Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1088-1090

In recent decades, American workers have suffered one body blow after another: the decline in manufacturing, foreign competition, outsourcing, the Great Recession and smart machines that replace people everywhere you look. Amazon and Google are in a horse race to see how many humans they can put out of work with self-guided delivery drones and driverless cars. You wonder who will be left with incomes to buy what these robots deliver.
Abolish the Corporate Income Tax
By LAURENCE J. KOTLIKOFF
New York Times
Published: January 5, 2014



Often as an activist I am meeting people who are the "new poor" and more often than not they are the whites who have fallen into poverty. They tell me, "I worked hard, I did all the right things, I am not a drug addict," etc. This is because they are appalled at the benign and silently conveyed hatred and blame for their condition directed toward them, the lack of assistance for them. I just want to scream at them, "Soooo, you mean that the woman who used to clean your house, the man who labored in the hot sun in your manicured yard, the person who cooked your food in that exclusive restaurant, they all did *not* "work hard enough" so they deserve their poverty and you do not?"

These newly poor are the ones who had good jobs and were laid off, fired, or whatever who now have to face the "McJob" economy that slipped in and took over while they remained silent because their bellies were full. These are the ones who laughed at activists like me when we tried to tell them these attitudes that later molded Welfare Reform would destroy the middle class and all that my grandfather and others who followed that had fought to attain to make working and economic conditions better for all. They think they "deserve" these services more than others who have always struggled in poverty all their lives because see, "those people" CHOSE to be poor, they did not.

What the hell? Who in the world wants to be poor????

Most people, even the poor, do not understand that poverty is an institution it is not a "choice". This institution remains firmly ensconced in our society because it is based on exploiting racism, sexism (including LGBTQ), ageism, classism, and the disabled in order to keep the upper classes in place.
Cat Sullivan

the Living Wage Foundation states in big letters on its homepage that: “We believe that work should be the surest way out of poverty.”

The “surest way”? What are they thinking? Are we living inside a Dickens novel or something? (No wonder we’re seeing a rise in regressive measures such as workfare). In the technological 21st century, only a small fraction of total wealth is generated by human labour (and the fraction seems to be dwindling all the time, according to Jeremy Rifkin’s book, The End of Work) – I see no logical or economic sense in making “work” a condition for having a living income.

News Frames

Anxiety Culture

[emphasis JS]