Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 482-485

Millions of Unemployed Face Years Without Jobs
New York times headline
Sunday, February 21, 2010


For a lot of working Americans today, the worker relationship with the employer has all the hallmarks of some wierd S and M relationship.
People are so fearful of losing their jobs, not being "productive" enough, not getting a "positive" enough job review. Lose your job and you lose health coverage, economic security, and your self esteem.

Being one of the "human assets" in a typical company today requires the "asset" to play the role of the submissive spouse in an abusive relationship: "beat me, insult me, double my workload, treat me like shit! Just don't let me go!!"
S and M in the worker-employer relationship
Posted by: raginghormones on Dec 13, 2009


Guaranteed liveable income is an idea that just won’t go away. It was a popular social justice issue in the 1960s and 70s, proposed by Martin Luther King in the US in the 1970s and recommended by Canada’s Royal Commission on the Status of Women in 1972. However, less was written about it during the following two decades.

Interest in this idea has recently been reviving, and the quantity of analysis on guaranteed liveable income has been growing. For example, the Saskatchewan office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has included basic income in its alternative provincial budget.

Cindy l’Hirondelle of Victoria has written a comprehensive report called The Women’s Economic Justice Project, an examination of how women would benefit from a guaranteed liveable income. The report, a project of the Women’s Liveable Income Working Group, c/o the Victoria Status of Women Action Group, was released in April. Cindy is a mother of three and has been working for many years for justice and equality for women.
Guaranteed Livable Income
Marya Nyland
The Victoria Unitarian


A full basic income for all Americans would cost approximately $1.8 trillion according to some estimates, or we could start with a more modest proposal that costs less. The U.S. has committed to funding a host of economic stimulus programs over the past year that adds up to about $9.7 trillion, according to Bloomberg.com. More than $3 trillion has already been spent or lent thus far, mostly in the financial sector, yet there is no end in sight to the ever-deepening recession. Spending $1.8 trillion to deliver much-needed income directly to the American people is a relatively small price to pay for turning our economy around.
From
Letter to President Obama
Stanley Aronowitz, City University of New York
Karl Widerquist, US Basic Income Guarantee Network
Steven Shafarman, Income Security Institute
Michael Howard, University of Maine
Eduardo Matarazzo Suplicy, Brazilian Senator
Frances Fox Piven, City University of New York
Nicolaus Tideman, Virginia Tech
Jason Burke Murphy, Educators for Social Justice, St. Louis University
Richard K. Caputo, Yeshiva University
Eri Noguchi, Columbia University
Jesse Johnson, Mountain Party of West Virginia
Almaz Zellekg, The New School
Michael Lewis, Hunter College School of Social Work
Harry F. Dahms, University of Tennessee
Doug Cresson, Monmouth University
Eron Lloyd, Henry George Foundation of America
Chandra Pasma, Citizens for Public Justice
Jeffery J. Smith, Geonomics.org
Al Sheahen, writer
Dan O'Sullivan, RiseUpEconomics.org
Buford Farris, retired sociologist
Sean Healy, Cori Justice
Brigid Reynolds, Cori Justice
Alanna Hartzok, Earth Rights
Stephen C. Clark, JaspersBox.com
David London, independent researcher, post-scarcity economics
Fabrizio Patriares, University of Rome, Democratic Party Italy
Reimund Acker, Netzwerk Grundeinkommen
Dorothee Shielbe Basha, Netzwerk Grundeinkommen


Thanks to L.I.F.E.

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 476-481

50 percent of U.S. children will use food stamps to eat at some point in their childhoods. Approximately 20,000 people are added to this total every day.
The Economic Elite Have Engineered an Extraordinary Coup, Threatening the Very Existence of the Middle Class
David DeGraw


…a new prison opens every week somewhere in America...
Incarceration Nation
Alan Bisbort
Hartford Advocate

Psychiatric drugs are so ubiquitous that the pharmaceutical industry is the most profitable industry in America, and antidepressants are their most profitable products.
Why Are Americans Passive as Millions Lose Their Homes, Jobs, Families and the American Dream?
Tikkun / By Harriet Fraad


My closest friends are all alphas and we can barely get by. We worked hard and followed the rules, but have nothing to show for it but student loan debt next, useless degrees and outsourced jobs.
ender
2010-02-04









Survival of the fittest is a dominator belief system. We must move to "thrival of the fittingest" where we disperse resources in such a way that everybody benefits and we build a common wealth.
When we allow every individual to thrive in a local garden, we allow them local energy, local autonomy, local sustainability. All of a sudden, every group makes a contribution, and we spend less time, energy, money and attention protecting ourselves from one another and fixing things that could have been prevented.
…
In your body, no particular cells go hungry. Every cell must be fed for the body to be in harmony. When we begin to treat all humans as cells in one body, and make sure that they all get the basics in life, we create the foundation on which to build an exciting future.
Bruce Lipton and Steve Bhaerman
The Big Theories Underwriting Society Are Crashing All Around Us -- Are You Ready for a New World?


