It’s official. Fresh Squeezed, the new Juice Verrone novel, is published. Covers, copyrights and, not one but three, ISBNs. For those of you who got one of our Pre-Publication Special Collector’s Edition sets, you should have received the eBooks already. Of course if you haven’t, let me or Bonnie Biafore know at once. The print book will be available as soon as we review the proof copy and slip ourselves into the printer’s schedule. For those of you who did not get in on the early excitement, fear not, we’ll be having the eBooks for sale on our website early next week followed shortly thereafter by everywhere else. Being that we’re writers – now authors – and not computer geeks, there might be a slight chance that when you press “Buy” on our website you will end up with a semi-load delivery of Slip-wear Spandex Chafe Guards instead of something to stuff into your Kindle. We hope to have that particular bug worked out of the system before we go live. Particularly since we learned that said chafe guards are non-returnable. Keep watching for more Fresh Squeezed news here and on our Facebook page.

But that’s just a minor issue when it comes to bugs in the system. We’re living through a whopper right now, one that might be able to bring the system to its knees. That is, of course, if the system is not already there.

Much has been made of the impact on American politics from the Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court. For those of you not in the know, Citizens United basically removed all restrictions on campaign spending by releasing whatever caps were in place before. As long as the contributions are made to “independent” organizations called Super-PACs and not directly to the candidate, you can now donate as much as you want.

The result is that the 2012 Presidential Election will see expenditures approaching ten billion dollars to elect somebody who gets paid, annually, four-hundred thousand dollars along with a fifty thousand dollar expense account; plus the nice jet.

The reason of course, is that the President is not the one making the money by being elected. The money is made by major contributors influencing government policy affecting themselves and the corporations they own. Special interest groups, movers, and shakers who shell out the big bucks reap the benefits of those campaign contributions in ways both direct and indirect.

Except for the magnitude of this year’s expenditures the system has been in place a very long time. The money keeps flowing in because even more keeps flowing out. It works like this: money buys access, access buys influence, influence shapes legislation, and legislation creates money. Sort of like the Circle of Life, only without all the Kumbaya nonsense.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of small-scale donations made by people who firmly believe that their chosen candidate is one who can and will make a difference, who is above the petty bickering and political posturing that defines the American political system, and who will raise the debate above the automatic gainsaying of the opposing party, shining a bright light for us all to follow.

Yeah, right.

There may indeed be such politicians out there but their voices are all but drowned out by the sound of all that cash flowing into everybody else’s wallets. Someday they realize that nobody is listening to them, and they will step up to the communal trough, and feed.

So let’s, for a second, forget those small time donors and assume all ten-billion dollars of political influence purchasing comes from the True Evil in the Country: The 1%. By the 1%, I’m lumping together real rich people and the corporations, businesses, and labor unions that are allowed to contribute like people into one group. Do these massive – tax deductible – contributions even make sense? Or are these just a bunch of elitist jerks showing off exactly how much money they already have?

When you consider that just removing the tax cuts the government has in place currently would result in an increase in government revenue of about fifty-six billion dollars a year, then spending ten billion every four years to make sure the tax cuts stay in place is a no-brainer. But that’s the small potatoes; on the business-tax side of things the numbers are even bigger. For every one percent increase of business income taxes, the government’s revenue would increase by thirty billion a year. With those kinds of savings, spending ten billion to influence government policy is even less than a no-brainer. It’s a prudent business decision.

And that’s just the taxes. When you throw in government contracts, subsidies, and favorable regulatory legislation, the benefits to the contributors are over a trillion dollars. Every year. That’s why it behooves the people with money to burn, to burn it on politics.

Admittedly those contributions are an aggregate of all donations, and most influence seekers contribute to both candidates to cover their bets. But billions and trillions are kind of mystical numbers. To bring it into the realm of reality what that means is: for an each annual expenditure of $2.50 in political contributions, the contributor can expect to receive $1,000.00 in return.

Those are much better odds than the lottery.

So where’s the bug in that system? You know, the one I said was going to bring the whole thing to its knees. Well that little bug is this: the legislation that the mega-rich contributors get enacted costs money in actual dollars and lost tax revenue, and so there is not enough money coming in to government coffers to pay for what the U.S. is spending every year, and so the government has to borrow.

And borrow. And borrow.

Since the last time the annual federal budget was balanced in 2001, the U.S. has racked up another six trillion dollars in debt and is now deficit financing fully forty percent of the annual budget. They can get away with this because, for now anyway, the cost of borrowing money is less than the cost of printing it. When you couple this with the problems in Europe and the ongoing recession, buying government backed securities still seems like a better idea than just stuffing your cash into a mattress. For now anyway, the feds still have the ability to sell their debt.

Of the current fourteen trillion we owe as a country (your share of which is $46,000, by the way) over five trillion is owed to foreign “interests”, the big two being China and Japan at over a trillion each. And there’s the bug.

Japan, whose economy has been in a recession since 1986, might be seen as problematic. But the real devil lives in China where they’ve only been playing the game for a few years. Here’s how it goes down. One of those countries runs into a bit of an economic downturn, sort of like what’s happening in China right now, and, to keep enough money coming into their system to finance their own programs, is forced to start selling their assets, like U.S. debt. Since 2008, the ongoing recession in the world has put a crimp in China’s economy to the point that the balance of trade has dropped, on average, 25% compared to pre-recession 2008. They still make things cheaper than everybody else – in so many ways – so the full impact of the recession hasn’t quite settled in there but when it does the ability of the Chinese banks to buy any more of our debt will vanish.

With the Chinese unable to buy our debt, and their own recession forcing them to sell off what they already own, the ability of the U.S. to offload debt to foreign shores will also vanish. At that point the U.S. will be stuck with a government needing to spend money, but, due to the political contributions, is completely in the pocket of corporations and special interests. The U.S.’s ability to deficit finance the country will disappear. The reduction of personal income due to the corporations making everything, ironically, in China will eliminate the middle class as a source of tax revenue and favorable treatment by our elected officials will already have eliminated everybody else.

The government will be unable to pay its debts, the U.S. dollar will become worthless, the rich will lose everything, and everybody, at last, will be truly equal.

Just like the Circle of Life, only without the happy ending.