Cornel West Calls Out Obama

Cornel West, 39 seconds

Parenti Nails The Invisible Hand

Michael Parenti,36 sec

Parenti: Capitalism Brings Prosperity?

Michael Parenti, 13 sec

Joni Mitchell At School

Joni Mitchell, 2 min 54 sec

Dog Food, 2013

Dick Gregory, 30 seconds

Three Top Causes Of Death In America

Dick Gregory, 21 seconds


Add this too. Put 2+2 together

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1067-1069

 Friday is that moment in time when you think you can make it through another week. Monday is that moment in time when you're sure you can't.

John Mitchell ‏@OneJohnMitchell

Why pursue greatness when you've already got 324 channels and a recliner? Pass the dip and forget about your grand designs.

If you've been doing what you're doing for years and it's not-so-great, you are in a rut. Many people refer to these ruts as careers.
The Six Enemies Of Greatness (and Happiness)
Jessica Hagy
Forbes

Five years after the economic crisis struck the Continent, youth unemployment has climbed to staggering levels in many countries: in September, 56 percent in Spain for those 24 and younger, 57 percent in Greece, 40 percent in Italy, 37 percent in Portugal and 28 percent in Ireland. For people 25 to 30, the rates are half to two-thirds as high and rising.

Those are Great Depression-like rates of unemployment, and there is no sign that European economies, still barely emerging from recession, are about to generate the jobs necessary to bring those Europeans into the work force soon, perhaps in their lifetimes.

Young and Educated in Europe, but Desperate for Jobs

By LIZ ALDERMAN

New York Times

Published: November 15, 2013

Why Not Cynical?

Henry Giroux, 1 min, 42 sec

Placebo Effect: What You Believe

Kelly McGonigal, 1 min 50 sec

Number One Regret Of The Dying

Jane McGonigal, 10 seconds

Die With Your Boots On

Morris Berman, 1 min 20 sec

Russell Brand, 1 Minute On Schooling

Russell Brand, 1 min

Pay Less, Live Worse

Abby Martin, 3 min 53 sec

Wolff, Tax Cuts For You And Them

Richard D. Wolff, 1 min 28 sec

How Were The New Deal Programs Paid For?

Richard D. Wolff. 1 min 12 sec

Wolff, Bailout Alternative

Richard D. Wolff, 2 min 41 sec

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1063-1066

The human race is a monotonous affair. Most people spend the greatest part of their time working in order to live, and what little freedom remains so fills them with fear that they seek out any and every means to be rid of it.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 
The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774

In the United States, we are generally told that poverty is a deeply complicated problem whose solution requires dozens of reforms on issues as diverse as public schooling, job training, and marriage.

But it’s not true. High rates of poverty can, as a policy matter, be solved with trivial ease. How? By simply giving the poor money.  

Last month, the Census reported that 46.5 million Americans, or 15 percent of the population, lived under the poverty line in 2012. While that number sounds disturbingly high, the total amount of money by which they are in poverty is smaller than you’d think. In 2012, those 46.5 million impoverished Americans were, collectively, $175 billion dollars below the poverty line. That figure is equivalent to 1.08 percent of the country’s GDP, one-quarter of the country’s $700 billion military budget, and exactly what we spend on Social Security disability benefits. Finding an optimal way to get $175 billion to these 46.5 million people is all that stands in the way of a country with an official poverty rate of zero.
…
Could we afford it? Sure.
How to Cut the Poverty Rate in Half (It's Easy)
MATT BRUENIG AND ELIZABETH STOKER OCT 29 2013
The Atlantic
[emphasis JS]

…there is no evidence that the long-term jobless are accumulating in any one industry, which would be a signal that the economy needs to move workers from, say, manufacturing into nursing. Long-term unemployment has hit workers young and old, of all industries, races and backgrounds. But the long-term jobless actually tend to be more educated. And long spells of joblessness have hit black workers especially hard, as well as single parents, the disabled and older workers.

With time, however, even people with desired skills can become “structurally” unemployed. Longer spells of unemployment become harder to explain away. Jobless workers’ skills can atrophy. Job seekers find it harder to appear eager. Wounds become scars.
Caught in a Revolving Door of Unemployment
By ANNIE LOWREY
New York Times
Published: November 16, 2013

Mightier Than The Sword

G. Edward Griffin. 1 min 7 sec

Genes, Money, Food

Richard C. Lewontin, Evolutionary Biologist, 7 min 49 sec

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1061-1063

I live in a small city that has seen grow from one soup kitchen that offered supper only to expanding to breakfast for children and a growing need for groceries, diapers and dry good items that people cannot otherwise manage easily. We now have more soup kitchens and even shelters than any small city should ever have to deal with.

