#photocopier kickers

[mostlysignssomeportents]

NLRB rules that any union busting triggers automatic union recognition

Tonight (September 6) at 7pm, I'll be hosting Naomi Klein at the LA Public Library for the launch of Doppelganger.

On September 12 at 7pm, I'll be at Toronto's Another Story Bookshop with my new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.

American support for unions is at its highest level in generations, from 70% (general population) to 88% (Millenials) – and yet, American unionization rates are pathetic.

That's about to change.

The National Labor Relations Board just handed down a landmark ruling – the Cemex case – that "brought worker rights back from the dead."

https://prospect.org/labor/2023-08-28-bidens-nlrb-brings-workers-rights-back/

At issue in Cemex was what the NLRB should do about employers that violate labor law during union drives. For decades, even the most flagrantly illegal union-busting was met with a wrist-slap. For example, if a boss threatened or fired an employee for participating in a union drive, the NLRB would typically issue a small fine and order the employer to re-hire the worker and provide back-pay.

Everyone knows that "a fine is a price." The NLRB's toothless response to cheating presented an easily solved equation for corrupt, union-hating bosses: if the fine amounts to less than the total, lifetime costs of paying a fair wage and offering fair labor conditions, you should cheat – hell, it's practically a fiduciary duty:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/468061

Enter the Cemex ruling: once a majority of workers have signed a union card, any Unfair Labor Practice by their employer triggers immediate, automatic recognition of the union. In other words, the NLRB has fitted a tilt sensor in the American labor pinball machine, and if the boss tries to cheat, they automatically lose.

Cemex is a complete 180, a radical transformation of the American labor regulator from a figleaf that legitimized union busting to an actual enforcer, upholding the law that Congress passed, rather than the law that America's oligarchs wish Congress had passed. It represents a turning point in the system of lawless impunity for American plutocracy.

In the words of Frank Wilhoit, it is is a repudiation of the conservative dogma: "There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect":

https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288

It's also a stunning example of what regulatory competence looks like. The Biden administration is a decidedly mixed bag. On the one hand there are empty suits masquerading as technocrats, champions of the party's centrist wing (slogan: "Everything is fine and change is impossible"):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

But the progressive, Sanders/Warren wing of the party installed some fantastically competent, hard-charging, principled fighters, who are chapter-and-verse on their regulatory authority and have the courage to use that authority:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

They embody the old joke about the photocopier technician who charges "$1 to kick the photocopier and $79 to know where to kick it." The best Biden appointees have their boots firmly laced, and they're kicking that mother:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/16/the-second-best-time-is-now/#the-point-of-a-system-is-what-it-does

One such expert kicker is NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo. Abruzzo has taken a series of muscular, bold moves to protect American workers, turning the tide in the class war that the 1% has waged on workers since the Reagan administration. For example, Abruzzo is working to turn worker misclassification – the fiction that an employee is a small business contracting with their boss, a staple of the "gig economy" – into an Unfair Labor Practice:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/10/see-you-in-the-funny-papers/bidens-legacy

She's also waging war on robo-scab companies: app-based employment "platforms" like Instawork that are used to recruit workers to cross picket lines, under threat of being blocked from the app and blackballed by hundreds of local employers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/30/computer-says-scab/#instawork

With Cemex, Abruzzo is restoring a century-old labor principle that has been gathering dust for generations: the idea that workers have the right to organize workplace gemocracies without fear of retaliation, harassment, or reprisals.

But as Harold Meyerson writes for The American Prospect, the Cemex ruling has its limits. Even if the NLRB forces and employer to recognize a union, they can't force the employer to bargain in good faith for a union contract. The National Labor Relations Act prohibits the Board from imposing a contract.

That's created a loophole that corrupt bosses have driven entire fleets of trucks through. Workers who attain union recognition face years-long struggles to win a contract, as their bosses walk away from negotiations or offer farcical "bargaining positions" in the expectation that they'll be rejected, prolonging the delay.

Democrats have been trying to fix this loophole since the LBJ years, but they've been repeatedly blocked in the senate. But Abruzzo is a consummate photocopier kicker, and she's taking aim. In Thrive Pet Healthcare, Abruzzo has argued that failing to bargain in good faith for a contract is itself an Unfair Labor Practice. That means the NLRB has the authority to act to correct it – they can't order a contract, but they can order the employer to give workers "wages, benefits, hours, and such that are comparable to those provided by comparable unionized companies in their field."

Mitch McConnell is a piece of shit, but he's no slouch at kicking photocopiers himself. For a whole year, McConnell has blocked senate confirmation hearings to fill a vacant seat on the NLRB. In the short term, this meant that the three Dems on the board were able to hand down these bold rulings without worrying about their GOP colleagues.

But McConnell was playing a long game. Board member Gwynne Wilcox's term is about to expire. If her seat remains vacant, the three remaining board members won't be able to form a quorum, and the NLRB won't be able to do anything.

As Meyerson writes, centrist Dems have refused to push McConnell on this, hoping for comity and not wanting to violate decorum. But Chuck Schumer has finally bestirred himself to fight this issue, and Alaska GOP senator Lisa Murkowski has already broken with her party to move Wilcox's confirmation to a floor vote.

The work of enforcers like DoJ Antitrust Division boss Jonathan Kanter, FTC chair Lina Khan, and SEC chair Gary Gensler is at the heart of Bidenomics: the muscular, fearless deployment of existing regulatory authority to make life better for everyday Americans.

But of course, "existing regulatory authority" isn't the last word. The judges filling stolen seats on the illegitimate Supreme Court had invented the "major questions doctrine" and have used it as a club to attack Biden's photocopier-kickers. There's real danger that Cemex – and other key actions – will get fast-tracked to SCOTUS so the dotards in robes can shatter our dreams for a better America.

Meyerson is cautiously optimistic here. At 40% (!), the Court's approval rating is at a low not seen since the New Deal showdowns. The Supremes don't have an army, they don't have cops, they just have legitimacy. If Americans refuse to acknowledge their decisions, all they can do it sit and stew:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/26/mint-the-coin-etc-etc/#blitz-em

The Court knows this. That's why they fume so publicly about attacks on their legitimacy. Without legitimacy, they're nothing. With the Supremes' support at 40% and union support at 70%, any judicial attack on Cemex could trigger term-limits, court-packing, and other doomsday scenarios that will haunt the relatively young judges for decades, as the seats they stole dwindle into irrelevance. Meyerson predicts that this will weigh on them, and may stay their hands.

Meyerson might be wrong, of course. No one ever lost money betting on the self-destructive hubris of Federalist Society judges. But even if he's wrong, his point is important. If the Supremes frustrate the democratic will of the American people, we have to smash the Supremes. Term limits, court-packing, whatever it takes:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/20/judicial-equilibria/#pack-the-court

And the more we talk about this – the more we make this consequence explicit – the more it will weigh on them, and the better the chance that they'll surprise us. That's already happening! The Supremes just crushed the Sackler opioid crime-family's dream of keeping their billions in blood-money:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/11/justice-delayed/#justice-redeemed

But if it doesn't stop them? If they crush this dream, too? Pack the court. Impose term limits. Make it the issue. Don't apologize, don't shrug it off, don't succumb to learned helplessness. Make it our demand. Make it a litmus test: "If elected, will you vote to pack the court and clear the way for democratic legitimacy?"

Meanwhile, Cemex is already bearing fruit. After an NYC Trader Joe's violated the law to keep Trader Joe's United from organizing a store, the workers there have petitioned to have their union automatically recognized under the Cemex rule:

https://truthout.org/articles/trader-joes-union-files-to-force-company-to-recognize-union-under-new-nlrb-rule/

With the NLRB clearing the regulatory obstacles to union recognition, America's largest unions are awakening from their own long slumbers. For decades, unions have spent a desultory 3% of their budgets on organizing workers into new locals. But a leadership upset in the AFL-CIO has unions ready to catch a wave with the young workers and their 88% approval rating, with a massive planned organizing drive:

https://prospect.org/labor/labors-john-l-lewis-moment/

Meyerson calls on other large unions to follow suit, and the unions seem ready to do so, with new leaders and new militancy at the Teamsters and UAW, and with SEIU members at unionized Starbucks waiting for their first contracts.

Turning union-supporting workers into unionized workers is key to fighting Supreme Court sabotage. Organized labor will give fighters like Abruzzo the political cover she needs to Get Shit Done. A better America is possible. It's within our grasp. Though there is a long way to go, we are winning crucial victories all the time.

The centrist message that everything is fine and change is impossible is designed to demoralize you, to win the fight in your mind so they don't have to win it in the streets and in the jobsite. We don't have to give them that victory. It's ours for the taking.

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/2023/09/06/goons-ginks-and-company-finks

[trashyswitch]

The Adorable Slimy Stranger

Chapter 2: Holidays With The Sides (& Pumpkin!)

The sides are nearing Christmas, and are getting ready to celebrate and share the joy with their new companion, Pumpkin!

This fanfic was suggested by an anonymous user! Thank you for the prompt for a sequel!

And this fanfic is also dedicated to Pumpkinpaw! Love you sweety!

Pumpkin had become a regular household companion within the next few weeks. When deciding what pronouns to use, the sides had put down papers that said ‘Boy’, ‘Girl’, and ‘both’, to mean they/them.

“Do you wanna be a girl? As in, a good girl?” Patton asked, pointing to the pink card.

“Or perhaps a boy? A good boy?” Logan offered, pointing to the blue card.

“Or maybe you wanna be both! Maybe ‘buddy’, or ‘good pumpa’?” Roman asked, holding up the purple card.

Patton gasped. “That’s such a cute nickname! Pumpa! I love it!” Patton cheered, hugging Roman.

Pumpkin looked at the three cards curiously for a few seconds. Right as someone was gonna speak up, Pumpkin picked up the pink card, pointed to it and tried to gurgle the word ‘girl’ as best as it could!

Patton and Roman both squealed excitedly, while Logan smiled proudly. “Girl it is. Pumpkin shall now be referred to as a female, until she shows us otherwise.” Logan declared.

