Mandarine. Dominic Billings
reforms. Yoland could little content herself with any outcome other than double-digit annual growth, as experienced by China of the past four decades.
To take hold in a market such as China would be ideal. A billion people, desirous of affluence and the trappings of a consumerist lifestyle. Nice clothes, electrical home appliances, more meat in the diet. Packaged rice pudding after a day’s toil.
Yoland knew General Motors seemed to be able to make it work in China. But GM shared its manufacturing and sales in a joint venture with a Chinese automaker. Yoland would much rather go it alone were an opportunity presented for entry to China.
It could shock Yoland's C-suite colleagues to unearth how meagre was her knowledge of rice. She knew farmers sewed, grew, harvested, then milled, but seldom else. Yoland knew rice could grow submerged in aquatic environments.
Escaping Yoland's curiosity of her lifeblood was rice itself was the seed, the part of a plant enclosed within an outer coating, a grass species growing a metre or two tall.
Yoland had split Pud Inc.’s corporate structure in two divisions. The packaged rice pudding aspect of the business, known as Packaged Product division. And coordination of Puderia franchises and marketing of the brand, the Puderia division.
Of the two, Packaged Product was the outright primary revenue source. Puderia’s margin was slim, as incoming franchise fees offset marketing expenditure. Puderia was an operation continuing for marketing outreach purposes. Puderia had meagre expectation of fruitful value in the form of profits.
There was debate of it achieving its stated ends of increasing Pud’s profile. Pud was benign, yet enticing, as customers expected homogenous, uniform, packaged foodstuff. Franchise standards were a liability, hindering, far more than helping, the Pud brand.
The line of Packaged Products had seized in the late nineties, now winnowed down to chocolate, caramel and cinnamon & raisin.
Attempts to innovate had faltered over the past two decades. Market share, product line and operations would for the foreseeable medium-term remain fixed.
So, squeezing profits meant increasing automation, refining the manufacturing procedures to dispose of the workforce wherever possible.
Yet the balance to achieve progress was iterative. With efforts to economise, and minimise staffing, Yoland took steps too far.
She expounded to managers how she viewed the world of business, the value she believed came of it. It seemed certain to an audience the words she crafted amounted to rich meaning for her. It would be clear such a worldview remained rational to her beliefs, but it kept an unnecessary shroud of abstraction to all others.
The realities of domestic cultivation and harvesting of rice had myriad hindrances. Economic, agricultural, a formidable litany of obstacles. This situation did not prevent exploring innovative solutions to overcome. Yoland, at the top of this venture, had an innovative mindset. Far too often, the directions it led down were to detriment. More hare-brained and hubris than helpful.
Yoland’s staff knew this. Often snickering about such flights of folly on her behalf behind her back. It was not difficult for her staff to agree at face value to naive suggestions, then continue in an effective, efficient form of operation.
Her memory was mercurial for what she had and had not said, believing whatever kept face, securing her pride. Senior executives could claim to have obeyed the word and letter of the correct course of action, in ignorance of those ideas, making eyes roll, corners of lips smirk, in knowing jest around her. As if a revered family matriarch had gotten senile.
In one regard, Yoland was inscrutable, more because of her big, blue eyes and perfect hair, affecting an icy immediacy, seeming blank yet resolute. As if she would never engage in self-reflection, even in moments of quiet solitude.
Yoland fancied herself temperate, a great misnomer of her own makeup. It was atypical for her to raise her voice, but the acidity of her personality undercut any self-claims to being mild-mannered. To those who knew her, she was a viper of unrelenting pursuit of triumph - for her and hers to win, and you and yours to lose. Yoland Fuchs lived by game theory. A prisoner’s dilemma attitude toward mutual conciliation, reviling compromise and consensus as a gross contradiction of the natural laws.
Yoland understood the US Code and its state counterparts to be a fiction edited at the whim of those blessed with the financial capacity to influence the authorities. When Ayn Rand’s Motherland gave way from the Soviet Union from which her family fled, to a Russian Federation privatising state-owned Soviet industrial behemoths that would’ve made Rand weep for joy, the soon-to-be oligarchs were said to benefit. Yet as modern Russia was considered to the West as a land of billionaire mobsters, the American republic proved itself to be as illusory a democracy as Russia could claim, a plutocracy of billionaires every bit as much as Rand’s Mother Rus.
Of even bearing though the framers of the Constitution may have been, and revered as Founding Fathers of unassailable virtue they came to be considered, the firewalls installed to mitigate abuses of power couldn't heed the needs of the underprivileged masses from a corps of organised and financially turbocharged advocates of myriad interests drafting legislation on behalf of their clients, often in glaring contradiction of what could be fairly considered the common good by an even-minded analyst.
When Yoland Fuchs didn't like the law lying at her feet, to which she lived under as a citizen born into an imagined community and its attendant codes of behaviour, powerless to the futility of campaigning to alter the direction of said law she did not feel. Would a tiresome campaign and loot boxes of lucre be employed to whittle away the ramparts upon which the burdensome hindrance held? Most certainly, though in Yoland’s mind, not entirely regrettably. For she saw victory in prevailing over an injustice to her eyes. Satiating sweetness in winning, inevitably implying a loser in a fittingly Darwinian zero-sum game, of which she was scarcely willing to concede another mode of game theory to be worthy of consideration.
Her vision was clear: transform a food manufacturer into an empire, a nation-builder or breaker. Of ignominious means and reputation as the United Fruit Company, eating up stray Latin republics, drawn left into the whirlpool of socialism. Spitting out right-wing death squads, and Chiquita bananas. Packaged in the frivolity of Carmen Miranda’s hip-gyrating, calypso syncopated rhythms.
2
The Champs-Élysées of lobbying - more akin to Hades than Elysium in the pantheon of politics - was K Street in America's capital district.
Shrewd, well-connected, often ruthless in its means, if K Street wished it so, representative democracy may very well reflect it, word and letter.
Phalanxes of lobbyists vastly outnumbered Congressional seats, in a Battle of Thermopylae whereby the Persian horde would obliterate the will of the Spartan’s 300-strong, a number just shy of Congress’ 535.
Yoland was meeting with a lobbying firm’s most senior official in a K Street building in Washington, D.C.
The head of the lobying firm, Trent Tolle, inspired himself with jurisprudence. Tolle was sought after for vacancies on the highest courts in the land, presiding upon the machinations and networks of his namesake firm, Tolle & Associates.
Tolle filled vacancies for sympathetic American court judgeships, from the federal districts, to all lower jurisdictions trickling down.
Tolle’s position was to insert candidates meeting his approval to hold lifetime appointments at the apex of a federal government branch - notwithstanding a Senate confirmation which had become more contentious than formality predominantly had in the past 30 years - making him a kingmaker.
Tolle's organisation had the networks to offer ideological influence, resourced to achieve its ends to mould the American judicial landscape. The principle of judicial impartiality was a useful veil to the public, behind which a battle of ideology waged, sometimes as rich as the other government branches.
Trent ushered Yoland into his office. Shelves of formidable legal tomes formed the two walls next to the entrance, James Madison and John Jay portraits on the walls