Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1171-1173

Just one weapons system, the F-35, a fighter jet that has been grounded because it does not work, has cost $49 billion per year since the program begin in 2006. Hayes Brown of Think Progress made a list of what that money could have been spent on instead. It could have bought a mansion for every homeless person or fed every school child in the US, funded every humanitarian crisis or provided global security through the UN or provided funding to rebuild America.

Why People Are Organizing to End U.S. Empire

AlterNet / By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers
[emphasis JS]

Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. In the Middle Ages when the feudal lords who inhabited the castles whose towers may still be seen along the Rhine concluded to enlarge their domains, to increase their power, their prestige and their wealth they declared war upon one another. But they themselves did not go to war any more than the modern feudal lords, the barons of Wall Street go to war. The feudal barons of the Middle Ages, the economic predecessors of the capitalists of our day, declared all wars. And their miserable serfs fought all the battles. The poor, ignorant serfs had been taught to revere their masters; to believe that when their masters declared war upon one another, it was their patriotic duty to fall upon one another and to cut one another's throats for the profit and glory of the lords and barons who held them in contempt. And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose, especially their lives.
Eugene V. Debs, Canton (Ohio) Anti-War Speech (June 16, 1918)

The French philosopher Simone Weil, an academic and revolutionary activist, decided to take a factory job in 1934 - she worked in 3 factories.

"In the factory the very basis of my self respect was radically destroyed within two or three weeks by the daily experience of brutal constraint- I was forced to recognize that the sense of personal dignity that I had thought internal to me actually depended entirely on external circumstances [sic]-and don't imagine this provoked in me any rebellious reaction- no- on the contrary it produced the last thing I expected from myself- docility: the resigned docility of the beast of burden."

Simone Weil