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engagement for and the funding
of the super PACS, there’d been no pattern of enforcement by the
FEC. The only rule, although it’s so narrow that no great wall of
protection was ever forged, is that super PACs and other
fundraising groups can’t share nonpublic information with campaigns
or party operatives.
    So be it. All that means is that making
information “public” is a very viable, as well as legal,
alternative.
    And nothing means going public in today’s
world like a record-breaking Twitter Stream, Facebook Likes off the
charts, and a YouTube clip that could become one of the
most-watched in the history of the internet.
    Pretty soon, the entire world would know what
Governor Crumley was hiding in Box 438 and what it meant to every
American’s financial livelihood. And for that matter, to every
person on the planet.
    And no, this wouldn’t be a silver screen
superstar conversing with some bizarre empty chair.
    Every chair in the world would be filled with
an average person in total shock by what they were watching,
reading and hearing on their smartphones, PCs, tablets and
television screens.
    From my days at Harvard and the Center for
Strategic and International Studies, I knew that successful
campaigns normally have to fit voters’ wishes. In other words, you
must feed them what they want to hear.
    But not this time.
    To be successful in this presidential
election, we had to feed them what they had to hear, whether they
wanted to hear it or not.
    I took out a legal pad and pen and began
creating a list of sample Tweets and post updates for Grams to use
at the convention. My list included:
     
    A Survey of 500 US senior financial services
executives showed 24% believed they had to engage in illegal and
unethical conduct to succeed.
     
    26% said they’d observed or had firsthand
knowledge of wrongdoing.
     
    16% said they would engage in insider trading
if they could get away with it.
     
    Goldman Sachs’ fine of $22 million for
insider trading was collected in just 7 hours of trading.
     
    Goldman’s record $550 million penalty for
securities fraud in 2010 amounted to less than 2% of that year’s
revenues.
     

    Two-thirds of the regulations called for in
Ruvama’s financial reform bill that passed 2 years ago are still
not in place due to the financial industry blocking their
progress.
     
    Governor Crumley has pledged to repeal the
Dodd-Frank financial reform act, if elected President.
     
    I put down my pen and rubbed my head, trying
to work out the tension headache that was starting to throb.
    Feeding voters what they wanted to hear,
instead of the truth, is what had brought us to the brink of
financial ruin. The American people, and the world, for that
matter, had no idea just how close we were to the edge, let alone
who was pushing us toward that edge.
    I reached into my desk drawer and pulled out
the file I’d hoped I wouldn’t have to use. So much for wishful
thinking. People had to know the truth...no matter how ugly that
truth was.

CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
     
     
     
     
    T he Secret Service
keeps what they call crank files. These files are full of the
regularly received death threats that are – in both call and letter
format – made against the President, as well as those close to
him.
    Many of the names in these files have been
traced by FBI and Secret Service analysts, but they kept coming up
with nothing but dead ends.
    Roman and I flipped through the list of names
from the file that Ross had delivered to us.
    “Almost every damn name on these lists match
up with my father’s Box 438 documentation,” I said, helping Roman
create a database full of matches and comparisons that we’d later
feed to our SEC contacts.
    From what the crank file indicated, the
threats were made using unique twists on many of the names used by
the various cartels, be they coffee, cocoa, casinos, or cocaine and
other drugs. If the magnates in charge didn’t feel they were
getting enough support from the current