A True October Surprise: The Added Surprises

[lord caedus]

The Bern Accords (formally the The Agreement Between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on the Reduction of Their Nuclear Stockpiles, Multinational Defense Agreements and Other Issues) is the agreement between the Soviet Union and the United States that is commonly agreed to mark the end of the Cold War. The accords, reached after months of negotiation by both superpowers (with US President Walter D. Huddleston and Secretary of State George Mitchell on one side and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze on the other), were the result of the Soviet economy deteriorating to a point where continued conflict with the West was no longer sustainable. As such, the accords' final terms were much more favorable to the United States- the Soviets agreed to a drastic reduction of their nuclear stockpile, sign international agreements that included declarations that the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states to be illegal, withdraw military advisers and military aid from other countries (with a few exceptions), allow unlimited emigration of ethnic and religious minorities outside of the USSR, and cooperate with UN agencies working to prevent nuclear proliferation. In return, the United States agreed to work to prevent the entrance of former Warsaw Pact nations (including any breakaway states from the Baltics) from entering into NATO or other defensive treaties, a similar reduction in their nuclear stockpile, and to increase trade with the Soviet Union.

The Accords' impact was felt throughout the world and in the Soviet Union, where Gorbachev’s status was so weakened after being forced to allow for internationally-observed independence referendums in the Baltic states that he was deposed in a coup that led to the resumption of hardliner rule in the USSR. Most notably, in Africa, the end of the Cold War resulted in many countries becoming destabilized as American or Soviet aid was removed while surviving communist states that had not undergone Chinese-style reform like Cuba or North Korea either began to change to allow more economic freedom (Cuba) or instead became nearly-failed states dependent on their neighbors for survival (North Korea).

 

[Aaaaasima]

Notorious RBG felt that she was needed during the Riley years to drive home this important lesson:

BOB RILEY DID NOTHING WRONG

 

[Wayside]

This is interesting... so the USSR is essentially a backwater ITTL? (I will admit, shamefully, that I haven't read ATOS as thoroughly as I should have.)

 

[Indicus]

This is interesting... so the USSR is essentially a backwater ITTL? (I will admit, shamefully, that I haven't read ATOS as thoroughly as I should have.)

I think that's a bit of an exaggeration, but the Cold War doesn't seem to be active due to a weakened USSR.

 

[lord caedus]

BOB RILEY DID NOTHING WRONG

That's something that probably was said unironically by a lot of Internet conservatives/Republicans during the whole "lobbyist scandal" thing (which turned out to technically be true but tanked his approval ratings).

This is interesting... so the USSR is essentially a backwater ITTL? (I will admit, shamefully, that I haven't read ATOS as thoroughly as I should have.)

The USSR has essentially been downgraded to a regional power (mainly over the ex-Warsaw Pact countries and the Baltics- and now only with soft power dominance) because of how structurally unsound the Soviet economic system is/was. The system ossified so badly by the time Viktor Grishin died in 1992 that essentially the only thing keeping the USSR intact in TTL's 2017 is hardliner control of the Kremlin in addition to the post-Bern slashing of the military budget that had been such a huge part of the Soviet budget for decades.

It still has terrific military capability and remains a player in global affairs, but it essentially uses its remaining military only to protect its internal security (read: brutally crush minorities who want independence) and has abandoned spreading communism and all that entails in order to ensure the continued survival of the Soviet state.

I think that's a bit of an exaggeration, but the Cold War doesn't seem to be active due to a weakened USSR.

The Bern Accords basically marked as the end of TTL's Cold War. There's still a healthy amount of wariness between Washington and Moscow, but there's such a clear power disparity now and the Accords' carving out a Soviet zone of influence has meant that for the most part, the two countries don't really share conflicting goals or zones of interest for tensions to spring back up again.

 

[Indicus]

The USSR has essentially been downgraded to a regional power (mainly over the ex-Warsaw Pact countries and the Baltics- and now only with soft power dominance) because of how structurally unsound the Soviet economic system is/was. The system ossified so badly by the time Viktor Grishin died in 1992 that essentially the only thing keeping the USSR intact in TTL's 2017 is hardliner control of the Kremlin in addition to the post-Bern slashing of the military budget that had been such a huge part of the Soviet budget for decades.

It still has terrific military capability and remains a player in global affairs, but it essentially uses its remaining military only to protect its internal security (read: brutally crush minorities who want independence) and has abandoned spreading communism and all that entails in order to ensure the continued survival of the Soviet state.

So it's essentially a larger version of the Russian Federation except instead of oligarchs they have apparitchiks?

 

[lord caedus]

So it's essentially a larger version of the Russian Federation except instead of oligarchs they have apparitchiks?

