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.

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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