Jack Saturday

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 767-769

2012-01-30T11:39:00.000-08:00

Someone is stealing our time, our time alive,

and all our lives are marked by that theft.
They have told us that time is money
and since money can be owned you can possess a man or a woman's time
and spend the human beings who live in that time
like a coin or a dollar. In some trucks
we are ordered to install
a recording tachometer, so that the owners
can constantly check
on the driver: the device tells how the driver shifts,
when he stops the vehicle, how fast he was driving
at any time. So even the man alone on the highway
has the foreman watching - he remains in the factory,
like the man or woman in the bar after supper
with one eye on the clock because even off work
somebody owns your time.
Tom Wayman

Yes, new technology has been eating jobs forever, and always will. … But there’s been an acceleration. As Davidson notes, “In the 10 years ending in 2009, [U.S.] factories shed workers so fast that they erased almost all the gains of the previous 70 years; roughly one out of every three manufacturing jobs — about 6 million in total — disappeared.”

And you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
Average Is Over
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: January 24, 2012

Men [sic] are as mature

As the forces of production
Of their times allow them to be.
T.W. Adorno

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 764-766

2012-01-23T09:40:00.000-08:00

Between 70 and 80 percent of Americans report rudeness and incivility at work, Herschcovis told LiveScience. Fewer are systematically bullied, she said, but the best estimate puts the number at about 41 percent of American workers having been psychologically harassed at work at some point.
Your bullying boss may be slowly killing you

Resignation

by Catherine Shaw

This, superiors,

is to offer you

my resignation.

Too many years have passed

without recompense

and without sentience

too many days,

each one vacant

as the bare vestibule

I pass through

day after hollow day

from or to

the circle of sorry labor

I inhabit,

my subordination.

Automaton, I

go about my work

in mindless quietude,

totting up numbers,

filling out forms,

stacking and stapling-

so efficient!-

but watching every minute

on your grey clock

loiter and drag

on its tired trail

to the tired end of day.

And what of

those dear others

who share my circle

and whose faces match

my own encrypted face?

They are not dear.

Away from here,

they live lives

I can't imagine

in small and singular worlds

that have no use for me.

if there's friendship here,

it's made of shallow stuff,

of pleasantries,

enforced equivalence:

the accident of company!

I soon learned

to be on guard against

such amity,

to cultivate

the ingrown point-of-view,

pruning away

those shoots of anger

and intelligence

that would expose to me

the baseness

of your hierarchy.

It's just as well.

I may be dwarfed

but how much worse

to flare up in my insignificance

and be unheard

and change nothing

and destroy only me.

"I will seek work elsewhere!"

That has been my quest:

a foolish enterprise,

a grail of styrofoam at best.

Wherever I go,

I find your duplicate:

vestibule, paperwork,

watched clocks

and grey-eyed vacancy

What's the good of going?

I'm too weary now

to take my future in my hands

and forge another way.

This, superiors,

is to offer you my resignation.

I'll stay.

The main problem: There just aren’t enough jobs to go around.

Lose a job, prepare for a really long job search
LIFEINC.

You Are a Socialist

2012-01-21T20:41:00.001-08:00

Roy Zimmerman

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 761-763

2012-01-16T12:29:00.000-08:00

VEST

X
When a supervisor says No

you did that wrong

despite my just

-ifications

you shouldn't have done it

I feel fastening around my ribs

a vest

of rage

whose tight clasp

restricts my chest, weights down

each breath

When did I cast

my ballot for this power

over my time, this vise

diminishing me

Outmoded

as a dunce cap

still in use

Tom Wayman

An Associated Press report… on census data found that “a record number of Americans — nearly 1 in 2 — have fallen into poverty or are scraping by on earnings that classify them as low income.”

Inconvenient Income Inequality
By CHARLES M. BLOW
New York Times
Published: December 16, 2011

The current presidential race has demonstrated that a million dollars is nothing — nothing — these days. Nothing!