“I’m still gonna call her lil’ pumpa tho! It’s perfect!” Patton added, giving Pumpkin a big hug.

“And she has at least 1 new nickname.” Logan muttered proudly with a chuckle.

To make things greater, it was nearing Christmas and EVERYONE was getting into the christmas mood!

Patton has been watching all the Hallmark movies and decorating the house with all the tinsel and lights he could summon. He also took time to hang up the advent calendars and had an elf hat on his head every second of the day!

Logan has been drinking out of christmas mugs, determining the holiday board games they could play together, and has been listening to different christmas music covers to determine the most beautiful and/or most classic versions. Using that knowledge, Logan successfully came up with the most christmassy playlist he could make, which also included songs from classic christmas films! And let’s not forget Bing Crosby and Pentatonix!

Roman has been singing christmas carols himself and wrapping up endless amounts of presents to fill the bottom of the christmas tree. He’s also spent lots of time making ornaments to add to the tree and was even sewing up adorable christmas outfits for Patton and himself! Remus even got an early Christmas outfit, which included a ‘King of Naughty’ original Grinch shirt.

Meanwhile, Virgil has been enjoying the heck outta the christmas sweaters that came out each year. This year? Thomas’s brand new Virgil-themed sweater merchandise Thomas came out with! Well...minus the scarf. Virgil found the scarf to be too much with the sweater. So, he gave it to Patton. Virgil has also been enjoying the holiday slippers! This year, Virgil was sporting a pair of hilarious shark slippers! Sometimes, Virgil would joke that ‘The sharks are hungry for feet!’

Janus has been enjoying watching the christmas baking shows and has been playing lots of christmas flash games that are always around. Super Santa Kicker, Christmas Race, Christmas Shopper Simulator (10/10, Best game of 2014!), Tattletail, Santa’s Rampage, even that crappy christmas wii game called ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas’! All of those games were common-place.

Last but not least, Remus has been doing the elf on the shelf this year (with a small list of rules, of course.) and has been surprising people with singing and dancing christmas decorations everywhere! There was the animated singing rudolph, the twerking Santa Claus toy (Yup...Of course…), the singing and jingling christmas hat, that cringey but funny dancing/singing poop toy, an animated dancing tree, the animated singing santa in the bathtub, and everyone’s personal favorite: The Snoopy dancing plush toy that wobbles back and forth!

But everyone found that Pumpkin was ALSO in the christmas mood! The sides enjoyed seeing her reactions to the dancing toys the best, and even danced along with the toys sometimes! She waddled along with snoopy, danced left and right with the dancing tree, and sang to the Rudolph song while Rudolph sang the classic song!

Meanwhile, Patton had sewed up a christmas hat for Pumpkin. The hat had a more burgundy red color, a traditional white bottom and a white pom pom on the top. When Patton first gave it to the orange blob, Pumpkin placed it on her own head and let the pompom flop onto her face. Upon seeing the pompom, it looked as if her eyes could’ve dilated and she started playing with the pompom like a kitty. That was the best reaction they could’ve gotten from her!

One of the days, Pumpkin was sitting in the living room with the sides, watching The Polar Express on TV. This was a holiday classic that the sides loved to watch together. So joining Pumpkin in on the fun was a must! The train had just been saved from falling into the ice, and the train climbed up the spiral to the high road to the north pole. Pumpkin had slid herself over to Roman and Patton, and snuggled under the extra blanket that was beside the boys. Pumpkin was also wearing her santa hat!

Watching the pretty lights in the sky over the sea, Pumpkin watched curiously as the big conductor man talked to them about them and then uttered the following words: “There...is the north POLE!”

Pumpkin ran as quickly as her body could to the TV and reached up to the north pole on the TV. She backed up a little and held her hands on her chin as the train approached the Santa Village and The Polar Express song started playing! The song was so quick and fun, and it didn’t take long for Pumpkin to start bouncing up and down to the song while she watched the camera move under the twisting train road arches.

“Oooooo!” Pumpkin reacted to seeing the Santa city for the first time.

Patton’s heart was all warm and gushing at Pumpkin’s reactions. Roman was visibly excited about the village as well!

The christmas spirit went uphill from there. Pumpkin learned about the big old man in red known as Santa and his big bag of toys, his deers with horns, and about the big man’s magical powers! He especially loved the amount of joy that filled the sides when they talked about the man wearing red. Whoever this red-coated man was, made the sides so happy! Almost as happy as she makes them! And not only that, but the man in the red suit had a hat just like she did! She was bouncing around and clapping about that!

But excitement soon turned into disappointment when she found out she had to wait for the man in the red suit to come. She didn’t want to wait for the happy old man to come! She wanted to see him now! NOW! She whimpered and paced around the house as she struggled to wait for the old man to come. So while they waited, Logan grabbed a paper and some crayons and let Pumpkin draw a picture for Santa. While that happened, Logan wrote a short christmas letter out for her which read:

[Dear Santa Claus;

Hi Santa! My name is Pumpkin! I just found out about you and the elves in the north pole, and really wanted to see you! I’m sad that I have to wait for you to come, but I’ll try to find fun things to do while I wait for you. For Christmas, I would like lots of candy! Candy is so yummy! And skittles are my favorite! I also love Patton’s crunchy gingerbread cookies! That day, I discovered icing! And it made me bounce off the walls! I would also like for everyone to be extra happy this Christmas. I’m making people happy everyday, but now I can let you make everyone happy too.

Love; Pumpkin! ]

Logan put the letter down, and looked at the picture Pumpkin drew. It was a picture of herself tickling Santa Claus’s belly. Logan couldn’t help but giggle at how Santa’s belly in the picture made him look like he was pregnant. He also giggled at the big smile that was all spread out on Santa’s face. Logan praised her on a drawing well done, and decided to add something to the letter:

[P.S: Your belly looks very big and ticklish!]

Logan grabbed the drawing Pumpkin made, photocopied it, and put the copied version of the drawing in the envelope along with the letter. With everything ready, Logan sealed it shut. “There. Off to the North Pole!” Logan declared to Pumpkin!

Logan mailed it off in the post office a day later.

With Christmas on its way and Pumpkin stuck in a bit of an antsy wait for the magic, Pumpkin started to tickle people a little more often than usual. Any other time of the year, Pumpkin would tickle at least 1 person a day. But with Christmas around the corner and Pumpkin growing hyper, Pumpkin had started tickling all the sides at least once a day! So her tickle attacks jumped from 1 or 2, to 6 every single day!

“NAHAHAHAHAHA! PUHUHUMPKIHIHIHIHIN! NAHAHAHAT MYHYHY AHAHARMPIHIHITS! TOHOHOHOO TIHIHIHICKLIHIHIHISH!” Roman laughed hysterically!

Pumpkin tilted her head curiously, and chose to remove her pods from the armpits like he begged. Roman quickly tried to gain back his breath, but Pumpkin still wanted to hear laughter! So, she made her pod super thin like a pencil and dipped it into his belly button.

“aAAAAEEEEEEHEHEHEHEHEHE! *snort* HAHAHAHAHAHA! *snort* NOHOHOHO FAHAHAHAHAHAIR!” Roman yelled through his laughter.

Pumpkin playfully stuck her tongue out at him and started to playfully nibble and ripple her blob-like body all over his belly.

Roman’s snorts grew more frequent and his laughter turned cackle-like. It was so ticklish! He was struggling to properly breath! But it was so fun! Roman had been tickled many, many, MANY times by Patton in the past. But THIS!

Holy cow!

Patton’s tickling was NOTHING compared to this!

Pumpkin decided to give him another ticklish, jiggly raspberry to get him squealing. And squealing, she was rewarded! Roman squealed so loud and so high-pitched, that Pumpkin stopped immediately just to process the strange sound!

Roman was a laughing, snorting mess after the squeal. And Pumpkin was loving every millisecond of it. As much as she was enjoying it however, Pumpkin knew when to give the man a long, giggly break. This would involve cuddling her ticklish victim and gently tickling a much less ticklish spot on their body to keep them giggling, but also let them breathe. For Roman, this was his neck.

“Ohohohohohokahahahahahay. Thahahahank yohohohou Puhuhumpkihin!” Roman told her.

Pumpkin smiled and gave his neck a tickly kiss on the neck. Roman giggled more from that, and calmed down the moment her ‘lips’ moved away from his neck. Pumpkin kept up her giggly tickling for a little bit longer before she went for Janus next.

Now, Pumpkin didn’t quite know Janus nearly as much as she knew the rest of the sides. She had even grown to know Remus quicker, than compared to Janus! The half man half snake in yellow, was more mysterious and...preferred his lonely time. So, she gave him his lonely time for the most part. She did come around to see if he was up for a tickle or two, but often walked away empty-handed, yet gaining some progress.

Finally, after weeks and weeks of trying, Pumpkin finally gained the courage to tickle Janus for the first time. She walked up to Janus’s side very quietly...geeently snuck her pod hand under the snake man’s shirt...and gave it a quick tickle.

“eeEEP! WHAT-” Janus turned around and immediately calmed down. Pumpkin made a surprised yip sound, and backed up a little to give him space. “Hi Pumpkin. Sorry about that. I...totally heard you come in.” Janus told her.

...Oh yeah...and then there was the strange way he talked to her and the other sides. He said things backwards. Like just now: if he actually heard her come in, then why was he so surprised and jumpy?

Things like that didn’t make sense to her. But what did make sense, was his calming face. “You tried to tickle me today. You...finally tried and tickled me. And it worked.” Janus told her.

Pumpkin didn’t really know what to do. She was confused. Was anything he was saying, supposed to be backwards? Or normal? Pumpkin couldn’t tell. But all that thinking went right out the window when Janus held his arms out for her. He wanted a hug from her! There was no saying no to THAT! Pumpkin quickly slid up to him and hugged him tightly.

“Wow! You have a very snug and firm hug for a jello being.” Janus admitted.

