Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotation Of The Week 390

I would live all my life in nonchalance and insouciance

Were it not for making a living, which is rather a nouciance.

Ogden Nash

thanks to Deb Crawford-Howell

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 387-389

In a recession this deep, recovery doesn't depend on investors. It depends on consumers who, after all, are 70 percent of the U.S. economy. And this time consumers got really whacked. Until consumers start spending again, you can forget any recovery, V or U shaped.

Problem is, consumers won't start spending until they have money in their pockets and feel reasonably secure. But they don't have the money, and it's hard to see where it will come from.
When Will the Recovery Begin? Never
Robert Reich's Blog.
Posted July 10, 2009.

I'm reminded of the old rightwing cliche that you can't solve problems by throwing money at them. I tend to agree with writer Robert Anton Wilson, who says that this cliche is the most stupid, moronic thing he's ever heard from the right. The vast majority of problems in life get solved by throwing money at them. Nothing else but money will do, in social reality.

You pay your rent by throwing MONEY at your landlord. Your landlord won't accept philosophical speculation as payment. When you need food, you throw MONEY at a food retailer. They won't accept positive thinking as payment. You need water to bathe - you throw MONEY at the water company. They won't accept your insightful perceptions about not being a mental slave.)
Brian Dean
CLAWS Discussion
AAA

Harvard guessed… that five percent of the population is all it takes to produce everything that we consume. Five percent. Another fifteen percent, arguably, are involved in essential services. That leaves eight people out of ten….
John Taylor Gatto

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 384-386

There are now more than five unemployed workers for every job opening in the United States.
…
Economists are currently spreading the word that the recession may end sometime this year, but the unemployment rate will continue to climb.
No Recovery in Sight
By Bob Herbert
The New York Times.
Published: June 26, 2009





I
live in a major city and everyone I know or have met is too busy to organise anything. Getting people to come for dinner is next to impossible, a drink is always quick, and most people's lives are a grind of marching to work and then a long commute back to home. I once lived in the third world. A place where everyone was within walking distance of each other. It was amazing! Having somebody come round for dinner was easy and spontaneous, trysts with women were easy, conversation was more meaningfull and less peppered with what was on TV last night. People in cities are like on a drug: scatty, diverted by the pace, doped up on TV and media tabloid garbage. It is sad.
I agree: people need to learn how to chill
Comment
Posted by: Bobsays on Nov 16, 2006



In the late 1960's we had a society almost completely devoid of computers and automation. Virtually everything was done manually by hand. However, it became obvious that computers and automation were going to have an enormous effect. For example, instead of having thousands of clerks doing all the processes required of a large organisation to send out bills and collect payments - over 95% of them could be replaced by computers and automated systems. Many forecast that this should bring tremendous benefits to all of society. People could be freed from repetetive, boring manual tasks. Society would redistribute wealth to result in an enormous increase in leisure time. Instead of most working 5 days a week, it should only be necessary to work 2 or 3 days a month. All this was and is completely technically feasible. The jobs that most people do serve no useful purpose whatsoever, except that people have been conditioned to behave like rodents on a hamsterwheel. The only jobs that are really required are those concerned with the provision, distribution and maintenance of basic services, like food, water, energy, shelter and health.These are the jobs that require basic traditional human practical skills - the jobs that are least valued by society.Yet most people sit in offices at a desk feeding an enormous and completely unnecessary system of bureaucracy. Most people are simply talking about work, and less than 10% are actually doing anything useful. Even where people are building things that are useful, they are building them to fail in 3 years, rather than building them to last 100 years.
RE: why do we need jobs anyway?
CommentPosted by: tony_opmoc on Jul 1, 2009

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 381-383

Abundance is scooped from abundance, yet abundance remains.
Upanishads

Steve Meyers and I have long discussed people’s resistance to visions such as Fuller’s or ours. It has been awesome to witness the general population’s intractable resistance to the idea of abundance, and for many years, Steve and I have beaten our heads against the walls of organizations that claim to be seeking answers. We have shown them solutions that make the big problems, the ones that threaten humanity’s existence, go away almost overnight, and what we get back is nearly complete silence and denial, or worse, derision. Dennis Lee discovered the same thing on his journey. That might be the most mind-boggling part of my strange journey, and I came to a new understanding of the phenemenon in early 2006. The vast majority of people do not even want to know that there are solutions waiting to be used, and those who say they seek solutions are often the biggest obstacles to achieving them. What follows are our speculations, based on our experiences, on why most of humanity does not want to solve its problems.

Fuller stated that for virtually the entirety of human history, only one-in-one-thousand people lived to a ripe old age, and only one-in-one-hundred-thousand was an economic success (Utopia, p. 340). Consequently the concept of failure has been nearly hardwired into human consciousness. Most people seem addicted to the fear/failure/scarcity paradigm, and ideas of abundance are literally outside their universe of possibility. Also, people often subscribe to ideologies that short-circuit their awareness, blinding them to what is really happening. The quickest dialogue-ender I have ever experienced regarding my work is people telling me they are “skeptical” that free energy is even possible, and I respond with the offers we received to cease our pursuit of free energy, the last one being at least one billion dollars. I do not even get back, “I do not believe you, give me evidence of your offer” (our treatment was pretty standard, as I eventually discovered, but more extreme, because we were more “threatening,” as far as being able to deliver alternative/free energy). When I mention the offers we received, I receive pure silence as their response, virtually every time. Why? Steve thinks it is because if they acknowledged that situation, it would shatter their comforting fantasies of how this world operates. The radical left, with its “conspiracy phobia,” has virtually never responded to my work, even from those who say they are looking for answers. Even Noam Chomsky says that earth’s rulers would rather destroy the planet than give up their “power.”