We once were a thriving manufacturing city. The jobs were often hard, and didn't pay what they should have perhaps, but they provided a living and people managed to keep their heads above water. The jobs are gone.
Sajwert
comment on
Billionaires’ Row and Welfare Lines
By CHARLES M. BLOW
Published: October 25, 2013

The concept of growth was put forward as a measure to mobilise resources during the second world war. GDP is based on creating an artificial and fictitious boundary, assuming that if you produce what you consume, you do not produce....nature’s amazing cycles of renewal of water and nutrients are defined into nonproduction. The peasants of the world, who provide 72% of the food, do not produce; women who farm or do most of the housework do not fit this paradigm of growth either. A living forest does not contribute to growth, but when trees are cut down and sold as timber, we have growth. Healthy societies and communities do not contribute to growth, but disease creates growth through, for example, the sale of patented medicine.

Water available as a commons shared freely and protected by all provides for all. However, it does not create growth. But when Coca-Cola sets up a plant, mines the water and fills plastic bottles with it, the economy grows. But this growth is based on creating poverty – both for nature and local communities. Water extracted beyond nature’s capacity to renew and recharge creates a water famine. Women are forced to walk longer distances looking for drinking water.
How Economic Growth Has Become Anti-Life
Vandana Shiva
Common Dreams

It’s every employer’s worst nightmare. An angry employee with a gun takes out his revenge on a boss, coworkers or both.

 Last year, Andrew J. Engeldinger did it when he killed five and injured three after being fired from his job at Accent Signage Systems in Minneapolis. Lawrence Jones did it when he killed two coworkers and wounded two others at a Fresno chicken processing plant. The year before, Rocky T. Christian, did it when he shot and killed his boss at Build Direct Floor, LLC in Apopka, Florida. Let’s bring guns to work!

 Last year, 375 employees were shot and killed on the job, says the Department of Labor. If you are an employee, you are five times as likely to be shot to death at work if your employer allows guns says an American Journal of Public Health study.

Shot and Killed at Work? It Happened to 375 People Last Year.

Posted by Martha Rosenberg

AlterNet

October 22, 2013

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Wise Old Man 6

Dick Gregory, 21 sec

Wise Old Man 5

Dick Gregory, 13 sec

Wise Old Man 4

Dick Gregory, 30 sec

Wise Old Man 3

Dick Gregory, 1 min 1 sec

Wise Old Man 2

Dick Gregory, 30 sec

Wise Old Man 1

Dick Gregory, 1 min 1 sec

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1058-1060

Build pockets of stillness into your life. Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going nowhere in particular. There is a creative purpose to daydreaming, even to boredom. The best ideas come to us when we stop actively trying to coax the muse into manifesting and let the fragments of experience float around our unconscious mind in order to click into new combinations. Without this essential stage of unconscious processing, the entire flow of the creative process is broken.

Most importantly, sleep. Besides being the greatest creative aphrodisiac, sleep also affects our every waking moment, dictates our social rhythm, and even mediates our negative moods. Be as religious and disciplined about your sleep as you are about your work. We tend to wear our ability to get by on little sleep as some sort of badge of honor that validates our work ethic. But what it really is is a profound failure of self-respect and of priorities. What could possibly be more important than your health and your sanity, from which all else springs?
Maria Popova

There are 16.4 million American children living in poverty. That's nearly one quarter (22.6%) of all of our children. More alarming is that the percentage of poor children has climbed by 4.5 percent since the start of the Great Recession in 2007. And poor means poor. For a family of three with one child under 18, the poverty line is $18,400.

Meanwhile, the stock market is booming. Banks, hedge funds and private equity firms are making tens of billions of dollars again, while the luxury housing and goods markets are skyrocketing.

...

To add to the misery, Washington has decided that the best way to tackle childhood poverty is to have poor kids eat less. Both parties already have agreed to cut billions from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Food Stamps).

America's Greatest Shame: Child Poverty Rises and Food Stamps Cut While Billionaires Boom

AlterNet / By Les Leopold
[emphasis JS] 

America has 442 billionaires with an average net worth of $4.2 billion each according to Forbes. That means collectively these 442 Americans have nearly $1.9 trillion in wealth.

During the current "recovery," these 442 billions saw their wealth rise on average by over 12 percent per year. What would happened if those billionaires received only 6 percent a year and the other 6 percent were taxed away in order to pull all of our children out of poverty?

That would provide sufficient revenue so that each child now living in poverty would receive an extra $7,000 per year which would pull nearly all of their families above the poverty line. The 442 billionaires would not suffer. No one in their families would go hungry. No luxury goods or services would be out of reach. No cooks, maids, chauffeurs or pilots would have to be let go. The 442 billionaires would feel no pain at all -- not even an itch.
America's Greatest Shame: Child Poverty Rises and Food Stamps Cut While Billionaires Boom
AlterNet / By Les Leopold 
[emphasis JS]