“It didn’t matter whether we called it ‘supply-side finance’ or ‘trickle-down economics,’ it always came down to the same thing, what David Stockwell called ‘a Trojan Horse for upper-bracket tax cuts.’ None of it ever reached the Great Unwashed. So why didn’t they rise up before? They have to know it’s never worked, at least for them.”
—Brenda Tower
Later that night, Brenda sat up with her brother in his big New York penthouse overlooking New York, Long Island, Staten Island and New Jersey.
“Hey little brother, I see you’ve been wobbling a bit on immigration—on whether birth in the U.S. should guarantee babies citizenship. At least, when it comes to Russian babies, you’re wobbling. You now say that it should?”
“You think I’ve turned softhearted in my old age?” He treated her to a smug smirk.
“No, I think you did the math.”
“And which math was that?” he asked.
“The math that counts all the money you’re making off your Russian birth-tourism business.”
Tower allowed her another small smile of mean merriment. “We have made a few bucks off those Russian rug rats, haven’t we?”
“A few bucks? Your tycoon buddies over there crank out hundreds of thousands of dollars every time they send one of their pregnant wives or mistresses to Miami. They pay us to put them up in our ultra-luxurious apartment complexes for three months or so. Their women-friends then drop their obnoxious tots here in the States. The mamas get to claim U.S. citizenship for the drooling, puking tykes, who, at the same time, keep their Russian citizenship. When the little ankle-biters turn twenty-one, their mega-rich parents can then apply for green cards under your ‘family unification program,’ all of it done through the good offices of J. T. Tower’s lavish high-rises and your pals in the birth-tourism business.”
“So I’m an astute but softhearted entrepreneur.”
“One who also campaigned on the promise to send all those Mexican babies born in the U.S. back across the border, kicking and bawling and screaming.”
“So?”
“Isn’t that a little … inconsistent?”
“Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
Brenda stared at him, shaking her head. “Do you have any idea at all who said that?”
“I did.”
“Ever heard of Ralph Waldo Emerson?”
“He claims he said that?”
“He did say it.”
“Then he can also suck my dick while he’s saying it.”
Brenda stared at him in frank astonishment. “Oh, my poor little brother,” she finally said. “No one understands you, do they?”
“Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, understood me,” Tower said to his sister, suddenly serious. “They knew that if they had sent the FBI after me and after Wall Street’s top VPs in 2008, we’d have paid them back by crashing the global credit markets. We’d have eviscerated the international economy and bled it out like a butchered hog. We’d have flooded the streets with red ink and blood. We’d have proved once and for all who was really running things and that we were not only too big to fail, we were too big to jail.”
Brenda stared at her brother a long hard minute, then sighed.
“Jimmy, why do we talk about money and power, violence and slaughter so much?” Brenda asked her brother. “Why don’t we talk about something else?”
“You’re not interested in my sex life,” Tower said.
“What about love?” Brenda asked. “I’m told it makes the world go ’round.”
“But filthy lucre oils the wheels.”
“Is it possible that under all our cynicism and hardness that we’ve missed out on something?” Brenda asked. “I’m told it’s okay to show the soft, sensitive side of our personalities to those whom we care about. Do you really think it’s okay to love?”
Tower snorted with derision.
“You’ve never known love?” Brenda asked him.
“Oh, I get it. You think I’ve grown a paper asshole.”
“You don’t even believe love exists, do you?”
“Nada—only bills come due.”
“Then, to you, collections are everything?”
“The only thing,” Tower said. “Collecting what’s yours is life’s single-most important skill.”
“The Jim Tower I know wants to collect not only what’s his but half of everyone else’s.”
“You mean all of everyone else’s.”
“So love is just a promissory note.”
“A quid pro quo,” Tower said. “Nothing more.”
“Like eye for an eye?”
“Fuck with me, it’s a head for an eye.”
“The poets say,” Brenda said, “that love is a gift—one freely given and freely received.”
“Nothing is free,” Tower said, leaning toward her for emphasis. “Everything’s bought and paid for.”
“You talk like you hate love,” Brenda said.
“How can I hate something that doesn’t exist? What you call love’s a snare, a scam, a fucking lie—pure and simple.”
“How is it a lie if people believe it in their hearts, their souls, their minds?” Brenda asked.
“Because those people are liars,” Tower said with a scathing sneer. “They begin by lying about love to themselves, then lying about it to each other, and then they end up lying about it to everyone else.”
“Is making love to someone you care about also a lie?” Brenda asked.
“Sexual love might begin as a big, happy fun-fuck, but it always ends as a huge, ugly … hate-fest.”
“Does heaven—or hell—ever enter into your calculations?”
“I want both,” her brother said.
“And what makes you think you’d like either?” Brenda asked.
“I want to visit heaven so I can see if peace, serenity and dreamful ease really exist.”
