#civil service of canada

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Gas jets in federal prison cells denied by commissioner," Montreal Star. December 16, 1969. Page 3. --- Canadian Press OTTAWA - Penitentiaries Commissioner Allen J. MacLeod denied yesterday that cells at a federal prison near Montreal are equipped with gas jets to quell excited prisoners.

But Mr. MacLeod said in an interview the contention that prisoners are frequently gassed as a control measure is "ridiculous it's just not true.'

However, he said that guards in some prisons carry cans of "tear gas. shall we say," as a defence against violent prisoners.

The contention that gas jets are installed in the ceilings of the special correctional unit at St. Vincent de Paul Penitentiary was made by Robert J. Deslauriers, assistant research director for the Public Service Alliance of Canada, and backed up by a correctional officer.

They were part of a union move seeking better wages and working conditions for about 2,000 federal prison employees. A dispute with the treasury board, the federal bargaining agent, is before an arbitration tribunal headed by Mr. Justice André Montpetit of Montreal, a Quebec Superior Court judge.

His eyebrows rose somewhat as Mr. Deslauriers, reading a brief, said that guards at St. Vincent de Paul "are constantly bombarded by sudden deafening outbursts of yells and cries of men clinging to cell bars screaming to high heaven about their desperate state, of others being gassed to semi-consciousness by the emission of gas through jets permanently installed in the wall or ceiling of the cells, of dealing with homosexuality."

Mr. Justice Montpetit interrupted to ask who had written this and Mr. Deslauriers said he had.

The vivid description was used to illustrate the need for shorter hours, a shorter working career and better pay for guards. The brief frequently mentioned the depressing and dangerous aspects of the work. It said that since a rehabilitation program gave prisoners more freedom of movement in 1961, violent incidents in which guards have been injured, held hostage or killed has numbered in the hundreds. Mr. Deslauriers said in an interview he visited the special correctional unit in 1967, before it was opened, and was shown the gas jets by a reluctant warden.

"He didn't want to show them to me." Mr. Deslauriers said. "I mentioned that's how you treat animals.

"Whether or not they use it, it's inhumane."

A guard, also helping present the union brief, said the jets have been used often since the prison opened. It is designed for hard-core prisoners who don't respond to incentives to rehabilitation in other institutions.

Mr. MacLeod said there is a special program "for trouble-makers" at the special unit but the gas jets were news to him. Negotiations between the guards and the government collapsed several weeks ago after the government put an offer of two per cent on the table.

The guards said the government position also would remove some of the benefits they now enjoy.

At least 10 of the 26 points they raised for arbitration yesterday were rejected by treasury board negotiators as non-negotiable.

The guards, who staff 34 federal institutions, have voted to hold an illegal strike if progress isn't made in arbitration.

Their brief said the government has consistently refused to recognize their special occupational problems and an explosive situation has developed as a result.

They are asking an average 13.7- per-cent wage increase retroactive to Oct. 1, 1968, and an average 8.5 per cent retroactive to Oct. 1, 1969.

This would raise the maximum in the lowest grade to $7,812 from the current $6,133 and in the highest to $9,928 from $7,843,

Among the union demands rejected as non-negotiable by the treasury board bargainers:

-A $25-a-shift bonus for handling canine patrols so vicious the guards are often bitten.

-Access to personal files to counter mistakes or "slanderous" reports. -$1,000 annual bonuses for work in maximum security prisons rather than the present $700.

"Rehabilitation leave" at age 55 or after 25 years of service, with pension at 60.

The brief said a man needs some time to get straightened out after 25 years of work in a federal prison.

[andrasthehun]

My Rant Today

January 30, 2025 I’m feeling rather irritated right now. The US administration’s illegal actions are shocking. How can they do all of this? They are firing civil servants protected by legislation and freezing programs Congress approved and funded. Surprisingly, I have seen little outrage or opposition in the news yet. Why does this matter to me? I live in Canada and am not a U.S. citizen, but I…

[cleoselene]

from facebook of all places

posted by Jay Michaelson, and sourced by him as well:

Hello! I'm posting in response to the many sincerely anguished claims that not enough is being done to stop Trump. This is not reflected in the facts. - Represented by Public Citizen Litigation Group and State Democracy Defenders Fund, the Alliance for Retired Americans, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) filed suit on Monday against the Treasury Department “for sharing confidential data with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), run by Elon Musk.” Go to Public Citizen's website to learn all about this lawsuit, which is very likely to prevail. - On USAID, appearing with other Democratic lawmakers outside USAID offices on Monday, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) shouted, “Elon Musk, you didn't create USAID. The United States Congress did for the American people … like Elon Musk did not create USAID, he doesn't have the power to destroy it. And who's going to stop him? We are... This a constitutional crisis that we are in today.” Lawsuits have also been filed in this matter, and are also likely to prevail. - Hakeem Jeffries has announced lawsuits have been filed regarding the firings of inspectors general. - On Jan 21, Democracy Forward, was filed at 12:01 p.m. ET on Monday and accused Elon Musk's DOGE of being a "shadow operation led by unelected billionaires" that flouts federal transparency rules. That should win. - National Security Counselors filed a suit arguing that DOGE meets the requirements to be a federal advisory committee and is therefore legally required to have "fairly balanced" representation, keep regular minutes of meetings and allow public access to meetings. Clearly accurate. - Eighteen state attorneys general and a slew of immigrants' rights groups brought swift legal action against Trump after he signed his executive order seeking to ban birthright citizenship for some children born in the U.S., arguing that it violates the Fourteenth Amendment. Obviously, clearly unconstitutional. - "Schedule F" has been challenged in court by the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents employees in 37 agencies and departments. - Several immigrant rights groups in the United States, as well as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), have filed a lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump’s ban on asylum claims. - GLAD Law and the National Center For Lesbian Rights (NCLR) have sued to stop Trump's ban on trans people in the military. And there are many more - I'll link to a great list of them in the comments. Yes, there are Trump judges in the courts, and if Aileen Cannon types get these cases, Trump may prevail. But most judges are not like her. These actions are clearly illegal and/or unconstitutional, and they WILL be stopped. Just like the tariffs were not meant to prevail -- Trump won that round, "forcing" Canada and Mexico to take "action" on fentanyl -- these actions are not meant to prevail. They're meant to flood the zone with shit, confuse and immobilize us. They said they'd do "Shock and Awe" and that's what they've done. Nothing here should be surprising. Shock and Awe is up to YOU. I am not shocked, I am not in awe. Oh, and the "mainstream media" has reported on all of these. The info above has come from Newsweek, the NY Times, and other mainstream sources. Please stop attacking journalists when we are being threatened by the FBI. Who do you think you're helping by doing that? Stop it with the doomsaying and gloomsaying. Want to make a difference? Give thousands of dollars to Public Citizen, the ACLU, and similar groups. Show up at marches. Put your ass on the line and help protect people from ICE. If you're safe, do simple symbolic things (like changing your social media pictures) to support people who are not safe. Just like we should not obey in advance, we should not panic in advance either. This is not the end of democracy. That is just what the bad guys want you to think. Get over it and fight.

I don't know how many times I've heard "Dems do nothing!" when they are in fact doing a lot of things. You just don't hear about it because the mainstream news doesn't pay attention or you don't see out news beyond your social media feeds.

The other thing is, Dems don't break laws in their fights the way Republicans do. Your desire to turn every Dem POTUS into the Dick Cheney Version of the Executive but then screaming injustice! when the GOP does it -- you see the problem there?

[fandomtrumpshate]

Fan Labor Golden Needles

At the time of posting, we still have 26 glorious fan labor auctions that have no bids. That means this could be your chance to make a small donation and get some help with beta reading, sensitivity reading, specialist expertise, or even some more unique offers!

astriiformes is offering Culture picking, Sensitivity reading, Specialist expertise, and Research for ANY fandom. They list the following areas of expertise:

Jewish & American culture-picking, sensitivity reading for Jewish, aromantic, asexual, transgender (especially transmasculine), ADHD, autistic, and chronically and mentally ill characters, as well as writing queerplatonic relationships. Specialist expertise: Archives and archival work, stringed instruments and orchestras, queer history, scientific & medical history, historical research

birbleafs is offering Betaing for Genshin Impact; Star Wars (Original Trilogy, Prequel Trilogy, The Clone Wars, Legends / Extended Universe) and Jujutsu Kaisen

Blue_Rose_1066 is offering Betaing, Sensitivity reading, Specialist expertise for Wheel of Time; Cosmere - Brandon Sanderson; and Good Omens. Here's how they describe their areas of expertise:

I am a Judaic studies student and have a good familiarity with ancient Jewish history, as well as WW2 German and USSR front. I can also provide knowledge about dog training, knitting, Hebrew Bible, Jewish practices, migraines and chronic paid. I can provide sensitivity reading for gender nonconforming (agender, nonbinary), Bisexual/ Frey sexual. I can provide any type of beta reading needed. I tend to ask a lot of questions, and notice small details.

BrowserET is offering Betaing, Specialist expertise for Avatar The Last Airbender; Legend of Zelda; and Any fandom they've created for before. Their expertise is in Camping/Hiking and Chess.

Chestnut_pod is offering to read a book or watch a ballet of your choice and give it a full-length review.

coslyons is offering Specialist expertise for ANY fandom

I am offering to provide myself as a resource for "ask an engineer". My expertise is primarily in civil engineering, but I have some background in other sub-types of engineering. I'm happy to provide feedback on any work, help with brainstorming and ideation, or answer general information questions.

donnadonera is offering Betaing and Translation (English to Spanish) for Dragon Age (Any); The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System; Tian Guan Ci Fu / Heaven Official's Blessing; and Steven Universe

fireandhoney is offering Translation (English to French) for Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Conan Doyle stories, BBC Sherlock); Any fandom they've created for before; and Harry Potter (Marauders Era, Original Series)

Galwithalibrarycard is offering Betaing for 9-1-1 and 9-1-1 Lone Star; Les Misérables; and Stranger Things

griffindor111 is offering Betaing, Culture picking, Specialist expertise, and Worldbuilding for K-Pop (SEVENTEEN); and Haikyuu!!!