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
By GAIL COLLINS
New York Times
Published: January 13, 2012

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 758-760

2012-01-09T13:28:00.000-08:00

The United States faces a protracted unemployment crisis: 6.3 million fewer Americans have jobs than was true at the end of 2007. And yet the country's economic output is higher today than it was before the financial crisis.
…
even a manufacturing revival is not likely to mean a great many new jobs on balance. Likewise, anyone whose hopes are pinned on "green jobs" may be disappointed. Though jobs will be created in the switch to cleaner energy sources, jobs tied to traditional energy will be lost in the same process.
"Tectonic Shifts" in Employment
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2012
BY DAVID TALBOT
technology review MIT

(emphasis JS)

Unemployment in the eurozone stayed at a record high in November as the impact of the sovereign debt crisis rumbled on, according to official figures.
x

The jobless rate in the 17 nations that use the euro was 10.3% in November for the second month in a row, according to the Eurostat statistics agency.
x

There were 16.3 million people in the bloc out of work.

At the same time, an index of consumer confidence fell to a two-year low in December, the European Commission said.

Eurozone unemployment stays at record high
6 January 2012
BBC NEWS BUSINESS

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

xThis was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled.

2. I wish I didn't work so hard.

This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children's youth and their partner's companionship. Women also spoke of this regret. But as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence.
Regrets of the Dying
(emphasis JS)

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 755-757

2012-01-02T12:53:00.000-08:00

For corporate interests in the United States, the wageless recovery is excellent news, of course. They’re spending less on labor at the same time they get to pick and choose between highly qualified job applicants, thanks to the huge numbers of unemployed people seeking work in a highly competitive market. Soft market conditions also make it easier to cut benefits, suppress unions, and exploit workers, because the ones who speak up can be easily exchanged for those who won’t.
Frozen Out: Is Congress About to Slash Heating Assistance Funds Just as Temperatures Plummet?
s. e. smith
AlterNet

The pipeline, known as Keystone XL, would be built by a Canadian company to carry heavy crude oil 1,700 miles from the tar sands in northern Alberta to the Texas Gulf Coast.
…
…the only independent study, conducted by Cornell University’s Global Labor Institute, concludes that it may generate no more than 50 permanent jobs when the work is done.
Keystone Claptrap
Editorial
New York Times
Published: December 12, 2011

The logic of “production” goes like this:

If the world requires a certain amount of something, then there are two choices:

1. some number of people work ALL of the time to produce the desired amount, or
2. some larger number of people work PART of the time to produce the desired amount.

Ah, but,
the logic of “consumption” is quite different, and goes like this:

1. we need to employ people all the time,
2. such employment produces a surplus,
3. people need to be convinced to purchase the surplus through marketing and advertising,
4. the surplus has to be quickly converted to waste, so people will purchase again,
5. this is accomplished by denying basic needs to everyone so that they have to work in order to consume.

The first story is a recipe for a civilization that spends some of its time meeting its obligations to society and the rest of its time in pursuit of leisure and other interests and projects. The second story is a recipe for a civilization with waste, pollution, and mass slavery.
Unemployment Is The Cure
Paul Hartzog
21st September 2011

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 750-754

2011-12-26T13:16:00.000-08:00

That was it. The jobs were gone to India.

“I couldn’t stop crying,” said Maile, a divorced mother of one, who until that moment had spent her professional life as a telecommunications worker before being laid off first by Verizon and then by Level 3.

Even then, Maile said, she still believed in the American Dream.

You’ve got to work hard… work hard.

Maile owned her own home. Although she had been forced to liquidate her retirement after the Verizon layoff, she had begun to build it back up. Then came the Level 3 layoff. It shook her to her core.

That was my defining moment. I was filling out paperwork, and I couldn’t help it…. I was just crying and crying. I said, ‘They don’t understand…. We’re all interconnected.’

