahlavi's efforts endeared him to much of the world at a time when he needed it. Having been steadily liberalizing his country since the late 1960s, he found himself having to deal with his country's issues and his own failing health, a fact he was soon acutely aware of. Pahlavi died of cancer in May 1981, leaving his wife, Empress Farah, and his twenty-year-old son Reza with the job of running the country. Farah was able to rally much of the nation to deal with internal issues. She ordered Iran's infamous intelligence service, the SAVAK, dismantled in July 1981, while still rallying the nation to fight the revolutionary forces in the nation, namely by working with the moderate elements, saying that any group that sought change in the nation through peaceful means was welcome to be part of the government. By the time her son was coronated as Shah in March 1983, Farah had done an excellent job of lining up the nation around the forces of the established Republic, but with promises of changing the country to be a more free and liberal one. Her son followed through on these provinces, while still facing the massive problems raised by the religious hardliners, led by the infamous Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. As Iran's modernization continued, helped by massive economic growth in the 1980s, Khomeini lost the public support he'd once had. He died in 1989 with his movement largely failing, and while Reza's position was plenty secure by then, his powers were a fraction of that of his father, but he did still have some power and immense influence. Iran would rapidly change through the 1980s and into the 1990s, becoming one of the world's biggest "rising nations" during that time.

Outside of the Israel-Palestinian question, Carter's centerpiece foreign policy job was his shift in tactics with regards to communism, namely the shift away from containment and into the field of focusing on human rights. The Vice President, to the surprise of many in Washington, enthusiastically supported this shift, believing that it would inject the ideas of human rights into the Soviet Union, a fact that history would prove correct. As the Soviet Union was starting to show signs of crippling economic problems in the 1970s (the United States had issues with inflation, but the Soviets had them far worse, problems that would get worse in the following years), it was believed by Jackson and others that the combination of a population agitating for greater rights and economic problems would eventually crack the Soviet Union apart or force it to accept American armed forces supremacy. This foreign policy position also made impacts on other unsavoury regimes, with the impacts being felt in Latin America's military juntas, the apartheid government in South Africa and various places in Asia. Carter's government found itself with difficulties in the Indian subcontinent, not exactly friendly with India under the leadership of Indira Gandhi but liking Pakistan and the government of General Zia-ul-Haq even less. Latin America was a persistent headache as it had been for American Presidents since the 1950s, but the Alpha 66 mess and the subsequent investigations of numerous anti-Castro groups and the numerous drug dealers protecting themselves by claiming to be anti-communist guerillas caused a considerable improvement in relations between Cuba and the United States. Despite this, the success of the Middle Eastern proposals, which had physically drained Carter and Jackson, was a massive good plank to run on as the 1980 election approached, and the two men did seek to use it.

The problem was on the other side.

The Republicans, after years of soul-searching, were ready to rock in 1980 and showed it, and the harder Conservative wings led by Ronald Reagan had won the battle between them and the more moderate Conservatives, a fact made blindingly obvious in the 1980 Republican primaries. Such was the conservatism of the campaign that one of the moderate competitors, Illinois Congressman John B. Anderson, ran as a candidate in the general election and, as with George Wallace in 1968, was very much a real competitor. America's economic problems of the late 1970s and the pessimistic mood of the nation of the time helped Reagan immensely, causing a race that was tight across the board. Some actions by third-party groups, particularly Jerry Falwell's "Moral Majority" drew fire, with VP Jackson calling Falwell a "charlatan and a liar" and a "closed-minded McCarthyite stooge". Carter's foreign police score and growing American energy efforts, as well as the open support of many unions, allowed Carter to have a strong hand going in. His hand was also helped in many ways by Anderson, who while getting support from both sides was vocally critical of many of Reagan's policies, with Anderson calling Reagan's decision to give a speech at the Neshoba County Fair (a county where three civil rights workers were infamously murdered by the Klan in 1964) a "truly insensitive decision". Anderson was no friend of Carter either, calling him "incompetent" and "truly ignorant of the issues that affect everyday American life". Carter initially wanted the television debate to be just between him and Reagan, but with Anderson looking like he could actually win states, both the Republicans and Democrats agreed to him being part of the debate. VP Jackson also squared off against Reagan's VP Pick, George H.W. Bush, in lively debates where Bush attacked Jackson's legislative past and Jackson shot back Bush's own experience and his being part of the CIA, an organization that by 1980 was not exactly held in high regard by most of the country.

Reagan played hardball on other issues, but in some cases this backfired on him. He commented on a speech to a supporters' lunch in Los Angeles that the White Night and Miami riots were a reason to mobilize the Conservative base, which when he visited San Francisco two weeks later saw him loudly booed by those who had been victims of White Night, who repeatedly egged his car. Reagan's loud support of states' rights didn't endear him to many voters in the South, with Dr. King being one of those who did not support him, saying that "When men talk about states' rights here, Governor, they usually want to use it as an excuse to discriminate against others." Carter didn't start the campaign with a grand economic plan, but didn't have any difficulty coming up with one during the campaign, and true to form during the election the economy's improvement began to show in the votes for the President.

On election day, it was clear that Carter's campaign had scored against Reagan in much of the Rust Belt. Anderson did what some thought was impossible and claimed three New England states (Massachusetts, Vermont and Connecticut) and also claimed his home state of Illinois (by a hair over Reagan), while Carter did better than expected in the South and parts of the Rust Belt as well as claiming the West Coast states, Nevada and Hawaii, with the end electoral vote result being Reagan 297, Carter 190 and Anderson 51. Anderson's vote tally of 8,835,000 was still back of George Wallace in 1968, but his success as an independent candidate made an impact and made sure that Anderson would be well known in the years to come. The Republicans also took back the United States Senate for the first time since 1952, but the Democrats remained solidly in control of the House. Reagan came into office with challenges of his own, but anticipating a massive Conservative revival under his leadership.

He would not have it so easy....

 

[TheMann]

Chapter Seven: A Revolution, But Not in the Way It Was Forseen

When Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as the 40th President on January 20, 1981, he inherited high hopes and big problems - the former necessary in his mind to defeat the latter. Having been elected on pledges to stop the growth of government intrusion into people's lives, Reagan got down to business quickly on that front, but early pledges to reduce government ran into resistance early. While Reagan had little difficulty fulfilling many of his foreign policy pledges, his domestic ones ran into trouble early and often.

The problems started before he was inaugurated with his supporters, who expected him to play hardball in the election. The amount of support which went to John Anderson was a sign that Reagan couldn't go as far to the right as he hoped to do, and he had other problems. He had been in power just over two months when would-be assassin John Hinckley Jr. shot him, his press secretary and two secret services officers on March 30, 1981. Reagan was back at work two weeks later, but the shooting caused a quite marked rise in his approval rating, allowing him to ram through his June 1981 tax cut package, and he also planned to massive reduce federal education and health care spending.

Union groups who supported Reagan (most notably the Teamsters) weren't pleased at the beginnings of right-to-work legislation which would reduce their influence, and Reagan's massive downplaying of pollution issues and near-refusal to enforce the demands from the Superfund law ran him head on into trouble, particularly when news reports of many of the worst polluted sites in the nation, most infamously the Berlin and Farro and Liquid Disposal Inc. sites in Michigan (which polluted the drinking water used by over five million Metro Detroit-area residents), made his wishes to loosen and avoid environmental regulations look foolish. President Reagan began his economic policies with his big tax cuts, and the combination of those and huge government borrowing caused a substantial rise in the nation's debt, but it did the job of kicking inflation, reducing it from 15.1% in spring 1981 to 2.0% five years later. Reagan's focus on supply-side economics earned him no favors with Congress, labor movements, many federal officials and indeed many states, and he got into further domestic trouble by first ignoring and then criticizing the Senate's Committee on Misconduct by Government Officials and by openly questioning the efforts of Senator Church's work with the state of California to reorganize the San Francisco Police Department after White Night. But the start of Reagan's problems was the American General Strike of 1981.

That trouble started when the AFL-CIO affiliated Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) began a work slowdown on July 25, 1981, followed by a strike on August 3. The Employee Free Choice Act made this strike legal so long as public safety was not endangered, and PATCO made a point of rotating people on and off of picket lines to ensure this was the case. Regardless, Reagan took a massively dim view of it, ordering the strikers back to work on August 4, and saying in his speech that "It is evident that when it comes to the balance of leadership in the workplace between labor and management, it must be a balance, and we make clear the notion that strikes that endanger the public interest will not be tolerated." PATCO, however, refused to budge, but they did send a team to negotiate a contract with the FAA - but FAA management, aware of Reagan's speech, would not speak to them until they returned to their jobs. PATCO refused, and on August 6, Reagan by executive order sacked nearly all of the 12,700 strike participants and banned them from working in the civil service for life.

The AFL-CIO, already angry after acriomoious labor battles among the Teamsters, UAW and United Mine Workers, was livid, and union president Lane Kirkland and dozens of union leaders, including UAW boss Douglas Fraser and UMW boss Richard Trumka, loudly and angrily called for a general strike, which they got. It took two weeks, but momentum of the strike grew between August 7 and August 19. By August 20, over two-fifths of the AFL-CIO's fourteen million members were out on the picket lines or engaged in work slowdowns, causing nearly the whole nation's economy to slow down. The strike massively slowed down everything from service jobs to the transportation industry to power generation, and Reagan's approval rating, high at the beginning of the strike, sank like a stone during it. But as that happened, things started changing.

It started at American Motors, Bethlehem Steel, Southern Pacific Lines and General Electric. All four companies had relatively new bosses at the helm and AMC already had a history of good relations with the UAW. These four companies had begun negotiations for their workers to go back to work, and on the night of August 20, GE's new (and highly regarded) boss, Jack Welch, went out on television to loudly criticize Reagan's hard line on the PATCO workers and make the speech with Walter Cronkite on CBS News which would make Welch famous:

WELCH: "I will tell you up front, Walter, that this situation is not of our making. If we were to be shortsighted and narrow-minded, I would be angry and want the President to win this fight. But it's not that simple. What we have here is America's organized workers going out saying that they support the men that the President has fired and that we are not against our employers. Our facilities are mostly idle, but those who have to work for whatever reason have not been attacked. Nobody had been hurt at General Electric, nothing has been destroyed, by this strike. And all of the union leaders say the same thing to myself and to all of the other management officials - we want to stop the President from using the statement he has said about the public interest from being an excuse to break unions."

CRONKITE: "And you agree with that statement?"

WELCH: "Absolutely. Why wouldn't I? When America prospers, so does General Electric. But how can America prosper without the middle-class men, the people who go to work every morning, do their jobs honestly and well and expect the good life in return? That is not too much to ask, is it? What we need in America is an understanding that all of our nation, from the poorest man to the richest, must be able to prosper. Those of us who have risen from middle-class parents want the same for our kids. I know I do. Whether you agree with the position of the Air Traffic Controllers or not, Reagan and his Administration have a position that is much too far for us. Yes, more flexibility in business is always desirable, but when our workers prosper, we all do. The progress made by the Auto Workers in Detroit and our own progress with the Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the Federation of Engineers shows that it is possible for labor and management to work out our differences. If the President truly wants to help us balance out the concerns of labor and management, he needs to put those air traffic controllers back to work and fairly work out their differences. It is time that the adversaries in the workplace put beat their swords into ploughshares."

The 'Swords into Ploughshares' comment by Welch would go on to be one of the most famous quotes in the history of the American labor movement, and it was met with almost universal agreement. Major employers and unions both agreed with it, and pressure from many sectors of American business for Reagan to back down swelled rapidly. PATCO did themselves a favor by publicly announcing that they would reduce their demands in a number of key areas, and public opinion quickly supported the unions and their new allies in the new members of senior management at companies large and small. Reagan's supporters pointed out that Welch had ambitious plans to reform General Electric, to which Welch pointed out that employees would always be able to purchase companies and spun-off GE divisions if they so chose. (The AFL-CIO had a massive fund, the Workers' Corporations Fund, to assist with this, a point Kirkland pointed out in response as well.) Welch's point was soon backed up by many others, and Reagan's position became untenable. On August 29, Reagan publicly announced the reinstatement of the controllers and that the FAA had accepted PATCO's terms. It took just 72 Hours before everyone involved in the general strike was back at work, a massive victory secured - and true to form, they returned to higher productivity at most businesses.

It would be years before the full effect of the General Strike and the "Labor-Business Alliance" (a term created by The Economist in 1983) would be seen in the American economy, but it would be notable that employers which did right by their employees saw their productivity rise rather faster than those which were less generous - and Welch's General Electric would be one of the vanguards of this. While GE's payroll sank from 411,000 in 1981 to 346,000 in 1986, it would rise back up to 392,500 in 1990, and their average compensation grew during the same time period. GE did a lot of this success from simply doing a better job than competitors, a viewpoint that was shared by many companies. A massive sign of what was to come came in 1982, when two former steel industry behemoths, Bethlehem Steel and Colorado Fuel and Iron, posted massive losses due to a crash in steel prices and had to be bailed out - in both cases, they were bailed out by their employees, who insisted on both modernization and keeping the mills operating, and lobbied for the funds to do it. It would be two instances of many to come, and by the early 21st Century, labor representation on corporate boards would be commonplace. But in 1982, that was all to come, but the unions had both proven their strength but also had been called out by the companies they dealt with. Both sides had expectations to meet, and while that process would not by any means always go smoothly, the view that the country was best served by unity between its management and labor classes would go on to be one of the great advantages of American businesses.

The general strike was a massive blow to Reagan's domestic policies, where he was forced to let Congress lead in the years that came, which both hurt his image among moderate conservatives and added to the nation's budget deficits in the early 1980s. The General Strike and Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker's orders to hammer down inflation, which resulted in eye-popping interest rates (peaking at 20.75% in May 1982) and the insolvency of many Savings and Loan banks, a problem which would persist throughout the 1980s. The result was a short, sharp recession, but the nation was powering out of it by 1983, and inflation was dropping fast by that point, particularly helped by America's by-then falling trade deficit. The economic improvements were not exactly a clincher for the President, though, and his domestic decisions came back to bite him in the 1982 elections, where the Democrats, courtesy of election wins in California, Missouri, New Jersey, Washington, Pennsylvania and New Mexico, took the Senate back from the Republicans. This added to Reagan's troubles in the expected ways, but massively from one more - Frank Church was now the Senate Majority leader, and he was not keen on being Mr. Nice Guy with President Reagan.

Church started off his work back in control of his Committee in the Senate by going after one of the Administration's darker actions, the support to Nicaragua's Contras which had been part of Reagan's actions against communism in the Western Hemisphere. It didn't take long for Church's committee to discover that much of the support sent to the Contras went though Rafael Quintero and Ramon Medina, who when forced to testify admitted that while they did supply arms to the Contras, they were frequently paid for them in drugs, usually cocaine, which they then made a profit on by selling, most notably to (by then already incarcerated) Freeway Ricky Ross, after which some of the money went to other right-wing and anti-Castro groups. As ugly as this was, they got way more than had been expected when the Church Committee called Orlando Bosch to the stand on June 13, 1983. Bosch explained not only his connections to the Contras, but also the CIA's involvement with his anti-Castro activities. Over two full weeks of hearings, Bosch explained his role in Operation Condor in intense detail, including his connection to CIA officials, and that statements in meetings with Luis Posada Carriles that landed on Henry Kissinger's desk. Bosch's testimony and subsequent witnesses called to the stand blew the lid off of Operation Condor, and the double exposures of the Supplies to the Contras and the drug smuggling that followed was a nasty shot to the REagan Administration - and the knowledge that Reagan's Vice-President was the director of the CIA at the time made it all worse. Vice-President Bush was called to testify, and he testified that he had no knowledge of Condor - an act proven false two months later, on October 4, 1983, when a February 1976 transcript of a meeting between Bush and several of his Latin America chiefs in Langley, Virginia, explained out Condor to him and asked for permission to give explicit support to Jorge Rafael Videla's planned coup in Argentina, which Bush gave permission to.

Bush's support of Condor and foreknowledge of Videla's coup enraged Argentina to the point that they withdrew their ambassador and Anti-American riots broke out in Argentina in the fall of 1983. The Senate judged that Bush's actions were unlikely to have been a "high crime or misdemeanor" sufficient to justify his impeachment, but Bush was politically crippled and Reagan's approval rating by Christmas 1983 had sank below 30%. Knowing that, Bush on January 4, 1984, announced that he would not seek another term as Vice-President and would retire at the end of Reagan's first term. The CIA was left a grossly unpopular agency, and stories of its actions ran rampant across the country. Reagan finally gave in and ordered the CIA reorganized in September 1984, accepting defeat in a scandal which by the spring of 1984 was approaching Watergate proportions. Condor wasn't the end of the story, either, as later discoveries would blow the lid off of a clandestine plan to provide support to the apartheid government of South Africa and open support for UNITA in Angola.

Outside of the Senate's revelations, while Reagan had floundered badly at home when it came to domestic policies, on foreign ones outside of Latin America he did rather better than many had expected. His wish to dramatically expand the United States' military spending was passed (with extensive Democratic support, too), with huge plans such as the 600-ship Navy and many weapons projects such as the B-1 Bomber and responding to the deployment of Russian SS-20 missiles to Eastern Europe by deploying Ground-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles and Pershing II ballistic missiles was a sign of strength. Reagan may have been mostly a failure on the domestic front, but the armed forces buildup was a considerable success in what it sought to achieve, though it came at a considerable cost. Reagan's rhetoric did scare the Soviets quite badly, and indeed they did exactly what he wanted them to do, that being massively increase the resources they focus on their armed forces while also depressing the costs for their key commodities on the world market, with the intent of hurting their economy.

Reagan would also admit that he couldn't take all of the credit for the crumbling of communism. Carter's human rights-focused foreign policy, done during the time of detente where it could actually reach the USSR's citizens, was a ploy that worked - in the case of the Solidarity trade union movement, it's leader, Lech Walesa, openly credited the United States with helping to kick-start the crumbling of communism in Eastern Europe. Solidarity's ability to survive the political repression of Poland in the early 1980s is often credited to substantial American financial support. Reagan was able to do much on America's foreign policy front, and America's 1980s economic growth and swelling industrial production, as well as its massive technological superiority (by the 1980s only West Germany and a handful of the Asian Tigers were anywhere close) over the USSR made sure that his successors could (and did) continue the tactic of reinforcing the American armed forces.

1984 started off with the explosive Operation Condor revelations and the primaries for President. With his approval rating in the gutter, his Vice-President disgraced and his comestic policies in tatters, Reagan had real challengers for the Presidency, as Senate Minority Leader Howard Baker announced in December 1983 that he would be seeking the Presidential nomination. He was joined on the GOP side by John Anderson, making a bid after his remarkably-successful Independent candidacy in 1980, and by televangelist Pat Robertson, who felt that Reagan's Presidency had been irreparably damaged by the General Strike and the CIA revelations. On the Democratic side, things were outright madness. Senators Ted Kennedy, Joe Biden and Paul Simon were joined on the trail by Congressman Dick Gephardt, Governors Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton and Mario Cuomo, the Reverend Jesse Jackson and former Senator Gary Hart. Cuomo began the race in the lead, got overtaken by Gephardt after New Hampshire and the lead fell to Kennedy by early April. Cuomo dropped out, and it looked like Jackson might be the dark horse in the race. Dukakis' campaign fell apart under the idea that Massachusetts should have one candidate, Hart was wracked by scandal and Biden, Clinton and Simon simply never got off the ground. Kennedy won the nominaton and stunned the world by asking Jackson to be his Vice-President, which Jackson accepted.

On the Republican side, Robertson proved to be a fluke outside of the religious right, ruining his appeal. The GOP race was becoming a real three-way event until February 25, 1984, when the GOP expelled Anderson in a highly-controversial move that ended up hurting the Republicans badly. Anderson was undeterred by this, and with his support substantial, he announced he would try again as an conservative-leaning independent, announcing his campaign in Chicago on March 6, 1984. Reagan comfortably defeated Baker in the remaining primaries, but his offer of the VP position to the Senator from Tennessee, who turned it down. Reagan's second-term VP choice ended up being Representative Jack Kemp of New York, who proved to be a good candidate for VP. But with Reagan's approval rating no better than the high twenties, they had a long way to go to get into contention, and that was something that the Democrats had no intention of giving them.

Reagan focused his campaign on the idea that Kennedy would not be able to properly be a defender of freedom and that his VP pick was a sign of his weakness in foreign policy, while touting his own achievements. Kennedy answered this by pointing out that he had been there when America had last truly faced down the Soviet Union, while Reagan hadn't been. He got help when Robertson and fellow religious right leader Jerry Falwell told their followers to vote for Reagan because "The devil has come for your freedoms, and you must elect the man who can stop them, and that's not Kennedy or Anderson." When Robertson was interviewed about this in April 1984, he said about Anderson "He's a fellow traveler, a fool who does not understand our place in the world, our place before God." Anderson answered that by saying of Robertson "Conservatism is a guiding view, not a religious cult, though I suspect that Misters Robertson and Falwell have more experience with the latter." Kennedy also gleefully pointed out the length and breadth of Reagan's previous statements on social policies and his administration's being caught up with the Cuban drug smugglers by saying "Does America really need an old actor who cares nothing for anyone but himself, and whose idea of defending the nation is allowing Cuban terrorists to poison our streets? He claims to have government waste, but then in the same breath supports his Star Wars set. We can do better, and we will do better just as soon as we send Ronnie Raygun Reagan back to Hollywood." While Kennedy was adept at campaigning and held a lead from the start, he was confident enough to publicly ask people to hold cabinet positions, justifying it by saying that Americans "Should know well who will be governing them, not just who is the face on the ballot." It didn't hurt that Kennedy chose well for many of his picks - his first public request was for the Secretary of the Treasury, which he asked Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas to take on. (Bentsen accepted.) He also made a point of picking one-time political opponents to do various jobs. His public request for Carter to be the Secretary of State was at first ridiculed by the Reagan campaign, but both Kennedy and Anderson pointed out that Carter had being massively responsible for the Ottawa Treaty and had dedicated his life after the Presidency to human rights. Carter declined the nomination, with Walter Christopher getting the position instead.

Anderson's campaign, it was soon clear, was destroying the Republicans' chances for success, and they begged him to get out of it - but having tossed him out publicly three months earlier, Anderson was not about to do that, saying that he had a campaign to run and wanted to make a point to the Republicans that Reagan's hardline conservatism was not the way to go. Anderson's campaign, however, had the desired effect. He never had a chance of beating Reagan and knew that going in, but with Anderson polling as high as 25% in some states, he was going to be an impact maker, just as he had been four years previously.

On election day, Reagan was able to claim much of the South and parts of the West, as well as Indiana. Anderson did even better than he had in 1980, winning 14.8 million votes and claiming the states of Michigan, Ohio, Vermont, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Colorado, claiming 83 electoral votes, a record for a third-party candidate. Reagan claimed Arizona, the Dakotas, Kansas, Utah, Texas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Wyoming, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia.. But as Kennedy claimed everything else, the final electoral vote total was Kennedy 322, Reagan 133 and Anderson 83. Reagan conceded on the evening of November 6, well aware that he had been beaten. But the Republicans were left out in the cold once again, the moderates fighting hard against the harder-line members and the former motivated by the massive support that moderate conservative Anderson had now been able to gather twice. Kennedy's victory wasn't just a victory for the Democrats, either. Jesse Jackson would be America's first black Vice-President, and the country entered into 1985 with a new confidence, ready for the future. There would be many challenges, but the second half of the 1980s would be a decadent, confident time, which would have its own lessons to teach....

 

[TheMann]

Chapter Eight: New Names, New Faces, New Places, New Problems

The swearing in of the second Kennedy to reside in the White House on January 20, 1985, was a spirited affair to say the least, not least because of the vast crowds on the Mall to watch the whole affair, which was televised live across the nation. The Inaugural Balls and ceremonies and all the usual pageantry was its normal excellent self, but there was more to it than that. Kennedy's rise to the presidency was in itself an excellent story, and the rapid and powerful political rise of Reverend Jesse Jackson only added to it. The first black man to every occupy a position in America's executive ranks was an eloquent speaker, aware that his actions would matter just as much as Kennedy's would, and his inauguration speech was a call to arms for advocates of American development. Kennedy was the same, but he had some big promises to fulfull early on in his presidency, and he didn't take long to get at it, starting with his first moves on his very first day in office, that being to massively expand the Superfund Law and reverse Reagan's social security adjustments, which Kennedy had claimed were robbing its recipients. That was merely the start of matters.

Kennedy's decision to have Jackson as VP gave him both a man people would listen to with regards to civil rights and a person who had high expectations, and Jackson got on that job quickly. While Kennedy was busy with domestic policy - he had proposed quite a lot in that regard - Jackson went into the international arena, and was highly regarded from the start, with British PM Margaret Thatcher referring to Jackson as "a gentleman of the finest order" and Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney referring to him as "One of the best men Washington has." Jackson's early focus on foreign affairs didn't matter a lick to many in the activist community, who figured (correctly) that Kennedy would be on their side. How much he was would be shown early on as well.

Kennedy's first major wish was health care reform. Kennedy had introduced a comprehensive health care reform package (that he had been researching for years) in the summer of 1984, expecting it to be reintroduced by a colleague after the election. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan did the honors on that one in the Senate, while Congressman Doris Miller (D-Texas) did the same thing in the House. With all three branches held by the Democrats and the GOP in a mess, there was little to stop the development of a health care package, and it didn't hurt that the allies for its passage grew quickly. The most notable package was the option for any American citizen to buy into Medicare and begin receiving its coverage immediately, in effect forcing private insurance providers to keep up with them in terms of both price and quality. Numerous other provisions made for improved quality of care from private insurers and made a number of other changes, including outlawing the use of "pre-existing conditions" to deny coverage, eliminating lifetime caps on treatment and numerous other practices of the industry. Also controversially, the bill mandated coverage for non-invasive forms of birth control (the Catholic Church and some evangelical groups were livid at this) and saw all partnerships as valid as far as medical decisions were concerned. America's health care industries were divided, but the front-line workers were almost universally in favor of the bill. The insurance industry tooled up a massive campaign to defeat it, but ran into an equally-massive campaign to support it from both unionized industry interests (who would gain big in reducing health care costs) and the unions themselves, as well as consumer groups. The act ripped through the House easily, but ran into a little bit of trouble in the Senate, namely due to the Republicans, who saw it as a massive intrusion into everyday life for many. That division was cleared fairly easily, and after passing the bill and reconciling the two bills, the Advancement of American Health Care Act was signed into law by President Kennedy on April 25, 1985, the first truly "big" bill of his presidency and one of the ones which would have the most impact. It transformed the nation's health care industries, and it also had a number of other effects, particularly in employment fields. With plenty of incentive give by the bill to provide more and better coverage (if companies enrolled employees in higher-coverage plans, they could write it off to reduce their tax bill), industries began finding the value in making sure employees were well covered, and as this also in the overwhelming majority of cases resulted in higher productivity in the businesses in question, those who weren't leading from the front on this quickly got the message, and by the time Kennedy was up for re-election in 1988 all Americans were covered by health insurance coverage either private or public, and the overall health of Americans was showing improvement, an improvement that continued into the 1990s.

Kennedy continued Reagan's defense buildup, and had little difficulty with it, twice being the keynote speaker at warship commissioning ceremonies (the USS Missouri in San Francisco in September 1985 and USS Theodore Roosevelt in New York in July 1986) and publicly backing the efforts to expanding the armed forces' abilities. Reagan's deployment of medium-range ballistic missiles to Western Europe was controversially supported by Kennedy, though many of his critics would admit that it had been a good idea when held in the context of the deployment of Soviet SS-20 missiles. Jackson's foreign policy roles took a rather different tack with Latin America than Reagan had done, publicly renouncing the actions of Operation Condor and announcing that Latin America's freedom from tyranny was America's only interest in the region. To that end, America loudly supported the admittedly-rocky transitions to democracy of several Latin American nations, notably Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Venezuela. Jackson and Kennedy were also very strong opponents of South Africa, while at the same time loudly condemning the involvement of any groups in Angola. Kennedy refused to support the guerillas in Afghanistan, but the mujaheddin groups were most of the time able to get around this through the use if supporters in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Iraq, who simply bought weapons and then shipped them, using contacts within the CIA and Department of Defense. This was discovered by the Church Committee in 1987, and it resulted in dozens of resignations and a complete halt to any form of clandestine weapons support, as well as a very public rift between the Arabian Peninsula states and the United States, both keen to face down to Soviet Union but the former much more willing and able to do so by clandestine means. This wouldn't prove to be an easy schism to get over, but it did however provide an opening for the traditional adversary of the Gulf states - Iran - to jump into the mold, which Tehran did. They quite publicly sealed the border between Iran and Afghanistan and were loudly against the Soviets' War in Afghanistan and provided support the mujaheddin themselves, but made sure nothing from the US got in that way unless it was authorized from a very high level, usually Jackson or Kennedy. This arrangement meant that some weapons still filtered from America to the Afghans, but what little support they had proved to be immensely troublesome to the Russians, who were finding out the hard way that immense Soviet military power couldn't suppress the Afghans - in other words, they were learning what America had in Vietnam.

The drug epidemic, which had gotten considerably worse during Reagan's time, was also aggressively tackled by Kennedy through much the same two-front strategy that had been undertaken by Carter in the late 1970s, but by now the crack epidemic was very real and needed to be handled. Both federal and state drug treatment programs were massively expanded by the National Drug Policy Act in July 1985, with the focus in most of these cases being stopping the crack epidemic, which had reached epic proportions by then. It also didn't take long before "broken windows" policing strategies began taking hold, first doing so in New York in the early 1980s. (It didn't hurt that New York's aggressive city district attorney, Rudy Giuliani, was both able and willing to attack crime of all sorts, right up to and including the famous Mafia Commission Trials in 1985-86, where he gutted the leadership of the Five Families of the New York Mafia.) The broken windows theories were assisted by the fact that wealth was by then flowing into these areas, and this led through the decade to massive gentrification efforts, which gave local residents all the incentive they needed to make sure their communities didn't get wrecked by crime. Massive expansions of mass transit systems, a trend started in the early 1970s and continuing to the present, made access to these parts of the city much easier and made gentrification possible in more ways than one. By this point, the beginnings of a backlash against Suburbia had also began, with people questioning whether the vast parking lots, big-box stores and strip malls, huge houses on large properties were truly worth the compromises that such living ultimately resulted in. This was most exemplified in wide-scale cities which were showing major signs of redevelopment in city centers such as Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, Houston, Chicago, Philadelphia and Indianapolis. Many of these places made up for their problems with traffic through the use of interlocking transit systems and schedules, but even that was not really a solution to the massive problems that many faced with traffic, though they showed improvements. Cities which had retained their rail-based transit systems during the 1950s and 1960s saw the benefit most of all as the development of better transit systems, lower crime rates, greater cultural attractions and better access to schools and hospitals resulted in inner-city populations growing in the 1980s and 1990s.

America's industrial sectors began shifting during this time frame as well. A number of huge and ambitious corporate restructuring plans went through in the 1980s, with those most commonly effecting the metals industries. Rapid expansion of the use of aluminum in many industries and changes in grades of steel used frequently saw the old-school integrated mills of the past being closed, but in a number of cases the mills were repurposed to producing higher-density metals and specialized products such as rails, heavy truck frames, big water pipes and structural steel products. One of the signs of this was Bethlehem Steel's namesake plant in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania which was sold off to its employees in 1987. The employee management then shocked the hell out of the former owners by announcing the repurposing of the plant to both make steel and cast large pieces for various purposes, able to do so in an efficient manner. The plant was producing such products by 1990, and in 1990 they got a big contract to supply hundreds of pieces to repair damaged battleship USS Iowa and cast pieces for several Arleigh Burke-class destroyers for the Navy. There would be dozens of major movements in such a way in the 1980s and 1990s. The industrial front also included some notable successes for American manufacturers. One of the most high-profile of this was the partnership between Atari Technologies and Sony to create a video game system, this coming after Nintendo broke a deal with Sony to make the next-generation video game system. The Sony-Atari project resulted in the Sony Playstation and the Atari Jaguar, both released on the same day in 1994 which were incredibly successful, in large part because the two systems could use each others' games. The Playstation handily outsold the Jaguar, but both companies were more than satisfied with the project and continued to work together in the future. One other notable reorganization success story was RCA, which began a revolution with the introduction of its first full-color plasma display panel televisions in 1983, a revolution when placed against the massive CRTs of the time. RCA's efforts were rapidly followed by others, but their lead in this field was such that RCA made a killing on it, allowing its consumer electronics divisions to remain profitable. American Motors' alliance with state-owned French automaker Renault in 1981 became a roaring success and was followed by Chrysler doing the same with Peugeot-Citroen in 1984, and General Dynamics got a surprise when they sold their famous Fore River Shipyard to its employees in January 1986 and then found out that the new company, New England Shipbuilding Industries, had a big contract from Hess Petroleum for seven 190,000-ton product tankers waiting on their desk. Hess, already famous for its efforts to advance industries in the Northeastern states, got famous first through the building of a plant to produce synthetic petroleum from low-sulfur coal in 1980 (this plant, built on an already-contaminanted site in Bruin, Pennsylvania, opened in 1984 and was producing 35,000 barrels of oil a day by 1987), but Hess' research division then worked out a way to make carbon fiber in large amounts from the leftovers from its Bruin facility in 1991, making carbon-fiber at much-reduced cost to traditional methods. American manufacturers in the 1980s went through the decades filled with confidence and with an educated engineering corps eager to erase anyone else's lead in technology and quality. With more and more American cars, electronics, consumer goods, aircraft, chemicals, refined fuels, machinery, vessels, high-end clothing and metals moving out than ever before, by the late 1980s the country's industrial output was surging - and with it was the profits of many of the manufacturers of it.

As America's might in economic, industrial and military might grew steadily, the Soviet Union finally hit its breaking point. By the time Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the USSR in March 1985, the Soviet Union was simply unable to maintain parity with America in economic or military terms, and Gorbachev was well aware that continuing to try to do would ultimately result in the economic collapse of the USSR. Realizing that, he began to programs of perestroika and glasnost, 'restructuring' and 'openness' in Russian. Realizing that doing this would make dealing with the USSR easier, it was welcomed by the West, and his first meeting with President Kennedy in November 1985 was a watershed moment for both sides, as both Kennedy and Gorbachev found it surprisingly easy to work with one another, and Gorbachev's moves to suspend and then reverse SS-20 deployment to Europe was matched by the removal of Pershing IIs by the United States. Gorbachev's movements included the approval of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987 and the end of the Brezhnev Doctrine in 1988, the latter in large part kicked along by Jackson, who said loudly in a 1987 speech in Berlin "The People of Europe deserve to be free, Mr. Gorbachev. Their Freedom is in your hands. You can bring down this wall, you can bring down the Iron Curtain. If you are truly a man of openness, bring down these walls and let freedom ring!" The decision to withdraw from Eastern Europe would result in the collapse of communism in Western Europe in 1989, the moment most famously encapsulated by the collapse of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.

