Anti-Job Pro-Freedom Quote Of The Week 161

Democratic theory requires that gains in productivity and leisure be treated as gains made by, and to be enjoyed by, the whole society, and that therefore the reckoning of men’s [sic] ability to use and develop their capacities must be made at any time against the standard of what that society as a whole can at that time afford to do by way of enabling all its members to use and develop their capacities.
C.B. Macpherson,

Democratic Theory,

Essays In Retrieval

Anti-Job Pro-Freedom Quotes Of The Week 156-161

The future is already here. It is just not evenly distributed.
William Gibson


Total income listed on tax returns grew every year after World War II, with a single one-year exception, until 2001, making the five-year period of lower average incomes and four years of lower total incomes a new experience for the majority of Americans born since 1945.
The White House said the fact that average incomes were smaller five years after the Internet bubble burst “should not surprise anyone.”
The growth in total incomes was concentrated among those making more than $1 million. The number of such taxpayers grew by more than 26 percent, to 303,817 in 2005, from 239,685 in 2000.
These individuals, who constitute less than a quarter of 1 percent of all taxpayers, reaped almost 47 percent of the total income gains in 2005, compared with 2000.
…
Nearly half of Americans reported incomes of less than $30,000…
from
2005 Incomes, on Average, Still Below 2000 Peak
By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON
New York Times
Published: August 21, 2007


…America's homegrown gulag archipelago, a vast network of jails, prisons and "supermax" tombs for the living dead that, without anyone quite noticing, has metastasized into the largest detention system in the advanced industrial world. The proportion of the US population languishing in such facilities now stands at 737 per 100,000, the highest rate on earth…

In 2002 just 19 percent of the felony sentences handed down at the state level were for violent offenses, and of those only about 5 percent were for murder. Nonviolent drug offenses involving trafficking or possession (the modern equivalent of rum-running or getting caught with a bottle of bathtub gin) accounted for 31 percent of the total, while purely economic crimes such as burglary and fraud made up an additional 32 percent.
from
Jailing Nation: How Did Our Prison System Become Such a Nightmare?
By Daniel Lazare, The Nation.
Posted August 20, 2007.


Where the Danes provide their unemployed with up to 80 percent of their previous salary and the Germans provide them with 60 percent, America has deregulated the rich while throwing a growing portion of its working class in jail.
from
Jailing Nation: How Did Our Prison System Become Such a Nightmare?
By Daniel Lazare, The Nation. Posted August 20, 2007.










Freedom itself was attacked this morning, by a faceless coward.
G.W. Bush



In some towns, the prison is the primary employer, and no one wants to give it up.
… Incidentally, our criminal justice system releases prisoners with so few resources that it's a miracle they manage to survive at all. A cynic might say it's another way to ensure that our prisons stay full.
from
Drugs and Prison
Posted by: Urstrly
Aug 20, 2007 5:00 AM

Du Temps Perdue

Lost, yesterday, somewhere between sunrise and sunset, two golden hours, each set with sixty diamond minutes. No reward is offered, for they are gone forever.
Horace Mann

Anti-Job, Pro-Freedom Quotes Of The Week 152-155

Millennials!


Quotation from 2000:

I think it’s harder and harder to understand why you wouldn’t do anything for money. And the biggest audience means the best thing—even though the people really know that it isn’t good, I think the values of mass entertainmment and celebrity culture have tremendously eroded our serious culture and our politics.

There’s a tremendous upsurge of a kind of approved vanity, or egotism now in the culture, where it’s considered perfectly normal that you’re really only interested in yourself—what you can do for yourself, what you can get for yourself, and the way you see things, and I think you’re just cut off from 99 percent of what’s out there. ...self-absorbed, maybe the character type that’s appropriate for consumer capitalism, the era of shopping—the promotionig egotism and egocentricity…
Susan Sontag
on CBC1, 2000

This is a separator, can't find another way to get a space in this
Quotation from 2004:

…younger workers (Gen-Y and Gen-X) are more likely to be “family-centric” or "dual-centric" (with equal priorities on both career and family) and less “work-centric” (putting higher priority on their jobs than family) compared to members of the Boomer generation.
…
“What we found was striking—specifically because it uncovers a marked shift in the attitudes of both women and men who are redefining their priorities in life and in work.”

