Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 727-729

Occupy Wall Street has been criticized for its lack of clear demands, but how do we issue demands, when what we really want is nothing less than the more beautiful world our hearts tell us is possible? No demand is big enough.

…
Is more stuff really what the world needs right now? Or can we envision a world instead with more play and less work, more sharing and less buying, more public space and less indoors, more nature and less product?
OccupyWall Street: No Demand is Big Enough
Reality Sandwich
By Charles Eisenstein

…there is an inappropriate and correctable disconnect between the abundance America produces and the scarcity its markets manufacture.

And in the process, they are pointing the way toward something entirely different than the zero-sum game of artificial scarcity favoring top-down investors and media makers alike.

Douglas Rushkoff

There is enough to go round...handsomely.

R. Buckminster Fuller

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 725-726

A faltering economy explains much of the job shortage in America, but advancing technology has sharply magnified the effect, more so than is generally understood, according to two researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The automation of more and more work once done by humans is the central theme of “Race Against the Machine,” an e-book to be published on Monday.

“Many workers, in short, are losing the race against the machine,” the authors write.

Erik Brynjolfsson…  and Andrew McAfee, authors of “Race Against the Machine,” argue in their e-book that technological advancements are outpacing the human worker.

The authors are not the only ones recently to point to the job fallout from technology. In the current issue of the McKinsey Quarterly, W. Brian Arthur, an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, warns that technology is quickly taking over service jobs, following the waves of automation of farm and factory work. “This last repository of jobs is shrinking — fewer of us in the future may have white-collar business process jobs — and we have a problem,” Mr. Arthur writes.
More Jobs Predicted for Machines, Not People
By STEVE LOHR
New York Times
Published: October 23, 2011

Whereas before the problem of identity had been one of meagreness and poverty, it has now become the problem of abundance and superfluity. We are individually overwhelmed by corporate  consciousness and by the inclusive experience of mankind both past and present.  It would be a cosmic irony if men [sic] proved unable to cope with abundance and riches in both the economic and psychic order.  It is not likely to happen.  The most persistent habits of penury are bound to yield before the onslaught of largesse and abundant life.
Marshall McLuhan,
Understanding Me

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 722-724

The economy is not producing enough jobs, and many of the ones created are lousy.

More Bleak Job Numbers
Editorial
New York Times
Published: October 7, 2011

Republican state representative Ritch Workman

of Melbourne, Florida, filed a bill to reinstate the
practice of dwarf-tossing, which was banned in 1989. "All
that it does is prevent some dwarfs from getting jobs they
would be happy to get," said Workman.
Harper's Weekly, 1/11/2011

The absurdity of 90% of existing jobs is never mentioned.
In a sane society, the elimination of all these absurd jobs (not only those that produce or market ridiculous and unnecessary commodities, but the far larger number directly or indirectly involved in promoting and protecting the whole commodity system) would reduce necessary tasks to such a trivial level (probably less than 10 hours per week) that they could easily be taken care of voluntarily and cooperatively, eliminating the need for the whole apparatus of economic incentives and state enforcement.
We Don’t Want Full Employment, We Want Full Lives!



Parasites, Tobin Tax, Guillotine

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 719-721

Beginning with what ruins our lives: work and its pointlessness (upon taking stock we concluded that 90% of this society’s productions are useless bullshit), its miserable wages, its hierarchies, its daily horror; and the wretchedness and boredom of unemployment, which we came to realize is merely the flip side of work, a threat held over the heads of workers, forcing them to submit to the economic blackmail.

We Don’t Want Full Employment, We Want Full Lives!

Antigovernment protests continued in Yemen, and

at least eleven protesters were killed in Syria. In
Manchester, 20,000 marched in protest of British
austerity plans; in Lisbon, tens of thousands rallied
against Portuguese austerity measures; in Athens,
protesters blocked the entrance to Greece's finance
ministry in an effort to stall talks on civil-service
wage cuts; and in New York City, more than 700
protesters were arrested during demonstrations against
Wall Street greed.
Harper's Weekly
October 4, 2011

With its endless propaganda the Moneyed Master has caused its slaves to believe they are free. But when that cruel hoax is ripped bare of its deceitful cloth and stands naked before the people, and when enough of the people sleep under the bridges and their children’s bellies swell from hunger then one day it will be too late for the Master. Suddenly, without warning, the people will rise up in explosive unison like a long sleeping volcano. Raging and turmoil will ring across the canyons of the streets and blood will flood the streets, and the people will at last prevail.

Gerry Spence

Enough Food

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 715-718

 If you want a big swig of despair, listen to the people who know something about the global economy.

The Lost Decade?
By DAVID BROOKS
New York Times
Published: September 26, 2011

The fastest growing category of employment gains over the last year, once subsidies and bailouts are stripped out? "Administrative and waste services". Sound like a recipe for prosperity to you--or a recipe for a nation of janitors, maids, and "assistants", hurriedly scurrying after a tiny number of imperious plutocrats?
Why America's Not Creating Enough Jobs--And How to Fix It
Umair Haque, Eudaimonics

In the last decade, we have gone from a connected world (thanks to the end of the cold war, globalization and the Internet) to a hyperconnected world (thanks to those same forces expanding even faster). And it matters. The connected world was a challenge to blue-collar workers in the industrialized West. They had to compete with a bigger pool of cheap labor. The hyperconnected world is now a challenge to white-collar workers. They have to compete with a bigger pool of cheap geniuses — some of whom are people and some are now robots, microchips and software-guided machines.
How Did the Robot End Up With My Job?
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
New York Times
Published: October 1, 2011

Rule #3: Keep Them Desperate

You’ll find in nearly every instance of cultural descent into autocracy, the offending government gained favor after the onset of economic collapse. Make the necessities of root survival an uncertainty, and people without knowledge of self-sustainability and without solid core principles will gladly hand over their freedom, even for mere scraps from the tables of the same men who unleashed famine upon them. Financial calamities are not dangerous because of the poverty they leave in their wake; they are dangerous because of the doors to malevolence that they leave open.

Destitution leads not just to hunger, but also to crime (private and government). Crime leads to anger, hatred, and fear. Fear leads to desperation. Desperation leads to the acceptance of anything resembling a solution, even despotism.

Autocracies pretend to cut through the dilemmas of economic dysfunction (usually while demanding liberties be relinquished), however, behind the scenes they actually seek to maintain a proscribed level of indigence and deprivation. The constant peril of homelessness and starvation keeps the masses thoroughly distracted from such things as protest or dissent, while simultaneously chaining them to the idea that their only chance is to cling to the very government out to end them.

THE ESSENTIAL RULES OF TYRANNY

by:  Brandon Smith