The massive economic growth, social progress and success in foreign policy allowed Kennedy and Jackson to comfortably re-elected in 1988 over the Republican ticket of Senator Bob Dole of Kansas and New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean, with Dole and Kean being honest enough to accept that Kennedy's social programs were working, though Dole loudly felt that as the Soviet Union was facing economic crisis, it would be best for America to shove them over the edge, a move which Kennedy vehemently disagreed with and Jackson called "insanity". Despite the disagreements, the election was rather more civil than those of 1980 and 1984, as Kennedy and Jackson had respect for Dole and knew well that the Republicans were moving to more moderate positions. Their second term would be marked by major changes to the world, as the Soviet Union finally gave up the ghost and the new world beyond it would show itself....

 

[TheMann]

Chapter Nine: The End of the Cold War and the Birth of the "Hyperpower"

As Edward Kennedy and Jesse Jackson began their second term in January 1989, the world had begun to shift in ways once thought unimaginable. Glasnost and Perestroika were having effects on Eastern Europe that few could have ever predicted, and communism was seemingly on the verge of collapse. The withdrawal of the Brezhnev Doctrine saw 1989 be a crazy year in the Warsaw Pact nations....and it ended with the dramatic fall in the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the subsequent domino-like collapse of nearly all of the Warsaw Pact's communist nations. The progress began in Poland, where Lech Walesa's Solidarity trade union movement successfully evolved into a political movement, and on June 4, 1989, Solidarity easily nearly entirely swept Poland's 1989 elections, with the first non-Communist Party government in the Eastern Bloc, led by Walesa and Tadeusz Mazowiecki, taking power in Warsaw on August 25, 1989, despite calls from parties within the USSR and from Romania's Nicolae Ceaucescu for the rest of the Warsaw Pact to get militarily involved. But at almost at the same time was a bigger story, and one which had bigger consequences than what was happening in Poland.

The death of popular former Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang in April 1989 caused a mess in China. With an economy stagnating since the mid-1980s (and 1988 economic decisions causing a sharp recession in China that year) and Deng Xiaopeng's economic reforms moving slowly, combined with gross corruption (both real and perceived) within China's elite, a perception not helped by Yaobang's removal from leadership in 1987 (caused in large part by massive student protests in China in 1986 and 1987) and the serious problems with nepotism and corruption that were by 1989 rampant in China. Peaceful negotiations between CCP moderates and the student protesters were perpetually undermined by conservative groups, and on June 4, the People's Liberation Army was called in to clear the square. Approaching it from all sides, they hemmed in tens of thousands of protesters, including camera crews from several nations (including the United States) and began firing. With troops from all of the PLA units involved firing, students began fighting back with rocks, bottles, molotov cocktails, chunks of pavement and other tools. The PLA then stopped negotiating and simply spent all of June 4 and much of June 5 shooting their way into the square. CNN reporter James Wilson and his cameraman and sound crew were filming the situation just after eleven in the evening (local time) when a 81mm mortar round from the 38th Army landed within five meters of them, killing Wilson and the cameraman instantly. Any form of protest against the troops' advance through the night was met with gunfire, with reports of tanks shelling apartment buildings, the use of field artillery, snipers and troops spraying buildings and apartment blocks with machine gun fire quickly reverbrated around China and around the world, and were met in China with more troop response. The end result was a death toll estimated at a minimum of 15,000 and a number of wounded of over a quarter of a million.

The first nastiness outside of China as a result of this was in Hong Kong. Hong Kong had quite openly supported the protesters and their goals, and news of Tiananmen Square caused chaos in Hong Kong. June 6 and the days afterwards started a political crisis, as protests at Government House in Hong Kong on June 9, 1989, had crowds in the hundreds of thousands demanding that Hong Kong's planned return to China in 1997 be scrapped. When the massive protests swept through Guangdong province in June 1989 and Britain announced that it would not break the deal with China on June 25, 1989, over 250,000 people attempted to flee Hong Kong in just two weeks. Making matters worse was that many of China's now-powerful leaders were demanding that China rip up the 1984 Joint Declaration and take back Hong Kong by force, a statement by Li Peng on June 28, 1989, adding fuel to that fire. Left with accelerating chaos in the colony and staring its economic destruction in the face, the Governor of Hong Kong begged both London and Beijing to make a deal over the situation. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher came to Hong Kong on July 16, 1989, in an attempt to work with Deng on fixing the issues - but she was met at the airport with massive, unruly protests and faced Deng's senior leaders being belligerent, a fact made worse the day before Thatcher arrived when news of the 64th Army being stationed in Guangdong made it to Hong Kong. Thatcher left Hong Kong six days later disheartened, commenting to one of her advisors "We can either destroy Hong Kong or let it destroy itself." But in this case, she got a lifeline.

Washington was to say the least not pleased with what had happened in China, and the loud belligerence of many of China's post-Tiananmen Square leaders didn't make Washington any more pleased. China-US relations had been quite good for years before Tiananmen Square, but facing a situation which by then was getting traction in the United States, Kennedy and Jackson decided to act. On July 23, 1989, the United States stunned the world when VP Jackson said that he felt that Hong Kong's status needed to be clarified by Hong Kong, China and Britain. China's leaders were furious, Hong Kong took it as a sign that America would support changing the situation. Thatcher, hearing that upon arriving back in Britain, is known to have said aloud "Bless you, Reverend Jackson, for you have just saved Hong Kong." Three days after that, the United Kingdom tore up the Joint Declaration, resolving to keep Hong Kong under British leadership until such time as a new deal could be renegotiated between the People's Republic of China and the United Kingdom. China's anger was even more pronounced, and talk of an invasion of Hong Kong quickly spread. But this time, figuring that America would indeed after Tiananmen Square be willing to defend Hong Kong from an aggressive China, many of the Hong Kongers held their ground. True to form, brand-new American aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, fellow carrier USS John F. Kennedy and battleship USS Missouri, along with their battle groups, were sent to the area to show that America was serious about making China talk out Hong Kong's status. Kennedy himself on August 25 spoke of the need for the parties involved to peacefully negotiate out the political problems. The Missouri docked in Hong Kong two days later to a very appreciative crowd of over 30,000, and by this point optimism about a new deal for Hong Kong was strong.

China wasn't willing to negotiate out a new timeline for Hong Kong, and the hardliners, many of whom had not approved of the terms of the takeover in the first place, fought it bitterly. By early 1990, the conversation was heading in the direction of an independent Hong Kong, but China scuttled that with its October 1990 declaration that any declaration of independence by Hong Kong or Taiwan would be seen as a declaration of war against China. Thatcher's resignation in November 1990 saw her replaced by John Major, and Major's appointment of Chris Patten to replace Sir David Wilson in May 1991 raised more than a few eyebrows in both Hong Kong and Britain....but Major bravely settled the debate on September 19, 1991, when he announced in Britain's House of Commons that he would make major modifications to the British Nationality Act to allow Hong Kongers to acquire British citizenship, and that Hong Kong would have its powers significantly expanded. Britain would retain responsibility for defense and foreign affairs, but a democratically-elected Legislative Council of Hong Kong would have the right to pass laws, with only those violating terms and conditions set out in a basic constitution for Hong Kong being invalid - and Patten's job was to oversee the process.

America loudly backed their ally, and the decision, hated as it was by China, held easily, and Hong Kong's economy, bloodied badly by the 1989-91 crisis, recovered substantially in the 1990s, while one of Hong Kong's first decision after the passing of the Basic Law in April 1992 was to throw the gates open to Chinese dissidents to come to Hong Kong in safety. That decision was opposed by Major, but under the terms of the Basic Law, he could not challenge it unless it made a foreign affairs or defense issue, and he didn't try. China's hard conservative turn in the 1990s caused tens of thousands of Chinese professionals, intellectuals and artists, as well as many prominent businessmen, to settle in Hong Kong, while the Royal Navy re-established a full naval base there in 1994. Hong Kong's relationship with China would remain rocky for many years to come, but America's stand with it improved its relations with other nations in Asia, particularly Taiwan and Korea.

Back in Europe, Hungary's decision to dismantle its border fence with Austria on May 2, 1989, opened the first crack in the Iron Curtain. It would be the first of many. The situation in East Germany came to a head on October 9, when East Germany's police and armed forces were ordered to put a halt to a massive protest in Liepzig, but upon reaching the scene - and finding an estimated 80,000 of their countrymen there - the soldiers and police refused to open fire. On November 9, East Berlin was suddenly swamped with people seeking to push their way through the wall, and as soon as that news ran through West Berlin, tens of thousands of West Berliners joined them in tearing down the wall. The TV images of the scene, of Germans from both sides of the Iron Curtain embracing one another, made headlines around the world. The collapse of communism in one nation after another after that moment was spectacular. Ceaucescu, who had openly advocated for military force to stop the new Polish government a few months earlier, was executed by a provisional government along with his wife on Christmas Day, 1989, with all but Romania seeing the Communist governments collapse with very little violence. The speed of it all overtook all but the most optimistic of predictions - few expected the Warsaw Pact to collapse in literally weeks - but it made sure that when Kennedy and Gorbachev met again, on the Soviet cruise ship Maxim Gorky in Malta on February 10, 1990, the focus was on making a new world. Gorbachev, who had not exactly gotten through the Revolutions of 1989 unscathed, was intent on trying to get American help to mitigate the aftermath, and he was surprised that Kennedy agreed with him on the need to try to keep the situations from getting violent. Gorbachev also threw in that the USSR did not approve of China's actions at Tiananmen Square that the Hong Kong problem needed to be solved without violence. With America being economically prosperous and Gorbachev well aware that he needed help to bring prosperity to the Soviet Union, Gorbachev and Kennedy agreed that the USSR and USA would attempt to solve issues of mutual interest together, and that the two leaders should keep a regular open dialogue to make sure there were no vast disagreements on issues.

Gorbachev's attempts at reform had opened a Pandora's box, though.

Glasnost had done something that few - Gorbachev included - had anticipated. The Revolutions of 1989 directly led to calls for secession by a number of Soviet Republics, particularly the Baltic states forcibly taken over by Stalin in 1940 and the long-restless Caucasus regions. Promises of greater decentralization had an effect in several of the Soviet Republics, but for the Baltic states and Armenia it had little hope of success. Soviet hardliners, seeing the success through force that their Chinese counterparts had achieved the year before, orchestrated a massive coup against Gorbachev on September 25, 1990. The coup's first act was the murders of Gorbachev and rebellious Russian Republic leader Boris Yeltsin, an act that would come back to haunt them in a big way. They were too late to stop the Baltics, Armenia and Georgia from breaking away, and Azerbaijan, the people there furious after the events of Black January earlier in the year, also walked out on the USSR. Popular support for the coup was minimal, but the army and the security services backed it in a big way, and the Soviet Army was sent out to attempt to restore Moscow's control over its republics. This resulted in one bout of violence after another, and it came to a head in Azerbaijan, when the newly-formed Azerbaijani People's Defense Council fought back against the Red Army with the weapons of locally-stationed Red Army units. The Red Army was singularly unsuccessful in stopping the momentum the reformers had, and while a sizable portion of the establishment supported the Soviet Union, the situation devolved into armed conflict in numerous places, starting with Ukraine, Georgia and Kazakhstan. By January 1991, the situation in the Soviet Union had devolved into a bitter civil war.

America was called by many in the West and some Americans to get involved in the ugly civil war, but fearing such a war going nuclear, the American armed forces stayed clear except in a handful of critical cases. America did, however, provide billions in humanitarian aid, and with the civil war turning into a stalemate by the Spring of 1991 began authorizing units to search out and locate Russia's vast arsenal of nuclear weapons, fearing them in the hands of terrorists or being used by the opposing sides in the war. The latter fear turned out to be unfounded largely due to the fact that both sides had such weapons and feared the use of them by the other side. Rutskoy's massive victory over a rebel column in western Russia personally led by Vladimir Kryuchkov, which resulted in Kryuchkov being seriously wounded in the battle, in November 1991 broke the stalemate and began the destruction of the hardline forces. (Kryuchkov would later die of his injuries.) The civil war lasted into 1992, but 18 months of war had by that time killed over 350,000 people and massively reduced everyone's supplies, a situation not improved by the unwillingness of anyone else to supply them. By the fall of 1991, former SSRs where the hardliners had lost the battle - including all of the Caucasus regions, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan - had become independent nations. The world'd attention got drawn back onto the mess on January 8, 1992, when a government unit fired a number of badly-aimed Scud-B missiles at Ukrainian forces and instead had three of them land within the Chernobyl reactor complex, causing a partial failure of the containment structure over the destroyed Number Four reactor. Chernobyl was hit again by missile fire six days later and a third time two days after that, but the plant, which had been closed in December 1990, was not operating. One waste-storage complex was hit, however, adding to the existing serious problems with radioactivity in the complex.

On April 20, 1992, the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church went on television in Kyiv, Ukraine, and loudly called for the violence to stop. The government forces loudly refused this, saying that "we will stop when the traitors have been defeated, the bastards are all dead." Rutskoy, by contrast, spoke approvingly of negotiating a ceasefire, but the continued unwillingness by the hardliners to listen made sure it came to nothing. But a series of huge wins in European Russia in the summer of 1992 allowed Rutskoy's forces to gain a huge military advantage, and Moscow fell to the rebels on October 19, 1992. Of the "Gang of Ten" leaders of the 1990 coup, only two were alive after the assault, both arrested by Russian Republic military forces. These two, Gennady Yanayev and Dmitry Yazov, were both sentenced to life imprisonment, avoiding the death penalty mainly because after nearly half a million dead, in the words of Alexander Yakolev, "There has been quite enough killing." It was in many ways a hollow victory, but it meant huge changes for the psyche of most of the nations most effected.

Decades of Soviet oppression and the brutality of the two years of civil war made very sure that the people of the devastated nations were not keen on authoritarian government, and the new governments of the nations involved made this point clear. This didn't always work out too well, as the problems between Georgia and Abkhazia and the battles between Armenia and Azerbaijan would frequently show, but the governments in the nations that had risen from the burnt ashes of the Soviet Union were absolutely committed to democracy and civil rights, with a population willing and able to go out and loudly protest when they felt that their rights were not adequately protected. The "tryanny of the majority" did at times cause serious issues, but the new nations wouldn't soon give up their hard-won freedoms - part of this being that, frankly, the post-war USSR had little else. The country gave up nearly the entirety of its nuclear arsenal and demobilized its armed forces to a massive degree at the end of the Civil War, as well as going looking for partnerships and technology absolutely everywhere they could, abandoning many of the previous Soviet-era industrial organizations and planning techniques in favor of market chasing and looking for export potential absolutely everywhere possible with the intent of funding the rebuilding process of the war-torn areas. This would be a very long process, but it would start bearing fruits by the early 2000s.

As if the Revolutions of Eastern Europe and the nastiness in China wasn't enough, problems brewed in a third spot, in this case the Middle East. Iraq, run since 1979 by the thuggish Saddam Hussein, had sought in the early 1980s to get back a chunk of land he had sought after by trying to destabilize Iran, but his attempts had gotten nowhere except for sporadic military offenses in 1980-82. Saddam had, however, long been able to get money from the selling of oil abroad, and as with Argentina in the 1970s, money from oil allowed Saddam to purchase weapons in big quantities from the Soviets and from some European nations. By 1990, Saddam had given up trying to push Iran around - he feared a retaliation by the Iranians, who had by 1990 built a strong army and one of the world's best air forces - and had instead turned his attention to the oil-rich Arabian Peninsula. Making matters worse was that the OPEC cartel consistently found that Kuwait was overproducing oil and causing the cartel to get a depressed price. Iraq's use of chemical weapons on its restless Kurdish population in 1988 had caused a complete break in relations between the United States (and Iran) and Iraq, and Iraq's social problems, particularly attacks on expatriates within Iraq, contributed to serious problems with its neighbors. At the same time, Iraq had built a massive army, with Saddam claiming that it was to protect Arabs from Iran, despite the fact that by 1990 Iran was trying to improve relations with its Arab neighbors. Saddam was not to be deterred easily, and on August 2, 1990, the Iraqis invaded Kuwait. The Kuwaitis in a handful of places put up a stiff fight, but they were unprepared for the invasion and were outnumbered at least twenty to one by the Iraqis. Resistance in Kuwait collapsed within twelve hours, leaving Saddam in control of Kuwait.

Iran and all of the Arab states went to high alert. Saddam, who had long opposed the Ottawa Treaty, attempted to frame the war as the beginning of an attempt by Iraq to unify Arabs against outside forces, specifically naming Iran, Israel and America as three enemies to be kicked out of the Middle East. Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, at a meeting of the Arab League on August 11, called that comment "absolute nonsense" and said that "Saddam wants to control the Arab world, pure and simple." The Saudis were especially concerned, as were the Gulf states. Shah Reza Pahlavi II commented of Saddam "He's a thug and a fool" and if he was to attack Iran "He will regret such an action in very short order". The main Western concern in this case was the proximity of Saddam's forces to the oil fields of Saudi Arabia. The invasion also caused a sudden and quite substantial rise in oil prices, which came down rapidly once increasing production by Iran, Saudi Arabia, Angola and Canada made up much of the difference of the lost Kuwaiti production. But the fear of Saddam's actions resulted in a huge military deployment by the United States and allied nations.

Operation Desert Shield began with the deployments of the forces of dozens of nations, with American efforts backed up by the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Italy, France, Spain, the Netherlands, India, Argentina and Brazil. Israel offered to support, but aware of Saddam's rhetoric, was asked to keep their powder dry, which they did. Most of the Arabs attacked by Saddam also lined up to back up the coalition effort, while Japan and Germany provided logistical support. Iran also offered to get involved but ultimately stayed out. With the Soviet Union descending into civil war, Saddam had only one source for resupply, that being China, who was happy to help....for a while, which ended on December 21, 1990, when one of their IL-76 transport jets, flying to Mosul, Iraq, from China was accidentally shot down by a Soviet anti-aircraft missile over Azerbaijan. Fast sealift ships and container vessels allowed for a fast logistical buildup, and the navies of the Coalition nations moved in in force. American carriers USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, USS Independence and USS Enterprise were sent out to the region, as well as battleships USS Missouri and USS Wisconsin. They were joined by both of the UK's big flat-deck carriers, HMS Queen Elizabeth II and HMS Prince of Wales, Canada's HMCS Eagle and France's FS Clemenceau. Iraq's destruction for the sake of destruction in Kuwait was instrumental in making sure the invasion went ahead.

Operation Desert Storm began on January 15, 1991, when Missouri and Wisconsin fired the first shots of the war on Iraqi targets near the coasts of Iraq. They were followed by massive waves of airstrikes from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the various carriers. Somewhat to the Americans' chargin, the Commonwealth battle group based around Queen Elizabeth II, Prince of Wales and Eagle were better than most, in large part due to Canadian CF-18 Hornets painting targets for the British carriers and their Blackburn Buccaneer strike aircraft, which proved to be remarkably capable. The air war started with destroying the Iraqi air force on the ground, then taking out command and control facilities and then hunting Scud missiles and their launchers. Saddam attempted to attack Israel, but Israeli, Jordanian and Palestinian air defenses handled that problem rather handily, and an attempt by Saddam to attack Jerusalem infuriated many on the Arab Street as much as it did the Israelis. Saddam fired over 200 Scuds at other nations, doing damage in Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. But on January 24, Iraq got a shock it hadn't expected.

Intensive negotiating sessions in Amman between the Israelis, Iranians and Arab leaders had come to the conclusion that since Saddam was attacking the Israelis, they had the right to respond. On the night of January 24, the Israeli Air Force did just that, with a massive strike on Iraqi Air Bases in central Iraq backed up by their own tankers....but the Israelis were surprised when the Jordanians and Palestinians took off behind them and blasted targets of their own, striking notably at the al-Taqqadum Airbase in west-central Iraq. Six Iraqi MiG-21s got airborne to engage as that airbase was attacked, with four Israeli F-15Cs moving north to take them out. Palestinian F-4E Phantom IIs got two of the Iraqi jets (though lost one of their own to a ground-based SAM), a Jordanian Dassault Mirage F1 picked off a third and the Israelis wiped out the other three before all their air forces headed back as one unit. It was not the only strike of the night, but the news of the three nations fighting together was reported in Ha'aretz in Israel on January 26 and caused a sensation in all three nations.

The first ground battle for the Saudi city of Khafji broke out on January 29. Saddam's forces attacked the lightly-defended town but soon came under intense air attacks, followed by battleship Wisconsin and other naval warships, as well as the US Marines and the Saudi National Guard. The Americans lost an AC-130 gunship in this fight to an Iraqi SAM, but the attack was an overwhelming win for the Allies. The ground phase of Operation Desert Storm began on February 24, 1991, and involved a huge ground assault into Western Kuwait, with the goal of encircling the Iraqis. This was only partially successful, but it did result in a massive number of Iraqi casualties. The effect of anti-tank missiles was shown blankly when an Iraqi tank battalion blundered into a Canadian anti-tank company on the right flank of a British armored division during the second day of the ground war. The Canadians called for air support and got it, but their TOW missiles themselves took down over half the battalion with only four vehicles lost on their side. The Iraqis were able to inflict some casualties against the Allies, but the losses were enormous, and Saddam ordered them out on February 27, 1991. They took just 36 Hours to get out, but the losses were massive in the process. Allied forces chased the Iraqis as far north as as Kerbala before withdrawing back to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

Operation Desert Storm was a massive display of American power at a time when the Soviet Union was collapsing and China had turned inward, and had a major psychological effect for many of the nations involved. The Iranians had long held the view that America and the West were good partners to have and Desert Storm gave them plenty of graphic evidence of how true this was. The allies involved performed as well as could be expected and in many cases better, and the Israeli-Jordanian-Palestinian 'West Front' attacks on Iraq in the final month of the war had a major effect on the Israelis and many Arabs as well. The Palestinians, equipped after the Ottawa Treaty with older F-4E and A-7E fighters, managed nonetheless to do substantial damage to the Iraqis and their pilots claimed four Iraqi air-to-air kills. The commander of the Israeli Air Force, General Avihu Ben-Nun, commented of the Arabs "They came to fly against Iraq with us and did as well as any force could under the conditions they had....they attacked Iraqi bases, shot down Iraqi planes and fired on Iraqi missile launchers that could have otherwise threatened us. They said that they could do this, and they did it. They should be proud of themselves. They have earned it." Operation Desert Storm was also noticed very clearly in China, which it was said at that point was still considering a military solution to the problems with Hong Kong and their difficulties with Taiwan, but they decided against it after the massive war in the Middle East.

The world may have had to learn what American power looked like in Operation Desert Storm, but in other ways there was little to be learned. A decision by then-Fed Chairman Paul Volcker in 1985 to attempt to slowly reduce the value of the US Dollar against the Japanese Yen and West German Deutschemark resulted in both a major growth in America's exports, but both nations responded to the growth in the value of their currencies with massive expansions, in the case of Japan to the point that the Bank of Japan had to begin trying to tamp down the asset price bubble in Japan by late 1987. This was only partially successful, but Japan's asset price bubble grew to such a degree that Japanese firms and individuals spent the second half of the 1980s buying massive amounts of pretty much everything around the world, with one joke being that by 1989 that the Mayor of Los Angeles might as well raise the Japanese flag over City Hall, people from Tokyo and Osaka had bought so much of Los Angeles. But as the asset price bubble collapsed in 1989, Japanese companies and corporations were so in deep with properties and operations abroad that selling them off was not really much of an option. The result is that many Japanese conglomerates expanded their international operations by vast amounts in the 1990s, attempting to allow what would otherwise be considerable losses to be turned into assets for the company. In prospering America, this turned into a major boom for some of them. Sony's work with Atari and Toshiba partnering with RCA on manufacturing of the latter's revolutionary plasma display televisions in 1990 was just the tip of the iceberg. Kawasaki Heavy Industries scored three massive coups in 1991 by selling 16 massive EF600AR two-unit diesel locomotives to the Denver and Rio Grande Western railroad, followed by a partnership with Chrysler-Alco to make trainsets for the Acela Express in the Northeastern United States and then by offering its newly-completed Kawasaki C-2 military plane design for partnerships (Japan was still prohibited from selling military equipment at the time), and promptly having a deal signed between KHI and Canada's Bombardier, which saw twenty-two C-2s ordered by the Royal Canadian Air Force to manufacturer by Bombardier under license. Japan's investments in America quickly became less prestige items and more business investments, as Japan spent the 1990s fighting to recover its lost economic momentum after the asset bubble burst.

Germany was faced with much less of an asset price bubble, but in 1990 it had the massive problem of paying the bills for German reunification, and it faced a significant problem in that many of Germany's neighbors, including Britain, France and Italy, were less than keen of a rapid German unification, fearing a rise in the nationalism that had been the cause of two World Wars, the former two being a significant barrier. The Soviet Union agreed to allow the unification with few conditions, but Germany regardless of this renounced weapons of mass destruction and accept the Oder-Neisse line as Germany's eastern border. Kennedy's only condition of note was that Germany remain part of NATO, a point that German Chancellor Helmut Kohl agreed to, even though he was well aware of the fact that German support of NATO was barely 25% (though that number grew substantially after Operation Desert Storm). All of the victorious WWII powers ratified the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany in the summer and fall of 1990, paving the way for the reunification to become law on October 3, 1990. The unified Germany substantially reduced the size of its armed forces. Aware of Kohl's support of Solidarity in the 1980s, one of the first nations to recognize Germany's unification was Poland, and one of Germany's first actions as a unified nation was to propose that Israel and Palestine be made members of NATO, much to the surprise of Yitzhak Shamir, the Israeli Prime Minister, and saying "Germany's past is not exactly an example of peace and kindness, and we accept that. No man on this Earth should fear us, and we invite any man who does fear us to speak to us, to let us know his concerns, so that we can make sure that all of the men of our home planet can be clear on our position. Germany will never again make war on another, and we seek to make it so that the divided world that was a fact of all of our lives never rises again."

The cost of reunification was not small, but was paid by Germany in any case, and the withdrawal of all troops from all sides from Germany, completed by Britain and France in 1992 and the USA, Russia and Canada in 1993, was a major cost reduction for many nations and the reduction of Germany's armed forces caused something of a high-tech economic boom in the 1990s as many Germans engaged in military fields instead went into higher-tech industrial fields. Indeed the largest place that changed in Germany was Berlin itself, which was transformed into a very modern western metropolis in the 1990s and 2000s with vast construction projects and the connection of the city to the rail networks of West and East Germany.

It was a new world, and the collapse of the USSR into first civil war and then nearly twenty individual nations, ranging from massive Russia to tiny ones like Abkhazia and Armenia, made sure that the symmetry that had once existed between the West and East fell apart. America, standing proud with a booming economy, a stable political system, improving social conditions and the ability to direct vast diplomatic, cultural, economic, financial and military power to nearly anywhere on Earth, and possessing of alliances that spread to virtually all corners of the globe, was very much seen as the world's "Hyperpower", able to largely shape the world to its liking. As true as this was, most of America's senior government officials made it clear that they had little interest in trying to reshape the world in their image, just improve it for America, its people and its allies.....

 

[TheMann]

Chapter Ten: North Korea's Fall, the Nightmare in Rwanda and Russia is Born Again

The world of 1992 was occupied with the end of Soviet Union's Civil War and a new administration on the incoming in the United States. Edward Kennedy and Jesse Jackson had very ably led America through the end of Communism and the Revolutions and protests of the late 1980s and early 1990s, but as American Presidents were term limited, Kennedy's time as President would be ending on January 20, 1993, no matter what. His Vice-President could run for the top job, but Jackson in January 1992 announced that he would not do that, saying that he "didn't think America was ready for a black President yet". Whether or not that was true was a matter for debate among many, but it set up a completely open 1992 primaries on both sides of the aisle, and by 1992 one other element which hadn't been true in 1988 was also true - the Republicans, smarting from the problems they had suffered during the Reagan Administration and their massive losses in 1984 and 1988, had learned that hard-line conservatism wasn't working, and by 1992 they had collectively decided to go a more moderate path.

The 1992 primaries on the Republican side began with a vast field of candidates, ranging from Senators Phil Gramm (Texas), Richard Lugar (Indiana), Howard Baker (Tennessee) and John McCain (Arizona) to governors Christine Todd Whitman (New Jersey), William Weld (Massachusetts) and Tommy Thompson (Wisconsin), as well as General Colin Powell, the number two boss of America's forces during Operation Desert Storm. It was notable that not one of these candidates talked about reversing most of the major reforms of the Kennedy Administration, well aware that their popularity was very high among both Republicans and Democrats. A handful ran from the farther right, most notably Libertarian stalwart Ron Paul and former Nixon Administration member Pat Buchanan, but neither even came close to winning a state. As the primaries went on, Baker, Lugar, Whitman and Powell emerged as the better candidates, and after dominating the middle of the primaries, Baker went into the convention with a big lead but having not sealed up the nomination, but Whitman's withdrawal did that for him - and it would become clear what was happening when Baker asked for Governor Whitman to be confirmed as his VP nominee. Lugar and Powell were not pleased by this, but they had little they could do about it, and so the Republicans chose Senator Baker and Governor Whitman as their nominees. The choice of a woman to be on a major ticket was a new one, and the Republicans crowed long and hard about how they had done this.

On the Democratic side, the popular Kennedy Administration had made it so that the Democrats went into the 1992 Presidential election with a considerable lead on the Republicans, and the full field of candidates on their side made it clear that they had plenty of people who wanted the nomination. First off the blocks were Senate Majority Leader Tom Foley (Washington), Congressman Dick Gephardt (Missouri), Governors Jerry Brown (California) and Ann Richards (Texas), while others jumped in after VP Jackson made it clear that he would not enter, with the leaders of this second pack being Senators Tom Harkin (Iowa), Lloyd Bentsen (Texas) and Daniel Patrick Moynihan (New York) and Governor Bill Clinton (Arkansas). Baker's partner in the Senate, Al Gore, was planning to run until a car accident left him requiring hospitalization and extensive physical therapy. While all of the candidates pledged to continue many of the Administration's policies, some got further than others with this. Foley blew an early lead with a gaffe about advantages to specific industries in Washington, while damning problems in his personal life wrecked Bill Clinton's bid, while similar gaffes also sank Richards' campaign. Moynihan's dismissal of lingering issues with health care in the United States earned him a mountain of scorn from the party's liberals, while also giving Republicans a wonderful piece of ammo to use against the Democrats in the general election. In the end, the party selected Gephardt as the Presidential nominee and Brown as the VP choice at their Convention in Detroit in July 1992, setting up the 1992 general election.

Kennedy was quite pleased at the choices of Gephardt and Brown as the Democratic ticket and happily supported their efforts, but the Republicans were by the general election firing on all cylinders and running with a much more moderate message than previous elections. Both Gephardt and Baker were well-liked and respected by each other and by their colleagues, and both Whitman and Brown knew each other and sought civility during the race. Attempts by harder-line conservatives to raise divisive social issues into the race (Pat Buchanan's famous 'Culture War' speech at the convention being one very high-profile example) were on more than one occasion shot down by either Baker of Whitman, but contrary to expectations, these events actually wound up helping the Republicans, as it added to their narrative of being the people able to make the often-tough decisions that were needed to govern the nation. The Democrats' focus on economic issues wound up not helping them as the nation's economy slowed some in 1991 and 1992, which resulted in their lead evaporating in the general election.

With the race a dead heat with just weeks later, Baker and Gephardt's attempts to stay civil evaporated from their parties. The Republicans' claim that the Democrats were the party of "sluts and freeloaders" (a claim by California Congressman Robert Dornan) was loudly thrown back by Democratic supporters, who said that the presence of the likes of Dornan and Buchanan around the race was a sign of "the Republicans have never really changed, they are the same group of misogynistic, bible-thumping, criminal nutcases as they were before" (this claim came from outspoken Congressman Bernie Sanders). The ugliness was condemned by both Baker and Gephardt loudly, with the focus staying on what the two parties would do for the people of America.

On election day, it went in too close to call and came out with an incredibly-narrow win for the Republicans, as Baker and Whitman captured 275 electoral votes to Gephardt and Brown's 263. It was an incredibly close battle, but one which for the top contenders was conducted by and large with honor, though others in the parties and in the masses were not so nice at times to each other. Gephardt conceded at just after two in the morning on November 4, 1992, marking the Republicans back into power after eight years in the wilderness, but it was a Republican Party which had massively mellowed from the fire-breathing right wingers of the early 1980s. Whitman called both Gephardt and Brown and congratulate them on running excellent campaigns, saying that "she'll be happy to work with them on the challenges we all face." That was accepted by the Democrats, who despite being vocally disappointed with the result did say that working on their problems was more important than engaging in partisan conflict. (Some would regret this action later on.) Baker and Whitman were sworn in on January 20, 1993, into a country which still had some domestic problems, but had a hot economy and was heading into a time where it had no real equals in terms of its power and influence in the world. The limits of that power would soon show themselves, mind you....

1993 was notable for the first terrorist attack on US soil by a foreign entity, that being the use of a 1800-pound van bomb, which detonated in the underground parking garage of the World Trade Center just after noon on February 26, 1993. The van blast gutted the parking garage structure and caused considerable structural damage to the World Trade Center complex, though the hope of conspirator Ramzi Yousef to have one tower collapse into the other did not occur. The massive blast did, however, claim twelve lives (including a three children who were with their mother, surprising their father on his birthday by visiting him at work) and injure over 1400. The attack got the attention of Americans in a big way, though, but the primary plot creator, Ramzi Yousef, took off to avoid arrest. Despite his escape, four others were arrested and charged with the attack, with all four convicted of numerous charges and sentenced to life in prison. That would not be the only time terrorism hit in North America, though.

In Russia and the nations of the former Soviet Union, the task of rebuilding after the bitter and ugly civil war began with heavy hearts and remaining political differences. Now separated into eighteen different nations (OOC: the OTL 16 plus Abkhazia and Chechnya), the nations began numerous tasks, including the critical one of re-establishing economic and social links, though in the latter case it was more than a little difficult. The Baltic States, always those least inclined to want to have anything at all to do with Russia for nationalistic reasons, ignored the whole idea of trying to associate with the former Soviet nations and looked westward, seeking market economies and entrance into the European Union, which was made a reality by the Maastricht Treaty and became a reality on June 1, 1993. The EU quite openly championed itself as a way of allowing the various states of Europe to have a better future through free trade and movement of people and capital, an idea that after Communist rule appealed to the entire former Eastern Bloc. Every member of the Warsaw Pact outside the USSR had begun talking of joining the EU by 1995, as well as the Baltic states, Georgia, Armenia and Ukraine, all of whom sought EU membership. It didn't make much to see why, as Europe had been peaceful for decades and the former Soviet Union hadn't, and all of the nations involved needed economic help. The EU imposed conditions on these nations, namely the demand on the Baltic states to provide citizenship to all in the country who sought it (this namely aimed at ethnic Russians who were not particularly fond of the new government) and on Armenia to sort out its differences with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh, a process that proved to be difficult at best, though Armenia did get some help when the EU, as part of negotiations to negotiate Turkey's entry into the EU in the 1990s, demanded and got Armenia's border with Turkey open, though relations there remained chilly. Ukraine's post-civil war changes went more smoothly - as a gesture, it openly made sure its constitution and government were mandated to be bilingual in both Ukrainian and Russian, and it made discrimination against those of Russian descent illegal, though at times this was not always followed.

