Anti-Job Pro-Freedom Quote Of The Week 149

Capitalism is like a shit sandwich-- the more bread you have, the less shit you have to eat.
Tim Moon
thanks to Lorraine Lee

Anti-Job Pro-Freedom Quotes Of The Week 146, 147, 148

The National Labor Relations Act (NRLB) makes it illegal to intimidate or fire workers for union activity. Yet, according to our study of data from the NLRB, there has been a steep rise in illegal firings of pro-union workers in the last few years. Currently, 1 in 53 is dumped during an election campaign, more than 50 percent higher than the chance of being fired in the late 1990s.

Employers generally fire the workers who are leading the union organizing drives. If 10 percent of union supporters are actually organizers in their workplace, NLRB data show that about 1 in 5 is fired illegally for their activism.
.…
More than half of nonsupervisory workers who aren't union members, want to be. The U.S. Senate voted last month to kill the Employee Free Choice Act, setting back another opportunity to increase fines and reduce the incentives for anti-union employers to break the law. Without those reforms, the current cost of illegal employer aggression ensures that crime really does pay.

from

In Keeping Down American Workers, Corporate Crime Pays
By Ben Zipperer and John Schmitt,

Posted July 20, 2007

AlterNet

One of the 500 richest Germans, Gotz Werner, owner of over 1700 drug stores with annual sales of 3.7 billion euros said, “Like almost all entrepreneurs, I wanted more and more in the past. Today maximizing meaning is my top priority. I have read the classics, Goethe, Schiller. I understand my own success is not everything. I want to help others succeed. ‘Nothing is stronger than an idea whose time has come,’ Victor Hugo said. Two years ago BIG was something for a few experts. When I give lectures today the halls are full.”

…In North America, participants in a survey by the [Canadian] National Council on Welfare ranked the Guaranteed Livable Income (another name for BIG) number one for action to permanently reduce poverty. Three Canuck politicos declared their support: Conservative Senator Hugh Segal, Green Party Leader Elizabeth May, and the Green Party of Manitoba.
The Progress Report
Politicians with gumption promote fair distribution

by Jeffery J. Smith

July, 2007

Picture your annual income as a stack of $100 bills.
Do you make $25,000? Your stack of $100 bills is 1 inch high.
Do you make $100,000? Your stack of $100 bills is 4 inches high.
Do you make $1 million? Your stack of $100 bills is 3.3 feet high.
Do you make $1 billion? Your stack of $100 bills is over ½ mile high!


Bill Gates’ best.
year he increased
his net worth by
$50 billion …
a 30 mile high stack of $100 bills!

(for source click on image)

Anti-Job Pro-Freedom Quote Of The Week 145

Essentially the power of the machine is only the stored up and projected power of humanity. To the extent to which the work world is conceived of as a machine, and mechanized accordingly, it becomes the potential basis of a new freedom for humanity.

Contemporary industrial civilization demonstrates that it has reached the stage at which “the free society” can no longer be adequately defined in the traditional terms of economic, political, and intellectual liberties. Not because these liberties have become insignificant, but because they are too significant to be confined within the traditional forms.

New modes of realization are needed, corresponding to the new capabilities of society. Such new modes can be indicated only in negative terms, because they would amount to the negation of the prevailing modes. Thus, “economic freedom” would mean freedom from the economy--from being controlled by economic forces and relationships. Freedom from the daily struggle for existence; from earning a living. “Political freedom” would mean liberation of the individuals from politics over which they have no effective control.
Herbert Marcuse

Anti-Job Pro-Freedom Quotes Of The Week 143, 144

In the American agricultural surplus, we behold a very different kind of surplus from that which was gathered by the lash in Mesopotamia 6,000 years ago.

It is a true granary-bursting physical surplus--it may be taken as symbolic of the surpluses generated elsewhere and everywhere in our industrial system. From these surpluses our economy adds to its capital at no visible cost to current consumption, maintains a vast military establishment, and still accumulates unsold inventories that periodically throttle its channels of distribution.

...The industrial surplus is the opposite of the scarcity surplus--it is abundance.
Gerard Piel,
The Acceleration Of History




Gerard Piel believed strongly that the entire world should participate and share in the benefits of scientific enterprise. For that reason, he aggressively sought partners outside the U.S. to publish Scientific American in other countries and languages.
Scientificamerican.com