Ten years ago, back when Maile worked at Verizon, she earned $75,000 a year. At Level 3, she was paid $50,000. Today, she makes $8.50 an hour at a retail job. She applies for professional jobs every day. Sometimes her application is one of 400.
As Unemployment Aid Sets to Expire, Jobless Worker Says: ‘All of Us Need to Stand Together’
AFL-CIO NOW BLOG

In 2010, 17.2 million households, 14.5 percent of households (approximately one in seven), were food insecure, the highest number ever recorded in the United
States.”
Hunger in America: 2011 United States Hunger and Poverty Facts

What’s going on here? Aren't we the richest country on earth?
How Can the World's Richest Country Let Children Go Hungry?
6 Tricks Corporate Elites Use to Hoard All the Wealth
Les Leopold
AlterNet

Twenty years after the Fall of Communism, it’s corporate capitalism that depends on information control as the basis of its power. Capitalism — as opposed to the free market — has always depended on the state to enforce artificial scarcity, artificial property rights, as a source of rents for the ruling class. But around twenty years ago, the forces of abundance unleashed by the digital and network revolutions became an unprecedented threat to the artificial scarcity rents that the Lords of Scarcity depend on. They were forced to resort to unprecedented levels of totalitarian information control to stave off the threat from abundance.
Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin
Center for a Stateless Society

Merry Christmas, Everybody!

2011-12-23T11:14:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas, Everybody!

Anti Wage-Slavery, Prop-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 747-749

2011-12-19T12:38:00.000-08:00

From 2005 to 2009, millionaires collected over $74 million in unemployment benefits…
Millionaires on Food Stamps and Jobless Pay? G.O.P. Is on It
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
New York Times
Published: December 12, 2011

I inquired as to a raise because the cost- of -living was going up. I got back a letter saying that “Market reality” was such that there would be no raise because there were people waiting for work who would do it at my current rate.That’s why people like Matthew Vadum, who call the poor, especially welfare recipients, the “non-productive segments of society” are wrong. The unemployed are performing a function that capitalism wants: They provide slack in the job market that keeps a downward pressure on wages. So as the poet John Milton said, “They also serve who only stand and wait.”
Why the Economy CAN’T work for us all
By: Kellia Ramares-Watson
Friday December 9, 2011

· Computerization creates unemployment

· Unemployment creates free-time
· Free-time generates innovation
What is wrong with unemployment is not its increase, but the unsustainability of a system where employment is “good” and unemployment is “bad”. The end of employment is by no means the end of doing things. Human beings are by nature creative, innovative, and vigorously pursue their goals. This is why the first tier of a panarchy economy provides necessities: to give individuals and groups the foundation on which they can make informed decisions and communicate those decisions to the system in a cybernetic way.
Unemployment Is The Cure
Paul Hartzog
21st September 2011

Practical Post-Scarcity

2011-12-17T10:44:00.001-08:00

Practical Post Scarcity from Open Source Ecology on Vimeo.

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 745-746

2011-12-12T12:01:00.000-08:00

Justice requires a democratic society in which people have equal standing and make collective decisions. It requires equal opportunities in life: fate must not be fixed by our birth. And it also requires that everyone can enjoy a fair share of available resources to enable all of us to pursue our lives.
Stanford philosopher Joshua Cohen

[I]f success is winning the World Series, 29 out of 30 teams will fail, every year, that’s a 96.66% failure rate.

Now, apply the principle of competition to the job market. Getting the job is success, not getting it is failure. On October 21, 2009, the NY Times published an article by Michael Luo called “$13 an hour. 500 apply, 1 wins job”. WINS… my analogy to sports is not far fetched. 1 person succeeded, 499 failed. 99.8% failure rate. That’s worse than trying to win the World Series.

But that’s only 1 job, you say, Well, it’s not much better when multiple jobs are at stake. On April 19, 2011 McDonald’s held its first ever national hiring day. The plan was to hire 50,000 nationwide.