Wade Frazier

Roots, Branches and Paradigms

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AAAAAAAA

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Of course, as a futurist, I still believe that the long-range future is away from the need or even the possibility of any kind of full employment, or anything even vaguely approaching full employment.

Dr. Jim Dator,

of the Department of Political Science

of the University of Hawaii at Manoa

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 378-380

After earning his doctorate in 2000, Crawford spent a year as a postgraduate fellow at the university's prestigious Committee on Social Thought, attempting half-heartedly to turn his dissertation into a book. When the Marshall Institute, a conservative environmental think tank in Washington offered Crawford a high-paying executive job, he accepted.

His primary role at Marshall, it turned out, was to develop arguments about climate change that happened to agree with those espoused by the oil interests subsidizing the institute.

"Coming up with the best arguments money could buy," says Crawford, "wasn't work befitting a free man." He also felt that his boss was trying to turn him into the kind of knowledge worker whose plight Crawford laments in his book: deprived of agency, carrying out instructions phrased in corporate "action" speak. He hated the job almost immediately.

Let’s Get Physical: What's So Great About Working in a Cubicle?
By Margaret Wheeler Johnson, AlterNet.

Posted June 13, 2009.

AAAAA…as a poverty conference convened here last week, custodians of the safety net confronted an obvious question: If aid is reserved for people with jobs, what happens when the jobs go away?
“We have a work-based safety net without work,” said Timothy M. Smeeding, an economist at the University of Wisconsin. “We’re really in a pickle.”…”We’re not at the moment narrowly focused on, Is there a work-based safety net?” said Martha Coven, a White House official who spoke at the poverty conference. “We’re focused on, Is there work?”
A crisis this large would challenge any safety net. Nearly 14 million Americans are unemployed, and more than 100,000 people join their ranks each week. Eight states have double-digit unemployment rates; California and Michigan have counties where the rate reaches Depression-era levels of 25 percent.…Another essential safety net program, unemployment insurance, reaches just 44 percent of the unemployed, with the lowest-paid workers most often left out.

Slumping Economy Tests Aid System Tied to Jobs

New York Times

By JASON DePARLE
Published: May 31, 2009

Nowadays, industrial robots comprise a roughly $18 billion annual market, according to the International Federation of Robotics.
There are going to be a lot more of them, too, as they move into homes, hospitals, classrooms, and barracks. NextGen Research has estimated that the worldwide market for consumer-oriented service robots will hit $15 billion by 2015.

Look out, Rover. Robots are man's new best friend

cnet news

May 27, 2009 4:00 AM PDT

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 375-377

In the United States, the majority of people get their health insurance through their job. Many have an immediate need for that coverage, either because they or someone in their families has a health condition that requires ongoing medical care. These are the millions of people for whom losing their employer-based coverage would have dire financial and health consequences. And for many of them, it means staying in a job they would rather leave to keep those health benefits. This phenomenon is referred to as 'job lock.'
Stuck in Your Job Because You Need the Health Benefits? You’re Not Alone.
Posted by Monica Sanchez,
Blog for Our Future
at 9:01 AM on May 31, 2009.

aa
When people talk about depression, it's usually seen as an individual thing. That one person has emotional problems - and they should get help. However, I view the large number of depressed people as systemic. We've made our society chalk-full of stress, denial of human desires, and not built for human comfort and desire. Every day many people repress emotions and what we want to do in order to keep that job.The result of that stress is pretty naturally depression. It's about time we started remolding our society and economics so that the goal is human happiness rather than a higher GDP.
depression and a stressful society
Posted by: carrotwax
on Aug 15, 2008 8:06 AM





They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective, toward which all their deceit is directed, is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man [sic] in eternal subjection."
U.S. Vice President Henry A. Wallace,
quoted in the New York Times,
April 9, 1944

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 372-374

One of the things that I am absolutely convinced of is that we have to have work as a centerpiece of any social policy.
Barack Obama, 2008











Out of this slavish dependence on mechanical time which spread insidiously into every class in the nineteenth century there grew up the demoralising regimentation of life which characterises factory work today. The man who fails to conform faces social disapproval and economic ruin. … Hurried meals, the regular morning and evening scramble for trains or buses, the strain of having to work to time schedules, all contribute to digestive and nervous disorders, to ruin health and shorten life. George Woodcock




We don't need this dominant concept of scarcity any longer. We don't need any longer the morality which gives pride of place to the motive of acquisition. We don't need any longer the incentive of unlimited freedom of acquisition. In at least the most advanced capitalist countries we produce already more commodities and more new capital than we know what to do with.

And in the very near future, our problem will be not to get people to work, but to find something for them to do. Not to make the most efficient use of scarce means, but to start repairing the scarcity of the human values that have been submerged in the struggle against material scarcity.
C. B. MacPherson
The Real World Of Democracy

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotation Of The Week 371

Many may those summer mornings be
when with such pleasure, with such joy
you will enter ports seen for the first time;
stop at Phoenician markets,
and purchase fine merchandise,
mother-of-pearl and coral, amber, and ebony,
and sensual perfumes of every kind--

as many sensual perfumes as you can.
from
Ithaca
C.P. Cavafy

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 369-370

If the weavers' shuttles were to weave of themselves -- then there would be no need either of apprentices for the master craftsmen or of slaves for the lords.
Aristotle
Atheniensium Republica

Looms… have taken on a life of their own. Today, in the industrialized world, a textile mill is a clean workspace dominated by huge, computer-controlled Dobby and Jacquard looms. The working of the looms are entirely enclosed. This is just as well, as compressed air shoots the laser-guided shuttles through the warp at machine-gun speeds—and very little in the entire process is touched by human hands.
Perfect Machines: The Loom
CBC IDEAS

Jobs Jobs Jobs!