In Moscow, Alexander Rutskoy took office as the President of the Russian Federation on an interim basis, as internationally-supervised elections were set for June 1993. They happened, but the process was a long ways from smooth as violence racked the vote, and Rutskoy's choice for the Prime Minister of Russia, Ruslan Khasbulitov, was able to win his seat in the new Russian State Duma, but as the PM was chosen by the Duma, they stunned the President (and indeed alarmed much of the world) by choose Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the very loud nationalist who was known as somebody who had switched sides during the civil war. The Duma, leaning towards libertarianism to start with, said privately that they had that Zhirinovsky would screw up and thus give a way to discredit both his hard-line supporters and those who believed in authoritarianism as the only way to govern Russia. Zhirinovsky, however, proved to be a little tricker than expected, as he supported and even advocated for many of Rutskoy's candidates for office. Rutskoy himself won the Presidential race with a considerable margin, but he only gained 41% of the vote, with Grigory Yavlinsky landing in second with 23%. The first job of the new country was solving its humanitarian crisis and then beginning the job of rebuilding. Rutskoy was lucky in a big way in this regard - Russia's farming infrastructure had not been damaged as severly as had been feared, and the move to privatize many of the farm collectives allowed them to be broken up and purchased for next to nothing by many who worked on them, and while the 1993 grain harvest was not real good, Russia's agricultural output swelled every year between 1993 and 2002. Likewise, as aid flowed in to improve the economy of Russia, the aid was used almost exclusively on the rebuilding of infrastructure to allow Russia's economy to improve, and adding to that, Russia invited others to make proposals and plans within the country to develop resources and build businesses.

The collapse of the Soviet Union had plenty of other results beyond its own borders, even if one discounted the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the nations behind it turning strongly westward, and the greatest madness of this world was to break out in North Korea.

The two Koreas, North and South, were the result of an accident of history. After the end of World War II (where Japan lost control of Korea after occupying it since 1910), Korea was divided between Western and Eastern camps, with the South occupied by the West and the Soviet Block occupying the North. Divisions between these two nations boiled into into open conflict in the brutal 1950-53 Korean War. The two remained at odds, but the problems began by the 1970s. South Korea, ruled by a series of strongmen and military leaders until the election of Roh Tae Woo in 1986, economic prospered, following Japan, Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia as economic tigers. At the same time, the North stagnated, particularly after China and the United States normalized relations in 1972 and North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung began his program and idea of absolute self-reliance, known as Juche, on the country. By 1976, South Korea's economic strength had passed the North and kept going. Economic crisis began in the mid-1980s, and after the Soviet Union's collapse, aid stopped completely. But what happened in 1993-94 on this front scared everyone.

China took over from the Soviet Union in supplying food and fuel, but facing economic crisis after Tiananmen Square and their own serious food shortages in 1992-93, China was unable to provide the help that North Korea needed. This, combined with a series of floods in 1993 followed by even bigger ones in 1994, caused a massive, widespread lack of food that hammered all of North Korea, a problem made worse when the leadership of North Korea changed in 1993.

Kim Il-sung's health was beginning to fail by 1992, resulting in many of the functions of state being transferred to his son, Kim Jung-Il. But the son passed away after a helicopter crash on May 25, 1994, near the port city of Namp'o after his helicopter flew into a transmission tower. Combined with the death of Kim Il-Sung from a massive heart attack on June 14, 1994, left North Korea leaderless at a time when it was starting to face its own self-destruction. Factions among the government were at each other's throats within days, and when the food available was insufficient to fully feed soldiers and their families, officers began hoarding it for themselves and their families, causing by the fall of 1994 a near-total breakdown in social order, both in civil society and among the government and armed forces. The situation finally boiled over on September 26, 1994, when an entire battalion on the Demilitarized Zone between South and North Korea defected, but not before blasting open a hole in the DMZ near Munsan four miles away using everything from small arms to armored vehicles and field artillery, all of the latter falling on the Northern side so as to avoid a South Korean response.

South Korea was aware of what was happening in the North, but the Munsan incident and the realization that North Korea was destroying itself through famine was simply too much to ignore for the nation or its government. The rest of 1994 was spent by South Korea beginning the task of moving food, and as refugees began fleeing south for the DMZ, the task of controlling the situation went from difficult to impossible. South Korean president Kim Young-sam called directly to President Baker on November 22, 1994, asking for military help in containing the situation and for food aid, a call which the world heard, but was heard most loudly in Japan.

Three days after the call by Young-sam to Baker, Japanese Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama called his South Korean counterpart and offered assistance of any kind that the Koreans required. Japan rapidly organized shipments of grain and other foodstuffs, shipping emergency supplies by air in Japanese and South Korean transport aircraft and then moving more by ship to Incheon, where it went north into North Korea.

On January 5, 1995, South Korean armed forces crossed the DMZ for the first time since July 1953, with American forces following close behind that. They held their fire unless fired upon, figuring (in most, but not all, cases correctly) that the North Korean police and armed forces would hold their fire on them, knowing that they were delivering food. By this point, rumours of what South Korea was doing were known to pretty much everyone in North Korea, and in more than a few cases the troops were met with starving but enthusiastic Koreans, this to the point that many of the junior officers of the North Korean armed forces ordered their forces not only to not open fire but to disable their weapons and assist the South Koreans as much as possible. The Americans got rather less of a positive response, but it didn't take long before the North Koreans figured out what the Americans were up to, and the America made great pains to point out that the operations were always commanded by a South Korean and that they would only fire their weapons if fired upon or a food convoy was attacked. This program didn't go perfectly smoothly, but within weeks food convoys had reached all the way to Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, and were continuing to move north.

On March 19, 1995, the Japanese Prime Minister visited South Korea - the first since the two nations normalized relations in 1966 - and asked if he could speak publicly on the television during the visit. The Koreans granted him that request, and in an emotional speech on March 24, 1995, Murayama acknowledged Japan's crimes against Korea over time and spoke of how his country had long treated its friends terribly, while promising to Korea any assistance that Japan could provide to settle the problems in North Korea. His most poignant statement was him saying "In a way, we caused the problem that now occupies the heart and soul of Korea. We never divided Korea or had anything to do with it, but it was us who stopped you from making your own choices, and it was us who forced you to be occupied by the Soviets and by the Americans, who brought what has happened now upon you. I believe in personal responsibility, taking charge of one's life and making right the problems one creates through his actions. We cannot do that alone, because before these problems can be made right, Korea has to forgive Japan. We did much of that thirty years ago, but it is long past time that we put right the mistakes of the past, that we all know the truth. It is time Japan accepted its past and moved on, but we cannot do that alone. Before Japan can move on, Korea must be willing to forgive us." The translation of Murayama's speech was stopped in the middle of his final statement for a moment, as the translator was unable to continue due to emotion and disbelief. (The South Koreans, surprisingly, admitted this.) To say South Korea was stunned was most than a minor understatement, as was Japan. But the impact of the speech was enormous.

Asahi Shimbun in Japan on the morning of March 25, 1995, wrote that Murayama's speech had been approved by the entire of the Prime Minister's cabinet, and over the coming days few politicians had the willingness to speak against it and those who did quite frequently were ripped for it by others in society. Being a very tight-knit society by any standard, Murayama's speech had massive support in Japan, and it didn't take long for that to become obvious, and numerous newspapers in the weeks afterwards called for Japan to do anything it could to rebuild North Korea, calling it a "duty of a nation which makes good its past mistakes". The South Koreans didn't want Japanese military help - they didn't really need it - but they did want help in terms of food, goods and supplies. They had little difficulty getting that, and just as soon as possible, Japanese experts, both military and civilian, began arriving in Korea to move into North Korea and see what could be salvaged.

North Korea's government collapsed on July 23, 1995, with the last provisional head of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea saying so in a televised address out of Pyongyang. Those came just as the nastiest floods in a century hammered all of Korea, with Pyongyang getting its usual yearly rainfall in just over 72 Hours. Even American observers there called the floods "An Act of a very angry God". Japan's second wave of help was followed by massive food aid, particularly from Canada and Australia, which was needed to deal with the massive aftermath of the mess in North Korea, the floods of July and August 1995 destroying over a million and a half tons of food and ruining some 15% of North Korea's arable land. By the end of summer 1995, South Korean troops, North Koreans who were working with the South and American troops had completely occupied the nation with very little violence, and aid was moving north in huge quantities.

On December 24, 1995, the government of Republic of Korea declared that the two Koreas had been reunified and that the South would now officially begin the task of providing for the economic rehabilitation of the north. Indeed, the unification of Korea would proceed in many ways just like Germany, including the way it was administratively done - the ten provinces of North Korea simply joined the Republic of Korea in the South, abolishing the federal government in the process. As with Germany, once the emergency phase was over, that largely completed by the fall of 1996, the permanent task of rebuilding the nation. The citizens of North Korea were considered citizens of the Republic of Korea, though provisional governments remained in North Korea as late as 2001. The unified nation's capital remained in Seoul, but plans for using Pyongyang as a major city were dusted off and began implementation as the years went on. In the 1998 elections, Young-sam's chosen successor, Kim Dae-jung, was easily elected as Korea's President, and it was notable that in that election voter turnout in North Korea was surprisingly high at 41%. The rebuilding of North Korea would prove to be a much longer and more drawn-out process than Germany had been, it had always been true that the Koreans had been a tough, hardy people, and they would become only too eager to show it in the years after unification.

Korea's unification and Japan's admission of guilt in its past actions, when combined with China's post-Tiananmen belligerence, changed the balance of power in Asia. Korea and Japan were only too aware of the problems that an angry, aggressive China proposed, and while Japan's 1990s actions to begin chasing down the truth behind what had happened in the past were accepted as genuine in most of Asia, China continued to deny that, a point that became clear to the Koreans first of all. China had not been unhappy to see North Korea go, but they were only too aware that with the North Korea problem settled, most of Asia would be in some way, shape or form allied with the West, and talk of military alliances in the later 1990s and 2000s forced China to begin looking at changing their policies, but by then much of Asia was benefitting from massive economic growth and the Chinese had a long way to go to catch up.

As the Americans were focused on Korea, Canada and the Europeans had to deal with another problem, this one in the middle of Africa.

The actions of previous colonial powers in Africa had left more than a few scars, and while the war in Angola was mostly over by 1994 and apartheid ended with the peaceful election of Nelson Mandela to South Africa's presidency in June 1994, there were other problems, and one of the most horrible in modern times erupted in the tiny country of Rwanda in Africa in 1994. That small country, ruled by the Belgians until 1962, had long been the scene of difficulties between its Hutu majority and its politically-powerful Tutsi minority, which escalated into a civil war in 1990. That war ended with a truce between the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front in 1993, but the Hutu Power movement that had begun as a result of the civil conflict had grown immensely powerful. The UN deployed a peacekeeping mission to the region, led by Canadian Lieutenant-General Romeo Dallaire, who was famous for being deployed in Jerusalem from 1981 until 1988. The situation remained tense, but it blew open with the Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi were killed when their airplane was shot down while coming in to land at Kigali, Rwanda's capital, on April 6, 1994. The provisional government of Rwanda refused to recognize the authority of Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, and when she was being escorted to the Radio Rwanda building to make her succession speech, she was murdered by members of Rwanda's Presidental Guard, along with her Belgian peacekeeper escorts. The extremist Hutus spent the following 36 hours rounding up and killing moderate political leaders, kicking off the genocide. Dallaire violated orders by trying to stop this and found himself under attack by the Rwandans, as well the Interahamwe militia. Dallaire was himself personally wounded in an attempt to rescue children from a school the Interahamwe militias were attacking, and he made a panicked call for help from his headquarters on April 12, stating that Rwandan Hutus had begun murdered Tutsis in massive numbers and he needed help badly. The response from Belgium and France was to pull their troops out, further making Dallaire's job harder. But on April 19, he got what he wanted.

That afternoon, Dallaire's headquarters got a call from Canada's National Defense HQ. The Canadians, who had by then acquired six of the Bombardier/Kawasaki C-2 jet transport aircraft and had over twenty C-130 Hercules five Shorts Belfast turboprop transport planes, had organized all of them to deliver Dallaire's reinforcements - Canada's elite Airborne Battalion, two battalions of the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry and an armored company from the Fort Garry Horse - if Dallaire could get Kigali airport open that night. Dallaire and his peacekeepers shot their way through the Rwandan Army and secured it mere hours before the help arrived, and while the Rwandan Army was organizing to take it back, the Canadian reinforcements arrived in their airplanes. The newly-arrived Canadian troops fought off the Rwandan Army attack - they had been combat loaded and had been half-anticipating having to jump in - and they set about securing the airport. They were followed by Air Canada civilian cargo planes, and then by eight CA-187 (A-7E) Corsair II attack aircraft.

It took mere hours before CBC television crews explained what was happening to the world. It took just hours after that before American C-5 Galaxy, C-141 Starlifter and C-17 Globemaster III transporters were at Canadian bases, loading up supplies, weapons and manpower. Dallaire took his new reinforcements and his air support and quickly got down to work, first by rescuing those most in danger and then taking on the Rwandan Army and the Interahamwe head on. The Canadians were too slow to get to the Ntrama church south of Kigali, but did get there in time to drive off the Intrahamwe, killing dozens of them in the process, but the event, combined with CBC TV reporter Adrienne Arsenault being shot at - and her continuing to report despite that, the cameras able to show the burning Ntrama church, made sure that the world cared.

Dallaire was able to end the genocide by the second week of May, but by that time the Hutu militias had already killed over 350,000 people. Pictures from those on the scene, from the Ntrama church to the similar scene at the Nyarubuye church, to roads filled with dead bodies to humans being burned alive, as was seen by the Canadians on numerous occasions, made the situation uglier. One of the men on the scene, Captain Jason Lukander, was quoted as saying "Hell itself is less horrible than Rwanda is now. There are bodies everywhere. Neighbors murdered each other or were murdered by others for not doing so. I don't think any horror movie could be like this, but this is real. God help this place and these people." The Canadians proved to be unwilling to play nice with those involved in orchestrating the killings - the Governor of Kigali province was shot sixteen times by Canadian troops when he tried to push his way through a roadblock, there were dozens of cases of Canadian snipers killing army officers and then their fellow troops shooting up the men they commanded and the RTLM "Hutu Power" radio station was knocked flat by four 1000-pound smart bombs by the Canadian jets - and the operation began to be seen in many of the same ways as defeating the Nazis had. The operation - named Operation Messiah by the Canadians, which for hundreds of thousands of Tutsis was nothing less than the truth - saw only 19 Canadian dead and 352 wounded, but they killed over two thousand members of the Rwandan military, police and Interahamwe militia members. The operation, done with CBC television broadcasts telling the world how it was going, were followed around the world. The Canadians were justifiably proud of the operation, which many military analysts around the world were amazed it had been possible. British, Australian and Brazilian peacekeepers were deployed in June to allow the combat-weary Canadians to go home, and General Dallaire, who had been wounded twice, arrived in Ottawa to a parade and being one of the first recipients of the Canadian Victoria Cross.

In Washington, Rwanda caused such a furor that many American TV networks were stunned by it all. VP Whitman said quite openly "If we'd known what was happening, we'd have gone in ourselves and stopped it, and we can now be thankful the Canadians and General Dallaire had the courage to do so." Dallaire and the Canadians, however, had bones to pick with the Belgians and French, first for pulling their men out, then sending troops only to get out their civilians and leave everyone else to die. "They knew damn well what was happening, and they knew what was gonna happen long before it happened, because they supplied the weapons and blades and grenades and ammunition used to kill those people." Both countries' leaders objected, but Canada's government stood by their war hero, and both America and Britain confirmed that the two countries had supplied weapons to Rwanda. This caused political earthquakes in both nations. America supplied the Canadians with supplies and ammunition and moved vehicles, and after the war they gave Canada six examples of the C-17 Globemaster III transport plane as payback for what they had done in Rwanda. The intervention in Rwanda proved that a competent middle-weight armed forces like that of Canada could get involved in situations around the world. Some pointed out Cuba's involvement in Angola in the 1970s and 1980s, but those troops had been supplied by the Soviets. The overall result was an idea that such genocides simply could not be allowed, a viewpoint that few in the world didn't share. This resolve to prevent the murders of so many of the innocent would be tested, but after the scenes of Rwanda in the late spring of 1994, few would question the need for it to happen....

 

[TheMann]

Chapter Eleven: The Millenium Awaits

After the early 1990s gave the world the unification of Korea and the horrors of Rwanda, it also gave the world many changes to the world, including the development of democracies in many parts of the world. South Africa saw Nelson Mandela become its President in 1994 after a nearly entirely-peaceful all-race election, sealing the end of apartheid and beginning South Africa's advancements of the 1990s and 2000s. Democracy had by the mid-1990s consigned dictatorship to history in much of Latin America and those democracies were starting to grow strong, with one of the notable events there being the election of Fernando Henrique Cardoso in Brazil in October 1994. Latin America had better governance, faster economic growth and greater reductions in poverty than in any time since the 1960s, and it showed in what they did with that money, which indeed wound being a benefit across the West, particularly North America.

At the same time, the growing use of containerization and the easy transport it created allowed many outsources industries to move to places where wages were lower. While at first this mostly went to China, in the aftermath of Tiananmen Square and the Hong Kong Crisis of 1989-90, China lost nearly all of this work, with it switching to other nations. The first real beneficiary of this was the Philippines and Thailand, the former having double-digit economic growth every year between 1992 and 2008 and the latter showing steady growth between the early 1980s and the present. But as the exports swung out of China and sectors such as textile and some forms of electronics manufacturing began to swing out of higher-wage nations like Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Malaysia, it swung to the lesser-developed nations of the region. India, which reformed its economy steadily after its 1991 economic crisis, wound up getting the overwhelming majority of the textiles work, while many of the manufacturing work wound up in the hands of the Thais, Vietnamese and Indonesians. The 1997 Asian Financial Crisis was a major burp in the road, but it wound up being saved by Western intervention, first in the form of IMF packages and then massive investment.

America proved to be helpful here. The last two years of Kennedy's Administration (1991-1992) had seen the first budgets surpluses since 1970, and the tech boom that America roared into in the 1990s, combined with continued growth in America's industrial sectors, resulted in America's economy growing in the 1990s, and the debt-to-GDP ratio of several Western nations sank substantially in the 1990s, with the US hitting its lowest debt-to-GDP level in the 20th Century in 1998 and several other Western countries also following suit. The economic confidence of the time allowed American banks and institutions to be able to help in the 1997 Crisis and indeed work at solving Japan's lost decade. Japan bought substantially into America at the height of the 1980s bubble boom, and the subsequent collapse of that boom forced them to restart their economy in the 1990s, and this meant unprecedented co-operation in many economic areas, particularly in several of Japan's economic specialties, with the greatest involvement here being in the automobile industry. General Motors' huge investment in Isuzu and Daihatsu in 1992 was followed by Mazda having a controlling interest sold to Ford in 1993 and Chrysler's majority stake in Subaru taken in 1996. But all of that even paled in comparison to the 1999 deal between American Motors and Renault, partners and investors in each other since 1981, to take charge of Nissan. The complex arrangement saw AMC and Renault buy big chunks of Nissan, while Nissan also got chunks of the other two makers. This also saw AMC's second-generation general manager, Mitt Romney, head off to be Carlos Ghosn's number-two running Nissan. The two did such a job in the 2000s that both would become idolized not just at Nissan but in substantial sectors of Japan's society in general. Japan's major companies which had bought huge assets in America often were quick to try to make profits this way - Sony's deals with Atari and its aggressively pushing its Columbia Pictures division was one example of many.

The tech boom, which largely began with the beginnings of the Internet with the release of the Mosaic web browser in 1993, swelled into a huge boom in the 1990s, with the peak of this being with the NASDAQ in 2000. Many of the best investors bailed out of the bubble before it collapsed, but it didn't stop over 30% of the dot-coms from collapsing in the early 2000s. In more than a few cases, traditional communications companies got burned badly in the dot-com collapse, with AOL Time Warner being one of the worst deals involved, while toy maker Mattel got scorched badly by buying The Learning Company and Telefonica's buying of Lycos, which subsequently collapsed, nearly destroying the Spanish firm. (Telefonica was burned badly by this and by overextension in mobile networks, leading it to be bailed out by Motorola and Canadian telecommunications firm Rogers Communications in 2003.) But the dot-com boom's successful people wound up in many cases providing huge funding for some of the biggest projects of the 2000s, and while many collapsed, companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple, and several others came out of the boom both intact and able to grow, while better fates were in store for several companies which had made huge money in the boom and then bailed out, with Corning, JDS Uniphase, Nortel, Electronica Avatar, Mid-America Electronics and Western Digital being examples of these. But this boom did have one positive consequence for all - the huge infrastructure that was built as a result of the dot-com boom would become increasingly important as faster computers, better internet speeds and increasingly-sophisticated media operations saw the need for internet bandwidth again swell, finding the extra infrastructure very useful for this purpose indeed.

As the 1990s economy boomed, it came with it new plans and proposals for the nation, and the 'peace dividend' that came from reduced defense spending led to a swell in the 1990s in spending, with the focus on education. The quality of schools went up nationwide, and the Baker Administration continued Kennedy's push for major reforms of the American college systems, a process first begun by Kennedy in 1989 but with its final result, the American Higher Education Improvement Act, being signed into law by President Baker on September 7, 1993. Health care spending also grew some, and Baker's courageous decision to jack the limit on Social Security premiums led to a vast growth in that program's income, though it landed Baker with a political problem with the right wing of his party. Baker was, however, quite personally popular, and it showed with his approval ratings in the 70% range through late 1993 and into 1994.

The peace dividend saw a major change in America's nuclear weapons policy, with silo-based nuclear missiles removed from service after 1992, with the last silo being blown up on national television on July 25, 1998. America's nuclear triad still existed, but the land-based portion shifted to mobile launchers, most notably the rail-based launchers that had been developed first under Reagan and then Kennedy in the 1980s. The peace dividend saw America's armed forces massively re-orient themselves in the 1990s toward a fast-action expeditionary force, though one with massive teeth. Several huge defense projects, including the A-12 Avenger II attack aircraft, laser-based missile defense programs and most space weapons and several major Army weapons projects were called off or cancelled in favor of cheaper options. The Navy, however, bucked much of this trend, with the Navy keeping all of its carriers save the ancient Midway-class vessels, with the aging Forrestal-class carriers being retired in the 1990s as replacements came online, and with the Burke-class and Ticonderoga-class vessels being joined by a new class of more-capable frigates, the Towers-class, which first entered the fleet in 1997, and a new-class of AIP-equipped diesel-electric attack submarines, the Barracuda-class, which entered the fleet in 1998. The F-22 Raptor was massively-produced, but the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter meant to complement it turned into a developmental nightmare and was canned in 2003. The most surprising ships to live on were the Iowa-class battleships, in large part in their cases due to the Marines' wishing to still have them available and developments in gun technology. The Iowas went through extensive overhauls in the mid-1990s as a result.

After the chaos of Korea and Rwanda, the remainder of the 1990s saw the world's armed conflicts largely limited to Africa and to the Balkan states. The Balkans had all been part of Yugoslavia until the collapse of the federation in 1991, and after short battles in Slovenia in 1991, it escalated with the wars between Serbs, Croatians, Bosniaks and Albanians turning uglier almost by the day. The Markale and Srebrenica massacres in July and August 1995 (the latter of which was ended when the Dutch battalion assigned to protect the area opened fire on the Serbs responsible, but only after massacres had begun) was the final tipping point that led to a series of massive airstrikes on the region, the operation known as Operation Deliberate Force, which resulted in forces from 17 countries involved in air strikes against Serb positions. Coming little more than a year after Rwanda and Canada's Operation Messiah, there was little choice for many nations but to respond. The war did ultimately end in the downfall of Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic, and with arrest warrants issued in early 1996 for several key war crimes leaders, with the moves started by a dramatic takedown by the British Special Air Service and Canadian Joint Task Force Two commandos of Republika Srpska leader Radoslav Brdjanin northeast of Sarajevo on August 19, 1996, followed by the United States Army Special Forces finding and arresting Ratko Mladic north of Banja Luka on September 30, 1996. In both cases the raids were surgical, which caused deep Serb resentment over whether they were being unfairly treated and questioning who knew about the raids before they happened. But when asked about it in a press conference on October 3, 1996, President Baker dropped a massive bombshell - IFOR wasn't involved in any way in the raid that had captured Mladic, only the US and its government and intelligence agencies. Then Baker added to it, committing the government of the US to hunting down the world's war criminals, saying "Any man who seeks to commit crimes against other humans will become a target of the United States, regardless of who he is and who he has committed such crimes against. Ratko Mladic is just the first of what may well be many" and "Some will say that we are being the world's policeman in doing this. Perhaps that is so, but after what we all saw in Bosnia and Rwanda, and all of the pictures of what our fathers and grandfathers bore witness to at such places as Auschwitz and Buchenwald, we have a responsibility as humans to prevent such atrocities. It does not matter if they are our enemies, our friends or even our own. We do all of those who have died in the past a disservice by not bringing those responsible for murdering the innocent to judgement."

It didn't take the media long to refer to this as the "Baker Doctrine". Just as the Carter Doctrine was respect for human rights, Baker's demands of the United States were pretty clear and obvious, and there were few who voiced anything but complete approval. Many wondered whether Baker had done this to get attention in the midst of the intense 1996 Presidential race (at the time, Baker and rival Bill Clinton were neck and neck), but regardless of the reasoning behind it, it got attention, and it openly put the United States on the job of hunting down those responsible for Rwanda and the Balkans, but in the minds of many it also would force America to deal with people like Saddam Hussein as well, a real problem in the minds of some.

On the domestic front, the 1990s were dominated by huge projects in many areas. With money in abundance and needs for everything from communications to transport to energy infrastructure needing improvement, construction got to be a very big business largely out of need. Among the plans done included numerous nuclear and hydroelectric power station completions, a system of HVDC power interconnectors to hook up regional power grids (which began in the mid-1980s but construction would take many years), the completion of the Interstate Highway System and the first true high-speed rain lines in America, with the Texas TGV (which changed its name to the Lone Star HSR in 1998) becoming operational in April 1994 and the Acela Express in the Northeast Corridor entering service in July 1995. The heavy industry businesses had good years, both big ones and smaller ones, of which by now there were dozens. Competition in many of these fields was intense, as the companies involved had to deal with the fact that there was only so many contracts to go around and more people who wanted them. In this economy quality mattered more than cost, and so even smaller heavy industrial firms spent fortunes on upgrading their quality control and improving employee efficiency in the hopes of being the company that had the best products, a way of development which double-charged development. On top of that, the collapse of the tech sector in 2000 and 2001 led to many investors, weary of such companies after being burned by their actual results, moving their investments to so-called 'brick and mortar' businesses, a fact which gave companies with substantial infrastructure much more room to invest.

The economic success and the political success of the early Baker years led to the Republicans having huge wins in 1994, putting the GOP in charge of all three levels of government for the first time since 1954 after the 1994 mid-terms. This immensely angered the Democrats, but they would not be disappointed in how things went - Baker, Whitman and Senate Republicans kept their focus on advancing policy positions, but there proved to be all kinds of trouble in the House of Representatives, with firebrand Newt Gingrich being the new Speaker of the House. The Republicans' Contract with America got into trouble early, however, as many of its provisions against lower-income earners were seen as draconian and the Common Sense Legal Reform Act was hated to the bone by consumer advocates. On top of that, as the 1996 election cycle got underway, Gingrich took it upon himself to fire mercilessly on the Democratic candidates, in particular attacking front-runner Bill Clinton. This wound up backfiring in his face when it became clear that Gingrich was indeed cheating on his wife and his current wife was his second, because he had been cheating with her on his first wife, which led to a comment by Hilary Clinton in an interview "Who does this man think he is, Hugh Hefner?" Congress' shutdown of the Office of Technology Assessment was also widely slagged by industry leaders, with Combustion Engineering boss George Kimmel saying "It's not just being penny wise and pound foolish, but its also a way of allowing lobbyists and think tanks massively more power." President Baker overruled Gingrich on this front, not the first disagreement between the two but most certainly not the last.

The 104th Congress' relationship with President Baker showed the scale of a problem for the Republicans. While moderation had been the order of the day for decades in Washington and working together was seen as critically important given America's constitutional divisions of powers, Gingrich and many of the base-elected Republicans had no such illusions and felt that even with a Republican president that they could drag them, and the whole country, further to the right. Baker knew this going in, as did the Republican-controlled Senate, but the problems began almost immediately. Gingrich's demands for a balanced-budget constitutional amendment (despite the federal government running a surplus every year since 1991) were decried as foolishness by Baker, who said "In doing that, we will be making it much more difficult for us to respond to crisis in the future." But the situation got uglier as the 1996 races went on, which saw Gingrich and his base's attacks on multiple Democratic candidates get more and more mean, to the point that Baker got frustrated with them. "They are making us look like neanderthals." Baker is known to have said to an aide in early 1996, and his sentiments were echoed by Senator Richard Lugar on Face the Nation on April 7, 1996, saying "Mentioning an opponent's failings is done by all candidates, really, but Newt and the men and women in the House are taking it so far that it is giving an image that we want to win this election on personal attacks. We don't need to do that and we don't want to do that." The Republican base, by now hearing plenty of vitiriol from the conservative media, were quite happy to support Gingrich, which put him at odds with both Baker and Senate Majority leader Bob Dole, who both loudly counseled the need to sort out differences.

On the Democratic side, the race for the 1996 nomination was just as intense as that of 1992, and with a few of the same candidates. Brown and Gephardt both stayed out as a result of their 1992 loss, leaving the field fairly open. Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton had an early lead, with Senators Al Gore (Tennessee), Bill Bradley (New Jersey) and Paul Wellstone (Minnesota), as well as Governor Howard Dean (Vermont), being the real rivals. Tom Foley and Tom Harkin both declined to run, as did former VP Jesse Jackson. Clinton's early lead held for much of the early race, but Bradley, Wellstone and Dean all hammered Clinton from the left, demanding a more liberal policy approach. Clinton came out ahead in Iowa, but Dean's victory in New Hampshire rocked the establishment and kicked the race wide open, and the victory for Wellstone in the California primary in March blew it open further still. Clinton responded to that by running a much more liberal campaign with an emphasis on family and smaller-scale social issues, a fact which narrowed the support for Dean and Wellstone. Clinton would end up sealing up the nomination, but he had a now very-energized liberal base to deal with, and despite being aware that the previous two Democratic presidents had seen vast work done by their VPs, Clinton selected Wellstone to be his Vice-President over Dean and Bradley because of Wellstone's popularity and Senate experience.

The GOP race should have been a walk for Baker, but the decision by Pat Buchanan to run, and his subsequent backing by many of the House's harder-line members, split the Republicans. Baker had little difficulty knocking down Buchanan's candidacy, but the GOP's split caused Baker's commanding poll lead in early 1996 to evaporate, a problem made worse when the Clinton/Wellstone ticket began seriously campaigning. Baker and Whitman rose to the challenge, and despite the GOP base not entirely backing Baker, the battle was on, and by the time of the parties' conventions in July 1996, the two sides were neck and neck.

The 1996 campaign saw many similar themes to 1992 but with many of the elements supercharged. Both sides' bases took nasty shots at the other sides' candidates while the leaders and Senators focused their efforts on policy proposals and plans for the future. Clinton had to admit that the Baker Doctrine was a stroke of genius, and when pushed on it he said that as President he would maintain that doctrine because "It's the right thing to do, politics or not politics." Clinton had the edge in personal popularity, though, and many of his actions, including his famously playing the saxophone on The Tonight Show with David Letterman, gave him that much more of a lead. Wellstone's contributions were his own personality and his life-long passion for advancing social causes, something which led to him being called "Senator Welfare" by Gingrich. Wellstone's proposals for tax breaks and programs to get good child care to be common in America and his passionate support for Veterans earned him plenty of support, knocking down the narrative of him being a dangerous liberal. Both Wellstone and Whitman were both loud supporters of environmental protections and Wellstone's popularity with labour led to an important endorsement by AFL-CIO and a sizable number of its member unions. Baker ran on the country's economic success and his foreign policy work, pointing out that America needed a steady hand at foreign affairs and pointing out that it had been VPs in the last two Democratic administrations who handled many of those duties, saying "I'm not really sure if Paul Wellstone is capable of handling affairs of state."

On election day, it went in much too close to call, even closer than 1992 had been. The last election had been Republicans coming from far back to claim victory, but now it was the Democrats' turn, and the EV came out as 315 for Clinton/Wellstone to 223 for Baker/Whitman, though that EV number doesn't begin to show how close it actually was - no less than fourteen states saw the election decided by less than three points between the competing tickets, and Clinton was unable to sow it up until California was called for him just after two in the morning on November 6. Baker conceded the next morning in an emotional speech in his hometown of Memphis, Tennessee, stating that he wished the Democrats the best of luck and success in the next four years, a surprisingly conciliatory statement which was matched by Clinton an hour and a half later. The civil end of the campaign was not so civil for many House Republicans - they kept the House, but the Senate went back to the Democrats, and the Republicans had just a seven-seat majority there. Gingrich narrowly kept his seat as Speaker, but it was clear that he could not try to follow his earlier tactics without it backfiring on him, and he had only narrowly survived the first brush. Gingrich took that lesson to heart, but some of his colleagues rather didn't, a fact that would show in the next few years.

In becoming the first Baby Boomer to sit in the oval office was a sign of yet another major change for the country, as the Boomers by the 1990s occupied many such big offices, and they were only too happy to expand the business-labor alliance, and the expansions of it grew in the 1990s in terms of social benefits for workers. Businesses that had better labor relations found themselves usually having higher productivity, and the growth in unionization hadn't ended up being terrible for the businesses - in many cases it was helpful, as the unions would in many cases handle employee grievances and differences rather than the employers themselves. By the 1990s, many of the middle managers who had supported many of the labor hopes in the 1970s and 1980s were rising into the upper management positions, and they could see that the better conditions for employers both resulted in higher productivity and made it easier to attract talented employees. Many businesses didn't need government to tell them why to treat employees better, as most had been doing that for years in any case, and that expansion continued unabated through the 1990s. As the new millenium approached, the dot-com boom was making a sizable number of people fabulously wealthy, the economy was strong and the second half of the 1990s was the best since the 1960s for America's poorer classes. It was by then also become a time of decadence, much like Japan had been in the 1980s, with some massive excesses created by those who had benefitted the most, but for many it meant better lives. Rising wages, property values and benefits, slowly but steadily decreasing health care and education costs and minimal inflation due to tight control of the money supply all led to the wealth in the hands of nearly all Americans growing in the 1990s, and with more money to spend and more time off work to spend it, leisure pursuits and the industries related to them exploded in popularity in the 1990s and 2000s. The tight control of the money supply and the higher interest rates that resulted from that also resulted in the savings rate in the United States rising, while debt also fell both in actual terms and in comparative ones. Times were good, and all kinda hoped it would remain that way long into the future....

They would not be so lucky.

 

[TheMann]

Chapter Twelve: The Challenge of the 2000s

The Millenium began with the massive fear (which came to nothing) of Y2K computer issues and huge celebrations of what was hoped to be a new world for the future. With the world more peaceful than it had been in a century, some historians, particularly in the West, were talking of this being the "End of History", with many, however, pointing out that history was never really over, and the world was still not exactly a truly stable place.

