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hyperlexichypatia · 1 year

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One of the main problems with the “Reagan closed the institutions” narrative, besides straight-out historical inaccuracy, is that it erases the decades of efforts of disabled people themselves, as well as allies, to abolish institutionalization. Ronald Reagan does not deserve more credit for deinstitutionalization than disabled activists on the ground. Politics is the art of the possible, and disability rights advocates were able to have some limited political success appealing to fiscal conservatives like Reagan. Locking up disabled people, after all, is not only cruel and inhumane (not issues Ronald Reagan was known for caring about), but is also wildly expensive and a massive waste of taxpayer money. Of course, Reagan was no particular ally to disabled people, either as governor of California (where he oversaw deinstitutionalization initiative) or as U.S. president, and deinstitutionalization did not result in the complete liberation of all disabled people. For one thing, deinstitutionalization coincided with the rise of for-profit prisons and mass incarceration. Disabled people can be freed from institutionalization, then arrested for ableist and classist crimes like “vagrancy” and locked in for-profit prisons. Deinstitutionalization also coincided with the rise of outpatient chemical restraint as a form of forced “treatment” of Mad/neurodivergent people -- the government can save money if, instead of locking Mad/neurodivergent people in institutions, it can simply require them to submit to forced drugging. (Any attempt to derail this point about forced drugging and chemical restraint to something about voluntary medication will result in instant blocking. “Meds help some people” could not be less relevant to a point about people being forcibly drugged against their will.) For these reasons, in the 21st century, disability rights activists can no longer appeal to fiscal conservatism as an argument against institutionalization. Furthermore, as we’ve seen with the “defund the police” movement, nominal fiscal conservatives are, in fact, all to willing to waste massive amounts of taxpayer money as long it goes towards oppression of marginalized people. As I’ve said many times before, disability rights are a nonpartisan issue, because every part of the political spectrum hates us. The U.S. is dominated by two major parties who want to see disabled people locked up and controlled, with one party advocating punitive incarceration and the other advocating “therapeutic” incarceration, and the entire rest of the political spectrum, from communists to libertarians, broadly accepting the premise that Mad/neurodivergent people need to be controlled, either “for our own good” or for the “safety” of others. Even anarchists generally make an exception in support of state biopower, as long as the coercion is framed as “trauma-informed” and “relationship-centered.” No political party, large or small, is an ally to disability liberation (especially not neurodivergent/Mad liberation). Disability liberation won’t happen until we have the complete abolition of all forms of medical control and biopower, from institutionalization to conservatorship to involuntary commitment to mass incarceration, AND the complete reallocation of public resources to ensure that every individual, disabled or otherwise, has access to the resources xe needs and chooses to fully manifest xyr individual self-actualization.

#ronald reagan #deinstitutionalization #mad pride #mad liberation #neurodiversity #psychiatric survivors #disability rights

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justforbooks · 5 months

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Jacques Delors, president of the European Commission during its most imperial and self-confident years, unwittingly became the Gallic symbol to British eurosceptiques of all they feared and despised about the great European project. This perplexed but did not faze him, especially given that after his departure the structure and aims of the European Union remained much as he had envisaged them during his decade from 1985 in Brussels. Appointed to a record three terms as president, he has claims to be the most significant architect and leader of the European project since its emergence following the second world war.

The irony was that the great achievement of Delors, who has died aged 98, was the creation of a single regulated market for trade, goods and services across the European Union – an idea that Margaret Thatcher, his nemesis, enthusiastically signed up to. However, he wanted to go much further than her and some other European leaders, seeing the concomitant need for a single currency and a more powerful, centralised federalist governing system in a global economy with competing power blocs: “National sovereignty no longer means much. . . voluntary cooperation never works,” he said. “In order to face American and Japanese challenges we need to be supranational” – this before the rise of China as an economic power.

Delors, with his lower middle-class background, his ferocious work ethic, his strong religious faith allied to an economist’s belief in fiscal restraint and anti-inflationary caution, might have been a natural ally of Conservative prime ministers. Thatcher backed his appointment to the commission in 1984, and his subsequent reappointment. But his very Frenchness – his strong accent, his pinched and somewhat rancorous manner, and his Gallic confidence in centralised government – counted against him as the tide of popular opinion on both sides of the Channel started to turn in reaction to economic downturn, job insecurity and rising unemployment. Certainly national governments made sure that no commission president would ever be so powerful again.

