Jack Saturday

Monday, March 26, 2018

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1747-1749

Forty percent of the 678,000 British Columbians living below the poverty line are working adults.
Friday, March 23, 2018
The Unsolved Riddle of Poverty Reduction
ECONOSPEAK





 If Nato was dissolved tomorrow, you’d be amazed how peaceful Europe would become. The reason for its existence – the USSR – vanished decades ago. We don’t keep up a huge alliance to protect us from the Austro-Hungarian empire, the Ottomans, or any other powers that have disappeared. So why this one? It was preserved to save the jobs and pensions of its staff. It was only expanded because American arms manufacturers were afraid they would lose business when the Cold War ended.
PETER HITCHENS: 

The 'patriotic' thought police came for Corbyn. You are next.
Daily Mail
17 March 2018 

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 Nearly half of all Disneyland Resort employees have gone hungry because they couldn’t afford to buy food, a survey found. More than one in 10 reported being homeless while working at the Magic Kingdom because of the low pay.
...
43 percent of employees needed, but couldn't afford, dental care. More than two-thirds enrolled in the company’s health insurance plan said they were forced to give up other necessities in order to make payments.

Eleven percent of those surveyed—including 13 percent of employees with young children—reported having been homeless in the past two years.

A further 46 percent said they had been forced to lower their food intake or have disrupted eating patterns. Fifteen percent of Disneyland employees receive food stamps.
...
“We are proud of our record as a quality employer,” Brown added. “We have created more than 4,000 jobs over the last five years—more than any other business in Orange County.”

Disneyland Workers Are Paid So Little, Many Are Hungry or Homeless
By Ewan Palmer / Newsweek via Alternet
March 1, 2018





Monday, March 19, 2018

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1744-1746


Why Companies and Countries Are Battling for Ascendancy in 5G
By DON CLARK and CECILIA KANG
Taking an early lead in ultrafast next-generation wireless technology can give players a strategic advantage.
NYT Headline
   March 07, 2018





  If those cuts had gone through, they would have exposed one of the biggest lies told about Big Pharma: that the current system of patents and price-gouging is just an unfortunate necessity to cover the cost of all their brave and noble R&D work.
...
Just how important is our publicly funded research to Big Pharma and Biotech? According to a new study by a small, partly industry-funded think tank called the Center for Integration of Science and Industry (CISI), it is existentially important. No NIH funds, no new drugs, no patents, no profits, no industry.
...
The authors found that each of the 210 medicines approved for market came out of research supported by the NIH. Of the $100 billion it spent nationally during this period, more than half of it—$64 billion—ended up helping the development of 84 first-in-class drugs.
...
...publicly funded labs conduct years of basic research to get to a breakthrough, which is then snatched up, tweaked, and patented (privatized) by companies who turn around and reap billions with 1,000-times-cost mark-ups on drugs developed with taxpayer money.
...
Those companies then spend the profits on executive bonuses and share buybacks, and lavish mass marketing campaigns to increase sales of amphetamines, benzos, opioids, and dick pills.
...
Why are we allowing drug companies to gain proprietary control over taxpayer-funded research, then turn around and price-gouge those same taxpayers to literal death?...

"... taxpayers fund the riskier part of drug development, then once the medicines show promise, they are often privatized under patent monopolies that lock in exorbitant prices for 20 years or longer,”...
By Alexander Zaitchik / Social Security Works
March 2, 2018, 10:46 AM GMT

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One of the many studies I would have funded had I hit one of the really big lotteries is on how much ostensibly private profit is gained from publicly funded research. Most of the iphone is derived from public research. The Weather Bureau costs about a billion a year to run, for a long time far beyond the ability of a single person to underwrite, and they gave away their output for free. Private profit, annually, from the Weather Bureau's research and forecasting? 100 billion dollars.

Where's my equity share of that? Where's yours?
Jack Strawb
 
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Monday, March 12, 2018

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1741-1743

Education is not vocational training, because training is not education. Animals and slaves are trained. Men and women are educated. The purpose of education is not a job--that’s the purpose of apprenticeship--or the housing of its students or the entertainment of its alumni or the national defense or the advancement of industry. The purpose of education is human freedom in so far as human freedom may be achievable through the cultivation of the intellect directed to the intelligent judgement of public and private affairs. ...the problem is to keep everything off the campus that has nothing to do with education for human freedom.
Milton Mayer
The Sellout






The U.S.-China Rivalry Is, More Than Ever, a Fight Over Tech
NYT Headline
March 07, 2018







 In the first days of the Trump administration, Carrier announced the company’s intent to close some Indiana operations and move production to Mexico. But politicians swooped in to save the day, and a deal was struck in which the state offered $7 million (over a decade) in economic development incentives. After a few photo ops with President Trump and other state politicians, interest in the story died down.

Today Carrier has already cut many of its Indiana jobs because the $7 million incentive wasn’t enough to offset the much lower production costs in Mexico. The incentive may have delayed Carrier’s decision long enough to confer some political credit, but many of the “saved” Carrier jobs are now lost.

Spending $7 million for no real impact may sound expensive, but other recent economic development offers are staggering, even for those of us who think we have seen everything. The State of Wisconsin is offering Foxconn $3 billion for electrical-component manufacturing opera
tions. The price tag for Amazon HQ2 is unknown, but the offers will most likely be in the billions for many locations.
Why Are Your State Tax Dollars Subsidizing Corporations?
By NATHAN M. JENSENMARCH 6, 2018
NYT Op-Ed




Monday, March 05, 2018

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1738-1740

As Kaveh Waddell explored in The Atlantic in 2016, companies including Accenture, Intel, IBM, and Twitter now use sentiment analysis to track their employees’ emotions. Last year the London newspaper The Daily Telegraph installed black boxes under every desk to track when their occupant was present (a move the paper said was to improve energy efficiency, but which staff feared was for more dubious purposes). Slack, now the global standard for team communication, allows employers to monitor private chats by default. And, last month, Amazon filed a patent for a piece of wearable tech that would enable them to track warehouse packers’ hand movements on the job—an obscene intrusion into employees’ autonomy, but one that is in keeping with the tendencies of a company for whom human employment seems to be simply an annoying step on the way to full automation.   
Downward-Facing Capitalist Dogma
Josh Hall
The Baffler

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 In Greek "necessity"- anangke, serves also as the word for "force," "constraint," "compulsion," violence, and "duress." Aristotle felt the need to eliminate the sense of "violence" from the word, when he used it in the context of the "necessity of being" in the Metaphysics. Apparently the Greeks understood very well the connection between necessity and violence, and the requisite that a citizen be a man of leisure indicates that necessity had passed from his life, and he could avoid violence in his thought and behaviour. Freedom to the Greeks could only exist after the conquest of necessity, which demeans man, causing him to have to live with force and violence, his very existence under duress. In that condition he could not be political. Under the pressure of necessity, he [sic] resorted to violence.
Earl Shorris, Scenes From Corporate Life

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 The 20th century income distribution system has broken down irretrievably. Globalisation, technological change and the move to flexible labour markets has channelled more and more income to rentiers – those owning financial, physical or so-called intellectual property – while real wages stagnate. The income of the precariat is falling and becoming more volatile. And chronic insecurity will not be overcome by minimum wage laws, tax credits, means-tested benefits or workfare. In short, a basic income is becoming a political imperative.
Guy Standing
The Guardian
Thu 12 Jan 2017

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