Well, kind of. They're essentially a combination of a more economically-balanced (in terms of military vs. non-military domestic spending) post-Brezhnev Soviet Union with a slightly higher (and more localized) foreign policy heft than Russia enjoyed IOTL's 1990s.

 

[lord caedus]

The Patriot News Network (PNN, formerly the Coors News Network) was the first and perhaps most successful right-wing television network in the United States. Formed by former Republican media consultant Roger Ailes and financed in large part by Peter Coors, heir to the Coors beer fortune, the Coors News Network launched in 1977 to provide a "fair and balanced" viewpoint to what it perceived as the liberal-dominated Big Three (ABC, NBC and CBS) news broadcasters. Less than a year after its initial broadcast, the network renamed itself to the Patriot News Network after it became apparent that networks were hesitant to pick up a channel whose name was a repeated punchline on several comedy variety shows on the Big Three networks, most notably, It's Saturday Night!.

Despite its politically conservative tilt, PNN was extremely innovative in its formatting, and media strategy. Taking advantage of right-wing direct-mail lists donated by social conservative activist Richard Viguerie, PNN was able to target its television audience to a level unheard of in the 1970s and 1980s. Eschewing direct competition with the Big Three networks for the first five years of its existence, PNN gradually built up a sizable following by offering favorable deals with small, independent broadcasters.

However, PNN's innovative news model was too far ahead of its time— as networks who copied it in the satellite era would demonstrate— and the network had to rely on funds from Coors and other members of his newsgroup to stay afloat for a majority of its lifespan. It also was fatally attached to the person of Roger Ailes, who was both the driving force for the network as well as its most brilliant and media-savvy executive. When investigative reporters witnessed Ailes' repeated harassment of female staffers and subsequently published their observations, it caused the entire network to come under scrutiny and reporters began publishing reports of a "frat-house culture" at PNN seemingly abetted by Ailes. The Coors News Group soon dwindled to Coors and two loyal partners as most of the less-dedicated partners left as public criticism mounted and investigations against Ailes began.

Having purchased most of the shares of the fleeing partners, Coors used his majority to fire Ailes and desperately worked to shore up his creation, but to no avail. Less than a year after firing Ailes, PNN aired its last broadcast and went off the air. While Ailes evaded criminal charges, he and the Coors News Group (as the former owners of PNN) settled a class-action lawsuit brought by former female staffers out of court for nearly $2 million.

Despite its short nine-year life and the shameful conduct of its architect, PNN was a pioneer in the field of niche television, whose innovations have been studied and copied for decades. It also served as the godfather of the several right-wing networks like the American News Channel, Sky America and Liberty Network that compete for right-of-center viewers who believe that the dominant media channels are pushing an ideologically liberal agenda.

 

[Nofix]

I'm running out of synonyms for interesting. Also, I don't know if PNN is a much better acronym then CNN, but I'll accept it.

 

[lord caedus]

I'm running out of synonyms for interesting.

NARRATOR (V.O.): And so, today was the day that Nofix had feared would eventually come, but had hoped would never arrive. He would have to buy a thesaurus.

Also, I don't know if PNN is a much better acronym then CNN, but I'll accept it.

There's honestly not a lot of "good" acronyms for news broadcasters, especially once I decided that the word "Patriot" would be in the name of Ailes' ATL organization.

 

[Indicus]

That's an interesting *FOX.

 

[lord caedus]

The South African general election of 2013 has seemingly marked the twilight of the era of political calm that the country had gone through since the end of its civil war a quarter-century before. Following the end of the South African Civil War, apartheid had been abolished and the country's black majority finally allowed to vote and participate in their nation's political future. The African National Congress (ANC), riding off both the legacy of the war and their long efforts to end apartheid, emerged as the dominant party, getting a super-majority of the vote in the first three elections and having little reason to fear a divided opposition. Outside of die-hard supporters of the "martyred" Magnus Malan, most white South Africans accepted the new order, although they emerged as the strongest political opponents of the ANC. A series of mergers of the surviving apartheid-era parties resulted in the creation of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) as the primary opposition to the ANC from the center. The presence of the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), a conservative Zulu-interest party, prevented the 1990s political landscape from being a majority-black party (ANC) against a majority-white party (NDA).

But by the time President Kgalema Mothlanthe's first term begun to wind down in 2008, the ANC's status as an unassailable juggernaut had begun to fall. Internal party divisions came to ahead as the ANC leadership sidelined several hard-left MPs who, in response, left the party to form the SA Freedom Forces (SAFF) to challenge the ANC from the left, and in explicitly more black nationalist terms. Corruption scandals emerged with such regularity that more ANC members left the party in disgust to form the Peoples’ Congress Party (PCP), a party with little more to its platform than a strong anti-corruption stance. The resulting election was a shocker, not in the result (another ANC majority) but in the fact that the ANC only barely won a majority of the popular vote.