What was remarkable was that Delors did not come from the privileged French elite of énarques, graduates of the École Nationale d’Administration, whose expectation is that they will run things, or from a powerful party political powerbase, but had fought his way up through ability, application and hard work. The only child of Jeanne (nee Rigal) and Louis Delors, a grievously wounded veteran of the first world war who had left the rural region of Corrèze in south-central France to become a messenger at the Banque de France in Paris, Jacques was born in the working-class 11th arrondissement of the French capital.

His background – half respectable urban poor, half self-reliant rural peasant – did not turn him into a socialist but encouraged him to become a member of the Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne (the Young Christian Workers) movement (and an able member of its basketball team). Delors’ devout Catholic faith shaped his politics, and although he became a member of the French Socialist party in the 1970s he said later: “I’ve never been fascinated by communism and Marxism – I am undoubtedly the only man on the French left who never has been. I believed one could improve society but not change society.” It was his Catholicism that fuelled his support for collective social responsibility and co-operation.

His education was disrupted by the second world war, and afterwards he was diverted from going to university by his father’s insistence that he should follow him into the Banque de France. Otherwise, he might have become a fashion designer, film director or sports journalist. Instead he worked as a securities manager, studied economics at evening classes and married another staff member, Marie Lephaille, who was of Basque origin, in 1948. The bank wanted to promote him, but in 1953 he accepted a job as an economist with a Christian trade union that appreciated his skill at explaining economic concepts clearly. When, years later, François Mitterrand asked him how he had acquired that skill, Delors replied: “If I am clear, it is because I have had little education. As I am not clever, before understanding something I have to make a huge effort.”

By the late 1960s that fluency and seriousness had taken him into politics, as an adviser to the Gaullist government and then into the Socialist party, tempering its secularism. Under Mitterand he became the government’s economics minister (1981-84), gaining the reputation of saving France from financial meltdown by reining in the socialists’ wildly unrealistic spending policies, curbing inflation and cutting the ballooning budget deficit, despite Mitterand’s cynical havering and the outright opposition of most of his fellow ministers.

He impressed European finance ministers and even eventually the sceptical Mitterand, though not enough to be made prime minister: “Delors,” said the president, “smells of the sacristy.” Instead, when there was a vacancy for the presidency of the commission, he was put up for that job as the acceptable French face of economic realism for leaders such as the German chancellor Helmut Kohl and Thatcher.

The commission, once described as a civil service with attitude (not only administering community policies but proposing and implementing its rules and regulations), was in a state of complacent near-torpor when Delors arrived in January 1985. Within a fortnight, following consultations with national governments, he shook things up with the announcement of plans to launch a European single market over the coming seven years, removing trading barriers and discrimination against foreign competitors. Stasis in decision-making in Brussels was countered by reducing countries’ vetoing powers. In constructing the single market he would have the enthusiastic support of the British Tory internal market, tax and customs commissioner Lord (Arthur) Cockfield.

More clearly than leaders such as Thatcher, who thought of it merely as a freeing up of markets, Delors saw the implications for states’ social and employment policies and, eventually, currencies as well: alarm bells rang when he announced that within a decade 80% of economic legislation, including taxation and social policy, would come from the commission. The single market was, certainly initially, a means of stopping Europe’s relative economic decline in the world, but it would also have wider international benefits. He told the European parliament that the member states would have to learn “to speak with a single voice and act together”, and added: “Are we Europeans capable of it? Whether it concerns currency instability, prohibitive rates of interest, hidden protectionism, a decline in aid to the poorest countries – no, Europe has not known how to lead the way.”

Under Delors, the commission became more forceful and outspoken, but also more tightly governed by the president’s cabinet coterie of mainly French staff. They – like him, but unlike many others in the commission – had a Stakhanovite work ethic and an arrogance in enforcing the president’s will across its departments.

Delors thought of himself as an internationalist, with a penchant for jazz and American films, but he was little travelled and struggled to appreciate national foibles and political differences. His strong French accent when speaking English and his austere and unsmiling appearance seemed to typify the arrogant European bureaucrat to the British tabloids, increasingly adopting the sceptical tone of the Thatcher government. He was wily but also outspoken, not always choosing his words carefully or respecting sensitivities.

In 1988 he told the TUC Congress that the commission would require governments to introduce pro-labour legislation, including a right to training and improved protection for workers. That swung the British left and the trade unions almost overnight in favour of Europe as a bulwark against Thatcherism, but it naturally infuriated the prime minister, who retaliated with a speech in Bruges. “We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain only to see them reimposed at a European level with a European superstate exercising a new dominance from Brussels,” she said.