Jello? Like that blue jiggly stuff that Logan made once?

Pumpkin let him enjoy the hug for a bit. She wanted him to feel safe in her grasp. And perhaps, she may not get any tickles in today. But the only thing that mattered now, is that Janus could be hugged now.

“...Aren’t you gonna tickle me more?” Janus asked.

Pumpkin widened her black eyes. Wait, REALLY?! HE WAS GONNA LET HER TICKLE HIM?! This was what she was waiting for! 16 days of working up to this! And now, she can tickle him!

Pumpkin happily started skittering her pods all over his sides and ribs almost immediately! “Ohoho bohohoy! Hehehere wehehe gohohohoho!” Janus giggled and let go of her so she could get more access to more exposed ticklish spots. Pumpkin happily took the offer and made more pseudopods so she could tickle more spots at once. This was like a special attack that Pumpkin would pull on someone. “aaAAAHAHAHAHAHAHA! YOHOHOU’RE SURPRIHIHISIHIHINGLY GOHOHOOD AHAHAT THIHIHIHIS!” Janus reacted in surprise.

Pumpkin gurgled happily to Janus and continued to tickle Janus wherever she could reach. The upside to having such a jiggly form, was just how well she could kneed the soft spots on her humans! This included the sides and his belly the most. Janus held his fists against his chest as his giggle fits, squeals and laughter filled his bedroom.

Pumpkin absolutely loved his laugh! It was much more bubbly and higher than she expected! It was such an amazing laugh, that Pumpkin chose to give him jiggly raspberries as well! He seemed like the kind of human that would love them! Pumpkin blew a raspberry on his sensitive belly and let her blobby, jello-like body flubber and jiggle to increase the ticklish sensation.

Janus fell into long fits of cackles! He couldn’t stop cackling! Now that he had reached the cackle-stage, there was just no going back! His laughter somewhat reminded Pumpkin of Patton’s laughter: bubbly, childish, and the musical representation of happiness. Though Janus’s wasn’t exactly like his, it was close enough.

“OHOHOKAHAHAHAY! CAHAHAN IHIHIHI HAHAHAVE AHA BREHEHEHEAK PLEHEHEHEASE?” Janus asked.

Pumpkin nodded her head and stopped tickling him almost immediately. As much as she enjoyed the sound of his laughter, she didn’t wanna overdo it. So Pumpkin snuggled herself into Janus and cooed softly.

Janus giggled at this and wrapped his arms around her. “Growing tired?” He asked.

Pumpkin nodded and snuggled herself even further into him.

“That’s ironic, considering I was the one getting tickled.” He joked.

Pumpkin let out a giggly little gurgle as she slowly succumb to her sleepiness. It didn’t take long for the tiredness to start dripping right off her and onto Janus, effecting him as well. Now Janus was growing more and more tired by the second. Janus decided he minus well cuddle himself in and get himself comfy.

It didn’t take long for Janus to fall into a full and deep slumber. It lasted a long while too. Janus didn’t expect to wake up to the smell of garlic or the sounds of something boiling. The garlic was an obvious thing to put together: garlic bread. But boiling? That could be anything!

This boiling sound would end up revealing itself to be spaghetti noodles in a deep pot. As it turned out, Patton was making spaghetti with garlic bread on the side. For Pumpkin, she was gonna have gummy worms with a new little christmas treat for Pumpkin: a Peppermint Pattie! Patton gave her one to try, and had a few unwrapped in a bowl in case she loved it and wanted more.

Pumpkin picked up the peppermint pattie first. She looked at it curiously, split it into two pieces, and ate one of the halves hesitantly. But the moment she chewed on it and actually tasted the pattie, her eyes widened and a HUGE smile grew onto her face!

Remus giggled as he spun his spaghetti. “Ihi think Pumpkin likes the peppermint pattie!” Remus told him.

Patton looked over and sure enough, Pumpkin was standing below him and eagerly reaching her pods out for more peppermint patties! Patton laughed and happily put more peppermint patties onto her dinner plate. Pumpkin happily bounced in place as she ate the gummy worms and enjoyed the taste of the brand new holiday treat.

[leaveharmony]

I feel ppl might appreciate the ongoing saga of The Stupid Bitch Who Threw Away Her High School Diploma, as related by my mother.

So mum works at a high school, as I'm sure I've mentioned.  When current students need course changes or the like she's the one who arranges them, etc, administrative stuff; but she's also the one people call when they need their transcripts (for applying for university, etc.) and on a rarer occasion, when former students need a new diploma because something's happened to the old one).  

Now, most of the time in the later two groups, people who contact her are a little sheepish/apologetic about it.  

Enter The Stupid Bitch Who Threw Away Her High School Diploma. 

It starts with contact: Stupid Bitch has a flowery explanation ready; she was "de-cluttering" during lockdown, improving her space, Letting Go of unnecessary items...and apparently, the single piece of paper that was her high school diploma constituted "clutter" so unbearable it had to go.  Only problem?  Stupid Bitch just applied for a job that requires a look at her high school diploma.

So, mum dutifully gets in touch with the board office, because obviously they don't keep stacks of the things from decades past laying around - did I mention Stupid Bitch attended high school 40+ years ago? - and they tell her of course there aren't stacks of diplomas laying around THERE from that far back either.  The only reason this matters is, the signature of the presiding bureaucrat would be wrong, and thus might require some explanation as Stupid Bitch was applying for a job with it.  Can't just make one up and assume it'd be fine, no, mum was legally obligated to ask if a mismatched replica would be OK.  So she does!  Adding in the explanation and an note RE this is not terribly uncommon, which is why as students are leaving now, they get a reminder to hang onto their original diplomas because they probably won't be able to replicate them perfectly if something happens.

Mum gets a reply.  As long as the Official is Qualified, says Stupid Bitch, she does not care one whit who signs the diploma, and of course remember that Time is of the Essence.   Mum shrugs, signs off on it with the board, and starts working on the hilariously outdated transcript they sent ahead, since Stupid Bitch needs that, too.  Of course, we're talking about marks from courses, and course codes, dated from coming up on a half century ago, and the codes are UNACCOMPANIED BY ANY KIND OF EXPLANATION as to what the classes actually were, so the transcript reads like incomprehensible gibberish.  Mum's maybe a quarter done deadass looking up what they were from dusty archived information so she can correct/expand it because my mother doesn't halfass her job...when she gets a second email.

And Furthermore, Stupid Bitch says, she appreciates neither my mother's "Personal anecdote" nor her Unprofessional Tone, because Stupid Bitch is a Retired Professional and should be addressed thusly, and all she is asking for is a display of the competence she expects from another educated professional (and remember, time is of the essence).

This was the first I heard of Stupid Bitch, because I came out to the living room to find out why mum was laughing so hard I could hear her in my room.

TIME BEING OF THE ESSENCE, my diligent mother thought, she wouldn't want to delay things any further, abandoned the extra work on the transcript and sent it as-is.

The diploma itself has gone on a merry circuit of the area; the first attempted delivery found the guy trying the school doors JUST after the custodian locked them, as is his habit, a half hour early.  Figuring this was not a woman they wanted further contact with, the principal gamely drove to the board office himself to pick it up...only to find that it was "out on the truck" and couldn't be recalled, so it's anyone's guess where the damned thing is NOW.

Today, mum gets another email from the board: a forwarded email with an apologetic note.  It seems they, too, had heard from Stupid Bitch again...who received the transcript they had sent...only to find that IT HAD HER BIRTHDAY LISTED WRONG.

They had "incorrectly delineated" her date of birth on the transcript, said Stupid Bitch, who must have really busted out the thesaurus for that one.  "Please impress upon your colleagues the need for Accuracy."

Did I mention the job Stupid Bitch is applying for is with the OPP?  Honestly I can’t imagine a better place for her than at the f’n cop shop.

At this point in the story I had actual tears of laughter in my eyes because the lengths this chick is going to to prove she's not a goddamn fucking moron who deliberately threw away her high school diploma with $10 words and rants about how well respected she is while educational professionals laugh at her audacity across half the province is the most entertaining thing I've heard all week.

I suggested that yes - print out and send the version with the corrected birthdate...but photocopy it first, and put a single hair down the entire length of the page before you do it, so there's a line across the whole thing nobody could possibly fail to notice.

The absolute kicker is that Stupid Bitch actually attended high school WITH my mother, who probably wouldn't have even remembered this if Trashed Diploma Karen hadn't acted like such a royal cunt.

[the-firebird69]

And there is a huge number of prizes for the race today it's gigantic he says letter wrap we have 450 different types of houses as prices each and every one of them comes fully operational inside a neighborhood is fully built out you don't have to do a thing so turn the key walk in and turn it all on and there are simple rules and stuff we give you everything you need and all you have to pay for our simple stuff like house insurance which is true and health insurance is cheap by the way sometimes $400 a year down here in Florida it's more depending on the flood area level you're in and out of those 450 types of homes we are providing about a million of each at each hole so that's $450 million houses and additional to that we're giving away tons of hard knock kicker 5150 made here in Florida each and every state has their own hard-knock kicker 5150 facility and we're donating those to these races from each and every locality and some of them need to be supplemented but most of them we buy and we give away because they're not allowed to sell them in the United States because they're having a bunch of pigs and each hole we're giving away approximately 750 million hard not kicker 5150 each hole and we have the bikes there and you arrive at the hole and you shouldn't fold it but we'll accept the photocopy if you want to make it to a small ball and stick it in a condom it's probably the best to condoms right all that stuff down putting the ball a photocopy is the best by the way of your license on lighter paper than you get it that stupid place they've noticed it I'm trying everything okay they're also offering tons and tons of our Sim and SYM cars trucks boats and trailers about 450 million of each at each hole and then the numbers three real and we're offering them all over the world now here we're not manufacturing them and we have to report them and it's kind of tricky and it's difficult with the smuggle you have to pay off people and it's a whole nightmare but it works and it happens to help and they do accept and a whole bunch of people who want to do business and they have they don't have businesses and franchisees we have franchises for everything you can imagine apartments restaurants all sorts of different types all sorts of different names tons of entertainment centers lots of rally facilities for kids they have these small little sacks for restaurants and if picnic tables and little ponds and they do the rally in you win prizes and there's a gathering area and you have a bonfire and everybody has a great time this campgrounds and they're huge those parking lot campgrounds fun to be wanting to run those I think they're lucrative they're very little they make a lot of money the legal way but they think they can run the way they want it was trying the races now every half hour on the hour and a half hour huge huge races gigantic