Culture-picking: Australian, as well as picking for 1st generation Asian immigrant in a western country Specialist expertise: Law (specifically Australian Law), coding (Python, HTML), violin and choir Worldbuilding: can help you worldbuild and finetune the finer details of your world

justtheblueberry is offering Typesetting for Genshin Impact; Haikyuu!!!; and any fandom they've created for before

Keladry is offering Betaing and American Culture picking for ANY fandom

Keladry is also offering Betaing and American Culture picking for Check Please!; Hockey RPF; and Marvel (Any)

kitkatkelly is offering Betaing, Culture picking, Specialist expertise for Good Omens; Our Flag Means Death; and Legend of Zelda.

Canada, English. Specialist expertise in music, especially singing, public service (government) work, modelling.

Lanterns is offering Betaing for Iron Widow; Gravity Falls; and Fruits Basket

Math-Is-Magic is offering Betaing, Sensitivity reading (ace and lesbian), and a unique offer to "Create/update Fanlore pages, stuff like that" for Mo Dao Zu Shi / The Untamed, The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System, Arcane and Dimension 20

Fanlore Pages: I'm happy to create a fanlore page on your choice of subject, or to overhaul an existing one. However, the less I know about the subject, the more I may need to rely on you for guidance and feedback. I.e. if you want me to create a page for one of your fics, you'd need to summarize the fic for me, or for a fandom I don't know, you'd have to point me towards the Big Things to know about the fandom and where I might get first-handed sources to read about it, etc.

Mouse9 is offering Betaing for The Magnus Archives/Protocol; Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Conan Doyle stories, BBC Sherlock, Elementary, Enola Holmes, Sherlock & Co.); 9-1-1 and 9-1-1 Lone Star

multifandom-fanfic-writer is offering Betaing for Naruto; Hannibal; and Ace Attorney

obsidianbyten is offering Betaing for Bungo Stray Dogs; Naruto; and The Owl House

queer_drunk_dwarf is offering Betaing for Minecraft Youtubers (DSMP, Parkour Civilization, QSMP); and Original Work

ranichi17 is offering Betaing, Culture picking, Sensitivity reading, Specialist expertise, Translation for A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones/House of the Dragon; Good Omens; Sherlock Holmes: Arthur Conan Doyle stories, Granada Holmes, Robert Downey Jr Movies, Watson CBS, the KAJ Mycroft series

I am also a native Filipino still living in the Philippines so I can help with the culture picking and translations in Filipino.

schweet_heart is offering Betaing and Specialist expertise for Merlin and the Biggles Series by W. E. Johns

have some (slightly rusty) skills in Latin and Old English if you need help to translate short pieces for spells or other purposes.

ShadowSpires is offering Betaing for Call of Duty; One Piece; and Star Wars (Original Trilogy, Prequel Trilogy, Sequel Trilogy, The Clone Wars, Rebels, Rogue One)

tiltedsyllogism is offering Betaing, Culture picking, and Specialist expertise for For All Mankind

Yankpicking (both language and culture); Russia-picking (both language and culture)

Toshokanin is offering Specialist expertise for Interview with the Vampire; Mo Dao Zu Shi / The Untamed, The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System, and Tian Guan Ci Fu / Heaven Official's Blessing

I will nitpick your library or bookshop fic! Let me help you make the most of these fun fandom settings, while also ensuring that any variation from the reality of the industry is a deliberate choice you make for your story.

winchestered_again is offering Sensitivity reading for Stranger Things; Any fandom they've created for before; and It by Stephen King

I have experience with stigmatized disorders that are often/mostly demonized/sensationalized in media, such as OCD (bar O-OCD/Pure O-OCD or cleanliness OCD, the most well-known), BPD, NPD, and DID to name ones that are probably the most known. I can also help where things like those + disorders like Autism intersect with gender identity and sexuality, particularly with FTM or Non-Binary / Genderfluid identities and can also speak on the AroAce spectrum of sexuality.

[contemplatingoutlander]

Technocrats argued that liberal democracy had failed. One Technocracy Incorporated pamphlet explained how the movement “does not subscribe to the basic tenet of the democratic ideal, namely that all men are created free and equal.” In the modern world, only scientists and engineers have the intelligence and education to understand the industrial operations that lie at the heart of the economy. Mr. Scott’s army of technocrats would eliminate most government services: “Even our postal system, our highways, our Coast Guard could be made much more efficient.” Overlapping agencies could be shuttered, and “90 percent of the courts could be abolished.” [color emphasis added] —Jill  Lepore , PhD, Harvard Professor of American History & Professor of Law

The historian Jill Lepore demonstrates how there are disturbing parallels between Elon Musk's recent political beliefs and that of his technocrat grandfather Joshua Haldeman.

According to another article by Davi Ottenheimer, Haldeman "fled" Canada to South Africa in 1950:

"Because he was under pressure following his 1940 arrest in Canada for being a part of an illegal political organization to destroy democracy called Technocracy. "Canada outlawed the political party as it had been determined to be a national security risk (anti-semitic, racist, and Nazi-adjacent)."

This is a gift🎁link, so there is no pay wall. It is worth reading, because it explains where many of Musk's peculiar beliefs about the importance of technocrats like himself taking over political systems. It also explains his weird fascination with "X."

Below the cut are some excerpts from the article.

Four years ago, I made a series for the BBC in which I located the origins of Mr. Musk’s strange sense of destiny in science fiction, some of it a century old. This year, revising the series, I was again struck by how little of what Mr. Musk proposes is new and by how many of his ideas about politics, governance and economics resemble those championed by his grandfather Joshua Haldeman, a cowboy, chiropractor, conspiracy theorist and amateur aviator known as the Flying Haldeman. Mr. Musk’s grandfather was also a flamboyant leader of the political movement known as technocracy. Leading technocrats proposed replacing democratically elected officials and civil servants — indeed, all of government — with an army of scientists and engineers under what they called a technate. Some also wanted to annex Canada and Mexico. At technocracy’s height, one branch of the movement had more than a quarter of a million members. Under the technate, humans would no longer have names; they would have numbers. One technocrat went by 1x1809x56. (Mr. Musk has a son named X Æ A-12.) Mr. Haldeman, who had lost his Saskatchewan farm during the Depression, became the movement’s leader in Canada. He was technocrat No. 10450-1. [...]

Technocrats argued that liberal democracy had failed. One Technocracy Incorporated pamphlet explained how the movement “does not subscribe to the basic tenet of the democratic ideal, namely that all men are created free and equal.” In the modern world, only scientists and engineers have the intelligence and education to understand the industrial operations that lie at the heart of the economy. Mr. Scott’s army of technocrats would eliminate most government services: “Even our postal system, our highways, our Coast Guard could be made much more efficient.” Overlapping agencies could be shuttered, and “90 percent of the courts could be abolished.” [...] Nevertheless, technocracy endured. Its spectacles grew alarming: Technocrats wore identical gray suits and drove identical gray cars in parades that evoked for concerned observers nothing so much as Italian Fascists. Mr. Musk’s grandfather was a technocracy stalwart. In 1940, when Canada banned Technocracy Incorporated — out of fear that its members were plotting to undermine the government or the war effort — Mr. Haldeman took out an ad in a newspaper, proclaiming technocracy a “national patriotic movement.”

Weeks later, when he tried to enter the United States for a technocracy speaking tour, he was denied entry at the border, possibly because of a new passport regulation that barred travel into the United States to “an alien whose entry would be contrary to the public safety” (something of an irony, given the current administration’s border policies). In Vancouver, British Columbia, he was arrested, convicted and sentenced to a fine or two months in jail. He later joined the antisemitic Social Credit Party, becoming its national chairman.

Mr. Haldeman retired from politics in 1949 and soon began thinking about moving to South Africa, which in 1948 announced the policy of apartheid. In 1950 he moved to Pretoria, where he wrote and distributed typewritten conspiratorial tracts. (Most have disappeared, but in 2023 I discovered several in university and private collections.) In May 1960, for instance, he wrote a pamphlet called “The International Conspiracy to Establish a World Dictatorship and Its Menace to South Africa,” a response to the unrest after the Sharpeville massacre. During those protests, Nelson Mandela was among 11,000 people arrested and jailed. Mr. Haldeman suggested the uprising had been staged.

He furthermore believed the West had been the subject of an “intensive mass mind conditioning” experiment, in which ideas he considered ludicrous, like the equality of races and the immorality of apartheid, were being spread by newspapers, magazines, radio, television and especially university professors. Convinced that the government was riddled with waste, he also proposed a finance committee to combat inefficiency, writing in all caps, “A watchdog financial agency is needed.”

That Mr. Musk has come to hold so many of the same beliefs about social engineering and economic planning as his grandfather is a testament to his profound lack of political imagination, to the tenacity of technocracy and to the hubris of Silicon Valley. [...] In 1995, after studying at the University of Pennsylvania, Mr. Musk left a Ph.D. program at Stanford to become a tech entrepreneur. He started a company called X.com in 1999. “What we’re going to do is transform the traditional banking industry,” he said. (Technocrats also planned to abolish banks. “We don’t need banks, bandits or bastards,” Joshua Haldeman once wrote.) Mr. Musk made a fortune when eBay acquired PayPal, which had merged with X.com, but in 2017 he bought back the URL, and it was at hand when he purchased Twitter and renamed it X, hoping to kill what he called the “woke mind virus” — echoes of his grandfather’s “mass mind conditioning.” Much that Mr. Musk has attempted to do at DOGE can be found in the technocracy manuals of the early 1930s.

Mr. Musk’s possible departure from Washington will not diminish the influence of Muskism in the United States. His superannuated futurism is Silicon Valley’s reigning ideology. In 2023 the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who helped staff DOGE, wrote “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto," predicting the emergence of “technological supermen.” It consists of a list of statements:

We can advance to a far superior way of living and of being. We have the tools, the systems, the ideas. We have the will. … We believe this is why our descendants will live in the stars. … We believe in greatness. … We believe in ambition, aggression, persistence, relentlessness — strength.

Mr. Andreessen cited, among his inspirations, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who in 1909 wrote “The Futurist Manifesto,” which glorified violence and masculine virility and opposed liberalism and democracy. It, too, is a list of statements:

We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness. We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist. … We want to sing the man at the wheel. … We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism. … Standing on the world’s summit, we launch once again our insolent challenge to the stars!