On April 28, Bloomberg.net a highly respected business website—–published an article by Leslie Patton headlined “McDonald’s Hires 62,000 in U.S. Event, 24% More Than Planned.” It said “McDonald’s and its franchisees hired 62,000 people in the U.S. after receiving more than one million applications” 62,000 out of a million = 6.2% They said that actually more than one million applied so lets say 6% were hired. That means a 94% failure rate. Better chance than winning the WS, but not by much.

Why the Economy CAN’T work for us all

By: Kellia Ramares-Watson Friday December 9, 2011

Disobedient!

2011-12-10T17:48:00.001-08:00

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 742-744

2011-12-05T17:42:00.000-08:00

Every day, millions of American workers do something dangerous to their health: they sit down.
Sitting for long periods is hard on the body. It strains the back and causes the muscles to become slack. It slows the processes that metabolize calories, increasing the risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and some cancers.
Don’t Just Sit There, Work Out at Your Desk
By ERIC V. COPAGE
New York Times
Published: December 3, 2011

Upon birth, as Mayhew described the practice in Germany at the end of the 19th century, “the wretched new-born little thing has been wound up in… ells of bandages, from the feet right, and tight, up to the neck; as if it were intended to be embalmed as a mummy.” Since these bandages were rarely changed, the infant was left in its own feces and urine, with the result, says Mayhew, that “babies are loathsome, foetid things…offensive to the last degree with their excreta [and] the heads of the poor things are never washed, and are like the rind of Stilton cheese, with dirt encrusted upon their skull.” The mothers were so frightened of their babies that they not only tied them up but often strapped them into a crib in a room with curtains drawn to keep out “lurking evils.” The results were that the infants were covered with lice and other vermin attracted to their feces, but they could not move to drive them away as infants who were not swaddled might do. The parents routinely called them “lice,” and “useless eaters” because they didn’t contribute to the family’s work until they were older, resenting their children so much that they often recalled “Rarely could we eat a piece of bread without hearing father’s comment that we did not merit it” because they did not earn their living.
The Childhood Origins of the Holocaust
Lloyd deMause

In June, President Obama announced a $500 million federal investment in manufacturing technology (including $70 million for robotics). It represents another step in developing robots that can assist with repetitious or physically stressful assembly-line tasks without posing a safety risk.
Safer robots will improve manufacturing.

Kurzweil

Molyneux On Spanking

2011-11-29T17:26:00.001-08:00

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 739-741

2011-11-28T10:59:00.000-08:00

While factories continue to make more stuff in the United States than ever before, employment in them has collapsed.

Computers have hurt workers outside factories too. Picture the advertising agency in “Mad Men,” and think about the abundance of people who were hired to do jobs that are now handled electronically by small machines. Countless secretaries were replaced by word processing, voice mail, e-mail and scheduling software; accounting staff by Excel; people in the art department by desktop design programs. This is also true of trades like plumbing and carpentry, in which new technologies replaced a bunch of people who most likely stood around helping measure things and making sure everything worked correctly.

…
…there’s… a pretty good chance that by some point in the next few years, your boss will find that some new technology or some worker overseas can replace you.
The Dwindling Power of a College Degree

By ADAM DAVIDSON
New York Times
Published: November 23, 2011

For the first time since the 1960s, when women entering the workforce led to a big increase in youth employment, a majority of young people are out of work. The story is the same around the world…. … the question of why we’re doing so little about it remains.

What Do Young People Around the World Have in Common? No Jobs
Good Business

However, the current jobless recovery, and the concurrent failure to create enough new jobs, is breeding a new and growing surplus pool. And some in this pool are in danger of becoming superfluous, likely never to work again.
…
In the old days — before Social Security, welfare and Medicaid — poverty-caused illnesses killed off or incapacitated some of the people who could not find jobs. Even earlier, some nations sold their surplus workers as slaves, while the European countries could send them to the colonies.

In addition, wars were once labor-intensive enterprises that absorbed the surplus temporarily, and sufficient numbers of those serving in the infantry and on warships were killed or seriously enough injured so that they could not add to the peacetime labor surplus.