And yes the flash was there this morning and the other flash my flash and I was there too female flash Quicksilver is the wife of Mercury and I'm called female flash that's his name and he's the flash the original flash was Mercury was the other one and his character is massively fast nobody can see it even him he wonders if he even did it no it's going about 800 miles an hour at first people saw him and thought I'll never be that guy no matter what I do Superman's out of this fly but he really can't but the suit that my question because he doesn't know how it works and he went all the races everyone's mad at him and says orange come in here and get powerful cuz I don't have enough manpower that's the way it is so they're doing that and Quicksilver and Mercury are upset I want to rematch so we can do that we're going to announce the times on the website that has all the prizes by the way these two are massive massive heroes of ours they're very understated and what they do usually is not seen that great but what they can do is amazing and they are extremely fast and a whole bunch of movies start because of them and we're going to tell you that they do slow down at the end and they accept the prize and they do slow down at the start and standing around with a whole bunch of other people are in cosplay right now and nobody can catch them they're a whole bunch of people who are running about 100 miles an hour one thing burning out at 200 fell over and he more or less died but it's real suscitated that was time for vino and it was an incredible race it's the best race I've ever seen and once it hits 1:00 unfortunately for my husband we're going to start the motor race and we're going to have an Open class off-road and we're going to show the route and we're going to have a road race and we're going to close roads just by nature all over the world and we're also going to have out in the Vegas area it's the one that was in the movie A celebrity death race and we're not telling you what it's for it has something to do with cars it's also posted on the website and one of your favorite superheroes will be driving in the car that's winning and it's the double for James Bond there's not just your guy even though Brian is the one doing it because we don't want him blowing stuff up at the same time and guess who that is yep my husband and there are other agents or from James Bond who actually have numbers of all have doubles and they're going to be riding those cars in two in a certain quantity for each race

Hera Zues

And especially announcement at the start of the race I'm going to be heading out trillions upon trillions of truffles of mine and at the end of the race I'm going to be hanging out with grand prizes for chocolates and visits to the chocolate factory and cruises which are going to be chocolate Cruise orientated and it's just going to be wonderful

[gaiatheorist]

“This Anxiety Thing.”

I’m now 2/3 of the way through the NHS ‘Introduction to Anxiety’ course, that it’s taken over two years to be allocated onto. I hate it. ‘Hate’ is a strong word, what I mean to say is that there are many elements to the thing I actively dislike. It’s a stepped process, and if I don’t complete next week’s session, I’ll be bounced out of the system, and have to wait to go on the waiting list again.

The lovely ladies that run the course invited 20 people to each of the two 90-minute sessions they run on a Friday. They only laid out 10 chairs in the room, and they knew that they wouldn’t fill them all, at the end of my first session, a couple of people said they might not come back, and I volunteered to swap into the earlier session, to make the numbers easier. That would have made four participants. One of the facilitators was watching the waiting-room before she did the photocopying, and she guessed-right the number of us that would actually show. Three. (Side-slant, about the NHS not being able to afford photocopying wastage, they probably run this course multiple times, but can’t ‘save’ any spare copies for the next run, in case the budget needs to be trimmed again, and it’s cut.) That’s the level of damage, or disengagement, or just not-being-able-to they’re working with, by the time ‘we’ get our appointments for the ‘Introduction to’, ‘we’ are already at a stage where some of us can’t sit in a room for 90 minutes with other people. Have that, ‘Minister for Loneliness’ and ‘Community Prescribing’, it takes so long to get into the system that some of us are already beyond sitting in a room watching YouTube clips.

I’m finding it very challenging. Not the content, I could have written most of it, but the process. There’s a snarky mind-loop of the very lucid priest sitting in the Hairy-Hands-Hospice in the Father Ted episode, the one who says “I really shouldn’t be here, you know.”, while the other priests are yelling “Feck!” and “Girls!” and “Drink.” There’s also a niggle in me that I mustn’t go all ‘Randal P McMurphy’, and be an obstacle to the progress of the other two participants. That’s not to say that I’m ‘faking it’, just that my anxiety-behaviours, like most things about me, are atypical. The control-behaviour in me, when I know a situation is not under my control is a massive strand of my anxiety-thing. Hyper-vigilant, I watch and listen, and then I usually either show off, or clown about. (There was a bit of ‘tears of a clown’ after last week’s session, I just crashed and slept after this one, I’ve been ill most of this week, I was exhausted.) The other two participants are VERY quiet, I don’t think the girl spoke at all, other than to confirm her name, and the man only spoke when addressed directly. I tried to keep a lid on it, and not answer every question. I deliberately dedicated a bit of my conscious awareness to making sure I wasn’t the only one talking, that’ll be why I greyed-out part way through. My ‘executive functioning’ can be patchy when I’m distracted, profoundly ironic, because when a thing has my full attention, I’m still highly functional. I should have been focusing on JUST the course content, but I had a backing-track of “Don’t act the goat.”, with a chorus of “Let the other participants speak.” and a pervasive-thought bridge of “This is not the right place for me.” Oh, and the projector was knackering my eyes, everything smelled fusty because of the rain, and I was simultaneously regretting eating a McDonald’s on the way, and wondering what nonsense I’d be able to buy the kid from town and still catch the bus home before dark. 

This course is a sifting process. We’ve passed the stage of random individuals telling us to pull our socks up and just get on with it, we’ve negotiated past the doctor’s-receptionist-dragons, to be patted on the head and told to get on with it. I was eventually lucky with the third GP I saw at my practice, the first one said “No, lass, you don’t need ‘that’, you need ‘this’.”, and two years later, it transpired that I did indeed need the ‘that’. The second one was worse “No, I can’t write you a sick-note for stress for ‘that’, that would stress anyone.” Erm, Hello, I’m someone, and it’s stressing me to a point where I can’t function. I followed protocol, that’s what I do. I filled in all of the right forms, and ticked all of the right boxes during my ‘descent into Hell for a bottle of milk’, it took all of my cognitive capacity just to stay afloat, I’m still scrubbing the metaphorical flood-stains off the walls.

Natural attrition, and human collateral, some people will sink, I’m a kicker.

I bed-blocked 16 sessions of IAPT counselling. A chirpy-chap telling me week after week that he admired my resilience, that some people wouldn’t be so tenacious, determined, focused, driven, brilliant, intriguing, able-to-survive. I don’t respond to praise and platitudes, I hit a plateau, and neither of us could shift me beyond that. He eventually ‘let me go’ when it looked like I had a referral for more appropriate intervention on the horizon. That mirrored the experience of trying to access meaningful therapy 2 years ago, Workplace Well-being didn’t want to take me on, because they’d made a referral to Neurology (which was never acted upon), my former employers weren’t going to pay for therapy for me, and their suggested alternative was wildly inappropriate. NHS-general mental health didn’t want to take me on because my employers were advised to buy-in therapy... that was ‘juggling a hot potato’ episode 1. Episode 2 was the Community Mental Health team saying they couldn’t take me on until the Neuro-Psych assessment had concluded it wasn’t entirely a physical-brain issue, and then Neuro-Psych giving me four agonising pages of reports on which bits of my brain didn’t work properly, and deciding that it WAS a mental health issue. It’s to be hoped that the gruesome game of pass-the-parcel I am doesn’t have any chocolate in it, I’ve been bundled hither and yon so much it will be melted. 

Unless you’re in absolute crisis, you have to wait for NHS mental health intervention. I’m not going to lie, I’ve been pretty close to that at various points over the last few years. In my case, it’s a combination of missed opportunities, and my stubborn streak. I can ‘appear’ functional for short stretches of time, but it’s bastard hard work, I go into my ‘emotional overdraft’, and tend to have to write-off the next day. (Due to having mental health issues and brain damage at the same time, my physical brain is no longer ‘playing with a full deck’.)  It’s very difficult, but I CAN do it, apart from that worrying grey-out yesterday, one of the facilitators asked me what phrase I’d used in an earlier answer, and it was just gone, no recall at all. (It was ‘graded exposure’, I have a phenomenal recall when I get something wrong, in 1988, I scored 99/100 in my secondary school entry spelling test, I’d transposed letters, and spelled the word ‘health’ as ‘helath’, the teacher was Mr James, nobody in the entire class scored 100, I was siting next to Gill, and she’d had a cough, so Mr James had given her a drink of water in his nasty old coffee mug.) 

I know I have some anxiety-behaviours, I know I’ve effectively ‘closed down’ very large parts of my world with my various resistances and aversions. Next week’s session is going to be the hardest one, covering the cognitive aspects of anxiety. It’s going to highlight how incongruent I am, how atypical, because, although I have some traits consistent with anxiety, the ‘anxieties’ are symptomatic of a deeper cause, we don’t need to ‘fix’ (most of) my anxiety. I ‘can’ do big, horrible, scary things, I can do things that other people can’t. This tiny, insular, closed-down world I live in is not because I can’t do things, it’s because I won’t. I have the ‘skill’, I just don’t apply the ‘will’. A cumulative toll of very challenging circumstances have led to me almost totally collapsing in on myself, and I’m beating myself up for ‘taking up a space’ on the anxiety course. I’m stupid-fearless, your original Pound-shop Wonder-Woman, there are very few things I CAN’T do, but about five billion things that I find difficult, so either avoid them, or find some mad work-around that works-for-me.