For the Americas, however, things were getting better all the time. Brazil's first Democratic president in decades to serve his full time in office, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, passed power in January 2003 to his successor, Luis Inacio Lula de Silva, in a ceremony that proved to be notable for a bunch of reasons. Argentina was suffering economically from serious problems with mismanagement at the time, but Cardoso's Brazil had proven to be both excellent for investors and the country's poorer masses, hammering inflation down to nil, growing the economy and helping wage growth in the country's poorer and middle classes. Lula did the same only better, taking advantage of a strong economy to create the massive Fome Zero and Bolsa Familia social programs to help Brazil's poor, and the Growth Acceleration Program to build on previous gains in the economy and advance the country's infrastructure. While the firebrand Hugo Chavez in Venezuela was often seen as a pain by some in America's government (despite Chavez's very public statements that he was not opposed to all American actions, just ones he felt were wrong), most of Latin America, having built massively on democratic gains in the 1980s and 1990s, became legitimately growing economic powers in the second half of the 1990s and into the 2000s, with Brazil and Chile leading the way. These changes for the most part led to increased foreign investment, with the US and Western Europe leading the way, and some investment going back the other way. Brazil and Argentina's development of Mercosur as a way of dispute resolution and economic growth in Latin America swelled in the 1990s and 2000s, a situation that few disagreed with in the Western Hemisphere.

Other parts of the world varied. The Middle East was a mess by 2000 - while the Saudi Kingdom may well have been saved by the West's intervention in 1991, there was little love for the West in devoutly-religious Saudi Arabia and many of its neighbors, though in the latter case the situation varied by country as most of the small Gulf states, with Saudi Arabia on one side and Iran (which most of them didn't like at all) on the other, the two sides had considerable disagreements, which benefitted Saddam Hussein in Iraq just fine, who sought to play off of both sides - both Iran and Saudi loathed the often-mindless, egomaniacal Hussein, but both saw him as a useful buffer between Iran and Saudi Arabia. In North Africa, Libya's Muammar Gaddafi was the interloper in that he despised the West and they despised him, but the rest of North Africa was on good terms with the West. The Holy Land was a different matter, of course - by 2000, 20 years after the Ottawa Treaty, terrorism in both Israel and Palestine was uncommon and the Palestinians had by some margin the highest standard of living in the region, while Israel by 2000 had a GDP per capita of over $35,000 (Palestine stood at $15,250 a person in 2000, Jordan at $11,950) and was becoming a major tourist destination. Israel, Palestine and Lebanon sent their first representatives to the Council of Europe in 1999 and talked of entry into the European Union in the future. Lebanon, having been able to start recovering from its brutal 1975-1985 civil war, did an unprecedented peace deal with Israel in 1992, normalizing relations and allowing open trade and movement of people between the nations but also asking for Israel's help in stopping the Syrians from again making trouble for tiny Lebanon. Syria's attack on Lebanon's Beqaa Valley in May 1995 put this to the test, and Israel answered it (with Palestinian assistance), providing air and artillery support as well as attack helicopters to the Lebanese Army in their push back against the Syrians, which forced the Syrians to retreat in late June 1995. Such was the advancement of co-operation between the Jewish state and its closest neighbors that the countries organized joint military operations in 2001, most of Israel's excess military equipment found its way to neighboring states (this most a benefit to Lebanon) and a tourist-oriented passenger rail service from Cairo to Beirut via Gaza City, Tel Aviv, Haifa and Tyre, with a connecting Tel Aviv-Jerusalem-Ramallah-Amman service, began in 2004. Indeed, this part of the world in many cases sought more to look abroad for its inspiration because of the difficulties in dealing with the unstable Arabian Peninsula, and they had little difficulties finding that help, particularly because the disaporas of several of the nations abroad.

In Asia, Japan's 1990s efforts to discover everything possible about its past turned up more than a few events which caused headlines. China was only too happy to see Japan expose events of its past and used them in more than one case to justify anti-Japanese sentiments or protests, but most of the rest of Asia, particularly the proud Koreans and the very-nationalistic Malaysians, was more than happy to see Japan look deeply into its past and discover what had once been. Japanese public opinion on this shifted rapidly in the 1990s against the Ukoyu Dentai and other harder-line nationalists, and at the same time Korea's huge efforts in rebuilding the North were soon ably assisted by Japan. The Philippines' discovery of massive gold deposits on the island of Mindanao in 1998 added to this, as the Japanese, Koreans and Americans were all quick to jump into this, though the Filipinos' demand for substantial royalties wasn't well liked by Korea, the Americans and Japanese had little problem with it, as a steady gold price rise in the second half of the 1990s and into the 2000s made sure that the mines would be profitable. Japan's discoveries so discredited the nationalists that there was a demand, finally accepted in August 2002, to remove the names of the Class-A War criminals enshrined at the infamous Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. As Japan's economy began to recover from the bubble burst in the second half of the 1990s, their new investment overwhelmingly went to its Asian neighbors, and the 2002 FIFA World Cup, co-hosted by Japan and Korea, was a roaring success - and included a semi-final match hosted at the newly-renovated Korea Future Stadium (the former Rungrado May Day Stadium) in Pyongyang. By that time, Pyongyang was pretty much one huge construction site, but the gargantuan Ryugyong Hotel, completed in time for the games, was where most of the action was in Pyongyang. Plans to build a tunnel between Korea and Japan, an idea going back to the days of Imperial Japan, began to be considered, with a bilaterial planning commission established for it in 2004.

For America, the economic growth in Latin America and Asia presented huge opportunities which export-minded companies wanted a piece of, and geopolitical concerns became less relevant. After the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991, the United States and the Philippines together rebuilt the Clark Air Base and the naval base at Subic Bay was transferred to the Philippines, but with American rights to use it. Japan and Korea were granted those rights by the Filipinos in 2001, and economic development across Asia made sure the Americans were paying attention and looking for ways of paying back those who were making big investments from the United States. The Philippines' railroad network's major 1990s and 2000s expansions were almost entirely done with Japanese-built electronic control systems and American diesel locomotives, while the Filipino's license-built rolling stock. Even the rails themselves were in large numbers forged in facilities in the United States, and industrial growth in the Philippines was matched with unprecedented concern towards damaging the islands' natural beauty as little as possible. America's huge industrial investments in Japan to counter Japan's massive investments in America during the bubble era proved to be lucrative on a variety fronts, and as Japanese cars grew in popularity in America (the Detroit automakers in 2000 still held some 77.9% of the American car market, but the rest had the Japanese as the biggest players) that popularity was more than a little bit reciprocated. Likewise, Boeing and McDonnell Douglas had little difficulties grabbing big chunks of the airliner market in the new Asian markets. The Filipinos also got in on the act in one big way - the Philippines Geothermal Energy Company, which by 1995 had gotten 16% of its electricity from geothermal power, did a deal in 1998 with Combustion Engineering where PGEC would build ten geothermal power stations in New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, Oregon and California, in return for C-E constructing three nuclear power stations in the Philippines, with the firms transferring knowledge on how to build future stations between the two firms at all stages of operation.

In Europe, the European Union made a massive gamble in 2004 when it admitted, at one time, fourteen nations. The island nations of Iceland, Cyprus and Malta were joined by nine Eastern European nations - the former Warsaw Pact nations of Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria, the former Yugoslav nation of Slovenia and former USSR states of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Ukraine. It was a bold play for a variety of reasons - including four nations that were formerly part of the USSR was sure to get Russia's attention (and it did, but not in the way the Europeans thought it would) and there was a considerable economic disparity between the two groups of countries. The Europeans, however, saw the massive expansion of the EU as both an opportunity and a way of gaining influence in the world - in the former point, Eastern Europe's economies were still struggling from the end of communism and on the latter point Brussels was by 2004 getting a little sick of hearing about how America dominated in the developed world. Jokes about Polish plumbers were well-known by this point, but having suffered from communism and authoritarian leadership, few in the new nations saw Europe as anything other than a way of escaping the past. Russia, to the surprise of the Europeans, didn't protest a lick at the plans of EU expansions into its sphere of influence....and the reason why became obvious just weeks after the accession of the new states into the EU, when the Russian Prime Minister, Dmitry Medvedev, said in a passionate speech in St. Petersburg that he envisioned a future where Russia was "an intersection for commerce, trade, knowledge, science and the arts, a nation at the intersection of Europe and Asia which learns from all and respects all....we serve the interests of Russia when we serve the interests of all mankind." Medvedev's speech was not entirely positively received - for many of the new nations, particularly Hungary and the Baltic nations, distrust of Russia's intentions died hard - but it was clear that Russia, which by that point was starting to show serious signs of economic growth.

In America, the 2000 presidential election began with the Republican primaries, which devolved into a two-man race between Texas Governor George W. Bush and Arizona Senator John McCain. Despite the primaries here being among the dirtiest in modern times (Bush's camp claimed McCain fathered an illegitimate child with a black prostitute), the Republicans had learned from 1992 and 1996, and the Republican base was overruled by concerns over beating President Clinton, and the foreign-policy expect McCain, whose campaign focused on this and campaign finance reform, beat Bush's campaigns through strong results in the Rust Belt states, New England and the northeast and many western states. McCain entered the 2000 race paired with famed Army general Colin Powell, who retired from the Army in 2000 to be able to run. Despite being a heavily foreign policy-heavy pairing, McCain and Powell used the concerns over the economy as well as Clinton's personal conduct while in office to paint him as unfit to be president - but the Republicans got the personal points thrown back in their faces by the First Lady, who loudly growled back to the Republicans "I forgive my husband for his past indiscretions. We all make mistakes, it is what makes us human." Despite some members of the right lampooning Hillary Clinton for that, it largely nullified that point (which both McCain and Powell were not real keen on chasing in any case) and focused the campaign on actual issues, a position which allowed Americans a clear choice between two sides, with the Republicans favoring large-scale tax cuts while the Democrats focused on improving the civil service and America's infrastructure. Both points had real merit, and so through the campaign the issues came to matter more than personal matters, a fact which proved to be good news for the lead candidates on both sides, both of whom had checkered personal lives.

The campaign literally ran down to the final days, and it turned out to be the narrowest win in modern times. Clinton and Wellstone came out with 325 electoral votes to 213 for McCain and Powell, but that understates how close it was - the gap in Florida and Ohio, both of which were won by Clinton, were less than 4,000 votes, and two recounts in each were able to faithfully say that Clinton came out ahead. Fox News got themselves in big trouble when they jumped the gun and claimed McCain had defeated Clinton when it turned out to be not true. Clinton's narrow win, however, made sure that McCain primary campaign planks, namely campaign finance reform and flexible armed forces responses, became ideas that were taken up in Clinton's second term. Hillary also claimed a Senate seat in that election, replacing the retiring Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York and marking the first time that a husband and wife had both been politicians, but the move immediately made Hillary a powerful Senator - having the President as your husband does tend to do that - and a convenient back path to the White House for the Senate, which might not have been so useful in the depths of the Lewinsky affair. Clinton began his first term with ambitious plans for continuing health care reform and plans for additional domestic changes, but his Presidency's focus on domestic affairs was ended on September 11, 2001.

The attacks of September 11, 2001, in New York, Washington, Detroit, Boston and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, were the deadliest terrorist incidents in the history of the United States, starting with bombs detonating in the basements of Washington's Union Station, Michigan Central Terminal in Detroit and South Station in Boston, as well as one going off in a maintenance compartment of a southbound Acela Express train just north of Tacony, Pennsylvania, north of Philadelphia. The bomb on the Acela caused the train to jump the track at 145 miles per hour, smashing into a northbound Chessie System freight and a crowded stationary SEPTA commuter train at Tacony station. The station bombs claimed 109 lives and injured over 700, but the crash of Acela Train 25 at Tacony claimed 235 lives (141 on the Acela, 92 on the SEPTA train and the engineer and conductor of the Chessie freight), and just as news of the train station attacks got out, American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York, crashing at 8:46 AM. United Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center at 9:03 AM. American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon across the Potomac from Washington at 9:37 AM. The fourth hijacked aircraft, United Flight 93, was brought down by passengers, the hijackers crashing the plane into the Three Mile Island nuclear power station south of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, missing the reactors entirely but completely destroying Reactor Two`s turbine hall and control center, the East cooling tower and the transformer station, knocking the station completely offline for 21 months and killing 41 people on the ground in addition to the 44 people on the plane. Both of the World Trade Center`s two main towers collapsed, the South Tower collapsing at 10:00 AM and the north Tower at 10:24 AM, that one collapsing to the West, leveling one of the buildings of the World Financial Center complex next door which, thankfully, had been almost entirely evacuated by that point.

The 9/11 attacks claimed 4,157 lives injured over 15,000, the deadliest single day in the United States since the Civil War and topping even the infamous Attack on Pearl Harbor that had brought the United States into World War II. It

The 9/11 attacks proved to be a tragedy followed by a showcase of what could be done by humans for each other. It began right from the start, when US Navy destroyer John Paul Jones, British frigate Westminster, Canadian frigate Toronto and Iranian destroyer Daryush, all three of which launched helicopters to rescue people trapped on the upper floors of the towers by the airliner hits, the British frigate's Westland Super Lynx helicopter being hit by debris from the collapsing South Tower and crashing as a result, claiming the lives of her four crew members. (All four were posthumously awarded the George Cross for their actions.) America closed its airspace down after the attack, forcing hundreds of inbound aircraft to head for other airports, mostly in Canada, which took in 322 US-bound flights. Canadians did unbelievable stories here, the most famous being the tiny town of Gander, Newfoundland, which took in 41 flights carrying 7,150 people, including the then-Vice President of General Motors, whose Northwest flight into Detroit was one of those which landed in Gander. The Canadians proved to be remarkably good hosts, housing all of the people. Even in the big cities of Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal and Halifax, arrangements proved to be hard, most notably in places like Gander. That tiny Newfoundland town was changed forever by what the Canadians called Operation Yellow Ribbon. In the United States, thousands of volunteers and rescue workers came in some cases hundreds of miles to try to help. President Clinton, who had been at a campaign stop in Raleigh, North Carolina, at the time of the attacks, was quick to head back to Washington. The international reaction was swift and pretty much unanimous in its shock and horror.

With the airspace of America shut down and the Northeast corridor jammed between Philadelphia and Trenton as a result of the Train 25 bombing (the site investigation of the attack was completed within 48 hours, and just twelve hours after that Amtrak, Chessie System and SEPTA repair crews had the tracks opened), travel in a lot of the country came to a standstill, but that didn't last. Amtrak was flooded with demands for travel, but their response was to drag out everything they had on hand, digging over 800 pieces of rolling stock out of storage and sending it out. Their own motive power was joined by over 150 diesel locomotives sent to Amtrak by the freight railroads for use, while commuter services and VIA Rail in Canada also sent equipment for use. As Michigan Central Terminal was damaged, Via Rail used its station in Windsor, Ontario, as a destination point for Amtrak trains and took responsibility for bussing passengers back across the river into Detroit. The train stations, despite considerable damage, were back up and operating within 72 Hours. Passenger trains in the week after the 9/11 saw the biggest numbers of passengers since the late 1950s, but Amtrak did its best - and rather more than many expected - to handle the sudden load. The need to move documents and other time-sensitive cargoes was also handled by Amtrak and freight railroads in a better-than-expected manner. This did not go unnoticed - when Congress bailed out American airlines in November 2001, they included an enormous $27.9 Billion appropriation for Amtrak and a demand that they got to work building high-speed rail networks in other parts of the nation, and seeing how they had done on 9/11, the states enthusiastically joined in the building of these lines, causing numerous HSR lines being planned out and beginning construction in the 2000s.

The 9/11 attacks also caused a sudden awareness of terrorism and a demand to deal with it. The 1998 attacks on the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, had gotten everyone's attention, but 9/11 got attention like a shotgun report in a crowded room. It was ascertained within 36 Hours that the terrorist group al-Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden, was responsible for the attacks. The United States didn't take long to locate him in the war-torn of Afghanistan.

Afghanistan, bordered by Pakistan to the south and east, Iran to the West and the former Soviet republics of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan to the north, had been ruled since 1995 by the religious-extremist Taliban, who had harbored bin Laden and loudly denied that he had anything to do with the attacks. Iran didn't buy this, and as the War on Terror began, Iran was about to become the front-line state. The first attacks on Afghanistan began on October 7, 2001, with the first actions by American special forces and air units, followed by ground units and heavy support for the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. This was followed by direct involvement by Iran, which invaded Afghanistan in December 2001. The Taliban's connections to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, both ruled by dictatorial governments ruling populations that were strongly anti-American, didn't help matters, but what it did do was get all those opposed to such governments working together. By March 2002, the Arab world was openly divided in both governments and populations, with one significant shift occurring in June 2002 when the Assad brothers, Bassel and Bashar, loudly announced that they would be siding with the Muslim nations which were openly supporting the War on Terror, which by that point included Iran, Egypt, Turkey, Algeria, Lebanon, Palestine, Malaysia and Morocco, which gained in additional member in Indonesia in 2003. Buoyed by massive Western support, the Northern Alliance booted the Taliban from power in Kabul in January 2002, but the Taliban managed in many cases to escape Kabul south into the southern provinces and the mountains separating Afghanistan and Pakistan....but the Americans were on to the game by then, as were their allies. Iran's armed forces, by 2002 long loyal to the civilian government and trained as fine an edge as any, ably assisted Western forces in going after Taliban and al-Qaeda hideouts. The Americans got their man on April 23, 2002, when American, British, Canadian and Australian special forces soldiers, backed up by Iranian mountain troops and Iranian, Dutch and German attack helicopters and French and Argentine attack aircraft, scored bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in the caves. Both were taken out of Afghanistan alive first by the Iranians, then by the Americans and British.

What to do about bin Laden was settled by the troika which led Jerusalem mere days after his capture, which offered to try him by Islamic Law in Jerusalem for the crimes. Western law scholars followed bin Laden's trial closely when it began on August 19, 2002, in Jerusalem. Bin Laden is said to have been surprised at what Jerusalem had become, but it did little for him. He was convicted in the trial and sentenced to death, but at the request of the Americans (including President Clinton), his sentence was commuted to life in prison. He was then sent to the ADX Florence prison in Fremont County, Colorado, with the goal being to make sure that Bin Laden was eventually forgotten about, which would prove to be the case. The lesser-known al-Zawahiri was tried in New York for involvement in the 9/11 attacks, with little chance of an acquittal. He was convicted on July 18, 2003, and sentenced to death. Zawahiri showed little remorse, and was executed at USP Terre Haute in Indiana on September 19, 2005. The primary planner of the attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, fled Afghanistan into Pakistan, but he didn't escape justice there - he was discovered (in this case by MI6) and was picked up by American special forces in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, on February 5, 2004, being brought back to the United States for trial. As with Zawahiri, Mohammed was tried in New York and as with Zawahiri, he was convicted and sentenced to death, with him also being executed at the same prison as Zawahiri on August 25, 2008.

The fall of the Taliban didn't end with their expulsion from Kabul. With Western pressure shoving on the Pakistanis (already not friends with America because of America's good relations with Iran and improving relations with long-time rival India) to try to seal up their border with Afghanistan but finding huge resistance within the country both from the Pakistani Taliban and other terrorist groups in Pakistan's nearly-lawless tribal regions, the task fell to the forces in Afghanistan to shut down the border to Pakistan in as great a way as possible. Iran's elite 56th Airborne Brigade proved to be good at this, and Pakistan's Army's inability to prevent Taliban infiltration led to additional issues with Pakistan. The presence of troops from several Muslim nations - Egypt, Turkey, Algeria, Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates were involved in the War in Afghanistan as well as the Iranians - made life easier on everyone, ably helped by intelligent leadership on the NATO side, which had a succession of leaders, namely British Army General Richard Dannatt, Canadian Lieutenant General Rick Hillier and French Lieutenant General Sebastien Brasseur, who emphasized a need to get on the good side of the Afghan population, a point the Iranians also emphasized. The Taliban's fighting was by 2004 largely confined to the Kandahar, Helmand and Zabul provinces, the fighters still dangerous but by then the Afghans were coming into the battle line against the Taliban in numbers.

Iran, having become a Western ally in the 1960s and 1970s and becoming an economic powerhouse and a full-fledged democracy in the 1980s and 1990s, proved to be worth their weight in Gold. Having the wealth and connections to massively influence Central Asia, they took the lead in many cases in rebuilding Afghanistan. Having been stuck in an almost-perpetual state of civil war since the late 1970s, Afghanistan's civil infrastructure was a mess and the governing ability of any body in the nation was sorely tested, a problem made infinitely worse by both the Taliban and the shifting alliances of the warlords and factions of the nation. As this went on, Iran was dumping money and support into the nations of Central Asia, allowing Tehran to largely replace Moscow as a place that the mostly-Muslim former Soviet Republics looked to for inspiration. Iran's actions led to their own actions from Turkey, which happily supported other nations in the Middle East, particularly after Iran and Azerbaijan began improving relations in the late 1990s and into the 2000s. Iran wisely didn't play up the Shiite dominance in Iran and wishes to create formal alliances in order to avoid formal divisions with the Saudis, but Iran's wide-scale involvement in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia's extensive funding of Islamic fundamentalists of both the peaceful and not-so-peaceful variety made sure that Saudi Arabia began to see problems with foreign relations in the 2000s, and Iran's moves to co-ordinate oil production deals between OPEC and other major oil producing nations (notably Norway, Mexico, Canada and Russia) in the 2000s led to the Saudis positions being weakened further, as Tehran began to seek leadership of that part of the world.

Turkey's problems with its past came abundantly clear in 2003 when the European Union officially recognized the Armenian Genocide as such, leading Turkey to angrily halt negotiations with the European Union, demanding the EU backtrack on that. Turkey's position got unexpected attacks from Iran, Israel and Japan, all three of which said that there was more than a little evidence of the Armenian Genocide. Israel's Foreign Minister at the time, Tzipi Livni, is known to have said to Turkey's Prime Minister "There is little point in denying the past". Japan's deputy foreign minister, Yuriko Koike, quite openly called Turkey's massive efforts to quash recognition of what had happened to the Armenians "A gross insult to history and a tragedy for those who lived with the suffering". Turkey's Prime Minister responded to these by tossing out the Ambassadors of both nations and loudly saying "We have told the world for years that Turkey did nothing to harm the lives of the Armenians, and it is long past time the world started listening to us rather than the professional victims in Yerevan." Russian Prime Minister Ruslan Khasbulatov chimed in after that, commenting "Turkey wonders why the Azerbaijanis and the Armenians have such a problem with each other and why Russia needs to be always in the area, watching over people. They need only look in the mirror to know why. They caused it. At a time when Japan is spending vast quantities of money to discover the truth of its past and Germany spends huge sums in Eastern Europe and Israel to help their economic development as a way of atoning for their crimes against Jews, the Turks continue to stand there and yell about how a vast crime committed by people long dead never happened, at the same time doing whatever they can to cause trouble for the Armenians. That's why we have to be there and that's why the Armenians and Azerbaijanis are both so territorial." The Turks responded to that comment by funding investigations into World War II crimes by the Russians, but that attempt backfired when Britain's Sunday Times newspaper exposed it in January 2004, leading to more than a little embarassment on Turkey's part.

The conflicts between Iran and Saudi Arabia and Turkey's belligerence were added to by a third problem in North Africa, namely the problems with Sudan and Libya, the latter ruled since 1969 by the enigmatic, vengeful Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, who had been made an international pariah in the 1980s through his support of multiple European terrorist movements, in particular the Red Factions in Italy and Germany and the Provisional Irish Republican Army. Gaddafi's leadership changed through the 1980s and 1990s, however, as Libya's economic situation changed and the Gaddafi's Pan-Arab nationalism proved to be a dismal failure - the decision of the Assad brothers in Syria to marginalize Gaddafi in their relations after the death of their father in 2000 was seen as the final blow to Gaddafi's Pan-Arab hopes - he instead shifted in the 2000s to trying to normalize relations for his past, inviting Vice-President Wellstone and British Prime Minister Tony Blair to Tripoli in 2004, this coming after Gaddafi loudly condemned the 9/11 attacks and helped to organize the African Union, which met for the first time in 2003. Wellstone visited Libya in February 2004, curious to see just what had changed, and he was surprised when Gaddafi offered Libyan help to the efforts to eradicate the Taliban in Afghanistan. His efforts were not in vain on either front, though his position that Africa didn't need to accept foreign help was loudly denied by the leaders of South Africa, Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe and Kenya, all of which were recipients of substantial quanities of foreign aid and investment. The African Union expansions efforts pushed by Gaddafi didn't go far, but his proposals for a number of common standards and large projects did get somewhere, with Gaddafi in 2003 proposing the building of what would be the world's largest hydroelectric dam on the Congo River, the mighty Grand Inga dam, in order to power industrial development in southern Africa. Relations between Libya and its Western-leaning neighbors also improved substantially, and one of Gaddafi's finest pieces of diplomacy occured in May 2005, when he organized a visit to Jerusalem of over two dozen African Union leaders, as well as Bassel and Bashar al-Assad, to not only visit the Holy Land but also meet with the leaders of Israel, Palestine, Lebanon and Jordan. Gaddafi and both Assads, none of which had never visited Jerusalem before, were surprised by the leadership of the arrangements, as it was clear that the way of government worked - Jerusalem by that time was a very wealthy city, and the population of the troika-led city had grown from 614,000 in 1981 to 1,295,500 in 2005, and prosperity was very true for both Palestinian and Israeli residents - and while the Arab leaders had long distrusted and despised Israel, they were not fools, and their visit to Israel turned into a major moment for the Arab world and its divisions with Israel. The widely-televised image of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (one of Israel's greatest military leaders and someone who had masterminded the defeat of Hafez al-Assad's attacks on Israel twice) escorting the Assads and Gaddafi onto the Temple Mount and the three Arab leaders then visiting the Western Wall made headlines around the world, with the Syria-based Arab News Network catching Bassel al-Assad commenting to Sharon "This is what the city in the Holy Land should look like." South African President Thabo Mbeki was also stunned by Jerusalem, saying to a Israel Broadcasting Authority interviewer that Jerusalem was "One of the world's great cities, for many reasons."

The scourge of terrorism had gotten vast attention on September 11, 2001, but what also got attention was America's response. Hate crimes saw a sudden rise in the days after the attacks, but law enforcement and community response to them was swift. The one murder directly connected to a 9/11 hate attack, that of a Shiite Lebanese-descent shopkeeper in Santa Monica, California, saw the three perpetrators charged with murder. The leader of the three, Joshua Miller, was tried and convicted of first degree murder and was sentenced to death on August 20, 2004. Over thirty thousand tons of steel removed from the World Trade Center site during the 2001-2002 cleanup was used in the construction of aircraft carrier USS United States and landing ship USS New York City, the latter being commissioned in New York on September 11, 2005. But what got the most attention in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks was the plans for rebuilding.

Twenty-one architecture groups submitted proposals for the rebuilding of the World Trade Center, with none being anything less than truly immense. With the destroyed buildings around the center, including the large WTC 7 building (which was destroyed by fire and collapsed in the evening of September 11), there was suddenly a huge gap in the middle of the city, with a city and a country that wanted that hole filled in spectacular fashion. The winning selection was chosen after intense public debate in April 2003, the winning design chosen being one developed by New York City Partners, with Bechtel getting the job of building the complex and the Partners developing the plan.

The plan was centered around an absolutely immense six-story base which covered the whole site, with the former base of the North Tower being used as the memorial at street level, open to West Side Highway with the base wrapped around it. A new transit hub went in south of the site, and three gargantuan center buildings were developed, a 111-story tower in the place of the crushed World Financial Center Two building and two identical 127-story monsters built in the sites of World Trade Center buildings four and five on the Eastern corners of the site, set back somewhat. Red granite steps in the middle of the complex on all sides led to an elevated lookout over the memorial from the East, with the memorial surrounded on three sides by sloping manicured grass and granite-block landscaping. All 4,157 people who died on 9/11 would have their names immortalized on the site, with the memorial in the middle being a vast steel sculpture made from the material from the site. The Base would be the New York Commerce Center, one of the largest shopping malls ever built, with 821 stores and restaurants and two 24-screen movie theaters built into the base. WTC 3, the building on the southeast corner, had floors 92-125 built into the Empire Hotel in New York, the Kempinsky-run property being the first entry into North America by the European hoteliers. The transit hub combined ferries, city and intercity buses and New York City Subway and PATH underground services into one terminal, making the job of transport in the city easier. The design also included five other smaller buildings, the largest of these being WTC 4A and 4B, built in place of the old WTC 7 and the badly-damaged Verizon building to the west of it, two towers on the same base, connected to the main complex by a massive bridge, the two identical towers standing 65 stories tall. The huge complex had numerous creators, including famed architects Sir Norman Foster, Fumihiko Maki, Zaha Hadid and Richar Meier. Bechtel and Jacobs Engineering were selected to build the project, and after the site plan was approved by the New York City Council in February 2004, reconstruction began. Work progressed more rapidly than some had expected, and the result was that the original timetable of having the new complex done by 2013 (as the original plan was) was moved up, in the hope of the site being completed in time for the 10th Anniversary of the attacks. That was not quite completed, but the site was officially opened in any case on September 11, 2011, as a very worthy new flagship complex in Lower Manhattan....

 

[TheMann]

Chapter Thirteen: The Oughties

9/11 was about as a big a shock to the collective soul of America as it could possibly get, but in many ways far beyond the War on Terror it had major impacts, both at home and abroad. In the World, it resulted in many nations in the world taking the issues presented by religious extremists more seriously, and it drove a massive wedge in the Middle East in particular. In America, it resulted in the last few months of 2001 and early 2002 being a rather changed place than before, with confidence knocked off to a big degree followed by collective decisions to help one another and preserve the values born over generations. Nowhere was this more seen than in the cities with the largest population of Muslim Americans in the country - New York, Detroit, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and San Francisco in particular. In these places, Muslim American leaders, who had been very loud in condemning the 9/11 attacks (one imam at a mosque in northern Indiana called those responsible "A menace to all of Islam and all of its followers" and "apostates of the highest order", while other mosques organized supplies for rescuers and financial support for victims and their families), were paid back by much of society. Hate crimes against them were punished harshly by the authorities, and in several cases those who hadn't been to prison for such crimes got hit with gargantuan civil suits instead. Outside of that, demands for better security against such attacks was demanded, resulting in the Advanced Prevention of Terrorism Act, introduced in late October 2001 and signed into law by Clinton on December 19, 2001. That law went through some debate, and the debate saw the provisions for extra surveillance powers removed by Congress, figuring (more than likely correctly) that the Supreme Court would strike it down as unconstitutional, and the 'sneak and peek' search provision was one of a number of elements that would ultimately be struck down as unconstitutional by a Tenth Circuit Judge in January 2004 in a decision that the Supreme Court agreed with in 2007. But the act's provisions, which included heavy anti-money laundering provisions, increased border security and expanding both the definition and penalties for terrorism, as well as extra intelligence sharing with friendly nations, were widely supported.

The post-9/11 world did change in other ways. Pride in American companies and American products caused many of these businesses to have a major boost in their fortunes in 2001 and 2002, with the smart ones pointing out that they were American AND they made great products, with many of these doing better than others. American automakers sought out opportunities to prove this, and with the victory of the Ford-powered Stewart/Tyrrell team in the 2002 Formula One World Championship and the 2002 24 Hours of Le Mans being won in every class in the race by American cars or teams, the point was clear. The 2002 Winter Olympics, held in Salt Lake City, don't hurt with the sense of pride, as those games went off without a hitch and with immense public support - and one of the most notable moments was when the American gold medalist in women's ski jumping, Fatima Beidas, got a roaring ovation over 25,000 strong when she said after receiving her medal "I'm an American, I'm a Muslim and I'm proud of being both". The unprecedented success of Team USA in the 2002 FIFA World Cup added to the pride, with the Americans proving to be shockers - after pounding Mexico in the Round of sixteen, they faced off against Germany and fought them to a 2-2 draw which was decided on penalties 4-3 in Germany's favor, with German legend Miroslav Klose commenting "Don't talk down the Americans. If they keep improving as they have, we will see far more of them in the future." Indeed, the 2002 World Cup was marked by upsets all over the place, with Costa Rica, which barely made it into the Round of 16 by outscoring Turkey, making it all the way to the third-place game (They lost that game to Japan) and Germany had to work rather harder than expected to down South Africa in the Round of 16 before their battle with the United States, before downing Japan in the semifinals and then losing to Brazil in the final. Japan's third-place finish after years of steady improvements was a great result for them, and Canada's run into the Round of 16 after qualifying for only the third time was set up by massive wins over France and Uruguay in the group stage.

Clinton, who had won his 2000 re-election by promising to massively improve America's infrastructure, made good on many of these promises during the decade. The highest-profile projects - the Midwest, Florida and California high-speed rail systems, Los Angeles' massive 'Subways to the Sea', Boston's 'Big Dig' and Detroit's 'Motor City Metro' were joined by major advancements to America's power grid interconnectors. The nation's power stations also began evolving during this time, with a number of the oldest nuclear facilities beginning the process of decommissioning but with replacements on the way, the biggest of these being the Lost Hills Nuclear Generating Station near Bakersfield, California, an immense six-reactor complex which began construction in 1997 and when completed in 2006 was the largest power station by output in the United States, producing 5,750 MW of electric power, in the process providing almost 20% of the electricity used in the state, powering large sections of the San Francisco Bay Area and the Los Angeles Basin and employing over 5,000 people. At the same time, steadily rising oil prices, which began to put a pinch on American gas prices by the middle of the decade but causing expansions in development of both synthetic crude and of oil shale, both promising in the United States, which has 27% of the world's coal reserves and 60% of the world's oil shale reserves. Beyond the big projects, smaller projects were brought out in the thousands, with many smaller cities investing in electrified light rail and trolley-buses, taking advantage of fairly-cheap electricity in many areas of the United States. Private individuals also began getting into the passenger rail transport business in the form of tour groups, with one of the early leaders (and best at it) at this was Pioneer Western, which began operating trains on a Seattle-Spokane-Helena route in 1995. They rapidly expanded, though, with their flagship Oregon Trail (Kansas City-Denver-Salt Lake City-Boise-Portland) and Pioneer (Albuquerque-Colorado Springs-Denver-Salt Lake City-Boise-Spokane-Seattle) services beginning in 2001. After 9/11, Amtrak's huge appropriation allowed progression to be swift, with Amtrak's existing trains taking advantage of new cab signalling and track upgrades to in many places up speeds to as much as 100 mph, the limit of most existing rolling stock. As the HSR lines were built, though, the speeds got faster, and the introduction of gas-turbine powered PowerTrains on several routes in the Midwest in 2005 upped speeds up to 125-135 marks in many cases, and it was noted that every increase in speed resulted in more passengers, and that the high-speed trains, even on longer Midwest HSR routes like routes from Chicago to Cleveland, Detroit and Minneapolis, the routes were frequently faster than short-haul airliners. Many of the air travel companies fought bitterly with Amtrak about this, but after most of these companies required huge subsidies in the early 2000s and had the airport they relied upon lavishly supported by the government, their complaints fell on dead ears. The first full route of the Midwest HSR, running from Chicago to Indianapolis, entered operation in January 2006, with Chicago to Detroit (via South Bend, IN and Lansing, MI) beginning operation in May 2006 (this line was extended to Toronto with the opening of VIA Rail's Detroit-Quebec City corridor in 2010) and the other routes opening between 2007 and the system's completion in 2013.

