Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 417-419

I fared no better at any of the other, less painful tasks I was assigned. Bottom line: I was a bad busser. On day two, Irving, a toxic little crust of a man with white hair and a raspy Delancey Street voice, started giving me grief. He called me "good for nothing." But he was wrong; I knew I was good for plenty of things. It was just that none of them happened to involve wiping up pools of pastrami grease or scraping crud off a grill for less than minimum wage. I called in sick on day three, and never went back.
The Loafer's Manifesto
By Bob Jacobson, Isthmus. Posted August 7, 2001

One year after the collapse of Lehman
Brothers, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said that
the recession is "very likely over." He added that many
people will continue to "find that their job security and their employment status is not what they wish it was."
HARPER'S WEEKLY
September 22, 2009

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…freedom was once the province of white men; now the lack of that freedom and the subsequent loss of the potential for happiness belongs to all of us. Our happiness is kept from us by prisonlike schools and meaningless jobs, un(der)employment and untreated physical and psychological ailments, by political leaders who scare the votes out of us and corporate "persons" that buy up all the resources that have been created and defined by our labor.

Get Happy

By Walter Mosley

The Nation

September 16, 2009

Steel Collar Workers Update

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 414-416

For my part, I’ve always liked late starters. … I like to meet the man who at the age of fifty-three says he doesn’t quite know what he is to be in life. I have a hunch that the boy of seven who knows just what he wants to be may be an inferior, who will have a conservative attitude to life later on.
A.S. Neill,
Neill, Neill, Orange Peel

"Individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience. Therefore [individual citizens] have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring" --Nuremberg War Crime Tribunal, 1950

The central idea I absorbed then, chiefly, not exclusively, from feminism, is that each of us a right to choose the life we lead; and we must fight to exercise that right against all comers.
Michael Ignatieff

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 409-413

Our economic system has also taken a toll on the people. Too many hours at a stressful workplace with too little sleep have burned many of us out. Our thinking and identity are about our jobs, not our spirit and character. Our values are devoted to markets with many of us placing making money over loving and caring for families and others. And there's no time for that stuff anyway.

We have become consumers instead of citizens and humans. Decades of falling wages, decreasing savings and increasing debt have tapped us out. Consumption has used us up. And we’re fed up.

So things reached a breaking point and broke down. This has been coming at us for decades. And here we are.

If this economic collapse was the consequence of decades of an unsustainable economic model, then what do we do?
Our Economy Has Failed -- It's the Reaganomics, Stupid!
By Dave Johnson, Campaign for America's Future.
Posted July 28, 2009





The accepted, official version of anything is most likely false. All
authority is based on fraud.
Kenneth Rexroth









All of my life I have thoroughly enjoyed working… The worst punishment for
me would have been if my work had been taken away.
Rudolf Höss
Commandant at Auschwitz





The only people really suffering in the financial ruins of Wall Street are 99% of the populace, the poor and "middle class," the ones that got suckered into a system where only a handful of business executives actually prosper, and ultimately everyone else gets buried underneath the rubble of market bubbles as they continually burst.
NYT Invites You to Shed a Tear For the Super-Rich (While Reminding You How Much We Need Them)
Posted by Allison Kilkenny, True/Slant
on August 21, 2009


Ruffle the skirts of prudes
speak of their knees and ankles
But above all, go to practical people
Say that you do no work
And that you will live forever
Ezra Pound,
Salutation The Second

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 406-408

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

An important new study has cast an appalling light on a place where workplace laws fail to protect workers, where wages and tips are routinely stolen, where having to work sick, injured or off the clock is the price of having a job.

The place is the United States, all across the lower strata of the urban economy.…Its researchers sought out people often missed by standard surveys and found abuses everywhere: in factories, grocery stores, retail shops, construction sites, offices, warehouses and private homes. The word sweatshop clearly is not big enough anymore to capture the extent and severity of the rot in the low-wage workplace.
Workers in America, Cheated
Editorial
New York Times
Published: September 2, 2009
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I actually believe that many more Americans than let on secretly share my distaste for work. They can sense that the American Dream of getting so rich they no longer have to work is a hallucination. It is almost impossible to achieve it through hard work alone. They believe instead in a version of the Dream that requires outsmarting work by going for the big kill. You can see that Dream being chased in casinos, in the slush piles of publishing houses, in the overflowing file cabinets of the patent office, and in classifieds sections thickened by omnipresent ads for multilevel marketing schemes and make-millions-working-at-home-in-your-spare-time scams. We are as much a nation of disappointed dreamers as of optimistic laborers. You can't really blame people for dreaming big. The problem with big dreams, of course, is that when you eventually wake up, you're still in the same grubby little bed you fell asleep in; the bigger the dream, the littler and grubbier the bed seems in the morning.
The Loafer's Manifesto
By Bob Jacobson, Isthmus.