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Yoland Fuchs was heir to a rice pudding company, her ancestor’s confectioners in the days of the 19th century robber barons in the Ohio River.

Yoland’s rice pudding business had always characterised itself as one with Pittsburgh, crucible of the US industrialist American Dream, out of the ashes of US Steel. A home of titans of heavy industry.

A Yinzer, native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to her veins, the so-called City of Bridges abided by Yoland's every whim to reach the uppermost echelons of American corporate crust.

Nibbling away at the vestiges of British mercantilism from which the soil of Penn’s former colony rose to statehood. A gift from King George III to Sir William Penn sprang the City of Brotherly Love via his son upon the shores of the Delaware River. Penn's namesake offspring to sowing the seeds of the forest land.

At the confluence of the Allegheny, Ohio and Monongahela sat, a Pennsylvania borough monikered of William Pitt the Elder. 18th century British statesman, Prime Minister, sympathiser for the colonial ambitions within the American Revolution. An active proponent of Pax Britannica and its expansion against imperial competitors.

Yoland’s family settled alongside Germanics taking flights for more pious grounds, the other Germans being the Pennsylvania Dutch, a misnomer of sorts. A term lost in translation to outside communities from the original Deutsch, the German word for 'German' i.e. Pennsylvania German.

Pittsburgh was a heartland of blue-collar industry, white-collar capital accumulating from its profitability. BNY Mellon, of the famous Mellon family, anchored Pittsburgh’s finance industry. Home to modern, innovative R&D efforts from Carnegie Mellon University, again of the Mellon namesake, as well as the Scottish American tycoon, Andrew Carnegie, whose ventures gave birth to US Steel.

Yoland had never met a member of the Mellon clan, despite both families being household names as Pittsburgh tycoons. Yoland sometimes daydreamed what it must be like to have holdings in such formidable fields of banking and oil.

Her self-esteem in food processing was secure - her family’s products adorned the pantry shelves of every single American home. Her foodstuffs were the first a native-born American sampled following breastfeeding. If you are what you eat, at least some part of each American was made by her company’s product.

The same applied with petroleum. The lifeblood of the industrialised world, if one drove into a Gulf Oil station to fill up their vehicle’s tank, then the Mellon legacy would touch those customers, but otherwise, it couldn’t be fairly argued Gulf Oil touched the daily lives directly of each and every American, living inside them on a cellular level like metabolised pudding.

Heavy industry and manufacturing had given way to services, as true an emblem of progress of all developed countries. In that way, Pittsburgh’s heritage cemented the fiction of what Yoland looked to revive - a reanimation of a bygone era for good reason. When wages rise, manufacturing must shift elsewhere, seeking cheaper labour inputs.

Yoland bridled at China and Japan as the modern-day creditors financing the US. Yoland interpreted this as loss, yet for her empire to blossom, Pud needed to import rice from East Asia.

Yoland’s duties devolved far from managing Pud's relationships with Chinese suppliers. She thought fit to rail against a trade imbalance, oblivious she was a driver of it. Pud profited from the low costs of Chinese agricultural output.

Yoland did not understand China, nor wanted to. She paid little heed to China’s nominal communism, seeing it more through the lens of Deng’s 1978 reforms. Still, its vastness was overwhelming. From a soft power perspective, nothing cultural about the Middle Kingdom fascinated her.

China to Yoland was soy sauce, people cycling to and from textile and toy manufacturing jobs - little else. Economic colossus by sheer population size. The US germinated any technological initiatives from her perspective.

Yoland was sanguine about America’s place in the 21st century. To her mind, the ‘American Century,’ coined by Time editor Henry Luce, would sustain.

In the modern day, ‘America’ is synonymous with the 48 contiguous, and 2 non-contiguous states of a federal republic, spanning the North American continent from “sea to shining sea”, at the expense of the other 34 sovereign states in the Americas.

Manifest Destiny saw to it the sons and daughters of the Sons of Liberty, throughout the generations, would look upon liberty as an incorruptible, high-minded virtue, deifying novelist Ayn Rand to a philosopher-queen.

The Russian Revolution, ushering in the one-party rule of Vladimir Lenin’s Russian Communist Party, in the bitterest twist of ironies, is what libertarian acolytes owe their intellectual guiding light upon.

