Wise Old Man

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 647-649

The master, the corporate power structure, has an insidious, built-in guarantee against reform, one that preserves the master’s perpetual power. The rich slave exploits the poor slave. The rich slave often accumulates hundreds, even thousands of times more wealth than the poor slave — usually from the sweat and toil of the poor slave. To justify his excesses, the rich slave proclaims he has worked harder and is self-made, while the poor slave is said to be irresponsible, lazy or stupid and entitled to what he earns which is often a mere pittance. By reason of his self interest, the rich slave refuses to recognize and renounce his own slavery and to join the poor slave in a mutual quest for freedom. Instead, the rich slave will fight for the master, the said corporate power structure, against his poorer brothers and sisters. But a few rich slaves are beginning to realize that riches do not provide freedom. Riches create only a different genre of slavery.

…

I say the master is dead because the corporation does not breathe, nor love, nor feel. Our life’s breaths can be counted, and to contribute our limited breaths for the greed of a dead master is monstrous at best. And slavery itself is a form of death. Yet slaves can be taught to embrace nearly any degradation, any dehumanizing condition – to love it, fight for it and to die for it, even with gratitude.

Gerry Spence

There are now approximately 14 million Americans who want a job and can't find one. According to the National Employment Law Project (NELP), if they stood side by side, they'd stretch from Bangor, Maine to Los Angeles, California and back.
8 Unemployed for Every Job Opening: What Are They Supposed to Do Once Their Benefits Run Out?
AlterNet / By Joshua Holland
AAA

Forbes magazine reports that there are 199 more billionaires this year than last. Moreover, the combined wealth of the world's 1,210 billionaires now totals $4.5 trillion dollars, up by nearly a trillion dollars from a year ago. So, see, the economy is not stuck in the doldrums, as so many party-poopers keep saying.

…

…their vast piles of wealth will soon begin to tinkle down on you and me -- just you wait and see!

And wait. And wait. And keep waiting.
Congress Making Themselves and Friends Richer, While Everyone Else Struggles to Make Ends Meet
Jim Hightower
truthout

Anti Wage Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 645, 646

It took a long time to drive into people’s heads the idea that it is legitimate to rent yourself. Now that’s unfortunately pretty much accepted. So that’s internalizing oppression. Anyone who thinks it’s legitimate to be a wage laborer is internalizing oppression in a way which would have seemed intolerable to people in the mills, let’s say, a hundred and fifty years ago. …
Noam Chomsky

Schools and universities, on their knees for corporate dollars and their boards dominated by hedge fund and investment managers, have deformed education into the acquisition of narrow vocational skills that serve specialized corporate interests and create classes of drone-like systems managers.
Hris Hedges
Power Concedes Nothing Without a Demand
Truthdig

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 641-644

The CEO of the company I work for got a six-figure bonus while the rest of us were told to work harder and generate ideas to make the company "more competitive in the marketplace" or other such business-speak drivel that my co-workers seem to eat up. No bonuses, no raises.
SomeoneElseNotMe

Labor automation through technology is at the bottom of every social transformation in human history.
Peter Joseph

what happens when peoples’ jobs are automated in a world where money is life? Gotta eat to live, gotta steal to eat, otherwise we get along. If every citizen were given an automatic stipend sufficient to support a modest life, thefts would plummet. You might complain about taxes or wealth redistribution, but mark my words, you are already taxed and your wealth is already redistributed: every time you shop, you pay a markup to offset theft, a highly inefficient and twisted dark-world version of basic income which rewards the unscrupulous.
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Innovation Needs Basic Income

Conventional laboratories and research provide incremental progress, but they suffer diminishing returns. Bound by the need to put food on the table, would-be innovators are forced to take the cautious road. Real innovation needs thinking outside the box, and it is inherently risky and dangerous. Basic Income is needed so that people can pursue their ideas without the horrible prospect of losing the game of capitalism. Sure, most ideas will lead nowhere, but the occasional idea will revolutionize everything. In our society, when an idea leads nowhere, it’s a financial disaster. As teachers are being laid off, universities are hiring fewer professors, and automated education looms troublingly on the far horizon, there are fewer and fewer fallback positions for the failed innovator, and without a guaranteed stipend, doing anything new or risky will become increasingly suicidal. We need to avoid that, and provide a fertile environment for innovation, by guaranteeing everybody we won’t let them go hungry if their idea doesn’t pan out.
Ten reasons for guaranteed minimum income
Xmanuel

1. fix GOVERNMENT INEFFICIENCY: CITIZEN DIVIDEND

Use a portion of income taxes to just simply pay us a $50,000 per year dividend instead of sending our taxes down an unresponsive government bureaucracy sinkhole.

2. fix LABOR INEFFICIENCY: AUTOMATION

We get more productivity from people doing leisure activities than jobs. Machines should do all the jobs and people should do all the leisure activities. Use existing automation technology to immediately eliminate the need to do 70% of all the jobs we do and make working a job optional.
Demand The Good Life

Cheap Energy

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 639-640

“From a legal staffing viewpoint, it means that a lot of people who used to be allocated to conduct document review are no longer able to be billed out,” said Bill Herr, who as a lawyer at a major chemical company used to muster auditoriums of lawyers to read documents for weeks on end. “People get bored, people get headaches. Computers don’t.”

Computers are getting better at mimicking human reasoning — as viewers of “Jeopardy!” found out when they saw Watson beat its human opponents — and they are claiming work once done by people in high-paying professions. The number of computer chip designers, for example, has largely stagnated because powerful software programs replace the work once done by legions of logic designers and draftsmen.

Software is also making its way into tasks that were the exclusive province of human decision makers, like loan and mortgage officers and tax accountants.
…
Mike Lynch, the founder of Autonomy, is convinced that “legal is a sector that will likely employ fewer, not more, people in the U.S. in the future.” He estimated that the shift from manual document discovery to e-discovery would lead to a manpower reduction in which one lawyer would suffice for work that once required 500 and that the newest generation of software, which can detect duplicates and find clusters of important documents on a particular topic, could cut the head count by another 50 percent.

The computers seem to be good at their new jobs.
Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software
By JOHN MARKOFF
New York Times
Published: March 4, 2011
AAA

It’s no longer true that having a college degree guarantees that you’ll get a good job, and it’s becoming less true with each passing decade.

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We need to guarantee the essentials, above all health care, to every citizen.

Degrees and Dollars

By PAUL KRUGMAN

New York Times

Published: March 6, 2011

(Emphasis JS)



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