Socially, America began to see demographic changes. Beyond the growing acceptance of the LGBT communities in America and the massive growth of the United States' Hispanic populations, several major American cities were seeing substantial baby booms. This was first noticed in New York in the early 1990s, but by 2005 it was also true in Philadelphia, Boston, Detroit, Chicago, Miami, Atlanta, Dallas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose and Seattle, and it was also beginning to be noticed in other places. This baby boom seemed to defy expectations, but studies of the boom found that it was most related to confidence in the future and the growing availability of quality child care, better education and improving economic opportunities. This idea appealed to many, and it was notable that the cities were all prosperous, but that was asbout all they shared - Los Angeles, Dallas and San Jose were widely-spread cities, while New York had the nation's highest population density, San Francisco and Seattle were both higher density cities. Chicago, Philadelphia and Detroit were widespread cities undergoing rapid gentrification, and the demographic difference between overwhelmingly-white Seattle, black-plurality Detroit and Hispanic-plurality Los Angeles were also considerable, all of this leading to the idea that the boom was because of prosperity and the advancing social conditions of the United States, an idea that caught on in the media as well, talking about the prosperous time. By the 2000s, that certainly seemed that way.

In the midst of that prosperity was the 2004 election. Term-limited President Clinton would pass on his leadership to a successor, with his Vice-President being a very-favored candidate. Sure enough, Paul Wellstone was one of the first to jump into the 2004 Presidential race, and his presence made potential challengers pause, though a few went for it, notably Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, Delaware Senator Joe Biden, Vermont Governor Howard Dean and popular Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Despite these people in the race (and all four were formidable characters), Wellstone had little difficulty in winning the Democratic nomination. Knowing of his reputation within the party, Wellstone's VP choice had to be a moderately conservative pick, and Tennessee Senator Al Gore, who was becoming famous in the Senate for his environmental activism, was the logical choice. (It helped that Wellstone and Gore got along well.) The Republicans had a choice to make here, and knowing that harder-line candidacies and the problems raised by the activist right had bit them twice in elections, intelligently chose candidates, easily weeding out several notables early on, namely activist Alan Keyes, Libertarian firebrand Ron Paul and Texas Governor Rick Perry, the latter because of his propensity for stupid comments to the media. (Perry's team tried to make this a sign of his honestly, but the GOP knew by that point that that would go nowhere.) New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani ran but his campaign fell apart early on (but not before Biden commented of Giuliani "Every sentence that comes out of his mouth has three things, a noun, a verb and 9/11.") and Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, despite being the choice of the religious right, was unable to get support outside the Bible Belt. In the end, Christine Todd Whitman and Colin Powell, despite both losing elections as VP candidates, went into the convention the favorites, with former Texas Governor George W. Bush and Utah Senator Orrin Hatch also making bids. In the end, Powell came out with the nomination by doing deals with Bush and Hatch and publicly promising Whitman a spot in his Administration. Powell then fought off an attempt by the religious right to push Huckabee into the VP position, but the position wound up going to popular Florida Governor Charlie Crist, setting up the 2004 race.

Inclined both by his personal demeanor, that of his running mate and that of the general public, Powell's campaign stuck to the issues like a leech, avoiding personally attacking Wellstone or Gore and even avoiding Clinton's personal mistakes. Wellstone did the same, not wanting to be seen as the gutter dweller. This proved to be good on two fronts - both focusing on the issues made for better debate of them, and it also saw more voters on both sides vocally support the candidates, resulting in a substantial rise in voter turnout in the 2004 election compared to 2000. The issues initially focused on foreign policy in the aftermath of 9/11, a benefit for Powell, but as domestic issues came up to the fore Wellstone came back up in popularity, with him being able to point out that Democratic leadership had resulted in unprecedented prosperity for the country. The threat of terrorism came up repeatedly, not helped by the bombing in Madrid, Spain, in March which resulted in 132 lives lost to bombs hidden on crowded commuter trains. The issues of the War in Afghanistan saw a split between Wellstone, who supported the war, and many of his base, who most certainly didn't. But what won it for Wellstone really was the surging economy. The prosperity of the time gave adage to Dick Gephardt's 1992 comment about "It's the economy, stupid" when referring to Howard Baker's public musings about the priorities of the American public. Wellstone's campaign slogan "The Best Has Yet To Come" and what it entailed caught on with a sizable number of voters. The end result was a popular vote win by Wellstone and Gore, beating Powell and Crist by just over three million votes and the Democratic ticket claiming the electoral college 340 to 198.

Paul David Wellstone was only too happy to be the first Jewish President of the United States, a fact that Wellstone didn't dwell on, because he knew he had a lot to live up to. America was prospering, but Wellstone had made a promise that the best hadn't come yet....

 

[TheMann]

Chapter Fourteen: Energy, Force, Power and Changes

The Clinton Administration ended with one of the biggest disasters in modern times, which resulted from a monstrous magnitude 9.3 Earthquake off of the West Coast of Indonesia, which caused one of the largest tsunamis in history, a monstrous tsunami which struck oceanfront lands in Indonesia, Thailand, India, the Maldives and Sri Lanka viciously hard, while also causing damage and deaths in Singapore, Malaysia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Somalia, Tanzania, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Yemen, Seychelles, South Africa and Australia. The tsunami, which included a tsunami waves in some places as much as 50 feet high, leveling whole communities, including several resort communities in India and Thailand, causing an estimated 260,000 deaths and over $200 Billion in economic damage across the tsunami regions.

The Boxing Day Tsunami was also the scene of one of the greatest movements to help others in history, and Japan and Korea claimed the credit for organizing it. Responding to the disaster, the Air Forces and airlines of Japan and Korea organized huge relief movements, sending hundreds of thousands of tons of relief to the region in a matter of ten weeks. Co-ordinating movements with Indonesia and Taiwan, the Japanese and Korean movements used practically everything both nations could scrape up, including the deployment of over two dozens warships from the two countries to the region, which moved fast to get there and provide support. Furthermore, a NATO carrier group on its way back from a visit to Australia, centered on aircraft carriers USS Enterprise and HMS Prince of Wales, helicopter carriers HMCS Rwanda, USS Saipan and FS Mistral and British casualty receiving ship RFA Argus headed north to provide assistance to hard-hit Indonesia, but as the Koreans and Japanese deployed, they moved to assist India, Sri Lanka and Thailand instead. Two American warships, destroyer Oscar Austin and frigate Lockwood, were on a port visit to Chennai, India, on the day of the tsunami, and despite being badly damaged by tsunami (so much so in the case of the four-year-old Oscar Austin that the ship had to be totally rebuilt), the crews of both were able to provide major assistance to the badly-damaged area after the disaster - Oscar Austin's helicopter was flying during the actual tsunami hit and spent hours flying back and forth to shore, plucking people out of the water, as well as the crew using everything at their disposal to help others. This action earned the destroyer a Presidential Unit Citation and two of the rescuers on the helicopter the Navy Cross. Such was the scale of the Korean and Japanese response - over $7.5 Billion worth of aid from the two countries, and over 22,000 people flown to hospitals in Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines and Korea - that even the Chinese, long the arch rivals of the Japanese and Koreans, had to admit that their efforts were more than many expected. The Japanese and Koreans also provided supplies to other nations to move their own units to the regions, with the Royal Australian Air Force delivering supplies and also air-dropping supplies into the regions where they could not get vehicles to. It was such a response that President Wellstone awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the "Japanese and Korean Rescuers in Southeast Asia", as well as the commanders of the effort, Japanese Rear Admiral Shikio Kawashima and Korean Vice Admiral Kal Sang Jun, while visiting Japan and Korea in November 2005. But the greater impact was in Indonesia and Asia itself. Japan's strong turn to find out the truth of its past had already been seen as positive for the region's relations, but the Boxing Day Tsunami response added to this, improving the region's view of Japan and Korea. It also improved the two nations' view of each other, with both sides having nothing but respect for the other's massive actions, a fact seen even more clearly in Japan when one considered Korea's immense costs of rebuilding the former North Korea.

The mess from the Indian Ocean tsunami hadn't yet gone away when President Wellstone was inaugurated, and he had no objections to a prayer being held before his inauguration for those who had lost their lives in Southeast Asia, an action that was well-received by nearly all. Wellstone's Presidency was only weeks old when disaster struck at home, in Texas City, Texas, southeast of Houston, on March 23, 2005. The 71-year-old refinery Amoco Texas City Refinery had been hit with numerous orders for facility improvements and fines for violations in the ten years previous, but the disaster in March 2005 resulted from a massive elementary mistake, namely that a raffinate tower at the refinery was massively overfilled and overheated, causing a vapour cloud that erupted into a massive explosion when it reached a diesel pickup truck parked with the engine running nearby. The initial blast killed sixteen people and injured 175, but the massive fires that resulted caused most of the refinery to be consumed by fire. Over 60,000 people were evacuated from Texas City as the fire raged, with fire crews staying behind to fight it until a first explosion, caused by an overheated LPG tank car, caused them to evacuate the scene. Over the following eleven days, several massive fuel tanks and dozens of railroad tank cars at the scene also exploded, but as the area had been evacuated, casualties were mercifully few. 26 people were ultimately killed by the explosions, with 340 injured and the refinery a total loss. The bigger concern early on was the loss of the United States' third-largest oil refinery caused a sudden and substantial rise in fuel prices, which had already been undergoing a steady rise since 2003.

But it got worse just seven months later.

On October 19, 2005, a large band (some say 150-180) of Al-Qaeda terrorists struck at Saudi Arabia's huge Ras Tanura oil refinery and export terminal, sinking two VLCC-class tankers at their piers, destroying the heavily-guarded oil tanks facility with mortar fire and then with car and backpack bombs. The Saudi Armed Forces exterminated the terrorists within three hours, but the end result was the same, with Saudi Arabia's primary oil export terminal completely wrecked, thus causing a massive rise in oil prices over the following five days, with oil in that period roaring from $65 a barrel on October 19 to $157 a barrel on October 24, and a fuel price rise of nearly 50% in most major energy markets. While North America did not face supply problems, there was major issues in Asia, to the point that several nations had to establish fuel rationing. The United States helped this by largely draining its Strategic Petroleum Reserves and other oil-producing nations, particularly Iran, Angola, Brazil, Kuwait and Venezuela, threw in by massively increasing their production in the short term. (For these nations, the massive paydays they also got as a result didn't hurt, either.) The 2005 oil shock, however, played into fears of the problems that relying on oil supplies made, and it also caught a chord in several nations other than the United States, particularly Japan and China, both of which imported sizable amounts of their oil from the Middle East. The oil shock also caused a short-but-sharp economic recession in the United States, its first since 1990, and also was behind the final bubble pop of the United States' overheated housing market.

The housing market bubble was a long time in the making, based on financial reform in the late 1990s that allowed the depository banking systems and the investment banking systems to be merged into one company, and the allowance of numerous changes in the lending markets. The rise of subprime mortgages and subsequent financial agreements led to substantial rises in both net worth and debt on the part of Americans, as payments against homes rising in value added on both fronts. But the downside of the derivatives was that investment by them by banks resulted in huge amounts of capital tied up in such markets, a problem which became obvious when the housing markets crumbled in 2006. The first signs of huge problems for the financial markets came as IndyMac bank, a major lender of subprime mortgages, hit the ground in September 2006, forcing the bank into FDIC stewardship. The most ironic thing is that the problems in this market had been known as early as 1998, and the problems with derivatives had resulted in numerous municipality economic problems before, including the bankruptcy of Orange County, California's municipal government in 1993, and a massive real estate bubble had been the base cause of much of Japan's economic problems after its bubble economy collapse in 1989-90. But as with so many cases, lessons had not been learned, and it became obvious in 2006 that the problems were both real and massive in scale. Making it worse was actions of companies like Countrywide Financial and America Prime Financial services, both of whom were found guilty of predatory lending. As the crisis got ugly in early 2007, the situation forced Congress to get into the act. The two government-sponsored enterprises which got involved in the mortgage business were taken into conservatorship in March 2007, and the failure of Lehman Brothers on February 17, 2007, followed by Washington Mutual nine days later, caused a huge shock through the economy. Credit slowed badly, and making matters worse was the FDIC, which had placed Washington Mutual under conservatorship and sought to sell it to another company, was blocked from doing so by Congressional action. Congress, well aware that the five largest US banks were all massively exposed to subprime and derivatives losses from the crisis, forced the FDIC to hold all bank mergers while the situation was sorted out.

Wall Street, suddenly in up to its neck because of a bear market and liquidity crisis problems of unprecedented proportions, now had to deal with a very hostile public, a Congress that was ambivalent at best and a President in Paul Wellstone who had little love for the financial community. A first attempt at bailing out many in Wall Street failed spectacularly, resulting in a second bill, the American Financial System Restoration Act of 2007, being enacted and made law in December 2007. This law repealed dozens of areas of financial deregulation, required much more liquidity on hand in banks and ordered the breakup of investment banks from their commercial banking counterparts, effectively rebuilding a firewall between the two types of banks. In return for access to a massive bailout fund, the companies who were bailed out had to deal with numerous terms which many found onerous. The law also ordered the breakup of nine major financial firms, including the bankrupt Washington Mutual, to be broken up into dozens of subsidiary companies with separate boards of directors. This was not popular among them but was widely cheered by the public, and the reinstatement of nearly all of the provisions of the Glass-Steagal Act of 1933, which had been overturned with the Gramm-Leach-Billey Act of 1995, was also a popular decision. Wellstone and Congress' massive fight with Wall Street was, to the shock of many, supported by much of corporate America, but it caused many of the Wall Street banking firms to have an intense distaste for many of the more vocal companies and executives who sided with Wellstone and Congress on the issue.

Outside of the financial problems, Wellstone found himself with a Congress and a nation that was very much moving on many social issues. The New Drug Policy Act of 2005 was one example of this - the act decriminalized marijuana (though still having public use of it and operation of any vehicle while intoxicated by it punishable by fines or prison) and changed nearly all of the laws regarding drug policy, including massively expanding the treatment programs for illicit drugs. The results of this were immediately obvious, as the rehabilitation programs resulted in millions of users cleaning up, and the DEA would report on a substantial drop in the demand for illicit drugs in the United States, quite happily saying that their job was getting easier rather than harder. The Social Responsibilities and Advancements Act, passed in March 2006, added to this by mandating paid maternity leave (making the United States one of the last nations in the developed world to do this) and expanding government assistance to numerous low-income earners, though this required people to show evidence of attempts to find jobs and expanded programs for such people to work in government positions. He also rammed through the Matthew Shepard Act, named for the Wyoming teenager whose murder in 1998 which made headlines around the country, in May 2005 (in the presence of now-Senator Judy Shepard, Matthew's mother) after it was passed with wide margins by Congress in April 2005, which made categories for hate crimes for homosexuals, women and people with disabilities. Such positions earned Wellstone outright hatred by some conservatives and disdain from some Democrats, but was much-loved by the liberal wing of the Democrats and saw Wellstone maintain substantial popularity early on, but the Financial Crisis of 2006-2007 badly damaged this popularity.

The financial crisis did come at a time where the world was flying higher than many figured it even could. With the number of armed conflicts falling at a faster time than at pretty much any other time in history and peace being more common than war on every continent, it was a good time to be a diplomat. Syria and Israel normalized relations in 2005, with Syria becoming the last of Israel's neighbors to do so, after the two countries negotiated terms of agreements - and in an act of good faith that all saw as remarkable, Syria gave up its claim on the Golan Heights in return for economic aid, assurances of Syrian ability to use Sea of Galilee water resources and that the Golan Heights region would be free for Syrian civilians to live, though they would have to abide by all Israeli laws while there. The demilitarization of the region also allowed the UN mission, stationed there since 1974, to be decommissioned, though a number of Canadian, Japanese and Filipino troops on the UNDOF mission were simply moved to Jerusalem to be part of the city's guard force. Both Syria and Israel made a point of promising to rebuild the city of Quneitra, a ruin since 1974, to prove good faith in restoring relations. Much of the advancement is said to be the result of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's invitation of Bassel al-Assad to Jerusalem in June 2004, a visit that began with Arafat being joined by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon at the airport - and if that wasn't shocking enough, the Arab-fluent Sharon is said to have said of the Syrians "we were enemies once, but no human beings can be motivated by enemies forever. It's not in either of our natures. Your father and I were, quite literally, in the crosshairs of each other's guns. But all evil must be vanquished at some point, I believe." Bassel and brother Bashar had by 2004 begun efforts to both liberalize Syrian politics and open up the country's economy, both suffering from decades of harsh rule (both Assad brothers openly stated that they did not wish to continue the sort of rule their father had led with) and economic stagnation which had put Syria far behind its neighbors in economic strength (Syria's GDP per capita in 2005 of $6,600 compared to $18,920 in Lebanon, $20,075 for Jordan, $25,700 for Palestine and $36,900 for Israel) and Syria's attempt to keep influencing Syria in 1995 had gone disastrously for them thanks to the involvement of the Israelis. Syria promptly had ties severed by Iraq and Saudi Arabia, but neither one particularly was relevant in modern times in Syria, and the move to normalize relations with Israel had an immediate effect on the nation's economic progress.

In the Western Hemisphere, Mercosur steadily expanded its membership as the Continent's politics and economics changed, with the original four members growing to include Venezuela in 2000, Chile in 2003, Bolivia in 2004, Peru in 2006 and Ecuador in 2008. Mercosur's original intent of unifying the South American trading community was rapidly expanding, and massive growth in pretty much every field there was was making trade unification a priority. The 2006 meeting that inducted Peru also one which saw expansions of the group's plans, with common transport systems, energy infrastructures and a number of joint projects approved, including large-scale development of domestic nuclear energy (Brazil and Argentina already used nuclear reactors for power and were growing their nuclear fleets, but the agreement expanded this further still) and co-ordination on several industries, with stated goals including the development of South American automakers, aerospace firms and military equipment developers. There was little objections from the United States, which was only too pleased about the economic growth in the region and the opportunities presented, even in the midst of the economic crisis of 2006-2007.

The financial crisis caused dozens of reorganizations of companies, with financial firms most hard hit. American Insurance Group (AIG) was destroyed by the crisis, and the splitting of the nine largest banks into fourty-two separate companies shook the stock market, which also resulted in several other major companies suffering from the bear market. One of these was General Motors, which was forced by huge losses in its GMAC financial division in 2007 to write off a loss of $8.7 Billion, the largest in corporate America's modern history, which forced them to have to reorganize. This resulted in the sell-off of the company's locomotive division to Bombardier and Fairbanks-Morse and of the Oldsmobile, Pontiac and Hummer brands to auto parts behemoth Magna, which began making cars of their own design under those names in 2011. Chrysler was also forced to write off losses, forcing the selloff of its Western Star heavy truck division - which was sold to Russian heavy truck maker Kamaz, in one of the first huge investments in the United States by a Russian company in the aftermath of the Soviet era and the Soviet Civil War of the early 1990s. (Kamaz extensively mined Western Star for experience as well as investing substantial funds with the goal of establishing the Russian maker as a real player in the American truck market, with some success.) Investors, in more than a few cases leery of the problems with the big fish, dumped money into funds which invested in smaller companies, since large-scale firms tended to be more effected by nerves than smaller companies with more-involved shareholders. Thanks to the fast and effective response, industrial America's hiccup was fairly small, despite the sudden and huge energy price rise. The disaster in Texas City resulted in new laws with regards to the operation of oil refineries, but if the laws didn't hit the plan home, the newest refinery in America, opened by Hess Petroleum near Carr, Colorado, south of Cheyenne, in November 2007, hammered the point home that oil refineries could be very different places.

The Carr refinery was built with the assistance of numerous partners - Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Combustion Engineering, Toshiba, JACOS and South African firm PBMR Technologies, among others - and produced dozens of products, and did so through the use of the first built-for-the-purpose Very High Temperature Reactors (VHTRs) in the Western Hemisphere. The reactors produced the power for the facility (and lots besides that, which was then transmitted north to Cheyenne and south to Colorado's Front Range communities), as well as the high-temperature steam used to make hydrogen for the refinery operations, while waste heat was used as the first stage to make refined petroleum. Oil shale arrived at the facility from Green River Basin mines by rail (the trains for this, run by Burlington Northern, are the largest freight trains in the world, with each one averaging 21,500 tons of shale), where initial separation was done on the east side of the facility before the bitumen headed into the refinery and the shale itself was returned to the mine on another train to eventual site remediation. The bitumen headed into the refinery to be broken up into dozens of products - gasoline, diesel fuel, jet fuel, liquified petroleum gases, lubricants, chemicals, asphalt. The plant also captured all of its gaseous releases and used them to create additional products - compressed carbon dioxide, carbon fiber, bulk hydrogen gas and several others. Beyond that, the refinery was a design revolution - whereas most previous refineries were open, the Carr facility was built inside dozens of large reinforced concrete buildings, all of which had halon and nitrogen fire suppression systems in order to prevent risks of fires and explosions, as well as shelters for workers in the event of emergencies. The covered facilities reduced corrosion problems and environmental concerns, and the whole facility, which employed over 4,500 people, was said to be the cleanest and safest refinery on Earth. The plant was by any standard impressive - President Wellstone is said to have said the plant was "what every oil refinery and chemical plant in the world should look like" and even Greenpeace's head commented of the Carr Facility "If one must refine petroleum, the Carr facility is the way one should do it." While few other refineries would include nuclear reactors as part of their construction, the enclosing and equipping of fire suppression systems was widely seen as a very good idea in the context of the disaster in Texas City and with environmental concerns with refineries near populated areas.

While the second half of the 2000s in America were dominated first by the economic problems that the oil crisis of 2005-06 and the financial crisis that unfolded over the following 18 months, the world was a different story in many regards, namely because the growing number of nations entering into the ranks of the world's developed and rapidly-developing nations. Between 2000 and 2010, numerous countries began industrializing at rapid rates, the smart nations among these also taking care to watch out over their environments and populations. With the GDP of Asia increasing over 150% between the end of Japan's bubble collapse in 1993 and 2008, more demand was there than ever for goods, energy and food. The stress on many resources in the world created opportunities and pitfalls in itself, with a massive resource price bubble resulting from this in the 2000s (this contributed with to the 2006-07 financial problems) and shortages in some areas leading to new projects. The reconstruction of North Korea went better than some expected, though the problems with the remnants of the Juche state remained in many regards, Korea's huge investment in their northern neighbor, when combined with Japan's somewhat slow but real recovery in the late 1990s and the massive growth in the "Second Wave of the Asian Tigers", defined as the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia, as well as India (which got much of the world's lower-wage manufacturing growth in the 2000s as wages rose in many of the nations which used to do this) and several places in Africa, resulted in more nations than ever having economic power and the financial muscle that went with it. Indeed, China became as the 2000s went on a major beneficiary of this - they still had some lingering difficulties with the West, but the growth in Asia could hardly completely ignore them, and as their trade relationships with the West and with its neighbors improved in the mid-2000s, China's economy, left comatose by Tiananmen Square and its slide back into Maoism in the early 1990s, began to return to prosperity.

The most visible sign of this was the BRIICSA nation bloc (Brazil, Russia, India, Iran, China, South Africa, Argentina), first brought together by Iranian Prime Minister Shirin Ebadi and her South African counterpart Thabo Mbeki in 2004. The seven nations involved sought to use their financial muscle and organizational ability to make their voices heard in the world, though none of the nations involved sought to massively change much of the world's economic order. Ebadi put it best when she said in 2008 "The reason for us working together is to advance our mutual interests, and those interests are not at all served by any sort of confrontation with Europe, Japan, America or anyone else. We want them to listen to us, but we don't want or need to give orders or make threats." Indeed, with five of the seven nations having GDP per capita of over $12,000 by 2010, it was clear that that group - home to half the world's population and by then over a billion and a half people considered to be in the world's middle class - could, and almost certainly would, wield huge power in the future. In the aftermath of the 2006-07 financial crisis (which hit the Latin Americans and South Africa particularly hard), the BRIICSA nations began meeting by themselves on a regular basis, which advanced on its own into the G25 nations summit, which first convened in Tokyo in 2011.

The G25 nations - Australia, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Iran, Italy, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Nigeria, Philippines, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, Turkey, United Kingdom and the United States - meeting all in one place was widely seen as being the largest gathering of major economic powers in the world in a century, and their primary order of business early on was attempting to sort out of the differences between nations on monetary policy, but it didn't take long before the developing nations and the nations which saw themselves as seeking to advance other nations' interests as well as their own - the Latin Americans sought not only to advance themselves but also their neighbors, while Nigeria and South Africa sought to do the same for Africa and Iran sought input from its Muslim neighbors - sought to use G25 agreements to get technological and investment support for their own efforts. The BRIICSA nations loudly pushed for this, while sought-after decreases in energy and resources prices were fought by some, particularly Canada, Australia, Mexico, South Africa and Nigeria, which relied on these to advance economic interests. Despite the differences, it was said that the Tokyo summit saw many of the nations involved find common ground in many areas, even if there were other disagreements between some nations and nations outside of the G25 in many cases criticized the bloc, seeing it as a way of allowing the rich nations of the world to carve up the world's economy for their benefit. (In the future, benefit-seeking nations would invite other nations to send delegations to the G25 meetings to make their cases.)

Economic power was one thing, but it was also said that despite the peaceful world, some of the nations of the world sought to expand their armed forces' abilities. Most of Europe, after spending the Cold War focused on the threat the Red Army and the Warsaw Pact posed, shifted their military focus back to expeditionary conflicts, and they were joined by others. Even within the context of the European Union in which both were members, the regular deployments of Britain and France's aircraft carriers to destinations (some far away from home) were more widely known as visits meant to show off both the ability of nations to project military power but also provide humanitarian support, a point driven home by the NATO group's humanitarian deployments following the Boxing Day Tsunami. This also manifested itself in more of such vessels - the obsolescent HMCS Eagle and HMAS Sydney were replaced in the 2000s with the HMCS Terra Nova and HMAS Australia (both based on the French Navy's FS Charles de Gaulle and Richelieu), India purchased the incomplete Russian aircraft carrier Varyag and rebuilt it as INS Vikramaditya and the two older French carriers, FS Foch and Clemenceau, were both sold to Brazil, which rebuilt both before putting them into service as NAeL Sao Paulo and Rio de Janiero. The proliferation of such vessels wasn't seen as much of a problem, as few expected any sort of conflict between countries widely seen as allies. The expansions of expeditionary forces also included many nations expanding their air forces both in terms of fighter and strike capability and in air transport. Having learned their lessons in Rwanda, the Canadians were at the forefront of this, by 2010 operating a fleet of medium and long-range airlifters over 70 strong, including sixteen of the mighty C-17A Globemaster III airlifters, capable of carrying 80-ton loads. Washington had little difficulty encouraging this - Afghanistan and the Boxing Day tsunami had proven that America's allies had both the capability and political will to carry a load all by themselves, and in more than a few cases these expansions meant orders for American manufacturers. America had no sooner said that they would consider orders for their awesome F-22A Raptor fighter than four of the five countries that America was willing to sell the mighty jet to - Japan, Canada, Australia and Israel - all sought to acquire it, and the United States sold 226 Raptors (80 Canada, 60 Australia, 54 Japan and 32 Israel) in the late 2000s and early 2010s to allies, who also were willing in cases to return the favor for stuff the United States wanted.

It was interesting times in the world, despite the peace. The 21st Century, it seemed, would be less of a competition for resources but one where the nations of the world would be focused on economic competition and scientific advancement. Peace hadn't entirely broken out, but humans, it seemed, were starting to turn a corner in their collective history, and the United States of America was leading the way in a lot of regards....

 

[TheMann]

Chapter Fifteen: Renewing America

By the 2008 election, the two primary parties in American politics were joined by a growing cast of characters. Having gained back considerably in the 2006 mid-term elections (they took back the Senate, but still fell considerably short in the House of Representatives), the Republicans sailed into the 2008 election with confidence, even with the popular incumbent in Paul Wellstone. It was telling that Wellstone had no primary challengers, and it was clear that the right-leaning side of the Democrats were simply unwilling to take on the avowedly-liberal President, though a sizable portion of this was simply the fact that Wellstone was as popular as he was and was willing to take ideas and opinions from the right side of his party. The Republicans had also learned their lessons and their primaries showed it - several of the right-wing candidates fell hard, leaving the field open to several right-of-center candidates, with the eventual nomination fight being between Senator Susan Collins of Maine and American Motors CEO Mitt Romney, the latter winning it - and then infuriating the right-wing of his party by having Collins as his running mate. This caused such anger on the left side of the Republican Party that two independent candidates roared out, the first being the Libertarian Ron Paul and the second being a social conservative campaign under the American Conservative Party, them nominating Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour and Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum for their candidacies. The divided right wing didn't help their chances, but Santorum, who was by then known for loud statements about homosexuality being a sin, was quite adamant that socially-conservative Americans deserved a chance to express their views.

The 2008 campaign was all about issues. Wellstone's liberalism was used as a benefit for America, while Vice-President Gore had long since acquired his daughter's passion for environmental conservation (he claimed that this was a conservative value with more than a little bit of conviction) and used this on the campaign trail, with his own slogan "Preserving America For Our Children". There was a movement early on to create a set of 'Democrats for Romney', but that went nowhere (DNC chairman Howard Dean was notably unsympathetic towards them) and Wellstone's adept handling of the energy crisis and then the financial crisis that followed made sure he had tons of public support. Romney also tried to focus on the economy, making the argument that the Democrats had been responsible for the economic crisis through their actions and that he could do better than them at rebuilding the economy. Romney was also helped in that he massively out-fundraised Wellstone (the gap here being over $150 million between the two), but his decision to loudly say that he would reverse Wellstone's changes to the financial system backfired in his face. Barbour and Santorum focused their efforts on the social problems they preceived, a movement which earned them considerable support in parts of the South and Mountain West but alienated them elsewhere, but Santorum's claim that the BRIICSA nations gathering was a plot to remove America's economic dominance in much of the world was dismissed by both Wellstone and Romney and called by the latter as a reason why "Haley Barbour and Rick Santorum are not the answer to the stability Americans want from their government." Romney's huge funding advantage allowed him to attempt to change topics of conversation and narrowed the once-considerable lead Wellstone and Gore had, making it so that on election day that it was not only a real tossup who would win, but it seemed that the 2008 election could be like 1968 where a third-party could saw the electoral college, thus making for a last-minute charge by the Democrats to push for higher turnout in multiple battleground states, figuring that the difference in turnout could decide the election.

On election day, Barbour and Santorum claimed the states of Kansas, Wyoming, Oklahoma, Mississippi and Alabama, giving the social conservatives 31 electoral votes, but it was not nearly enough to split the electoral college. Wellstone and Gore came out with 27 states as well as the District of Columbia and 351 electoral votes, though in eight states (Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, Florida, Nevada, Colorado and North Carolina) the margin of victory was less than 2.5 percentage points, which is why the election was so close on election day. Despite a popular vote count of 66.1 million, Romney and Collins only came out with 156 electoral votes from 18 states, but the Republicans, well aware that a three-percent vote swing would have seen them comfortably win the Presidency, knew that they had turned the corner. Romney, who was only too happy to support many of the policies Wellstone and Clinton had created (as the boss at a major global automaker, Romney was well aware that the industrial policies of America had proven to be beneficial to America on a number of fronts), ran on a brand of competency and intelligence, a style the Republicans called "Intelligent Conservatism", and it was clear that they had scored a major way of winning elections, which made them happier than expected. Wellstone's decision to travel to Romney's campaign headquarters in Chicago the day after the election to congratulate Romney in person - widely covered by the media - was seen as a statement of respect between two very good men. The fact that Wellstone had done something once considered impossible in winning the fourth straight term for the Democratic Party (only done before by Harry Truman in 1948) was a statement in its own right. But the Democrats had noticed that Romney had been the recipient of over $200 million in financial industry donations and had pledged to overturn Wellstone's reinstatement of many previous financial regulations, as had much of the American public, and it wasn't long after the election that that began to change.

On May 11, 2009, the first major constitutional amendment since the 28th Amendment (concerning the laws affecting any changes to Congressional salary until after the next congress takes office) was passed in September 1985. The 29th Amendment to the Constitution, the Advancement of Citizens Political Rights Amendment, was an amendment meant to limit contributions of money to politicians and limit the ability to do so to American citizens, expressly prohibiting corporate or union bodies from doing so, in effect eliminating corporate rights with regards to both official donations and third-party operations on behalf of a candidate. The 30th Amendment, the Right To Vote Amendment, introduced on June 15, 2009, limited the size of electoral districts, mandated a minimum number of voting booths in a district to increase voter turnout and established a requirement for all states to have a non-partisan, independent committee to draw political district boundaries. The 31st Amendment, introduced on October 6, 2009, would make the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico the 51st and 52nd US states, with all of the rights that go with it.

Both Amendments were initially loudly booed by Conservatives (it should be noted that the booing reduced dramatically when they realized that this result in their ability to crack Democratic stronghold states like California and Illinois where gerrymandering had been rampant for some time and it would add to their members in the House), but the debate over it in Congress was vicious, namely because the three Amendments were loudly supported by very large portions of the American population. As the debates went on, a number of changes were brought into them. Republican Senator Orrin Hatch asked for - and got - a change to the 30th Amendment to change the Presidential and Vice-Presidential requirements to being a naturalized citizen for a minimum of twenty years. The debates were helped along by the strong recovery that America's economy was experiencing in 2009 and 2010, which raised confidence in the future. Lower and Middle class voters were massively in favor of the 30th Amendment, and union campaigns for the 30th and 31st Amendments didn't hurt their overall opinion.

With support of the Advancement of Citizens Political Rights Amendment at 69% and growing, it was passed by a vote of 70-28 in the Senate on December 15, 2009, and by the House by a 308-125 vote the next day. State approval of the laws was rapid, and the constitution entered into force on August 1st, 2011, as the 29th Amendment to the United States Constitution. The passage of the amendment was loudly supported by many in the media and in the general population, where the general opinion was that the action would make America a more perfect democracy because of corporate or union interests being able to buy influence in elections. The District of Columbia and Puerto Rico Statehood Amendment, which made good on the passage of a 2004 referendum where Puerto Rico asked to become a state, passed shortly thereafter, passing the Senate 88-10 on February 10, 2010 and the House 340-86 on February 14, 2010, becoming the 30th Amendment. The Right To Vote Amendment, because of what it implied, took longer to pass, but ultimately it too did pass into law, passing the House with a number of amendments on May 18, 2010, and the Senate of May 20, 2010. State approvals for the constitutional amendments were fast owing to the vast groundswell and enormous political support that created them, and the honor of the last state to ratify the constitutional amendments fell to Utah, which approved them both on September 25, 2011. The 30th and 31st Amendments both became law on January 1, 2012, with the data for them coming from the 2010 Census.

The overall result of the three amendments was to massively reduce the scope of money in politics and expand voter turnout, though one result, the requirement of a district size maximum being the population of the smallest-population state in the Union (in the 2010 Census, this was Wyoming, which had a population of 565,650) resulted in the fact that the first elections after that Census, which would be 2012, would be for a House that swelled from 435 seats to 574 seats as a result. This made things a little more difficult at first, but the 2012 elections, which would be the first under the new constitutional amendments and the new, bigger house and stricter rules, were expected to be a whole new ball game, and they were just that - rather less money (though fundraising was still important), considerably increased voter turnout and now hundreds of House seats that could move around, along with four new senators. It was expected to be madness, and it would not disappoint in any way.