“If they do, why would you want to go to hell?”
“For the nightlife,” Tower said.
“You are your father’s son.”
“That I am, sis. That I am.”
Tower looked away, strangely silent, distracted. Brenda could read his moods and saw he was morose.
“So what’s wrong?”
“I don’t understand any of it anymore.”
“You mean why the people want to ransack our offshore bank accounts?” Brenda asked.
“That’s not it,” Tower said. “I understand why they want to close the inequality gap. From their point of view, it makes perfect sense. I’d try to shrink the wealth gap too if I were in their shoes. What I can’t figure out is why the public has supported me for so long. They had to know I was going to rob them blind.”
“We ripped off most of them,” Brenda had to admit.
“Yes,” Tower said, “and they willingly, adoringly gave their money to us and our friends.”
“It didn’t matter,” Brenda said, “whether we called it ‘supply-side finance’ or ‘trickle-down economics,’ it always came down to the same thing, what David Stockwell called ‘a Trojan Horse for upper-bracket tax cuts.’ None of it ever reached the Great Unwashed. So why didn’t they rise up before? They have to know it’s never worked, at least for them.”
“I understand why their representatives back us,” Tower said. “We give money to them—to a lot of politicians to get them elected—and they fill our coffers many times over. Afterward, we all laugh on the way to the bank. But what about the ordinary people—the good, strong, hardworking men and women, in particular—who support us so slavishly? They have to know we’re going to loot then piecemeal, and if we had our way, we’d take everything they had.”
“Especially their Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid,” Brenda said, nodding.
“They’ve always been at the top of our hit list,” Tower agreed. “We’ve already grabbed up most of their corporate pension funds, so the voters have to know that their Social Security and their government retirement plans are next on the chopping block. Yet those assholes not only back me, I swear to God they actually like me.”
“They love you, Jim. The crowds cheer for you like maniacs at your rallies. The women look and sound like they’re having orgasms.”
“You know what Danny McMahon calls our middle-class supporters?” President Tower said. “‘The chickens that eat at Colonel Sanders.’”
“They are stupid, aren’t they?”
“They’re sheep bleating for our shears,” Tower said.
“Is that why God made us?”
“Someone has to fleece them.”
“So they, the Great Unwashed,” Brenda said, “get nothing out of all this, even as we grow even richer than sin?”
“You and I give the Unwashed Masses the opportunity to work their asses off enriching those at the top, particularly you and me. It’s not too much to ask.”
“And you offer them nothing in return?” Brenda asked.
“The satisfaction of a hard job well done.”
“In short, you offer them blood, sweat, toil and tears.”
“Their blood, sweat, toil and tears—that’s all the morons deserve,” Tower said.
“Nothing else?” Brenda asked, amazed.
“They learn, if they’re lucky, to kiss the whip—to willingly and gratefully sacrifice themselves for the financial betterment of … us.”
“But I keep asking you, why should they do it?” Brenda asked.
“Because that’s the way the world works,” Tower said. “The strong prevail, the weak perish, and that is life.”
“Ah, the situational ethics of the super-rich.”
“I do see myself as a morally relative billionaire.”
“Yeah, and if the Ignorant Masses ever found out how we live,” Brenda said, “they’d set our world on fire.”
“But they don’t know,” Tower said, “and anyway, it’s all just laziness and envy on their part. If they wanted what we have, they’d simply work harder.”
“Ah, Jimmy, the gap between us and them is unbridgeable. We travel in mega-yachts and on our own private jetliners. We own dozens of penthouses and McMansions, most of which sit empty year-round because we have so many of them. Our investment returns dwarf anything the Great Unwashed could ever imagine—in part, because they can’t afford to buy politicians, dismiss regulators and cut their taxes. They don’t have cross-border, wealth-management firms that stash their investments abroad in labyrinthine trusts, shell companies and in offshore, black-hole, black-money tax havens. Last year our businesses earned $129 billion combined in three small islands—the Virgin Islands, Bermuda and the Caymans. Those places have fewer than 150,000 inhabitants, so our profits would have come to almost $900,000 per islander had our firms actually done any real work over there.”
“On the other hand, we’re small potatoes compared to the Rothschild family,” Tower pointed out, “which is worth upwards of $2 trillion and the Saudi Royal Family, which is worth $1.4 trillion.”
“I heard the Saudi king recently bought a 500-foot yacht for $500 million.”
“But what about the UN mandate, the anti-inequality bill,” Brenda asked. “It sounds like the people of the world are finally rising up against us.”
“A temporary setback,” Tower said. “We’ll turn them around quickly enough, bring them to heel, teach them what happens when they fuck with J. T. Tower and Mikhail Putilov.”
“Jimmy, I don’t know what Putilov has planned,” Brenda said, “but knowing him, the solution could be … unacceptable.”