Rand was born Alisa Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, then the capital of the Russian Empire, epicentre of the February Revolution. Rand née Rosenbaum’s father’s business was confiscated in the upheaval, seeking shelter in the anti-communist, White Russian-held Crimea.

Rand took solace and edified in the ways of laissez-faire capitalism and cold reason thereafter - rejecting altruism, embracing egoism.

The only ostensible parameters were the borders cartographers such as the land’s namesake Vespucci nominally agreed as a shared fiction.

Even this was undermined for the conceit it was. America implicitly suggested two continents of landmass, occupying an entire hemisphere of the planet.

To this conceit and shared fiction, could Yoland believe. To the shared lie of a Florentine’s lines on a map, she envisioned a fortune leading a Spanish conquistador to weep in contrast to his vast auric bonanza.

Pud rice pudding was a household brand name. Used as a proprietary phrase for rice pudding in general - like Jell-O for jelly or Frisbee for frisbees.

Yoland never ate Pud, seldom even eating rice. She seldom spoke even of rice pudding. Business she talked of - deals, competitors, wining and dining prospective stakeholders. But not rice pudding, the proprietary name of her main product line.

What did the apotheosis of her rice pudding business look like to Yoland’s prospective mind? Was it of affinity with a Heinz 57 Varieties ketchup, or the inexplicable ubiquity of Nescafé Blend 43? A Pud #38 or other such number, #76 to tie-in to patriotic sympathies? Being an empire, were her aspirations to be bound to pre-defined territories? Such as within the US market, or was it to infuse its presence to foreign markets? Pud's reach extended only to the bounds of the fifty states, as well as the territory of Puerto Rico. The US military had held stock of Pud products in Guam, Okinawa and Diego Garcia. Further by extension, the hundreds of other foreign US military posts.

The Armed Forces were conducting her whims without her forethought or effort. Supplying the military to which it stocked its own supplies to its whims from there. Desserts were the breakfast of champions for those defending the Stars and Stripes. The creature comforts of home were a familiar fixture of US bastions. Whether in remote Afghanistan, or aboard a naval vessel on the high seas.

Yoland took great encouragement from the Pentagon doing her own bidding. She hastened to yearn for imperialism. The efforts on the Pentagon’s behalf to these aims, they were oblivious to. Still, they sufficed to meet Yoland’s aims.

Yet, the desire for imperialism, wherever it may emanate from, is seldom satiated. It wants more, as is human nature. Humans look to conquer, to usurp, to hold power, absolute above the other. Steadfast protection of the in-group toward the out-group. Extremist displays of courage, pleasure-seeking or self-aggrandisement.

Yoland desired to aggrandise her lot from her present station in life. A recognisable and ubiquitous example of human nature. The absence of a moderating force to such aims - recognition of ‘enough,’ or satiety of aims. As if the accretion of power served to speed up and increase the ability to accrete yet more power.

In absence of serious and sombre self-reflection, not on a mental trajectory to recognise an endpoint of her aspiration satiated. Sad for those who would find themselves in the way of her aspirant designs. Yoland’s beliefs were of a Manifest Destiny for her and hers of the American tradition. Turbocharged with latent instincts of dominance over the out-group. A beneficiary of millennia of the survival of the fittest, standing with two feet upon the Earth.

Yet to Yoland, where would buying in to the concept of Manifest Destiny end for her? If not outer space, where would Yoland delimit her imaginings of Manifest Destiny? Military bases bearing the Stars and Stripes on otherwise sovereign soil? Did Pud need to usurp the synonymity of Tang with American astronauts? Its viscosity in a tub suited to gravitational qualities of orbital life in a spacecraft.

Pud was a recognisable fixture on close to all supermarket shelves in the United States. Yoland harboured ambitions of similar ubiquity in all 193 countries of the world. Would one or two do, a half-dozen? Multinationals could lay claim to such an accolade.

The People’s Republic of China would always be a tough nut to crack. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea could all but be disregarded as a lost cause for such a venture. In its present state of total war, Syria did not seem as if it could be a market, unless humanitarian aid agencies could couple Pud among food supplies. Sub-Saharan African nations seemed in such poverty to be dubious prospects. She knew Somalia was a ‘failed state’ yet was not sure what that meant as it related to consumables.

