Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1723-1725

Last year, a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that people working in agriculture – including farmers, farm laborers, ranchers, fishers, and lumber harvesters – take their lives at a rate higher than any other occupation. The data suggested that the suicide rate for agricultural workers in 17 states was nearly five times higher compared with that in the general population.
Why are America's farmers killing themselves in record numbers?



Following 30 years of neoliberal deregulation, the nine-to-five feels like a relic of a bygone era. Jobs are endlessly stressed and increasingly precarious. Overwork has become the norm in many companies – something expected and even admired. Everything we do outside the office – no matter how rewarding – is quietly denigrated. Relaxation, hobbies, raising children or reading a book are dismissed as laziness. That’s how powerful the mythology of work is.

Technology was supposed to liberate us from much of the daily slog, but has often made things worse: in 2002, fewer than 10% of employees checked their work email outside of office hours. Today, with the help of tablets and smartphones, it is 50%, often before we get out of bed.

Do you work more than 39 hours a week? Your job could be killing you
Peter Fleming
Mon 15 Jan 2018
The Guardian

 

 More than a third of British workers think their jobs are meaningless, according to a survey by YouGov. And if morale is that low, it doesn’t matter how many gym vouchers, mindfulness programmes and baskets of organic fruit employers throw at them. Even the most committed employee will feel that something is fundamentally missing. A life.

Do you work more than 39 hours a week? Your job could be killing you
Peter Fleming
Mon 15 Jan 2018
The Guardian

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1720-1722

As for where the money will come from, there are a multitude of proposals on how it could be funded, but the money is there. Plus, the idea is that basic income will significantly reduce the cost of tax-funded services. Experiments in basic income have found that it reduces emergency room visits and mental health care costs, plus costs related to crime. It’s a big investment into giving everyone a better world instead of using that money to clean up the results of poverty.

But the best and most feminist part of basic income is how it will help all women and all people of marginalized identities, particularly those who are so often forgotten by privileged feminism. Disabled and chronically ill women won’t have to worry so much about whether they’ll be able to live. Though you can get welfare payments for disability, the hoops that these individuals are forced to jump through in order to get a sum that is no longer enough to live on are a full time job and a constant source of anxiety. Basic income is unconditional.
Basic Income:
A Feminist Issue
By Lindsey Weedston
Equality For Her
[emphasis JS]



A new study by Apartment List, a rental aggregator, shows that over half of high-income households claim the tax benefit, called the mortgage interest deduction (MID) because it reduces a filer’s taxable income by the amount of interest they owe on their mortgage. More than $10bn goes to households with incomes in the top 1%.

More expensive properties mean a larger deduction, so homeowners in pricey coastal regions – including Silicon Valley, San Francisco and surrounding towns such as Berkeley, and southern Connecticut – lead the country in the amount they are rewarded by the government, with subsidies of about $3,500 per household.

By comparison, only one in four Americans in need of rental housing actually receive it. In fact, the rental-assistance system – which is called Section 8 and generally covers costs that exceed 30% of someone’s income – is so overburdened that until recently, the city of Los Angeles had declined to even accept new applications for a voucher for a staggering 13 years, and New York’s waitlist has been closed since 2009. When Los Angeles finally started accepting new applications again, for only two weeks in October, almost 200,000 people applied for only 20,000 spots on the waitlist.

Indeed, in none of the country’s 25 largest cities do low-income residents receive more than half of the money that goes on housing benefits. This despite the fact that stable housing has been linked to improved educational outcomes, health and psychological wellbeing. Mostly, the cash goes to the well off.
US spends twice as much on tax break for rich as on rent for the poorest
Alastair Gee
The Guardian[emphasis JS]

Just who are the poor? Alston says that many of them are children and women. And they are all races. "The face of poverty in America is not only black or Hispanic but also white, Asian and many other colors."
...
I saw sewage-filled yards in states where governments don't consider sanitation facilities to be their responsibility." And "people who had lost all of their teeth" because dental care wasn't covered by their health insurance plans. And homeless people who were told to move by a police officer who had "no answer when asked where they could move to."

