Fresco on Scientists Working for Corporations

Jacque Fresco 38 sec

Fresco on Poetry And Art

Jacque Fresco 1 min 54 sec



When the poets and artists get onside with you, Jacque, you might find the impasse of consciousness-raising beginning to attenuate. You may not need art to create infrastructure and supply necessities, but you may need it to get people onside with you. And once you replant the roots of this human occupation of the biosphere, then there will come a great flowering - as there was in the European Renaissance - both of scientific discovery/invention, and poetic/artistic. Root and flower.

Fresco is right: survival comes first: but the poets and artists have to help convince people. Hearts and minds: Your heart got you into this, Jacque, and your mind got to work. I'd like to have seen Fresco and Joe Campbell together.
Jack  Saturday

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1042-1044

Student loan debt in the U.S. recently surpassed $1 trillion -- more than all credit card debt combined. Americans are spending money they don't have to finance educations they're not sure are worth it.
Is College Worth It?
Gallup Business Journal
[emphasis JS]

None of my dominant desires are for things that can be
bought. All I need are simple pleasures, and money
poisons them all. …if they are not to be had for nothing,
they have no attraction for me… one must bargain and
purchase and often be cheated, paying dear for poor
services. I want an article of quality, but my money is sure
to obtain a poor one. …the pleasure of possession is not
worth the trouble involved in acquisition.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Confessions 

1782

Last month, Eli Lilly, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in North America, filed a lawsuit against Canadian taxpayers for $500 million dollars. On what basis is an American corporation suing us for such an outrageous sum you ask? The $4.3 billion dollars Eli Lilly earned in profit in 2011 was not enough for the pharmaceutical giant.
Under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a company can sue another NAFTA country if that nation’s laws affect its expected future profit. In this case, Eli Lilly is “losing profit” because Canadian regulators dared to act within Canadian laws and rightly denied patents on two of Eli Lilly’s expensive drugs.
Sum of Us
[emphasis JS]

Max Keiser's Message To Black America

1 min 27 sec

Your Days

from A Thousand Clowns, 1965
3 min 6 sec

You Can't Have Enough Eagles

Intro to A Thousand Clowns, 1965
4 min 27 sec

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1038-1041

 And SNAP [food stamps] benefits not only reduce food insecurity and poverty this year; they also reduce poverty in the next generation. Recent research that tracked children into adulthood found that families’ access to food stamps improved their infants’ health and birth weight. Children who benefited from the program later posted better health, higher educational attainment, less heart disease...".

The Mismeasure of Poverty

By SHELDON H. DANZIGER

New York Times

Published: September 17, 2013

WASHINGTON, DC (WP)
What Would Jesus Do? He’d cut food stamps obviously, which is why America’s only Christian party, the GOP, slashed food stamps by $40 billion dollars.

The bill is expected to deny 3.8 milion people food stamps, but as Majority Leader Eric Cantor explains, this will allow them all to get jobs. Somehow.
...
House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, a devout Catholic explained that “Sure, we cut food stamps today, but we’re saving $40 billion. Isn’t paying off 0.25% of the national debt worth letting 3.8 million people starve to death?”
GOP USHERS IN NEW ERA OF PROSPERITY BY CUTTING FOOD STAMPS
Wink
Tea Party Cat
WINKPROGRESS
[emphasis JS]

Cato also trumpets what it calls “The Virtue of Production” without ever defining what production is. Economics defines the term, but libertarianism is looser with its terminology. That was easier to get away with in the Industrial Age, when “production” meant a car, or a shovel, or a widget.

Today nearly 50 percent of corporate profits come from the financial sector—that is, from the manipulation of money. It’s more difficult to define “production,” and even harder to find its “virtue,” when the creation of wealth no longer necessarily leads to the creation of jobs, or economic growth, or anything except the enrichment of a few.

RJ Eskow

AlterNet

11 Questions You Should Ask Libertarians to See if They're Hypocrites

 [emphasis JS]

Granted the proper integration of the world around potentials by political unblockings, there could be enough to provide all men [sic] to enjoy all earth at a higher standard of living than all yesterday's kings, without self-interferences and with no one being advantaged at the expense of another.

R. Buckminster Fuller, 

Utopia Or Oblivion

Artists Are Addressing Economics

Richard Wolff
1 min 50 sec

The Moral Centre

Richard Wolff
31 sec

UBI: Non-Workers Parasiting on Workers?

Philippe Van Parijs
1 min 49 sec.

thanks to @Geni47

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1035-1037

The top 10 percent of earners took more than half of the country’s total income in 2012, the highest level recorded since the government began collecting the relevant data a century ago, according to an updated study by the prominent economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty.

