Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1810-1812

And how do you get the laborer to take lower and lower wages?

Through extended unemployment to create desperation and job insecurity. Through shredding the social safety net to create desperation. Through the destruction of collective bargaining. Through keeping minimum wages lower than a living wage. Through taxpayer subsidies to businesses enabling them to underpay workers, like food stamps. And now, through creating a system of worldwide wage arbitrage between the top industrialized nations and the third world in a race to the bottom for all.
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Why Don't We Pay People Enough? 8 Facts About America's Struggling Working People
AlterNet / By Bill Quigley

 Central to its philosophy is the assumption the market drives not just the economy but all of social life. It construes profit-making as the essence of democracy and consuming as the only operable form of agency. It redefines identities, desires and values through a market logic that favors self-interest, a survival-of-the-fittest ethos and unchecked individualism. Under neoliberalism, life-draining and unending competition is a central concept for defining human freedom.

As an economic policy, it creates an all-encompassing market guided by the principles of privatization, deregulation, commodification and the free flow of capital. Advancing these agendas, it weakens unions, radically downsizes the welfare state and wages an assault on public goods. As the state is hollowed out, big corporations take on the functions of government, imposing severe austerity measures, redistributing wealth upward to the rich and powerful and reinforcing a notion of society as one of winners and losers. Put simply, neoliberalism gives free rein to finance capital and seeks to liberate the market from any restraints imposed by the state. At present, governments exist preeminently to maximize the profits, resources and the power of the wealthy.
Henry Giroux,
Neoliberal Fascism and the Echoes of History

The State of the Economy
by
Louis Jenkins
   
There might be some change on top of the dresser at the
back, and we should check the washer and the dryer. Check
under the floor mats of the car. The couch cushions. I have
some books and CDs I could sell, and there are a couple big
bags of aluminum cans in the basement, only trouble is that
there isn’t enough gas in the car to get around the block. I’m
expecting a check sometime next week, which, if we are careful,
will get us through to payday. In the meantime with your one—
dollar rebate check and a few coins we have enough to walk to
the store and buy a quart of milk and a newspaper. On second
thought, forget the newspaper.
From Sea Smoke (Holy Cow Press, 2004)