Outside the constitutional amendments, the baby boom first seen in several major cities began to swell in its geographic reach, namely because of growth in Hispanic population in many states and a growing birth rate, as well as lengthening life expectancy. The growing number of boomers heading towards retirement age was a concern to some demographers, but the swelling young person population and substantial immigration - helped along by Immigration Reform Act of 2011, which created a pathway for illegals without criminal records to become citizens, along with their children and dependents - made sure that the boomers would cycle out of the workforce just as this new young generation began showing up in numbers. They were emerging into a changing workforce in many ways - American manufacturing was still strong (and indeed, the higher costs of long-distance shipping that the energy crisis of 2005-06 brought with it actually added to that), service sector jobs were growing in what they paid and confidence was brimming. The growth in business confidence helped overcome sluggish economic growth in Western Europe (the fast growth in the BRIICSA countries helped here, too) and remaining problems with efficiency in some industries. Wage growth combined with minimal inflation (higher interest rates trying, successfully, to tamp a lot of this down), lower health care costs and a growing number of industries allowing greater time off for employees (more than a few found this improved their productivity) resulted in tens of millions of Americans having more time to pursue leisure pursuits and more money to pursue them with, with everything from professional sports leagues to tourist tours to outdoors shops to airlines and railroad companies benefitting from this. Even the US Government was getting in on the action with greater numbers of visitors to places like the Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Carlsbad Caverns and Mount Rushmore national parks, and Amtrak, benefitting from its massively-increased post-9/11 funding, was only too happy to carry millions of travelers both between cities and to other destinations. After the entry of Puerto Rico into the United States as a state, it didn't take long before tourism began to massively expand in the island, which couldn't not benefit the Puerto Ricans, who had long since established communities outside of the island in most major East Coast cities.

After being re-elected, while Wellstone was busy with the constitutional amendments and changes in business and labor laws, Vice-President Gore dove head-first into the problems of global warming. Aware of the problems it potentially represented but also aware that there were limits of what even an international consensus could do - his Chief of Staff, David Walker, commented on that subject "We cannot expect other people in the world to not have the bounty we enjoy if they can achieve it. We have to make it possible for the whole world to have that bounty while not destroying the environment." Gore, whose history of paying attention to the environment went back to the 1980s, pushed hard for greater research into development of alternative energy sources, greater fuel efficiency in cars and biofuels for many uses, including military fuels. Gore's daughter's movie, An Inconvenient Truth, had been released to substantial fanfare in 2006, and its sequel, Our One Earth, released in 2010, were major factors in expanding the issue of environmental protection, with Gore in the second movie focusing on potential solutions to the problems that he sought to advance, focusing on the development of ways of keeping carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and reducing its production.

Also entering into this was private industry itself. The two largest waste disposal companies in America, Waste Management and Republic Services, both within weeks of each other in 2008 announced that they would rebuild all of their solid waste incinerators to capture greenhouse gas emissions, a considerable cost - but with Gore calling for a tax on carbon emissions, both companies (among others) figured that it might be better for major polluters to figure out how to reduce such emissions by investing in technology. The re-authorization of the Superfund Law in 2010 included a provision requiring hazardous waste disposal incinerators (disposal of such waste by landfill had been outlawed in 1980) to capture a sizable portion of their greenhouse gas emissions, and Gore's push to outlaw the generation of electricity by burning of coal, a mission of his since the expansion of synthetic crude manufacture in the 1990s and 2000s, was passed into law in 2011. With by that point such facilities producing just 16% of American electricity (nuclear accounted for 62% of American electrical generation in 2011 and hydroelectricity accounting for another 14% and renewable energy sources growing in usage rapidly), it was seen as an ambitious but by no means uneconomic project. It was helped later that year by Kenosha Material Science and 3M, which patented a way of economically chaining together carbon atoms, providing an economic way of producing carbon fiber from recovered carbon dioxide from industrial processes with a method known as the Washington process after its creator, Dr. Paul Washington. It wasn't long before KMS and 3M began licensing their developments, with the largest early customer being Chrysler Corporation, which had long invested in the development of carbon-fiber bodywork and chassis components - the Washington for them was a godsend. It didn't take long before expansion of CF components in everything from body armor to sports equipment to auto components to cases for consumer electronics began to be proposed, all out of a material whose emissions needed to be curtailed in the environment. The Washington Process for carbon capture was also collected by defense contractor Lockheed Martin, but their development program was for the development of a water desalinization and filtration system known as Perforene. They had been working on this since 2001, but by 2012 it was ready for testing on a commercial scale, and trials by Lockheed Martin and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power began in January 2012.

As cities came out of the economic crisis and it became clear that strong cities started with strong cores, when combined with global warming concerns, mass transit system enhancements appeared everywhere. Long-modernized transit systems like California's Pacific Electric were soon seen as examples of what could be, and cities with existing (and widespread) streetcar services began expanding them further. Passenger commuter rail, already long-used (and very busy) in several cities expanded further, and urban renewal projects in many cities mixed both wide-scale developments and local designs and communities. The scale of these redevelopments varied, but some were very big indeed - Houston's immense Gulf Coast Challenger rail service, which began operations in 2011, was eventually expanded to cover much of the Houston metropolitan areas in the 2010s, operating right from the start with Dutch-built electric multiple units on its lines and with a massive network of light rail to fill in the gaps. Denver did a similar thing with its FasTracks project, using the same EMUs. Several existing commuter lines were merged together - Metra's absorbtion of the South Shore Line and Connecticut's South Shore Line's integrating its operations with New York's Metro-North Railroad reduced gaps (the same happened with Maryland's MARC and Virginia's VRE and the CalTrain, Altamont Corridor Express and Capitol Corridor trains in California) while ridership on the rails grew massively in the second half of the 2000s and into the 2010s.

In the cities themselves, urban renewal in many cases focused on former industrial facilities and other brownfield sites. Most of the time, these were mixed-use developments with commercial and residential facilities mixed in with each other, frequently with prestige projects in the middle of them. Perhaps the most massive was Indianapolis' gargantuan Hoosier Center, which was focused on the immense Lucas Oil Stadium, which was completed in 2009. Besides the huge stadium was a massive complex, completed in 2017 at a cost of $6.5 Billion and including Indianapolis' new tallest tower, the 1,055-foot, 76-story Indiana Center, just west of the huge stadium. As Amtrak's high-speed lines in the Midwest began operation in the 2000s, many long-disused Union Stations - Chicago Union, Detroit's Michigan Central Terminal, Indianapolis Union Station, St. Louis Union, et cetera - began to become focal points of commercial activity again. Amtrak, in a wise move, began to attach names to its high-speed trains in an attempt to make a certain image to its operations, starting with the Chicago-Detroit Wolverine and Chicago-St. Louis Abraham Lincoln in 2010. As the High-Speed network expanded in the 2010s, Amtrak began plans to resurrect big names of the past. Upon completion of the last section of the Water Level Passenger Route east of Erie, Pennsylvania, in 2014, Amtrak planned out and then brought back a famous name in the 21st Century Limited, running as before from New York to Chicago, with the run making its first run on April 16, 2015. A locomotive-hauled consist instead of a train set, the 21st Century Limited was still equipped with powerful Bombardier ALP-46 or Chrysler-Alco Millenium 180EP electric locomotives and ran the 980-mile trip between New York's Moynihan Station and Chicago's Union Station in just nine hours and fourty minutes, averaging 101 mph on the run. The hooking of the Empire Corridor to the Midwest Network, which also hooked to the Canadian St. Lawrence River High-Speed Network at Detroit, Buffalo and Albany and the Northeast Corridor at Moynihan and Grand Central stations in New York caused such an explosion in passenger traffic in the second half of the 2010s that passenger aircraft flights began to be reduced in number.

That shrinking number of passenger flights resulted in its own changes. American airlines, well aware of the world's economic growth and opportunities that resulted from it and aware of the short-haul fleet needed starting to be reduced as a result of the fast passenger trains, began shifting their focus in the 2000s. After TWA's bankruptcy in 2001, the former "second flag carrier" was bought out by Southwest Airlines, which kept the TWA name flying as its international divisions and flights with new liveries - this proving to be a wise decision after southern's bread-and-butter traffic in the Midwest began to sink. The post-deregulation airline shakeout had already produced problems for some, but after 9/11 the major long-haul American airlines still flying - Pan Am, Delta, United, Eastern, American, Continental and now the Southwest-owned TWA - were all left to figure out how to maintain profitability against nationally-owned flag carriers with a shrinking domestic market and tough competition against each other, with mergers not really being an option due to congressional and public pressure. To a man, all decided after the bailout that they needed to restore the lustre they had once had, while at the same time seek out new sources of revenue and new connections. That resulted in a 2002 agreement between representatives of each of the airlines to work out between them who would fly where. This was, technically, in violation of American anti-trust legislation, but Washington ignored that, hoping to have the airlines sort out their issues themselves. They all also to a man did deals with Amtrak (one big result of this was the Kennedy Connector between Grand Central Station and John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, which opened in 2013) and with freight railroads, which themselves had long ago done deals with parcel delivery firms like UPS and FedEx. The end result was that the freight railroads and their trucking company subsidiaries would funnel international-bound traffic directly onto the airlines' planes, and it would go out on the next flight where there was room, giving the parcel delivery companies additional capacity at no capital cost to themselves while allowing airlines to improve their profitability of some less-than-excellent routes. Pan Am had long been at the front of the pack on this, having been joined at the hip with the New York Central railroad since the mid-1970s, and it was Pan Am who benefitted the most from the Kennedy Connector, but most of the airlines looked their way when it came to wanting better results.

New airliners entering the markets at this time didn't hurt matters. Boeing's mighty twin-jet 777 and much-improved 747-400 followed the medium-range 767 from the 1980s, while McDonnell Douglas advanced its DC-9 and DC-10 designs into the MD-10 and MD-11 in the early 1990s, but their kicker was the mighty double-deck MD-12. The MD-12 had come as a result of McDonnell Douglas' financial problems and a massive bubble-fueled investment in them by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in 1988. When the bubble fell apart, McDonnell Douglas and Mitsubishi both had every reason to make sure the company succeeded, and the MD-11 made its range goals as a result of Japanese- developed IHI engines, while the MD-12, which first flew in 1994 and entered service in 1996. Such was the costs on McDonnell Douglas, however, that the company was bought out by MHI to ensure its survival, become Mitsubishi McDonnell Douglas in May 1996, weeks before Japan Air Lines flew the first MD-12 flight. Lockheed bowed out of the civilian market in the midst of this, selling assets to others to make up their losses - but they did one big move in selling a fast-flying airliner concept, which they called the Sonic Cruiser, to Canada's Bombardier Aerospace. Bombardier turned the Sonic Cruiser into the Bombardier World Airliner series, or WA Series, which first flew in 2005. Airbus also factored into this - the Airbus A300 had busted into North American markets, but the A330 and A340, which entered service in 1993 and 1994, also made legitimate competitors.

Needing to restore the lustre, companies fought over how best to do so, but all made for improved amenities on their aircraft. The Boeing 777, 747-400 and Bombardier WA310 were built with fiber-optic electronic systems and were designed for extensive in-flight entertainment systems, which were quickly copied by others. Grand Central Station was modified to have customs clearance points for the airport traffic, allowing much faster moves through Kennedy for passengers. Seats got bigger and plusher, on-board food service got better, composite-hulled airliners began to have greater pressurization and humidity for better passenger comfort. The focus on international routes and destinations in Latin America caused an explosion in travel in many areas, to the point that the American firms began causing difficulties for other companies which flew to America. In essence, once profitability returned to the big airlines, they went hell-bent on taking every passenger possible on the routes to America and from there to Caribbean resorts and locations near America. The situation was different in the West, where wider distances made train travel less advantageous, but in the Midwest, East and parts of Texas increasingly rail travel began taking back passengers they had lost to aircraft a generation before, and the battles over scheduling and amenities was good pretty much across the board for travelers, and the growing numbers of travelers that resulted wound up being good news for the airlines and the railroads involved.

As the 2000s evolved into the 2010s, life was continuing to advance for most. With America's prosperity after the 2006-07 financial crisis largely having returned to normal and with huge political changes on the horizon, it was a good time to be in the Land of the Free, and it was going to get even more like a new world in the near future....

 

[TheMann]

Chapter Sixteen: What Happens When The People Rule

The public momentum around the 29th, 30th and 31st Amendments to the United States Constitution were such that despite huge backroom efforts aimed at both parties, it took just months for state after state to retify the decisions made by the United States Congress and approved by President Wellstone. There was a political element to this as well, as both parties believed that they would benefit from greater people power, and such was the scale of the Republicans' abandonment of their far right in the 2000s that the argument many of them had made against the amendments - that greater voter turnout would give the Democrats a real advantage, an idea that Newt Gingrich ran with endlessly on every politically-motivated news station that would listen, among others - was dismissed out of hand, in large part out of fear that opposition on those grounds would be seen as trying to entrench elite power at the expense of the power wielded by the people. The idea of the government being citizen legislators chosen by the average folk was one which was deeply entrenched in American folklore, despite two centuries of experience to the contrary, and it was clear by 2012 that the 2010 Census would be used to redraw the political boundaries of the nation, and states worked overtime to get everything set up. They were doing this even as the two primary parties in America went into 2012 deciding who the people leading their parties in 2012 would be. Having seen three consecutive close elections go the way of the Democrats, the Republicans were hell-bent on making sure that didn't happen again, and the Democrats were wanting to choose who they believed would be Paul Wellstone's successor.

On the GOP side, it didn't take long before the cream rose up. The Republicans' move to the center and calls for experienced legislators had resulted in many new arrivals in their ranks in the 2000s and into the 2010s, and it was no surprise to most that a lot of these came forward. Governors Jon Huntsman Jr (Utah), Charlie Crist (Florida) and Chris Christie (New Jersey), New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Senators Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Susan Collins (Maine, trying again for the nomination) and Senate freshman Jose Morales (Texas) all led in, along with newly-eligible Puerto Rico governor Luis Forteno. Mitt Romney looked at trying again but chose not to, and numerous calls from the Republican base for famed actor and former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger came to naught, particularly after Romney rose to the presidency of the Automaker alliance in 2011 and Schwarzenegger was forced to deal with personal issues in 2011 and 2012. Congressmen Michael Robertson (Pennsylvania) and Eric Bell (Washington) also made runs. That primary began with huge wins in Iowa for Crist and New Hampshire for Huntsman, and the primary challenge for Christie ended when it was exposed that he was involved in a number of real estate deals and deals involving New Jersey state pension funds - nothing illegal was found and Christie was never charged, but the optics ruined his campaign. Bloomberg's stance on gun control left him with the wrath of the firearms lobby, but to Bloomberg's credit he did not back down. Collins backed out of the race after Super Tuesday, and as the battle went on others also bowed out. Bloomberg backed out and began canvassing for an independent run, which he ultimately began in May 2012. At the convention, Huntsman had the delegate lead, with Crist, Forteno, Murkowski and Bell still in it. Bell was eliminated in the first round, and Huntsman's deals with Murkowski and Forteno delivered the nomination to the Utah Governor. Those deals did have another consequence - for the fourth time in twenty years, the Republicans would go into the election with a female VP candidate in Murkowski, and Huntsman made it clear that Forteno would be a high-ranking cabinet member if he was elected. Bloomberg's independent candidacy was serious (and he funded it with over $25 million of his own money, plus that of supporters) and well-organized, but it would soon become clear that Huntsman's policy positions were too much for Bloomberg to possibly overcome.

On the Democrat side, the situation was even madder. Vice-President Al Gore, Governors Howard Dean (Vermont), Cameron Woodhouse (Michigan), Christine Gregoire (Washington) and Antonio Villaraigosa (California) held early leads, while Senators Elizabeth Warren (Massachusetts), Russ Feingold (Wisconsin), Arianna Huffington (California) and former movie star Ashley Judd (Kentucky) were all also serious contenders. Long shots were led by firebrand filmmaker Michael Moore (Michigan) and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, both of whom had loudly and openly criticized some elements of the party, though both had been massive supporters of the new amendments. New York Senator Hillary Clinton was asked if she would run, as was Illinois Senator Barack Obama, but both declined, to the stunned surprise of many Democrat supporters - though it would later become clear that both intended to support Vice-President Gore. Gore had name recognition and the ability to campaign on the issues, but the economic problems and his more-conservative nature saw him blasted from the left side, particularly by Dean, Warren and Huffington, all of whom were very much outspoken on where to go with the country. Moore and Sanders' campaigns flamed out early, while the earliest primaries saw New Hampshire taken by Gore, but the Iowa and the new Puerto Rico primaries both went to Villaraigosa, which game him massive momentum. Judd's campaign came to a halt as a result of an unlikely of reasons - her husband, Scottish-born racing driver Dario Franchitti, was seriously injured in an accident in April 2012, leaving him in a hospital for a month and ultimately ending her own campaign as she was concerned for him - a decision that nobody in the race gave her any grief for. As her husband recovered, she went back into the race, backing Warren. Villaraigosa's momentum ended Huffington's chances, and Feingold, Woodhouse and Gregoire found their support waning as time went on.

Into the convention, Villaraigosa had been on the move for two solid months, and him and Gore were neck and neck for the nomination, with both Howard Dean and Elizabeth Warren conceivably holding the balance of power. Antonio knew that the party bosses would almost certainly back the Vice-President, and so he did deals with both Warren and Dean to get support, with Warren asking for a sizable number of policy demands on the official platform and Dean asking for a spot in Villaraigosa's cabinet. Both got what they wanted, and the California Governor got the nomination, to the surprise of the media following it, who had been sure that Gore would be the nominee. Despite that, Gore was plenty willing to support the Democratic candidate. The convention began with a stirring speech by Senator Obama and got surprise number two when Villaraigosa asked for Judd to be his Vice-President publicly. Totally unaware of that, Judd was cornered by MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow and told "Governor Villaraigosa has asked you to be his running mate. Are you willing to accept?" This led to a long silence from a visibly-stunned Judd, who then answered "Most Definitely."

That was where the real 2012 campaign began, and it showed.

With huge growth in voter turnout a guarantee, it put several states in play that had not been there before, and it showed in the campaign tactics in the 2012 General Election. There were five debates between the Presidential candidates (overall consensus was that Huntsman claimed the first two and the fourth, Villaraigosa the third and final debates, while Bloomberg was capable in both) and two between the VP candidates (both of which Judd came out ahead on, but Murkowski didn't make that easy in either case). Both candidates spent huge money to make their positions known to voters, seeking to sway voters to their cause. Villaraigosa and Judd ran on expanding America's social systems and improving educational and health care standards, while Huntsman and Murkowski focused on improving government efficiency and more state-led expansion of government programs. Both had differing ways of how to use the government surplus - Huntsman sought to use it to reduce taxes and pay down the debt, while Villaraigosa sought to expand infrastructure spending and provide a massive cut in the cost of American higher education, particularly in the trades. Bloomberg, who ran with Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, shot a middle ground between the two sides, but both took a hard line on law and order issues, particularly when it cames to gun laws, with the infrastructure spending proposed by Villaraigosa being narrowed to transport and energy by the Mayors, and taxation issues being a central portion of their debate. Negative ads were nearly non-existent - all campaigns knew well that among likely new voters, focusing on negative ads would likely bring a backlash from them, and no side wanted to give up that advantage.

As it came down to the final days, Huntsman and Murkowski had a slim lead, but it was still too close to call it for either side, and it was clear that voter turnout would decide it all. Both sides went crazy on this in the dying days of the campaign, registering over ten million voters in the last three weeks of the campaign alone. The electoral college was expanded as a result of the constitutional amendments from 538 votes to 670, thus a candidate had to get 336 votes to win instead of the traditional 270. Puerto Rico was visited by both campaigns, and states that hadn't traditionally been in play this time around most assuredly were, with Texas being one notable example of this. It made for a decidedly different tone from many, and the loud proclamations through the campaign of "American Justice and Equality" from the Democrats were countered in similar fashion by the Republicans, who sought to completely dodge questions of ethnic, cultural, religious or gender identity, largely successfully. Commentators also noted that while America's senior executive branch positions had for most of its history occupied by White Protestants of Anglo-Saxon backgrounds, many noted that none of the six individuals on the ballots were of such a background - Huntsman (a Mormon) was running against Villaraigosa (a Catholic Hispanic) and Bloomberg (who is Jewish), while two women (Judd and Murkowski) and a second Hispanic man (Emanuel) were on the VP side of the ticket.

On election night, the election went to the Republicans. Heavily-urbanized Connecticut and Maryland went to Bloomberg, earning him 21 electoral votes in the new system, while the other 649 votes went 352-297 in favor of Huntsman and Murkowski, finally breaking the Democrats' four-term hold on the White House. As expected, voter turnout was a massive 78.7%, a twenty-two point increase on 2008, no doubt helped by the much-more accessible polls and aggressive voter turnout campaigns. With Huntsman and Murkowski easily gaining more votes (82,564,400) than any other candidate in history, he had every right to say that he had gained a mandate to lead America for the next four years. Villaraigosa and Judd accepted the loss with pride, noting that the Republicans had learned over the previous elections to remember that they govern the nation, and that they would keep the Republicans honest in every way possible, just as the Republicans would have done had the Democrats been victorious. The House and Senate provided substance to Villaraigosa's warnings - the now 574-seat Congress went 329-245 for the Democrats and the 104-seat Senate went 58-46 for the Democrats. The Republicans got one Senator from Puerto Rico, while the Democrats got both of the Senators from the District of Columbia. The Democratic-dominated Congress was sure to make life a little more challenging for Huntsman, but such was his confidence and ability that he was sure he could work with them.

All three contenders all were most gracious to the people of the country in their concession speeches, pointing out that this election, which had provided many new challenges for those seeking political power in America, was a sign that America's people demanded better from its government, and all sides pledged to make sure they lived up to the promise. Many had made such comments before, but with new limits on what individuals could donate making it much more important to be able to draw from the people, the newly-drawn districts and massively-increased voter turnout, it was more clear than ever before that popular movements would have an impact on Washington. Neither side was blind to the problems such an arrangement could cause, but the 2012 election had been all about the promise of expanding America's society, and its way of electing its leaders was an important part of that.

In a very real way, the Amendments and their response made sure Paul Wellstone, the nation's 44th President, was to go down in history as an influential figure. Wellstone had quite openly hoped to have a Democratic successor, but he wasn't unhappy to be standing in front of the Capitol on January 20, 2013, watching Jon Huntsman Jr. sworn in as President. Governor Villaraigosa and Senator Judd went back to their respective positions with the same respect as before (in Judd's case, quite possibly a lot more), but one of the results of the 2012 race for the Democrats was to make sure that they did not lose in 2016. And it didn't take long for that to lead to talk directly towards many of the best candidates of 2012. The Republicans, having learned the lessons of their 1980 and 1992 victories and the problems that they had after them, were quick to start cutting deals with the 113th Congress, and its leaders - House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Senate Majority Leader Cory Booker of New Jersey - were more than willing to take Huntsman's calls. Murkowski, well aware of the Senate's actions, was there often early on in Huntsman's Presidency, and her and Booker, along with Senate Minority leader John Ensign, were soon well-known for doing deals about issues in the government both on the Senate floor, in each others' offices and indeed in meeting places outside the Senate itself. (In one case, Booker spoke about negotiating with Murkowski while the two of them rode on the Acela Express from Washington to Booker's hometown of Newark, New Jersey, while Murkowski, Booker and Ensign often met at Washington's Metropolitan Club.) Huntsman also came to know Pelosi and Booker on a very intimate basis, along with a number of other influential members on both sides, including Senator Judd, who Huntsman called "The most beautiful of people, inside and out". (What Huntsman's wife or Judd's husband thought of that is another question probably best left unasked.) The nation's prosperity was strong and getting stronger in 2013, something which made both sides' jobs easier.

The world of early 2013 in America was a prosperous one. Aside from the (admittedly rather large) hiccups of the 2005-2008 years the nation's prosperity had been pretty constant since the early 1990s, and with only three short recessions in a generation breaking up long periods of economic growth, America's output was very high. The Boomers who had worked their way up through the system were by then making it clear to themselves and others that their run had been something awesome, but it was time to pass the torch to the Generation X and the Echo Boom generations. With a massively-expansionary monetary policy from the financial crisis years now past, the Federal Reserve's steady rising of interest rates in the 2010-2013 timeframe was done to catch and hold any inflation, with the goal of hammering it down to zero as the economy grew steadily in the years following the crisis. This also had the effect of causing a small growth in the savings rate in the country, which also combined with many people reducing their outstanding credit and loan balances, pushed up many people's net worth in its own right. The retiring boomers, in most cases having plenty of wealth in their pockets, combined with a strong middle class to make life good for both producers of middle class products and luxury ones. America's four automakers (and the fifth in Canada) made sure to provide plenty of options for these markets, as did makers in Japan and Europe, while it also benefitted many boutique makers of products in the United States which catered to higher-wealth individuals. The growing numbers of retirees also resulted in a condo boom in many places, as many moving out of larger homes due to retirement and/or being without children caused a growth in smaller properties. America broke a record in 2014 in one of these areas, that being automobile sales. 17,784,500 new cars were sold in America in 2014, the highest number ever, and some 72% of those were produced by General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, American Motors or Magna, making the American auto industry one of the largest in the country. The cars themselves were changing - growing numbers of urban dwellers, increasingly-dense cities with better mass transit systems and more people without children meant fun cars and better small cars led the way, while smaller trucks and commercial vehicles also saw plenty of sales in the smaller environments. Families with kids also sought through the 2000s and 2010s to get vehicles with more features and more style, a trend most famously shown by Volkswagen scoring its biggest single sales success in decades in America when it replaced the massive, boxy Eurovan with the retro-styled, stylish Microbus in 2004, a trend which everyone in the market - Chrysler, Ford, Nissan, Toyota, Renault and Hyundai - quickly aped in their own ways.

While America's situation was good, Europe's was improving. The European Union's decision to admit Israel, Lebanon and Palestine in 2008, followed by Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2010 and Serbia and Georgia in 2013, was a sign that they were good and serious about expanding their views in the world, but the Lisbon Treaty, the document meant to expand the powers of European authorities when working with national authorities, fell flat on its face in no less than six referendums in May 2011, forcing Brussels to have to rethink its plans for the European Union. Nationalism died hard in many nations, and the vast differences in the nations involved didn't make that task any easier. The decision by Russia in September 2011 to begin talks to join the EU added to the shock, as Russia had the ability to diplomatically and economically dominate any such bloc. Turkey's continued attempts at accession kept stumbling with regards to its hard-shelled nationalism and its differences with some neighbors, particularly Armenia. Europe was following American plans and ideas in many ways with regards to its integration, with projects and plans for integration of border control systems, power grids, transportation systems and communications standards. The Eastern Bloc benefitted most from this, with the biggest gainers economically in the post-crash era being Poland, Romania and Ukraine, all three showing massive economic growth in their post-EU entrance eras, in the last case showing a stunning 13.1% real GDP growth in 2012. This contrasted with sluggish economic growth in some areas, particularly the southern European nations, as Portugal, Greece and Italy had to deal with considerable economic difficulties in the post-crash era. The EU's policies on business were often criticized for being able to allow some nations, particularly Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, to buy many assets in businesses in southern European nations. Brussels' hopes of a single foreign and military policy apparatus came to an end with the failures of the Lisbon Treaty's referendums, but at the same time NATO, left without a mission in the wake of the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the devastation of Islamic terrorism in Afghanistan, sought instead to become an organization meant to provide a way for its members influence events in the world. Some nations in NATO (United Kingdom, France, Canada, Netherlands, Germany, Israel, United States) relished such an idea, but others were dead set against it, and it showed in the debates there, too.

Asian affairs during this time were dominated by two realities - China's attempt to re-enter the world of international commerce it had cast away after Tiananmen Square and Japan's ongoing efforts to make up for its past actions. China's renouncing of any claim to Hong Kong in 2011 - this done in response to deals with the United Kingdom to expand the two nations' trade and diplomatic relations two years before - removed one particularly troublesome problem for the United Kingdom and the People's Republic of China. Hong Kong's subsequent decision to seek complete independence for itself, which it achieved in 2016, was largely based on China's renouncing of claims and it looking likely that the United Kingdom was unable or unwilling to fully make Hong Kong part of the UK. Hong Kong's independence didn't cause China any difficulties, as China rather liked the idea of the independent city-state acting as a gateway for its goods abroad. China's return to the world stage in the second half of the 2000s coincided with a massive construction boom and massive expansions in its industrial output, but China's domestic policies began to be somewhat of a hinderance to this growth in the 2010s. Despite that, China's improvement in its economic performance made many take notice, and post-independence Hong Kong's ability to be a go-between between China and the rest of the world made for massive prosperity for both in the 2010s.

Japan's efforts also got noticed by China. Nearly 15 years of research and investigation went into the first report to Japan's Diet by its Historical Research Project went into the first detailed report about Japan's actions in its colonial past, which was released in February 2011. The revelations contained many details about actions by then well known to Japan and its people that made the public response that much stronger, but in many ways it was overshadowed by the monstrous Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami on March 11, 2011.

The most-powerful Earthquake to ever hit Japan, the Tohoku quake, which measured an awesome 9.0 on the Richter Scale, caused massive damage on Japan's East Coast, damage multiplied by the destruction wrought by the massive tsunami that swamped much of Japan's East Coast less than an hour later. The disaster, which caused damage as far away as Kyushu Island, was one of the most massive disasters in Japan's history - and it was made worse when officials of the Tokyo Electric Power Company lost control of the situation at the badly damaged by the tsunami Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on Japan's east coast. The six-reactor facility suffered extensive damage, and the day after the tsunami, ground liquefaction caused a sizable chunk of the previously-undamaged Reactor Four to collapse, while Reactors One, Two and Three were by then total losses. It was soon discovered that the facility's operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, had a history of falsified records and had sat on a report that could have protected the facility at Fukushima Daiichi from the disaster. The damage to the facility was such that there was no option but to entomb the three totally-destroyed reactors. Many in Japan saw the 3.11 Tsunami as the spirits punishing Japan for its past, while others saw it as them being angered by the dredging up of history that may have been left buried.

Japan's 2011 and subsequent years would be spent trying to figure out how to fix their country, a not-inconsiderable challenge. Fukushima Daiichi's devastation resulted in a massive debate over the future of the nuclear industry worldwide, and after the destruction at that facility several facilities in the world seen as being vulnerable, including the San Onofre facility in Southern California, were ordered closed by authorities. Japan's government, dealing with public anger, made the massive decision to order closed all Generation II nuclear reactors in Japan permanently in May 2012, and all of Japan's nuclear facilities were idled by January 2013. The huge problems this resulted in for a nation reliant on nuclear power was not unnoticed, and it added to Japan's existing economic and political difficulties. But as Japan got into such issues, they got help from an unexpected place - that being Korea.

Korea had begun development of nuclear power around the same time as Japan, but after Korean unification in 1995 economic problems had been suffered by Korea's electric power providers, leading to their 1998 nationalization. Korea had chosen to advance its nuclear program based on Heavy Water designs, and an agreement between KEPCO and Atomic Energy of Canada Limited had seen the Koreans and Canadians have equal responsibility for developing new reactors. KEPCO after the Fukushima Daiichi disaster was quickly stating that Japan's nuclear industry could rebuild itself using newer reactors, and Korea's government in August 2011 proposed Japanese electric power companies buying the Korean-Canadian reactor designs, with Korea and Canada underwriting the costs of construction. This potentially-risky arrangement was backed up with the Koreans pointing out that the designs they used were invulnerable to the sort of meltdowns that had crippled Fukushima. The industry, struck dumb by that brave move, loudly supported it, hoping to save their reputation in one of the world's largest largest operators of such reactors. Mitsubishi quickly pointed out that its APWR designs were much safer than the older style of units used at Fukushima, and the industry pointed out that the reactors built at Fukushima were of an older design. General Electric, which had provided the reactors that destroyed themselves, openly said that designs had improved and that modern facilities could not do what happened at Fukushima.

The Korean connection was played up a lot in both nation, and it heralded a new era between the two nations. They saw each others both as rivals and as worthy adversaries, and with Korea's corporate giants being direct rivals in Japan in the electronics, shipbuilding, engineering and automobile industries, both countries had long respected each others' abilities, but after Fukushima and the response to it it was clear that the two were starting to want to learn from each other. Even more than the 1995 admission of Japan's actions, 2011 made Japan see both that they needed to respect their neighbors and that such respect could result in great benefits for Japan.

Stateside, the tsunami doubled down on Japan's need for their American assets to work, and it also resulted in America being willing to help its cross-Pacific ally in both aid aspects and in terms of direct industrial investment with the goal of rebuilding. GM, having seen years of failures in trying to crack into Japan's car market, was one of those that jumped on this, providing a huge $2.3 Billion investment with the goal of returning Isuzu into the car business which it had abandoned in 1996 as well as providing jobs. The decision to put their new facility at Ishinomaki, one of the hardest-hit towns by the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, was a decision that earned General Motors big points with Japanese consumers, and the opening of the facility and the first new Isuzu cars in nearly fifteen years in September 2015, with the first car out being a new Isuzu Gemini, with the next car out being an Isuzu Vector, the name for gas-electric Chevrolet Volt and its derivatives, which would become a substantial hit in Japan. GM wasn't the only one - hard-hit Sendai Steel Industries was bought up by Bethlehem Steel, becoming Bethlehem Sendai Metals (a name which became more successful than Bethlehem had expected in northern Japan, where Christianity's roots go back to the early 17th Century) and Cosmo Oil, whose major refinery in Sendai was almost totally destroyed by the Tohoku disaster, had a majority stake bought by Hess Petroleum, who promptly brought their coal to oil processes to Japan. Japan's business community, already well aware that Americans could bring them enormous prosperity - a certain Mr. Romney had pretty clearly shown that - but the investments into the devastated Tohoku region did make an impact on the locals, and in 2013 Japan Air Lines took advantage of this by opening direct routes from Sendai to Seattle, Detroit and Los Angeles, and Misawa Air Base, once the site of substantial anti-American protests, saw such activity drop off to nearly nothing in the years after. There was other efforts, but the work in the devastated region of northeastern Japan by Americans made sure that people paid attention on both sides of the Pacific.

Following the disaster, Japan's work at unearthing its past continued, its pace quickened. Such was public perception of the discovery of the details of Japan's sordid past that Japan rewrote their citizenship laws, allowing all of those in Japan of other ethnic groups besides the Yamato - Koreans, Chinese, Taiwanese, Ainu and Ryukyuan indigineous groups and any foreigner who met Japan's requirements - to claim complete Japanese citizenship. Japan removed visa requirements for visitors from Korea in 2013, followed by Taiwan in 2015, Hong Kong shortly after its independence in 2016 and from the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom in 2017. Japan also moved to allow dual citizenship rights, and among the society most foreigners who live in Japan found that their treatment was better after the tsunami's impact sank in on the Japanese psyche.