The old ways of reducing surplus labor are, however, disappearing.
…
Meanwhile, new ways of increasing surplus labor have appeared. One is the continued outsourcing of jobs to low-wage countries; the other is the continuing computerization and mechanization of manufacturing.
…
In fact, if modern capitalism continues to eliminate as many jobs as it creates — or more jobs than it creates — future recoveries will not only add to the amount of surplus labor but will turn a growing proportion of workers into superfluous ones.
…
Policies that are now seemingly utopian will have to be tried as well….
The Age of the Superfluous Worker
By HERBERT J. GANS
New York Times
Published: November 24, 2011

Fall of Rome?

2011-11-26T11:30:00.001-08:00

Principles of Economics translated

2011-11-26T10:53:00.001-08:00

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 736-738

2011-11-21T12:52:00.000-08:00

It was absolutely unheard of for one of us in the working class of Flint (or anywhere) to receive such a sum of money unless one of us had either robbed a bank or, by luck, won the Michigan lottery. On that sunny November day in 1989, it was like I had won the lottery -- and the people I had lived and struggled with in Michigan were thrilled with my success. It was like, one of us had made it, one of us finally had good fortune smile upon us. The day was filled with high-fives and "Way-ta-go Mike!"s. When you are from the working class you root for each other, and when one of you does well, the others are beaming with pride -- not just for that one person's success, but for the fact that the team had somehow won, beating the system that was brutal and unforgiving and which ran a game that was rigged against us. We knew the rules, and those rules said that we factory town rats do not get to make movies or be on TV talk shows or have our voice heard on any national stage. We were to shut up, keep our heads down, and get back to work.
Life Among the 1% ...a letter from Michael Moore

a long time ago when I was a fair maiden wearing rose colored glasses and tie dyed frocks, I was introduced to a swain of high pedigree and culture and exhorbitant wealth. Intelligent, disciplined,and focused, a Cornell graduate,second in command in the family (corporation) business. How impressed was I,the farm fresh country stock daughter of a working man who toiled at an honest day’s work and whose personna magnified integrity,fairness and kindness. As it was in the days of old(the 60′s) a fair maiden many times caught the eye of a privileged fellow who dwelled betwixt the land or peer and privilege and was not yet submerged in the water of well to do-ism as he sought out his future. A slight state of youthful comradery allowed acquaintance between the two opposing worlds of privilege and peasantry for a season.

Oh, but the inevitable… the clash of impetuous and opposing ideals..

The world of privilege is not a place for a princess of conscience and
perception of the principles of Golden Rules. Alas, the chameleon prince changed to ugly hues of dark and selfish nature and deed as he was programed genetically and socially to be “privileged”. Privilege status required occupying the top seat in the Castle of Corporation. The king,father placed the successor prince at the of his kingdom,after all..

Wrestling with understanding the distinction between the man and the mechanism(corporation/family business) became cleary indistinguishable. They were one and the same- symbiotic.” All for one,one for all ” was the motto. Soon the realization dawned that the future king was in fact, a robot , designed to perform dutifully and without emotion or calculation of his subjects’ humanity since they were soley serfs for the kingdom. Oh, horrid prince,the illusion of a knight vanished from before the very eyes who beheld him ! Then, to my amazement and instruction in the ways of privilege I learned a most valuable lesson..the prince and the power are one and the same. The umbilical cord could not be severed.The man is the mechanism who feeds the corporation,not vice-versa. Without the vile sustenance the offspring would expire.

With lessons learned, I, the princess of higher power,fled the kingdom of poisoned power and never looked back to this very day…(except to thank lucky stars for guiding me out of darkness) :)
Jerrye Barr

Comment on Gerry Spence's Blog

My dad has spent his life accumulating wealth, because to him, money is love.

My parents both grew up with the fear of not having enough. Their parents grew up poor.

When I was 25, my parents gave me a $100k check. There’s lots more where that came from.