Ten years after Mr. Marinetti wrote “The Futurist Manifesto,” fists raised to the stars, he co-wrote the founding document of the movement led by Mussolini: “The Fascist Manifesto.”

Muskism isn’t the beginning of the future. It’s the end of a story that started more than a century ago, in the conflict between capital and labor and between autocracy and democracy. The Gilded Age of robber barons and wage-labor strikes gave rise to the Bolshevik Revolution, Communism, the first Red Scare, World War I and Fascism. That battle of ideas produced the technocracy movement, and far more lastingly, it also produced the New Deal and modern American liberalism. Technocracy lost because technocracy is incompatible with freedom.

That is still true, but unlike his forefathers, Mr. Musk does have a theory for the assumption of power. That theory is to seize power with the dead robotic hand of the past. It remains for the living to wrest free of that grip.

[bookskeepers]

a little bit of love ◆ chapter one

content warnings: mentions of violence/gore, mentions of cheating, probably not how South Korean court works (i got my information from a guide called 'An overview of the criminal law system in South Korea' which was on... canada's government website)?, mentions of penises, trauma !, woo jinchul IS in this chapter

word count: 2,363

author's note: heh...? reader rlly said "oops"

taglist: none yet ! leave an ask / comment to be added

previous ◆ masterlist ◆ next

The police had appeared on your friend's doorstep the next day. When she opened the door, they simply mentioned that they were there for you and that they determined your location based on eyewitness reports. They didn't tell your friend what the crime was, instead opting to push past her and arrest you in the kitchen.

You'd've been foolish if you hadn't known this was coming; through the haze of your memories, you distinctly recalled mutilating your ex-boyfriend somehow. And, unfortunately for you, your ex-boyfriend was someone of mild importance in your neighborhood, so the police moved faster than usual to get you.

The actual investigation against you hadn't lasted very long -- they sat you down in a small, tiled room to ask you questions about your supposed motive. You could tell from their phrasing that they were already convinced you were guilty of whatever crime they were informed of, since each question was pointed and guiding.

After that, the trial itself was relatively short; you hadn't opted for a jury trial, so the decision was made by a judge. You had been detained in between the investigation and trial, cited to be "unfit to return to civil life" due to your apparent awakening and lack of control over your abilities. Your lawyer did most of the speaking for you, as your evidence was presented orally. There were only four separate court sessions total despite you having confessed to the crime, since the circumstances made the entire thing more nuanced.

When word first got out, it made national news -- it's not every day that a newly awakened hunter loses control of themselves and injures someone else unintentionally, especially not in a situation like yours. As a result, you lost your job due to the sudden criminal charges looming over your head. However, you and your ex-boyfriend's fifteen seconds of fame soon faded as the case progressed. The internet was full of arguments about who was in the right, with most people on your side since you were cheated on and abused. Your personal life was aired in every sense of the word, making you feel more like an animal in a cage than a human, and it felt like the entire world knew anything there was to know about your life by the time the trial was over.

The judge had deemed you guilty, but had given you a fairly light punishment given the scenario itself: you were to perform community service under the Hunter's Association. More specifically, you were to assist the Surveillance Team in something-or-other. You hadn't been paying close attention to the specifics, overwhelmed by relief that you weren't going to spend your life behind bars.

The same could not be said for your ex-boyfriend, however -- he lost his guild contract due to his mistreatment of you and was hospitalized for quite a bit to ensure his newly grown penis (courtesy of an A-rank healer) was working as intended. You had heard through the grapevine that it was extremely malfunctional, and you had taken a private moment of glee in response.

◇◆◇◆◇◆◇◆◇◆◇◆◇◆◇◆◇◆◇◆◇◆◇◆◇◆◇◆◇◆◇◆◇◆◇◆◇

The verdict had been delivered two weeks ago. Now, you stand in front of a mirror in your friend's apartment, dressed in the best business-casual attire you own. A loose white button-up, a pair of black leggings, and a crepe blazer that dangles over your frame. You find yourself once again grateful that your friend had agreed to host you until you were able to find your own place, despite it all. You make a mental note to buy her lunch later, thankful that you were able to save while you were stuck in that awful relationship. After all, your hunter ex-boyfriend had insisted on paying for everything to appear more "masculine" to whoever may have been watching, whatever that meant.

You take a deep breath, inhaling through your nose and exhaling through your mouth, straightening your blazer before pulling your bag over your shoulder. As you make your way out of the spare room and into the entryway of the apartment, you stop by the door to slip on a pair of low wedges to complete your outfit. You leave your slippers by the shoerack.

It doesn't take you long to reach the main building of the Hunter's Association. Upon your arrival, someone at the front desk whisks you away to a different building across the street, telling you that you need to be evaluated before your community service can actually begin.

You spend a good chunk of the morning waiting in the queues, trying to maintain an air of patience while you ignore the stares aimed at you. While you may have faded from national headlines, your verdict had been public and the case itself had been considered "juicy" for lack of a better term. It wasn't difficult to put two and two together to figure out who you were.

Right before noon, your name is called and you shuffle into the evaluation room. The giant sphere in the middle intimidates you, and you feel a pit of dread begin to form in your stomach when the attendant instructs you to place your hand on the surface of it. Some brainwashed part of you whispers that you hope you're not an E-rank, despite knowing that's impossible; you were able to harm your C-rank ex-boyfriend, after all. It's only when the attendant lets out a soft sound of surprise that you look up at her with a tilted head, a questioning look in your eyes.

"You're an A-rank," she says with a bright smile, and you wonder if they're trained to deliver all news with that expression. "In fact, you're on the upper end of the spectrum! Congratulations on your new rank." She gestures you over to her so you can look at the screen dictating your power levels. The graphs and images don't mean anything to you, however, so you decide to take her at face value.

"An A-rank?" you echo, confusion lacing itself in your tone. "That's... wow. I didn't think..." You trail off, struggling to get the words out.

The attendant seems unbothered. "If you're lucky, maybe you'll get scouted by a major guild!"

Her optimism sinks its claws into you, and you give her a weak smile. "I don't think that'll happen," you say earnestly. You've never heard of anyone with a criminal record being recruited by one of the big five. Besides, you have a stint with the Hunter's Association that has to be completed before you can even consider guild recruitment.

You thank the attendant for her time and head out, picking up your Hunter ID on your way out. You retrace your steps, crossing the street once more and re-entering the Hunter's Association HQ. The individual behind the desk herds you into an elevator this time, pressing the button for a floor higher up in the building. Soft music fills the tense, awkward silence between the two of you as the elevator ascends.

The muzak doesn't do much to quiet your thoughts, which are currently spiralling out of control. Ever since the incident, you had been trying to make sense of these sudden new powers, trying to see if you ever felt the sensations of those abilities manifesting since then. Simply put, the answer was no. In the past several months, there had been no itch in your fingertips, no sparks of red-hot rage. To be quite honest, you aren't even completely sure how awakening works -- you honestly think there should be more incidents similar to yours, because how often do people awaken with perfect control over their abilities? How did people even learn how to use them?

As if the universe itself is trying to answer your question, the elevator dings softly and the doors slide open to reveal a long hallway. You can faintly hear bustling and ringing phones off to your left, and you suppose that's where one of those huge offices with cubicles is. The secretary gestures for you to follow as they lead you down the long hallway, past the door you're sure leads to those cubicles. There are two rights and three lefts on your route, and you're working on memorizing them before the secretary stops in front of a door that matches all the other doors you've seen thus far.

"You can wait in here," they say, albeit not unkindly. They open the door with one hand, and you can feel their eyes on you as you walk inside.

It's a fairly average-looking personal office; there's a mahogany desk in the center, with giant windows as the backdrop. A swivel chair sits behind the desk, along with a neat stack of papers next to a monitor and keyboard. Several meters in front of the desk are two sofas across from each other with a coffee table in between. The walls that aren't windows are lined with tall bookcases, and closer inspection reveals that most of the books are about hunting, raids, and mana. The other few are fantasy novels and science fiction novels, which comes to you as a mild surprise.

The secretary closes the door behind you with a soft click, and you take the time to inspect the room some more. On the desk, there's a silver placard with the name "WOO JINCHUL" written in bold letters on it. The handwriting on the paperwork is extremely organized, as if whoever wrote it took extra time to ensure it's legible. The monitor isn't displaying a screensaver and the PC it's attached to is hidden out of view, but the rim of the screen has several sticky notes detailing important dates hanging from it.

You run your fingers along the placard, feeling the grooves of the letters. The metal is cool to the touch, and your hand comes away completely free of dust. You're beginning to form an image in your mind of this Woo Jinchul when the door suddenly opens rather loudly without warning, frightening you.

In your state of panic, your mind flashes back to the times your ex-boyfriend would do the same, usually with the intent to shout at you or worse. The itching in your fingers suddenly returns full force, and you find yourself firing off another one of those airblades at the newcomer. You let out a strangled "watch out," thinking about how you're about to have yet another criminal charge on your once-perfect-now-ruined record.

To your relief -- and perhaps shock -- the newcomer makes a slashing motion with their hand, and the incoming attack dissipates. Your knees suddenly collapse beneath you, the fear coursing through your veins too much to bear. It takes you several long, silent minutes to calm yourself. Once you succeed, you cringe at how awful of a first impression you just made on this individual.

"Better?" the person asks, tone polite and plain. The voice is deep and masculine, pleasing to your brain.

You blink a few times, taking the time to actually look at him. He's tall, clad in a black suit, and his blondish-orangeish hair is slicked back save for one curl that rests against his forehead. He's too far away for you to determine the exact color of his eyes, but from your vantage point you can see that they're on the darker end. His frame is broad, and something about the way he stands suggests years of experience at doing whatever it is he does. He also exudes a slightly intimidating aura, made worse by your embarrassing interaction just now.

"Um, yes, thank you, sorry," you manage to say, although your voice is not much louder than a mumble.

The man makes a show of dusting himself off before striding across the room and sitting on one of the sofas. He gestures to the couch opposite him. "Sit."

You pick yourself off the ground, wincing at the pain in your knees, and obey his command. Now that you're closer to him, you can tell that his eyes are a shade of violet. Pretty.

