Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 429-431

Just being an average accountant, lawyer, contractor or assembly-line worker is not the ticket it used to be. As Daniel Pink, the author of “A Whole New Mind,” puts it: In a world in which more and more average work can be done by a computer, robot or talented foreigner faster, cheaper “and just as well,” vanilla doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s all about what chocolate sauce, whipped cream and cherry you can put on top. So our schools have a doubly hard task now — not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.
The New Untouchables
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
New YorkTimes
Published: October 20, 2009



Enough! Goldman Sachs is thriving while the combined rates of unemployment and underemployment are creeping toward a mind-boggling 20 percent. Two-thirds of all the income gains from the years 2002 to 2007 — two-thirds! — went to the top 1 percent of Americans.

We cannot continue transferring the nation’s wealth to those at the apex of the economic pyramid — which is what we have been doing for the past three decades or so — while hoping that someday, maybe, the benefits of that transfer will trickle down in the form of steady employment and improved living standards for the many millions of families struggling to make it from day to day.

That money is never going to trickle down. It’s a fairy tale.
Safety Nets for the Rich
By BOB HERBERT
New York Times
Published: October 19, 2009


The measure of a society's industrial advancement is not dollars, but its use (consumption) of energy. In 1939, the United States consumed enough energy (from mineral fuels and water power) to produce 746 quadrillion footpounds of work.

It is estimated that one man, besides carrying his own weight, can do 150,000 foot-pounds of work in an eight-hour day, a total of 37,500,000 foot-pounds per year.

Reduced to human terms, the U. S. consumption of energy, therefore, would provide the equivalent of the work of 20,000,000,000 human slaves.
R. Buckminster Fuller,
Untitled Epic Poem On The History Of Industrialization