Barrymore Carver descended like a storm on the research department.\u00a0 Within an hour he had half of the department digging through the details of the financial records for all fifty of the farms he had failed to take.\u00a0 By 8 pm he had a systematic database of all the financial and commercial records for each farm for the last ten years.\u00a0 By midnight he had a pounding headache but he also had a eureka moment that might save his career.\u00a0 And at 6am he collapsed across his desk with a look of relief on his face.<\/p>\n
When Dexter Hastings reached his office at 10am Carver was in his office.\u00a0 \u201cSo, Barry, I hope you have something worth my time.\u00a0 I have a 10:30 with the HR director to browbeat her for hiring you and I know that should put her in the mood to craft your separation package properly.\u00a0 What have you found?\u201d<\/p>\n
On the office display, Carver queued up a slide deck that he had assembled sometime after 3am.\u00a0 In his best corporate jargon, he detailed the data he had unearthed.\u00a0 He demonstrated that each of these farms managed to pay all their bills with an absolutely precise balance sheet.\u00a0 Each of the accounts managed to match debits and credits down to the penny.\u00a0 And this occurred regardless of how many separate sales the farmers collected or what random setbacks or emergencies befell them.\u00a0 And in fact, these farmers didn\u2019t seem to sell their products to wholesalers or even retailers.\u00a0 They sold their products to private individuals.\u00a0 And even the prices they charged were constantly changing without any rhyme or reason.<\/p>\n
Dexter listened to this exposition for about ten minutes then shut off the display from his desktop and disgustedly said, \u201cThat\u2019s enough Barry.\u00a0 This gibberish is meaningless.\u00a0 All you\u2019ve shown is that these dirt-poor farmers are dirt-poor farmers barely scraping by.\u00a0 It means you were defeated by the most pathetic individuals imaginable; penniless yokels.\u00a0 You might as well go now before I really get mad.\u201d<\/p>\n
Carver did something very strange, he smiled condescendingly at his boss and said, \u201cSure Dexter I\u2019ll go, but if you had a little more attention span you would have learned why you haven\u2019t been able to increase the price of wheat in three years.\u201d<\/p>\n
Anger and confusion battled with curiosity on Dexter\u2019s face, \u201cWhat are you talking about?\u00a0 What could these fifty farms possibly have to do with the price of a commodity like wheat?\u201d\u00a0 Carver walked over to Dexter\u2019s desk, turned the display back on and started an animation that showed the fifty farms colored in red geographically on the GRID 19 map and then expanded out to the Midwest and showed hundreds of thousands of additional parcels in the same color, \u201cHow about half a million farms?\u201d\u00a0 Our fifty farms have all their financial accounts in the same bank.\u00a0 This bank has an additional eight hundred thousand accounts.\u00a0 Not all of them are farms.\u00a0 Some are small businesses and some not so small businesses but the great majority of these accounts have the same kind of screwy bookkeeping.\u00a0 Apparently, none of them make any money worth talking about and yet none of them go out of business.\u00a0 And I\u2019ve looked at the owners of these businesses.\u00a0 All of their homes and businesses are financed through this same bank and on paper none of them seem to have enough money to be able to buy a toaster without a loan and yet based on a random selection of social media accounts they all seem to have large families and are active members in all the community groups around them and none of them look like they\u2019re starving.\u00a0 And when I built up the customer list for our fifty farms every customer is an account holder at that same bank.<\/p>\n
This isn\u2019t a coincidence.\u00a0 This is a highly developed and carefully orchestrated hidden network.\u00a0 This is a secret society.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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