Linear-logical, I need to complete the anxiety course, because that’s the only way I’ll progress to the 1:1 ‘evaluation’, where I’ll apologise for ‘taking up a space that would have better served someone else’, and reveal the truth of me. (Mad analogy, there, about which of the kids in the Chocolate Factory I’d be, what’s my flaw? I have Charlie’s good-natured poverty, but I also have traits of the others, I don’t watch as much TV as Mike, my obsessions aren’t quite as entrenched as Violet’s, but I am absolutely adamant about what I want, like Verruca. I don’t want the world, I want to be as functional as I can be within it.) The anxiety course was a best-fit alternative from the options offered to me ‘off the peg’. I have a massive, pervasive anxiety about   harming other people. It’s not new, and I don’t think any amount of graduated exposure is ever going to undo it. It’s very easy to unpick, I’ve had a chain of people in my life do me significant harm, and I don’t want to be them. A snowball rolling downhill, I’ve picked up scars, and slights, and scandals, and slurs, and carried them with me, determined not to pass them on. I try very hard not to deliberately hurt others, to help and heal where I can.

That’s why I’m so strung-out wrung-out, I know I shouldn’t be on that course, but I also know it’s my only way in to productive intervention. I’m using up too much brain-space ‘guarding’ other people from me, because I’m an absolute nightmare. All the while, in the background, I have the conditionality of the Universal Credit and PIP systems drawing on the resources I should be using to ‘get better’.  The ‘safety net’ has me well and truly tangled.   

[getseriouser]

20 THOUGHTS: 2017 Get Serious Awards for Football

THIS column has become such a juggernaut we are dedicating an entire column to our own version of honours for the 2017 season.

That whilst all the other scribes and bloggers and twitter menaces have their say on who was the best, the worst, their highlights of the season, why would I begrudge this snowball of an audience by not chipping in with our own version.

So as we celebrate the home and away year in this chasm between the last round and the first week of finals, let’s look back and reminisce by calling it as we see it, who outperformed, underperformed and work out just who had the shitter year out of Damien Barrett and Mark Robinson.

Some of the following awards are cliché and obvious, some though are a bit different and unique to the Get Serious platform, so get on board, get yourself a cupper and a bicky, and prepare to be enlightened.

 SURPRISE OF THE YEAR:

Nominees: Liam Jones (Carlton), Tom Mitchell (Hawthorn), Ben Brown (North Melbourne)

 Winner: Ben Brown – Bloody hell, the once-third ruck option down at Arden St. almost won the Coleman in a team barely able to avoid the wooden spoon. And the crucial kicker to be as good as the season was, it won’t be a flash in the pan. Given he is only 24 Shinboner fans can expect him to build on his 63-goal season, which is a scary thought really.

  DISAPPOINTMENT OF THE YEAR:

Nominees: Gold Coast, Western Bulldogs, AFL Senior Executives, the married ones, who should know better….

 Winner: The Match Review Panel – stuff the nominees, we had to give it to the MRP. Do we need to explain this one, I mean Jack Redpath, Brodie Grundy, Toby Greene, the list goes on. Horrid, awful, un-Australian really…

  GAME OF THE YEAR:

Nominees: Round 2 Geelong defeats North Melbourne by 1 point; Round 4 (Good Friday), Bulldogs defeats North Melbourne by 3 points; Round 14, Sydney defeats Essendon by 1 point; Round 19, Collingwood draw with Adelaide; Round 22, Adelaide defeats Sydney by 3 points.

 Winner: Round 4 (Good Friday), Bulldogs defeats North Melbourne by 3 points – great game, great occasion. There were so many close, exciting, high standard games this year, it was the best season on record for close finishes, but we loved this game back in April. It was well promoted, it worked beautifully as an initiative, and on the fast track at Etihad the final term especially was pulsating.

  COACH OF THE YEAR:

Nominees: Don Pyke (Adelaide), John Longmire (Sydney), Damien Hardwick (Richmond)

 Winner: Don Pyke – Horse and Dimma are stiff but here’s why: Horse has got the Swans into great shape, but we’re going to knock a couple points off for the start of the year from a coaching standpoint, and Dimma, he would have yielded a similar result to last year if it wasn’t for two things, the soft draw and the turnover of assistants. Pyke has kept the Crows up all year and deserves the minor premiership.

  TEAM OF THE YEAR:

Nominees: Adelaide Crows, Sydney Swans, Richmond

 Winner: Sydney Swans – so we knocked points off Longmire in the previous award, but the best team for much of the year were the Swans, who almost knocked off the top of the ladder Crows in Adelaide. Yes, not a super start, but since Round Six no-one comes close, a phenomenal performance, scary, and given the Dogs saluted from 7th last year, the 6th placed Swans are a massive show to go one better in 2017.

  THE ABEL TASMAN PERPETUAL PLATE (MISS OF THE YEAR)

Named after Dutch sailor Abel Tasman, who on his journeys centuries ago, discovered Tasmania, discovered New Zealand, but sailed straight past Australia, and instead of being a Commonwealth country under British rule, we so easily could have been pot-smoking tulip farmers. Bloody Abel.

 Runner Up: Josh Bruce (St Kilda) for not one but two shockers in the goal square, down in Tassie against Hawthorn and against Richmond at Etihad.

 Winner: Melbourne – when your marketing department comes up with the website banner for finals arrangements, you better do better than six first quarter tackles when Collingwood has already kicked six goals and stuff up the unmissable finals spot at the final hurdle.

   THE LANCE ARMSTRONG AWARD FOR HONESTY (LIE OF THE YEAR)

Runner Up: Perth radio shock-jock Who-Cares McSomebody who had Nat Fyfe as a lock to St Kilda, weeks later the Dockers captain re-committed to the club for five years.

 Winner: Jordan De Goey – blamed a broken hand on playing with the dog before eventually confessing he did it in a weekend scuffle at a watering hole. Now come on Jordan…

  THE Y2K BUG GOLDEN JUG (WORST PREDICTION OF THE YEAR)

Winner: Me – for predicting West Coast will finish a strong third or that I had Fremantle improving resoundingly into eight spot. Yuck.

   THE GET SERIOUS PREDICTION OF THE YEAR

Essendon – In the lead up to the season proper I was bullish about the Bombers in 2017, that the 2016 wooden spooner could do the unthinkable and ascend into a September appearance as early as a year later, and then March 30 suggested Dons fans get ready for finals, they are good enough now. Low and behold, they came through like a treat, well done to the club and the faithful alike, pretty amazing year.

  FIRST YEAR PLAYER OF THE YEAR:

Nominees: Andrew McGrath (Essendon), Sam Petrveski-Seton (Carlton), Sam Powell-Pepper (Port Adelaide)

 Winner: Andrew McGrath (Essendon) – you don’t believe how much I wanted to award my pre-season Rising Star pick SPP but one must concede the Bombers defender did just enough to pip the bull from Alberton. Amazing poise and contribution, consistently over the entire year too, so whilst it’s closer than many think, especially those Victorians who don’t see enough of Port Adelaide, this one goes to McGrath.

  THE CHER MEMORIAL TROPHY (“If I could turn back time” REGRET OF THE YEAR)

Winner – Chris Mayne (Collingwood) – Four years. And VFL track-watchers advise his form in the seconds as the year progressed was hardly progressing either, not good. Four. Years.

  THE 1944 NORMANDY LANDINGS MEDAL (TACTICAL MOVE OF THE YEAR)

Winner: James Sicily (Hawthorn) – Sicily was an ‘ok’ key forward prospect in a club who started the season 3-6. Alastair Clarkson throws the magnets around, turns Sicily into a tall ranging midfielder and with great success it helps turn the Hawks season around. From that point, the Hawks lose only three of the next ten games and 22-year old averages 24 disposals and nine marks a game in that stretch – a superb positional move.

 THE GET SERIOUS PLAYER OF THE YEAR

Nominees: Patrick Dangerfield (Geelong), Dustin Martin (Richmond), Tom Mitchell (Hawthorn)

Winner: Dustin Martin (Richmond) – Geelong are annoying but somehow get the job done, and hosted a preliminary final as recently as last year. The Tigers meanwhile stunk so bad last year if their coach not had this year already on his contract he would have been booted. We award this to Martin over Danger because of the influence he has had on his side finishing where it has. We rate the Cats list a little better than the Tigers list, structurally, especially with tall stocks, the Cats do a lot better than the Tigers. But the games that Martin has single handedly won are mesmerising, and not to downplay Dangers’ 2017, he has been a jet, this column just acknowledges that in our view, Martin was a smidge more valuable, a smidge more influential, a smidge better.

  And now the big one….

 THE SEAN SPICER ‘SWINGERS PARTY KEYS IN THE BOWL’ PAPER MACHE BOWL FOR OUTSTANDING MEDIA PERFORMANCE IN FOOTBALL JOURNALISM

Nominees:

Damien Barrett – ‘breaking’ the Rod Butters story about his alcohol and drug issues as President of St Kilda on the Footy Show when the Herald Sun ran the same tale as a feature six years ago, and also for being very boring, more narcissistic as the year progressed, and for claiming on his own podcast St Kilda had double standards for criticising Sam Newman’s transgender comments when by doing so was double standards in itself.

 Mark Stevens – late entry, but for following Dustin Martin to Auckland this week, chucking a microphone under his chin at the airport and expecting something. Martin is as introverted a footballer anyway, let alone the fact he was going to get nothing close to ‘hi Stevo, look, I can reveal to your audience exclusively, since you made the effort to make the trip over here, that I will be moving to North Melbourne next year”. And for ‘making up’ that the Pies want/need Jarrod Harbrow. Time to take a look in the mirror Stevo, average by you.

 Mark Robinson – one thing to send out an insensitive tweet about a player with depression, but it’s another thing to reach out with an apology letter, after being told not to, which included an interview request at the same time to further feather your own nest. Seriously you can’t make this stuff up sometimes.