Thus was a new Tory trope born, gradually replacing the party’s previous pro-Europeanism, though two years later Thatcher’s “No! No! No!” to Delors and federalism in the Commons was what precipitated her downfall. More demotically, “Up Yours Delors!” was the Sun’s headline response, reflective of a growing identification of the commission president with the ills of Europe.

By the early 1990s, with the single market in place, Delors’ plans for the next stage – the single currency and political union – were causing consternation among voters in other countries besides Britain. His perceived stubbornness was exemplified when he attempted to derail a deal on farm subsidies with the US, holding up a world trade agreement, because he believed it would undercut French agriculture. The commission’s pre-emptive announcements across a range of issues fed into a wider perception of its indifference to national preferences and democratic decisions.

This came to a head with the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, which – over 250 convoluted and constipated pages – outlined the creation of the European Union, explained new modes of governance within it, and detailed steps towards the adoption of the euro through the creation of the European Monetary System. Its passage through the member states, in legislatures and referendums, was fraught: it nearly brought down John Major’s government in the UK, was initially rejected by the Danes, and was only endorsed by the narrowest of margins by the French. The treaty became a symbol of an out-of-touch bureaucracy and commission president, both unable to connect with or explain to Europe’s voters either why the changes were necessary or what their benefits would be.

Delors’ infuriated statements, such as in a speech in Quimper, Brittany, where he asserted that “there’s no place in a democracy for people who call for a non,” only fuelled the mainly rightwing campaigns against the treaty and created resentment about Europe’s creeping interference in national democratic procedures.

Nevertheless, the treaty eventually passed. Delors had wrestled Europe into a new, more unified and federal direction, with the new states of eastern Europe queueing up to join. However, the treaty was also the harbinger of growing difficulties to come, especially as the single currency intially faltered in the following decade.

Delors, by then the longest serving president in the commission’s history, seemed to recognise that his time was now over. “I became the symbol of an idea of Europe which is in the process of vanishing,” he said in December 1993. “I am discouraged to the extent that I can no longer be useful. I can no longer stamp my mark on Europe. It’s finished [and] frankly, I am no longer the man for the job.”

It was assumed that when Delors stepped down from the presidency in 1995 that he would resume a political career in France, perhaps as a socialist candidate for the presidency. But it was not to be. The French elected the Gaullist Jacques Chirac to succeed Mitterrand, and by then Delors was anyway touching 70 and troubled by sciatica. In the EU, the heads of government had had enough of an overweening, over-ambitious commission and replaced Delors with the ineffectual former prime minister of Luxembourg, Jacques Santer – a man with no ambition to impose his will either on colleagues or on the governments of nations larger than his own.

Delors’ ambitions for Europe were hollowed out: even as he retired, the Balkan countries were erupting in ethnic violence that the EU proved powerless to prevent or stop. In a quiet retirement, he still lived unassumingly in a small Paris apartment, emerging not to pronounce on world events but to commentate on the Tour de France.

He and his wife had two children. Their son, Jean-Paul, a journalist, died of leukaemia in 1982 aged 29. Marie died in 2020. Their daughter, Martine Aubry, became a French government minister, mayor of Lille and leader of the French Socialist party (2008-12).

🔔 Jacques Lucien Jean Delors, politician and public servant, born 20 July 1925; died 27 December 2023

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

#just for books #Jacques Delors #in memoriam

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transfenris-truther · 7 months

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Broward probably just didn't renw the contract on October 1st the end of the fiscal year. Just how it is for contractor businesses unfortunately. I don't think they were layoffs but a common motion in big business. Still sucks for the contractors though but once it's expired, it's done with.

Respectfully, who cares? Bioware (it's autocorrecting to Broward for me too, lol) has been bleeding long-time team members, alienating its employees and engaging in generally crap employment practices for AGES. And it's only gotten worse over the last few years.

Bioware absolutely could've saved these jobs. They could've saved the jobs of other employees that they definitively have laid off in the past. They could've made the lives of their employees good enough that their veteran writers and game designers didn't feel compelled to quit. Bioware doesn't have to hire contractors either. I personally know out of work game designers who are desperate to escape a contractor model where they have no rights and no job security. Bioware could hire these people as employees, pay them good money and benefits, and not treat them like crap.

