Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 975-977

Only 24 per cent of university and college faculty are now tenured or tenure-track.

Much of the coverage has focused on the sub-poverty wages of adjunct faculty, their lack of job security and the growing legions of unemployed and under-employed PhDs.

…

Fewer professors and fewer qualified - or even paid - teaching assistants will be required in higher education's New Order.

The Neoliberal Assault on Academia

Al Jazeera English

By Tarak Barkawi

AlterNet

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MADRID, April 24 (Reuters) - More than six million Spaniards were out of work in the first quarter of this year, raising the jobless rate in the euro zone's fourth biggest economy to 27.2 percent, the highest since records began in the 1970s.
Spain Unemployment Hits Record High On Recession Fears
Reuters  | 
By Paul Day
Huffpost
Posted: 04/25/2013

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 [W]e are indeed creating a permanent class of jobless Americans.

And let’s be clear: this is a policy decision.
The Jobless Trap
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: April 21, 2013

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Abraham Maslow for 42 seconds

Abraham Maslow, timid, shy kid,
the father of Positive Psychology

Who are the bad guys?

Max Keiser, 26 seconds
He's not laughing

Oh dear! A disincentive to work!

John Maynard Keynes biographer Lord Robert Skidelsky

They hate us for our what?

Richard Wolff

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 972-974

If one wanted to crush and destroy a man [sic] entirely, to mete out to him the most terrible punishment … all one would have to do would be to make him do work that was completely and utterly devoid of usefulness and meaning.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The House of the Dead

The strangely puritanical – and deeply irrational – obsession with “jobs”, “hard-working families”, etc, at a time in history when greater leisure for all is more than a utopian promise (due to the maturation of labour-saving technology, etc) seems an integral part of the conservative framing – which is perhaps why many on the “left” find it difficult to provide counter-narratives.
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We have a strangely distorted view of “wealth” (due partly to business PR) – we imagine it all comes from “private enterprise” in the present, and from the recent past. But it accumulates over history. We’re all totally dependent on the work and innovations of dead generations, and the taxes they paid.

In other words, the dichotomy between “dependency culture” and “private enterprise” is completely false.
News Frames
Anxiety Culture
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Of the top 20 region-sectors ranked by environmental impacts, none would be profitable if environmental costs were fully integrated. Ponder that for a moment. None of the world’s top industrial sectors would be profitable if they were paying their full freight. None!

That amounts to an entire global industrial system built on sleight of hand. As legendary environmentalist Paul Hawken put it, “We are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it GDP.”
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But the UNEP report makes clear that what’s going on today is more than a few accounting oversights here and there. The distance between today’s industrial systems and truly sustainable industrial systems — systems that do not spend down stored natural capital but instead integrate into current energy and material flows — is not one of degree, but one of kind. What we need is not just better accounting, it is a new global industrial system, a new way of providing for human wellbeing, a new way of relating to our planet. We need a revolution.
None of the world’s top industries would be profitable if they paid for the natural capital they use
By David Roberts
Grist
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What The Sun Never Says To The Earth

Hafiz

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 969-971

PARIS — While the euro zone has been transfixed lately by the Cyprus meltdown, another and potentially bigger European crisis has continued to simmer: record-high unemployment.

...

Both the jobless rates and the number of unemployed are the highest Eurostat has recorded in data that reach back to 1995, before the creation of the euro.

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Among Greek youth, the jobless rate has hit a staggering level, 58.4 percent.

Unemployment in Euro Zone Reaches a Record 12%

By DAVID JOLLY
New York Times
Published: April 2, 2013

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Last week, President Obama proposed an initiative to map the complete structure and activity of the brain. "As humans we can identify galaxies light-years away," he said. "We can study particles smaller than an atom, but we still haven't unlocked the mystery of the three pounds of matter that sits between our ears." I'm all in favor of the effort, especially if it can unlock one particular mystery of those three pounds that was very much in evidence in the days following the president's proposal: How can the human brain not perceive something that's right in front of it? I'm talking about the massive jobs crisis in which the country remains mired.
Arianna Huffington
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These are good times for Libbey, a 125-year-old American glassmaker that nearly went bankrupt four years ago. The company’s shares have risen to almost $20 from below $1, sales of its tableware are at a record high, and its energy-intensive factories saved more than $5 million in 2012 as natural gas prices fell.
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PPG Industries is a heavy user of natural gas at its glass factory in Carlisle, Pa. Cheaper gas helps glass makers stay competitive.

Despite all the upbeat news, however, Libbey recently announced it would lay off 200 workers at its plant...
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“At the end of the day you still want a strong manufacturing base, but there aren’t as many people on the factory floor.”