 The Winner – Mark Robinson. Not a great year for the chiefy chief-chief of the sport’s biggest publisher. But the clincher for our friend Slobbo ‘Time to say no at the dinner table’ Robinson, was when he accused in the wake of Tom Boyd’s public battle with depression, that manager Liam Pickering or president Peter Gordon might be to blame for the illness, for not thinking of the psychological repercussions of the monster contract that Boyd signed in moving to the Dogs a couple years ago. Really? Very ordinary stuff. Time for a spell we think, maybe a ‘promotion’ to the classifieds section of the Colac Observer, or into photocopying for the Ovens Valley Bugle?

    (originally published August 30)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

At long last, a meaningful step to protect Americans' privacy

This Saturday (19 Aug), I'm appearing at the San Diego Union-Tribune Festival of Books. I'm on a 2:30PM panel called "Return From Retirement," followed by a signing:

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/festivalofbooks

Privacy raises some thorny, subtle and complex issues. It also raises some stupid-simple ones. The American surveillance industry's shell-game is founded on the deliberate confusion of the two, so that the most modest and sensible actions are posed as reductive, simplistic and unworkable.

Two pillars of the American surveillance industry are credit reporting bureaux and data brokers. Both are unbelievably sleazy, reckless and dangerous, and neither faces any real accountability, let alone regulation.

Remember Equifax, the company that doxed every adult in America and was given a mere wrist-slap, and now continues to assemble nonconsensual dossiers on every one of us, without any material oversight improvements?

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/20/equifax-settles-with-ftc-cfpb-states-and-consumer-class-actions-for-700m/

Equifax's competitors are no better. Experian doxed the nation again, in 2021:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/30/dox-the-world/#experian

It's hard to overstate how fucking scummy the credit reporting world is. Equifax invented the business in 1899, when, as the Retail Credit Company, it used private spies to track queers, political dissidents and "race mixers" so that banks and merchants could discriminate against them:

https://jacobin.com/2017/09/equifax-retail-credit-company-discrimination-loans

As awful as credit reporting is, the data broker industry makes it look like a paragon of virtue. If you want to target an ad to "Rural and Barely Making It" consumers, the brokers have you covered:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#axciom

More than 650,000 of these categories exist, allowing advertisers to target substance abusers, depressed teens, and people on the brink of bankruptcy:

https://themarkup.org/privacy/2023/06/08/from-heavy-purchasers-of-pregnancy-tests-to-the-depression-prone-we-found-650000-ways-advertisers-label-you

These companies follow you everywhere, including to abortion clinics, and sell the data to just about anyone:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/07/safegraph-spies-and-lies/#theres-no-i-in-uterus

There are zillions of these data brokers, operating in an unregulated wild west industry. Many of them have been rolled up into tech giants (Oracle owns more than 80 brokers), while others merely do business with ad-tech giants like Google and Meta, who are some of their best customers.

As bad as these two sectors are, they're even worse in combination – the harms data brokers (sloppy, invasive) inflict on us when they supply credit bureaux (consequential, secretive, intransigent) are far worse than the sum of the harms of each.

And now for some good news. The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, under the leadership of Rohit Chopra, has declared war on this alliance:

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/08/16/cfpb-looks-to-restrict-the-sleazy-link-between-credit-reporting-agencies-and-data-brokers/

They've proposed new rules limiting the trade between brokers and bureaux, under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, putting strict restrictions on the transfer of information between the two:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/15/tech/privacy-rules-data-brokers/index.html

As Karl Bode writes for Techdirt, this is long overdue and meaningful. Remember all the handwringing and chest-thumping about Tiktok stealing Americans' data to the Chinese military? China doesn't need Tiktok to get that data – it can buy it from data-brokers. For peanuts.

The CFPB action is part of a muscular style of governance that is characteristic of the best Biden appointees, who are some of the most principled and competent in living memory. These regulators have scoured the legislation that gives them the power to act on behalf of the American people and discovered an arsenal of action they can take:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

Alas, not all the Biden appointees have the will or the skill to pull this trick off. The corporate Dems' darlings are mired in #LearnedHelplessness, convinced that they can't – or shouldn't – use their prodigious powers to step in to curb corporate power:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

And it's true that privacy regulation faces stiff headwinds. Surveillance is a public-private partnership from hell. Cops and spies love to raid the surveillance industries' dossiers, treating them as an off-the-books, warrantless source of unconstitutional personal data on their targets:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/16/ring-ring-lapd-calling/#ring

These powerful state actors reliably intervene to hamstring attempts at privacy law, defending the massive profits raked in by data brokers and credit bureaux. These profits, meanwhile, can be mobilized as lobbying dollars that work lawmakers and regulators from the private sector side. Caught in the squeeze between powerful government actors (the true "Deep State") and a cartel of filthy rich private spies, lawmakers and regulators are frozen in place.

Or, at least, they were. The CFPB's discovery that it had the power all along to curb commercial surveillance follows on from the FTC's similar realization last summer:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/12/regulatory-uncapture/#conscious-uncoupling

I don't want to pretend that all privacy questions can be resolved with simple, bright-line rules. It's not clear who "owns" many classes of private data – does your mother own the fact that she gave birth to you, or do you? What if you disagree about such a disclosure – say, if you want to identify your mother as an abusive parent and she objects?

But there are so many stupid-simple privacy questions. Credit bureaux and data-brokers don't inhabit any kind of grey area. They simply should not exist. Getting rid of them is a project of years, but it starts with hacking away at their sources of profits, stripping them of defenses so we can finally annihilate them.

I'm kickstarting the audiobook for "The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation," a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and make a new, good internet to succeed the old, good internet. It's a DRM-free book, which means Audible won't carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

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/2023/08/16/the-second-best-time-is-now/#the-point-of-a-system-is-what-it-does

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

[mostlysignssomeportents]

California to smash prison e-profiteers

On Weds (May 10), I’m in Vancouver for a keynote at the Open Source Summit and a book event for Red Team Blues at Heritage Hall and Thu (May 11), I’m in Calgary for Wordfest.

It’s a double-whammy that defines 21st century American life: a corporation gets caught doing something terrible, exploitative or even murderous, and a government agency steps in — only to discover that there’s nothing it can do, because Reagan/Trump/Clinton/Bush I/Bush II deregulated that industry and stripped the agency of enforcement powers.

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/2023/05/08/captive-audience/#good-at-their-jobs

Man, that feels awful. The idea that extremists gutted our democratically accountable institutions so that there’s nothing they can do, no matter how egregious a corporation’s conduct is so demoralizing. Makes me feel like giving up.

But the law is a complex and mysterious thing. Regulators aren’t actually helpless. There are authorities, powers and systems that the corporate wreckers passed over, failed to notice, or failed to neuter. Take Section 5 of the FTC Act, which gives the Commission broad powers to prevent “unfair and deceptive” practices. Since the 1970s, the FTC just acted like this didn’t exist, even though it was right there all along, between Section 4 and Section 6.

Then, under the directorship of FTC chair Lina Khan, Section 5 was rediscovered and mobilized, first to end the practice of noncompete “agreements” for workers nationwide:

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/antitrust-enforcers-to-ban-indentured

A new breed of supremely competent, progressive regulators are dusting off those old lawbooks and figuring out what powers they have, and they’re using those powers to Get Stuff Done. It’s like that old joke:

Office manager: $75 to kick the photocopier?

Repair person: No, it’s $5 to kick the photocopier, $70 to know where to kick it.

There’s a whole generation of expert photocopier-kickers in public life, and they’ve got their boots on:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

This is the upside of technocracy — where you have people who are appointed to do good things, and who want to do good things, and who figure out how to do good things. There are dormant powers everywhere in law. Remember when Southwest Air stranded a million passengers over Christmas week and Transport Secretary Pete Buttigieg responded by talking sternly about doing better, but without opening any enforcement actions against SWA?

At the time, Buttigieg’s defenders said that was all he could do: “Pete isn’t the boss of Southwest’s IT department, you know!” He’s not — but he is in possession of identical powers to the FTC to regulate “unfair and deceptive” practices, thanks to USC40 Section 41712(a), which copy-pastes the language from Article 5 of the FTC Act into the DOT’s legislative basis:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

The failures of SWA were a long time coming, and were driven by the company’s shifting of costs from shareholders to employees and fliers. SWA schedules many flights for which they have no aircraft or crew, and when the time to fly those jets comes, the company simply cancels the emptiest flights. This is great for SWA’s shareholders, who don’t have to pay for fuel and crew for half-empty planes — but it’s terrible for crew and fliers.

What’s more, selling tickets for planes that don’t exist is plainly unfair and deceptive. A good photocopier-kicker in charge of the DOT would have arrived with a “first 100 days” plan that included opening hearings into this practice, as a prelude to directly regulating this conduct out of existence, averting the worst aviation scheduling crisis in US history. That’s what Buttigieg’s critics wanted from him: a competent assessment of his powers, followed by the vigorous use of those powers to protect the American people.

One domain that’s been in sore need of a photocopier-kicker for years is prison tech. America (“the land of the free”) incarcerates more people than any nation in the history of the world — more than the USSR, more than China, more than Apartheid-era South Africa.

For corporate prison profiteers, those prisoners are a literal captive audience, easy pickings for gouging on telephone calls, books, music, and food. For years, companies like Securus have been behind an incredibly imaginative array of sadistic tactics that strip prisoners of the contact, education and nutrition that governments normally provide to incarcerated people, and then sells those prisoners and their families poor substitutes for those necessities at markups that cost many multiples of the equivalent services in the free world.

Think of prisons that reduce the amount of food served to sub-starvation levels, then sell food at high markups in the prison commissary. For prisoners whose families can afford commissary fees, this is merely extortion. But for prisoners who don’t have anyone to top up their commissary accounts, it’s literal starvation.

This is the shape of every prison profiteer’s grift: take something vital away and then sell it back at a massive markup, dooming the prisoners who can’t afford it. The most obvious way to gouge prisoners is by charging huge markups for phone calls. Prisoners who can afford to pay many dollars per minute can stay in touch with their families, while the rest rot in isolation.

