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