Indeed, while the sector has added 500,000 jobs since the recession ended and the value of what the nation’s factories churn out is close to a high, there are nonetheless two million fewer manufacturing workers today than in 2007. Ever since the early 1960s, the share of jobs in manufacturing has been on a nearly uninterrupted downward slope, now accounting for less than 9 percent of all employment in the United States.
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“Because it is automated, we won’t have to add a lot of employees with the upturn in the construction industry,”...
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It’s not that manufacturing itself is disappearing. But nearly all of the American manufacturers that survived the lean years of the last decade are globally competitive companies that depend on high productivity and advanced technology for their success more than masses of assembly line workers.
Rumors of a Cheap-Energy Jobs Boom Remain Just That
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ
New York Times
Published: April 1, 2013

Happy Hour

Richard Wolff
37 seconds

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 965-968

“There is this incredibly powerful long-run trend of declining employment in manufacturing,” said Robert Z. Lawrence, a professor of economics at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. “It’s the same story as in food and farming. We’re producing more food with many fewer workers. The only way we compete with our higher wages is by being more innovative.”
Rumors of a Cheap-Energy Jobs Boom Remain Just That
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ
New York Times
Published: April 1, 2013
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Let's go through a little thought experiment shall we. Say all of the tractors in the world disappeared tomorrow. Suddenly farms are hiring laborers left and right. We've created jobs! But now the cost in human labor hours has increased dramatically for each loaf of bread. People are paying nearly a hundred times as much as they used to for bread. Do you think the number of jobs created matters to everyone else? Automation creates wealth for humanity. 

thesaintofelsewhere
comment on YouTube video

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[USA] The number of suburban residents living in poverty rose by nearly 64 percent between 2000 and 2011, to about 16.4 million people, according to a Brookings Institution analysis of 95 of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas. That’s more than double the rate of growth for urban poverty in those areas.
Sprawling and struggling: Poverty hits America's suburbs
Fri Mar 22, 2013 4:26 AM EDT
In Plain Sight
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On 21 and 22 February, 2013 in the building of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, a conference took place entitled Poverty and Inequality in Human Society. Proposals for an inclusive society.

We of the Association Basic Income (Ad Planken, Leon Segers, Robin Ketelaars, and Christine Lambrecht from Belgium) were highly surprised by the high “basic income level” of the conference. This was peppered with the term basic income. From the most unexpected corners of concern speakers referred to it. It looks like the “Early Warnings Division” discovered Basic Income at the right time. Europe is ready for a basic income, at least the Council of Europe is.
Report on rights and poverty conference in Strasbourg
By Robin Ketelaars March 11, 2013 
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Welfare Bums: The Camels People Swallow

Michael Parenti before the biggest bailouts.
5 min.


These are the camels people swallow while straining at the gnats of welfare mothers.

"Great" BritaIn in 2013

George Galloway
2 min 32 sec

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 961-964

The ILO notes that while rising unemployment is putting downward pressure on wages in advanced economies, worldwide, 397 million workers are living in extreme poverty and 472 million cannot address their basic needs. And the World Bank notes that for a great number of workers in poorer countries, the reality is that even holding more than one job and working long hours (often without basic rights and in unsafe conditions), they do not earn enough to provide for themselves and their children.

In short, it is becoming more and more obvious that capitalism does not create enough jobs for the people and when it does create jobs, a great majority of them are not allowing people to secure humane living conditions.
The Global Unemployment Crisis
Saturday, 30 March 2013
By Ozgur Orhangazi
Truthout
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“Damaged goods,” Ms. Farley describes herself, recalling how she recently overheard a child whispering to her mother about whether the “crippled lady” was a meth addict.

For about five years, Ms. Farley, 45, stood alongside about a dozen other workers, spray gun in hand, gluing together foam cushions for chairs and couches sold under brand names like Broyhill, Ralph Lauren and Thomasville. Fumes from the glue formed a yellowish fog inside the plant, and Ms. Farley’s doctors say that breathing them in eventually ate away at her nerve endings, resulting in what she and her co-workers call “dead foot.”

A chemical she handled — known as n-propyl bromide, or nPB — is also used by tens of thousands of workers in auto body shops, dry cleaners and high-tech electronics manufacturing plants across the nation. Medical researchers, government officials and even chemical companies that once manufactured nPB have warned for over a decade that it causes neurological damage and infertility when inhaled at low levels over long periods, but its use has grown 15-fold in the past six years.
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“I did the work,” Ms. Farley said about her years putting together furniture for America’s households. “This doesn’t seem a fair price to pay.”
As OSHA Emphasizes Safety, Long-Term Health Risks Fester
By IAN URBINA
New York Times
Published: March 30, 2013
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 Based on an annual single room occupancy  (SRO) cost of $558 per month, any ONE of the  ten richest Americans would have enough with his 2012 income to pay for a room for every homeless person in the U.S.  for the entire year. These ten rich men together made more than our entire  housing budget.
Five Ugly Extremes of Inequality in America
Paul Buchheit
AlterNet
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