The money sent me into a spiral of shame and denial.

Now at age 30, I’ve started giving it away to organizations working for ECONOMIC & RACIAL JUSTICE.

That’s something I can do, and it makes me feel better, but I know it’s not enough.

I don’t want to live in a world where money represents love.

I don’t want to live in a world where some people accumulate way too much - because they’re scared of not having enough.

We ALL should have enough.

I am the 1%

I stand with the 99%
We are the 1 percent

We stand with the 99 percent

Give Them Their Whole Lives

2011-11-15T15:13:00.001-08:00

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 733-735

2011-11-14T12:39:00.000-08:00

Stop us if you've heard this one before: long commutes are bad for your health. Some of the strongest recent findings in behavioral science have focused on the perils of a long ride to work. People with a lengthy commute show an increased amount of stress, get worse sleep, and experience decreased social interaction. A commute of 45 minutes carries such a cost to well-being that economists have found you have to earn 20 percent more to make the trip worth it. Length alone isn't the source of the problem: stress rises with a commute's variability, and for transit riders it rises with the unpredictability and overcrowding of a bus or train.
Your Commute is Slowly Killing You

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, a higher percentage of Americans is living in extreme poverty than they have ever measured before.
Extreme Poverty Is Now at Record Levels -- 19 Statistics About the Poor That Will Absolutely Astound You
Michael Snyder
November 8, 2011

Solar is now cost-effective. Here comes the sun, if we’re willing to let it in.

Here Comes the Sun

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: November 6, 2011

End of Jobs

2011-11-12T10:16:00.000-08:00

thanks to @Livable4All

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 730-732

2011-11-07T09:20:00.000-08:00

The British medical journal, The Lancet, estimatesthe total death toll from the Iraq war at nearly 700,000. When the war began,Pentagon experts estimated the cost of the war at about $60 billion. Theyunderestimated by 8,000%. But if the war were to stop tomorrow…and if JosephStiglitz’s estimates of total cost were close to correct…each Iraqi killed(let’s hallucinate that he was an ‘enemy combatant’) would cost about $8million.

You have to wonder why America would want to kill even asingle Iraqi, let alone at a cost of $8 million each. WWII killed far morepeople — 50 million. Total spending on the war, by all the combatants, wasprobably around $10 trillion (our estimate). This puts the cost per corpse atonly $200,000. WWII was far more efficient.

A Perversely Perfect War

BillBonner

It's not just the recession that killed American employment.
And it's not just robots taking jobs from autoworkers.
The scary new dimension is artificial intelligence, which could replace as many as 50 million professional jobs according to a recent book by software entrepreneur Martin Ford. Artificial Intelligence Took America's Jobs And It's Going To Take A Lot More
Gus Lubin
Business Insider

I have taught urban poverty and inequality every year for the past 3 years and every year have similar debates in my class: when I start the section off by asking them why people are poor the first response I usually get from students is that, simply put, people are lazy and they don't want to work. I see my job then to be to explain the structural causes of poverty and that simply saying, “People are lazy and don't want to work” is actually a really problematic way of thinking. Explaining all of this has been so much work in my classes that usually I dread the week on poverty and inequality because it is a week where I am tired.

But last week when I asked my students this question the first response I got in my classes was that “People can't find jobs” and the next one was, “There is a huge wealth gap” and the third was that, “We have an economic system that needs poor people”. I was shocked. I have never gotten responses like this before.
Occupy Wall Street is Transforming its Participants, Our Country, and Democracy
AlterNet / By Manissa McCleave Maharawal

The End Of Money

2011-11-06T11:00:00.001-08:00

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 727-729

2011-10-31T12:50:00.000-07:00

Occupy Wall Street has been criticized for its lack of clear demands,but how do we issue demands, when what we really want is nothing less than themore beautiful world our hearts tell us is possible? No demand is big enough.

