Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations 177-178

But while there are 17,000 shelter beds in Los Angeles County, most of them within the city, there are some 74,000 homeless across the county’s 4,060 square miles, officials say. And despite the decline in their numbers on Skid Row, it remains an area with one of the nation’s largest concentrations of the homeless. As a result, the shelters remain full every night, said Andy Bales, chief executive of the Union Rescue Mission, which operates one of them.
…
Yet Skid Row’s street people have been watching their territory shrink for years, as downtown developers open the long-neglected area to gentrification. Late-night restaurants, art galleries and refurbished loft spaces selling in the high six figures now form the edge of the neighborhood.
Some Respite, if Little Cheer, for Skid Row Homeless

By SOLOMON MOORE

New York Times
Published: October 31, 2007

WASHINGTON, Oct. 30 — Congress authorized spending of $43.5 billion over the past year to operate spy satellites, remote surveillance stations and C.I.A. outposts overseas, according to a budget figure released Tuesday…
…
The number released Tuesday does not include the billions of dollars that military services spend annually on intelligence operations. The total spying budget for the last fiscal year, including this Pentagon spending, is said to have been in excess of $50 billion.
$43.5 Billion Spying Budget for Year, Not Including Military
By MARK MAZZETTI
New York Times
Published: October 31, 2007

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations 173-176

What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn't have done it. Who was it who said, "Blessed is the man [sic] who has found his work"? Whoever it was he had the right idea in his mind. Mark you, he says his [sic] work--not somebody else's work. The work that is really a man's own work is play and not work at all. Cursed is the man who has found some other man's work and cannot lose it. When we talk about the great workers of the world we really mean the great players of the world. The fellows who groan and sweat under the weary load of toil that they bear never can hope to do anything great. How can they when their souls are in a ferment of revolt against the employment of their hands and brains? The product of slavery, intellectual or physical, can never be great.

Mark Twain

It is "society" which provides man [sic] with food, clothing, a home, the tools of work, language, the forms of thought, and most of the content of thought; his [sic] life is made possible through the labor and the accomplishments of the many millions past and present who are all hidden behind the small word "society."

It is evident, therefore, that the dependence of the individual upon society is a fact of nature which cannot be abolished—just as in the case of ants and bees.-

Einstein

I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
Stephen Jay Gould

If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders.

Hal Abelson

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations 171-172

There were reports of a
restaurant in Tokyo where patrons could rape an animal before eating it. "When people have got money and done everything else," said a lawyer who'd had the pork, "they turn toward bestiality."
Harper’s Weekly

The global financial system is now out of control. Greed is rampant. Existing international institutions cannot change this reality. We are on the verge of a serious crisis-if not now, then in the near future.
The Financial Crisis-An Outline
ZNet Commentary
By Gabriel Kolko
October 16, 2007

Anti-Job Pro-Freedom Quote Of The Week 169, 170

A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway. This delusion drags in its train the individual and social woes which for two centuries have tortured sad humanity. This delusion is the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his [sic] progeny. Instead of opposing this mental aberration, the priests, the economists and the moralists have cast a sacred halo over work. Blind and finite men [sic], they have wished to be wiser than their God; weak and contemptible men, they have presumed to rehabilitate what their God had cursed.
Paul Lafargue
The Right To Be Lazy



It is perfectly true that we really do enjoy ourselves too little, therefore take a particular pleasure in torturing other people. For instance children who are cruel to animals or to their fellows are always children who are tortured at home by the parents. And the parents torture them because they themselves are tortured—either by themselves, or by the grandparents. If the grandparents are dead the parents continue their bad education, and torture themselves—they think it is their duty. To do something disagreeable to themselves is their idea of morality—and inasmuch as they have such barbarous beliefs, they pass on to their children that unnatural cruelty—and then the child tortures animals, or nurses, or fellow beings. People always hand on what they get. So what children do is a kind of indicator of what parents do to the children. Of course it is all done unconsciously. That is typical Protestantism—that is inherited sin. They hand on these things to the following generation, and then they of course hand them on too. If people would only enjoy themselves, they would not hand on so much cruelty. Then they would not enjoy disagreeable things, and would avoid doing them.
C.G. Jung
Zarathustra Seminars

Anti-Job Pro-Freedom Quote Of The Week 168

Why should we make it a point with our false modesty to disparage that man [sic] we are, and that form of being assigned to us? A good man is contented. I love and honor Epaminondas, but I do not wish to be Epaminondas. I hold it more just to love the world of this hour, than the world of his hour. Nor can you, if I am true, excite me to the least uneasiness by saying, `He acted, and thou sittest still.' I see action to be good, when the need is, and sitting still to be also good. Epaminondas, if he was the man I take him for, would have sat still with joy and peace, if his lot had been mine. Heaven is large, and affords space for all modes of love and fortitude. Why should we be busybodies and superserviceable? Action and inaction are alike to the true. One piece of the tree is cut for a weathercock, and one for the sleeper of a bridge; the virtue of the wood is apparent in both.

I desire not to disgrace the soul. The fact that I am here certainly shows me that the soul had need of an organ here. Shall I not assume the post? Shall I skulk and dodge and duck with my unseasonable apologies and vain modesty, and imagine my being here impertinent?

Ralph Waldo Emerson