“You’re wrong, sis. This time it’s for all the marbles, and the only thing that matters now is that we show no fear, we don’t back down, we don’t give an inch. This time it’s total retaliation.”
“So there are no ethical limits to our response?” Brenda asked.
“None at all.”
“Does that explain our financial dealings with men like Putilov and Prince Waheed?” Brenda asked. “That the making of money recognizes no moral boundaries?”
“Money doesn’t care where it comes from.”
“But, Jimmy, those are dangerous men. We should be afraid of them.”
“If Putilov and Waheed had any sense, they’d fear me.”
“Really?” Brenda asked. “Suppose they turned New York into a nuclear necropolis. How would you justify your business transactions with those people then?”
“The cost of doing business.”
“So it’s prodigious wealth and moral relativism for people at the top, and serfdom for everyone else?”
“I couldn’t have put it any better myself,” Tower said.
“Is that why you insist on manufacturing benzene, the most carcinogenic chemical on earth? Jules Meredith calls you ‘the Johnny Appleseed of metastatic cancer.’ She says you’ve saturated the country’s air and half its water table with carcinogens.”
“So what’s wrong with making a few bucks off benzene?” Tower asked.
“Meredith says it’s fairly fucking disgusting.”
“Fairly fucking lucrative, you mean, and anyway, why do you care? Our constituents wanted the pipeline. We called it ‘a jobs creator.’”
“But they didn’t want the terminal cancer, which the pipeline will eventually cause,” Brenda said.
“No, but they want cars that’ll go 160 miles an hour,” Tower said. “They want supersonic airliners. They want high-performance war transport. I give them the fuel that’ll get it done.”
“But why are we doing business with the Saudis? We can get all the oil and gas we want in the U.S. and Canada. Do we really have to bankroll them? A cadre of Saudi royals underwrote the 9/11 attacks. They financed and created ISIS. They’re behind the New United Islamist Front.”
“Yeah, but the Saudis still have the cheapest oil on earth, and in this age of plummeting petro-profits, Saudi oil money, for us, is the difference between the red and the black, between fiscal prosperity and corporate collapse.”
“I can’t argue with that,” Brenda said, emitting a long painful sigh.
“It’s like I always say, Brenda, this life is a great big rock. You’re either on top of it or under it.”
“And that’s all there is to it?” Brenda asked. “That’s what it all comes down to?”
“You conquer the world or you’re crucified by it,” Tower said.
“With Jules Meredith hammering in the nails?” Brenda asked.
“She would if she could,” Tower said, “but I intend to hammer her first, hammer her till she can’t stand up—till she begs for mercy.”
“Jimmy,” Brenda said, her eyes widening in astonishment, “you aren’t attracted to Jules Meredith, are you?”
“Am I ever.”
“She’s looking to you take down.”
“I’m looking to take her down.”
“You’re kidding? You could have a thousand women as hot—or hotter—than her for a phone call.”
“I’ve had them by the thousands. But, I don’t know, sis, I’ve never known one like her. Hell, I even like listening to her talk, and I don’t like listening to anyone talk. Now it’s like I’m Captain Ahab, and she’s my white whale. I can’t stop thinking about her—about harpooning her.” He rubbed his crotch.
“Maybe you’ve gone too long without a woman. Let me make some calls, set you up.”
“Wouldn’t do any good. I’m just not that interested in sex anymore. Nothing helps—porn, high-dollar hookers, Cialis.”
“I hear you brag all the time to business friends, reporters and colleagues—even over the phone to Putilov—about what a stud you are,” Brenda said, confused.
“It’s all bullshit—just me trying to make myself feel better about myself,” Tower said. “The truth is for the last five years I’ve been irreversibly impotent. Then one night about a year ago, I saw Jules Meredith trashing me on a talk show, and suddenly I was on fire for her. It’s been that way ever since. One glimpse of Jules Meredith on a magazine jacket, anywhere, or if I just hear her voice on the radio, even when she’s attacking me, and suddenly I’m crazy-mad for her. It’s like I’m fifteen years old again—hammer-hard and jalapeno-hot—but she’s the only one who does it for me. Otherwise, I’m deader than Kelsey’s nuts down there.”
“You have to get over this. That woman’s uncut plutonium—pure poison. She could very well destroy you—us.”
“And I have something I’d like to destroy her with.” J. T. Tower again motioned toward his crotch.
“That’s insane.”
“Brenda, I have to see her. I’ll go nuts if I don’t. She’s dying to interview me, you said.”
“She’s been trying to interview you for years,” Brenda said.
“Then set it up.”
“You’re out of your mind.”
“Just set it up. Call Jules Meredith. Tell her I’ll meet her here—after midnight. Tell her I’m giving her that interview, but it’s deep background. I tell you, Brenda, I have to see her—tonight at the latest. Tell her it’s tonight or never.”