Jack of Harts

The Socialist Republic of Juneau was not a founding member of Pacifica. The networks had been ravaged enough that communications with the Lower Forty Eight was spotty at best for several years. But once they found out that their ideological friends in Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco had banded together, they jumped at the opportunity to join. Yes, there were Capitalist Pigs in Vancouver, and Royal Pigs in Hawaii, but they could be dealt with in time. What mattered was that, for once in America, The People’s Collectives were finally beginning to take a true measure of control. Their eventual victory was ensured. So Juneau simply absorbed all of the resources it could collect around it, and sent those who didn’t want to participate in the collective outside their ever-expanding borders. They acquired the entire Juneau Panhandle before the Second Great Depression ended, though found it impossible to expand into the rest of Alaska and imprudent to take any Canadian lands. So they sat back and waited. Their times would come. The socially selected leaders of Juneau had no doubt that their times would come.

Unfortunately for the Socialist Republic of Juneau, there were a finite number of resources in Juneau itself, so they had to go forth and collect more from the surrounding communities. These selfless efforts saved many thousands of lives and the collective prospered as time went by and they added new communities. They also found less wasteful ways to cast out the disloyal as their power grew. Once they had access to continental land, they simply dropped those who would not fit in with their new society on dry land outside their borders and let them go off to find whatever life they wished to live outside the bounds of civilization. The Socialist Republic of Juneau had to focus its efforts on saving those who wished to work for the collective, but they always maintained an open immigration policy. Even those who left were welcomed back if they realized the error of their ways and returned to prove their willingness to contribute to the collective. There were always fields that needed plowing after all, and a single shift’s labor would grant any citizen a daily ration allotment.

The Juneau Panhandle suffered greatly when the Second Great Depression ended the easy shipments of American prosperity. Government was the biggest employer, and paper pushing was the greatest industry of the area, and it effectively ceased to exist when Federal support ended. But the career government bureaucrats who lived there knew exactly how to weather a crisis caused by the failure of American Capitalism. Big Brother would always hold out a helping hand to those in need if everyone gave him the proper resources. So they quickly formed a new, more caring, collective of the people,, and collected all resources within their reach. And so the Socialist Republic of Juneau arose to save the people, and there was great rejoicing when the new government provided the necessities of survival to the people according to their need.