But they don't do that. Because the "Bioware" we have now is just EA wearing its corpse.

Bioware may not be the worst games company out there, but they're a part of an industry that is extremely committed to burning out employees, churning out trend-chasing, souless garbage, and enabling incredibly toxic business practices which harm their consumers and employees. The crunch is very real at Bioware and, while they've shown more restraint than the average AAA game company, we've seen them choose to engage in business practices which are anti-employee, and some that are anti-consumer as well.

We lost Bioware a long time ago, and I don't think the video game industry is ever going to give it back.

#i love DA2 #but you will never convince me to love a company #and im under no illusions that bioware is going to start treating its employees better #thanks for the ask anon #i know youre coming from a good place #I'm always going to be critical of this company ESPECIALLY after reading about Darrah's experiences with crunch #bioware critical

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mightyflamethrower · 8 months

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Good news for Americans:

In both of his mayoral races, Johnson has received the support of some big donor Republicans. He asked Senator John Cornyn to administer his oath of office last June.

Johnson’s top priorities in office have been public safety, city ethics reform, workforce development, increasing parks and green space and boosting the city’s international standing. He realizes that cities need Republicans, and Republicans need cities. He pointed out that urban cities depend on champions of law and order and fiscal conservatism. Johnson said that today, 80% of Americans live in urban areas. “As America’s cities go, so goes America.”

Unfortunately, many of our cities are in disarray. Mayors and other local elected officials have failed to make public safety a priority or to exercise fiscal restraint. Most of these local leaders are proud Democrats who view cities as laboratories for liberalism rather than as havens for opportunity and free enterprise. Too often, local tax dollars are spent on policies that exacerbate homelessness, coddle criminals and make it harder for ordinary people to make a living. And too many local Democrats insist on virtue signaling—proposing half-baked government programs that aim to solve every single societal ill—and on finding new ways to thumb their noses at Republicans at the state or federal level. Enough. This makes for good headlines, but not for safer, stronger, more vibrant cities.

Full Story: (https://hotair.com/karen-townsend/2023/09/23/shocker-big-city-mayor-switches-from-democrat-to-republican-n579872)

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zvaigzdelasas · 2 years

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To finally have the EU play a “geopolitical role” Chancellor Scholz calls for political “cohesiveness.” “Permanent disunity, permanent dissent among the member countries weaken us.” Therefore, there must be “an end to the egotistical blockages by individual countries of European decisions.” In terms of Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, the EU has reacted with “unprecedented determination and cohesiveness,” which should now be continued. Now, it is a question of finally “closing our ranks” on long-standing controversial issues, such as “the creation of a European defense” or “technological sovereignty.” Scholz announced that “Germany will present concrete proposals in the next few months.” As a first step, the Chancellor reiterates a demand that has been repeatedly raised by German foreign policy makers for years, abolish the right to veto on foreign policy issues that EU members still have today – permitting smaller member countries to protect their vital interests, when necessary, against the pressure of powerful member countries. “We can simply no longer afford national vetoes,” writes Scholz, “if we want to continue to be heard in a world of competing great powers.”[5]

The call for abolishing the right to veto was recently reiterated by SPD Chair Lars Klingbeil in a speech on June 21, where he said that because the EU “must be capable” of “acting rapidly,” it must “abolish the principle of unanimity, for example in foreign, financial and fiscal policies.”[6] From Berlin’s perspective, it is central: “Germany can only be powerful, if the Europe is powerful.” Therefore, Germany must, “as the leading power, ... massively promote a sovereign Europe.” Germany now has – “after nearly 80 years of restraint – a role in the international system of coordinates.” Germany, today, “is, to a growing extent, at the epicenter.” “We should fulfill these expectations.” “Germany must aspire to become a leading power,” the SPD chair insisted. This “new role as a leading power,” however will “require tough decisions from Germany – financial as well as political.” “We must transform structures, and renegotiate budgets.” Particularly the military needs to be strengthened, for example, with the Scholz government’s €100 bn “special fund.” This means “also seeing military force as a legitimate political means,” alleges Klingbeil, who is declaring the accelerated militarization a “peace policy.”

19 Jul 22

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eaglesnick · 2 years

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101 Things You Should Know About the UK Tory Government

Thing 17

During Covid, Rishi Sunak lost billions of pounds of taxpayer’s money. It is estimated that £17 billion was lost in loans that will never be paid back, while almost £5 billion was lost to fraud. Further public funds were lost through the self-employed support scheme, 8.7% of furlough payments were given to fraudsters or made by mistake, in addition to 8.5% of payments to the Eat Out to Help Out scheme.

