Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1801-1803

Greenfield shows us the investment banker who cannot recall the number of homes he owns as he eyes his next yacht; the Orlando time-share mogul who builds a 90,000-square-foot mansion on credit, hoping to outrival the Palace of Versailles; the etiquette coach in Beijing who charges $16,000 to teach proper pronunciation of Western designer labels; the wife of a Russian oligarch who proudly labels herself “a luxury.”

In addition to the mega-rich, Greenfield also shows us the poor — primarily white American women, as she’s chosen to represent them — who are equally caught up in this frantic, often narcissistic, struggle for excess: the school bus driver who puts herself in debt and loses her child and home after traveling to Brazil for plastic surgery (“It was time to focus on me”); the small-town 15-year-old girl who wants to become a porn star because she is determined to “make something of [her]self”; the six-year-old beauty queen who chants through pouty, painted lips, “money, money, money!” while dressed like a Vegas showgirl.

Plenty
By Anne Anlin Cheng
LARB

  For a number of years now, I have been conducting research on forms of employment seen as utterly pointless by those who perform them. The proportion of these jobs is startlingly high. Surveys in Britain and Holland reveal that 37 to 40 percent of all workers there are convinced that their jobs make no meaningful contribution to the world. And there seems every reason to believe that numbers in other wealthy countries are much the same. There would appear to be whole industries — telemarketing, corporate law, financial or management consulting, lobbying — in which almost everyone involved finds the enterprise a waste of time, and believes that if their jobs disappeared it would either make no difference or make the world a better place.

Are You in a BS Job? In Academe, You’re Hardly Alone
By David Graeber
The Chronicle Of Higher Education
May 06, 2018
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Uwe Mauch has called Vienna “home” for more than 30 years. The 52-year-old Austrian journalist and writer lives in a subsidized apartment in the north of the European city, in one of the many low-cost housing complexes built around leafy courtyards by the municipal government.

Mauch pays 300 euros, or the equivalent of $350, a month in rent for his one-bedroom apartment ― only 10 percent of his income.

“It’s great ― I’m really happy living here,” he says. “I like all the green space right outside my window. When people from other countries visit, they can’t believe it’s so nice and also so cheap.”

With its affordable and attractive places to live, the Austrian capital is fast becoming the international gold standard when it comes to public housing, or what Europeans call “social housing” ― in Vienna’s case, government-subsidized housing rented out by the municipality or nonprofit housing associations. Unlike America’s public housing projects, which remain unloved and underfunded, the city’s schemes are generally held to be at the forefront not only of progressive planning policy but also of sustainable design.

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Social housing in Vienna has been widespread since the 1920s when the post-war municipality, led by the Social Democrats, began building high-density estates all over the city ― typically six- to eight-story apartment blocks with communal green spaces. Today, anyone earning up to $53,225 a year after taxes is eligible to apply for a subsidized apartment in Vienna in a country where the median gross annual income is about $31,500.

According to the municipality, 62 percent of Vienna’s citizens currently live in social housing.

Vienna’s Affordable Housing Paradise
Adam Forrest
HuffPost
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