You swallow the lump in your throat, willing your voice to be louder this time. "I'm really sorry about that," you begin. "The door... startled me, and I don't have the best control ov--"

He holds up one finger, and you find yourself stopping mid-sentence. "Don't worry about it. I've dealt with worse." He leans forward, reaching his hand out over the coffee table. "Let me formally introduce myself. My name is Woo Jinchul, and I'll be your... case worker, for lack of a better word."

"Case... worker?" you echo, confusion laced in your tone.

"I'll be the one overseeing your community service," he clarifies. "I'm the Chief Investigator of the Hunter Association's Surveillance Team."

You blink, all these words making sense separately but not together. "So... that means...?"

Jinchul raises an eyebrow at you, perhaps the first sign of emotion he's outwardly displayed since stepping foot in the room. He slowly retracts his hand once he realizes you're probably not going to shake it. "It means my team and I keep an eye on hunters and investigate raid-related incidents when necessary."

You nod, things finally clicking into place. "I'm guessing I'll be helping you do that?" you finally say.

"Eventually. Firstly, I'm going to help you control your abilities. Then we'll see about fieldwork."

You note that he has a very straight-to-the-point way of talking, and he excels at keeping his voice even to ensure it doesn't betray his internal feelings. In fact, you can't actually get a read on how he might feel about this whole situation, as he's been nothing but polite yet somewhat cold during your entire brief interaction. Nothing about the way he's acted thus far suggests he's repulsed by you, at least.

"That's good, at least. Maybe this way I won't accidentally kill anyone for opening a door loudly," you joke.

The silence that follows your words is deafening. You find yourself wishing that there were at least crickets in the room, as their chirps would be more responsive to your comedy than Jinchul is.

After a bit, he just lets out a small sigh. "I look forward to working with you, Ms. Sun."

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Government Interferes In Ottawa Appointments, Former Official Charges," Toronto Globe. September 22, 1933. Page 1. --- Deputy Minister Wrote to Commissioners Saying Head of Department Was Anxious to Have Allan Appointed to Collins Bay Because He Was Only Available Man, Newton MacTavish States ---- As a rejoinder to the statement of Hơn. Hugh Guthrie, Minister of Justice, which was published yesterday in a despatch to The Globe from Ottawa, in reply to charges of Governmental interference in penitentiary appointments, Dr. Newton MacTavish, who made the charges, now virtually makes a challenge to the Minister. His rejoinder follows:

"The reply, or 'challenge,' as it is called. of Hon. Hugh Guthrie to my letter of Sept. 19 would be true if half-truths could be accepted as the whole truth. The Globe correspondent says: 'No one knows better than he (Mr. Guthrie) that the Government has a way of manipulating things so that the "favorite" applicant with a friend in the Cabinet will be appointed, regardless of the qualifications of the other candidates. That is what I claim happened in the appointments of Brig. Gen. Ormond, Superintendent of Penitentiaries; Colonel Megloughlin, Warden at Portsmouth, and Structural Engineer Allan at Collins Bay. If the Minister still denies this, I am willing to accept the denial, but only on condition that he order an investigation and prove what he says. The remedy is in his hands.

"But it would be quite as interesting at the moment if Mr. Guthrie would say whether his Deputy Minister did or did not write to the Civil Service Commission, in effect, that the Minister was anxious to have Allan appointed Warden at Collins Bay, because he was the only 'available' man. I say he did. And I say further that, while I could cite many more instances of Governmental Interference, this one of the Wardenship at Collins Bay is more than just simple interference; it is downright coercion."

[argyrocratie]

"How will people get healthcare?

(...)

During the Spanish Civil War, Barcelona’s Medical Syndicate, organized largely by anarchists, managed 18 hospitals (6 of which it had created), 17 sanatoria, 22 clinics, 6 psychiatric establishments, 3 nurseries, and one maternity hospital. Outpatient departments were set up in all the principal localities in Catalunya. Upon receiving a request, the Syndicate sent doctors to places in need. The doctor would have to give good reason for refusing the post, “for it was considered that medicine was at the service of the community, and not the other way round.”[40] Funds for outpatient clinics came from contributions from local municipalities. The anarchist Health Workers’ Union included 8,000 health workers, 1,020 of them doctors, and also 3,206 nurses, 133 dentists, 330 midwives, and 153 herbalists. The Union operated 36 health centers distributed throughout Catalunya to provide healthcare to everyone in the entire region. There was a central syndicate in each of nine zones, and in Barcelona a Control Committee composed of one delegate from each section met once a week to deal with common problems and implement a common plan. Every department was autonomous in its own sphere, but not isolated, as they supported one another. Beyond Catalunya, healthcare was provided for free in agrarian collectives throughout Aragon and the Levant.

Even in the nascent anarchist movement in the US today, anarchists are taking steps to learn about and provide healthcare. In some communities anarchists are learning alternative medicine and providing it for their communities. And at major protests, given the likelihood of police violence, anarchists organize networks of volunteer medics who set up first aid stations and organize roving medics to provide first aid for thousands of demonstrators. These medics, often self-trained, treat injuries from pepper spray, tear gas, clubs, tasers, rubber bullets, police horses, and more, as well as shock and trauma. The Boston Area Liberation Medic Squad (BALM Squad) is an example of a medic group that organizes on a permanent basis. Formed in 2001, they travel to major protests in other cities as well, and hold trainings for emergency first aid. They run a website, share information, and link to other initiatives, such as the Common Ground clinic described below. They are non-hierarchical and use consensus decision-making, as does the Bay Area Radical Health Collective, a similar group on the West Coast.

Between protests, a number of radical feminist groups throughout the US and Canada have formed Women’s Health Collectives, to address the needs of women. Some of these collectives teach female anatomy in empowering, positive ways, showing women how to give themselves gynecological exams, how to experience menstruation comfortably, and how to practice safe methods of birth control. The patriarchal Western medical establishment is generally ignorant of women’s health to the point of being degrading and harmful. An anti-establishment, do-it-yourself approach allows marginalized people to subvert a neglectful system by organizing to meet their own needs.

After Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, activist street medics joined a former Black Panther in setting up the Common Ground clinic in one of the neediest neighborhoods. They were soon assisted by hundreds of anarchists and other volunteers from across the country, mostly without experience. Funded by donations and run by volunteers, the Common Ground clinic provided treatment to tens of thousands of people.

The failure of the government’s “Emergency Management” experts during the crisis is widely recognized. But Common Ground was so well organized it also out-performed the Red Cross, despite the latter having a great deal more experience and resources.[41] In the process, they popularized the concept of mutual aid and made plain the failure of the government. At the time of this writing Common Ground has 40 full-time organizers and is pursuing health in a much broader sense, also making community gardens and fighting for housing rights so that those evicted by the storm will not be prevented from coming home by the gentrification plans of the government. They have helped gut and rebuild many houses in the poorest neighborhoods, which authorities wanted to bulldoze in order to win more living space for rich white people."

-Peter Gelderloos, "Anarchy Works" (2010)

[allthecanadianpolitics]

The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) passed a resolution on October 24 to push the Canadian Government to end the sale of arms to Israel and call for a ceasefire in Israel-Palestine.  The resolution passed with a 70 per cent majority at CUPE’s National convention in Quebec City, which hosted approximately 2,000 CUPE members.  Just a few days after this resolution passed, on October 26, a coalition of over 70 humanitarian, faith, labour, and civil society organizations announced that they would hold a press conference urging the government to endorse the demand for a ceasefire in Israel-Palestine and the demand to end the blockade in Gaza.  Among the speakers at the event was Alex Silas, the executive vice-president of the National Capital Region for the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC).  Catherine Larocque, president of CUPE local 2626, said that labour’s support for a ceasefire came at a crucial time because many workers are facing “hate and blowback for expressing sympathy with the plight of the Palestinian people.” 

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Sign of the Day - Boston again… another great overpass banner sign there….

* * * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

June 4, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Jun 04, 2025

Just hours after President Donald J. Trump posted on social media yesterday that “[b]ecause of Tariffs, our Economy is BOOMING!” a new report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said the opposite. Founded in 1961, the OECD is a forum in which 38 market-based democracies cooperate to promote sustainable economic growth.

The OECD’s economic outlook reports that economic growth around the globe is slowing because of Trump’s trade war. It projects global growth slowing from 3.3% in 2024 to 2.9% in 2025 and 2026. That economic slowdown is concentrated primarily in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and China.

The OECD predicts that growth in the United States will decline from 2.8% in 2024 to 1.6% in 2025 and 1.5% in 2026.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released two analyses today of Trump’s policies that add more detail to that report. The CBO’s estimate for the effect of Trump’s current tariffs—which are unlikely to stay as they are—is that they will raise inflation and slow economic growth as consumers bear their costs. The CBO says it is hard to anticipate how the tariffs will change purchasing behavior, but it estimates that the tariffs will reduce the deficit by $2.8 trillion over ten years.

Also today, the CBO’s analysis of the Republicans’ “One Big, Beautiful Bill” is that it will add $2.4 trillion to the deficit over the next decade because the $1.2 trillion in spending cuts in the measure do not fully offset the $3.7 trillion in tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. Republicans have met this CBO score with attacks on the CBO, but its estimate is in keeping with those of a wide range of economists and think tanks.

Taken together, these studies illustrate how Trump’s economic policies are designed to transfer wealth from consumers to the wealthy and corporations. From 1981 to 2021, American policies moved $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. After Biden stopped that upward transfer, the Trump administration is restarting it again, on steroids.

Just how these policies are affecting Americans is no longer clear, though. Matt Grossman of the Wall Street Journal reported today that economists no longer trust the accuracy of the government’s inflation data. Officials from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which compiles a huge monthly survey of employment and costs, told economists that staffing shortages and a hiring freeze have forced them to cut back on their research and use less precise methods for figuring out price changes. Grossman reports that the bureau has also cut back on the number of places where it collects data and that the administration has gotten rid of committees of external experts that worked to improve government statistics.

There is more than money at stake in the administration’s policies. The administration's gutting of the government seeks to decimate the modern government that regulates business, provides a basic social safety net, promotes infrastructure, and protects civil rights and to replace it with a government that permits a few wealthy men to rule.

The CBO score for the Republicans’ omnibus bill projects that if it is enacted, 16 million people will lose access to healthcare insurance over the next decade in what is essentially an assault on the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. The bill also dramatically cuts Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Plan (SNAP) benefits, clean energy credits, aid for student borrowers, benefits for federal workers, and consumer protection services, while requiring the sale of public natural resources.

