False Gods

With the nationalization of healthcare, America's Health Stores is sitting on a potential gold mine and the senior executives know it. But as backlash from the populace and an increasing discontent grows in the general public, the CEO and his top company officials fear that they may not get all the profits that the National Inclusive Medical Act promises them. They begin cutting the salaries and benefits from the retail pharmacy's 250,000 employees and redirecting that money into their own salary and bonus packages while freezing all new spending at the store level in order to help boost their stock price. On Election Day, a young pharmacy technician embarks upon a bold plan to begin a grass-roots employee stock buyback program. Enlisting the help of Cam and Barbara Carter, two of New York's finest and most successful financial gurus, the operation is launched when AHS, as well as the rest of the nation, is consumed with the results of the presidential election. When the employee plan is discovered by the senior officers, it is largely dismissed as not being feasible for the hourly employees due to the high cost of the company's stock. But when a fourteen-year-old dies from a misfilled prescription at a Florida AHS pharmacy, everything changes. The teenager's death suddenly becomes national news, and with it, the decline of AHS' stock price begins--facilitating even larger numbers of employees purchasing stock with the goal of obtaining an inside majority in order to reconfigure the leadership of the company. At a West Texas university, a college professor hands out the same midterm assignment he always has, challenging his class to work in groups and offer up ideas how small businesses can not only survive in difficult economies, but actually grow and thrive. One group comes up with a strategy whose brilliance is in its simplicity. As the students put the strategy into play utilizing social media, the idea goes viral in a matter of days and garners participation across the nation. The chief-level executives of the nation's largest, richest and most powerful corporations find themselves suddenly wondering where their sales have all gone when middle-class America begins abandoning the national brands for the locally-owned businesses. Wall Street finds itself no longer able to dictate the economy and the corporations are demanding that their elected officials intercede. As the employee stock buyback gains momentum and the college students' small business project sweeps the nation, powerful forces in the upper echelons of America's largest corporations meet in private and come up with their own strategy and tactics for neutralizing the employees and college students. But the young people find help from the most unlikely of places and in doing so, embark upon a path that will ultimately topple not only the most powerful people in business, but the most powerful people in the U.S. government as well.