In 2015, the FCC tried to halt this practice, passing an order capping the price of calls, but in 2017, the DC District Court struck down the order, ruling that the FCC couldn’t regulate in-state call tariffs, which are the majority of prison calls:

https://www.cadc.uscourts.gov/internet/opinions.nsf/0/C62A026B396DD4C78525813E004F3BC5/%24file/15-1461-1679364.pdf

This was a bonanza for prison profiteers. Companies like Jpay (now a division of Securus) cranked up the price of prisoners’ calls. At the same time, dark-money lobbying campaigns urged prisons to get rid of their in-person visitation programs in the name of “safety��:

https://www.mic.com/articles/142779/the-end-of-prison-visitation

Not just visitation: prisons shuttered their libraries and banned shipments of letters, cards and books — again, in the same of “safety.” Jpay an its competitors stepped in with “free tablets” — cheap, badly made Chinese tablets. Instead of checking out books from the prison library or having them mailed to you by a friend or family member, prisoners had to buy DRM-locked ebooks at many multiples of the outside world price (these same prices were slapped on public domain books ganked from Project Gutenberg):

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2018/07/24/no-cost-contract/

Instead of getting letters and cards from your family members and friends, you had to pay to look at scans of them, buying “virtual stamps” that had to accompany every page (they even charged by the “page” for text messages):

https://www.wired.com/story/jpay-securus-prison-email-charging-millions/

Enshittification is my name for service-decay, where companies that have some kind of lock-in make things worse and worse for their customers, secure in the knowledge that they’ll keep paying because the lock-in keeps them from leaving. When your customers are literally locked in (that is, behind bars), the enshittification comes fast and furious.

Securus/Jpay and its competitors found all kinds of ways to make their services worse, like harvesting recordings of their calls to produce biometric voice-prints that could be used to track prisoners after they were released:

https://theintercept.com/2019/01/30/prison-voice-prints-databases-securus/

Of course, once the prison phone-carriers started harvesting prisoners’ phone calls, it was inevitable that they would leak those calls, including intimate calls with family members and privileged calls with lawyers:

https://www.aaronswartzday.org/securedrop-prisoner-data/

Prison-tech companies know they can extract huge fortunes from their captive audience, so they are shameless about offering bribes (ahem, “profit-sharing”) to prison authorities and sheriffs’ offices to switch vendors. When that happens, prisoners inevitably suffer, as happened in 2018, when Florida state prisons changed tech providers and wiped out $11.8m worth of prisoners purchased media — every song prisoners had paid for:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/08/captive-audience-how-floridas-prisons-and-drm-made-113m-worth-prisoners-music

As bad as these deals are for prisoners, they’re great for jailers, who are personally and institutionally enriched by prison-tech giants. This is textbook corruption, in which small groups of individuals are enriched while vast, diffuse costs are extracted from large groups of people. Naturally, the deals themselves are swathed in secrecy, and public records requests for their details are met with blank, illegal refusals:

https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2018/may/25/laramie-county-prison-phones/

The “shitty technology adoption curve” predicts that technological harms that are first visited upon prisoners and other low-privilege people will gradually work its way up the privilege gradient:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/29/impunity-corrodes/#arise-ye-prisoners

Securus powered up the Shitty Tech Adoption Curve. They don’t just spy on and exploit prisoners — they leveraged that surveillance empire into a line of product lines that touch us all. Securus transformed their prisoner telephone tracking business into an off-the-books, warrantless tracking tool that cops everywhere use to illegally track people:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/10/technology/cellphone-tracking-law-enforcement.html

In other words, our jails and prisons are incubators that breed digital pathogens that infect all of us eventually. It’s past time we got in the exterminators and flushed out those nests.

That’s where California’s new photocopier-kickers come in. Like many states, California has a Public Utility Commission (PUC), which regulates private companies that provide utilities, like telecoms. That means that the state of California can reach into every jail and prison in the state and grab the prison profiteers by the throats and toss ’em out the window.

Writing in The American Prospect, Kalena Thomhave does an excellent job on the technical ins-and-outs of calling on PUCs to regulate prison-tech, both in California and in other states where PUCs haven’t yet been neutered or eliminated by deregulation-crazed Republicans:

https://prospect.org/justice/2023-05-08-california-prison-phone-calls-free/

Thomhave describes how California’s county sheriffs have waxed fat on kickbacks from the prison-tech sector: “for example, the Yuba County Sheriff’s Office receives 25 percent of GTL/ViaPath’s gross revenue on video calls made from tablets.” Small wonder that sheriffs offices lobby against free calls from jail, claiming that prisoners’ phone tariffs are needed to fund their operations.

It’s true that the majority of this kickback money (51%) goes into “inmate welfare funds,” but these funds don’t have to go to inmates — they can and are diverted to “maintenance, salaries, travel, and equipment like security cameras.”

But limiting contact between prisoners and their families in order to pay for operating expenses is a foolish bargain. Isolation from friends and family is closely linked to recidivism. If we want prisoners to live productive lives after their serve their time, we should maximize their contact with the outside, not link it to their families’ ability to spend 50 times more per minute than anyone making a normal call.

The covid lockdowns were a boon to prison-tech profiteers, whose video-calling products were used to replace in-person visits. But when pandemic restrictions lifted, the in-person visits didn’t come back. Instead, jails continued to ban in-person visits and replace them with expensive video calls.

Even with new power, the FCC can’t directly regulate this activity, especially not in county jails. But PUCs can. Not every state has a PUC: ALEC, the right-wing legislation factory, has pushed laws that gut or eliminate PUCs across the country:

https://alec.org/model-policy/telecommunications-deregulation-policy-statement/

But California has a PUC, and it is gathering information now in advance of an order that could rein in these extractive businesses and halt the shitty tech adoption curve in its tracks:

https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Efile/G000/M478/K075/478075894.PDF

That’s some top-notch photocopier-kicking, right there.

Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, DC, Gaithersburg, Oxford, Hay, Manchester, Nottingham, London, and Berlin!

[Image ID: A prison cell. Behind the bars is the bear from the California state flag. There is an old-fashioned telephone headset near his ear, such that he appears to be making a call.]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Being good at your job is praxis

You know the joke.

Office manager: "$75 just to kick the photocopier?"

Photocopier technician: "No, it's $5 to kick the photocopier and $70 to know where to kick it."

The trustbusters in the Biden administration know precisely where to kick the photocopier, and they're kicking the shit out of it. You love to see it.

Last July, the Biden admin published an Executive Order enumerating 72 actions that administrative agencies could take without any further action from Congress - dormant powers that the administration already had, but wasn't using:

https://www.thenation.com/article/economy/biden-monopoly-executive-order/

This memo was full of deep cuts, like the Competition in Contracting Act of 1984, Northern Pac. Ry Co v US (1958), the Bank Merger Act and the Bank Holding Company Act of 1956, and the Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2021/07/09/executive-order-on-promoting-competition-in-the-american-economy/

The memo opened with the kind of soaring rhetoric that I absolutely dote on, a declaration of the end of Reagonomics and its embrace of monopoly:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby

But the memo didn't just offer red meat to tube-feeding activist cranks like me: it also set out 72 specific, technical activities that would make profound, material changes in the economy and improvements to the lives of every person in America, and then the administration executed every one of those actions:

https://www.davispolk.com/insights/client-update/president-bidens-executive-order-competition-one-year-later

They knew where to kick the photocopier and boy did they kick it - hard.

The White House action has Tim Wu's fingerprints all over it. He's the brilliant, driven law professor who's gone to work as Biden's tech antitrust czar. But Wu isn't alone: he's part of a trio of appointees who are all expert photocopier kickers. There's Jonathan Kanter at the DoJ and Lina Khan at the FTC.

Khan is a model of administrative competence and ideological coherence. Her tenure has included lots of soaring rhetoric to buoy the spirits of people like me:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/09/rest-in-piss-robert-bork/#harmful-dominance

But it's also included lots of extremely skillful ju-jitsu against the system, using long-neglected leverage points to Get Shit Done, rather than just grandstanding or demanding that Congress take action. Here's the FTC's latest expert kick at the photocopier: action on Right to Repair that exercises existing authority:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7bxaa/ftc-energy-rules-right-to-repair

The Right to Repair fight is a glaring example of democratic dysfunction. Americans broadly and strongly support the right to fix their own stuff, or to take their stuff to the repair depot of their choice. How broadly? Well, both times that the question has been on the Massachusetts ballot, there was massive participation and the measures passed with ~80% majorities:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/26/nixing-the-fix/#r2r

But despite this, state-level attempts to pass R2R bills have been almost entirely crushed by a coalition of monopolists, led by Apple, including John Deere, GM, Wahl Shavers, Microsoft, Google, and many other giant corporations who want the power to tell you your property is beyond repair and must be condemned to an e-waste dump:

https://doctorow.medium.com/apples-cement-overshoes-329856288d13

Right to Repair is a case study for the proposition that "ordinary citizens… get the policies they favor, but only because those policies happen also to be preferred by the economically-elite citizens who wield the actual influence."

https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf

Enter the photocopier kickers, wearing boots. The same month that the White House dropped is massive antitrust executive order, it also published an executive order on Right to Repair, including electronics repair:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/10/unnixing-the-fix/#r2r-plus-plus

The EO built on the evidence compiled through the FTC's "Nixing the Fix" report:

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/reports/nixing-fix-ftc-report-congress-repair-restrictions/nixing_the_fix_report_final_5521_630pm-508_002.pdf

But it also identified that the FTC already had the power to do Right to Repair, in its existing Congressional authorization:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/07/09/fact-sheet-executive-order-on-promoting-competition-in-the-american-economy/

The Biden antitrust strategy is powerful because it recognizes that every administrative agency has powers that can be brought to bear to slow down the anticompetitive flywheel that has allowed giant corporations to extract monopoly profits and then launder them into pro-monopoly policies.