These cuts continue those the administration has made since Trump took office, many of which fell under the hand of the “Department of Government Efficiency.” But, while billionaire Elon Musk was the figurehead for that group, it appears his main interest was in collecting data. His understudy, Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought, appears to have determined the direction of the cuts, which did not save money so much as decimate the parts of the government that the authors of Project 2025 wanted to destroy.

Vought was a key author of Project 2025, whose aim is to disrupt and destroy the United States government in order to center a Christian, heteronormative, male-dominated family as the primary element of society. To do so, the plan calls for destroying the administrative state, withdrawing the United States from global affairs, and ending environmental and business regulations.

Yesterday the White House asked Congress to cancel $9.4 billion in already-appropriated spending that the Department of Government Efficiency identified as wasteful, a procedure known as “rescission.” Trump aides say the money funds programs that promote what they consider inappropriate ideologies, including public media networks PBS and NPR; the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which provides food and basic medical care globally; and PEPFAR, the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief that was established under President George W. Bush to combat HIV/AIDS in more than 50 countries and is currently credited with saving about 26 million lives.

Vought appeared today before the House Appropriations Committee, where members scolded him for neglecting to provide a budget for the year, which they need to do their jobs. But Vought had plenty to say about the things he is doing. According to ProPublica’s Andy Kroll, he claimed that under Biden “every agency became a tool of the Left.” He said the White House will continue to ask for rescissions, but also noted that, as Project 2025 laid out, he does not believe that the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, which requires the executive branch to spend the money that Congress has appropriated, is constitutional, despite court decisions saying it is.

Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) told Vought: “Be honest, this is never about government efficiency. In fact, an efficient government, a government that capably serves the American people and proves good government is achievable is what you fear the most. You want a government so broken, so dysfunctional, so starved of resources, so full of incompetent political lackeys and bereft of experts and professionals that its departments and agencies cannot feasibly achieve the goals and the missions to which they are lawfully directed. Your goal is privatization, for the biggest companies to have unchecked power, for an economy that does not work for the middle class, for working and vulnerable families. You want the American people to have no one to turn to, but to the billionaires and the corporations this administration has put in charge. Waste, fraud, and abuse are not the targets of this administration. They are your primary objectives.”

The use of the government to impose evangelical beliefs on the country, even at the expense of lives, also appears to be an administration goal. Yesterday, the administration announced it is ending the Biden administration’s 2022 guidance to hospital emergency rooms that accept Medicare—which is virtually all of them—requiring that under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act they must perform an abortion in an emergency if the procedure is necessary to prevent a patient’s organ failure or severe hemorrhaging. The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act requires emergency rooms to stabilize patients.

The Trump administration will no longer enforce that policy. Last year, an investigation by the Associated Press found that even when the Biden administration policy was being enforced, dozens of pregnant women, some of whom needed emergency abortions, were turned away from emergency rooms with advice to “let nature take its course.”

Finally tonight, in what seems likely to be an attempt to distract attention from the omnibus bill and all the controversy surrounding it, Trump banned Harvard from hosting foreign students. He also banned nationals from a dozen countries—Afghanistan, Chad, Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Myanmar, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen—from entering the United States, an echo of the travel ban of his first term that threw the country into chaos.

Trump justified his travel ban by citing the attack Sunday in Boulder, Colorado, on peaceful demonstrators marching to support Israeli hostages in Gaza. An Egyptian national who had overstayed a tourist visa hurled Molotov cocktails at the marchers, injuring 15 people.

Egypt is not on the list of countries whose nationals Trump has banned from the United States.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The new globalism is global labor

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

Depending on how you look at it, I either grew up in the periphery of the labor movement, or atop it, or surrounded by it. For a kid, labor issues don't really hold a lot of urgency – in places with mature labor movements, kids don't really have jobs, and the part-time jobs I had as a kid (paper route, cleaning a dance studio) were pretty benign.

Ironically, one of the reasons that labor issues barely registered for me as a kid was that my parents were in great, strong unions: Ontario teachers' unions, which protected teachers from exploitative working conditions and from retaliation when they advocated for their students, striking for better schools as well as better working conditions.

Ontario teachers' unions were strong enough that they could take the lead on workplace organization, to the benefit of teachers at every part of their careers, as well as students and the system as a whole. Back in the early 1980s, Ontario schools faced a demographic crisis. After years of declining enrollment, the number of students entering the system was rapidly increasing.

That meant that each level of the system – primary, junior, secondary – was about to go through a whipsaw, in which low numbers of students would be followed by large numbers. For a unionized education workforce, this presented a crisis: normally, a severe contraction in student numbers would trigger layoffs, on a last-in, first-out basis. That meant that layoffs loomed for junior teachers, who would almost certainly end up retraining for another career. When student numbers picked up again, those teachers wouldn't be in the workforce anymore, and worse, a lot of the senior teachers who got priority during layoffs would be retiring, magnifying the crisis.

The teachers' unions were strong, and they cared about students and teachers, both those at the start of their careers and those who'd given many years of service. They came up with an amazing solution: "self-funded sabbaticals." Teachers with a set number of years of seniority could choose to take four years at 80% salary, and get a fifth year off at 80% salary (actually, they could take their year off any time from the third year on).

This allowed Ontario to increase its workforce by about 20%, for free. Senior teachers got a year off to spend with their families, or on continuing education, or for travel. Junior teachers' jobs were protected. Students coming into the system had adequate classroom staff, in a mix of both senior and junior teachers.

This worked great for everyone, including my family. My parents both took their four-over-five year in 1983/84. They rented out our house for six months, charging enough to cover the mortgage. We flew to London, took a ferry to France, and leased a little sedan. For the next six months, we drove around Europe, visiting fourteen countries while my parents homeschooled us on the long highway stretches and in laundromats. We stayed in youth hostels and took a train to Leningrad to visit my family there. We saw Christmas Midnight Mass at the Vatican and walked around the Parthenon. We saw Guernica at the Prado. We visited a computer lab in Paris and I learned to program Logo in French. We hung out with my parents' teacher pals who were civilian educators at a Canadian Forces Base in Baden-Baden. I bought an amazing hand-carved chess set in Seville with medieval motifs that sung to my D&D playing heart. It was amazing.

No, really, it was amazing. Unions and the social contract they bargained for transformed my family's life chances. My dad came to Canada as a refugee, the son of a teen mother who'd been deeply traumatized by her civil defense service as a child during the Siege of Leningrad. My mother was the eldest child of a man who, at thirteen, had dropped out of school to support his nine brothers and sisters after the death of his father. My parents grew up to not only own a home, but to be able to take their sons on a latter-day version of the Grand Tour that was once the exclusive province of weak-chinned toffs from the uppermost of crusts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour

My parents were active in labor causes and in their unions, of course, but that was just part of their activist lives. My mother was a leader in the fight for legal abortion rights in Canada:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/8882641733

My dad was active in party politics with the New Democratic Party, and both he and my mother were deeply involved with the fight against nuclear arms proliferation, a major issue in Canada, given our role in supplying radioisotopes to the US, building key components for ICBMs, testing cruise missiles over Labrador, and our participation in NORAD.

Abortion rights and nuclear arms proliferation were my own entry into political activism. When I was 13, I organized a large contingent from my school to march on Queen's Park, the seat of the Provincial Parliament, to demand an end to Ontario's active and critical participation in the hastening of global nuclear conflagration:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/53616011737/

When I got a little older, I started helping with clinic defense and counterprotests at the Morgentaler Clinic and other sites in Toronto that provided safe access to women's health, including abortions:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/morgentaler-honoured-by-order-of-canada-federal-government-not-involved-1.716775

My teens were a period of deepening involvement in politics. It was hard work, but rewarding and fundamentally hopeful. There, in the shadow of imminent nuclear armageddon, there was a role for me to play, a way to be more than a passive passenger on a runaway train, to participate in the effort to pull the brake lever before we ran over the cliff.

In hindsight, though, I can see that even as my activism intensified, it also got harder. We struggled more to find places to meet, to find phones and computers to use, to find people who could explain how to get a permit for a demonstration or to get legal assistance for comrades in jail after a civil disobedience action.

What I couldn't see at the time was that all of this was provided by organized labor. The labor movement had the halls, the photocopiers, the lawyers, the experience – the infrastructure. Even for campaigns that were directly about labor rights – campaigns for abortion rights, or against nuclear annihilation – the labor movement was the material, tangible base for our activities.

Look, riding a bicycle around all night wheatpasting posters to telephone poles to turn out people for an upcoming demonstration is hard work, but it's much harder if you have to pay for xeroxing at Kinko's rather than getting it for free at the union hall. Worse, the demonstration turnout suffers more because the union phone-trees and newsletters stop bringing out the numbers they once brought out.

This was why the neoliberal project took such savage aim at labor: they understood that a strong labor movement was foundation of antiimperialist, antiracist, antisexist struggles for justice. By dismantling labor, the ruling class kicked the legs out from under all the other fights that mattered.

Every year, it got harder to fight for any kind of better world. We activist kids grew to our twenties and foundered, spending precious hours searching for a room to hold a meeting, leaving us with fewer hours to spend organizing the thing we were meeting for. But gradually, we rebuilt. We started to stand up our own fragile, brittle, nascent structures that stood in for the mature and solid labor foundation that we'd grown up with.

The first time I got an inkling of what was going on came in 1999, with the Battle of Seattle: the mass protests over the WTO. Yes, labor turned out in force for those mass demonstrations, but they weren't its leaders. The militancy, the leadership, and the organization came out of groups that could loosely be called "post-labor" – not in the sense that they no longer believed in labor causes, but in the sense that they were being organized outside of traditional labor.

