This is chapter 25
The first section begins with Taggart's nervous anticipation of the announcement of the nationalization of d'Anconia Copper, whilst the pitiful state the nation has succumbed to is expounded upon: how "pull peddlers" in every possible concern--transportation, steel, wage-raise, suspended sentence--have replaced competent men, dynamic like their predecessors, but also unseemly, like that which breeds, feeds, and moves upon the stillness of corpses--parasites. The news arrives that on the moment of the official nationalization of d'Anconia Copper, the company--each of its ports--had simultaneously committed suicide, the workers having long been evaluated and paid. Francisco would later leave a message asserting the exact conscious knowledge of what he had done, replacing the 1984-like calander on the towers of New York with the line "Brother, you asked for it!"