Which brings me to today's news: the FTC has carefully reviewed the powers it has under its existing Energy Labeling Rule (you know, the rule that produces those Energystar stickers on appliances) and concluded that it can also force companies to publish repair manuals under this rule:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/10/federal-trade-commission-seeks-public-comment-initiative-reduce-energy-costs-strengthen-right-repair

As USPIRG's Nathan Proctor told Motherboard’s Matthew Gault, "When Congress passed energy conservation policies decades ago, it included the ability to require Right to Repair access. While that provision has gone unnoticed for too long, it’s not surprising it was written that way."

https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7bxaa/ftc-energy-rules-right-to-repair

The FTC is now planning to exercise that long dormant authority in a game-changing way - to kick the photocopier really, really well. It is seeking public comment on "whether lack of access to repair instructions for covered products is an existing problem for consumers; whether providing such information would assist consumers in their purchasing decisions or product use; whether providing such information would be unduly burdensome to manufacturers; and any other relevant issues"

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/R611004EnergyLabelingANPR.pdf

The Trump years were brutal. Every time we turned around, some Trumpy archvillain was twirling his mustache and announcing an evil plot. Yet so many of these turned out to be nothingburgers - not because they were sincere in their intentions, but because they lacked administrative competence.

Trump embodied administrative incompetence. He was very good at commanding the news cycle, and very good at riling up his base, but he had no idea where to kick the photocopier, and every expert photocopier kicker that Trump hired got immediately fired, because they would insist that Getting Shit Done required patience and precision, not a deluge of chaotic governance-by-tweeting.

To the extent that Trumpland Got Shit Done - packing the courts, handing out trillions in tax gifts to the ultra-rich - it was in spite of Trump and his trumpies, and because of the administratively competent wing of the party: McConnell, Romney, et al. In the GOP, "establishment" is a slur meaning "competent."

This isn't to say that Trump wasn't dangerous - he absolutely was. But it does militate for an understanding of politics that pays close attention to competence as well as virtue or wickedness.

It's one of the things that was very exciting about the Elizabeth Warren campaign - those long-ass policy documents she dropped were eye-wateringly detailed photocopier-kicking manuals for the US government.

Biden himself isn't much of a photocopier kicker. He's good at gladhanding, but the photocopier kickers in his administration represent a triumph of the party's progressive wing. And therein lies a key difference between the parties: in the GOP, the competent are the establishment; in the Democrats, the establishment are the ones who can't or won't act, and the progressives have got their boots on and are ready to kick.

Image: Temple University Libraries (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/tulpics/4882641645/

CC BY 2.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[Image ID: A photocopier in an office copy room; a silhouetted figure is dealing a flying kick to it.]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Bill Gates will kill us all

2.5b people in Earth's 130 poorest countries have not been vaccinated. The 85 poorest countries won't be vaccinated until 2023. The humanitarian cost is unforgivable - and self-defeating, as each infected person is a potential source of new strains.

https://www.who.int/director-general/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-media-briefing-on-covid-19-5-february-2021

How the actual fuck did this happen?

What happened to the early pledges by governments, the WHO, public health experts and leading research institutions to create global cooperation in vaccine development, eschewing patents and secrecy so that we could rescue our species?

That dream was smashed.

Many people helped create our vaccine apartheid, the single individual who did the most to get us here is Bill Gates, through his highly ideological "philanthropic" foundation, which exists to push his pitiless doctrine of unfettered monopoly.

It was Gates who sabotaged the WHO Covid-19 Technology Access Pool (C-TAP), replacing it with his failed ACT-Accelerator, a system of patents and secrecy and vast profits for the pharma industry, ornamented with nonbinding, failed promises of access for poor nations.

It was Gates who convinced Oxford to renege on its promise of patent-free access to its publicly funded vaccine research for the global south in favor of exclusive patent access for Astrazeneca.

https://khn.org/news/rather-than-give-away-its-covid-vaccine-oxford-makes-a-deal-with-drugmaker/

When we hear ghoul sellouts like Howard Dean pushing the racist, genocidal lie that "patents don't matter" because brown people in poor countries can't make vaccines, we're hearing Gates's talking points:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/08/howard-dino/#the-scream

Gates's role in vaccine apartheid is laid out in exquisite detail in Alexander Zaitchik's outstanding New Republic feature, which delves into Gates's longstanding project to sideline democratic governments and cooperation in favor of monopoly tyranny.

https://newrepublic.com/article/162000/bill-gates-impeded-global-access-covid-vaccines

This goes way, way back. I mean, *waaaay* back, all the way to 1976, when Gates wrote his infamous "Open Letter to Hobbyists," decrying the dominant, cooperative mode of software development and calling its practitioners thieves.

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

Gates's fortune depended on creating a software monopoly, and that monopoly required "intellectual property" protection. Gates has always been a monopolist, and so naturally, he loves IP (before "IP" was a common term, copyrights and patents were called "monopolies").

Intellectual property is a very important part of the inequality story, the story of how we got to a world where billions of people are denied vaccines and where all people face new, more virulent strains as a result.

As UNCTAD chief economist Richard Kozul-Wright told Lynn Fries for GPE: "[IP allows companies] to grab a larger share of what has already been produced in the economy."

It's a means of extracting rents, not for doing things, but for OWNING things.

IP is key to tax avoidance: companies like Ikea transfer "IP" (the Ikea trademark) to a numbered company in a tax haven; each national Ikea subsidiary pays "licensing fees" for the trademark equal to 100% of their in-country profits, so they never earn a (taxable) cent.

The transformation of the world into a monopolized system of IP-heavy, rent-extracting, tax-dodging companies really kicked into gear after 1999, with the signing of the WTO agreement and its IP adjunct, the TRIPPS, and as Zaitchik details, Gates was instrumental there.

For this part of the story, Zaitchik talks to Jamie Love, who was at the UN when NGOs like his were pushing to create vaccine and other pharma pools for the global south, while pharma companies handed out pamphlets bearing the Gates Foundation logo, smearing the plan.

Though the US delegation struggled for credibility, the combination of the Gates Foundation, and former US trade officials fronting for  the global pharma industry managed to sideline the project, which was being driven by the demand for equitable access to AIDS drugs.

With Gates's help, the WTO emerged as an IP enforcement powerhouse. Zaitchik cites Dylan Mohan Gray: "it took Washington 40 years to threaten apartheid South Africa with sanctions and less than four to threaten the post-apartheid Mandela government over AIDS drugs."

Incredibly, the Gates Foundation used this to burnish its humanitarian image: they solicited donations from pharma companies and used them to subsidize AIDS drugs in the global south, a maneuver that let them seem like philanthropists.

When in reality, they had overseen a program to systematically deny the world's poorest and most threatened people the right to make their own drugs, making them dependent on the whims of multinational corporate charity instead.

Sound familiar? Today, Gates runs around repeating the lie that poor people can't make their own medicine,  saying that patent exemptions won't make a difference now - to the extent he's right, the world *now* is the crucial one.

Having sabotaged the efforts by poor countries to engage in the kind of production ramp-up the rich world saw as vaccines were being developed, it may *now* be too late. "Because of my bad ideas *then*, it's too late *now*."

The connection between IP and elite philanthropy is deep and important. IP's rent-seeking and tax-dodging has made poor countries beholden to offshore monopolists in health, agriculture and IT, and then starved them of taxes to build up domestic alternatives.

This, in turn, makes them dependent on "gifts" from the billionaires who arm-twisted them into IP treaties, forced them to pay rent on all domestic production, and then profit-shifted the funds out of the reach of their tax-collectors.

As Anand Giridharadas reminded us in his seminal "Winners Take All," the core purpose of elite philanthropy has been the same since the robber-baron era: to burnish the reputations of monsters who take everything and give back crumbs.

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/11/10/winners-take-all-modern-philanthropy-means-that-giving-some-away-is-more-important-than-how-you-got-it/

Reading Jamie Love's quotes in Zaitchik's article reminded me of my own time working with Jamie and Knowledge Ecology International at WIPO in Geneva, when I was an NGO delegate to a global DRM treaty.

You see, at WIPO, the vast majority of NGOs aren't human rights organizations or other public interest groups - they're industry associations representing tech, entertainment, broadcast and pharma monopolists.

These guys - almost all guys - were just aghast when real NGOs started showing up for these meetings and were absolutely shameless in their sabotage of our efforts to balance their corporate lies (absolutely bald-faced lies were routinely entered into the debates).

How petty? Well, they had been accustomed to writing up "fact-sheets" for the day's debate and handing them off to WIPO staffers working for the secretariat, who would photocopy them and set them out on literature tables for the national delegates.

So we started doing this too: we'd take careful notes on the day's debates, convene with global experts to debunk industry association lies, get our Indymedia friends to translate them into six languages, and hand them off to the secretariat in the morning for copying.

So they got the secretariat - a former US textiles negotiator who made her bones helping create the conditions for slave labor in places like Bangladesh - to end the practice of photocopying papers for all NGOs.

Of course the industry bodies had cushy offices in Geneva, whereas we stayed in flophouses and youth hostels. They could ask their underlings to come in early and do their copying for them, whereas we had to take a bus to the all-night copy-shop to get our handouts copied.

Here's where it gets super-weird: our handouts started to go missing. We'd set out our stacks of paper on the literature tables before the morning session and an hour later, they'd all be gone, but none of the delegates had managed to get a copy.

We found those missing handouts...in the garbage, behind potted plants and in the *toilets*.

No, seriously.

And here's the kicker: during the ensuing furore, the main response from the pharma lobbyists was to object to us calling ourselves "public interest NGOs."

I'll never forget this smarmy sociopath in his expensive suit, with his shit-eating grin, standing there saying, "Phamaceuticals serve the public interest, and our industry association is a nonprofit. We are a non-profit, public-interest NGO."

It was a remarkable sight. 20 years later, their version of the public interest - the doctrine of Gates - has produced a multi-billion-person reservoir of the sick and vulnerable who are doomed to serve as factories for highly virulent variants.

This is a literally genocidal doctrine, and it threatens our very civilization. It's a funny kind of non-profit, public interest move for an industry and its billionaire ideologue funders to have made.

But hey, at least no one's "intellectual property" took a hit.