Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 456-458

To Markus and my other Australian friends, who are in the oncoming year as I post this. The future hits Australia first.

Dillingham, Alaska, the Willow Tree Bar

Gary Snyder

Drills chatter full of mud and compressed air

all across the globe,

low-ceilinged bars, we hear the same new songs

All the new songs.

In the working bars of the world.
After you done drive Cat. After the truck

went home.

Caribou slip,

front legs folded first

under the warm oil pipeline

set four feet off the ground-

On the wood floor, glass in hand,

laugh and cuss with

somebody else's wife.

Texans, Hawaiians, Eskimos,
Filipinos, Workers, always

on the edge of a brawl -

In the bars of the world.

Hearing those same new songs

in Abadan,

Naples, Galveston, Darwin, Fairbanks.

White or brown,

Drinking it down.

the pain

of the work

of wrecking the world.

Adolf Eichmann was thoughtful, orderly, and unimaginative. He had a profound respect for system, for law and order. He was obedient, loyal, a faithful officer of a great state. He served his government very well. The sanity of Eichmann is disturbing. We equate sanity with a sense of justice, with humaneness, with prudence, with the capacity to love and understand other people. We rely on the sane people of the world to preserve it from barbarism, madness, and destruction. And now it begins to dawn on us that it is precisely the sane ones who are the most dangerous.

Thomas Merton,

Raids on the Unspeakable

The real rate is somewhere around 20%. But if we acknowledged that, we'd have to admit to being on par with Europe's unemployment rate. And by diddle damned we can never do that. Every American fully understands that the purpose of life is to hang onto one meaningless job or another, two of them if possible. And by the state's official numbers more Americans have a white knuckled grip on the life's purpose than any of those pussy socialist European nations with their free healthcare, low infant mortality rates and ridiculously long vacations.To the Hope and Change Crowd -- How's It Working Out for You?
By Joe Bageant,

JoeBageant.com.
Posted December 9, 2009

Who's Boss

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 454-455

The majority of adults in this country hate their work. Whether it is a factory job, a white collar job, or with some exceptions a professional job, or the role of being a housewife. They hate their work-- as much as young people rebel against the prospect of similar work. Indeed it is the parents' feelings that are a principle source of the children's feelings. The middle class also resents the authority that is imposed by work-- the boss and the system-- and they feel that they lack power over their own lives.

The new consciousness seeks new ways to live, in the light of what technology has made both possible and desirable. Since machines can produce enough food and shelter for all, why should man [sic] not end the antagonism derived from scarcity and base his society on love for his fellow man? If machines can take care of our material wants, why should people not develop the esthetic and spiritual sides of their natures?
Charles A. Reich,
The Greening Of America

Dear Joe,

…Like probably many other people I hate spending my time in an office with air conditioning perpetuating an economic and social system of psychopathy, with seemingly intelligent people scrambling over to stick knives in each others backs to 'get ahead'. You know what I mean? The fake smiles, the enforced 'team player ethic', all of that capitalist workplace crap that employers and their paid flunky psychologists have been working on since 1900.

I know I have to get free of the debt trap but even getting back into a job on the same level of money slavedom hasn't happened thus far and I'm under 40! My right wing dad always said become a lawyer. And I was like eight, going nah, I wanna be a social worker or an artist, much to his apoplexy. Now I think it doesn't matter if one retrains, because wherever you are in this system if you are an independent thinker and scorn the non-critique 'happy consumer' society -- you are always an outsider.…

I trained in the biological sciences in the end and always found the palpable cognitive dissonance in my professors unbelievable. Here I was learning about how we face imminent collapse through the loss of biodiversity, rainfall pattern change, atmospheric pollution, desertification, erosion, pesticide and fertilizer pollution, genetic modification crossover, hormone poisoning, etc. and they just carried on -- business as usual, man.

Pascal

Leeds, England
--------
Dear Pascal,
I am glad to hear someone else is as "lazy" as I am.…Fuck no. I don't wanna work ever again.

Joe Bageant

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 451-453

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

A pleasant surprise on the job front… 79,000 jobs were created in November… October was a bad month… this is very good news… good news for a lot of people…

CBC Radio 1 News,

December 4, 2009

The coroner did not want to cast blame on Mr Sidebottom, but he did suggest that investing a few pence in a board to protect workers from the cogwheels might be a good idea. The verdict of the inquest was that 'accidentally, casually, and by misfortune, the trousers of the said Robert Greeney became entangled in the cog wheels of the machine, whereof the thigh and buttocks of the said Robert Greeney were seriously torn and lacerated of which said injury the said Robert Greeney languished, and languishing lived until the twenty-fourth day of December… when the said Robert Greeney did die'.

Though the coroner might not have blamed Mr Sidebottom, the verdict of history is different. Sidebottom committed a worse crime against Robert Greeney than ever he had inflicted upon society. Sidebottom did not simply kill Robert Greeney; rather, by lack of imagination and foresight, he tortured him to death. In a world so unjust, how bitterly must Robert Greeney have reviled himself for struggling so desperately to obey other men's rules? Better by far to be a desperate criminal and renegade, than a drudge in a filthy industry that enriched only those who did not dirty their own hands, an expendable drudge whose life was not worth protecting.
Germaine Greer,

Daddy We Hardly Knew You

Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world, in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem. We recognize this for Nazi Germany, that the people obeyed Hitler. People obeyed; that was wrong.

Howard Zinn

We can't leave people in abject poverty, so we need to raise the standard of living for eighty percent of the world's people, while bringing it down considerably for the twenty percent who are destroying our natural resources.
Jane Goodall

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 449-450

Now to the Canadian economy and a breath of fresh air today from Statistics Canada. The latest employment numbers are encouraging…
A pleasant surprise on the job front… 79,000 jobs were created in November… October was a bad month… this is very good news… good news for a lot of people…
CBC Radio 1 News, December 4, 2009
(emphasis JS)
aaa

The classic bully—mean, overbearing, belittling, sadistic… and when that kind of thing happens in the workplace, it can be absolutely shattering… way more common than imagined…37% of the workforce, that’s 54 million Americans… witnesses to this type of psychological violence also can be traumatized…. 5 million people in this country [Canada] are or have been bullied in the workplace?… Yeah.
CBC Radio’s The Current, November 30, 2009