Page 46 - Billy Graham in Heaven

The Hemispheric War
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to get tight. Much of the upper class was unaffected except for a fashionable aversion to buying Third Millennium.
America used every depression-prevention method it knew including deficit spending and lowered interest rates. Even a record seven quantitative easings by the Fed involving the printing of around fourteen-trillion new dollars was ineffectual. And finally a Treasury campaign with 300 million buttons shouting: “Consumption Creates Confidence!” Nothing worked.
So the U.S. began to search outside itself for the cause. One certainty was that billions of dollars were dropping out of the economy to pay for cocaine. People were returning to that antidepressant standby to fill the psychological hole that their plunging consumption left. Patriotic Americans began hating the large coke producers such as Peru, Columbia and Ecuador. A prohibitive tariff was slapped on the exports of the three countries, and it became a sin against the U.N. to trade with the trio. War talk abounded.
You might think the continuing Middle Eastern wars would provide enough fear and excitement. Nope. By 2026 they were mostly a simmering boil of low-tech war lords or outlandish Sharia-law dictators on the ground, while the big powers like Russia, America and Europe bombed safely but boringly from the air. The media hardly ever reported those wars, and they were far from a potent national stimulant.
Then 17 DEA agents were shot, execution style, and their mutilated bodies dragged through the streets of Bogotá behind electric crotch rockets. America retaliated by bombing cocaine factories in Cartagena. Peruvians