“But rather than respond with robust measures when the scale of the fraud was revealed, the Treasury said it expected its anti-fraud taskforce to write off the payments lost to fraud. Treasury minister Lord Agnew accused the Treasury of having “little interest in the consequences of fraud to our society” and of making “schoolboy errors” over the awarding of loans". (BylineTimes: 03.11.22)

More recently, Conservative Prime Minister Liz Truss cost the country an additional £50 billion.

“Rishi Sunak is preparing years of tax rises for Britain in an effort to make up for a £50bn fiscal hole left by Liz Truss’s disastrous tenure in Downing Street, according to a Treasury insider.” (Guardian 31/10/22)

Who will pay for this repeated Tory economic incompetence? Bankers? The wealthy? Corporations making record breaking profits? The super-rich?

None of the above. Yesterday, Jeremy Hunt, Sunak's Chancellor of the Exchequer, made it perfectly clear who is to pay for these Tory mistakes:

“Families up and down the country have to balance their accounts at home.”

No one should be surprised by this announcement. It is ALWAYS ordinary working families that have to pay for Tory mismanagement of the economy. Bankers can have unlimited bonuses under Sunak’s government, and energy producers are allowed to continue to make obscene profits, but public sector workers must accept compulsory pay restraint and ordinary working families must “balance their accounts". Quite how people are to balance their household accounts while taking a cut in real wages while the already rich are allowed to make even more money hasn’t yet been explained.

#uk politics #rishi sunak #liz truss #fraud #treasury #black holes #fiscal incompetence #jeremy hunt #working families #budgets #super rich #energy corporations #wealth #poverty

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mariacallous · 1 year

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As Chicagoans went to the polls on Tuesday, early signs pointed to a narrow victory for Paul Vallas, the former head of the city’s public school system and noted educational reformer, over Brandon Johnson, a former social studies teacher turned organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union. Vallas led in the pre-election polls by an average of 3 percentage points, a margin that widened to 6 points when undecided voters were asked whether they leaned toward a candidate. A higher share of Vallas’s supporters said that they were certain to cast their ballots, and more of Johnson’s said that they might change their minds about their choice. Vallas enjoyed a strong lead among voters 60 and older, who are the most likely to vote of all age cohorts, while Johnson was doing best among those 30 and younger, who are typically the least likely to participate.

The ideological battle lines were clearly drawn. Vallas ran as a moderate, Johnson as an unabashed progressive. Johnson wanted to raise taxes on businesses, visitors of Chicago, and wealthy individuals to fund new social programs, while Vallas advocated fiscal restraint. The centerpiece of Vallas’s campaign was a pledge to crack down on violent crime. By contrast, Johnson expressed early sympathy (some would say support) for the “defund the police” movement that erupted after the murder of George Floyd before moderating his position. Not surprisingly, Vallas enjoyed the fervent backing of Chicago’s police union.

When incumbent mayor Rahm Emanuel ran for reelection in 2015, he also faced a progressive candidate, Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, leading some observers to draw parallels between then and now. But these elections differ in two key respects. First: because there was no Black candidate in the 2015 race, the Black vote was up for grabs, and Emanuel won it by a margin of 58 to 42. He also won the white vote by 2 to 1 while Garcia prevailed among Hispanics by a similar margin. This year, Brandon Johnson, a Black candidate with strong community roots, is receiving more than 70 percent support in this key constituency, while Vallas is outpolling Johnson among Hispanics. (Although Vallas is of Greek extraction, his last name — which means “fences” in Spanish — has led some Hispanics to believe that he is one of them.)

The second difference between 2015 and today: eight years ago, no single issue dominated the race, and the electorate was almost equally split among the economy, city finances, education, and crime as its chief concern. This year, violent crime dwarfed all other considerations, and the outcome of the race would be seen as a referendum on the candidates’ competing plans for addressing it.

It is the centrality of voters’ concerns about crime that gave this local contest national implications. A Vallas victory would have reinforced the tough on crime message that the election of Eric Adams in New York City had sent. If Johnson prevailed, his supporters would be able to argue that only a strong progressive message could bring young people and disaffected minority voters to the polls in large enough numbers to overcome those who wanted to intensify the use of tough, racially tinged methods against street-level criminals — and more broadly, to give progressives a chance to prevail over what they regard as the defenders of the status quo.

