Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1165-1167

…it's interesting that the recent news of job market "improvement" doesn't mention that of the 10 occupation categories projecting the greatest growth in the next eight years, only one pays a middle-class wage. Four pay barely above poverty level and five pay beneath it, including fast-food workers, retail sales staff, health aids and janitors. The job expected to have the highest number of openings is "personal care aide" -- taking care of aging baby boomers in their houses or in nursing homes. The median salary of an aid is under $20,000. They enjoy no benefits, and about 40 percent of them must rely on food stamps and Medicaid to make ends meet, plus many are in the "shadow economy," vulnerable to being cheated on the already miserly wages.

To measure the job market by quantity -- with no regard for quality -- is to devalue workers themselves. Creating 217,000 new jobs is not a sign of economic health if each worker needs two or three of those jobs to patch together a barebones living -- and millions more are left with no work at all.
Creators Syndicate / By Jim Hightower 
The Terrible News Economists Are Trying to Hide About American Jobs
AlterNet

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The Way of Heaven

Is like stretching a bow.

The top is pulled down,

The bottom is pulled up.

Excess is removed

Where more is needed, it is added.

It is the Way of Heaven

To remove where there is excess

And add where there is lack.

The way of people is different:

They take away where there is need

And add where there is surplus.

Who can take his surplus and give it to the people?

Only one who possesses the Tao. 

Lao Tzu,

Tao Te Ching

But many Americans are well-educated and work hard. For example, schoolteachers. Yet they don’t get the big bucks. Last year, those 25 hedge fund managers made more than twice as much as all the kindergarten teachers in America combined. 

...

Second, ignore the rhetoric about “job creators” and all that. Conservatives want you to believe that the big rewards in modern America go to innovators and entrepreneurs, people who build businesses and push technology forward. But that’s not what those hedge fund managers do for a living; they’re in the business of financial speculation, which John Maynard Keynes characterized as “anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be.” Or since they make much of their income from fees, they’re actually in the business of convincing other people that they can anticipate average opinion about average opinion.

Now That’s Rich

Paul Krugman

New York Times

MAY 8, 2014
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