…
Is more stuff really what the world needs right now? Or can weenvision a world instead with more play and less work, more sharing and lessbuying, more public space and less indoors, more nature and less product?
OccupyWall Street: No Demand is Big Enough
Reality Sandwich
ByCharles Eisenstein

…there is an inappropriate and correctable disconnect between theabundance America produces and the scarcity its markets manufacture.

And in the process, they are pointing the way toward something entirelydifferent than the zero-sum game of artificial scarcity favoring top-downinvestors and media makers alike.

Douglas Rushkoff

There is enough to go round...handsomely.

R. Buckminster Fuller

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 725-726

2011-10-24T12:18:00.000-07:00

A faltering economy explains much of the job shortage in America, but advancing technology has sharply magnified the effect, more so than is generally understood, according to two researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The automation of more and more work once done by humans is the central theme of “Race Against the Machine,” an e-book to be published on Monday.

“Many workers, in short, are losing the race against the machine,” the authors write.

Erik Brynjolfsson… and Andrew McAfee, authors of “Race Against the Machine,” argue in their e-book that technological advancements are outpacing the human worker.

The authors are not the only ones recently to point to the job fallout from technology. In the current issue of the McKinsey Quarterly, W. Brian Arthur, an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, warns that technology is quickly taking over service jobs, following the waves of automation of farm and factory work. “This last repository of jobs is shrinking — fewer of us in the future may have white-collar business process jobs — and we have a problem,” Mr. Arthur writes.
More Jobs Predicted for Machines, Not People
By STEVE LOHR
New York Times
Published: October 23, 2011

Whereas before the problem of identity had been one of meagreness and poverty, it has now become the problem of abundance and superfluity. We are individually overwhelmed by corporate consciousness and by the inclusive experience of mankind both past and present. It would be a cosmic irony if men [sic] proved unable to cope with abundance and riches in both the economic and psychic order. It is not likely to happen. The most persistent habits of penury are bound to yield before the onslaught of largesse and abundant life.
Marshall McLuhan,
Understanding Me

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 722-724

2011-10-17T13:49:00.000-07:00

The economy is not producing enough jobs, and many of the ones created are lousy.

More Bleak Job Numbers
Editorial
New York Times
Published: October 7, 2011

Republican state representative Ritch Workman

of Melbourne, Florida, filed a bill to reinstate the
practice of dwarf-tossing, which was banned in 1989. "All
that it does is prevent some dwarfs from getting jobs they
would be happy to get," said Workman.
Harper's Weekly, 1/11/2011

The absurdity of 90% of existing jobs is never mentioned.
In a sane society, the elimination of all these absurd jobs (not only those that produce or market ridiculous and unnecessary commodities, but the far larger number directly or indirectly involved in promoting and protecting the whole commodity system) would reduce necessary tasks to such a trivial level (probably less than 10 hours per week) that they could easily be taken care of voluntarily and cooperatively, eliminating the need for the whole apparatus of economic incentives and state enforcement.
We Don’t Want Full Employment, We Want Full Lives!

Parasites, Tobin Tax, Guillotine

2011-10-11T11:56:00.000-07:00

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 719-721

2011-10-10T10:14:00.000-07:00

Beginning with what ruins our lives: work and its pointlessness (upon taking stock we concluded that 90% of this society’s productions are useless bullshit), its miserable wages, its hierarchies, its daily horror; and the wretchedness and boredom of unemployment, which we came to realize is merely the flip side of work, a threat held over the heads of workers, forcing them to submit to the economic blackmail.

We Don’t Want Full Employment, We Want Full Lives!

