Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations 206-212

WELFARE BUMS!



American spending on welfare—this is Federal, state, and municipal, from 1789 to the present day is less than the cost of the ongoing Savings & Loan bailout.
Gore Vidal



The nation's escalating economic troubles -triggered by the growing wave of home foreclosures, declining housing prices,and bank failures -- was entirely preventable. It will take years and trillions of dollars to dig ourselves out of this hole, as the ripple effects of the mortgage meltdown reverberate throughout the economy: millions of families losing their homes, a housing industry in disarray, skyrocketing consumer debt, tight credit, massive lay-offs, neighborhoods in decline, and serious fiscal woes for states and cities.
…
the Bush administration… is about to invest huge sums of taxpayer dollars to bail out Wall Street…
Peter Dreier
The Mortgage Mess and the Economic Meltdown: What McCain (and the rest of us) Should Learn from the Keating Scandal
Posted March 25, 2008 11:46 AM (EST)



Why is it that they abhor government intervention, yet come running to the government with their hats in hand when their scams fall apart?
Comment
Posted by: Sushi on Mar 27, 2008 10:38 AM




…as the saying of the predators goes..."privatize the profits and socialize the losses"
Comment
Posted by: particle61 on Mar 27, 2008 8:31 AM





The Associated Press reports the four biggest U.S. investment banks—Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and Bear Stearns Cos.—will award an estimated $30 billion in bonuses this year. The bankers at Goldman Sachs will have particularly heavy Christmas stockings. Compensation at the nation’s largest investment bank jumped 20 percent in 2007, which the AP estimated will mean $12 billion in bonuses, or an average of $600,000 per employee.
"Frosty the Goldman" and Other Odes to Subprime Profiteers
Daily Vice
Posted by Eileen Markey at 10:30 AM, January 8, 2008





An unrestricted guaranteed annual income... would, in effect, replace a society based on the coercion of millions with a free society. What would you do with yourself when you begin receiving your dividend checks? In a free society, the answer is that it's nobody's business.
Jim Smith
Separating survival from work:The quest for a guaranteed income
(couldn't find a working link to this article at posting- JS)



“A not-so-small and certainly impressive list of promulgators of more or less serious proposals for some form of UGI [Universal Guaranteed Income] would include simply the many Nobelists in economics who have at one time or another in their career suggested or concurred with the basic idea. Indeed, it would appear that over half (a majority!) of the economics Nobelists to date have in fact suggested or even advocated some such system.”
Robley E. George,
Director, CSDS

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations 204, 205

It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?”
Charles Bukowski, Factotum, Black Sparrow Press, 1975




"I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables—slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war . . . our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off."
Fight Club, 1999

thanks to
Top ten quotes against work

Wise Old Woman 2

Land Of The Free

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore
Send these, the homeless,
Tempest-tossed, to me
I lift my foot
And stamp them through the floor.

Wise Old Woman 1

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotation 203

Fast-food restaurants are structured like assembly lines. Hospitals function like factories where separate departments tend to different parts of the body, in assembly-line fashion. Classroom courses are scripted to the point of describing which hand gestures to make while teaching.

Devalued workers are treated as expendable. An estimated 55,000 Americans die every year from occupational injury and illness, far more than died on 9/11. Despite this shocking level of industrial slaughter, politicians do not denounce employers as “terrorists,” and they do not order Homeland Security to patrol the workplace.

Ninety percent of all work sites in America, covering 40 percent of the nation’s workforce, are not inspected regularly for health and safety violations. When violations are found, the penalties are too small to force any real change.

The State virtually gives employers a license to kill workers. In 1970, Congress declared that causing the death of a worker by deliberately violating safety laws is a misdemeanor (not a felony) with a maximum sentence of six months in jail. This is half the maximum for harassing a wild donkey on federal land.
Machismo at Work: False Consciousness or Self Defense?

by Susan Rosenthal

Wise Old Man 3: Are You Normal?

Thanks to Anon Smith, psychiatrykills