Labor was in retreat. Five years earlier, organized labor had responded to NAFTA by organizing against Mexican workers, rather than the bosses who wanted to ship jobs to Mexico. It wasn't unusual to see cars in Ontario with CAW bumper stickers alongside xenophobic stickers taking aim at Mexicans, not bosses. Those were the only workers that organized labor saw as competitors for labor rights: this was also the heyday of "two-tier" contracts, which protected benefits for senior workers while leaving their junior comrades exposed to bosses' most sadistic practices, while still expecting junior workers to pay dues to a union that wouldn't protect them:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/25/strikesgiving/#shed-a-tier

Two-tier contracts were the opposite of the solidarity that my parents' teachers' union exhibited in the early 1980s; blaming Mexican workers for automakers' offshoring was the opposite of the solidarity that built transracial and international labor power in the early days of the union movement:

https://unionhall.aflcio.org/bloomington-normal-trades-and-labor-assembly/labor-culture/edge-anarchy-first-class-pullman-strike

As labor withered under a sustained, multi-decades-long assault on workers' rights, other movements started to recapitulate the evolution of early labor, shoring up fragile movements that lacked legal protections, weathering setbacks, and building a "progressive" coalition that encompassed numerous issues. And then that movement started to support a new wave of labor organizing, situating labor issues on a continuum of justice questions, from race to gender to predatory college lending.

Young workers from every sector joined ossified unions with corrupt, sellout leaders and helped engineer their ouster, turning these dying old unions into engines of successful labor militancy:

https://theintercept.com/2023/04/07/deconstructed-union-dhl-teamsters-uaw/

In other words, we're in the midst of a reversal of the historic role of labor and other social justice movements. Whereas once labor anchored a large collection of smaller, less unified social movements; today those social movements are helping bring back a weakened and fragmented labor movement.

One of the key organizing questions for today is whether these two movements can continue to co-evolve and, eventually, merge. For example: there can be no successful climate action without climate justice. The least paid workers in America are also the most racially disfavored. The gender pay-gap exists in all labor markets. For labor, integrating social justice questions isn't just morally sound, it's also tactically necessary.

One thing such a fusion can produce is a truly international labor movement. Today, social justice movements are transnational: the successful Irish campaign for abortion rights was closely linked to key abortion rights struggles in Argentina and Poland, and today, abortion rights organizers from all over the world are involved in mailing medication abortion pills to America.

A global labor movement is necessary, and not just to defeat the divide-and-rule tactics of the NAFTA fight. The WTO's legacy is a firmly global capitalism: workers all over the world are fighting the same corporations. The strong unions of one country are threatened by weak labor in other countries where their key corporations seek to shift manufacturing or service delivery. But those same strong unions are able to use their power to help their comrades abroad protect their labor rights, depriving their common adversary of an easily exploited workforce.

A key recent example is Mercedes, part of the Daimler global octopus. Mercedes' home turf is Germany, which boasts some of the strongest autoworker unions in the world. In the USA, Mercedes – like other German auto giants – preferentially manufactures its cars in the South, America's "onshore-offshore" crime havens, where labor laws are both virtually nonexistent and largely unenforced. This allows Mercedes to exploit and endanger a largely Black workforce in a "right to work" territory where unions are nearly impossible to form and sustain.

Mercedes just defeated a hard-fought union drive in Vance, Alabama. In part, this was due to admitted tactical blunders from the UAW, who have recently racked up unprecedented victories in Tennessee and North Carolina:

https://paydayreport.com/uaw-admits-digital-heavy-organizing-committee-light-approach-failed-them-in-alabama-at-mercedes/

But mostly, this was because Mercedes cheated. They flagrantly violated labor law to sabotage the union vote. That's where it gets interesting. German workers have successfully lobbied the German parliament for the Supply Chain Act, an anticorruption law that punishes German companies that violate labor law abroad. That means that even though the UAW just lost their election, they might inflict some serious pain on Mercedes, who face a fine of 2% of their global annual revenue, and a ban on selling cars to the German government:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/10/an-injury-to-one/#is-an-injury-to-all

This is another way reversal of the post-neoliberal era. Whereas once the US exported its most rapacious corporate practices all over the world, today, global labor stands a chance of exporting workers' rights from weak territories to strong ones.

Here's an American analogy: the US's two most populous states are California and Texas. The policies of these states ripple out over the whole country, and even beyond. When Texas requires textbooks that ban evolution, every pupil in the country is at risk of getting a textbook that embraces Young Earth Creationism. When California enacts strict emission standards, every car in the country gets cleaner tailpipes. The WTO was a Texas-style export: a race to the bottom, all around the world. The moment we're living through now, as global social movements fuse with global labor, are a California-style export, a race to the top.

This is a weird upside to global monopoly capitalism. It's how antitrust regulators all over the world are taking on corporations whose power rivals global superpowers like the USA and China: because they're all fighting the same corporations, they can share tactics and even recycle evidence from one-another's antitrust cases:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/05/big-tech-eu-drop-dead

Look, the UAW messed up in Alabama. A successful union vote is won before the first ballot is cast. If your ground game isn't strong enough to know the outcome of the vote before the ballot box opens, you need more organizing, not a vote:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/23/a-collective-bargain/

But thanks to global labor – and its enemy, global capitalism – the UAW gets another chance. Global capitalism is rich and powerful, but it has key weaknesses. Its drive to "efficiency" makes it terribly vulnerable, and a disruption anywhere in its supply chain can bring the whole global empire to its knees:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/21/eight-and-skate/#strike-to-rule

American workers – especially swing-state workers who swung for Trump and are leaning his way again – overwhelmingly support a pro-labor agenda. They are furious over "price gouging and outrageous corporate profits…wealthy corporate CEOs and billionaires [not] paying what they should in taxes and the top 1% gaming the system":

https://www.americanfamilyvoices.org/_files/ugd/d4d64f_6c3dff0c3da74098b07ed3f086705af2.pdf

They support universal healthcare, and value Medicare and Social Security, and trust the Democrats to manage both better than Republicans will. They support "abortion rights, affordable child care, and even forgiving student loans":

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-05-20-bidens-working-class-slump/

The problem is that these blue-collar voters are atomized. They no longer meet in union halls – they belong to gun clubs affiliated with the NRA. There are enough people who are a) undecided and b) union members in these swing states to defeat Trump. This is why labor power matters, and why a fusion of American labor and social justice movements matters – and why an international fusion of a labor-social justice coalition is our best hope for a habitable planet and a decent lives for our families.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/20/a-common-foe/#the-multinational-playbook

[batboyblog]

Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week #17

May 3-10 2024

Vice President Harris announced 5.5 billion dollars to build affordable housing and address homelessness. The grants will go to 1,200 communities across all 50 states, DC and Puerto Rico. 1.3 billion will go to HUD's HOME program which builds, buys, and rehabs affordable housing for rent or ownership. 3.3 billion is headed to Community Development Block Grants which supports housing as well as homeless services, and expanding economic opportunities. Remaining funds focus on building housing for extremely low- and very low-income households, Housing for people struggling with HIV/AIDS, transitional housing for those with substance-use disorder, and money to support homeless shelters and homeless prevention programs.

At the 3rd meeting of the Los Angeles Declaration group in Guatemala Security of State Blinken announced $578 million in new US aid to Latin America. The Los Angeles Declaration is a partnership between the US and 20 other nations in the Americas to address immigration, combat human trafficking, and support economic development and improved quality of life for people in poor nations in the Americas. The bulk of the aid, over $400 million will go to humanitarian assistance to the Venezuelan people. Inside of Venezuela over 7 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance due to decades of political and economic instability. Over 7 million more have been forced to flee the country and live in poverty across the Americas. The aid will help Venezuelans both inside and outside of Venezuela.

The Department of Energy lead an effort to get the G7 to agree to phase out coal by the early 2030s. The G7 is a collection of the 7 largest Industrial economies on Earth, the US, the UK, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and Italy. To avoid catastrophic climate change the International Energy Agency believes coal needs to be phased out by 2035. However this has been a sticking point with the G7 since 1/3rd of Japan and 1/4th of Germany's energy comes from Coal. This agreement to phase out represents a major breakthrough and the US plans to press for even wider agreement on the issue at the G20 meeting in November.

President Biden announced a major investment deal in Racine, Wisconsin, site of the failed Trump Foxconn deal. In 2018 then President Trump visited Racine and declared the planned Foxconn plant "the eighth wonder of the world.". However the promised 13,000 jobs never materialized and the Taiwan based Foxconn after bulldozing 100s of homes and farms decided not to build. President Biden inked a deal with Microsoft for the land formally given to Foxconn which will bring 2,000 new jobs to Racine to help replace the 1,000 job losses during Trump's Presidency in the community.

200 tribal governments and the US territories of American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, published climate action plans. The plans were paid for by the Biden Administration as part of a 5 billion dollar Climate Pollution Reduction Grants program. The federal government is supporting all 50 states, territories, DC, and tribal governments to draft climate action plans, which will be used to apply for more than 4 billion dollars in grants to help turn plans into reality

As part of marking Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), the Biden Administration announced a number of action aimed at combating antisemitism and supporting the Jewish Community. This included $400 million in new funding for the Nonprofit Security Grant Program. The Program has supported Synagogues and Jewish Community Centers with security improvements like bullet proof windows and trainings for staff in how to handle active shooter and hostage situations. The Department of Education issued guidance to all schools districts and federally funded colleges stressing that antisemitism is banned under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. These actions come as part of the Biden Administration's National Strategy To Counter Antisemitism, the first ever national strategy addressing the issue by any Administration.

USAID announced $220 million in additional humanitarian aid to Yemen. This new funding will bring US aid to Yemen over the last 10 years to nearly $6 billion. Currently 18 million Yemenis are estimated as needing humanitarian assistance, 9 million of them children, and the UN believes nearly 14 million face imminent risk of famine. The US remains the single largest donor nation to humanitarian relief in Yemen.

The Department of Interior announced nearly $150 million to help communities fight drought. The funds will support 42 projects across 10 western states. This is part of the President's $8.3 billion dollar investment in the nations water infrastructure over the next 5 five years.

[savage-daughter-of-nikitie]

This French Senator's fiery speech on the collapse of the American Empire is required reading.

Mr. President, Mr. Prime Minister, Ladies and Gentlemen, Ministers, my dear colleagues. Europe is at a critical turning point in its history. The American shield is crumbling, Ukraine risks being abandoned, Russia strengthened. Washington has become the court of Nero, a fiery emperor, submissive courtiers and a ketamine-fueled jester in charge of purging the civil service.

This is a tragedy for the free world, but it is first and foremost a tragedy for the United States. Trump’s message is that there is no point in being his ally since he will not defend you, he will impose more customs and duties on you than on his enemies and will threaten to seize your territories while supporting the dictatorships that invade you.

