Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1082-1084

Neither China nor India shows much interest for now in new organizing principles for the world.

Perhaps, those principles are now defined by technology, social networks and individual empowerment, forces that lie outside conventional notions of geostrategic power.
A Dangerous Interregnum
By ROGER COHEN
New York Times
Published: November 18, 2013
[emphasis JS]

In 2012, 49 million people in America were food insecure, meaning they don't know where their next meal is coming from.
Arianna Huffington

Say not the struggle naught availeth

Say not the struggle naught availeth,
The labour and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
And as things have been they remain.

If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
It may be, in yon smoke conceal'd,
Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers,
And, but for you, possess the field.

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light;
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly!

But westward, look, the land is bright!
Arthur Hugh Clough
[emphasis JS]

What Is Slavery, Professor Cites Poet

Noam Chomsky. Percy Shelley,26 seconds

You Working Class?

Noam Chomsky, 1 min 18 sec

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1079-1081

It takes some time to realize that your old working li[f]e is over, that your degree, experience, professional demeanor and over eagerness to work means nothing. It comes in increments. First you go through anger and all the nonsense that you've endured on every job you've ever worked. After being mistreated and employment agencies and realizing that not only are people fist fighting for jobs at McDonald's, this company is using guest workers. The day the unemployment is finished is a dark day. Then one goes to apply for food stamps. Then that final humiliating day when you have to apply for cash assistance. It's the day the internet was cut off smack in the middle of a 45-minute online application. So you go to the library for free internet. The day you are made to sit in mandatory job search classes held by some of the most ignorant instructors who resent you because your last salary was 3x theirs and then you have to go to state mandated WEP-Workers Experience Classes is the darkest day ever. Having to clean the park, bathrooms, make photocopies, etc. among people who were already lost in the system, ex-cons, other people who need help is reality Krugman can't speak of.

 Deborah

 Staten Island, NY

comment on

The Jobless Trap

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: April 21, 2013

We can afford a basic income guarantee.  We can give every citizen enough money to survive. It will stimulate an economy starved of demand.  It will make our society more equitable. It will feed the hungry and house the homeless.  It respects the individual. It provides a constant level of demand that firms can depend on and so stimulate the animal spirits of businessmen.  It will strengthen workers bargaining position because they will be able to tell their employers to “take this job and shove it.” It will also reduce labour costs since firms won’t be required to provide a living wage.  It will give us more free time to dance and play and love our children.  I would also suggest, it might just end up making us better human beings.

Tom Streithorst

MORAL ASPECTS OF BASIC INCOME

Pieria  

31 “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. 32 All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, 33 and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. 34 Then the king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; 35 for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, 36 I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’ 37 Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? 38 And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? 39 And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ 40 And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family,[a] you did it to me.’ 41 Then he will say to those at his left hand, ‘You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; 42 for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ 44 Then they also will answer, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?’ 45 Then he will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ 46 And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

Matthew 25:31-46

New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

The Judgment of the Nations

[emphasis JS. Let revisions continue]

Just Write Checks to Everybody

Newt Gingrich, Cornel West, Ross Douthat, 43 sec

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1076-1078

"No politician wants to mention “redistribution” because it conjures up images of worthy “makers” forced to hand over hard-earned income to undeserving “takers.”

It seems to me to be the other way around. The "worthy makers" are the working people who actually make everything, from hamburgers to heavy machinery. The "undeserving takers" are the capitalists who leverage their wealth to take a much bigger share of revenues from business than they reasonably deserve. If income is "hard-earned," it is by the workers much more than by the owners.

Income distribution has been decided by owners for much too long; who thinks they divide it fairly, unless one thinks that "fairly" is to be permitted to take as big a share as humanly possible for themselves, leaving as little as possible for employees? It's high time that some other paradigm besides GREED (e.g. NEED) determined how profits are distributed.

yankee2 

Comment on

The Time for Wealth Redistribution Is Now

Robert Reich's Blog / By Robert Reich

AlterNet

[emphasis JS]

Elsewhere, Weeks remarks that we should not underestimate just how much hesitation about anti-work positions is rooted in fear. Fear of idleness, fear of hedonism—or to borrow a phrase from Erich Fromm, fear of freedom. It is relatively easy to say that in the future I will be what I am now—a worker, just perhaps with more money or more job security or more control over my work. It is something else to imagine ourselves as different kinds of people altogether. That, perhaps, is the unappreciated value of Occupy Wall Street encampments and similar attempts to carve out alternative ways of living within the interstices of capitalist society. It may be, as critics often point out, that they cannot really build an alternative society so long as capitalism’s institutional impediments to such a society remain in place. But perhaps they can help remove the fear of what we might become if those impediments were lifted, and we were able to make our exodus from the world of work to the world of freedom.
Peter Frase
quoted by Uncle Vanya

Federal and state governments spend a trillion dollars a year just on these means-tested welfare programs, which does not include Social and Medicare. That is more than we spend on national defense. It adds up to roughly $17,000 per person in poverty, over $50,000 for a poor family of three. The Census Bureau estimates that our current Welfare spending totals four times what would be necessary just to give all of the poor the cash to bring them up to the poverty line, eliminating all poverty in America.

