Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1567-1569

At the research and policy nonprofit Innovations for Poverty Action, we work with academics and field researchers to test which programs help the poor. Here are four things we’ve learned in 2016.

First, give the poor cash. Studies in Kenya and elsewhere show that the simplest way to help is also quite effective. We also know that if we give cash, the poor won’t smoke or drink it away. In fact, a recent look at 19 studies across three continents shows that when the poor are given money, they are less likely to spend it on “temptation goods” such as alcohol and tobacco. More and more research shows that when the poor come into a windfall, they spend it on productive things—sending their children to school, fixing the roof that’s letting in the harsh weather, or investing in a business. Based on this evidence, a “cash revolution” is taking hold in the humanitarian world. Even refugees in places such as Lebanon and Turkey increasingly carry ATM cards provided by aid organizations, which are periodically loaded with cash to spend on whatever they need—including shoes, food, and rent.
Why 2016 Was Actually One of the Best Years on Record
By Annie Duflo, Jeffrey Mosenkis | January 10, 2017 |
Greater Good
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 The Center for Disease Control found that 66 percent of American workers say they lie awake at night troubled by the physical or emotional effects of stress, and stress has been linked to many health problems, including obesity and heart disease—especially among low-income Americans. Stress not only affects us, but it can impact those around us, too, especially our children.
How to Fight Stress with Empathy
By Arthur P. Ciaramicoli | January 11, 2017

 I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,- who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going à la Sainte Terre," to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a Sainte-Terrer," a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander.
Thoreau,
Walking

 

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1564-1566

The long-term unemployed “are an unlucky subset of the unemployed.” They tend to be a little older, a little more educated, a little less white – but really they’re not that different from the broader pool of people who have lost jobs in recent years. Except for one thing: There is a good chance they’ll never work again.

These are the sobering conclusions of a new paper by three Princeton University economists including Alan B. Krueger, the former chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors. 
Unemployed? You Might Never Work Again 
By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM  MARCH 20, 2014 
New York Times

 Here are five public welfare programs that are wasteful and turning us into a nation of “takers.”

First, welfare subsidies for private planes. 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.

As the leftists in the George W. Bush administration put it when they tried unsuccessfully to end this last boondoggle: “The family of four taking a budget vacation is subsidizing the C.E.O.’s flying on a corporate jet.”

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 ...

Second, welfare subsidies for yachts. The mortgage-interest deduction was meant to encourage a home-owning middle class. But it has been extended to provide subsidies for beach homes and even yachts.

In the meantime, money was slashed last year from the public housing program for America’s neediest. Hmm. How about if we house the homeless in these publicly supported yachts? [etc]
 ...
After all, quite apart from the waste, we don’t want to coddle zillionaires and thereby sap their initiative!  
A Nation of Takers? 
Nicholas Kristof,
New York Times
MARCH 26, 2014 
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For the first time, the next technological wave may not be a net creator of jobs, but a net destroyer. The forthcoming transition to autonomous cars is just the first wave of robots and machines taking over human jobs. The World Economic Forum predicts a net loss of 5 million jobs globally just by 2020, across many industries due to automation. 
How do we fix job-stealing robots? We don’t. 
Bjorn Broby Glavind 
Hackernoon 
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Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1561-1563

But could Australia be more ambitious? How about we pay every working age Tasmanian (330,000 people) a $15,000 UBI for the next five years? That’s about the same as the maximum Newstart payment and would cost around $5bn a year. That’s easily affordable when you consider that the super tax concessions that disproportionately benefit the well-off cost the federal budget over $30bn in 2016-2017.

Debate: should we be fighting for a universal basic income in Australia?

