Robin Hood confronts authority

Don't eat meat!

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 958-960

These systems managers believe nothing. They have no loyalty. They are rootless. They do not think beyond their tiny, insignificant roles. They are blind and deaf. They are, at least regarding the great ideas and patterns of human civilization and history, utterly illiterate. And we churn them out of universities. Lawyers. Technocrats. Business majors. Financial managers. IT specialists. Consultants. Petroleum engineers. “Positive psychologists.” Communications majors. Cadets. Sales representatives. Computer programmers. Men and women who know no history, know no ideas. They live and think in an intellectual vacuum, a world of stultifying minutia. They are T.S. Eliot’s “the hollow men,” “the stuffed men.”    Chris Hedges
The Careerists
[emphasis JS]

 JOBS – according to the decrees of Money, the unelected ruler of the Known Universe – are what we must have in order to:
a) be happy
b) make a worthwhile contribution to the economic growth of the nation
c) satisfy an inner desire to serve others
d) not be seen by our friends and relatives as work-shy
e) earn money, which allows us buy lots of things to make us happy
f) have a bit left over at the end of the week, which allows us to buy lottery tickets in the hope that we can suddenly become rich.
Being rich is the ultimate goal, because it allows you to be happy without all the palaver of having to have a job.
marcus moore

Then would come the third and final stage,- you can call it the age of leisure - or the age of abundance. With a surfeit of consumption goods, people would start swapping greater consumption for greater leisure. The world of work would recede. This was supposed to be the end point of the economic phase of history.
...
Government... should institute an unconditional basic income for all citizens. This would aim to improve the choice between work and leisure. Critics say this would be a disincentive to work. That is precisely its merit in a society which should be working less and enjoying life more.
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH OF THE AGE OF CONSUMPTION
Robert and Edward Skidelsky
Financial Times
[emphasis and link, JS]

The Credentialled At Work!

Maté and Travis
3 min or so


Brent Kyle, Z-Day 2013 Vancouver Virtual Online Event
6 min 51 sec

Two enlightened MDs: give mothers a million dollars

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 955-957

In a recent sample taken among automobile workers, who were questioned about how they'd use extra time off, only 16.8 per cent said they'd take another job. But a staggering 96.8 per cent said they'd spend the time "working around the house." Whether they actually would or not is another question, but it's significant that this activity - one which does use the word "work" - is listed above all others: travel, fishing, hunting, hobbies, sports, reading, going to school, resting, relaxing, joining clubs, and so on. It suggests that "free time" in North America is not equated with "leisure." The idea that conversation, for instance, might be an acceptable free-time activity is foreign to an industrial society. The idea that contemplation, in the Greek sense, might be a way of filling free hours, is simply appalling.

Pierre Berton,

The Smug Minority, p. 65-66

(emphasis JS)

 

 

 

 

In 1944, Franklin Roosevelt asserted that "true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence." He called for a "second Bill of Rights" that would guarantee everyone a decent home, medical care, education, and enough income for food and clothing. In the 1930s, millions of people joined national movements for guaranteed income, creating the public demand that led to Social Security. In the 1890s, ideas about universal economic security powered the progressive and populist movements. Abraham Lincoln called for, and the federal government enacted, the National Homestead Act, which gave land to poor Americans for subsistence farming. Thomas Jefferson proposed a homestead plan in Virginia in 1776. Tom Paine advocated a cash payment to everyone at age 21 and annually starting at age 50.

Real National Security: Personal, Economic, and Universal
by
Steven Shafarman

(emphasis JS)

 

 

 

 

 

A not-so-small and certainly impressive list of promulgators of more or less serious proposals for some form of UGI [Universal Guaranteed Income] would include simply the many Nobelists in economics who have at one time or another in their career suggested or concurred with the basic idea. Indeed, it would appear that over half (a majority!) of the economics Nobelists to date have in fact suggested or even advocated some such system.
Robley E. George,

Director, CSDS

(emphasis JS)

Corporations could easily pay workers a minimum wage of $100 an hour

Max Keiser 1.5 minutes


"Ethos" documentary 2 min 45 sec

Huey Long Nails It In 19 Seconds

Famous Lazy People

Thanks to @Livable4All

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 952-954

With millions still out of work, companies face little pressure to raise salaries, while productivity gains allow them to increase sales without adding workers.