To the surprise of many veteran observers, this is exactly what happened. With 90,000 absentee ballots still to be counted, Johnson led by a margin of 15,000 votes out of more than 550,000 cast. And because Johnson was receiving nearly 70% of the absentee vote, Vallas already has conceded the race.

Although exit polls are not yet available, preliminary results from Chicago’s 50 wards paint a clear picture. Johnson racked up nearly 80% of the Black vote on Chicago’s South Side and ran strongly among white liberals on the Lakefront. Vallas prevailed in the mostly white working-class wards in the Northwest and Southwest sections of the city, but his margins were not large enough to overcome Johnson’s margins elsewhere. With no Hispanic candidate on the ballot, turnout in the Hispanic-majority wards was reportedly anemic. Overall turnout, though, was higher than usual, which the Johnson campaign attributes in part to a surge among younger voters. We do not yet have enough information to confirm this assessment.

With a strong boost from the Chicago Teachers Union, which has become a dynamo of progressive policies and organizing in the Windy City, Johnson has an opportunity to advance his progressive agenda and become a trendsetter for other cities. Of course, governance always is more complicated than winning elections. The former will require policy approvals from the City Council and tax increases staunchly opposed by the business community to fund his proposed boost in social spending. How he deals with crime increases, underperforming schools, shaky city finances, and a divided Democrat party will determine how successful he is. Against the backdrop of the presidential campaign and national battles for control of Congress, next year won’t be dull.

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vote-democrat-president-congress · 1 year

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They want to cut HEALTH INSURANCE, SOCIAL SECURITY, and MEDICARE, in order to give more tax cuts to the wealthy.

#mccarthy #kevin (1965- )

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freshvinculum2 · 3 months

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#limit power #convention of states #founding fathers #self governance #article v #deficit #fiscal restraint #Instagram

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if-you-fan-a-fire · 10 days

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"Although the LCBO's system of panoptic surveillance was an effective social control tool, it was not without problems. Not only did these technologies carry a substantial cost in staffing, equipment, and finances, as annual reports and various circulars reveal, but they carried secondary and unexpected social effects. Along with certain patterns of resistance, the Board's intensive surveillance resulted in political problems both for the Board itself and for the provincial government in 1936-1937 (LCBO 1936). "Hepburn Agrees the Probe Liquor Administration as Opposition Insists,” announced a head line in Toronto's Telegram of May 25, 1937 (referring to Premier Mitchel Hepburn).

Within its first seven years the LCBO began to suffer under the weight of its surveillance apparatus as its budget reached the level of about $2,307,000 annually. Its document-intensive system was time-consuming, and supplies were difficult to maintain (LCBO Circular no. 1783, 1936, no. 3621, 1945, no. S-145, 1956). The weight both in person-power and equipment needed to successfully perform panoptic surveillance across such a wide population was substantial, requiring over two hundred head office staff and hundreds of local vendors buttressed by the large annual budget (LCBO Reports 1927-34). Coupled with the budgetary restraints associated with the Depression of the 1930s, the pressures of the system led to the changes in policy that slowly shifted away from "soul-training" and a surveillance system based on continuous oversight of human performance to one based on the auditing of records, document analysis, and statistical review, with the development of accountability and governance through the reconstruction of purchase histories and store-related events. The LCBO's use of its auditing and reconstructive technologies increased until its panoptic self-reflection and self-control-based systems were officially removed in 1958. By 1943 it had already been spending $13,708.59 in permit printing costs alone (Ontario 1943-1944, Questions 5 and 6).

From 1928, stores had been instructed to retain orders on file, with the exception of those stores in the Greater Toronto area, which submitted their records on a six-month basis until after 1951. The LBCO told vendors that Purchase Order forms were to be "neatly parceled day by day, endorsed plainly with the date, and arranged in order for quick and convenient reference in case of need, and kept under lock and key" (LCBO Instructions, 1927:4). In 1934 the Board abandoned its policy of reviewing customer purchase orders at head office as part of the daily review of sales. As the Board explained, "Original Purchase Orders covering sales for residence consumption will not be forwarded to head office but will be retained by you on file for a period of 3 months" (LCBO Circular no. 1594, 1934). The Board's new policy centred on the ability to review the records when needed, that is, when other organizations requested purchase history information or when the information was needed in the Board's own investigations into permit holders or employees, or used to refute claims against the Board. Later on these regulations would change: the period in which documents needed to be retained was lengthened to six months for purchase records and one full year, beginning after the end of the fiscal year, for other store documents and reports (LCBO Manual 1951: 2).