The king of the deal is showing what the art of the deal is all about. He thinks he will intimidate China by lying down before Putin, but Xi Jinping, faced with such a shipwreck, is probably accelerating preparations for the invasion of Taiwan.

Never in history has a President of the United States capitulated to the enemy. Never has anyone supported an aggressor against an ally. Never has anyone trampled on the American Constitution, issued so many illegal decrees, dismissed judges who could have prevented him from doing so, dismissed the military general staff in one fell swoop, weakened all checks and balances, and taken control of social media.

This is not an illiberal drift, it is the beginning of the confiscation of democracy. Let us remember that it took only one month, three weeks and two days to bring down the Weimar Republic and its Constitution. I have faith in the strength of American democracy, and the country is already protesting. But in one month, Trump has done more harm to America than in four years of his last presidency.

We were at war with a dictator, now we are fighting a dictator backed by a traitor. Eight days ago, at the very moment that Trump was rubbing Macron’s back in the White House, the United States voted at the UN with Russia and North Korea against the Europeans demanding the withdrawal of Russian troops. Two days later, in the Oval Office, the military service shirker was giving war hero Zelensky lessons in morality and strategy before dismissing him like a groom, ordering him to submit or resign. Tonight, he took another step into infamy by stopping the delivery of weapons that had been promised.

What to do in the face of this betrayal? The answer is simple: face it. And first of all, let’s not be mistaken. The defeat of Ukraine would be the defeat of Europe. The Baltic States, Georgia, Moldova are already on the list. Putin’s goal is to return to Yalta, where half the continent was ceded to Stalin.

The countries of the South are waiting for the outcome of the conflict to decide whether they should continue to respect Europe or whether they are now free to trample on it. What Putin wants is the end of the order put in place by the United States and its allies 80 years ago, with its first principle being the prohibition of acquiring territory by force. This idea is at the very source of the UN, where today Americans vote in favor of the aggressor and against the attacked, because the Trumpian vision coincides with that of Putin: a return to spheres of influence, the great powers dictating the fate of small countries.

Mine is Greenland, Panama and Canada, you are Ukraine, the Baltics and Eastern Europe, he is Taiwan and the China Sea. At the parties of the oligarchs of the Gulf of Mar-a-Lago, this is called “diplomatic realism.” So we are alone. But the talk that Putin cannot be resisted is false. Contrary to the Kremlin’s propaganda, Russia is in bad shape. In three years, the so-called second largest army in the world has managed to grab only crumbs from a country three times less populated. Interest rates at 25%, the collapse of foreign exchange and gold reserves, the demographic collapse show that it is on the brink of the abyss. The American helping hand to Putin is the biggest strategic mistake ever made in a war.

The shock is violent, but it has a virtue. Europeans are coming out of denial. They understood in one day in Munich that the survival of Ukraine and the future of Europe are in their hands and that they have three imperatives.

Accelerate military aid to Ukraine to compensate for the American abandonment, so that it holds, and of course to impose its presence and that of Europe in any negotiation. This will be expensive. It will be necessary to end the taboo of the use of frozen Russian assets. It will be necessary to circumvent Moscow’s accomplices within Europe itself by a coalition of only the willing countries, with of course the United Kingdom.

Second, demand that any agreement be accompanied by the return of kidnapped children, and prisoners, and absolute security guarantees. After Budapest, Georgia and Minsk, we know what agreements with Putin are worth. These guarantees require sufficient military force to prevent a new invasion.

Finally, and this is the most urgent, because it is what will take the most time, we must build the neglected European defense, to the benefit of the American umbrella since 1945 and scuttled since the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is a Herculean task, but it is on its success or failure that the leaders of today’s democratic Europe will be judged in the history books.

Friedrich Merz has just declared that Europe needs its own military alliance. This is to recognize that France has been right for decades in arguing for strategic autonomy. It remains to be built. It will be necessary to invest massively, to strengthen the European Defense Fund outside the Maastricht debt criteria, to harmonize weapons and munitions systems, to accelerate the entry into the Union of Ukraine, which is today the leading European army, to rethink the place and conditions of nuclear deterrence based on French and British capabilities, to relaunch the anti-missile shield and satellite programs.

The plan announced yesterday by Ursula von der Leyen is a very good starting point. And much more will be needed. Europe will only become a military power again by becoming an industrial power again. In a word, the Draghi report will have to be implemented. For good.

But the real rearmament of Europe is its moral rearmament. We must convince public opinion in the face of war weariness and fear, and especially in the face of Putin’s cronies, the extreme right and the extreme left. They argued again yesterday in the National Assembly, Mr. Prime Minister, before you, against European unity, against European defense. They say they want peace. What neither they nor Trump say is that their peace is capitulation, the peace of defeat, the replacement of de Gaulle Zelensky by a Ukrainian Pétain at the beck and call of Putin. Peace for the collaborators who have refused any aid to the Ukrainians for three years.

Is this the end of the Atlantic Alliance? The risk is great. But in the last few days, the public humiliation of Zelensky and all the crazy decisions taken in the last month have finally made the Americans react. Polls are falling. Republican lawmakers are being greeted by hostile crowds in their constituencies. Even Fox News is becoming critical.

The Trumpists are no longer in their majesty. They control the executive, the Congress, the Supreme Court and social networks. But in American history, the freedom fighters have always prevailed. They are beginning to raise their heads.

The fate of Ukraine is being played out in the trenches, but it also depends on those in the United States who want to defend democracy, and here on our ability to unite Europeans, to find the means for their common defense, and to make Europe the power that it once was in history and that it hesitates to become again.

Our parents defeated fascism and communism at great cost. The task of our generation is to defeat the totalitarianisms of the 21st century. Long live free Ukraine, long live democratic Europe.

Claude Malhuret is a French physician, lawyer and politician who has served as a member of the French Senate since 2014, representing the department of Allier. A member of Horizons, a center-right party that was created to attract support for Emmanuel Marcron in the 2022 French presidential election, he has presided over the The Independents – Republic and Territories (LIRT) parliamentary group in the Senate since 2017.

[mariacallous]

After less than two months in power, U.S. President Donald Trump has delivered a shock to the United States and the world so profound that even calling it that risks feeling trite.

This is not the place to compile a litany of examples of the previously unthinkable or long-feared moves that Trump has attempted. Almost every day brings new examples, from his unprovoked and senseless trade war with Canada, with its hints of old-world imperialist expansionism, to his murky but long-anticipated rapprochement with Russia.

As a long-standing provider and enforcer of a certain world order, Washington has grown accustomed to seeing whatever it does as a norm that others, like it or not, will have to adjust to—and will probably even appreciate one day. But as Americans struggle to come to terms with the seismic changes underway in their country, recent days have produced scenes abroad that show that, absent a major course correction, this time will be different.

I’m not talking about the plucky and admirable pushback of Canada and Mexico or of aggrieved smaller places such as Panama and Greenland. What I have in mind is the mounting response from some of Washington’s most important allies and partners further afield. One stunning example was the speech that Claude Malhuret gave to the French Senate last week. Precisely because of the United States’ insularity, it is worth quoting from at length:

Europe is at a critical turning point in its history. The American shield is crumbling, Ukraine risks being abandoned, Russia strengthened. Washington has become the court of Nero, an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers, and a jester high on ketamine in charge of purging the civil service. This is a tragedy for the free world, but it is first and foremost a tragedy for the United States. Trump’s message is that there is no point in being his ally since he will not defend you, he will impose higher tariffs on you than his enemies, and will threaten to seize your territories while supporting the dictatorships that invade you. Never in history has a U.S. president capitulated to the enemy. Never has any one of them supported an aggressor against an ally. Never trampled on the U.S. Constitution, issued so many executive orders, dismissed judges who could have prevented him from doing so, dismissed the military senior staff in one fell swoop, weakened all checks and balances, and taken control of social media. This is not an illiberal drift—it is the beginning of the confiscation of democracy. Let us remember that it took only one month, three weeks, and two days to bring down the Weimar Republic and its constitution.

You may say that hot air comes cheaply in deliberative bodies. But the best evidence that this was much more than that came shortly after Malhuret’s speech. On March 11, more than 30 army chiefs from some of Washington’s steadiest and most durable partners, including NATO and European Union members, met behind closed doors to begin thinking about how to ensure security in a world where the United States is no longer in the business of providing it. No one from the United States was invited. The gathering suggested that many Europeans worry that Washington, if not quite an enemy yet, could become one.

At the center of these global shocks lies the Trump administration’s apparent calculation that the financial support Washington has provided Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in 2022—and the security assurance that this has given Europe—is simply not worth the more than $120 billion it has cost the United States.

But this is about as narrow a bookkeeper’s view of geopolitics as one can imagine. I write not as a Europeanist, or even as someone especially attuned to that continent’s interests, given the wealth it has accumulated over the centuries from the slave trade, colonization, and its domination of much of the global south. Even so, all but the most ignorant must recognize that Washington’s total spending in Ukraine dramatically pales in comparison with the benefits that have accrued to the United States, Europe, and much of the world from the postwar rules-based international order.

Imperfect as these norms are, a world that runs on rules and values is incomparably preferable to one that’s governed nakedly by raw power, fiat, and whim.

It would be a gross miscalculation, however, to focus only on how the wrenching changes underway will affect Europe or that once widely beloved but now endangered thing called “the West.” As Europeans struggle to adjust to Trump’s authoritarian inclinations and fondness for Russian President Vladimir Putin, they are coming to terms with the necessity to rearm, and this will have wide-reaching consequences.

Amid the reordering of recent months, liberal democracies’ first reflex has been to sacrifice the interests of the poorest and weakest. This was evidenced in Trump’s theatrical war on supposed government waste, which made the United States Agency for International Development one of its first targets. As he giddily proceeded with the agency’s dismantlement, mega-billionaire Elon Musk, entrusted by Trump to trim federal spending, called Washington’s principal vehicle for assisting poor countries “evil.” Many analysts now expect that spending on social insurance for the country’s poor, retired, and infirm through programs such as Medicaid and Medicare—and perhaps even Social Security, which Musk has called a scam—will be his next target.

