Chapter 708 - 332: Flattery

The Mayor’s Office on the top floor of Pittsburgh City Hall.

Leo Wallace sat behind his desk, working through the mountain of paperwork that had piled up for the day.

He picked up the first report.

It was for the approval of an expansion at the heavy machinery plant in Erie City.

The report detailed the additional land area the factory required, the projected number of workers to be hired, and the plans for the accompanying logistics routes.

Leo carefully verified the figures.

This type of approval process was highly unusual in Pennsylvania.

According to the traditional market-based logic of the United States, if a factory wanted to expand, it just needed the money, the land, and a favorable environmental impact assessment. The Mayor would typically only show up for the ribbon-cutting ceremony.

But within the Industrial Revival Alliance established by Leo, the rules had been completely rewritten.

This Alliance was now a highly collaborative production community.

Erie City, Scranton, Johnston, Newcastle—these cities were no longer isolated administrative units. Leo had forcibly integrated their industrial foundations.

The primary purpose of this integration was to prevent internal friction.

Leo was keenly aware that the decline of these Rust Belt Cities over the past few decades stemmed, in part, from a kind of self-destructive, cutthroat competition.

Whenever Washington put out a bid for an infrastructure contract, these cities would race to the bottom, slashing land prices, offering tax breaks, and even sacrificing workers’ rights to win the bid.

In the end, they often won the contract, but all the profits went into the pockets of multinational conglomerates, while the cities themselves continued to languish near the poverty line.

Leo had put an end to that dynamic.

Now, all requests for expansion and increases in production capacity within the Alliance were centrally managed by the command center in Pittsburgh.

Every factory was a cog in this vast industrial chain.

If a factory wanted to expand, it had to prove to Leo that its added capacity was urgently needed by the market and wouldn’t undercut similar factories in other Alliance cities.

Leo looked at the financial projections in the report.

The Mayor of Erie City, Ron Smith, had added a handwritten note at the end of the application: We need this workshop to complete that order for LNG processing equipment destined for Germany.

Leo mentally reviewed the data.

The Germans needed energy equipment from Pennsylvania, and only this particular plant in Erie could manufacture the core transmission components. Even running at full capacity, their output was still falling short by twenty percent.

The expansion was justified.

Leo picked up a pen and signed his name at the end of the document.

The nib scratched softly across the paper.

When it came to factories within the Alliance, Leo spared no mental effort.

As for factories outside the Alliance system, however, Leo paid them no mind.

If some small, private factory in Erie City that wasn’t part of the Revival Alliance wanted to expand, Leo wouldn’t give them a second glance, even if they leveled an entire mountain.

He permitted free competition to exist, but he only managed the factories that were integrated into his system and abided by his rules.

The next document was the weekly settlement report for the Alliance’s note system.

The system was running smoothly, with hundreds of thousands of workers and thousands of businesses relying on it completely for their daily transactions.

Leo checked the capital pool’s liquidity indicators; all were at the high end of the safe range.

He approved the issuance of an additional fifty million in Alliance notes to cover advance payments for materials on a new batch of municipal projects.

He tapped his desk tablet to life, and the screen displayed a live feed of the Inland Port’s Phase Two construction site.

Hundreds of large excavators were leveling the ground, while automated container cranes were undergoing final calibration.

Leo checked the project schedule; the project was fifteen days ahead of schedule.

He issued a direct order to the port authority, telling them to immediately begin the bidding process for the Phase Three warehousing and logistics center.

Item by item, he moved through his agenda, methodically managing every facet of the city.

Allocating funds, zoning land, directing the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands.

Every one of his decisions directly affected the lives of ordinary people.

Ethan pushed open the office door, holding a thick, bound document in his hand.

"Boss, this is the final monthly operations report for the Rust Belt Health Trust." Ethan placed the document on Leo’s desk.

Leo opened the report.

To date, the Mutual Aid Alliance covered more than eighty percent of the permanent residents in Western Pennsylvania.

Collective purchasing, which bypassed pharmacy benefit managers entirely, had proven to be tremendously powerful.

The report listed price changes for several key medications.

For the commonly used insulin aspart injection, the price per unit had dropped from over two hundred dollars to just twelve dollars.

The cost for a single course of treatment with a specialty drug for certain cardiovascular diseases fell from five thousand dollars to four hundred dollars.

The quality of the medications was fully assured.

All medications were shipped directly from the high-standard production lines of giants like Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson. They were then delivered to licensed pharmacies in each community through an independent cold-chain logistics network established by the Mutual Aid Alliance.

The entire distribution process was under strict digital surveillance, eliminating any possibility of counterfeit or substandard products entering the supply chain.

Ethan pointed to the report’s appendix.

"We’ve collected feedback from the communities," Ethan said. "Right now, the core demographic drawn to our Mutual Aid Alliance consists of patients with chronic illnesses who require long-term medication."

Ethan turned to a page with a pie chart that clearly showed the demographic breakdown.