Lazy Parasites

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 589-591

When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: 'Whose?'
Don Marquis

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Freedom is sweeter than fame.
Tom Robbins

We have to get money into the hands of people, to free them up to follow their callings, and trust the people.
E. Margaret Fulton

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 586-588

Until we understand the nature of institutional violence and how it manipulates values and mores to maintain the power of the few, we will forever be imprisoned in the caves of ignorance.
Abbie Hoffman
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Who would have thought that it would be easier to produce by toil and skill all the most necessary or desirable commodities than it is to find consumers for them? Who would have thought that cheap and abundant supplies of all the basic commodities would find the science and civilization of the world unable to utilize them? Have all our triumphs of research and organization bequeathed us only a new punishment: the
Curse of Plenty? Are we really to believe that no better adjustment can be made between supply and demand?
Winston Churchill
Romanes Lecture at Oxford University on June 19, 1930.
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[P]ay each resident of the U.S.a dividend, at first by means of vouchers for the necessities of life, in the amount of $1,000 per month per capita starting immediately. It would be our fair share of the resources of the earth and the productivity of the modern industrial economy. Under the plan, the money would then be concentrated through deposit in a new network of community savings banks to capitalize lending for consumers, small businesses, and family farming.
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Because we are talking about a dividend, there would be no means test. Everyone —rich, poor, and in-between —is entitled. The dividend would total about $3.6 trillion, which, not by coincidence, is the amount of new debt U.S. residents must incur each year from banks simply to exist. That borrowing, of course, is on top of borrowing in past years, because most people do not entirely pay off old loans before taking out new ones. Debt in this country in recent years has been cumulative, with interest constantly compounding. The annual dividend I have proposed would bring a halt to this “Grip of Death,”as it has been termed by British author Michael Rowbotham in his book: The Grip of Death: A Study of Modern Money, Debt Slavery, and Destructive Economics.
Richard C. Cook
Bailout for the People:
Dividend Economics and the Basic Income Guarantee
(emphasis JS)

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 580-585

As for the causes of long-term unemployment, there's the obvious answer: there simply aren't enough jobs.
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Closing that gap would require adding 300,000 jobs every month for the next five years. In August 2010, the economy shed 54,000 jobs. You do the math.
The Black Hole of Long-Term Unemployment
Andy Kroll
AlterNet
October 5, 2010
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[Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's] Montaillou quietly placed itself in the French literary tradition that treats laziness with the gravity and intelligence it deserves. An earlier representative of this tradition is Paul Lafargue's call to arms, The Right to Be Lazy, while a more recent addition to this genre is Corinne Maier's Bonjour Laziness. While Lafargue's pamphlet was published in the late 19th century and Maier's small book appeared in the early 21st century, they address the same phenomenon: the soul-numbing nature of modern work. Whether it takes place at the factory or office, work has become mechanical and meaningless. Rather than a trend, it is a perennial subject in France.
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Ladurie notes that for the village's [the small town of Montaillou in the 14th century] shepherds, in particular, wealth was not measured in terms of money, property, or possessions. Instead, a rich life was one filled with travel and daydreaming, conversations and meals with friends.
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They willingly worked to live, but most unwillingly lived to work. Rather than devoting themselves to hammering out a better plow or plowing a better field, the peasants of Montaillou did what was necessary to keep food on their table, but nothing more. Instead, they were suckers for lounging on a bench with a friend on a sunny day or sitting in front of a fire with a lover or spouse at night, exchanging stories….
..
Lafargue approvingly quotes the Enlightenment writer Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, who declared: "Let us be lazy in everything, except in loving and drinking, except in being lazy." In a similar fashion, Maier insists that the laziness she abhors is the intellectual and moral laziness encouraged by the corporate world. Instead, she values -- as did the Cathars of Montaillou -- a life fully lived.

Hello laziness? The French never said au revoir. It's no surprise this is annoying to American sensibilities: If we were honest with ourselves, we never would have wanted to say goodbye, either.
In Praise of Laziness
BY ROBERT ZARETSKY
FP
SEPTEMBER 24, 2010
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Braude (1975) described the Greek belief that a person's prudence, morality, and wisdom was directly proportional to the amount of leisure time that person had. A person who worked, when there was no need to do so, would run the risk of obliterating the distinction between slave and master.
Roger B. Hill, Ph.D.
AAA
There are many different kinds of revolution, roughly speaking, as many kinds as there are possible subversive recodifications of power relations.
Michel Foucault
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The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you; Don't go back to sleep. You must ask for what you really want; Don't go back to sleep. People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch. The door is round and open. Don't go back to sleep.
Rumi

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 577-579

What was proper 50 years ago is not proper today--So the virtues of the past are the vices of today. And many of what were thought to be the vices of the past are the necessities of today--and the moral order has to catch up with the moral necessities of actual life in time here and now.
Joseph Campbell


Researchers are finding indications that obesity, diabetes and mental illness among adults are all related in part to what happened in the womb decades earlier.

One of the first careful studies in this field found that birth weight (a proxy for nutrition in the womb) helped predict whether an adult would suffer from heart disease half a century later.
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kids facing stresses before birth appear to have lower educational attainment, lower incomes and worse health throughout their lives. If that’s true, then even early childhood education may be a bit late as a way to break the cycles of poverty.
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One study in this field, by a Columbia University economist, Douglas Almond, looked at children who were born after the great flu pandemic of 1918. The pandemic lasted only about five months and infected about a third of pregnant women in America, so Mr. Almond compared those who had been exposed to it while inside their mothers with others born just before or after.

Ms. Paul quotes Mr. Almond as concluding, “People who were in utero during the pandemic did worse, on average, on just about every socioeconomic outcome recorded.” They were 15 percent less likely to graduate from high school, 15 percent more likely to be poor, and 20 percent more likely to have heart disease in old age.

Stress in mothers seems to have particularly strong effects on their offspring, perhaps through release of cortisol, a hormone released when a person is anxious. Studies show that children who were in utero during the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War of 1967 were more likely to have schizophrenia diagnosed as adults.
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“Given the odds stacked against poor women and their fetuses, the most effective antipoverty program might be one that starts before birth,” writes Annie Murphy Paul in a terrific and important new book called “Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives.”
At Risk From the Womb
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
New York Times
Published: October 2, 2010
(emphasis JS)
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Joseph Chilton Pearce: I've often talked about three important characteristics of all teenagers. The first is a feeling they have of great expectation that something tremendous is supposed to happen in their lives around the age of fifteen or sixteen. The second is the feeling that some greatness exists within them. The third is a longing that is so intense it can never be assuaged. And so at this point teenagers begin looking for models of who they can be, someone to help them define and put that deep longing into perspective. And what do they get? They get MTV, they get rock stars, they get all of the rest of the trash in movies and on television.

Kim: This is the stage of life when many other cultures encourage spiritual growth through things like coming-of-age and rights-of-passage rituals. Do you think the absence of these in our culture is one of our downfalls?

Joe: Certainly, but the things you're speaking of are vehemently blocked by our society because they're not economically viable. They can't be given a dollar value. Young people looking for something of meaning and substance out there have a terrible time finding what they're seeking because they are locked into our cultural system. Look into Ralph Nader and Linda Coco's new book on the corporate exploitation of children. It's a bomb shell. For instance, when Ralph Nader approached Bob Pittman, who invented MTV, and asked him if he realized the profound influence they were having on fourteen year olds, the guy leaned back and said, "Ralph, we don't influence fourteen-year-olds, we own them."
Joseph Chilton Pearce