Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 848-850

I get this notion that I've missed out on a life that might have been mine. I deliberately rejected the path that women had trod for years and headed - yes, eagerly plunged - into a world traditionally held by men.  I so firmly believed that a meaningful life would be found where the men were, where the jobs were. But now, after twenty-five years in the workplace, I wonder - what did I lose?  Can I still make up for missed experience?
Janet E. Bradley
Middle-Aged Musings On Retirement
Dropped Threads

I talk about remodelling the kitchen, or buying a big house with a fortress around it and a moat, so wide we can defend ourselves against the bad stuff that is out to get us. I search for that house, often, the one that doesn't look like illness can live inside its 3000 square feet, the house that celebrates an immunity from disaster. I know that I can't have this house - that it doesn't really exist.
Deborah Schnitzer
Just A Part
Dropped Threads

If people follow voluntary simplicity, grow veggie gardens, eat healthy home cooked meals, walk, bike and use public transit, pack homemade lunches, drink homemade beer and wine, live frugally in modest green homes, and become so imbued with happiness that world peace breaks out...   this would cause a seismic loss of jobs world wide.

Healthy, happy, people can never create the same number of jobs as a society of unhappy, TV-watching, junk-food eating, booze-swilling, tobacco-smoking, car-dependent, compulsive-shoppers with epidemic diseases, illness and addictions. The current economy is designed as a perpetual wrecking/fixing machine. Very good for jobs, but bad for everyone and everything else.
C.A. L'Hirondelle,
Guaranteed Income Makes Fertile Ground For Green Ideas
Livable 4 All

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 844-847

 Perhaps the world would soon slide to ruin if everyone behaved as I do. But I would suggest that an ideal human life lies somewhere between my own defiant indolence and the rest of the world’s endless frenetic hustle. My role is just to be a bad influence, the kid standing outside the classroom window making faces at you at your desk, urging you to just this once make some excuse and get out of there, come outside and play.
The ‘Busy’ Trap
By TIM KREIDER
New York Times
June 30, 2012

 SOME unemployed people in my local area recently received some jarring news: their outplacement counselor had been outplaced.
…
It’s just one example of confidence-rattling developments in the job market that make the unemployed question whether they will ever find the light at the end of the tunnel, whether there’s anybody left out there who can help.
The Jobless Won’t Forget Your Help
By JON PICOULT|
New York Times
Published: July 21, 2012



[I]t's not enough to work hard, get a degree, sacrifice and slave anymore because the system in fact is broken.
How Less Work for Everybody Could Solve a Lot of Our Economic Turbulence and Make Life More Pleasant
AlterNet / By Sarah Seltzer

Guaranteed Livable Income For All

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 841-843

Today's schools are vestiges of a world that needed legions of workers to carry out laborious, repetitive tasks. Now, however, we find ourselves on the threshold of an age of information and technology that holds the promise of liberation from drudgery. The educational transformation this requires will be as profound as the one launched by nascent democracies two centuries ago when they realized that their survival depended on what Thomas Jefferson called "the enlightenment of the people" and adopted universal compulsory education. The schools built to serve the needs of the manufacturing age trained a literate workforce that could follow directions and carry out tasks that called for little or no initiative. Real creativity was neither expected nor desired from either blue or white-collar workers. Such conformist schooling can take us no further. It is quite inadequate to the needs of knowledge-based societies in the age of information.
Robert W. Fuller
Somebodies and Nobodies
(emphasis JS)

 It all boils down to a simple empirical question: Is there, or is there not a waged job for everyone who wants one? The answer is a very clear no.
Taking It to the Streets in Spain
by DANIEL RAVENTOS and JULIE WARK

Paine favored the preservation of a private-property, market-driven economy, but he argued that its self-destructive dynamism - its tendency to generate wealth by widening the income gap between classes - could be tamed by institutionalizing the basic principle of each person's entitlement to full citizen's rights…  That universal guarantee of a right to a basic citizen's income would then require… contrary to the spirit of the new 1795 constitution - a universal franchise.
John Keane
Tom Paine: A Political Life
(emphasis JS)

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 838-840

The majority of law grads now wind up deeply in debt and jobless.
The Ones We've Lost: The Student Loan Debt Suicides
C. Cryn Johannsen
HUFFPOST

Both candidates are only tinkering at the edges of the most important issue facing the United States: the hollowing out of the employment marketplace, the disappearance of mid-level jobs.

The issue of the disappearing middle is not new, but credible economists have added a more threatening twist to the argument: the possibility that a well-functioning, efficient modern market economy, driven by exponential growth in the rate of technological innovation, can simultaneously produce economic growth and eliminate millions of middle-class jobs.
The Hollowing Out
By THOMAS B. EDSALL
New York Times
July 8, 2012
(emphasis JS)

I have gained nothing by the enlargement of my world, on the contrary, I have lost. I want to become more and more childish and pass beyond childhood in the opposite direction. I want to go exactly contrary to the normal line of development, pass into a superinfantile realm of being which will be absolutely crazy and chaotic but not crazy and chaotic as the world about me. I have been an adult and a father and a responsible member of society. I have earned my daily bread. I have adapted myself to a world which never was mine. I want to break through this enlarged world and stand again on the frontier of an unknown world which will throw this pale, unilateral world into shadow. I want to pass beyond the responsibility of fatherhood to the irresponsibility of the anarchic man who cannot be coerced nor wheedled nor cajoled nor traduced. I want to take as my guide Oberon the night rider, who, under the spread of his black wings, eliminates both the beauty and the horror of the past. ...even if I must become a wild and natural park inhabited only by idle dreamers I must not stop to rest here in the ordered fatuity of responsible adult life.
Henry Miller, Tropic Of Capricorn

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 835-837

Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done. “Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do,” wrote Thomas Pynchon in his essay on sloth. Archimedes’ “Eureka” in the bath, Newton’s apple, Jekyll & Hyde and the benzene ring: history is full of stories of inspirations that come in idle moments and dreams. It almost makes you wonder whether loafers, goldbricks and no-accounts aren’t responsible for more of the world’s great ideas, inventions and masterpieces than the hardworking.
The ‘Busy’ Trap
By TIM KREIDER
New York Times
June 30, 2012

 I wish I could say that was the happy ending of my childhood story. Instead, it was the beginning of a rather torturous developmental period. My new outlook on life, which could be summarized as “Don’t tell me—I want to figure it out myself!” was not an attitude that went over too well in school. For many years I struggled with wanting to please my teachers—listening to directions and following the rules—but feeling creatively unfulfilled and unchallenged. At times I had an instinct to speak up and offer an alternate explanation, or an urge to try something a different way, but I quickly learned that only ‘undisciplined and obnoxious children’  challenged authority and caused disruption. These were not the kinds of students that teachers favored. I learned to ignore the pangs of my creative spirit, which only seemed to bring me misery when answered.
The Educational Value Of Creative Disobedience
By Andrea Kuszewski
Scientific American

This is one of the subtler ambiguities of play. On one side we have the imaginative, empowered, visionary play of the strategic manager, on the other, the collective, embattled and fatalistic play of the workforce. For all the hype about creativity and collaboration, they are only encouraged to play within the rules of the corporate plan, rather than cogitate freely about their productive life and its meaning.
Pat Kane
The Play Ethic