...
With $85 billion in automatic cuts taking effect between now and Sept. 30 as part of the so-called federal budget sequestration, some experts warn that economic growth will be reduced by at least half a percentage point. But although experts estimate that sequestration could cost the country about 700,000 jobs, Wall Street does not expect the cuts to substantially reduce corporate profits — or seriously threaten the recent rally in the stock markets.
...
“Right now, C.E.O.’s are saying, ‘I don’t really need to hire because of the productivity gains of the last few years,’ ”....
Recovery in U.S. Is Lifting Profits, but Not Adding Jobs
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ
New York Times
Published: March 3, 2013

(emphasis JS)

 

 

 

On a visit to Standard Motor Products' fuel-injector assembly line in South Carolina, Atlantic writer Adam Davidson asked why a worker there, Maddie, was welding caps onto the injectors herself. Why not use a machine? That's how a lot of the factory's other tasks were performed. Maddie's supervisor, Tony, had a bracing, direct answer: "Maddie is cheaper than a machine."Davidson's complex, poignant story, Making It in America, revealed some chilling data about where American manufacturing is headed. It's a matter of simple math. Maddie makes less in two years than a $100,000 machine would cost, so her job is safe—for now.

Elsewhere in America, robots are getting cheaper and more sophisticated, and they're landing better, more advanced jobs. They are driving cars, writing newspaper articles, and filling prescriptions, displacing people with years of schooling and training under their belts. It sounds like a classic sci-fi story, but that disconcerting future isn't in the future. It's here today.
How a Robot Will Steal Your Job
Cord Jefferson
Gizmodo

(emphasis JS)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Before long we will have the means to provide comfortably for everybody, and human labor will be subsumed almost entirely by machines. This leaves a problem; currently we distribute wealth through the trade of goods and services. If there is no service for people to provide there is no money flowing back into the population in wages. If there is no money flowing back into the population people will have no money to spend, and no money to pay the tax that provides the welfare. Automation is demanding a new way for resources to be distributed before seemingly inevitable economic catastrophe happens, and the solution will need to include a plan for a smooth transition from our current wage based economy to a economy where there is a basic income guarantee for everyone.
George Deane
Technological unemployment: panacea or poison?
IEET
(emphasis and strikethroughs JS)

Peter Joseph, Those Jobs

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 949-951

Federal, state and local governments now employ 500,000 fewer workers than they did on the eve of the recession in 2007, the longest and deepest decline in total government employment since the aftermath of World War II.

Austerity Kills Government Jobs as Cuts to Budgets Loom
By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM
 New York Times
Published: February 26, 2013

(emphasis JS)

The unemployment rate in the euro zone edged up in January to another record, official data showed on Friday.
...
there are few reasons to regard a recovery as imminent...
...
The bloc’s debt problems, and the tax increases and government spending cuts that have been prescribed as the remedy, have sapped spending power, reducing business demand for labor.
Euro Zone Reports Record Joblessness and Low Inflation
By DAVID JOLLY
New York Times
Published: March 1, 2013
(emphasis JS)

… to me this problem is an obvious thing, yet everyone seems too indoctrinated with old morals and values to realize that freeing ourselves from work is what we should try to do, instead of trying desperately to find jobs for everyone because of how things worked in the past.
Comment Submitted by Sno on October 14, 2012
Future of Work: Finding Value in the Rejects of the Job Economy
h+ Magazine
By: Nick Meador
(emphasis JS)

Confronting The American Dream

Richard Wolff with Bill Moyers

Getting The Employment Rate Down

Joe Alexopoulos