Basic Income. All citizens are given a monthly stipend sufficiently high to provide them with a standard of living above the poverty line. This monthly income is universal rather than means-tested -- it is given automatically to all citizens regardless of their individual economic circumstances. And it is unconditional -- receiving the basic income does not depend upon performing any labor services or satisfying other conditions. In this way basic income is like publicly-financed universal health insurance: in a universal health care system, medical care is provided both to citizens who exercise and eat healthy diets and to those who do not. It is not a condition of getting medical care that one be "responsible" with respect to one's health. Unconditional, universal basic income takes the same stance about basic needs: as a matter of basic rights, no one should live in poverty in an affluent society.
Redesigning Redistribution
Organized by Bruce Ackerman, Anne Alstott, and Phillipe Van Parijs

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 471-475

…the proportion of American marriages in which the wife makes more money rose to 22 percent in 2007 from 4 percent in 1970.
…
In the end, we all want a wife. But the home has become increasingly invaded by the ethos of work, work, work, with twin sets of external clocks imposed on a household’s natural rhythms.
My So-Called Wife
By SANDRA TSING LOH
New York Times
Published: January 23, 2010


For the first time in American history, the majority of women are abandoning marriage. Women now initiate two-thirds of divorces. Half of first marriages and 60 percent of second marriages end in legal separation or divorce. These impressive figures do not include the many people who end their marriages outside of the legal system.
Why Are Americans Passive as Millions Lose Their Homes, Jobs, Families and the American Dream?
Tikkun / By Harriet Fraad

Sometime in the fall last year, I was at my local supermarket in San Francisco’s Mission District, picking through some melons when I heard the unmistakable sound of a body hit the floor behind me — hard. I turned to find a woman being handcuffed and led into an employees-only area, as she pleaded with the security guard: “I lost my job and need to feed my children.” It was nothing short of heartbreaking.
Later, as I waited to pay for my groceries at the register, I watched another woman set off an alarm as she ran out of the supermarket with bananas and baby food in her arms. She made it — and presumably was able to feed her child that night.
I thought of that desperate day again when I read an extensive report released today on the state of food hardship in America (pdf) by the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC). In it comes the striking news that one in five Americans went hungry at some point in 2009.
The U.S. Food Crisis: 1 in 5 Went Hungry Last Year. Now What?
Daniela Perdomo

The latest figures from Salary.com indicate that if a stay-at-home mother in the United States were replaced by paid domestic products and services, the cost would be $122,732 a year.
Why Are Americans Passive as Millions Lose Their Homes, Jobs, Families and the American Dream?
Tikkun / By Harriet Fraad

Normal Shit

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 468-470

The book I’ll assign you to read if you haven’t already read it is Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. Here the wealthiest man in the world, the most powerful man in the world, the Emperor of Rome writes a book that’s still in print and widely read, that says that nothing money can buy or nothing power can earn, has any importance at all! That none of it produces happiness, that all of it produces is addictions. That to be free you need to be free of.
John Taylor Gatto



You indeed are the one and only lord of the ten thousand chariots of your estate. But you use your dignity to embitter the lives of the people, and to pamper your ears, eyes, nose and mouth. But your spirit does not acqiesce in this. The spirit of man [sic] loves to be in harmony with others, and hates selfish indulgence. This selfish indulgence is a disease, and therefore I would comfort you under it.
Chuang Tzu
AAA


Juridically they are both equal [the worker and capitalist]; but economically the worker is the serf of the capitalist . . . thereby the worker sells his [sic] person and his liberty for a given time. The worker is in the position of a serf because this terrible threat of starvation which daily hangs over his head and over his family, will force him to accept any conditions imposed by the gainful calculations of the capitalist, the industrialist, the employer… The worker always has the right to leave his employer, but has he the means to do so? No, he does it in order to sell himself to another employer. He is driven to it by the same hunger which forces him to sell himself to the first employer. Thus the worker's liberty… is only a theoretical freedom, lacking any means for its possible realisation, and consequently it is only a fictitious liberty, an utter falsehood. The truth is that the whole life of the worker is simply a continuous and dismaying succession of terms of serfdom -- voluntary from the juridical point of view but compulsory from an economic sense -- broken up by momentarily brief interludes of freedom accompanied by starvation; in other words, it is real slavery.
Mikhail Bakunin

Line 'Em Up

Thanks to Brasscheck TV