Japan's evolution was watched with interest in Korea. Beyond the mutual competition and respect for each other, Korea had faced the truly-immense task in the 1990s and afterwards of reunifying the nation, a task made doubly-difficult by the North's massive poverty. By 2011, much progress had been made, but not so much that the problem was entirely solved, but Korean nationalism, never the most subtle of ideologies, had grown up some again as a result of the unification and the massive efforts made to improve the lives of the 22 million North Koreans that had suddenly become part of the Republic of Korea. But what was different in Korea manifested itself in more ways than one after the 2011 tsunami, with Korea's public in many cases openly calling for Korea to help Japan, with Korea's form of nationalism seeming to be based less on ethnic supremacy and more on the idea of using their abilities to help themselves and others. And with immense progress made in the fifteen years since the unification of Korea and with their long-arrogant neighbor next door learning a good dose of humility, they had reason to be confident. The "Korean Wave" of the 2000s added to this, spreading Korean television shows, movies and musical acts across large swaths of Asia, a fact that Japan was at first loath to admit but then keen on rivalling. The statement by the Koreans "Culture is Power" was once scoffed at, but with the internet, social media and the ability for cultures to travel the world over, it was a statement that had more than a small ring of truth. Korea's use of such cultural phenomenons to advance some of its geopolitical goals did not always sit well in other nations, but it didn't stop or even slow the growth. The movement also saw actors from both Japan and Korea successfully seeking roles in each other's nations, and the first co-productions between the two nations, with one of the first being Rising Hearts, the 2013 co-production chronicling lives changed by the Boxing Day Tsunami. Rising Hearts was a massive hit in both nations, and following a translation to English, it was released in North America in June 2014 to additional critical acclaim and a nomination for Best Picture in the 2015 Academy Awards.

Iran's involvement in the new world also took its own form, though Tehran took great pleasure in pointing out to others the divisions in modern Islamic states, noting the substantial problems with Islamic extremism in Pakistan and the continued influence of the Wahhabi movement in Saudi Arabia, whose extreme view of the divisions in Islam by the 2000s had made them despised in Iran and largely hated in North Africa and much of the more-diverse Levant regions. By the late 2000s, the influence of the Wahhabi movement was causing friction in Iraq and parts of North Africa, though by now few Iranians wanted anything to do with religious hardliners, and such was the shifting of public opinion and morality that even many of those who had been devout supporters of the likes of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Iran had changed viewpoints. Opinions weren't dissimilar in Syria (which had begun the process of political liberalization in the early 2000s), Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan and Egypt, as well as with Israeli Arabs - and these groups, as well as more-liberal nations in Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco and less-religious but highly nationalistic Turkey, had the benefits of greater resources, and all were well aware of the poisonous influence of such groups. It took a lot to get Shi'a clerics and the Baha'i Faith's leaders to agree on anything - the former had once viciously persecuted the latter - but by the 2000s both sought to use their own resources to counter the growth of Madrassas that taught Wahhabi principles. Indeed, the changing tides of much of the Middle East was highly-beneficial to the Baha'i Faith, which saw growth in its numbers in the 2000s, with the persecution of them having tailed off to nearly nothing in Iran by then, and the quite-open comments by many of the Baha'i leaders that Islam was not at all wrong in any of its teaching did much to ease off the pressure put on them by Muslims in many places, with one landmark being the visit by Shah Reza Pahlavi to the rebuilt House of the Bab in Shiraz, Iran, in 2007. The fact that religious liberalization was being mixed with economic growth did much to expand the idea to many Muslims that this was the way to go, and Iran's move into a modern nation in the latter decades of the 20th Century also saw them actively cultivate the idea that there was a difference between what they saw as "enlightened" Muslims and those were less enlightened. The push by Iran to split the US-Saudi alliance very nearly succeeded in 2002 after 9/11, and while relations between Saudi Arabia and the United States were never broken, the Americans (and indeed the Europeans as well) had by the end of the 2000s focused their ally efforts in the Middle East on Iran and Israel and its neighbors. This proved to be immensely beneficial to Iran's economic development and indeed its social advancement.

With governments changing in the aftermath of the mid-2000s economic crisis, the idea of greater democracy was everywhere. It had played a factor in the collapse of the Lisbon Treaty, but it was also being seen in other places. One widely-reported result was the reducing of South Africa's once-unassailable African National Congress to a need to form alliances after losing its majority in South Africa's parliament in 2009, and a similar story facing governments in Europe. Britain's shocking election of Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg as Prime Minister in 2010 saw him need to get alliances of his own, and in several countries in the West, including France, Canada and New Zealand, alliances and all that went with them were becoming par for the course - in Canada's case, they had been in this scenario since 1993, with the left-side parties in Canada (Liberal and New Democratic) facing the right-side parties (Progressive Conservative and Canadian Alliance) being unwilling in either case to form real mergers, despite the quite-massive possible benefits of such an arrangement. The idea of "Citizen Rule" and "Government by the People" was one often talked about in the 2000s and 2010s, particularly as improving communications technology made it much easier for individual people to make their voices heard, though in many nations this also resulted in reforms to speech laws and numerous formal legislation efforts designed to make sure the internet stayed a wide-open forum where all could have their say, despite the massive power of internet companies like Google, which themselves sought in many cases to portray themselves as companies fighting for good, which had in most cases more than a little bit of truth. In nations with long histories of coalition governments such as Japan, Israel and Italy this was nothing new, but the growth of this in other nations was a political earthquake, though in most cases it was met with realistic, intelligent conversations about the best paths - people naturally want power and influence, and even in nations with massively-fractured parliaments the most powerful always managed to rise to the top, and getting powerful meant intelligent use of that power. America to a great extent also had this - unlike many nations with parliamentary systems, the United States' two dominant parties simply were too large to rigidly enforce message or opinion discipline (though many tried), and the result was factions within the parties, which had largely the same results as the many different parties of other nations. It made for exciting times for media commentators and political junkies, and it made for a new world for those who sought new ideas both to test and to prove....

 

[TheMann]

Chapter Seventeen: New Places to Be, New Things to See, One Holds The Key

By the mid-2010s, the world's challenges had evolved from those of national scope to those of global. Rapid economic growth had pushed prices for resources to such a degree that it was stunting some nations, even if it was making others (particularly those which could export vast amounts of both energy and minerals like Iran, Brazil, Russia and Canada) rich. Brazil's rapid rise into the world of developed nations followed what one often called "Latin America's Economic Miracle", a term which didn't need justification - Brazil between 1990 and 2015 averaged an annual GDP growth of 7.9% a year, a mark matched only by Japan and Korea in the 1960s and 1970s, and Brazil under the guidance of their leaders in the 1990s and 2000s was more than able to harness such spectacular growth to benefit its people. The BRIICSA bloc by 2015 was notably trying to create balances in the world's economy and reel in speculators, with most of those nations well aware of the problems that those who had speculated on their economic past had caused. Many among them felt that was somewhat vindictive, but few outside of those people gave a damn. Balancing out the power of "The West", as they were often called (something which was something of a source of amusement to many in places like Japan and Korea), gave a sense of purpose to that bloc, even with its ability to work with the West both in face-to-face negotiations and in groups like the G25 nations. The nations made a habit of bi-annual meetings of its leaders to sort out differences, and by the 2010s the way of sorting out disparate economic differences was to try to balance out currencies at set values. This was most benefit to Russia and India, both of which had weak currencies that they wanted to get stability to. These nations also sought collaborative projects in many cases in everything from energy infrastructure to high-technology industries to airliners to space programs. This also had the benefit of putting more money into the world's economy than ever before, and it also made it easier to deal with many of the world's problems.

South Africa was one of the aggressive ones when it came to working on social problems. Left a bitterly-divided nation in the aftermath of the transition from apartheid in 1994, that nation saw slow growth in early times but incrasingly-rapid such growth in the 2000s and into the 2010s, with the country being notably pragmatic and innovative in tackling problems - South Africa had built several innovative housing projects using shipping containers and recycled materials, was the world's second-largest producer of synthetic crude from coal (behind the USA, with Britain and Japan in third and fourth), had modified its penal code to allow those serving sentences for non-violent crime to reduce their sentences by serving the state in construction projects or using particular skills they had and had turned an informal economy into a formal one by providing spaces for street merchants to set up real stores at minimal cost in return for paying taxes - but when South Africa's SunAfrika Energy company announced in July 2015 that they planning on building the world's first space-based solar power plant in the Great Karoo desert in the nation's southwest, lots of people guffawed at it - how was it going to work? How would they get enough energy to be produced to make the system possible? Lots of questions were asked, but the South Africans, it turned out had planned for that, and had commissioned Russia to make the world's most massive launch system to get it all to work.

A development of the 1980s Energia system developed for the Buran shuttle, the Energia was the world's most powerful launch system in the 1980s, and the Vulcan system, Energia's successor, was even more powerful, capable of lifting 175,000 kg to Low Earth Orbit or 62,500 kg to Geostationary orbit, a sum more than enough to put some huge satellites into space - and that was the South African plan. The Isis Alpha satellite, meant to supply power to the facility in South Africa, was built right to the limit, using a carbon-fiber shell and folding solar cells, using a technology originally created by a university student in the United States. The idea was that high-efficiency solar cells would catch energy from space then beam it to Earth, the cells being rolled up into arms which would be unfurled once the satellite was in position, with a extraordinarily-thin layer of synthetic material over the cells to protect them from radiation present in space and remote-controlled robots to do maintenance to the systems and cells. The hope was that the satellite would be big enough to allow the power station in the Great Karoo to make 70 MW of electric power. The cost was massive, but the prospect of space being a new way of collecting energy was too much for many investors to pass up, and it became clear to researchers and scientists alike that the South African company's proposal, as outlandish as it first seemed, wasn't as crazy as it at first seemed. Indeed, in June 2017, JAXA (Japan's space agency) released a report to the Diet (that was promptly leaked to the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper) that the South African plan, while almost certainly economically unfeasible, was technically very possible and indeed likely to work once put into practice, and advocated that energy-short Japan enter into this world themselves. The Russians' ability to get a 62-ton satellite into orbit was not in question - the United States had been here since the 1970s with the developments of the legendary Saturn V which had taken America to the moon and Energia was a monstrous but well-done system - but the prospect of such a massive satellite relying on folded-up solar cells was another. But as tests on Earth proved in the second half of the 2010s in numerous nations proved, it was indeed possible, and that made for several copycat companies in that decade, with Bigelow Aerospace, Blue Origin and Anik Power Systems in North America, Starchaser Industries in Great Britain and TechnikAsia in Korea soon working on similar ideas.

Economic development had also brought out new sources of capital for those who were making their way up. Russia, having long left behind its bitter past, had faced the end of their vicious civil war hardly able to feed themselves, let alone develop into a modern nation. But natural resources had begun to fix that quickly, and while the "Russian Oligarchs" had accumulated massive wealth in the second half of the 1990s and into the 2000s, they had also faced a society that wanted better, and they wanted to keep their power. To do that, they had largely taken the same tactic many American companies had had, providing the capital to rebuild the country and searching for more outside of Russia. Russia's new industries had largely taken the same tactic Japan had done to rebuild, take the best ideas possible and learn to do that themselves. Russians had never been dumb, and Russia's economic growth from resource prices had then been used to rebuild several important industries - steel and aluminum production, shipbuilding, car and truck manufacturing, aircraft and armaments - and advance new ones, including the production of carbon fiber, chemicals, computer chips and recycling. Facing 75 years of complete disregard for the environment, Russia also developed some of the world's best methods of environmental remediation. By the 2010s, these had started to pay off, and the entry of Kamaz into the North American truck market and the entry of AvtoVAZ into North America in 2012 (using the new nameplate Ativia, as it was felt by the Russians that the Lada name was synonymous with terrible cars, a point they were probably right about) with small and medium-sized cars and the exotic-looking Ativia X-Ray SUV and Ativia Revolution sports car, followed by Marussia the year after that was its B2 sports car and its F2 SUV. The Russian vehicles sold in North America saw few sales early on, but it became clear fairly quickly that these were not the crap boxes of old - the Marussia F2 and Ativia X-Ray both soon gained a reputation for being tough, durable vehicles which could go places few other trucks could. Marussia added to its rep by entering the B2 into the 2012 IMSA American Sports Car Championship, which it quickly proved to be no weakling. The Russians had, it seemed, decided that they would not sell cheap junk early on, as Japan had....

Global economic growth had also created many more places where Americans who loved travelling could go to. The traditional Caribbean and Mexican resorts and European destinations were soon being joined by others. Iran, Thailand, South Africa and Israel made big pushes for such tourists, but it turned out there were others as well. Kenya and Tanzania also actively sought Western tourists, as did Indonesia, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, the Seychelles, Madagascar, Colombia, Costa Rica and the Maldives all sought sunseekers from the United States, with varying degrees of success, but it did mean that an enterprising Western tourist had more options than ever on where to go and where they could find a gem. Air travel made it easier than ever to cross such oceans, and with more places than ever to go and see, it made for lots of both Americans abroad and visitors to America from other nations, particularly those rising in wealth and the greater mobility that wealth brings. It also brought more than a few changes to American society and to its way of life, with the biggest of these being in sports.

In the minds of many, the roots of this ran deep. Gridiron football and rugby were well known for being cut from many of the same cloths, but as the NFL and many senior college football programs placed more emphasis on passing quarterbacks and wide receivers (legendary QBs like Peyton Manning and Tom Brady who were known for their arms epitomized this), many of the better runners made their way into rugby, where the rules mandated that the ball could not be thrown forward. By the mid-1980s, college rugby leagues were growing in popularity, and while these competitions had nothing like the popularity of gridiron football, by this time America produced a great many excellent players, and even a few which dabbled in both sides - Heisman Trophy-winning NFL quarterback Tim Tebow was one famous example of this, playing in the NFL in 2010-2012 before he found himself out of it, but transitioning to Rugby union, signing with the Miami Hurricanes in the North American Rugby Union league in 2013, proving to be so good at it that he was one of the "American Monsters" who smashed and crashed their way to victory in the 2015 Rugby World Cup. The NARU, which was founded in 1995 after the IRB's decision to remove restrictions on payments to players, had by 2010 gained more than a little measure of respectability, even in markets where the NFL existed. (Some NFL teams even drew running-position players from the NARU, with the Seattle Seahawks, who won Super Bowl XLVIII in 2014 on the strength of a bruising defense and fast runners, being one of the most prolific at this - they had six guys on their Super Bowl team, including starting quarterback Russell Wilson, who had played in NARU games.) The image that Rugby was for football players who couldn't play football didn't last long, as the interconnection between the NARU and NFL, CFL and college football programs made sure that more than a few players jumped between the sides.

Also out there was the introduction of association football, often called soccer by Americans. A sport played by millions of children and teenagers had had difficulties establishing itself in North America at a professional level, though by the 1970s teams like the legendary New York Cosmos had made huge reputations for themselves. The North American Soccer League's re-organization into Major League Soccer in 1985 was the start of a second wind, a wind helped by events internationally - both the United States and Canada qualified for the 1986 World Cup, a first for the latter, and both made excellent accounts of themselves, with Canada pulling off one of the runs of the century all the way to the semi-finals. It was a sign of what was to come, and as Americans who had played the sport as youth grew up into men and their skills became known to scouts, larger and larger numbers of them began playing at professional and semi-pro levels. The 1994 hosting of the World Cup by the United States - the first FIFA World Cup with 32 teams and all of the additional games this brought with it - was the event that fixed the sport in America. The 64 games of the 1994 World Cup, played at 12 stadiums in 12 different cities (Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Detroit, San Francisco, Dallas, Washington, Boston, Orlando, Philadelphia, Atlanta and Columbus) garnered huge television audiences and record crowds that to this day have yet to be broken, with an average attendance of just shy of 71,000 at each match and millions watching on television, with the large crowds being plenty enthusiastic - in the case of the first game at the Superdome, so loud that the manager of the Swiss team complained about the noise level. The idea of soccer being unable to have major prosperity in North America was comprehensively shattered by the 1994 World Cup, with the idea garnered by MLS was that they needed to make the games a big deal, and it showed in the tactics taken on by MLS owners after that, signing some of the biggest players from the 1994 World Cup to their teams - the Cosmos led this, signing both the Golden Ball (Romario) and the Golden Boot (Hristo Stoichkov) winners in early 1995, both to wide acclaim (and a 1996 MLS title for the Cosmos). The decision to host games of the Cup in Columbus, Ohio's immense Ohio Stadium was controversial at the time, but it proved to be more successful than anyone imagined - the Columbus Crew, founded in 1996, went on to be one of the best MLS squads in history, winning four-straight MLS titles in 2000-2003, and becoming known as "The Crew" in the League, which manager Oleg Salenko lovingly added "From Hell" to when talking to how the team planned to play. The Crew had the additional benefit of mostly drawing from home-grown talent, with the first goal ever by the team scored by legendary midfielder Chris Henderson and its first championship in 2000 sealed by six-foot-ten striker Michael DeMaryius, who would be a key portion of the Double win by Arsenal in Britain's Premier League in 2002 and a major player for America's World Cup team in 2002. MLS grew steadily in support in the 1990s and 2000s, by 2010 hosting 28 teams (four of these in Canada and one in the Bahamas) and being considered very much a top league in the world's association football leagues. The United States added to its football credentials by cracking FIFA's Top Ten rankings in January 2010, just in time for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. America, seeded in a group with England, Slovenia and Algeria, fought England hard on route to a 3-2 win before pounding Algeria 4-0 and then doing even worse to Slovenia, beating them 6-1. The United States smashed Israel 5-2 in the Round of 16 then beat Uruguay 3-1 before falling to the Netherlands 3-2 in the semi-finals. The American team recovered to avenge their close 2002 quarter-final loss to Germany by beating them in the third-place game 4-3 to finish third. The final saw the Dutch, after finishing second no less than three times, beat the Spanish in extra time to claim their first World Cup victory. North America's three nations were not only all represented, they all made it out of the group stages - Mexico was eliminated by Argentina 4-1 in the Round of 16 while Canada fought into out of the group stages only to draw the eventual champs in the Round of 16, where Canada fought hard en route to a 5-3 loss to the Dutch. Better still for the Yanks, America's captain, Robert "Rocketman" Shandan, saw his six goals earn him the Golden Boot, the first-ever such win for an American player.

By the time of the re-election campaign for President Huntsman, people had gotten their heads around what was the new facts of American politics, and while the Republicans weren't going to challenge their popular (60% approval in late 2015) president, the Democrats were all over the place on how to challenge him. One of the most-likely candidates, the field largely cleared down to New York Senator Hillary Clinton and Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, as well as Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York, as well as several other, less likely candidates. Illinois Senator Barack Obama bowed out of running, focusing his efforts on Senate work, as did his friend and counterpart Cory Booker, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Vice-Presidential candidate from 2012, Senator Ashley Judd, all of whom felt that the odds of winning for the Democrats with the popular incumbent weren't very good and wanting to focus on the House and Senate races, which also seemed to be shifting towards the Republicans. Feingold dominated much of the Midwest and Cuomo claimed New York and much of New England and the Northeast, but Clinton wound up sowing up the nomination fairly quickly nonetheless. Realizing the problems that strong Republicans posed, the Democrats went into the 2016 fight good and united, with Clinton selecting Ohio Governor Sherrod Brown as her running mate against Huntsman and Murkowski.

The 2016 election was a repeat of the 2012 one in many ways, particularly with the focus on getting voters to turn out. Huntsman began the campaign with a considerable lead, but Clinton whittled that down steadily as the general campaign. The election saw next to no negative campaigning by the Democrats and very little by the Republicans, though some third-party groups attempted to run ads blasting Clinton's record as a Senator, a move which backfired on the Republicans to such a degree that Murkowski called them "asinine stupidity". One of the main issues in the 2016 race was Global Warming and its impact on the world, how to deal with massive healthcare costs resulting from a massive wave of retiring baby boomers and continuing debate about what to do with America's budget surplus. With the United States' foreign debt by 2016 down to less than 30% of GDP, both sides admitted that there was room for change in finances. The Republicans wanted most of that put into tax cuts, while the Democrats pointed out continuing infrastructure needs and said that that should be the priority. Huntsman made a rather big whoopsie when he proposed during the campaign selling both Amtrak and Consolidated Rail Corporation, a move that was not popular with many areas of the Midwest and Northeast owing to long-lasting memories of Conrail's predecessors and Amtrak's high reputation for customer service. (How much of that reputation is owning to some airlines' poor reputations is a matter for debate.) The rise of China and the problems that remained in the Middle East also were common themes, with Huntsman (who had once served as Ambassador to China and spoke fluent Mandarin Chinese) being more in favor of their movement into the world and Clinton, who was more hawkish with the Communist-dominated Chinese government. The Democrats were more than able to hold their own in Congress, though they saw their majority reduced to 54-47 (with one independent) in the Senate and down to 306-268 in the House and some traditional Democratic strongholds (including California) being threatened by the Republicans. Huntsman claimed re-election with 29 states to Clinton's 21, but a slightly lower vote turnout than in 2016. (Mind you, the 77.9% number from 2016 was still leagues ahead of what had once been.) Huntsman again was the statesman, making the now-traditional trip to the winner's campaign HQ to congratulate the other side for their hard work.

The world Huntsman had earned the right to lead America into in November 2016 was one that was becoming less a collection of states and more a unified example of the human race. With the world now producing over $90 Trillion a year worth of goods and services between just over seven billion people, and with communications technology rapidly narrowing the gap between people who lived in different parts of the world, one simply could not look at the world and figure out who the dominant power. The United States was still the most powerful single nation on the planet, but with many other powers able to wield immense power on their own, the unipolar world was in some ways and in other ways just beginning. From America proving to be capable in the World Cup to rising popularity of foreign music and movies in North America (English-release Bollywood movies began showing up in America in numbers in the mid-2000s, and others followed, including acclaimed foreign-language and English-language movies such as City of God, The Lives of Others, Soul City, Rising Hearts, Persian Son, Slumdog Millionaire, Tsotsi, Pan`s Labyrinth, Two Sisters, Brick Mansions, Blue Planet, Arabian Night and Spirited Away in the 2000s and early 2010s) to American cars turning up in pretty much every country on Earth (American luxury cars are considered status symbols equal or superior to Europeans in many parts of Asia and Africa, a point that Cadillac, Lincoln and Chrysler play quite openly to) to American franchise food restaurant chains being joined both at home and abroad by rivals (Canada`s Tim Horton`s opened over 800 locations in the United States between 2000 and 2015, and South Africa`s famous (or infamous) Nando`s opened over 250 North American locations in the same time period), the world was getting smaller in terms of distance and communication but bigger in terms of opportunities. Into this was America - wealthy and prosperous, intelligent, self-reliant and increasingly wise in the ways of the world. If you had a skill in America in the 2010s, people wanted you to use it, and it made for an exciting time....

 

[TheMann]

Chapter Eighteen: Make Your Home Great, Then Go For The Stars

The 2016 re-election of President Huntsman occured as America's social systems were in the midst of a change, with a powerful economy providing more than enough prosperity to allow things to change without fear. With America's population in modern times being added to be a rapidly-growing Hispanic population and growing numbers of immigrants (most of these from Asia or Africa) arriving in the states, there was social changes resulting from that. With Spanish now a second language for over 15% of the American population, racism growing less common every day, women making up very nearly a majority in the workplace, a growing baby boom in several major cities resulting in growing numbers in many of these cities of younger children and the concerns of the world, from resource scarcity to global warming, the America of January 20, 2017, had a number of challenges to face, but was able to look at them and know that they were not unassailable, or in many ways even all that difficult. But President Huntsman faced one of his most horrible situations just weeks after he took office for his second term.

There are few ways beyond perhaps "The End of the World" that could overstate the Palmdale Earthquake of 2017. The 9.1-magnitude earthquake was the second-strongest ever recorded in North America (Alaska's infamous Good Friday earthquake in March 1964 was a 9.2), it ripped open along the San Andreas fault northeast of Palmdale, California at 7:16 AM on February 22, 2017. The massive movement of the fault - the San Andreas fault moved over twenty feet in the single earthquake - triggered additional movements on the several other major faults in the region, causing the massive quake to rattle out the entire Los Angeles Basin, as well as southern portions of the Central Valley and as far south as San Diego, which saw structural damage to numerous buildings and hundreds of thousands of broken windows, downed power lines, broken trees. Los Angeles was devastated by the hit, with the massive shaking destroying ten of thousands of buildings. The 62-story Aon Center was unable to handle the seven minutes of shaking and collapsed, breaking at its 12th floor (which had been damaged by fire in 1988) and crashing down to the West, destroying the buildings there and causing serious structural damage to the One Wilshire building, which collapsed fourty minutes after the quake. Bridge and freeway collapses caused by the quake during rush hour claimed countless lives, including a tragedy where a bus full of school children was crushed by a collapsing overpass at Glendale Boulevard and the 101 Freeway. Fires caused by electrical problems, broken gas mains, wrecked cars, burning gas stations and all kinds of other ignition sources made for thousands of fires, far more than the Los Angeles Fire Department could handle on their own. Making matters worse was the fact that the Governor of California was on his way home from a trade mission to Japan, and the Mayor of Los Angeles was one of the dead from the quake - he had been heading to work when his car had been in a major accident caused by the quake. Police, fire crews, paramedics and other emergency workers rushed to their posts and to help others, but blocked roads, fires, car accidents and numerous other problems made that difficult. It was a nightmare to say the least.

But not long after the shaking stopped, and for at least 48 hours after it, Los Angeles completely forgot about their differences, dislikes, or personal tastes. For everyone that could be seen, the next two days were all about finding anyone that was trapped, putting out any fire they could, helping anyone that got hurt and generally trying to do everything possible to save anyone and anything that could be saved.

Within minutes, that help began. A hospital in Pasadena that had lost power in the quake and whose generators were out was put back online within two hours, thanks to a fast-thinking local electrician, three of his apprentices and a quick-thinking Union Pacific Railroad engineer, who parked his train and his two AC-current locomotives on a siding, where the engineers wired it to the hospital four blocks away. (This action was promptly imitated by other locomotive crews and maintenance technicians from Santa Fe, Union Pacific, Southern Pacific and Amtrak.) A local construction crew then buried the wire to make sure it wasn't cut by a vehicle, and the two diesels powered the hospital for four days before the generators could be repaired. Locals with four-wheel-drive vehicles pressed them into service as go-anywhere transports, and delivered both people and supplies to where they had to go. Overloaded fire crews were met with thousands of volunteers, to the point that the LAFD in multiple cases assigned crews with gear to open water mains and hoses to go out and organize the volunteers. Would-be rescuers scoured rubble with everything from construction equipment to household shovels, trying to find anyone they could find and in many cases saving lives that might not otherwise have been able to be saved. A famous case of this was seen by a news helicopter at Normandie and Jefferson Avenues in South Central, where a telephone pole and a large palm tree had come crashing down on a police cruiser and a city bus, and a crowd of locals, along with a tow-truck driver and the driver of an truck who detached his trailer and helped a crowd of locals pull two injured LAPD officers and several injured passengers on the bus out of the wreckage, before the truck driver used his rig to pull the wrecked city bus into an adjacent parking lot, out of the way. The news crew's stunned speech about it quickly led to them, on air, telling paramedics and fellow officers where the injured people were. Photographers took thousands of pictures of the scene, but they pretty much always took the pictures then dove into the action themselves, pulling injured people from the remains. Civilian and news helicopters used their radios to inform first responders of the best routes to get where they needed to go, And they were in lots of cases also followed by civilians in Vans, SUVs, pickup trucks and station wagons, out to assist the responders. In some cases they were more of a hindrance than a help, but in most cases the first responders would give orders to the people trying to assist that were followed, and things got done as a consequence. Even the famous got in on the act, with legendary tough guy actor Danny Trejo earning himself a citation for bravery when he, as part of a crew trying to rescue a woman and child from a collapsed apartment complex in Hollywood, had an air conditioner and a sizable chunk of rubble fall and land on him as he carried a six-year-old buy with a badly broken leg out of the rubble, earning him three broken ribs in the process but getting the boy out. (Trejo then had the ribs wrapped up by a paramedic, and then kept at it.) Movie star and Former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was another notable, helping a group of rescuers searching houses pull an injured man out of his house's basement by lowering a woman down to the basement to get him and then him and four others pulling them out with a rope. One civilian owner of a CH-47 Chinook helicopter proved to be worth his weight in gold as the pilot, whose ex-Army aircraft was equipped with it lifting gear, flew for fourteen straight hours lifting medical supplies, vehicles and emergency responders across Los Angeles. The Twitter hashtag #ThisisLA trended like mad in the hours afterwards, as pictures and video of Los Angeles and its responders flew across the internet, and by the end of the day offers of help had come from across the world.

Perhaps predictably, Mexico and Canada were fastest to respond. Mexican Air Force Black Hawk and Twin Huey helicopters asked for permission to go assist in Los Angeles and quickly got it, followed by the end of the day by relief supplies. Canada's internationally-known DART disaster relief teams were sent in, and by the end of the first day US Air Force airlifters and Army, Marine Corps and National Guard units were on the way to help. The relief supplies and personnel allowed the relief of exhausted first responders and civilians, and blood drives, volunteer emergency personnel and repair crews and supplies in large amounts moved out to help in Los Angeles. A particular contingent in Denver of volunteer responders, repair crews, equipment operators, their equipment and supplies was hustled to Los Angeles by the Rio Grande and Union Pacific Railroads, with the crew organized, loaded and delivered in just over 48 Hours. The response to the earthquake was massive, but it needed to be massive, as the devastation wrought was horrific.

The Earthquake killed 4,049 people in Los Angeles, San Diego, Bakersfield, Palmdale and the Antelope Valley, Barstow, Mojave, Lancaster, Victorville - as far out as Indio and Santa Barbara. Power was lost for most of the region, with the nuclear power plant at Diablo Canyon cut off from the network by a landslide which knocked down its power lines, though the plant itself suffered only minor damage. The number of injuries that required hospitalization number just shy of 235,000, many of those for broken bones, falls, injuries from things falling on people or burns. Insurance claims for the disaster totaled some $137.7 Billion, by some margin the largest loss for insurers in American history (though when accounted for inflation, the Dust Bowls of the 1930s and the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 were more destructive) and edging out even the devastating Hurricane Katrina's attack on New Orleans in 2005. It would be over two weeks before any sense of normality returned to life in Los Angeles, with power not fully restored to all areas of Southern California until March 5 and water for another five days after that. For some of the over 250,000 left homeless by the disaster, recovery would take a long time, but it happened, because Los Angeles, well aware of its flaws as a city, made sure it happened.

LA took the opportunity given to it by the massive disaster to rebuild much of its cityscape. The massive quake movement on the north side of the San Gabriel mountains had exposed massive slabs of incredibly-pure white granite that had been hidden under the mountains, sizable amounts of which were mined for the rebuilding of structures. The development of a sealing polymer by Union Carbide was also used on chunks of this granite, allowing milled granite to be used as crosswalks in places. The Los Angeles Aqueduct, badly damaged by the Earthquake, was repaired but over the 2010s was largely reduced by several massive facilities which used Graphene-sheet desalinization, with the largest such facility in Long Beach completed and opened in 2021. As the desalinisation plants were completed, the usage of the Los Angeles and Colorado River Aqueducts was reduced. The water that once flowed through these Aqueducts largely began shifting towards the usage of Arizona and the San Fernando, San Joaquin and Antelope Valleys, which saw something of a renaissance of agriculture in these areas. The Colorado River benefitted massively from this, particularly after Mexico constructed two additional such plants in Baja California and began sending water through pipelines back into Arizona. In addition to this, rehabilitation efforts for the Salton Sea ecosystem were massively accelerated by the ability to use water from these aqueducts to reduce the Salton Sea's salinity levels, a tactic that allowed the Salton Sea's shorelines to be used for numerous aquaculture operations along the shore, taking advantage of the ability for the Sea to be used to simulate ocean waters after salinity levels were reduced by Imperial Valley water projects. The new water supply in Los Angeles also allowed water restrictions to be lessened through the 2020s.

Los Angeles' famed freeway system got more than a few overhauls after the Earthquake, but what happened that made more attention was transit. Already with more light rail than any other city in the nation and with more commuter rail than any North American city save New York and Toronto, Los Angeles ripped out and rebuilt its rail system into the single largest subway network in the world, turning light rail lines into full-blown mass transit lines and challenging developers to build near them. Ten surface/subsurface routes were built in the system, a system totalling over 580 miles of track and by 2030 hauling nearly four million passengers daily. Los Angeles' rebuilding and water supply assurances contributed to its continued expansion in terms of population, but as the land area had largely been all built up within decent distance of the city, Los Angeles' trend towards going up rather than out, a trend began in the 1970s, continued, with forests of tall buildings rising along 8th Street and Olympic Boulevard west out of the city center, as well as through South Park and Pico-Union. What had been a massive parking lot between Grand Avenue and Olive Street became the 74-story Lockheed Martin Center, which was completed in 2021, and the idea of "living where the action is", a common one heavily influenced by New York and also used substantially by numerous other cities (Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Seattle, San Francisco, San Diego and Miami were all notable in the level their residential developments were influenced by this) was soon also common in Los Angeles. The destroyed Aon Center and its wrecked blocks next door became the Los Angeles World Trade Center, with two stairwell-shaped 50-story towers taking the place of it, the buildings destroyed and the destroyed One Wilshire building, the buildings soon gaining the perhaps-a-little-inappropriate nickname "The Stairways to Heaven".

Los Angeles' rebuilding was a sign of what was coming for American cities. Urban sprawl by now was seen as deplorable, and falling crime rates meant that there were fewer concerns about safety, and most municipalities (and more than a few volunteer groups) found that organizing sports leagues for kids was a good investment, particularly of the costs involved were cheap or free. Lots of these existed already, but it grew in the 2010s. In many ways, this was inspired by the "Future Racers" kart program that CART began in 1988 (and NASCAR joined in on in 1996), but it was many orders of magnitude bigger, and particularly the NBA and MLS encouraged this, with financial support for the leagues, official recognition, prizes for the best players in them and organizing sponsorships for them. It was a cheap investment, and both leagues saw the value in chasing stars that may not have been visible to them otherwise. It would not be long before the NFL, NHL and MLB would do the same. With denser urban areas came better policing protection (response times were shorter and cops actually on the streets were more common) and better transit, as well as more imaginative ways of allowing people to relax. While Los Angeles and New York were known as the party centrals, but the 2010s they had real rivals in Detroit, Chicago and Toronto, all three having massively vibrant club and dance scenes, to the point that people would travel to the cities on days off to enjoy the parties, something which pleased many local hotel owners as well as the clubs themselves. Chicago's Navy Pier and Toronto's Exhibition Place were the templates for inner-city attractions that people could (and did) walk to and enjoy. It didn't appeal to all, of course, but it did appeal to enough that even wide-spread cities started going up in a big way.

