$3 Trillion Shopping Spree

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations 229, 230

Low-level employees can't predict the sources of stress, and have little control - their stress hormone (adrenaline/cortisol) levels are typically much higher than their bosses'. These hormones prepare the body for short term emergency - they turn off long term body-healing functions like tissue repair, hence the decline in health of the chronically stressed. For animals, this stress response lasts for about 3 minutes while they escape danger; for humans it can last 30 years while they worry about work.
Brian Dean,
Top Dogs are Less Stressed




The U.S. economy does not come close to providing decent employment — enough jobs — for everyone who wants to work.
A Dubious Milestone
By Bob Herbert
New York Times
Published: June 21, 2008

Happy!

Working 'makes us happy', an expert has claimed.
Working 'makes us happy'
Mail Online

Prof Mansel Aylward advised us to wander to work with a spring in our step and a smile on our face, happy to avoid the depression of unemployment...

A.L.F.

Comment:

why bother creating or inventing if you get money for doing nothing? this was one of the fundamental problems of socialist russia. without stimulus, economic or otherwise, people turn into lazy, apathetic fucks.

Anonymous

Excellent question, Anonymous! Curious why you put out the energy to write it, to type in the code letters etc, and post it, without any pay! In fact, who paid you to read my blog? I’d like to meet them.

I’m so sorry you feel you are a lazy, apathetic fuck without “stimulus.” You are certainly not alone, many agree with you that without a carrot or a stick they—or perhaps not they but others, are lazy apathetic fucks.

Now of course without the stimulus of healthy food, water, shelter, clothes, and on top of that a decent environment in which to live, people indeed may become apathetic.

But you see, carrots and sticks are for donkeys. I can’t help but think either you are in an asylum full of drugged people (which the USA itself seems to be becoming), or you are an academic who doesn’t look around at real people.

I have never met an apathetic lazy fuck, either among the homeless, those on the dole, or the poor slaves in the job system. Unfortunately the latter are in many cases too damned exhausted to use their energy to do what they want. And clinical depression can be very debilitating. But anyone I’ve ever met with a little, or, better, a lot of free time, plus some cash, dive into projects, or energetic play, gardening, or bicycling, or kayaking, etc, or if they are artists or thinkers, into reading projects, writing, art, music, poetry, social activism, volunteering, working with kids or old folks, improving the planet. Human beings are the most creative, energetic animals on the planet—beavers and bees spend most of their time apparently “doing nothing.” As do almost all animals once fed. Lions are extremely lazy fucks.

How sad that you have lost this inborn incentive, my guess is long ago when you started school, when all your energy went into doing what the teacher wanted, so you could get some kind of reward. It’s well known after psychological studies that if you pay kids to do what they love, soon they won’t do it at all unless they are paid. That is how lazy fucks are born, and artists and inventors die.

Finally: A GLI (Guaranteed Livable Income) isn’t “pay for doing nothing.” It’s a basic income for being a human being on a planet heaped with too much wealth for the few who stagger around under it, and on which the job system is being eaten away by technology. It’s like your mother’s breast, which in my guess you never got: it’s like watering a plant, or a planet. The plant “does nothing” until it is fed and watered in decent soil—then stand back. Set people free of the yoke of selling themselves, and watch the renaissance.

Your unpaid friend,

Jack

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations 227, 228

If you are good, you will be assigned all the work. If you are really good, you will get out of it.
Dilbert

If you really want something in life you have to work for it. Now quiet, they're about to announce the lottery numbers.

Homer J. Simpson

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotation 226

What Is He?
By D. H. Lawrence



--What is he?

A man, of course.

--Yes, but what does he do?

He lives and is a man.

--Oh quite! But he must work. He must have a job of some sort.

Why?

--Because obviously he’s not one of the leisured classes.

I don’t know. He has lots of leisure. And he makes quite beautiful chairs.

--There you are then! He’s a cabinet maker.

No no!

--Anyhow a carpenter and joiner.

Not at all.

--But you said so.

What did I say?

--That he made chairs, and was a joiner and carpenter.

I said he made chairs, but I did not say he was a carpenter.

--All right then, he’s just an amateur.

Perhaps! Would you say a thrush was a professional flautist, or just an amateur?

--I’d say it was just a bird.

















And I did say he is just a man.

Wage Slavery Revisited

Thanks to my friends from Australia
--JS

Wise Old Man 4: Utah Philips, May 15, 1935 -- May 23, 2008

“One thing my constitution couldn’t stand is the theory and practice of having a boss… to give your brain to someone else for eight hours in the hope that they'll give it back in an unmutilated condition.”

Utah Philips


Jenny and I were on a BC Ferry from Swartz Bay to Tsawwasen, bound for the Vancouver Folk Fest—I was going to see Utah Philips, the hobo folksinger and storyteller. We sat in the middle of a large seating area toward the bow of the big boat. An old guy with an impressive white beard was walking beside a good-looking older woman. They wended their way around, turned to go find a seat themselves, and Utah Philips came and sat right beside me. The woman was Rosalie Sorrels. We shook hands and chatted. At that time I was not confident enough to engage him, an old Wobbly and philosophical anarchist, on ideas like Guaranteed Livable Income. I was so mad at myself for not doing so that I forced myself to phone a CBC call-in show on work almost as soon as I got back from Vancouver.

I have a clip of Utah talking about his heart condition:

He (a doctor) said ‘are you worried about performing?’ I said look, I’m not a natural, I backed into this trade, this wasn’t a trade of choice, I did it because I got blacklisted in Utah and had to find work. I’ve been sprayed on stage every time I go on, it never changes, I’m a worried, frightened performer. He said ‘OK, if you just hammer your heart with adrenalin for thirty years, you pays your money and you takes your choice.’

Utah Philips had songwriting talent. Johnny Cash wanted to record his songs but Utah didn’t want to buy into the corporate machine. There was plenty of unemployed wealth around that could have saved Mr. Philips from his fear and consequently his death. A simple guaranteed basic livable income, something advocated by half of Nobel economists, and we could have the works of such artists created in leisure without fear of the economic abyss—that is the best soil for the flower of art.

What’s that you say? Artists need their suffering and hardship to make art? Bullshit. William Blake said it:

“…some say that Happiness is not Good for Mortals & they ought to be answerd that Sorrow is not fit for Immortals & is utterly useless to any one-- a blight never does good to a tree & if a blight kill not a tree but it still bear fruit let none say that the fruit was in consequence of the blight.”

ppppppp

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotation 225

Global market economy makes the first citizen the corporation. The rest of us are slaves, second class citizens.

Vandana Shiva