"People in the U.S. seem particularly unable to stomach the sight of homeless," he says, "yet are unwilling to enact policies to help them."
..
Still, he concludes that American innovation, money and power aren't being channeled to address poverty — and there is a lot of poverty to address. In 2016, 40 million people — more than 1 in 8 citizens — lived in poverty, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. "The reality is that the United States now has probably the lowest degree of social mobility among all the rich countries," Alston says. "And if you are born poor, guess where you're going to end up — poor."
...
 at the end of the day, particularly in a rich country like the USA, the persistence of extreme poverty is a political choice made by those in power."
Sasha Ingber
U.N. Investigator On Extreme Poverty Issues A Grim Report — On The U.S.
December 21, 2017
 [emphasis JS]








 

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1717-1719

“Anti-careerism” refers to a negative stance, a rejection of a certain way of thinking. In this rejection, however, lies an enormous potential to explore ways of life beyond the 9-to-5 grind, to find paths to happiness, fulfillment, and well-being outside the cycle of working, earning, and spending, and to strive for self-development without regard for employability, marketability, and economic productivity. It can free us to become less competitive and less materialistic, and to lead lives of greater leisure and less stress. It opens us to focus on questions like “What can I do for the world?” or “How can I become the best person I can be?” rather than “What can I do that people will pay me to do?”

Interview: Kate McFarland On Anti-Careerism
December 3, 2017 Jennifer Lawson

 

Almost beyond belief, he draws three trees and perchance the hint of purple clouds outside the windows, existing far off in the distance. Remember these are a kindergartner's "hopes and dreams"; this is what his imagination pictures when it's uncoercively invited to do so. Remember he is but five-years-old.

Kindergartener #borntowork: The Hegemony of Total Work
Andrew Taggart

The US farmer suicide crisis echoes a much larger farmer suicide

crisis happening globally: an Australian farmer dies by suicide every

four days; in the UK, one farmer a week takes his or her own life; in

France, one farmer dies by suicide every two days; in India, more

than 270,000 farmers have died by suicide since 1995.

Since 2013, net farm income for US farmers has declined 50%. Median farm income for 2017 is projected to be negative $1,325. And without

parity in place (essentially a minimum price floor for farm

products), most commodity prices remain below the cost of production.

After the study was released, Newsweek reported that the suicide death rate for farmers was more than double that of military veterans.

Why are America's farmers killing themselves in record numbers?
The Guardian - Dec 6, 2107

[emphasis JS]

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1714-1716

The notion that we must better ourselves—or simply survive—by toiling to increase the wealth and property of already wealthy men was perhaps first comprehensively articulated in the 18th-century doctrine of “improvement.” In order to justify privatizing common land and forcing the peasantry into jobbing for them, English landlords attempted to show in treatise after treatise that 1) the peasants were lazy, immoral, and unproductive, and 2) they were better off working for others.
Bertrand Russell & Buckminster Fuller on 
Why We Should Work Less, and Live & Learn More
By Josh Jones / openculture.com


...historian W.E. Tate quotes from several of the “improvement” treatises, many written by Puritans who argued that “the poor are of two classes, the industrious poor who are content to work for their betters, and the idle poor who prefer to work for themselves.” Tate’s summation perfectly articulates the early modern redefinition of “work” as the creation of profit for owners. Such work is virtuous, “industrious,” and leads to contentment. Other kinds of work, leisurely, domestic, pleasurable, subsistence, or otherwise, qualifies—in an Orwellian turn of phrase—as “idleness.”
Bertrand Russell & Buckminster Fuller on Why We Should Work Less, and Live & Learn More
By Josh Jones / openculture.com
[emphasis JS]




As U.S. children’s rights activist Marian Wright Edelman points out, such actions are particularly alarming and cruel at a time when “millions of America’s children today are suffering from hunger, homelessness and hopelessness.”

She adds: “Nearly 13.2 million children are poor — almost one in five. About 70 per cent of them are children of colour, who will be a majority of our children by 2020. More than 1.2 million are homeless. About 14.8 million children struggle against hunger in food insecure households.”
Fascism’s Return and Trump’s War on Youth
Henry Giroux
The Tyee

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1711-1713