Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1816-1818

Nearly six million factory jobs, almost a third of the entire manufacturing industry, have disappeared since 2000. And while many of these jobs were lost to competition with low-wage countries, even more vanished because of computer-driven machinery that can do the work of 10, or in some cases, 100 workers. Those jobs are not coming back...
Skills Don’t Pay the Bills
By ADAM DAVIDSON
New York Times
Published: November 20, 2012

...why are Europeans so much happier and saner than Americans? Well, the reason is that Europeans don’t live under the constant, pervasive threat of genuine violence that Americans do. It’s not just that they don’t have access to guns — remember, we’re talking a deeper level of violence. It’s that they have “safety nets.” Healthcare, childcare, elderly care, retirement, pensions, and so on. And so they merrily go on with their lives, and become happier, healthier, saner people — they are not as psychologically and culturally and socially insecure precisely because they are not constantly threatened and intimidated with structural and institutional violence.
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Predatory capitalism is. It is as if it is pointing a gun at the average American, laughing, and saying: “you had better sell me your labour, now, at the lowest possible price — or else.” Just like a mafia boss might. The result is that the strange paradox we see: Americans work harder than anyone else in the rich world, even in the poor world — but they only realize shrinking lives from all that hard work. And yet, every year, the cycle repeats itself. Americans work harder, only to lose more. More longevity, income, savings, assets, trust, meaning, purpose, democracy.
umair haque
Why America’s a More Violent Society Than You Think

We’re all on the same side. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, as the expression goes, but we must let go of a system that is making us sick, making us crazy, and killing us. During my entire life, success has been defined, incorrectly, by the amount of money a person has, rather than the amount of compassion. Similarly, the entire system has been defined in terms that make no sense because the system rewards money over happiness, and death over life. As John Ralston Saul pointed out in his 1992 book Voltaire’s Bastards, “never has failure been so ardently defended as success.”

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Time is not on our side, and it might be too late already to prevent our own near-term extinction. It’s long past time to let go of a system that enslaves us all while destroying all life and therefore all that matters. And it’s not merely time to let go, but to terminate this increasingly violent system that values the property of the rich more than the lives of the poor.
Guy McPherson
the good men project