Mothlanthe's second term did little to stop the dissatisfaction felt with the ANC by many in the big-tent party. Despite the country’s handling of the 2012 Summer Olympics in Johannesburg going relatively smoothly, Mothlanthe's hand-off leadership led to infighting between ANC factions, which prevented a coherent ideology from emerging from the administration just as South African voters were looking for one. The lack of improvement in the wages and working conditions of many industrial workers since Nelson Mandela's term led to a series of strikes that alienated the ANC from its organized labor supporters. Mothlanthe's precarious position within the party resulted in his inability to placate the strikers and, after enough cabinet ministers’ patience had worn out in dealing with the union leadership (who had grown frustrated at Mothlanthe's wavering and the influence anti-strike ministers had over him), the strikes were crushed in a wave of arrests of union leadership on trumped-up charges. The strike was dispersed violently at the Lommin mine, resulting in the largest instance of violence the country had experienced since the war.

Many labor leaders, horrified and enraged, bolted from the party they had supported for decades and formed Forward South Africa (Forward SA) under former union leader Zwelinzima Vavi. NDA leader Wilmot James, sensing an opportunity, quickly obtained the promise of a coalition government in case the ANC lost its majority in the upcoming elections. Cyril Ramaphosa, the new ANC leader and candidate for president in 2013, spent most of the last few months before the elections furiously reminding voters of the ANC's history as the leader in the fight against apartheid and their role in the (slow) progress that had been made to reverse its economic and social effects.

For the first time since 1961, one party did not win a majority of votes. Forward SA pulled votes from most of the other parties represented in the previous parliament, but especially the SAFF and PCP, the latter of whom was left with only one seat as a result of losing over half of its support from 2008. Despite this, the ANC retained a (slightly diminished) majority, owing in part to the double-list system used to allocate seats to the National Assembly. Ramaphosa's skill as a negotiator has so far served him well in placating the increasingly uneasy factions in the ANC as well as opposition parties, but polling indicates that support for the ANC is waning as more and more of the generation born after the war and end of apartheid become eligible to vote, leading to an uncertain future when the life of the current parliament ends in 2018, three decades after the end of apartheid.

 

[Beata Beatrix]

This is great, @lord caedus. I hope you know how much I ship you and Nofix.

 

[lord caedus]

This is great, @lord caedus. I hope you know how much I ship you and Nofix.

 

[Beata Beatrix]

I'm just joking, of course. Your boxes are something I aspire to one day.

 

[Marius]

snip

Very cool.

What is the background though? How does the electoral system work? How long is the election cycle? What happened to Zuma, and was Mbeki president in this TL?

I have some comments, but overall, very good.

 

[lord caedus]

I'm just joking, of course. Your boxes are something I aspire to one day.

You can get there with practice, learning how to use image editing software like Paint.NET or Inkscape and by drinking plenty of milk.

Very cool.

What is the background though? How does the electoral system work? How long is the election cycle? What happened to Zuma, and was Mbeki president in this TL?

I have some comments, but overall, very good.

1. I wrote like three paragraphs explaining the background.
2. The electoral system, as the post says, is a double-list system. There are provincial lists (amount varies by the population of each province, but the total for all provinces combined is 200) and a national list (200 seats). Seats are determined by party-list PR with 5% thresholds on both sets of lists, meaning that parties like the People's Congress can win zero seats from the national list (since they fall below the 5% threshold nationally) but can get into the National Assembly if they win more than 5% in a province.
3. I assumed it would be obvious from both the box and the write-up, but it's five years.
4. Zuma's career in politics effectively ended when he was convicted on three counts of bribery and corruption during the Mbeki administration and spent five years in jail before being released early for good behavior.
5. Yes, Mbeki was president in between Mandela and Mothlanthe.

 

[Beata Beatrix]

You can get there with practice, learning how to use image editing software like Paint.NET or Inkscape and by drinking plenty of milk.

I have Inkscape. Currently, I'm just limiting myself to people.

Unfortunately, I'm lactose intolerant, so...

 

[lord caedus]

Barry Bonds is widely considered to be one of the greatest baseball players of all-time and certainly one of the best to play in the modern era. The son of major leaguer Bobby Bonds and godson of Willie Mays, Bonds seemed destined for greatness before he ever made it to the major leagues. A high school standout, Bonds was initially drafted in 1982 by the San Francisco Giants, but when their initial offer was too low, he opted to play college ball instead. Two strong years at Arizona State University made him one of the top prospects in the nation and he was drafted second overall by the Milwaukee Brewers in the 1985 draft. He continued to attend Arizona State while in the minor leagues, graduating in 1986 and proving himself ready for the big leagues.

