Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 381-383

Abundance is scooped from abundance, yet abundance remains.
Upanishads

Steve Meyers and I have long discussed people’s resistance to visions such as Fuller’s or ours. It has been awesome to witness the general population’s intractable resistance to the idea of abundance, and for many years, Steve and I have beaten our heads against the walls of organizations that claim to be seeking answers. We have shown them solutions that make the big problems, the ones that threaten humanity’s existence, go away almost overnight, and what we get back is nearly complete silence and denial, or worse, derision. Dennis Lee discovered the same thing on his journey. That might be the most mind-boggling part of my strange journey, and I came to a new understanding of the phenemenon in early 2006. The vast majority of people do not even want to know that there are solutions waiting to be used, and those who say they seek solutions are often the biggest obstacles to achieving them. What follows are our speculations, based on our experiences, on why most of humanity does not want to solve its problems.

Fuller stated that for virtually the entirety of human history, only one-in-one-thousand people lived to a ripe old age, and only one-in-one-hundred-thousand was an economic success (Utopia, p. 340). Consequently the concept of failure has been nearly hardwired into human consciousness. Most people seem addicted to the fear/failure/scarcity paradigm, and ideas of abundance are literally outside their universe of possibility. Also, people often subscribe to ideologies that short-circuit their awareness, blinding them to what is really happening. The quickest dialogue-ender I have ever experienced regarding my work is people telling me they are “skeptical” that free energy is even possible, and I respond with the offers we received to cease our pursuit of free energy, the last one being at least one billion dollars. I do not even get back, “I do not believe you, give me evidence of your offer” (our treatment was pretty standard, as I eventually discovered, but more extreme, because we were more “threatening,” as far as being able to deliver alternative/free energy). When I mention the offers we received, I receive pure silence as their response, virtually every time. Why? Steve thinks it is because if they acknowledged that situation, it would shatter their comforting fantasies of how this world operates. The radical left, with its “conspiracy phobia,” has virtually never responded to my work, even from those who say they are looking for answers. Even Noam Chomsky says that earth’s rulers would rather destroy the planet than give up their “power.”

Wade Frazier

Roots, Branches and Paradigms

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Of course, as a futurist, I still believe that the long-range future is away from the need or even the possibility of any kind of full employment, or anything even vaguely approaching full employment.

Dr. Jim Dator,

of the Department of Political Science

of the University of Hawaii at Manoa

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 378-380

After earning his doctorate in 2000, Crawford spent a year as a postgraduate fellow at the university's prestigious Committee on Social Thought, attempting half-heartedly to turn his dissertation into a book. When the Marshall Institute, a conservative environmental think tank in Washington offered Crawford a high-paying executive job, he accepted.

His primary role at Marshall, it turned out, was to develop arguments about climate change that happened to agree with those espoused by the oil interests subsidizing the institute.

"Coming up with the best arguments money could buy," says Crawford, "wasn't work befitting a free man." He also felt that his boss was trying to turn him into the kind of knowledge worker whose plight Crawford laments in his book: deprived of agency, carrying out instructions phrased in corporate "action" speak. He hated the job almost immediately.

Let’s Get Physical: What's So Great About Working in a Cubicle?
By Margaret Wheeler Johnson, AlterNet.

Posted June 13, 2009.

AAAAA…as a poverty conference convened here last week, custodians of the safety net confronted an obvious question: If aid is reserved for people with jobs, what happens when the jobs go away?
“We have a work-based safety net without work,” said Timothy M. Smeeding, an economist at the University of Wisconsin. “We’re really in a pickle.”…”We’re not at the moment narrowly focused on, Is there a work-based safety net?” said Martha Coven, a White House official who spoke at the poverty conference. “We’re focused on, Is there work?”
A crisis this large would challenge any safety net. Nearly 14 million Americans are unemployed, and more than 100,000 people join their ranks each week. Eight states have double-digit unemployment rates; California and Michigan have counties where the rate reaches Depression-era levels of 25 percent.…Another essential safety net program, unemployment insurance, reaches just 44 percent of the unemployed, with the lowest-paid workers most often left out.

Slumping Economy Tests Aid System Tied to Jobs

New York Times

By JASON DePARLE
Published: May 31, 2009

Nowadays, industrial robots comprise a roughly $18 billion annual market, according to the International Federation of Robotics.
There are going to be a lot more of them, too, as they move into homes, hospitals, classrooms, and barracks. NextGen Research has estimated that the worldwide market for consumer-oriented service robots will hit $15 billion by 2015.

Look out, Rover. Robots are man's new best friend

cnet news

May 27, 2009 4:00 AM PDT

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 375-377

In the United States, the majority of people get their health insurance through their job. Many have an immediate need for that coverage, either because they or someone in their families has a health condition that requires ongoing medical care. These are the millions of people for whom losing their employer-based coverage would have dire financial and health consequences. And for many of them, it means staying in a job they would rather leave to keep those health benefits. This phenomenon is referred to as 'job lock.'
Stuck in Your Job Because You Need the Health Benefits? You’re Not Alone.
Posted by Monica Sanchez,
Blog for Our Future
at 9:01 AM on May 31, 2009.

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When people talk about depression, it's usually seen as an individual thing. That one person has emotional problems - and they should get help. However, I view the large number of depressed people as systemic. We've made our society chalk-full of stress, denial of human desires, and not built for human comfort and desire. Every day many people repress emotions and what we want to do in order to keep that job.The result of that stress is pretty naturally depression. It's about time we started remolding our society and economics so that the goal is human happiness rather than a higher GDP.
depression and a stressful society
Posted by: carrotwax
on Aug 15, 2008 8:06 AM





They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective, toward which all their deceit is directed, is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man [sic] in eternal subjection."
U.S. Vice President Henry A. Wallace,
quoted in the New York Times,
April 9, 1944

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 372-374

One of the things that I am absolutely convinced of is that we have to have work as a centerpiece of any social policy.
Barack Obama, 2008











Out of this slavish dependence on mechanical time which spread insidiously into every class in the nineteenth century there grew up the demoralising regimentation of life which characterises factory work today. The man who fails to conform faces social disapproval and economic ruin. … Hurried meals, the regular morning and evening scramble for trains or buses, the strain of having to work to time schedules, all contribute to digestive and nervous disorders, to ruin health and shorten life. George Woodcock




We don't need this dominant concept of scarcity any longer. We don't need any longer the morality which gives pride of place to the motive of acquisition. We don't need any longer the incentive of unlimited freedom of acquisition. In at least the most advanced capitalist countries we produce already more commodities and more new capital than we know what to do with.

And in the very near future, our problem will be not to get people to work, but to find something for them to do. Not to make the most efficient use of scarce means, but to start repairing the scarcity of the human values that have been submerged in the struggle against material scarcity.
C. B. MacPherson
The Real World Of Democracy