Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [50]
“True.”
“I wonder what would happen if the reinsurance companies refused to insure oil companies that didn’t get with the cap program right now?”
“Good idea.” She sighed. “Boy, if only we could sic them on the World Bank and the IMF too.”
“Maybe we can. Phil Chase is president now.”
“So maybe we can! Hey, it’s two already—have you had lunch?”
In his office, Frank smiled. “No, you wanna?”
“Yes. Give me five minutes.”
“Meet you at the elevator.”
So they had lunch, and among other things talked over the move to the White House, and what it meant. The danger of becoming an advisory body only, of having no budget to do things—as against the potential advantage of being able to tell all the federal agencies, and to an extent the whole government, what to do.
Diane said, “My guess is Chase is still trying to work out what’s really possible. He’s talked quite a line but now push has come to shove, and it’s a big machine he’s got to move. I’ve gotten a whole string of questions about the technical agencies, and just today I got an e-mail asking me to submit a thorough analysis of all the particulars of the New Deal—what he called the scientific aspects of the New Deal. I have no idea what he means.”
Nevertheless, she had looked into it. There had been five New Deals, she said. Each had been a distinct project, with different goals and results. She listed them with a pen on the back of a napkin:
1) Hundred Days, 1933
2) Social Security, 1935
3) Keynesian stimulation 1938 (this package, she explained, had been enacted partly to re-prime the pump, partly to restore what the Supreme Court had blocked from New Deal 2)
4) the defense buildup of 1940–41, and
5) the G.I. Bill of Rights of 1944
“Number five was entirely FDR’s idea, by the way. Nothing’s ever done more for ordinary Americans, the analysis said. It was what made the postwar middle class, and the baby boom.”
“Encouraging,” Frank said, studying the list.
“Very. Granted, this all took twelve years, but still. It doesn’t even count the international stuff, like getting us prepared for the war, or winning it. Or starting the UN!”
“Impressive,” Frank said. “Let’s hope Chase can do as well.”
Here Diane looked doubtful. “One thing seems pretty clear already,” she confessed. “He’s too busy with other stuff for me to be able to make many of our arguments to him in person. I mean, I’ve barely met him yet.”
“That’s not good.” Frank was surprised to hear this.
“Well, he’s pretty good at replying to his e-mail. And his people get back to me when I send along questions or requests.”
“Maybe that’s where I should ask Charlie for help. He might be able to influence the decision about how to allocate Chase’s meeting time.”
“That would be good.”
It seemed to Frank, watching her and thinking about other kinds of things, that she appeared to have forgotten his abrupt cancellation of their post–North Atlantic date. Or—since no one ever really forgot things like that—to have let it go. Forgiven, if not forgotten—all he could expect, of course. Maybe it had only been a little weird. In any case a relief, after his experiences with Marta, who neither forgot nor forgave.
Which reminded him that he had to talk to Marta sometime soon about Small Delivery Systems’ Russian experiment. Damn.
As always, the thought of having to communicate with his ex-partner filled Frank with a combination of dread and a perverse kind of anticipation, which came in part from trying to guess how it would go wrong this time. For go wrong it would. He and Marta had always had a stormy relationship, and Frank had come to suspect that all Marta’s intimate relationships were stormy. Certainly her relations with her ex-husband had been inflamed, which had been one of the reasons she and Frank too had come to a nasty end. Marta had needed to keep her name off the paperwork on the house she and Frank had bought together, in order to keep it clear of the divorce