Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of the Week 261-264

Why are the voices raised in protest so shrill and few? Why will Americans fall on their fountain-pens for their bankers? If America is to adopt socialism, why not have socialism for the poor, rather than for the rich? Why should American households that earn $50,000 a year subsidize Goldman Sachs partners who earn $5 million a year?
Let's Stop the Greatest Theft in the History of Humankind
Otto Spengler, Asia Times.

Posted September 23, 2008.

At first glance it may sound appealing to taxpayers for banks to be told to use their future earnings to pay back the $700 billion dollars in junk mortgages, bad hedge-fund bets and other gambles that the Treasury promised on September 20 to pick up at face value, no loss incurred. To provide a sense of proportion, this money could have funded the next forty or fifty years of Social Security. It could have funded health care for all Americans. It could have made a big step toward rebuilding the nation's crumbling infrastructure.
The Paulson-Bernanke Bank Bailout: Will the Cure be Worse than the Disease?

by Michael Hudson

Global Research.ca

AAAAA

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Today we sit and watch as the high-rolling gamblers and critics of "big government" take welfare. These are many of the same people who thought it was just fine to deprive millions of women of critical resources and let them fend for themselves.

Even before the catastrophic news out of Wall Street in recent days, women have been worried about their economic security.

Last March a Gallup poll found that in the past two years more women than men said that they worry about the economy (64 percent versus 57 percent). The same holds for health care, crime, the environment, drug use, unemployment, hunger and homelessness.

… Bush tax policies diverted dollars from public services and boosted corporate profits to a record high of almost 14 percent of national income while the share going to wages dropped to its lowest level since 1929. Combined with relaxed government oversight and rampant speculation the way was paved for abusive mortgage practices that turned Wall Street into one big profit bubble waiting to pop.

With these excesses as a backdrop, women saw their other two pillars of economic security weaken as well: marriage to a wage-earner and paid employment.

Falling marriage rates combined with three decades of sagging male breadwinner wages have undercut the capacity of matrimony to provide women with the financial security it once offered.
Mimi Abramovitz
Wall Street Takes Welfare It Begrudges To Women
Women’s eNews (WeNews)

Each question will be programmed into the computer, asking which way society will experience the lowest cost optimum living-- by giving all humans handsome fellowships with an income adequate for a high standard of living, or by having them go on earning their livings. The computer will show that 70% of all jobs in America, and probably an equivalently high percentage of jobs in other Western private enterprise countries are preoccupied with work that is not producing any wealth or life-support. Inspectors of inspectors, re-underwriters of insurance re-insurers, 'obnoxico' promoters, spies and counter-spies, military personnel, gunmakers, etc. ...it will save both Universe and humanity trillions of dollars a day to pay them handsomely to stay at home.
R. Buckminster Fuller
Critical Path
(emphasis JS)

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 257-260

Death twitches my ear. "Live," he says, "I am coming."
Virgil














How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
Annie Dillard








Remember you must die whether you sit about moping all day long or whether on feast days you stretch out in a green field, happy with a bottle of Falernian from your innermost cellar.
Horace

When one has a great deal to put into it a day has a hundred pockets.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 254, 255, 256

I would argue with you though, that the generalization that most Americans are selfish greedy bastards is overstated and ignorant in and of itself. I won't argue with you on the ignorance in America. Ignorance is bliss, and too many here are blissfully ignorant as to exactly why they are getting screwed. Most Americans are just trying to get by, trying to pay bills and live. Which is getting harder by the day. Me and my wife both work two jobs each and it's still not enough, can anyone relate?
RE: This Will All Be Forgotten
Posted by: Elmowilcox
Sep 5, 2008 4:35 AM

Absolutely Elmo! We live in East Texas (used to live in Austin and miss it badly), I am disabled and my wife works odd hours so it is difficult for her to get a second job. It's almost impossible to make ends meet, which I believe may be part of the elite's plan. Keep everybody so busy just trying to survive that they don't have time to pay attention to anything else that is going on around them
RE: This Will All Be Forgotten
Posted by: aussidawg
Sep 5, 2008 8:58 AM







In Kurzweil’s view, what we are dealing with is not a “constant” rate of technological change, but an “exponential” rate, the acceleration of acceleration. The rate of technological change doubles every decade. At today’s rate, Kurzweil says, the world will experience one thousand times more technological change in the 21st century than took place in the 20th century.
Navigating a Breakpoint in History
by
William Van Dusen Wishard
WorldTrends Research

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 252, 253

According to a Workplace Democracy Association/Zogby Interactive survey, 25 percent of Americans compare their workplace to a dictatorship.…"The survey also found that less than half of working Americans -- 46% -- said their workplace promotes creative or inventive ideas, while barely half -- 51% -- said their co-workers often feel motivated or are mostly motivated at work.
One in Four Americans Compare Their Workplace to a Dictatorship
Posted by Meg White,
BuzzFlash
8:23 AM on July 23, 2008


It is time to issue a challenge to all those nations that profess to champion freedom that the time has come for that nation to put up or shut up about that freedom. It is time that workers and employers both were finally freed from the outdated and increasingly dysfunctional economic relationship that has developed. It is time we put a stop to the growth of bloated bureaucracies who do little more than endlessly police and pinch the pennies that flow through their hands. It is time that democratically elected governments provided their citizens with a guaranteed, liveable base income, one that ensures true freedom of choice and true freedom of life for all their citizens. We need to encourage democratically elected governments to take on the responsibility for their own citizen’s economic security and well-being by finally providing those citizens with the freedom to choice how they will live out their lives without any coercive employability demands. A government that will not take up this challenge is a government that is unable or unwilling to move into the 21st century.
BASIC INCOME CONFERENCE ABSTRACT
William D. Clegg, B.A. Phil.Member
National Anti Poverty Organization