Got a bum education, double-digit inflation
Got a bum education, double-digit inflation
I've descended from the mountain of parenthood to shine the light of my wisdom on you mortals. As raising children is the hardest job you can have, parents are, QED, the hardest workers. The hardest workers are the best workers and the workers are the heart of the revolution. QED again, I am the heart of the revolution. You're welcome.
It's already hack for science fiction writers to say that their fiction in-progress is being outstripped by reality but, here we are, every day, right here at home. I'm halfway through my modest proposal below and our do-nothing Justice Minister threatens to do something. Such is the world where Lethbridge is real. Almodovar knew the wind makes people crazy. Lethbridge Police Service pulls a minor little whoopsie like vast political harassment and all the sudden there's cause to shut them down. What a perfect place to pilot a provincial police, people!
You can understand why Jason and friends have longed for a provincial police. All animals have to eat and will eat their fill where they can. Armed enforcers are a missing food group for the legislature in Edmonton. Their flaming eye is ever focused on the undeserving sub-genius in Queen's Park so you can only imagine the drool puddles forming in the Sky Palace when Doug Ford almost put a drinking buddy atop the OPP. Cities have some leverage over their cops, though intellectual giants like Sean Chu and Jerr-oh-mee Farkas prevent using them well. Instead they're allowed to run rampage like bully toddlers with suspect driving skills. The feds have...light influence over the RCMP, though their reach and power give the Mounties a foreign policy unto themselves. Nobody is bulletproof in Ottawa and they can all make a constable "in fear for their life". The gendarmerie blow over the country like very racist weather.
This is a rare good instinct by our local laugh-barrel. Softies will get mad but any major change to help people in poverty comes either at the end of a gun or by people with a whole mess of armed people standing behind them. It's nobody's fault, humans lack the capacity to start anything unless threatened. This is the essence of ideology and procrastination. Having a provincial police department would be ideal for protecting any gains made in the welfare state because you could use it to suppress your opposition. Sorry, you thought they were for other purposes? Enjoy kindergarten I guess, you should meet my kids.
If we're going to have vast police corruption we should define that corruption through the lenses of welfare and, broadly, defunding traditional police. If we take power (a long shot given our toolbox) the left should immediately create the Alberta Provincial Police and seek funding from investors signing away TARP dollars to anything with the word APP in it. In the act we include broad language about protecting the “welfare” of all Albertans. In supporting legislation, we define some brand new initiatives - caps on rent to 10% of income, 100% drug coverage, housing first social policy, you name it - as “welfare guaranteed by the province via the Alberta Provincial Police”. Boom. Fireworks. Ticker tape parade. Somewhere an artist cries and doesn’t know why.
The genius of having an armed force (and, by extension, my genius) is they are basically immovable by the unarmed. If you make it against the law to impose austerity measures on social programs you point a gun - our gun - at every conservative in the future. That's the Armalite prong of a two-point trident of social justice. The other one is political entropy. If you give the public something beneficial like public healthcare or our new initiatives to pay women for social reproductive work and to give everyone free daycare, it's very hard to take them away. The widespread enjoyment of increased quality of life combined with a dedicated unit inside the legislature tapping reactionary kooks on the shoulder and shaking their head "no" if they introduce a bill that reduces benefits by a single cent will be a powerful beachhead against eventual conservative governments.
Around the hard nut of our little Milrevcom we create the "police" force we deserve and dismantle all others. Upon the ejection of the RCMP we push our new Provincial Police Act with thousands in uniform enforcing the rights of the people. They make sure everyone has a home, three hots, and a cot. They travel door to door making sure everyone knows the mental health supports, education, and job training they need is available to them, paid for by taxing billionaires and enforcing a maximum wage. The prisons are dismantled, replaced by Norwegian model carceral communities filled to bursting with politicians who would use their power to degrade the welfare state. It's a paramilitary force of social workers, housing construction, educators, and civil servants. Their one aim - improve the quality of life for Albertans - is backed by the threat of sanction. Arrests are no longer the primary statistic judged for promotion. Those who pull the most out of poverty, who find the underserved and serve them will advance.
Oh, this is a stupid idea and I should be stopped you say? What's the worst that can happen? People will rebel? We hold a monopoly on force and are offering them a life unpegged from employment. We can't pay for it? There's a lot of billions in them thar corporate welfare hills on top of the savings we reap from dissolving brutal local police departments. The feds overrule us and use force to take jurisdiction? Oh please, please uncouple the Alberta welfare state from our predilection to vote against our interest. I'm begging you.
Canada barely has a constitution and Justin Trudeau can barely shift his body for all the sedatives and facial shoe polish. Come enforce it. My APP officers are in the community filling speculation apartments with the unhoused and paying mortgages for oil workers in school changing their careers. Pry it from our fingers attached to white knuckles.
🦝Turns out I was wrong and the Canadian Energy Centre truly is working in our best interest. I will eat my crow along with everyone else. Give them a blank cheque.
🐣Not even a plague will keep corporations from collecting and selling your personal data.
💅They will always build a pipeline if you let them, even if it has wheels on the bottom.
☎️Uber is exporting their fucked up lobbying efforts to make all of us gig workers into Canada.
🥋Wexit is back on everybody!
🍬Someone pointed out that Quebec is racist as hell and everybody is sad and mad. If Albertans freaked out this hard every time someone told the truth about us aneurysm deaths would skyrocket.
🍌Biden was successfully pushed left this week.
📉No joke here, The Atlantic is just really fucking stupid.
🚧Really wish I had some money to launder, it’s so easy these days. This dumb shit is coming for the housing supply too. My Alberta Provincial Police will be confiscating these empty houses AND the Bitcoin used to buy them.
👗You can now pirate a COVID vaccine.
🛹It takes a subpoena for health records to be purged, even handwritten notes. It just takes a sneeze and a shredder for the RCMP. The Alberta Provincial Police will keep all documentation in a blockchain archive.
🦊The LAPD need to be dissolved too.
🏴☠️The climate is deeply fucked.
🏴The Teamsters appear to be tooling up internationally. We support even the slightest hint of increased radicalism in our unions.
🪔Solidarity with any healthcare workers deciding to strike. The post-COVID austerity will hit them first.
🥾Hero who attacked imperialists in Washington to return to take more bodies.
⏲The COVID impact on labour.
🎊US policy that harms labour also harms my ability to get an overclocked 3090 RTX.
🏉Monopolies are bad, but half measures against monopolies might be just as bad.
⚡️Goodbye to the best sitcom about labour since Taxi.
📉The Progress Report says the haram thing loud - not all trains are good.
🎧Kino Lefter watched a movie on VHS and talked about it for almost as long as its runtime.
🔇Britain remains bad with Tech Won’t Save Us.
⛲️Do you want to dismantle capitalism? Do you own a boat?
♟Courage is trying to get the NDP to actually do something, if you would like to help them out.
🥞An AUPE comrade passed away and a GoFundMe has been created to support his family, were so you so inclined to do so.
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Our editor is Clinton Hallahan. Newsletter subject lines are stolen from these songs.
