Glen Tate - 299 Days - The 17th Irregulars

As mayor, when the spotted owl crisis hit, Winters got to dole out all the state and federal money for the closed plant. All the worker retraining money, all the displaced worker grants; all that money. Gobs and gobs of it just showed up from Washington DC and Olympia.

It was largely up to Winters to decide who got the money and who didn’t. He settled a lot of old scores that way. He had a very long memory. One minor comment that could be taken either as a joke or an insult ten or twenty years before was all it took for Winters to use his “discretion” to steer favors away from one person and toward another. He loved it. It was like there was a giant scoreboard in his head. The scoreboard showed who acknowledged that he was the boss and who crossed him.

Winters did a magnificent job of handing out the state and federal cash during the rough times of the early 90s. He easily won a spot on the county commission, which consisted of the three elected officials who ran the county. Now, with more territory, his reach was wider than just Frederickson. There were more permits that needed his approval, which came at a price. Not cash in brown paper bags. He was more sophisticated than that. Getting a subdivision or commercial building approved by him, or getting a county contract, or getting a cousin out of jail meant that you owed Ed Winters for the rest of your life. And he would call in the favor. At a minimum, if Winters helped someone then they would vote for whomever Winters said. They would donate to causes he told them to, most of which weren’t really charities but hired Winters and his friends as “consultants.” Winters might ask someone to invest in one of his real estate ventures. And they did.

Winters spent the next twenty plus years building up an empire. Nothing happened in Frederickson or the county without him. Nothing. He viewed Frederickson as his town. He owned it. The people living there were like the little plastic human figures in a toy train set. The “townspeople” as he derisively called them. They were little people playing a part, and he ran the show. He loved that.

In the early 2000s, a threat to his empire emerged: Mexicans. They started to move in, and they didn’t understand how things worked. They actually ran independent little businesses, without cutting him in. What were they thinking? This was giving others in town the idea that it was possible to do things without him. That had to stop.

Winters started a campaign to shut down “unlicensed businesses.” The townspeople, who were not keen on these new brown-skinned people who talked funny, were happy to rally behind their leader…and make the town “safe” by having only licensed businesses. New ordinances were passed, imposing fines and even jail time for the heinous crime of operating a little grocery or used tire business without several licenses and approvals. The city attorney—a pathetic bootlicker who did whatever Winters said—started suing the Mexican businesses for licensing violations. The Mexicans thought they had left this kind of thing in Mexico, but quickly concluded they needed to play ball. Just like in Mexico.

Soon the Mexicans came to Winters asking for relief. He told them how his “charities” and investment opportunities worked. He also told them how to register to vote. Washington State had a very strong “Motor Voter” law that allowed anyone applying for a driver’s license to register to vote. No proof of citizenship was required. Hell, no identification of any kind was required. Anyone could vote — several times in each election, for whomever they were told.

Washington State went to an all vote-by-mail system instead of requiring people to physically go to the polls. This was to save voters the “extreme inconvenience” of going to a school or church every few years and taking ten minutes to vote in person. Of course, the politicians had a bigger reason to impose vote-by-mail. The county would mail a ballot to each name appearing on the voter registration list. It was not uncommon for one household to get two or more ballots per “person” because signing up with at least two names was encouraged. Multiple voter registrations was “how we do it” in Frederickson, the Mexicans were told.

All this voter fraud was actually considered humanitarian and enlightened. Winters even got a grant from the state election office to register “underserved” voters in his county. The easier they made it for anyone to vote (several times), the more they were doing to encourage minority voting. And voting was always good; politicians would ask, “You’re not against voting, are you?”

To “help minorities,” Winters ran a Mexican on the city council to show everyone how “diverse” Frederickson was. Everyone—white and Mexican—thanked Winters for his “leadership” on bringing the two communities together. Of course, the Mexican city council member did whatever Winters said. He got more and more Mexicans elected, and they stayed elected as long as they did exactly what they were told. All the while, everyone lauded Winters for fighting “racism” by bossing around brown-skinned people and taking advantage of them. He laughed at that.

Now that he was firmly in control of everything, Winters was glad to have the Mexicans in town. He was very happy to have all the new Mexican “customers” for his much-needed services, like permit approvals. He was happy to have all those votes—not just for him, but for other candidates. He could make deals with state legislators and even the area’s U.S. Congressman to deliver votes in exchange for grants and government programs, that Winters got to administer. It was beautiful.

The stupid townspeople, Winters marveled, never said anything. They never demanded clean government. They never questioned what he was doing. They did what they were told. They wanted free stuff. They had been convinced their whole lives, starting in elementary school, that the solution to a problem was more government. They were so used to corruption that they just assumed that was how it was. One time, when a new editor for the newspaper came in and started asking questions, the townspeople pretty much ran him out of town. It warmed Winters’ heart to see that. His townspeople loved him.

As the economy started to tank, it became harder and harder to run the city and county. Businesses shut down in record numbers. A few years later, D2—or the “Second Great Depression”—as some called it, really got rolling. Frederickson looked like a ghost town with all the boarded up buildings.

Tax money, Winters said to himself. That’s what was wrong. Boarded up buildings didn’t produce any tax money. At first, the “recession,” as it was initially called, was a blessing to Winters.

That’s right: a blessing. There was all that stimulus money to dole out—and Winters was the guy who everyone came to for all that big, fat federal money. He made sure the number of city and county employees didn’t decrease during that time. He actually hired more government workers as a “local stimulus” project. It was all federal money, so who cared?

Then, the federal money ran out. So did the state money. Winters was faced with deciding what to do. Increase fees for everything? There was no one left to pay the fees. Winters had to start firing government workers, which was hard at first. So many of those people had helped him get where he was, but he was where he wanted to be so who cared? The townspeople, after all, were just little plastic figures playing a part in the train set Winters was running. It was actually much easier to fire them than he’d thought.

He had to fire about half the police and essentially empty the jail, which had a predictable effect. He needed to have a volunteer security force. He had plenty of volunteers; they were all the people Winters had helped over the years and their sons. (Winters didn’t allow any Mexicans to volunteer for security. It was just understood that white people ran things.)