In any regard, these examples would not be likely to bear financial fruits. Unilever seemed to have gone as close to finding its brands into the world's myriad corners. Supplying teabags to Gulf countries, or sachets of shampoo to Indian street vendors. The most apt markets for Yoland to follow was her fellow Yinzer company, Heinz. Where customers could find Heinz’s baked beans, Pud could follow and adapt.

She was oblivious to the unique cultural and linguistic necessities of going multinational. Only on a small scale could Pud export to foreign markets. The first obstacle had been product packaging in English. Also, an absence of certification of EU or halal standards. Plus, the nutritional information displayed was only to FDA standards. In likelihood, Pud would need to incorporate in most jurisdictions in which it ran. That made the EU’s 27-member state authority the most attractive in the immediate.

Profitability was also a factor for Yoland to calculate. An African state may hold millions in population, but there were set-up costs in each country. Then the price point at which an average citizen could afford a pack of Pud at market cost left little profit. What good was laying claim to being on the shelves in Kenya, or Equatorial Guinea, if running at a loss? Was it enough to consider the market may develop? If so, Pud would be there on the ground level when a middle class appeared.

What would be the first venture outward from American soil to bear the flag of Pud? To devour whichever local traditions of rice pudding may be native to such lands. Whether of the Caucasus, Levantine or Nordic varieties, or myriad more. A United Nations of rice pudding varieties, even of regional varieties within a nation. Most foreign preparations were home cooked, thus, Pud’s packaged form would be a unique offering on shelves in markets, with exceptions in European countries. The world was ripe for packaged rice pudding to supplant the homemade kind.

Was the key to multinational success a sound foundation in the home country? Was a better imperative to sow the seeds of Pud Inc. deeper into America’s foundations? Yoland was not sanguine about this possibility.

Market maturity limited Pud’s homegrown growth prospects. There always existed the prospect of whittling profit margins greater via reduced costs. Economising on its workforce by automation, championing the employment of casual workers. Profit-maximising had been the guiding light of Yoland’s efforts to this point in her career.

Yoland relished yet more profit eked out of operations over decades. Her ambitions now yearned for the need of the human spirit to expand its geographic reach. Laying claim to new markets, novel riches. In a market unbeknownst to its business landscape, Pud courted risk. Trial and error, coupled with loss, would be a feature of such a venture. But Yoland trusted the ultimate outcome would be to prevail.

Would the operations of manufacture still be within the US? Outsourced in a race to the bottom of ever lower wages, or a combination of the two? Her attentions away from American operations to develop new markets could come awry. How could she mitigate this eventuality?

Did one thing to lead another? Territory begat more territory, a lust to conquer and make one’s own ever more peoples and land. Yoland omitted to enquire of herself when enough may be enough.

She wished for empire. But Yoland had not prompted herself to answer why. If so, she could at best have attested to falling prey to bold and blind ambition, lust in purity for more. A rationalisation entwined with the concept of Manifest Destiny. A sense of place within the pantheon of great American mercantilists who made this land what it was to this day. Enterprising, innovating, a vanguard of progress.

From the Thirteen Colonies to the expansion of buying Louisiana from France. The annexation of the Republic of Texas leading to war with Mexico, resulting in yet more land captured from its southern neighbour. The sale of Alaska from Russia across the Bering Strait and annexation of Hawaii.

Also, in 1898, further territories developed thereafter in the Spanish-American War, including Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam.

Yet the tenor of American expansion took on a subtler form upon entering the 20th century, as Latin America experienced its powerful northern neighbour’s predations. After World War II, only the Soviets remained in contention for Great Power status.

Could the Founding Fathers have laid claim to foreseeing the eventual territorial bounds? Who could presage what the territorial borders would be a century hence from the present day? Empires waxed and waned, as if by Newtonian law.

China posed as an outlier of sorts. The 20th century had seen China’s fortunes fall to near-ubiquitous grinding poverty. The Middle Kingdom’s rise proved a rare example of an empire having fallen only to rise again.

Yoland willed Pud to extend its dominion beyond coterminous USA. It would call for a second act pushing beyond its relative stagnation in the land of its birth. It would call for a second wind akin to the prosperity unleashed by Deng’s 1978 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.