Peter Ferrara,

Forbes

[emphasis JS]

Saving At Wal-Mart? Nope, Losing.

Richard D. Wolff, 3 min 38 sec

Situation Of Workers, AAAA! Dec 2013

Richard D. Wolff,
3 min 26 sec

Nobody Wants To Be Dumb, So Don't Be.

Richard D. Wolff, 4 min 50 seconds

Leading Economist: Is There Enough To Go Round?

Richard D. Wolff, 30 seconds

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1073-1075

At least for now, Google’s robotics effort is not something aimed at consumers. Instead, the company’s expected targets are in manufacturing — like electronics assembly, which is now largely manual[...]
...
A realistic case, according to several specialists, would be automating portions of an existing supply chain that stretches from a factory floor to the companies that ship and deliver goods to a consumer’s doorstep.

“The opportunity is massive,” said Andrew McAfee, a principal research scientist at the M.I.T. Center for Digital Business. “There are still people who walk around in factories and pick things up in distribution centers and work in the back rooms of grocery stores.”
...
The company is tight-lipped about its specific plans, but the scale of the investment, which has not been previously disclosed, indicates that this is no cute science project.
Google Puts Money on Robots, Using the Man Behind Android
New York Times
Published: December 4, 2013 
[emphasis JS]

On Black Friday, thousands of Walmart employees and union supporters staged protests to demand annual wages of at least $25,000 for the 825,000 workers who make less than that amount and supplement their incomes with an average of $1,000 annually in Medicaid and food stamps. “The protest is sad,” said a Southern California shopper, “because Walmart has good prices.” Police arrested a man dressed as Santa Claus outside an Ontario, California, Walmart; a shopper stabbed and pulled a gun on another shopper during a dispute over a parking space outside a Claypool Hill, Virginia, Walmart; police pepper-sprayed one shopper and ticketed another for spitting on a stranger’s child at a Garfield, New Jersey, Walmart; a police officer was hospitalized for injuries sustained while breaking up a fight outside a Rialto, California, Walmart; and a bomb threat led police to evacuate a White Plains, New York, Walmart. “Black Friday is the Super Bowl of retail,” said Walmart U.S. CEO Bill Simon. “We ran a play that only Walmart could deliver.”

Harper's Review

December 3, 2013

{emphasis JS]

The Protestant ethic allowed workers to imagine that when they worked for the profit of the boss, they were really working for their salvation, and for the glory of God.

By the twentieth century, however, the calling had become a material one: hard work would ensure broad-based prosperity. Each of the century’s twin projects of industrial modernity developed this calling in its own way. Soviet authorities promoted the Stakhanovite movement, which glorified exceptional contributions to the productivity of the socialist economy. In Detroit, meanwhile, the social democratic union leader Walter Reuther denounced advocates of shorter hours for undermining the U.S. economy in the struggle against Communism. In neither case was the quality of industrial work called into question; it was simply a matter of who was in control and who reaped the spoils.

Peter Frase

quoted by Uncle Vanya

[emphasis JS]

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1070-1072

Since 2000, the number of fast-food jobs in New York City has increased by more than 50 percent — 10 times as fast as in any other type of private job. But the conspicuous increase has not received the attention given, say, to the city’s high-tech industry, nor has it lessened the financial insecurities of this growing work force.

According to a study released in October, only 13 percent of fast-food workers get health-insurance benefits at work. In New York State, three in five have received some form of government assistance in the last five years. Meanwhile, executive pay and profits in the industry are on the rise. Last winter, Bloomberg News determined that it would take a Chicago McDonald’s worker who earns $8.25 an hour more than a century on the clock to match the $8.75 million that the company’s chief executive made in 2011.
Life on $7.25 an Hour
By ALAN FEUER
New York Times
Published: November 28, 2013
[emphasis JS]

 Fifty-two percent of families of fast food workers have to rely on government assistance. McDonald's' "McResource" help line goes so far as to advise workers who cannot make ends meet from their poverty-level wages to sign up for government food stamps and home heating assistance. Is it fair that taxpayers have to shell out $1.2 billion a year to subsidize McDonald's paying its workers while the fast food giant rakes in $5.5 billion in profit?

Ralph NaderConsumer advocate, lawyer and author

Can Right and Left Rally Against Walmart?

Posted: 11/25/2013

HuffPost

[emphasis JS]

To think deeply in our culture is to grow angry and to anger others; and if you cannot tolerate this anger, you are wasting the time you spend thinking deeply. One of the rewards to deep thought is the hot glow of anger at discovering a wrong, but if anger is taboo, thought will starve to death.

Jules Henry, Culture against Man