In fact, as many inequality watchers have noticed, profits as a share of income are at or near record highs while the compensation share is around a 50-year low.
...
– According to Mr. [Robert] Samuelson, over the last decade, there’s been a shift amounting to $750 billion from labor to capital.
…
 it's worth remembering that the falling share of labor income has been happening all over the world, in countries with a very wide range of different policies and economic institutions.
...
The share of income going to labor as a whole is falling, and also a greater share of labor income is going to those at the highest levels of income.
Why Labor’s Share of Income Is Falling
By JARED BERNSTEIN
New York Times
Friday, September 13, 2013
[emphasis JS]

 Just as parents who feared their child was going to fail may be relieved by a report card full of “D’s,” what seems to matter in Europe is that things are getting worse more slowly. Call it a second derivative recovery. This is the eighth consecutive quarterly decline in employment, but it is the smallest of the eight.
Been Down So Long, It Looks Like Up to Me
By FLOYD NORRIS
New York Times
[emphasis JS]

 "The OECD has observed, for example, that over the period from 1990 to 2009 the share of labour compensation in national income declined in 26 out of 30 developed economies for which data were available, and calculated that the median labour share of national income across these countries fell considerably from 66.1 per cent to 61.7 per cent ... Looking beyond the advanced economies, the ILO World of Work Report 2011 found that the decline in the labour income share was even more pronounced in many emerging and developing countries, with considerable declines in Asia and North Africa and more stable but still declining wage shares in Latin America."
Global Wage Report 2012/13
[emphasis JS]



 

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1032-1034

Unfortunately, I own a 3br home with all the normal amenities plus two vehicles. I have a lot of work to do and it was not worth it to be tied down. I wished I live in a one br condo. advice: Have an accurate assessment of your future.
Ron
comments
Slaves to Our Stuff: A Creative Vision to Break Away From Consumer Culture's Destructive Grip
[emphasis JS]

If you advance, as Thoreau said, in the general direction of your dreams, you may have them. If you advance in the direction of someone else's dreams - if you want to live someone else's life rather than yours - then get a TV for every room, buy yourself a lifetime supply of your favorite quaff, crank up the porn channel, and groove away.
Mark Edmundson
Who are you and what are you doing here
Best American Essays 2012

The euro zone jobless rate rose to a record 12.1 percent in March, a sharp reminder that unemployment remains among the region’s biggest problems.
...
Jobless figures for both the euro zone and the European Union are the highest Eurostat has reported since it began keeping the data....
Unemployment in Euro Zone Continues to Rise
By DAVID JOLLY
New York Times
Published: April 30, 2013
[emphasis JS];

Spider Robinson Worked!

Spider Robinson,  84 seconds.




Spider Robinson, 40 sec

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1029-1031

Coercion—the use of physical, legal, chemical, psychological, financial, and other forces to gain compliance—is intrinsic to our society’s employment, schooling and parenting. However, coercion results in fear and resentment, which fuel miserable marriages, unhappy families, and what we call mental illness.
...
Critics of schooling from Henry David Thoreau and Paul Goodman to John Holt and John Taylor Gatto have understood that coercive and unengaging schooling is necessary to ensure that young people more readily accept coercive and unengaging employment. As I reported in the same article, a June 2013 Gallup poll revealed that 70% of Americans hate their jobs or have checked out of them.
AlterNet / By Bruce E. Levine
The More a Society Coerces Its People, the Greater the Chance of Mental Illness
[emphasis JS]

WD ['Shift Work Disorder'], of course, is a made-up "disease" now being propagandized for the sole purpose of selling drugs like Nuvigil. The pushing of fictitious disorders is generally known as "disease mongering" across the industry. The premise of so-called Shift Work Disorder is that the tiredness you feel when you stay up all night working a night shift is actually some sort of disease requiring chemical intervention.

You're not simply tired because you're out of sync with the sun, the fictional narrative says: you're tired because you have a disorder! And unless you pop these pills -- which might kill you -- you'll never be normal again!

This is the incessant lie of all drug advertisements: these pills will make you normal and healthy, they claim. Yet people who take their pills aren't normal and healthy; they're chronically diseased and suffering kidney failure, liver failure, skin disorders, sleep disorders and often dying from FDA-approved medications.

An incredible 783,000 Americans die each year from conventional medicine. Roughly 100,000 of those are killed by FDA-approved prescription medications.
    
Big Pharma invents yet another disease to sell deadly drugs: 'Shift Work Disorder' now used to push medication that may kill you
Sunday, August 25, 2013
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Naturalnews.com
[emphasis JS]

Joseph Brodsky... told the 1,100 Dartmouth graduates that, although they may have had some splendid samples of boredom supplied by their teachers, these would be as nothing compared with what awaits them in the years ahead. Neither originality nor inventiveness on their part will suffice to defeat the endless repetition that life will serve up to them, as it has served up to us all. Evading boredom, he pointed out, is a full-time job, entailing endless change—of jobs, geography, wives and lovers, interests—and in the end a self-defeating one. Brodksy therefore advises: “When hit by boredom, go for it. Let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom.”
…
The lesson boredom teaches, according to Brodsky, is that of one’s own insignificance, an insignificance brought about by one’s own finitude. We are all here a short while, and then—poof!—gone and, sooner or later, usually sooner, forgotten.
Duh, Bor-ing
Joseph Epstein
Commentary
[emphasis JS]