After the stipulated period a Store Inspector audited the documents and “the Vendor and Store Inspector" signed a certificate indicating the material had been reviewed for accuracy and approved. The certificate was then awarded to the Chief Inspector of Stores at head office" and the original documents were destroyed. This was standard procedure for all stores across the province except for "stores in the Greater Toronto Area," which "instead of destroying their purchase orders and store records" continued to send them to head office (ibid.).

Once the documents were not being submitted to a daily review they no longer exercised discipline over employees in a strict panoptic sense. Nonetheless, they remained central in enforcing regulations and exercising surveillance in a discretionary manner. The Board stressed its ability to review these documents upon demand, arguing that the myriad of forms still allowed for oversight through the reconstruction of sale, purchase, and in-store behaviours when considered necessary (LCBO Annual Report 1961-62: 5; LCBO Circular no. 3377, 1943, no. 3503, 1944). As time passed the Board increased its reliance upon this at-need model of control, and the head office decreased its manual oversight-based Permit Department and Store Inspection staff in favour of centralized statistic-oriented and trend-based Store Supervision and Store Auditing departments.

This "just-in-time" disciplinary regime minimized the need for storage space and offered flexibility in the redeployment of staff, reprioritization of tasks, and technological automation. Moreover, the emphasis on "activating" inspectors on-demand created a leaner, more finely tuned, and dynamic investigation system highlighting the significance of the temporal dimension of surveillance, a point that Foucault (1977: 149ff) underlined with respect to "disciplinary time." This disciplinary power occurs in temporal sequences, co-ordinated patterns of events, and regularities such as schedules and routines.

The characteristics of secondary reconstruction - post-panoptic, selective, efficient, at-need, reassigned personnel, non-daily reporting - have the effect of lifting surveillance out of continuous time and into a depthless present that lacked a lived context in events and relations. In essence a documentary fragmentation of the present occurred along with a shift away from the disciplinary fabrication and individualization of social subjects to a system that was somewhat lighter and generally less visible - ephemeral, that is. It was based on reconstructing the social subject through a collage-like revival of the fractures of the present captured by the LCBO's detailed surveillance-based documentation, only when it was needed and the system became activated (targeted, efficient, sensitive, and, in short, super refined). In a sense, then, the shift was none other than the transformation of surveillance by means of its abstraction from an empirical field - to what David Lyon (2001/13) refers to as "disappearing bodies," with surveillance passing from a strategy of place to a strategy of time, speed, and projections of outcomes in a pure anticipation of the results (Bogard 1996; 76); even time no longer suffices to describe in a straightforward way how informaticized and networked surveillance enters into a "forever universe" (Castells 1996: 464). Specifically, as the regulatory forces of surveillance become unbound to a single place where someone is watching, and become able to convert social events and people's actions into captured data, the necessity of the physical presence of the body for surveillance and control loses its previous importance (thus "disappearing bodies"). Previously, when bodies and surveillance were rooted in a particular time and space, social action retained its context and meaning, but with the ability to "capture" these particular moments within data, surveillance becomes freed from its particular moment in time and space; and data can be called into question without its context, allowing for new meanings to be developed through that newly found freedom. As Bogard (1996: 76) notes, this freedom enables the development of socially influencing simulations of predetermined futures, while Castells (1996: 464) notes a time-disrupted "forever universe" in which social action regarding collected data has lost all meaningful sequencing and becomes an indiscriminate jumble of timeless moments.

Although the LCBO effectively employed Purchase Order forms to reconstruct purchase and sale histories, this shift towards lighter, statistical reconstruction-based technologies also applied to Board attempts to identify, gain access to, and control "risk" populations. Specifically, this shift came in the LCBO's relocation of staff to statistical Store Audit and Store Supervision departments, and in the shift from the use of person-power to high-tech solutions of tabulating and sorting machines as a means of assembling cob Cured fragments and elaborating prejudicial discriminatory practices (LCBO Circular no. 3940, 1948; LCBO Manual 1951: 25)."

- Gary Genosko and Scott Thompson, Punched Drunk: Alcohol, Surveillance and the LCBO 1927–1975. Winnipeg and Halifax: Fernwood Press, 2009. p. 78-80

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