What does this have to do with Europe and the so-called developing world? By heightening European fears around security, Trump has all but ensured that Washington’s longtime Western partners will follow in his wake in abandoning other countries—not in disdain or out of spite, but in the interest of self-preservation. Regardless of whether one sees this as necessary, by cutting the strings of support to low-income countries, a state is behaving selfishly by definition.

The United Kingdom has already embarked on this road. In February, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced plans to cut overseas aid at virtually the same time he sought to impress Trump by committing to spending more for security at home and in Europe. Others in the rich world will surely follow.

One of the most grievous consequences of the new U.S. administration’s behavior is perhaps the one least talked about. In narrowly prioritizing their own military security, members of the erstwhile West are acting out a delusion based on the notion that Europe can thrive behind high walls. As the poor of the world fall further behind—and are devastated by population growth, the inability to industrialize or produce jobs quickly enough, and the spread of disease—they will not stand pat. Their conflicts, growth, and, ultimately, migration will rock the rich world to a degree too few today can imagine.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Status of Soldier Settlement Board," Kingston Whig-Standard. May 17, 1934. Page 7. ---- OTTAWA, May 17 - (CP) - Brigadier-General A. Ross, president of the Canadian Legion, appeared before the Commons civil service committee yesterday to make representations on behalf of the staff of the Soldier Settlement Board. General Ross requested that definite action be taken in settling the status of this board, which was composed of ex-service men who had served 15 or 16 years, besides giving three or four of the best years of their lives during the war, and were no longer young. These employees had no hope of advancement in the Government service, and were entitled to no superannuation.

General Ross strongly urged that the Settlement Board come under the Civil Service Act. With the return to normal times, the Government would no doubt be faced with the necessity of embarking on new colonization schemes, and a body of trained men, such as those at present employed on the Settlement Board, would be invaluable.

The counting of war service for superannuation of civil servants was also brought up by General Ross. He said that such extraordinary service as had been given to their country during the war by these men might well be given some recognition. He asked this not only for men employed in the Civil Service at the time of enlisting, but also for those entering it subsequent to the war.

J. Earl Lawson, chairman of the committee, doubted whether it would be justifiable to add to the preferences already being given to returned men, and add in this burden to the Government.

As an alternative, General Ross suggested that ex-service men should not be retired while physically fit.

[sayit3x]

Mrs. Juice’s Journal #36

**Trigger Warning** 

This journal entry contains references to suicide, which may be a difficult topic for some readers. You’re not alone, and help, hope, and healing are always possible. If you or someone you care about is struggling with thoughts of suicide or a mental health crisis, please reach out through these confidential resources. There are compassionate people ready to listen and support you right now:

National Crisis and Suicide Lifeline:

Call or text **988** anytime in the US and Canada. In the UK, you can call **111**

Crisis Text Line:

Text **HOME** to **741741** from anywhere in the US, anytime, about any type of crisis

The Trevor Project for LGBTQ youth: 

Call **1-866-488-7386** or text **START** to **678-678**

Astrid's birth in 2007 was the catalyst for a new direction in Betelgeuse and Lydia’s futures, specifically their careers. After Delia's wise advice back in 1991, Betel knew he had to expand beyond freelancing as a bio-exorcist. He’d been gearing up for a while, and once Astrid arrived, it was time to put his plan into action. But it all hinged upon the slow-turning ship of Neitherworld bureaucracy.

Cruelly, suicide victims are compelled to become civil servants somewhere in the afterlife’s administrative process, as receptionists, guides, or other roles across many departments. With service durations of a millenia or more, caseworkers like Juno are among the oldest ghosts in the Neitherworld, having climbed the ranks for an absurdly long time. After all, they had to learn the ins and outs of the afterlife and demonstrate that they knew the Handbook by heart. That being said, caseworkers have always been overworked.

When our family died in the middle ages, Earth’s population was around a mere 350 million people. It had been higher, but the devastation of the black plague killed nearly a quarter of everyone in Europe. Back then, caseworkers already struggled to keep up with demand, especially when wars, famine, and other mass tragedies regularly plunged a huge number of newlydeads into the Neitherworld at once. Yet, the struggle of daily life was so challenging that it didn't take much to push regular people past their breaking point, leading the unfortunate to voluntarily leave their mortal coils behind.

Such a choice meant there were often new civil servants cycling in and being trained to help handle the unending barrage of paperwork. Therefore, the ones who'd been around a while could start training to become caseworkers. The bureaucratic engine of the afterlife was brittle, yet functional for the population at the time, even if it sadly depended on a steady stream of incoming suicides. But by 2007, the living population had swollen to 6.7 billion people, nearly 20 times what it'd been a mere 650 years before. As such, waiting room delays got longer and longer, to the point that what used to take months in the 1980’s could now easily take a year. And, from a purely bureaucratic point of view, things were only getting worse for the dead even if they improved for the living.

When suicide prevention measures were implemented topside in the 20th century, dedicated resources, hotlines, and better psychological support caused suicides to (thankfully) fall. However, at the dawn of the 21st century, in certain regions (like the US) suicides actually began increasing. Many factors contributed to this shift, but, frustratingly, suicide rates rose fastest among marginalized communities and adolescents. Most were impossibly young to work in administration, let alone hang in there long enough to be caseworkers. Not that the powers that be didn't at first try to force them to work, but the results were always disastrous. Children, no matter the era, shouldn't have to grow up so fast or shepherd adults, whether that's in the living world or the Neitherworld.

The afterlife’s perpetual labor shortage was probably why the powers that be never invested in addressing their dirty little secret – mislabelled suicides. They needed the manpower and dug their claws into whoever they could get. They even started conscripting those who'd died far from home, trapping them with the promise of shorter services than typical suicides and relocation back beneath their cities of origin. Newlydeads were no longer safe from government work, even if they didn't take their own lives.

But even changing the rules didn't fix the backlog. Caseworker strikes became common, but things rarely improved and the threat of longer services typically brought the rebellious back in line. Some ghosts could clone themselves to try and fill the gaps, but those who could were few and far between, and such heroics take a lot of magic, followed by a lot of rest, to maintain. They needed another solution and the ever clever Betelgeuse had a proposal up his sleeve.

Betel was the one who pitched the idea of the Afterlife Call Center in the first place. As a former guide himself, he knew that many questions from newlydeads weren't important enough to warrant a visit with a caseworker. Most of the time, fresh ghosts just needed a not-so-gentle reminder to “read the damn Handbook” where they’d find answers to most of their beginner questions. But as attention spans shrank (thanks, Internet), people’s disdain for reading instructions grew exponentially, and they just wanted to ask questions instead. The Call Center became Tier 1 support for fielding questions, only filtering ones worth a caseworker’s time up to the right person. 

At first, Betel just cloned himself to man the phone lines, but that barely lasted a week before he reached his limit, getting into screaming matches with stubborn newlydeads. After that, he hired shrunken head men, or “shrinkers,” to man the phones. He initially turned to shrinkers because they couldn’t talk back to him with their lips traditionally sewn shut. But Betel had spent so many centuries learning new languages, he couldn’t help but understand them over time, even when it just sounded like wordless mumbling to everyone else. He definitely developed a favorite, Bob, who became his loyal assistant manager.

While on the surface, the call center served to help the bureaucracy, in truth, it was the heart of Betel’s growing bio-exorcism business. Newlydeads would call complaining about their circumstances and with Betel's excellent hearing, he'd pick out the conversations that interested him and offer his services as a bio-exorcist instead. It was a win-win-win. The call center gave the powers that be a pressure release valve for the caseworker shortage, and Betel got the stability of a desk job (just like Delia suggested) as well as a regular flow of potential clients for his bio-exorcism business. And, soon, it proved to be a way to help Lydia, too.

Before Lydia was far along in her pregnancy, her freelance photography helped her and Richard maintain a comfortable, though far from lavish, lifestyle. Now with Lydia at home watching baby Astrid, they were relying on Richard's work as an environmental activist to make ends meet. But being a new parent is expensive, and Lydia was frequently turning to her parents to fill in the gaps. Her parents were happy to help and certainly didn't suffer for it, especially when Delia's career as an artist was finally starting to pick up. Yet Lydia was embarrassed, not wanting to get comfortable accepting their generosity and set a less-than-ideal example for Astrid. She longed to do freelance photography again, but couldn't travel like she used to with Astrid in tow, and scheduling conflicts with Richard often kept her home. Even when she stayed local to capture images of New York rallies, she struggled to reclaim her notoriety as a photographer in a landscape where nearly everyone now had a camera in their pocket. The world was going digital and competing with the speed of the internet, even with Lydia’s undeniably higher quality shots, was a disheartening challenge.

Betel saw how frustrated Lydia was that she couldn't return to what she loved, though she never blamed Astrid or Richard or loved them any less. She just seemed unfulfilled in a way that the rewards of motherhood couldn't touch. It was like she needed something that was purely hers, and an idea hit Betel like lightning. He'd noticed that the most challenging cases that came into his call center were from new ghosts who waffled in their motivation to haunt, unsure what to do with their above ground tenants. And Betel knew just the woman who wanted the living and the dead to get along and had even found a loophole that helped two newlydeads move on. Lydia was the perfect person to help these wavering ghosts and Betel just had to find a way to funnel them to her.

Luckily a little intervention from Delia solved that problem. As one of the few people who knew Lydia could see ghosts, it was Delia's idea to film her mediating with one that was haunting a Manhattan gallery Delia was trying to land. It made for quite a riveting video, with the ghost throwing paintings and sculptures across the room until Lydia finally talked him down. Though Delia promised not to post the footage on her own Facebook feed, she did post it to Lydia's. And that was all Betel needed, along with his compellingly written pitch for how a full-blown show could work, to get the attention of the man who would become Lydia's producer on Ghost House. 

After that, Betel quietly sent call center cases he personally screened to the studio, and nothing dangerous ever made it to her producer’s desk. Suddenly, Ghost House was a success and Lydia and Richard’s financial troubles were solved. As it turns out, Betel reaped rewards, too. Between his desk job, bio-exorcism gigs, and rewards from ghosts who mediated with Lydia, he finally saved up enough to outright buy the plot of land his Roadhouse sat on from his landlord. And just like that, he, Jacques, and Ginger would never have to pay rent again, and Lydia would always have a safe place to come back to if she ever returned.

This journal dovetails into a Beetlejuice fanfiction epic I’ve written here:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/63522586/chapters/162777649