He had a solid rookie year as a lanky twenty-two year old fielder for the Brewers, hitting .310 with 17 home runs, as he acclimated to the major leagues. Bonds' sophomore season of 1987, on the other hand, would mark the beginning of the Bonds era in Milwaukee- he crushed 39 home runs and drove in 132 runs while stealing 47 bases. The 1988 season would see Bonds return to form, hitting 34 home runs and stealing 46 bases, winning his first MVP award. With Wally Joyner, Paul Molitor and Mike Schmidt, Bonds led the Brewers to the World Series, where they fell to the Montreal Expos in five games. Bonds would break 40 home runs for the first time in 1989, hitting 45 and winning his first home run title.

A fractured wrist hurt Bonds' performance in 1990 and poor late-season performance by Milwaukee in 1991 and 1992 caused them to miss the playoffs. In 1993, however, would see things fire on all cylinders for the Brew Crew; alongside John Olerud and fellow slugger Salvador Soto, Bonds' 39 home runs, 37 steals and 126 runs batted in led the Brewers to coast through the season and meet the Houston Astros in the World Series. The 1993 series was a slugfest between the two evenly-matched teams and in the end, Milwaukee's superior bats won out, giving Bonds his only World Series ring.

Joined by Kirby Puckett and John Smoltz in 1994, Bonds went on a tear, chasing Roger Maris' home run record throughout the season before falling short at 58. The best team Bonds would ever find himself on, however, fell apart in the World Series, getting dispatched by the San Diego Padres 4 games to 1. The late 1990s were the denouement of the terrifying Bonds Brewers- Olerud and Puckett were traded, in part to offer Bonds a hefty new contract, and Soto became a free agent in 1996. Despite losing most of his major support, Bonds continued to perform at high levels, hitting 41 home runs in 1996 and bringing the Brewers to the fourth World Series with him in the club, where they were again beaten by Montreal in five games.

The 2000 season would be one of the most well-remembered in baseball history. Fueled by competition with Texas slugger Mark McGwire, whose 54 home runs in 1999 to Bonds' 39 had given the beefy first baseman a larger media profile than Bonds, who had a better performance except for his home run total, Bonds began to increasingly work on his power hitting- and soon, it became clear that the two were on pace to meet Maris' record. The race consumed baseball fans and returned waning American interest (due to the growth of both football and basketball in previous decades) to the national past-time. McGwire would fall one short of the record with 60. Bonds, however, cleared the record with plenty to spare, ending with 66 and becoming the new single-season home run champion.

The new millennium brought another season derailed midway by injury and, in his final stint in a Brewers uniform, another excellent season at the plate, with 53 home runs as he led the Brewers to the World Series yet again, where they fell to the Texas Rangers 4 games to 2. With the small-market Brewers unable to pay for another contract after his expired at the end of the 2002 season, Bonds signed with the Toronto Blue Jays. His 2003 season, like 2001, was interrupted by injury. At age 40, Bonds would put on a show in 2004, showcasing his danger to hitters even as he neared the end of his career. Hitting a career-high .378 and coming close to his single-season home run record at 64 homers, Bonds won the American League batting Triple Crown and his fifth and final MVP award. A preseason back injury left Bonds out for the entire 2005 season, the final one in his three-year contract with the Blue Jays.

Like San Francisco, Toronto could not afford to offer Bonds another contract and the aging superstar signed with the high-rolling New York Yankees. Bonds was in pinstripes when he hit his 773rd home run in 2007 to pass Hank Aaron as the all-time leading home run hitter, which the New York media played up as a virtue of civic pride in returning the title to the Big Apple, which was viciously mocked by the rest of the sports world, noting that Bonds had hit more home runs in one season in Toronto than he ever had (or would) for the Yankees. His final season, in 2008 at age 44, was when his body reached its breaking point- back and wrist injuries reduced his performance to such an extent that he was traded before the All-Star break to the Orlando Rays for two middle relievers. It would be in a Rays jersey that Bonds would make his 19th and final All-Star appearance and hit his final three home runs, retiring at the end of the season.

Despite his eye-popping statistics, Bonds' arrogance and egotism did not lend him personal popularity with the fans in any of the cities he played in and questionable business associations in the twilight years of his career resulted in his personal reputation getting tarnished even more. However, he easily was voted into the Hall of Fame on the first year of his eligibility. In 2015, Bonds joined the Texas Rangers as a hitting coach, one of many new additions to the Rangers organization in Texas owner George W. Bush (son of the former president)'s efforts to get the struggling franchise back on track.

 

[lord caedus]

As a note, Salvador Soto is a fictional person.