Origins: The Reich by Mark Henrikson

had a response, it was lost on Hastelloy whose attention now lay upon his secretary.  “Are they ready in the conference room?”
    “Yes, Director,” Alvina answered with a broad grin of satisfaction on her face as her eyes followed the wounded man out the door leading to a bank of elevators.  In her position, she was privy to nearly as much intelligence information as Hastelloy.  “Mister Rockefeller, Guggenheim, Morgan and DuPont are all waiting for you.  By the way, each of them is wearing my salary; I need a raise.”
    “I’ll see what I can do,” Hastelloy teased on his way to the conference room to greet his distinguished guests.  Inside the dimly lit conference room, and seated around a circular table, Hastelloy found the four wealthiest and most powerful industrialists in the world.  Each of them was either influential enough to keep incriminating evidence out of his hands, or actually abided by the laws.  Either way, Hastelloy would have to use other motivating factors to secure their cooperation.
    “Gentlemen, thank you very much for your time this evening,” Hastelloy offered in greeting.
    “I was led to believe I didn’t have much choice in the matter,” Mr. Rockefeller said with an encouraging amount of good cheer in his voice.  “How about the rest of you fine gentlemen?”
    “There were no handcuffs involved,” Mr. Guggenheim chuckled, “though I did feel a certain necessity to cancel my dinner reservation.  What is this all about, Director?”
    Hastelloy allowed the question to hang over the room as he pulled out a chair for himself at the table of distinguished men. “It’s about the future.  Each of you placed your considerable financial and organizational backing behind President Hoover’s election on the basis that he was a business friendly capitalist whose policies would bring you much prosperity.  Three years and an unprecedented economic collapse later, I am now forced to ask the four of you how that has worked out for you?”
    “Considering a third of my factories sit idle and I’ve lost nearly half my net worth, I have to answer that it hasn’t worked out the way I’d hoped,” Mr. DuPont answered.
    “What was our alternative?” Mr. Morgan insisted.  “Lose half our wealth with a Republican in office or all of it with some Communist sympathizing Democrat as president?  Those liberals are all backed by labor unions supporting minimum wages, fixed forty-hour work weeks, and requiring employers to contribute toward an unemployment benefits pool to be paid out to laid off workers.  They want to destroy everything that our meritocracy was based upon in favor of handouts.”
    “Oh spare me, Morgan.  You were handed most of what you control from your father, the same as me,” Rockefeller objected with a nonchalant wave of his hand across the air in front of him.
    “Be that as it may,” Morgan conceded, “the only way to recover from this economic depression is for us to grow our way out of it.  That is accomplished by way of President Hoover’s policies to issue tax breaks and lend capital to manufacturers in order to encourage their expansion.  Our businesses would then hire more workers and pay them a decent wage for a day’s work rather than having them sitting around waiting to collect a handout.”
    “Morgan, I find it rather ironic that you sit here and in one breath denounce the worker’s cries for financial help.  Then in your very next breath, you insist the only way to fix things is for the government to give tax breaks and cheap lending, also known as handouts, to us and our businesses,” Rockefeller objected.
    “We industrialists will put that money to good use making products the people will want to buy.  What are millions of workers going to do with the few dollars they receive from some unemployment fund handout that I paid into on their behalf?” Morgan asked.  “It gets diluted across the economy and does nothing for it in the