Troy Henderson and Gigi Foster

Thursday 12 January 2017

theguardian

When I see, for example, that you’re making millions by laundering drug-cartel money (HSBC), or pushing bad paper on mutual fund managers (AIG, Bear Stearns, Morgan Stanley, Citibank), or preying on low-income borrowers (Bank of America), or buying votes in Congress (all of the above) – just business as usual on Wall Street – while I’m barely making ends meet from the earnings of my full-time job, I realise that my participation in the labour market is irrational. I know that building my character through work is stupid because crime pays. I might as well become a gangster like you.
Fuck Work
James Livingston
Aeon

 What’s secretly in the water
of modern culture is that people
enter the world empty.
That’s a very dangerous idea,
because if everybody’s empty
then other people can get us
to do whatever they want
because there’s nothing
in us to stand against it.

But if we came to do
something that’s meaningful,
that involves giving and
making the world a more
beautiful, healthy, lively place,
then you become a difficult person
to move around and manipulate.
Michael Meade

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1558-1560

Work means everything to us Americans. For centuries – since, say, 1650 – we’ve believed that it builds character (punctuality, initiative, honesty, self-discipline, and so forth). We’ve also believed that the market in labour, where we go to find work, has been relatively efficient in allocating opportunities and incomes. And we’ve believed that, even if it sucks, a job gives meaning, purpose and structure to our everyday lives – at any rate, we’re pretty sure that it gets us out of bed, pays the bills, makes us feel responsible, and keeps us away from daytime TV.

These beliefs are no longer plausible. In fact, they’ve become ridiculous, because there’s not enough work to go around, and what there is of it won’t pay the bills – unless of course you’ve landed a job as a drug dealer or a Wall Street banker, becoming a gangster either way.
Fuck Work
James Livingston
Aeon
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Capitalism requires an impoverishment mechanism that must absorb increases in productivity to keep the working classes with as little surplus capital as possible. Taxes (followed by wasteful spending) are the major impoverishment mechanism and this is why taxes increase to absorb the extra revenues flowing from increased productivity. Government does not want to pay off the national debt because that interest makes a great cash sink.

There are two reasons for the decline in living standards, both tied to the push for a one world government. Before national barriers may be brought down between two economies the economies have to be made equal, and since it is easier to pull the top down than the bottom up, the prosperity and standard of living our parents and grandparents worked hard to create must be destroyed.

Finally, history has shown that all opposition to entrenched oligarchy arises from the middle classes, who have the surplus of funds needed to challenge the ruling classes. Communism survived for as long as it did because their system designed the middle class out of existence at the very start. The New World Order will have to, indeed already is, following the same model. If the general population only has enough to pay for the next day's rent and food, they will do as they are told.
Michael Rivero
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 This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown . . . reexamine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency.
Walt Whitman

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1555-1557

The Mustard Seed currently distributes about 2,200 food hampers every month from their current Queens Avenue office and small warehouse, which helps to feed about 5,000 people.

Lingwood said an estimated 50,000 people in the Capital Region experience food insecurity, which means they can not afford to adequately feed themselves and their families.
Victoria food bank to double aid with new warehouse
CBC News
Dec 29, 2016
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 Food bank use in B.C. is at a record high, with 103,400 people receiving assistance as of March 2016, according to Food Banks Canada's annual hunger count.

That's an increase of 3.4% since 2015, making 2016 the third year in a row that food bank use in B.C. has increased.

Children accessed food banks at disproportionately high levels, according to the count, which reported that 32 percent of  B.C. food bank users in 2016 were minors.
Food bank use in B.C. at an all-time high
CBC News
Nov 14, 2016
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 Food bank use in Canada is on the rise, and some provinces and territories have seen "drastic" surges in use since last year, a new report says.

In March 2016, 863,492 people received food from a food bank in Canada, up 1.3 per cent from the same time last year, and 28 per cent from March 2008, according to the Hunger Count 2016 report from Food Banks Canada.

Every province had an increase except Ontario and Manitoba, and some saw double-digit spikes.

Food bank use on the rise in Canada, with 'drastic' surges in Nova Scotia, territories
CBC News
Nov 15, 2016

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