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