Molyneux On Spanking

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 739-741

While factories continue to make more stuff in the United States than ever before, employment in them has collapsed.

Computers have hurt workers outside factories too. Picture the advertising agency in “Mad Men,” and think about the abundance of people who were hired to do jobs that are now handled electronically by small machines. Countless secretaries were replaced by word processing, voice mail, e-mail and scheduling software; accounting staff by Excel; people in the art department by desktop design programs. This is also true of trades like plumbing and carpentry, in which new technologies replaced a bunch of people who most likely stood around helping measure things and making sure everything worked correctly.

…
…there’s… a pretty good chance that by some point in the next few years, your boss will find that some new technology or some worker overseas can replace you.
The Dwindling Power of a College Degree

By ADAM DAVIDSON
New York Times
Published: November 23, 2011

For the first time since the 1960s, when women entering the workforce led to a big increase in youth employment, a majority of young people are out of work. The story is the same around the world….  … the question of why we’re doing so little about it remains.

What Do Young People Around the World Have in Common? No Jobs
Good Business

However, the current jobless recovery, and the concurrent failure to create enough new jobs, is breeding a new and growing surplus pool. And some in this pool are in danger of becoming superfluous, likely never to work again.
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In the old days — before Social Security, welfare and Medicaid — poverty-caused illnesses killed off or incapacitated some of the people who could not find jobs. Even earlier, some nations sold their surplus workers as slaves, while the European countries could send them to the colonies.

In addition, wars were once labor-intensive enterprises that absorbed the surplus temporarily, and sufficient numbers of those serving in the infantry and on warships were killed or seriously enough injured so that they could not add to the peacetime labor surplus.

The old ways of reducing surplus labor are, however, disappearing.
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Meanwhile, new ways of increasing surplus labor have appeared. One is the continued outsourcing of jobs to low-wage countries; the other is the continuing computerization and mechanization of manufacturing.
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In fact, if modern capitalism continues to eliminate as many jobs as it creates — or more jobs than it creates — future recoveries will not only add to the amount of surplus labor but will turn a growing proportion of workers into superfluous ones.
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Policies that are now seemingly utopian will have to be tried as well….
The Age of the Superfluous Worker
By HERBERT J. GANS
New York Times
Published: November 24, 2011

Fall of Rome?

Principles of Economics translated

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 736-738

It was absolutely unheard of for one of us in the working class of Flint (or anywhere) to receive such a sum of money unless one of us had either robbed a bank or, by luck, won the Michigan lottery. On that sunny November day in 1989, it was like I had won the lottery -- and the people I had lived and struggled with in Michigan were thrilled with my success. It was like, one of us had made it, one of us finally had good fortune smile upon us. The day was filled with high-fives and "Way-ta-go Mike!"s. When you are from the working class you root for each other, and when one of you does well, the others are beaming with pride -- not just for that one person's success, but for the fact that the team had somehow won, beating the system that was brutal and unforgiving and which ran a game that was rigged against us. We knew the rules, and those rules said that we factory town rats do not get to make movies or be on TV talk shows or have our voice heard on any national stage. We were to shut up, keep our heads down, and get back to work.
Life Among the 1% ...a letter from Michael Moore

a long time ago when I was a fair maiden wearing rose colored glasses and tie dyed frocks, I was introduced to a swain of high pedigree and culture and exhorbitant wealth. Intelligent, disciplined,and focused, a Cornell graduate,second in command in the family (corporation) business. How impressed was I,the farm fresh country stock daughter of a working man who toiled at an honest day’s work and whose personna magnified integrity,fairness and kindness. As it was in the days of old(the 60′s) a fair maiden many times caught the eye of a privileged fellow who dwelled betwixt the land or peer and privilege and was not yet submerged in the water of well to do-ism as he sought out his future. A slight state of youthful comradery allowed acquaintance between the two opposing worlds of privilege and peasantry for a season.

Oh, but the inevitable… the clash of impetuous and opposing ideals..

The world of privilege is not a place for a princess of conscience and
perception of the principles of Golden Rules. Alas, the chameleon prince changed to ugly hues of dark and selfish nature and deed as he was programed genetically and socially to be “privileged”. Privilege status required occupying the top seat in the Castle of Corporation. The king,father placed the successor prince at the of his kingdom,after all..