The study revealed that children of Gen-X parents receive more attention than children did in 1977, with Gen-X fathers spending over an hour more per day with their children than Boomer fathers. The study also finds that both women and men have become more conscious of the personal tradeoffs they have to make to advance in their careers and that an increasing number are instead choosing to stay at the same levels, rather than continue moving up the career ladder.
from
STUDY EXAMINES DIFFERENCES AMONG GENERATIONS IN THE WORKFORCE OVER THE PAST 25 years

SEPARATOR

Quotation from 2006:

"Generation M is not innately rebellious or deviant or even countercultural. They have new tools they understand better than we do. They don't have some of the shackles and frames and anchors and tunnel vision we have. And they are asking 'why?' in a number of ways and in a number of places. And they need to be encouraged."
JP Rangaswami, quoted in
Positive Deviancy
Posted By Rob Millard


SEPARATOR
Quotation from 2007:

"Many people reaching their twenties find that their jobs do not provide the fulfillment and excitement they had anticipated," Twenge continues. "And their salary isn't enough to afford even a small house."

Millennial dissatisfaction in the workplace has not gone unnoticed by employers. Anastasia Goodstein recounts a recent Wall Street Journal article about a company that hired a praise consultant to help assuage the egos of young employees. "This is a generation used to veneration and attention and getting a pat on the back," Goodstein explains. But still, Goodstein wonders what kind of praise the consultant might offer. "Maybe 'Great job, you showed up today!' "

On EmployeeEvolution.com, 20-something bloggers Ryan Paugh and Ryan Healy hope to "create an anonymous dialogue between our generation and the corporations struggling to understand our attitudes about work." In a recent post entitled "Where Should a Millennial Draw the Line?," Paugh writes, "Part of being an entry-level worker is just waiting for something big to come your way. In the meantime, you bite your lip and act busy. Preceding generations say it's normal. I say it sucks.

In fact, they're dedicating their time to efforts they care about more than ever before. In 2003, 83 percent of college freshman were volunteering -- up from about 66 percent in 1990…
And for those dismayed by the general public's apparent distrust of smart politicians, here's a great sign: Eight in ten teens now say it's "cool to be smart."
from
What the World Might Look Like When the Millennials Run It
By Tom Tresser,
Conscious Choice. Posted August 2, 2007.

SEPARATOR

Jack Saturday comments:

When The Breast-Fed Come Of Age

What happened between 2000 and, say, 2004 when I first heard about this wonderful generation called the Millennials? Where did this flipped generation of “good kids” who question corporate culture come from? What happened, I asked, over that four years? Did 9/11 wake them up from MTV to real compassion? Perhaps, partly.

I attribute this phenomenon to how the Millennials were treated as babies from birth to 8—I think if you look at the Millennials’ critical years, you might find breast-fed babies from the Boomers, I was there, those hippie girls were very wisely importing pagan and tribal wisdom back into relating to babies and children, unquestionably and irrefutably the most important job on earth. They were, thank God(dess) critiquing allopathic interferences in childbirth, and the evils of Nestlé. Their truly subversive, and quietly revolutionary acts of nursing/breastfeeding brought very close to the mainstream over the years starts to blossom when those little cared-for kids come of age. Now comes a wave of these kids who got something they needed when they needed it. Check it out, talk to their mothers*, and then ask who might have already contributed the most to saving this planet’s biosphere from the unloved/neglected kids, who always sought power, often in gangs. *Fathers of course have been slow in many cases, but they have been coming onside with regard to babies and toddlers, we see them out there with the baby carriages.

Anti-Job Pro-Freedom Quotes Of The Week 150, 151

In short, the government implemented a series of policies during this period that had the effect of shifting wage income upward. This was a predictable result of policies that placed downward pressure on the wages of a large segment of the labor force. These polices removed protections of various types for workers in the bottom three-quarters of the labor force and subjected these workers to increased international competition. While these policies were generally justified as increasing economic efficiency, no comparable drives for economic efficiency were directed toward the protections that benefited higher-income workers. This one-sided application of market forces had the effect of redistributing income from those who lost protection to those who were able to maintain it.

As a result, for most of the population of the United States, the quarter century from 1980 to 2005 was an era in which they became far less secure economically, and the decrease in security affected their lives and their political attitudes. It is important to realize that this decrease was the result of conscious policy, not the accidental workings of the market.
from
Dean Baker,
The United States since 1980








"Perhaps it is time the 'work ethic' was redefined and its idea reclaimed from the banal men who invoke it."
Studs Terkel,
Working