Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1250-1252

The United States offers three kinds of subsidies to tycoons with private jets: accelerated tax write-offs, avoidance of personal taxes on the benefit by claiming that private aircraft are for security, and use of air traffic control paid for by chumps flying commercial.
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I worry about those tycoons sponging off government. Won’t our pampering damage their character? Won’t they become addicted to the entitlement culture, demanding subsidies even for their yachts? Oh, wait ...
Nicholas Kristof
A Nation of Takers?
MARCH 26, 2014
New York Times
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The disenfranchised, ostracised youth are an easy target for indoctrinators of all sorts. The current economic crisis, which hits the youth particularly hard, has even handed more ammunition to fanatics: among the young men who enlist to fight for Daesh, many are actually disenfranchised white youth with no familial links to Islam.
Charlie Hebdo: a letter to my British friends
Olivier Tonneau
theguardian
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Target Canada currently has 133 stores across the country and employs approximately 17,600 people.

"I can't think of another time in Canadian history when 18,000 people were laid off at once; It's a tragedy on several levels," said Unifor economist Jim Stanford. "It's an incredible legacy of scorched earth that Target has left from its misguided venture up here in Canada."

The Minneapolis-based department store entered the Canadian market in 2012, after purchasing 200 former Zellers store locations from the Hudson's Bay Company.

In that $1.8 billion deal, almost 27,000 workers lost their jobs. Shortly afterward, Target announced that all Zellers employees -- regardless of experience or years of service -- would be fired and needed to reapply if they wanted a job in their rebranded workplaces. The new jobs were not unionized, and "new" hires lost their years of seniority, and started their jobs with wages set at the bottom of Target's pay scale.
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...most Target workers won't qualify for Employment Insurance benefits, "because of the bias rules that makes it very hard for part-time or irregular workers to collect enough hours to qualify."
17,600 workers lose as Target Canada closes its operations
BY ELLA BEDARD
JANUARY 15, 2015
rabble.ca
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Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1247-1249

Grace also seemed disappointed that Epps would rap about smoking marijuana, among other topics, in his music, given that he graduated at the top of his high school class and attended Alabama State University on a basketball scholarship.

“Were you using pot then?” Grace asked about his high school playing days. When Epps told her he was selling marijuana then, she asked, “And would you want your children to do that?”

“No, but it was a means to an end,” he replied. “It was a way to make a living.”
Nancy Grace gets smoked trying to force her reefer madness on rapper ’2 Chainz’
RAWSTORY
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Nothing is more fundamental than food. There’s only one way you can force people to accept an intolerable lifestyle. You have to lock up the food. Though it surely isn’t recognized at the time, locking up the food is the beginning of the hierarchical life we call civilization.

As soon as the storehouse appears, someone must step forward to guard it, and this custodian needs assistants, who depend on him entirely, since they no longer earn their living as farmers. A manager class soon emerged to look after the accumulation and storage of surpluses — something that had never been necessary when everyone was just working a few hours a day. They soon came to be regarded as social and political leaders. In a single stroke, a figure of power appears on the scene to control the community’s wealth, surrounded by a cadre of loyal vassals, ready to evolve into a ruling class of royals and nobles.

What these founders of our culture fundamentally invented for us was the notion of work. They developed a hard way to live — the hardest way to live ever found on this planet. Their revolution wasn’t about food, it was about power. That’s still what it’s all about.
Daniel Quinn
Beyond Civilization: Humanity's Next Great Adventure
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The money for a basic income guarantee would be already existing money circulated through the economic system. It would not be new money, just money shifted from one location to another. This means that the value of each dollar has not changed. The dollar itself has only changed hands.

It is also important to note the observation that even when money supply is vastly expanded, the effects on prices need not be extreme. For example, the Fed’s quantitative easing added over four trillion new dollars to the U.S. money supply, and the results were not enough inflation, as defined by the Fed.

In 1982, Alaska began providing a partial basic income annually to all its residents. Until the first dividend, Alaska had a higher rate of inflation than the rest of the United States. But ever since the dividend was introduced, Alaska has had a lower rate of inflation than the rest of the United States.

A partial basic income was also provided in Kuwait in 2011, when every citizen was given $4,000. Fears of increasing inflation were rampant, as Kuwait already had high inflation. Instead of bad inflation getting worse, it actually got better, decreasing from record highs to under 4 percent.

Scott Santens

Medium

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Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1244-1246

3200. That’s how many copies of Moby-Dick were sold during Herman Melville’s lifetime. A critical and commercial flop at the time of his death — by which point he was working as an anonymous customs inspector for the City of New York — it took nearly 50 years for Melville’s book to become the Great American Novel.
How to Get Read on Medium
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Espied from some timid man-of-war, or blundering discovery vessel from afar, when the distance obscuring the swarming fouls, nevertheless shows the white mass floating in the sun, and the white spray heaving high against it; straightway the whale's
unharming corpse, with trembling fingers is set down in the log: shoals, rocks, and breakers hereabouts: beware!  And for years afterwards, perhaps, ships shun the place; leaping over it as silly sheep leap over a  vacuum, because their leader originally leapt there when a stick was held. There's your law of precedents; there's your utility of traditions; there's the story of your obstinate survival of old beliefs never bottomed on the earth, and now not even hovering in the air!  There's orthodoxy!
Melville, from Moby-Dick

Reason has no chance if men [sic] are starving, or even if they have undue cause for envy. But granted an economy that is no longer competitive, in which the highest yield of production is wisely and evenly distributed among all mankind, then reason will have a chance.

Herbert Read

The Politics Of The Unpolitical (1963)
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Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1241-1243

Bumping into a student at the gym can be awkward, but exposing the reality that I, with my master’s degree, not only have another job, but must have one, risks destroying the facade of success I present to my students as one of their university mentors.

In class I emphasize the value of a degree as a means to avoid the sort of jobs that I myself go to when those hours in the classroom are over. A colleague in my department labeled these jobs (food and beverage, retail and customer service — the only legal work in abundance in Las Vegas) as “survival jobs.” He tells our students they need to learn that survival work will not grant them the economic security of white-collar careers. I never told him that I myself had such a job, that I needed our meeting to end within the next 10 minutes or I’d be late to a seven-hour shift serving drunk, needy tourists, worsening my premature back problem while getting hit on repeatedly.
Your Waitress, Your Professor
By BRITTANY BRONSON
NYT
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Ft. Lauderdale has earned a national reputation for its treatment of homeless people this year. In the span of eight months, the city has passed new ordinances making it illegal for homeless people to sleep in public and prohibiting homeless people from having possessions in public on top of the recent crackdown on volunteers handing out food. The city also arrested a homeless man for speaking out during a meeting where the City Commission honored National Homeless Week.
90-Year-Old Vet Arrested For Feeding Homeless Will Hand Out Christmas Eve Dinner
BY SCOTT KEYES POSTED ON DECEMBER 24, THINKPROGRESS
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Marx never asked what might happen if intense global competition some time in the future forced entrepreneurs to introduce ever more efficient technologies, accelerating productivity to the point where the marginal cost of production approached zero, making goods and services "priceless" and potentially free, putting an end to profit and rendering the market exchange economy obsolete. But that's now beginning to happen.

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Hundreds of millions of people are already transferring bits and pieces of their lives from capitalist markets to the emerging global collaborative commons, operating on a ubiquitous internet-of-things platform. The great economic paradigm shift has begun.

Capitalism is making way for the age of free

Jeremy Rifkin

The Guardian

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