Saturday Forever

                                                      
Thanks to Markus

                                                   

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 832-834

For the technologies that did emerge proved most conducive to surveillance, work discipline, and social control. Computers have opened up certain spaces of freedom, as we’re constantly reminded, but instead of leading to the workless utopia Abbie Hoffman imagined, they have been employed in such a way as to produce the opposite effect. They have enabled a financialization of capital that has driven workers desperately into debt, and, at the same time, provided the means by which employers have created “flexible” work regimes that have both destroyed traditional job security and increased working hours for almost everyone. Along with the export of factory jobs, the new work regime has routed the union movement and destroyed any possibility of effective working-class politics.

Meanwhile, despite unprecedented investment in research on medicine and life sciences, we await cures for cancer and the common cold, and the most dramatic medical breakthroughs we have seen have taken the form of drugs such as Prozac, Zoloft, or Ritalin—tailor-made to ensure that the new work demands don’t drive us completely, dysfunctionally crazy.
Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit
David Graeber
The Baffler

Is there anybody here that can tell me when was the last time you heard or read that a Pharma company has come [up] with something that cures a disease?  I'll give you 100 Euro right now if you tell me. They don't cure anything, they make you sick.
...
All of the drugs out there are useless. They are garbage. They don't work, they give you serious side effects - and eventually many of them kill you.
John Virapen
former manager of the pharmaceutical companies Eli Lilly (1980 to 1988 Managing Director) and Novo Nordisk 

Political maturation goes hand in hand with changes in traditional patterns of domination and submission. Subjects simultaneously reject the paternalism of the authorities, dispense with their own complementary infantilism and victimhood, and assume the responsibilities of citizenship.
Robert W. Fuller
Somebodies and Nobodies

Marketing Analysis

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 829-831

Across the country, many states like Pennsylvania that happily accepted stimulus money to pay for existing employees are laying off those workers now that Congress has turned off the spigot. Over the last three years, at least 700,000 state and local government employees have lost their jobs...
Pink Slips
New York Times
Published: June 12, 2012

Extractive ownership is ownership that is designed to generate maximum financial wealth in the short term. But generative ownership is aimed at serving the needs of life. Serving the needs of life is what economies have been about for thousands of years -- creating food, shelter, clothing -- this is what economies are for. In the recent time period, like post-war, we've completely lost our way and now it is all about finance.

Time to Ditch Our Profit-Hungry Corporate Economy: Here's What the Future Could Look Like Instead
By Tara Lohan
AlterNet

I would like to see people refusing to work in any job they felt was wrong. I would like to see work-dodgers: honourable and brave people who refuse to continue to feed this monstrous culture.
Chris Busby,
First Coordinator of the Green Committee of 100

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 826 -828

 Why has education been exempt from genuine competition and consumer feedback for so long? Because at every level it's riddled with abuses of rank. While the teacher-pupil relationship that lies at the heart of learning is inherently hierarchical, this presents no problem so long as the teacher's authority is confined to his or her area of expertise and put at the service of student interests. But when administrators and educators substitute their own goals for learners' interests. Motivation wilts. Students assume the passive-aggressive posture of the prisoner or slave.
Robert W. Fuller
Somebodies and Nobodies
[emphasis JS]

 Madeleine Bunting's acutely observed UK statistic - that more time is lost to the 'sickie' than was ever lost in the heyday of industrial dispute in the seventies - is a sign that the revolt against work is already under way in an individualized but concerted fashion: a silent collective withdrawal from the necessities of work which we would not do out of free choice. But does it always have to be made in private, covertly, in bad faith and through evasion? Or could governments and business see the writing on the wall and concede the inevitable - that the ever-more potentialized and individualized 'worker' wants to put work in its place; only one of the moments of existence, and not a forced labour, not the source of a personal identity, writes Paolo Virno.
Pat Kane
The Play Ethic

 While Bhutan's GDP remains among the worlds lowest, life expectancy increased by 19 yrs from 1984 to 1998. Perhaps therefore money and income should be thought of as secondary to a general notion of happiness. Money fuels competition, insecurities and ultimately stress. Increasing happiness means increasing one's sense of empowerment and freedom over the choices they make while, at the same time, ensuring they have the support structure to back these choice (whether families, friends, society or government). A combination of basic human rights and basic human necessities may therefore be what is necessary for 'health, life and dignity.'
Guaranteed Livable Income
[emphasis JS]

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 823 - 825

Peter Edelman: On top of how awful the wages are for so many jobs, wage theft adds up to an astonishing number of dollars because employers take brutal advantage of workers and either don't pay overtime or the minimum wage or just don't pay the worker at all for day labor. It's just remarkable, in a terrible way, what a huge problem this is.
…
…the level of extreme poverty that we have now is so much larger – it was 12.6 million people in the year 2000 and it's 20.5 million in the year 2010 –
Disgusting: 7 Million Kids and Mothers Suffer Extreme Poverty in the Richest Country in the World
By Karen Dolan

General Electric Co. GE -1.52% announced plans to move production of electric water heaters to Louisville, Ky., from Mexico after U.S. unions agreed to a $13-an-hour starting wage for new hires, $8 to $10 or more an hour below the previous contract.

Without such concessions from workers, company executives say, they would be less likely to expand employment in the U.S. at all.
Flat U.S. Wages Help Fuel Rebound in Manufacturing
By DAVID WESSEL and JAMES R. HAGERTY
Wall St. Journal
May 28, 2012
(emphasis js)

Our ability to generate more output with fewer people has lifted our lives out of drudgery and delivered us a cornucopia of material wealth.
Let’s Be Less Productive
By TIM JACKSON
New York Times
Published: May 26, 2012

Tapscott, Let's Do It