Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 750-754

That was it. The jobs were gone to India.

“I couldn’t stop crying,” said Maile, a divorced mother of one, who until that moment had spent her professional life as a telecommunications worker before being laid off first by Verizon and then by Level 3.

Even then, Maile said, she still believed in the American Dream.

You’ve got to work hard… work hard.

Maile owned her own home. Although she had been forced to liquidate her retirement after the Verizon layoff, she had begun to build it back up. Then came the Level 3 layoff. It shook her to her core.

That was my defining moment. I was filling out paperwork, and I couldn’t help it…. I was just crying and crying. I said, ‘They don’t understand…. We’re all interconnected.’

Ten years ago, back when Maile worked at Verizon, she earned $75,000 a year. At Level 3, she was paid $50,000. Today, she makes $8.50 an hour at a retail job. She applies for professional jobs every day. Sometimes her application is one of 400.
As Unemployment Aid Sets to Expire, Jobless Worker Says: ‘All of Us Need to Stand Together’
AFL-CIO NOW BLOG

In 2010, 17.2 million households, 14.5 percent of households (approximately one in seven), were food insecure, the highest number ever recorded in the United
States.”
Hunger in America: 2011 United States Hunger and Poverty Facts

What’s going on here? Aren't we the richest country on earth?
How Can the World's Richest Country Let Children Go Hungry?
6 Tricks Corporate Elites Use to Hoard All the Wealth
Les Leopold
AlterNet

Twenty years after the Fall of Communism, it’s corporate capitalism that depends on information control as the basis of its power. Capitalism — as opposed to the free market — has always depended on the state to enforce artificial scarcity, artificial property rights, as a source of rents for the ruling class. But around twenty years ago, the forces of abundance unleashed by the digital and network revolutions became an unprecedented threat to the artificial scarcity rents that the Lords of Scarcity depend on. They were forced to resort to unprecedented levels of totalitarian information control to stave off the threat from abundance.
Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin
Center for a Stateless Society

Merry Christmas, Everybody!

Merry Christmas, Everybody!

Anti Wage-Slavery, Prop-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 747-749

From 2005 to 2009, millionaires collected over $74 million in unemployment benefits…
Millionaires on Food Stamps and Jobless Pay? G.O.P. Is on It
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
New York Times
Published: December 12, 2011

I inquired as to a raise because the cost- of -living was going up. I got back a letter saying that “Market reality” was such that there would be no raise because there were people waiting for work who would do it at my current rate.That’s why people like Matthew Vadum, who call the poor, especially welfare recipients, the “non-productive segments of society” are wrong. The unemployed are performing a function that capitalism wants: They provide slack in the job market that keeps a downward pressure on wages. So as the poet John Milton said, “They also serve who only stand and wait.”
Why the Economy CAN’T work for us all
By: Kellia Ramares-Watson
Friday December 9, 2011

· Computerization creates unemployment

· Unemployment creates free-time
· Free-time generates innovation
What is wrong with unemployment is not its increase, but the unsustainability of a system where employment is “good” and unemployment is “bad”. The end of employment is by no means the end of doing things. Human beings are by nature creative, innovative, and vigorously pursue their goals. This is why the first tier of a panarchy economy provides necessities: to give individuals and groups the foundation on which they can make informed decisions and communicate those decisions to the system in a cybernetic way.
Unemployment Is The Cure
Paul Hartzog
21st September 2011

Practical Post-Scarcity

Practical Post Scarcity from Open Source Ecology on Vimeo.

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 745-746

Justice requires a democratic society in which people have equal standing and make collective decisions. It requires equal opportunities in life: fate must not be fixed by our birth. And it also requires that everyone can enjoy a fair share of available resources to enable all of us to pursue our lives.
Stanford philosopher Joshua Cohen

[I]f success is winning the World Series, 29 out of 30 teams will fail, every year, that’s a 96.66% failure rate.

Now, apply the principle of competition to the job market. Getting the job is success, not getting it is failure. On October 21, 2009, the NY Times published an article by Michael Luo called “$13 an hour. 500 apply, 1 wins job”. WINS… my analogy to sports is not far fetched. 1 person succeeded, 499 failed. 99.8% failure rate. That’s worse than trying to win the World Series.

x

But that’s only 1 job, you say, Well, it’s not much better when multiple jobs are at stake. On April 19, 2011 McDonald’s held its first ever national hiring day. The plan was to hire 50,000 nationwide.

x

On April 28, Bloomberg.net a highly respected business website—–published an article by Leslie Patton headlined “McDonald’s Hires 62,000 in U.S. Event, 24% More Than Planned.” It said “McDonald’s and its franchisees hired 62,000 people in the U.S. after receiving more than one million applications” 62,000 out of a million = 6.2% They said that actually more than one million applied so lets say 6% were hired. That means a 94% failure rate. Better chance than winning the WS, but not by much.

Why the Economy CAN’T work for us all

By: Kellia Ramares-Watson Friday December 9, 2011

Disobedient!

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 742-744

Every day, millions of American workers do something dangerous to their health: they sit down.
Sitting for long periods is hard on the body. It strains the back and causes the muscles to become slack. It slows the processes that metabolize calories, increasing the risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and some cancers.
Don’t Just Sit There, Work Out at Your Desk
By ERIC V. COPAGE
New York Times
Published: December 3, 2011

Upon birth, as Mayhew described the practice in Germany at the end of the 19th century, “the wretched new-born little thing has been wound up in… ells of bandages, from the feet right, and tight, up to the neck; as if it were intended to be embalmed as a mummy.” Since these bandages were rarely changed, the infant was left in its own feces and urine, with the result, says Mayhew, that “babies are loathsome, foetid things…offensive to the last degree with their excreta [and] the heads of the poor things are never washed, and are like the rind of Stilton cheese, with dirt encrusted upon their skull.” The mothers were so frightened of their babies that they not only tied them up but often strapped them into a crib in a room with curtains drawn to keep out “lurking evils.” The results were that the infants were covered with lice and other vermin attracted to their feces, but they could not move to drive them away as infants who were not swaddled might do. The parents routinely called them “lice,” and “useless eaters” because they didn’t contribute to the family’s work until they were older, resenting their children so much that they often recalled “Rarely could we eat a piece of bread without hearing father’s comment that we did not merit it” because they did not earn their living.
The Childhood Origins of the Holocaust
Lloyd deMause

In June, President Obama announced a $500 million federal investment in manufacturing technology (including $70 million for robotics). It represents another step in developing robots that can assist with repetitious or physically stressful assembly-line tasks without posing a safety risk.
Safer robots will improve manufacturing.

Kurzweil