Wrestling with understanding the distinction between the man and the mechanism(corporation/family business) became cleary indistinguishable. They were one and the same- symbiotic.” All for one,one for all ” was the motto. Soon the realization dawned that the future king was in fact, a robot , designed to perform dutifully and without emotion or calculation of his subjects’ humanity since they were soley serfs for the kingdom. Oh, horrid prince,the illusion of a knight vanished from before the very eyes who beheld him ! Then, to my amazement and instruction in the ways of privilege I learned a most valuable lesson..the prince and the power are one and the same. The umbilical cord could not be severed.The man is the mechanism who feeds the corporation,not vice-versa. Without the vile sustenance the offspring would expire.

With lessons learned, I, the princess of higher power,fled the kingdom of poisoned power and never looked back to this very day…(except to thank lucky stars for guiding me out of darkness) :)
Jerrye Barr

Comment on Gerry Spence's Blog

My dad has spent his life accumulating wealth, because to him, money is love.

My parents both grew up with the fear of not having enough. Their parents grew up poor.

When I was 25, my parents gave me a $100k check. There’s lots more where that came from.

The money sent me into a spiral of shame and denial.

Now at age 30, I’ve started giving it away to organizations working for ECONOMIC & RACIAL JUSTICE.

That’s something I can do, and it makes me feel better, but I know it’s not enough.

I don’t want to live in a world where money represents love.

I don’t want to live in a world where some people accumulate way too much - because they’re scared of not having enough.

We ALL should have enough.

I am the 1%

I stand with the 99%
We are the 1 percent

We stand with the 99 percent



Give Them Their Whole Lives

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 733-735

Stop us if you've heard this one before: long commutes are bad for your health. Some of the strongest recent findings in behavioral science have focused on the perils of a long ride to work. People with a lengthy commute show an increased amount of stress, get worse sleep, and experience decreased social interaction. A commute of 45 minutes carries such a cost to well-being that economists have found you have to earn 20 percent more to make the trip worth it. Length alone isn't the source of the problem: stress rises with a commute's variability, and for transit riders it rises with the unpredictability and overcrowding of a bus or train.
Your Commute is Slowly Killing You

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, a higher percentage of Americans is living in extreme poverty than they have ever measured before.
Extreme Poverty Is Now at Record Levels -- 19 Statistics About the Poor That Will Absolutely Astound You
Michael Snyder
November 8, 2011

Solar is now cost-effective. Here comes the sun, if we’re willing to let it in.

Here Comes the Sun

 By PAUL KRUGMAN
 Published: November 6, 2011

End of Jobs

thanks to @Livable4All

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 730-732

The British medical journal, The Lancet, estimates the total death toll from the Iraq war at nearly 700,000. When the war began, Pentagon experts estimated the cost of the war at about $60 billion. They underestimated by 8,000%. But if the war were to stop tomorrow…and if Joseph Stiglitz’s estimates of total cost were close to correct…each Iraqi killed (let’s hallucinate that he was an ‘enemy combatant’) would cost about $8 million.

X

You have to wonder why America would want to kill even a single Iraqi, let alone at a cost of $8 million each. WWII killed far more people — 50 million. Total spending on the war, by all the combatants, was probably around $10 trillion (our estimate). This puts the cost per corpse at only $200,000. WWII was far more efficient.

A Perversely Perfect War

Bill Bonner

It's not just the recession that killed American employment.
And it's not just robots taking jobs from autoworkers.
The scary new dimension is artificial intelligence, which could replace as many as 50 million professional jobs according to a recent book by software entrepreneur Martin Ford. Artificial Intelligence Took America's Jobs And It's Going To Take A Lot More
Gus Lubin
Business Insider

I have taught urban poverty and inequality every year for the past 3 years and every year have similar debates in my class: when I start the section off by asking them why people are poor the first response I usually get from students is that, simply put, people are lazy and they don't want to work. I see my job then to be to explain the structural causes of poverty and that simply saying, “People are lazy and don't want to work” is actually a really problematic way of thinking. Explaining all of this has been so much work in my classes that usually I dread the week on poverty and inequality because it is a week where I am tired.

But last week when I asked my students this question the first response I got in my classes was that “People can't find jobs” and the next one was, “There is a huge wealth gap” and the  third was that, “We have an economic system that needs poor people”. I was shocked. I have never gotten responses like this before.
Occupy Wall Street is Transforming its Participants, Our Country, and Democracy
AlterNet / By Manissa McCleave Maharawal

The End Of Money