The end of the 2010s also included massive leaps in technology, which had started in the 2000s. Smartphones by 2018 came from many companies all over the world, with makers of them in America (Apple, Motorola, HP Palm, RCA), Canada (Research in Motion), Japan (Sony, Toshiba, Kyocera, Panasonic), China (Lenovo, Huawei), Korea (Samsung, LG), Taiwan (Asus, Acer, HTC), France (Archos, Alcatel-Lucent), Britain (O2 Communications), Finland (Nokia) and India (Karbonn), though the overwhelming majority of these used Google's Android operating system, though Apple's iOS and the Blackberry OS series both also had considerable acceptance. By the late 2010s, these had become less phones and more mobile computers, and after phones shrank for all of the 1990s and 2000s they grew dramatically in the 2010s, particularly as wireless technology advanced. By 2020, the wireless industry was entering into its fifth generation of wireless technology, and the use of flexible screens on phones (originally pioneered by Research in Motion, Archos and O2) had allowed massive growth in screen size without massively increasing the size of the phone. The crowded market was in many ways seen as similar to computers in many ways in terms of operating systems, though the massive growth of Linux usage in the 2010s (partly as a response to Microsoft's Windows domination and Apple's compatibility-sensitive OS-Series operating systems making development hard for programmers) began to put dents in Microsoft's lucrative business, and an anti-trust ruling in 2011 mandated that Microsoft remove Internet Explorer functionality or install pre-loaded browser options, a move that proved to be spectacularly lucrative for the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, which saw its Firefox web browser suddenly be pre-loaded on millions of new computers - and, by the way, the company was due massive royalty payments from Microsoft as a result. Tablets were a common production in the 2010s, though by the end of the decade the smartphone's functionality and size growth and the massive power of modern laptop computers made tablets less common. GPS was nearly universal on automobiles by the end of the decade, and the growth of the demand for signals was such that America was left struggling to keep up, as its GPS system satellites were soon verging on overloaded with demand. This problem got solved in an amazing way in 2018, when the European Union announced that future advancements in their Galileo satellite constellation would both transmit and receive GPS signals, effectively allowing the Galileo constellation to double the signal capacity of GPS networks. The installation of fiber-optic communications systems to replace older cable systems, a project begun in the mid-1990s, had by 2020 all but replaced older copper cables in the first world and indeed much of the developing world. The usage of millimeter-wave bandwidth frequencies, cognitive radio technology and IPv6 made sure that wireless communications were made easier than ever, but wireless conditions made sure that there was still widespread needs for the latest generation of fiber-optic cable communications. Wearable computers, first brought forward by the Google Glass in 2013, became more common by the end of the 2010s, with R&D-heavy tech firms (particularly Research in Motion, Archos, Alcatel-Lucent, HP Palm and Kyocera) being first to go for this, with smart watches and by the end of the 2010s glasses with one-way vision, allowing the wearer to wear the glasses and see data on the glasses, which were steadily improving in both style and capability. Three-dimensional computer chip designs and memristors, both emerging in numbers in the 2010s, were able to extend concerns about Moore's Law and allow greater power in devices.

On the transportation front, changes in the 2010s actually saw more people employed. After two horrific train derailments in 2012 and 2013 (the first on the British Columbia Railway at Clinton, British Columbia and the second on the Montreal, Maine and Atlantic at Lac-Megantic, Quebec), Canada mandated the return of a third man on trains carrying hazardous materials, and both Canadian National Railways and Canadian Pacific Railway both chose to return cabooses to the rails as a result, though modern cabooses were built with diesel generators, air compressors and radio-controls, thus also improving brake performance on their trains. It was not long before many American railroads followed suit, for the same reasons. Freight boxes similar in design to aircraft cargo containers had started replacing the FRP skids which had been in use in many cases since the 1960s, and computerized tracking made it possible to move even time-sensitive goods by rail, a fact that by the 2010s had massively reduced long-haul trucking firms and forced independent drivers to form co-operatives. The employee-owned Southern Pacific, Chicago and North Western and Erie Lackawanna railroads openly encouraged this, with SP earning major kudos points by establishing numerous stations where truckers affiliated with them could refuel their trucks at the lower rates SP bought diesel from major oil companies from, a move that saw most of the West Coast's such trucking co-ops ally themselves with SP. The last full-blown Midwestern HSR line (in this case the route from St. Louis to Kansas City) was completed in 2020, while the builders of high-speed train lines were by that point focusing their efforts in the Pacific Northwest and the South, with Amtrak's capital plan including eventually building unbroken HSR lines clear from Boston to Houston and Miami. Routes that were uneconomic to use full HSR on instead often got the gas turbine-powered trains that operated on existing freight lines - not a real problem in most cases, as centralized traffic control, effective cab signalling and the building of lines for heavy freight service has also helped to make it easier for these trains, which in nearly all cases operated at speeds of over 110 mph, to use existing tracks and signalling systems. Domestic airlines, aware of the downtown-to-downtown service these trains almost always provided, countered this every way they could, streamlining as much as possible security checks, equipping new airliners with better climate control and amenities such as in-flight internet access and providing luxurious coach transfer service to downtown locations for nominal fees.

The first hybrids had hit the road in 1997 with the Toyota Prius and Chevrolet Volt, and while by the early 2010s electric cars were finally coming of age thanks to machines like the Tesla Model S and Ford Focus Electric, it was not until the 2017 patenting of the 'Vision Charge' system, a product of fifteen years of research by Western Electric, Altairnano Technologies, Solyndra, Ford Motor Company and Fairchild Electronic Technologies, that the ability to fix the charging problem truly came. The Vision Charge system was, in essence, a box that took in a huge quantity of current at relatively low voltage and distributed it widely, effectively charging every individual battery in the battery pack simultaneously and thus reducing the charging time for a 60 kWh battery pack from hours on a standard house charger to just over twelve minutes on the Vision Charge system. The downside of the system was that it early versions were somewhat finnicky (the safety systems being somewhat troublesome but absolutely necessary at first) and the huge current draws of the system meant that stations for the system needed to be on high-capacity electric grids. Continuing development of internal combustion engines allowed the electric revolution to move at its own pace, on now primarily determined by how many cars people would buy. With ultra-low-sulfur diesel fuel available nearly anywhere, American gasoline having by the mid-2010s moved up from 87 to roughly 92 octane for regular as better refinery quality control allowed and both ethanol (by now nearly all made by cellulosic processes) and biodiesel become increasingly available in major cities and many urban areas, the once-strong concern about automobiles consuming all of the world's resources was now fading fast, particularly as cars got more efficient and more of their materials were able to be recycled. Electric charging stations using the Vision Charge system (and its rival EnergyBlue system, a development by a team made up by Toyota, Subaru, Sony, Panasonic, Meidensha and the Kansai and Chubu Electric Power companies) would be increasingly common through the 2020s.

Helping the growing demand for power be handled was a new source of it. Nuclear fusion, the way of generating energy the Sun uses, had been under development in the world since the 1980s, and the ITER project, which began building its pilot plants in 2002, was unable to come to an agreement on where to put the facility. In the end, the money in the project was sufficient that no less than four such test plants were to be built - the first primary at Cadarache in southern France, the second primary at Rokkasho in northern Japan and the two other test facilities at the Darlington Nuclear Power Station in Ontario, Canada and the fourth one at Oak Ridge National Laboratories in the United States. All four began construction in 2004, and the first to be finished (in this case it was the Darlington facility) began testing in 2013. The four plants were all built to similar designs, but it was often remarked that they used different contractors - the massive Tomamak modules were built by three different sets of suppliers and contractors (Nippon Steel and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries for Rokkasho, Corus Group and Larson and Toburo for the Cadarache facility and Bethlehem Steel, Bechtel and SNC-Lavalin for the plants at Oak Ridge and Darlington) and the plant in Japan used a slightly-different cooling system developed by Nakano Corporation, as opposed to the Air Liquide-developed units used at the other facilities. Despite this, all were finished within months of each other - that despite the fact that the Rokkasho facility had been damaged by the Tohuku Earthquake - and began operations and research projects on time in 2015 and 2016, a fact much-lauded in multiple countries. Other fusion projects also existed and were underway, but nothing on the scale of ITER, a fact noted by both its proponents (as a genuine way of advancing the science) and by its detractors (who said the cost was unreasonable for a research project).

Perhaps even more worthy of science fiction than ITER was the development of the first single-stage to orbit spacecraft, the Skylon. The Skylon had originally been born by British scientist Alan Bond and his HOTOL project, but the project's discontinuance by the British Government in 1988 left him without funds or support. That lasted until 1997, when Reaction Engines did a deal with Rolls-Royce Orenda to continue development of the Skylon system. Progress was slow, but when the first test of the massive SABRE engine and its precooler was run in 2011, it got the attention of the Brits, as well as that of other countries. Reaction Engines did a deal with Bombardier Aerospace in 2013 to build a full-scale Skylon mockup, which flew for the first time on February 11, 2016 on turbofan power from Bombardier's huge facility at Montreal's Mirabel Airport in Canada. That successful test led to installations of the SABRE engines in that mockup and further testing, and on October 25, 2017, the first flight of the Skylon on its liquid hydrogen-fueled engines took off from RAF Kinloss in Scotland, and soared into low-earth orbit. The Skylon didn't fly with a payload this time, but other than that it did so as it would be used in service, with it being remotely controlled from an airliner (ground stations would take over this role in service) and it easily soared to its changeover speed and altitude before soaring into orbit. The landing on the strengthened-for-the-purpose runway at the station showed the problems that the heavy aircraft and its narrow landing gear posed with damage to the left side main gear, causing the main landing gear to be strengthened to handle the weight. Proving its turnaround abilities was done quickly, and the Skylon's second flight was just three days later, this time with Queen Elizabeth II in attendance to see it. Reaction Engines declared the Skylon ready for service in August 2018, with the European Space Agency and the United Kingdom Space Agency both in agreement, and the first operation usage of the Skylon occured on September 9, 2018, when the Skylon lifted the newest version of the Galileo satellite system to orbit from Kinloss. The base, which was subsequently renamed Royal Air Force Space Operations Center Kinloss, rapidly became a mecca for space watchers, who were no less than gushing about the Skylon.

It was hard to understate the impact Skylon would have on low-orbit space operations. Reaction Engines' estimate of the reduction in the cost of lifting a satellite to orbit was a tad optimistic, but with it reducing the cost of LEO space lift from $15,000/kg to just $740/kg, it massively improved the economics of any space program and allowed nations and corporations alike to much more easily go to space, and it also made feasible the recovery of dead satellites from orbit and plans to reduce the problems of space debris, which by the 2010s was a real problem for many. Companies like Bigelow Aerospace and Planetary Resources began talking much more realistically about plans for private space stations, moon stations and asteroid mining which could much more easily be taken seriously, even if they were still ambitious. Skylon imitators were soon being developed by several firms in the world, but Reaction Engines was plenty capable of providing customer support, and having built the monster and helped develop it, Bombardier Aerospace, its Dutch division Fokker and Australia's Westralia Aerospace Technologies built several more examples of the Skylon for Reaction Engines, which were most of the time assembled at Mirabel and then flown on gas turbine power to Britain for the installation of their SABRE engines. The efficiency problems with this arrangement ultimately would lead Bombardier to move its production to Britain in 2021, operating out of the former Shorts Brothers facilities in Northern Ireland. McDonnell Douglas won the battle to make a rival to it in the United States while Pratt and Whitney and Chrysler Defense got the job of making engines for it. The Pratt and Whitney R-8000 'Gemini' engine is often said to be not as good as the Reaction SABRE at first, but Chrysler's wicked TDCP2 'Arctica' pre-cooler was able to substantially outperform the SABRE's unit (having several years extra R&D on this helped a lot) and the spacecraft, audaciously named the MDSC-1 'Enterprise', proved to be substantially better at lifting than the Skylon after its introduction with NASA in 2027.

 

[TheMann]

Chapter Nineteen: The Presidencies of Jon Huntsman and Barack Obama

As America spent the second half of the 2010s recovering from the shock that was the Great Palmdale Earthquake, the world advanced further, and the advancements were indeed worthy of a lot of note. While indeed there was few fields that the United States wasn't right at the cutting edge of, the other seven billion or so people in the world had no intentions of not doing everything they could for themselves, and the challenges of the 21st Century presented many with opportunities, and indeed the arrival of Skylon and the subsequent developments of other single stage to orbit spacecraft increased the frontiers for those dreaming of their vision of a better world. And for a sixth of that population, the citizens of India, their world was increasingly the world of tomorrow for them.

India had been working on development since the gradual dismantling of the License Raj in the 1980s, and after China's right turn back into Maoism in the early 1990s after Tiananmen Square, their lost trade was something that India jumped into with both feet. As with Japan and its fellow Asian Tigers, India started at the bottom of the markets in many of its endeavors, but by the 2010s, they weren't there any more, and indeed they were moving into bigger and better things, with everything from cars to electronics made in India, but the country's biggest benefits came from the production of consumer goods of all kinds. Indian firms were by the late 2010s operating all over the world, and in America they were best known for good cars and trucks (the Tata Nano Europa had a cult following in North America, and the Tata Sabre mini sports car had an even bigger such following, as well as Mahindra's attempts at agricultural machinery and light truck markets which were fairly successful), some of the world's finest clothing (India's skill in this category of goods was well known and goes back centuries), huge quantities of jewels (India primarily imported raw materials and exports finished products in this category) and many other consumer goods, from televisions to toys. And unlike China, which still demanded companies form partnerships with local firms and demanded intellectual property rights, India had no difficulties with allowing foreign firms to drop in and employ Indians, but such was the level of wealth among many of the nation's elite that frequently they went abroad to do deals themselves and bring companies to India who might otherwise never have done so.

But even beyond that was India's entertainment industry. Bollywood, as it is collectively known as, by the 2010s was producing substantial numbers of movies in English, and not poor quantity ones either. Paramount, MGM and Lionsgate were quickest to both embrace introductions for such movies in North America but also bring the best actors, writers, producers and directors to North America, advancing both sides. Danny Boyle's famed Oscar-winner Slumdog Millionaire of 2008 was widely seen as the first of many, and while early attempts hadn't been huge successes (though Kabir Khan's New York has a cult following in North America), Kathryn Bigelow and Anurag Kashyap's Chasing Hearts of 2015, with its all-star cast from both North America and India, was widely seen as the first true Bollywood epic to truly take off, and true to form its stars (Priyanka Chopra, Salman Khan, Anand Tiwari, Deepika Padukone and Kangara Ranaut from Bollywood and Chris Hemsworth, Jessica Alba, Ryan Gosling, Christian Bale, Jennifer Lawrence, Shailene Woodley and Stephen Lang from Hollywood) were both able to make an incredible movie that landed no less than ten wins at the 88th Academy Awards in 2015, including Best Picture, Best Director shared by Kashyap and Bigelow, Best Actress for Chopra and both Best Supporting Awards, the male award to Tiwari and the female award to Lawrence. Bollywood's arrival into Hollywood did not go unnoticed by the other studios - while the Indians could make action movies, they tended to more dramatic and comedy films, and were not only good at it, they could do so without the vast budgets of Hollywood. But as with the efforts by Canada, Europe, Japan and South Korea to make blockbusters, money talked, but talent brought its own form, and Hollywood largely saw its genres of movies change in the 2010s and 2020s both because of moviegoer demand and because movies from around the world could, and in plenty of cases did, show the studios in Los Angeles that they could be beaten at their own game. As with Anime and K-Pop from Asia and the presence of music from across the world, America was able in plenty of cases to see what other people in the world did for entertainment, and they liked what they saw.

India was by then a major player in the world's industrial sectors, but by the 2010s a major point of co-operation for India and America was armed forces. India's massive economic strength and ability to much of their own gear, as well as Pakistan by this point having given up its attempts to maintain military parity with India (with one-seventh of the population and one-fourteenth of the economic strength, getting to where Pakistan was in that regard had been ruinously expensive for them) and instead trying to face its enormous problems with Islamic extremism. Not helping this was Pakistan's intelligence organs, the Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), acted more like a nation into itself than part of the Pakistani government. By the 2010s, the ISI's perpetual involvement with terrorist groups such as the Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Haqqani network had angered the West to such a degree that Pakistan was becoming something of an international pariah. Pakistan's reality was very different from India's - the War in Afghanistan had seen the Pakistanis helped out in order to assure logistical ease with NATO forces in Afghanistan, but after that conflict was over, the Pakistanis quickly found out that neighboring Iran and India were both much more likely to get support from the West. Pakistan in response spent the 2010s increasing its connections with China and the Arabian Peninsula. Regular deployments to Pakistan of Saudi armed forces units by the second half of the 2010s was one of the results, a result neither Iran or India liked much. When combined with the Saudis massive support of religious schools in Pakistan, it was seen that this nation - which had undertaken its first nuclear test in 1998 - was sliding into trouble with its Islamic elements. India answered this by both harboring those who fled Pakistan and making sure its armed forces stayed well clear of Pakistan wherever possible, though in the disputed region of Kashmir this was often quite difficult. But with India's armed forces undertaking major modernization efforts in the 2000s and 2010s (efforts that resulted in billions in defense purchases to American manufacturers), it was clear that Pakistan was unable to match India, and the fact that the wars of 1965, 1971 and 1999 (the first and last wars resulting in little movement on either side and the second being a complete Pakistani defeat) hadn't turned out well for Pakistan had made sure that the smaller nation would turn to irregular attacks in an attempt to beat the Indians. These had gain attention during the wind-down of the War in Afghanistan, but two events, first the discovery of over 350 tons of heroin on board Pakistani freighter MV Blue Emperor in November 2011 by HMS Dauntless in the Arabian Sea and then the October 2012 assassination attempt on teen-aged education crusader Malala Yousafzai. (Yousafzai was flown to the United Kingdom for medical treatment and recovered there, but Pakistan, in a ham-first attempt at placating its religious conservatives, made her and her parents persona non grata. This turned out to be a bad idea - Malala's global fame and subsequent international touring made sure Pakistan's move looked ridiculous, and the media in India took great pleasure in pointing this out both in India and abroad.) Pakistan's attempt after this to reduce the power of the ISI ended up sparking massive civil unrest. Pakistan's situation got uglier still on September 19, 2017, when an angry mob attempted to ransack the American embassy in Islamabad. The attempt failed after the Marine security force at the embassy opened fire on the attackers, but it resulted in the embassy being closed and evacuated. The day after it closed on September 28, another mob again attacked it, this time burning it to the ground. As Pakistan's relations with the US worsened, the situation was largely mirrored in Europe, who wanted no more to do with the Pakistanis than America did. There was no major conflicts, but by 2018 Pakistan was diplomatically isolated, and its problems led to both India and Iran reinforcing their borders to make sure that the problems stayed there.

Also getting attention in the world's radar was two hot spots in Africa - the Horn of Africa nations of Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia and Somaliland and Zimbabwe in southern Africa. The former had been a mess for decades since the collapse of Mohammed Siad Barre's government in 1991 and the intervention by the West against Mohamed Farrah Aidid in 1993 didn't help much, resulting in the Battle of Mogadishu where eighteen American soldiers were killed in a pitched battle with Somali militia. Eritrea, which had become an independent nation after a twenty-year war with Ethiopia in April 1993, had by this point become one of the most repressive nations in the world, marked by vast militarism and ultra-nationalistic tendencies, enormous sexual exploitation, pervasive media control and serious religious persecution. Eritrea made itself a pariah by supporting Islamic factions in Somalia and when bombs were found in Addis Adaba during the 2011 African Union summit there, and the bomb efforts were linked to Eritrea. Piracy by Somalis off the coast of Somalia proved to be big problems in the late 2000s and early 2010s, but the presence of naval units in the area by 2011 was making life hard on the pirates, but also led to a discovery of its own - in February 2012, a vessel from Italy was stopped by Iranian destroyer Kouroush while in the area, and it was discovered that the vessel contained 652 55-gallon drums of radioactive medical waste, originally from Italy's ENEA research agency, and the ship's manifest said that there was originally 710 such drums. Upon being pushed, four members of the ship's crew admitted to dumping the waste into the waters off of Somalia. This caused an international incident in its own right, as Somalia's objection to this was backed up by India and Kenya, neither of which liked them doing that either. (The fact that the vessel in question was later linked to the 'Ndrangheta didn't help matters for the Italians.) The naval flotilla handling the piracy issues would eventually catch four other vessels, including a Canadian tanker carrying fuel oil which was found to be dumping PCBs and a Malaysian freighter which tossed off loads of arsenic and cadnium, dumping illegally. Word of the naval vessels involved being on the lookout both for the pirates and for the dumpers got out quickly, and the Somalis noted it as well. The country's issues over the 2010s didn't get worse, though as the central government there was non-existent and decades of this had forged substantial sets of clans and groups seeking control for themselves, progress towards better conditions in the African country remained slow and elusive.

Zimbabwe was another story altogether. Bordered by South Africa and Namibia (both beneficiaries of a major economic growth in the 1990s onward) and with Zambia (relatively prosperous by the 2000s) and Mozambique (one of the best-performing economies of the 2010s), Zimbabwe, ruled from 1980 until 2015 by Robert Mugabe, suffered from serious economic stagnation in the 1990s and Mugabe's ham-fisted attempt at land reform in the nation in 2000-2002 ended very badly, with immense capital flight followed by major problems with inflation, and after the viciously-fought 2008 elections there, which ended in multiple rounds of violence between the ruling ZANU-PF party and the MDC opposition party, saw South Africa largely restrict the situation in Zimbabwe after over four million refugees fled Zimbabwe into neighboring nations. Mugabe's death in January 2015 at the age of 90 thrust the nation into massive civil violence, which ended in the deployment of a Kenyan-led African Union force in the summer of 2016, which ultimately resulted in a ZANU-PF/MDC unity government in the fall of 2016, but that government collapsed less than six months after its formations after ZANU-PF attempted to boot out MDC members. The MDC, supported from Pretoria, took over governance of the nation relatively peacefully but the ZANU-PF factions out of power ultimately fought a bloody terrorist campaign against the government in Harare and against both the African Union forces and against South Africa and Botswana. This problem remained the major one in sub-Saharan Africa in the 2010s, a problem that ultimately saw American Army Special Forces and FBI anti-terrorist experts deployed to South Africa to help deal with the threats posed by the ZANU-PF loyalists, who saw a major source of income stopped cold in November 2017 when the government in Harare was able to secure complete control of the nation's diamond fields, which ultimately allowed Zimbabwe to begin exporting diamonds not long afterward. It was notable that the nation had an election in July 2018, which resulted in a sizable number of ex-ZANU members elected in opposition to the MDC government under the National Party of Zimbabwe banner in an election closely monitored by Western observers who concluded that the job done was excellent. Despite this, years of economic mismanagement left Zimbabwe as one of the poorest nations on Earth by 2017, and the process to rebuild the nation was further hampered by the problems posed by the insurgency.

The problems of the Horn of Africa, Pakistan and Zimbabwe were seen as the foreign policy issues of the day, but on a day-to-day basis, it was clear that America's focus was gonna be on its domestic policies and its international nations were both often focused on Washington's relations with the G25 nations and the BRIICSA nations, which by now were able by 2020 challenge American and European hegemony on financial markets in the world. This didn't turn out to be too much of a problem - past exploitation in most of those nations and demands by both the population and many of their elites to keep potentially-destructive speculations under control meant that the world's financial markets were well-handled, and the traditionally-massive stock markets of New York, Tokyo, London, Hong Kong and Frankfurt were now facing real opposition both from newly-big markets in Western nations (the resources-heavy Toronto and tech-heavy Tel Aviv exchanges were leading this vanguard) and the great exchanges of several emerging markets - Shanghai, Sao Paulo, Mumbai, Johannesburg, Tehran and Moscow in particular - were all places where investors could go to get financing for even the biggest projects. What also was effecting the world's situation was the problems that global warming was creating, though by the late 2010s many of the BRIICSA nations and their allies were hard at work on reducing their own carbon emissions. Nuclear and hydroelectric power was leading these efforts in most cases, and it continued in North America and Europe as well as in the developing nations.

In terms of science advancement, while imaging and computing technology's growth continued through the 2010s and into the 2020s - the effects of Moore's Law was reduced substantially by the widespread use of three-dimensional computer chips, and superconductor research was underway to improve electronics further - the vanguard of science in the late 2010s it appeared was in biology. In May 2019, White Shield Bioresearch, a firm based in Salt Lake City, Utah, announced that they had created a bionic limb which could be powered by the human body, thus making it possible to replace limbs lost for whatever reason with artificial ones. Combined with continuing development into the creation of artificial organs (most research here at this time was focused on the lungs and heart), it raised prospects of the ability to begin extending lives by simply replacing the organs that either through age or from other reasons were unable to function any longer and replace them with organs grown from a person's own DNA, which could theoretically dramatically increase one's lifespan.

Domestically, America's population growth was showing changes in itself. With the largest source of immigrants now being from Asia (India being the largest single source of these) didn't change the massive growth of America's Hispanic population, but what was also notable was that by the mid-2010s that the African American population, whose numbers swelled past 45 million in 2012, was as a percentage of their population growing faster than Hispanics. What was also true by the late 2010s was that the movement of the population westward was shifting direction, with migration to California, Arizona and Texas slowing down while migration to Oregon, Washington, Utah, New Mexico, Colorado and Montana swelling. Of major cities, Seattle, Portland, Salt Lake City, Albuquerque and Denver were the fastest growers of the 2010s, with Seattle in that decade growing from 3,762,000 in 2010 to 5,447,000 in 2020, Denver growing from 2,965,000 to 4,118,000 and Salt Lake City exploding from 1,215,000 to 2,154,000 in that same time period. What also got noticed demographically during this time period was that the baby boom of the 2010s began spreading outside of just major cities, and nearly all major American cities were going up more and more, and communities closer to the cores of major cities began to see building booms.

Cultural changes also effected this. The first state to legalize same-sex marriage was Massachusetts in 2003, and through the 2010s this snowballed rapidly, with the first state to legalize same-sex marriages by popular vote in 2008 (California, Washington, Maine, New Mexico, Maryland and New Jersey share this honor) and by the mid-2010s it was guessed that all 50 states would legalize same-sex marriage by the early to mid 2020s. Two working parent households, a trend which had started becoming clear in the 1980s, had by the 1990s led to massive growth in daycare programs, and by the late 2000s many corporations with major headquarters or facilities would often provide such facilities on their own as a perk to get the best employees. Employee-owned companies, a trend which had begun decades before but absolutely exploded in number in the 1980s and 1990s (with Colorado Fuel and Iron, Southern Pacific Lines, BFGoodrich and Johns Manville becoming the largest employee-owned corporations in the 1980s), swelled further as banks and unions jumped into the development of such companies with both feet (in literally tens of thousands of cases, re-organization of these firms into lucrative enterprises made millionaires of their own employees), with even many huge companies allowing hourly or salaried employees to buy into their employer or even offering bonuses in the form of stock in the firm. (Stock options had been well-known at the executive level, but with even major industrial employers such as Chrysler, Bethlehem Steel and Archer Daniels Midland are offering such bonuses to employees, it made an impact.) The internet also created dozens of cases of company employees keeping tabs on what was going on at their workplaces through the use of websites (and later on through the use of social media) and the right for shareholders to speak at their meetings. This when combined with a media which was aware of the prestige and support for those who break stories of importance created a large numbers of investigative journalists in the 2000s and 2010s, a fact which didn't always work to the benefit of companies, though most companies soon quickly learned the benefits that resulted from honesty with the journalists. Beginning in California in 1985 and Massachusetts, New Jersey and Maryland in 1986, all-day kindergarten education programs expanded early-learning results, and by the late 1990s these were common across the nation, with President Clinton's Young Americans Education Act of 2001 making federal funding available through the Department of Education for this purpose.

One of the most prolific social changes of the 2000s and 2010s was in the fields of healthy living. The well-known effects of smoking on one's health began to see falling rates of smoking in America by the mid-2000s, and massive growth of obesity in America peaked in 2012. "Sin Taxes" on highly-unhealthy foods and alcohol and the removal of many taxes on healthier foods in the 2000s and 2010s saw the obesity rate begin to slow down, and by the mid-2010s the trend was starting to be reversed. (It didn't hurt that social stigmas against people who lived unhealthily were both very real and widespread, though this at times had a dark side.) Alcohol sales largely stayed flat through the 2000s and 2010s, despite rising taxes in many states against this. It was noted by the late 2010s that the places with the lowest "Sin Taxes" were also states which tended to have higher rates or obesity and smoking, a point used early and often by those supporting attempts at making such foods more expensive in an attempt to change eating habits. Higher-density metropolitan areas also tended to help with this, as these areas, which tended to have greater mass transit usage and many residents engaging in more physical exercise, tended to be in better physical shape. The proliferation of health food stores and chains selling such products and even the most massive of fast-food chains creating healthier alternatives was a trend in American markets of the 2000s and 2010s, but multiple class-action lawsuits for deceptive advertising against firms (including supermarket giants Kroger and Albertsons and organic food chains Whole Foods and Grain of Truth) saw regulations on all aspects of the health food industries tighten up significantly in the 2010s.

As President Huntsman sailed through his second term with a prosperous, forward-looking America behind him, the race to replace him began in earnest. With Congress battled intensely between both the Republicans and Democrats in the 2010s (this despite regular working meetings on legislation and mostly-civil debates on the bills in front of them), it provided very clear and obvious choices for the people of the country to decide on. And there were things to be decided on. Energy policy had been a near-constant bugbear, namely because the shift in electric power generation from fossil fuel-powered stations to non-polluting options (nuclear and hydroelectric far and away outstripped all other forms of electric power generation, but by 2018 America's wind power capacity totalled over 135 GW, several massive solar power stations in the West were capable of producing massive power outputs of their own and geothermal and space-based solar power were areas where the science of energy was coming into its own) was proving difficult to work on simply due to the scale of the work. Despite that, the growing numbers of electric cars, high-speed trains running on electricity replacing short-haul airliners, continually-improving standards of energy efficiency in buildings and growing urban density was making energy efficiency easier to work on, and beyond that many industries wanted this. The oil companies of America had long ago seen the future and they wanted in on it, with most of them working on cleaner, better fuels and refineries, better lubricants, carbon capture and storage (and in many cases, other uses) and developments of ethanol and methanol fuels, aiming for a future for petroleum when there are alternatives to its use and being part of the world after oil has become much less of a way of powering the world. This was despite the fact that perfection of the coal-to-oil systems first pioneered by Germany and America during WWII and perfected by South Africa during apartheid were making oil much more common than it had been before. The reasons for this were fairly obvious. Climate change, first seriously proposed in the 1980s, had by the 2010s become a very real part of life, and if anyone needed proof, it was taught to them in October 2012 by Hurricane Sandy, which caused massive messes in large sections of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia as a result, and the substantial numbers of tropical storms in the Caribbean in the 2000s and 2010s had become something of a symbol of the problems climate change represented.

The end of the 2010s also meant a new face in American politics, as the term-limited Jon Huntsman Jr. headed into an honorable retirement, and his Vice-President Lisa Murkowski surprised many in the Republican Party by choosing not to run for the top job. The list of those gunning for the nomination was, nonetheless, substantial - and on top of the list was Florida Senator Marco Rubio, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley and Michigan Congressman DeMarco Hultman, all people of color who entered the race with a legitimate shot to win, and California Congressman Han Sun Rhee also entered, though his bid at the Presidency was over fairly quickly. Hultman, who along with Puerto Rico Senator Christopher Mendoza and businesswoman Meg Whitman, quickly occupied the more liberal wing of the Republican Party, while Congressmen Rand Paul of Kentucky and Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania quickly staked out the farther-right side of the spectrum, while others fought for the center. Hultman quickly consolidated his position on one side, but such was the pace of the change of modern American politics that despite their credentials, neither Paul nor Santorum got much in the way of traction. While Hultman hogged the center, Haley and Rubio battled out the center-right of the party, and eventually Haley was the one who came out ahead, helped by the endorsements of both Huntsman and Murkowski, though it has to be said that both endorsements were on the back half of the primaries, both seeking to not contaminate the race. Haley pulled a surprise on the field by having her running mate be Nevada Congressman John Ensign, who had returned to politics after a stint away in 2018 after resigning his Senate seat in May 2013 as a result of ethics violations. Ensign, to his credit, was a left-leaner among the Republicans, and Haley it was said wanted to be able to show the Republicans as being willing to look past one's past. (Governor Haley's hopes proved accurate - Ensign's personal history didn't often come up in the election.) The Republicans had tempered down many elements of their message - indeed, the Republicans showed a willingness to accept same-sex marriages nationwide, a change from previous campaigns that also, unlike times past, had little result, showing that the once-formidable religious right had lost much of its ability to influence modern American conservative politics.

The Democrats went into the race with a batch of excellent candidates as well, but on top of their list was the charismatic Junior Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama. Obama, by now in his third term, had had presidential talk about him since he had become a US Senator in 2006, but he had shied away from it in times past - but not this time. He was not without challengers, mind you - Kentucky Senator Ashley Judd, having been the unsuccessful VP candidate in 2012, this time ran for the top job, along with fellow Senators Cory Booker (New Jersey), Tammy Baldwin, Russ Feingold (both from Wisconsin), Michael Moore (Michigan) and Kirsten Gillibrand (New York). Also in the race was Congressmen Cameron Red Horse (North Dakota), Paul Robertson (Michigan) and Natasha Kovalenko (Illinois). Obama entered the race with a lead, but that lead evaporated as others, particularly Booker, Baldwin, Judd and Kovalenko, laid out their plans in concrete as Obama attempted to run a campaign on raising hopes for the future of the nation. Obama shifted gears during the campaign, continuing his plans, taking a page from the book President Wellstone by offering most of those running against him positions they sought to have. The campaigns of several ended with the New Hampshire and Iowa primaries, and others bowed out after Super Tuesday. Obama's lead was such after Super Tuesday that only Judd and Kovalenko could catch him, and Obama's decision to take the page out of the book Wellstone used made for plenty of succession for him. Judd left the race before the convention, and Obama easily sowed up the nomination at the convention, naming Feingold as his Vice-Presidential choice.

The Presidential race began in early 2020 with a Republican lead, but the charismatic Obama quickly eliminated that lead, but Haley, who was no slouch at debating, could and did close up the gap. Feingold and Ensign's first debate was a wild debate after Feingold, in a faux pas he'd quickly regret, tried to claim that Ensign wasn't able to be trusted because of his past. That massive faux pas drew such a backlash that Feingold was forced to publicly backpedal to stop himself from being an anchor on the Democratic ticket. That move resulted in a brief but strong Republican lead, which Obama once again chipped away at, taking the leads back after the third debate with Haley in Salt Lake City, where a rather-partisan crowd (Utah was massively in favor of Governor Haley) didn't stop a bravado performance by Senator Obama to win the debate. (Such was the aggressiveness of the crowd that Haley had to tell some of the crowd to back it down some.) The presence of the charismatic Obama and the highly-competent Haley was such that the ranks of voters swelled again, and indeed the 2020 election would wind up with a spectacular 82.5% turnout, the highest in American history. On election day, President Obama carried 30 states to Nikki Haley's 22, winning some 53.9% of the vote against Haley's 45.7%. Despite the loss, the Republicans didn't have any problems accepting the loss, because even Haley knew that the party had done a great job against a formidable rival. And the election of the first Black President, coming right after the first Mormon one in Huntsman (and the first Republican to serve two full terms since Eisenhower) and the first Jewish President in Wellstone, was celebrated both by the Republicans and Democrats, with the likes of Rubio, Hultman and Mendoza all commenting (after the election, of course) that Obama's election really meant a completely broken glass ceiling - after all, if a Black man and an Indian woman were the rivals for the Presidency, what was that if not a sign that race was becoming less of a factor in American life? The Republicans weren't entirely without their victories in the 2020 election - they left that election with 29 out of 52 governors and with a bunch of great new candidates elected to various positions, the largest such success being the elections of Meghan McCain to replace her retiring father John McCain as a Senator from Arizona and the election of movie star Gary Sinise to replace the retiring Mark Kirk for the Senate from Illinois.

As Obama headed to Washington to be sworn into office in 2020, he had no idea of the world of the future any more than anyone else did. But what mattered was that America, as was becoming all too usual, was ready to go forward into the future with confidence, and they would do so having broken one of the last barriers that truly existed in the nation....