Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1540-1542

Despite the all-party resolution, child poverty has jumped from 15.8 per cent a generation ago to 18.3 per cent today. It soars to 60 per cent for First Nations children living on reserves.

For those under age 6, the rate is almost 20 per cent nationally and closer to 45 per cent for young children in Nunavut, according to the report based on Statistics Canada tax filer data for 2014, the most recent available.

“Nearly one in five children in Canada live in poverty today because their families are forced to navigate the uncertainty of precarious work, skyrocketing housing costs, and uneven and unaffordable child care services while they try not to slip through the holes in Canada’s social safety net,” said the group’s spokeswoman Anita Khanna.
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Toronto is the child poverty capital of Canada with 133,000 children living in low-income families, a rate of 27 per cent, according to a report released earlier this month. 
Sober child poverty stats should prompt action, advocates say 
thestar 
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Statistics Canada reported today that there were only 199,700 vacant jobs in December 2013, the fewest recorded since it first reported these figures for March 2011
 StatCan Reports Fewest Vacant Jobs on Record 
THE PROGRESSIVE ECONOMICS FORUM
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 But it was impossible to save the Great Republic. She was rotten to the heart. Lust of conquest had long ago done its work; trampling upon the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home; multitudes who had applauded the crushing of other people's liberties, lived to suffer for their mistake in their own persons. The government was irrevocably in the hands of the prodigiously rich and their hangers-on; the suffrage was become a mere machine, which they used as they chose. There was no principle but commercialism, no patriotism but of the pocket. 
Mark Twain 
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Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1537-1539

In real, energy-time, know-how accounting of wealth, the planet earth’s four billion billionaires [1981] have not yet been notified of their good fortune. Their heritage probating is being postponed by the lawyers for the now inherently obsolete power-structures of all kinds - religious, political, financial, professional, and academic - all of which exploitative systems are organized only to take biased advantage of all scarcities, physical and metaphysical.
R. B. Fuller,
Critical Path

The mass of humanity is subjected to the labor processes for the purposes of those who control it rather than for any general purposes of “humanity” as such. In thus acquiring concrete form, the control of humans over the labor process turns into its opposite and becomes the control of the labor process over the mass of humans.
Harry Braverman,
Labor And Monopoly Capital, 1974

 A fourth lie of rentier capitalism is the claim that profits reflect managerial efficiency and returns from risk-taking. In reality, the increased profit has gone to those receiving rental income, much of it linked to financial assets, IP rights and the edifice of subsidies given to capital.

To top it off, the undemocratic ISDS (Investor-State Dispute Settlement) process gives multinationals insurance against changes in government policies deemed to affect their profits. Imagine us having the right to sue governments if we thought changes in policies affected our incomes.
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And so we come to the fifth lie of rentier capitalism: the claim that work is the best route out of poverty. The army of taskers and the precariat in general stand testament to that lie.

In sum, the challenge is to achieve Keynes’ euthanasia of the rentier. It will be a struggle, but it is feasible. It requires a new income distribution system, one element of which would be a basic income paid from a levy on all forms of rental income. Without that, a dark age threatens. Politics will grow uglier, unless rent-seeking can be curbed and unless the need for basic economic security for all is recognised and met.
The Five Lies Of Rentier Capitalism
by Guy Standing on 27 October 2016
Social Europe
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Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1533-1536

Her explanation for this was halting but vehement, spoken with pauses and in bursts. She was disappointed in Obama after having voted for him. “I don’t like the Obama persona, his public appearance and demeanor,” she said. “I wanted people like me to be cared about. People don’t realize there’s nothing without a blue-collar worker.” She regretted that she did not have a deeper grasp of public affairs. “No one that’s voting knows all the facts,” she said. “It’s a shame. They keep us so fucking busy and poor that we don’t have the time.”

Revenge Of The Forgotten Class

   By Alec MacGillis | ProPublica | November 11, 2016    
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 …what America’s top military recruiter acknowledged years ago: “America’s economic downturn means that increasingly it is not the governing class, but the working class that disproportionately sends soldiers to fight and bears the burden of physical and mental war wounds.” This trend has grown more pronounced throughout history, the researchers argue, meaning that “even more than previous wars, Iraq and Afghanistan have been working class wars.”

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 “In raw, inflation-adjusted dollar terms, this income casualty gap increased over time from a $5,500 gap in Korea, to an $8,200 gap in Vietnam and now to more than an $11,000 gap in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

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 …poor people are likely to face worse health outcomes after their service, due largely to lack of social support and resources once they are discharged.

US Troops Killed in Iraq and Afghanistan More Likely to Be Poor Than in Previous Wars
By Sarah Lazare / AlterNet
November 3, 2016
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 Nearly half (43.9 percent) of U.S. households live on the edge of financial collapse with almost no savings to fall back on in the event of a job loss, health crisis or other income-eliminating emergency, according to a report by the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED).

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 The Buckwalter research has found that financial stress affects cognitive processes. As Buckwalter told AlterNet, "It’s also damaging our bodies and minds, leading to deeply destructive health outcomes, leaving millions of Americans sick in ways we’re just beginning to understand.
Now That Trump Won: 10 Plagues Unearthed by This Election We Need to Face
By Don Hazen, Kali Holloway, Steven Rosenfeld, Adele M. Stan, Janet Allon, Jan Frel / AlterNet
November 8, 2016
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Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1530-1532

I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.

…The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.

Bertrand Russell

In Praise Of Idleness



 ...once you develop one copy of software, the next billion copies don’t cost you anything.

"There’s zero marginal cost of replication. That is just completely different from the world of electromechanical machinery. Once Henry Ford had built one factory, if he wanted another he’d have to build it all over again. He had to put in lots of millions of stock."

Technological innovations, such as industrialisation, have traditionally generated more jobs than they destroyed. But research by Citi and Oxford University earlier this year found a "downward trend in new job creation" from the 1980s onwards, with technology generated fewer, lower-skilled jobs than past revolutions.

The World Economic Forum has already forecast that 5 million jobs could be eradicated by technology by 2020 and 57% of all jobs across the OECD are at risk of automation, according to research by Citi and Oxford University.
LORD TURNER: 'We may be at a turning point in the nature of capitalism'
Oscar Williams-Grut
Business Insider UK
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 What if you could receive a guaranteed basic yearly income with no strings attached? Didn’t matter how much money you made now, or in the future. Nobody would ask about your job status or how many kids you have. The check would arrive in the mailbox, no matter what.

Sounds like a far-fetched idea, right? Wrong. All over the world, people are talking guaranteeing basic incomes for citizens as a viable policy.

Half of all Canadians want it. The Swiss have had a referendum on it. The American media is all over it: The New York Times’ Annie Lowrey considered basic income as an answer to an economy that leaves too many people behind, while Matt Bruenig and Elizabeth Stoker of the Atlantic wrote about it as a way to reduce poverty.

5 Reasons to Consider a No-Strings-Attached, BasicIncome for All Americans

 By Lynn Stuart Parramore / AlterNet