Antigovernment protests continued in Yemen, and

at least eleven protesters were killed in Syria. In
Manchester, 20,000 marched in protest of British
austerity plans; in Lisbon, tens of thousands rallied
against Portuguese austerity measures; in Athens,
protesters blocked the entrance to Greece's finance
ministry in an effort to stall talks on civil-service
wage cuts; and in New York City, more than 700
protesters were arrested during demonstrations against
Wall Street greed.
Harper's Weekly
October 4, 2011

With its endless propaganda the Moneyed Master has caused its slaves to believe they are free. But when that cruel hoax is ripped bare of its deceitful cloth and stands naked before the people, and when enough of the people sleep under the bridges and their children’s bellies swell from hunger then one day it will be too late for the Master. Suddenly, without warning, the people will rise up in explosive unison like a long sleeping volcano. Raging and turmoil will ring across the canyons of the streets and blood will flood the streets, and the people will at last prevail.

Gerry Spence

Enough Food

2011-10-07T13:21:00.001-07:00

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 715-718

2011-10-03T12:03:00.000-07:00

If you want a big swig of despair, listen to the people who know something about the global economy.

The Lost Decade?
By DAVID BROOKS
New York Times
Published: September 26, 2011

The fastest growing category of employment gains over the last year, once subsidies and bailouts are stripped out? "Administrative and waste services". Sound like a recipe for prosperity to you--or a recipe for a nation of janitors, maids, and "assistants", hurriedly scurrying after a tiny number of imperious plutocrats?
Why America's Not Creating Enough Jobs--And How to Fix It
Umair Haque, Eudaimonics

In the last decade, we have gone from a connected world (thanks to the end of the cold war, globalization and the Internet) to a hyperconnected world (thanks to those same forces expanding even faster). And it matters. The connected world was a challenge to blue-collar workers in the industrialized West. They had to compete with a bigger pool of cheap labor. The hyperconnected world is now a challenge to white-collar workers. They have to compete with a bigger pool of cheap geniuses — some of whom are people and some are now robots, microchips and software-guided machines.
How Did the Robot End Up With My Job?
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
New York Times
Published: October 1, 2011

Rule#3: Keep Them Desperate

You’llfind in nearly every instance of cultural descent into autocracy, the offendinggovernment gained favor after the onset of economic collapse. Make thenecessities of root survival an uncertainty, and people without knowledge ofself-sustainability and without solid core principles will gladly hand overtheir freedom, even for mere scraps from the tables of the same men whounleashed famine upon them. Financial calamities are not dangerous because ofthe poverty they leave in their wake; they are dangerous because of the doorsto malevolence that they leave open.

Destitutionleads not just to hunger, but also to crime (private and government). Crimeleads to anger, hatred, and fear. Fear leads to desperation. Desperation leadsto the acceptance of anything resembling a solution, even despotism.

Autocraciespretend to cut through the dilemmas of economic dysfunction (usually whiledemanding liberties be relinquished), however, behind the scenes they actuallyseek to maintain a proscribed level of indigence and deprivation. The constantperil of homelessness and starvation keeps the masses thoroughly distractedfrom such things as protest or dissent, while simultaneously chaining them tothe idea that their only chance is to cling to the very government out to endthem.

THE ESSENTIAL RULES OF TYRANNY

by: Brandon Smith

Tapscott on Dropouts and Internet

2011-09-28T19:37:00.001-07:00

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 712-714

2011-09-26T10:01:00.000-07:00

A friend asked me just now about an unusual context for the word ‘employ’. To clear things up, I explained that ‘employ’ actually means ‘use’. For example, one employs a hammer to drive a nail.
It struck me as odd that we never hear ‘use’ when someone says ‘employ’ in relation to a person’s profession. “I am used by a large software company”. “My husband is used as a secretary”. “My daughter is used on a fixed-term basis”. Doesn’t sound very pleasant does it? Makes one sound like a piece of gym equipment.
Conversely, “I am unused” sounds far more pleasant than “I am unemployed”. I think I’ll start using it! Or rather employing it.
New Escapologist

…we squander between a quarter and a half of all the food produced in the United States. Even using the more conservative figure would mean that 160 billion pounds of food are squandered annually--more than enough, that is, to fill the Rose Bowl to the brim. With the high-end estimate, the Rose Bowl would almost be filled twice over.
Americans Waste Enough Food to Fill a 90,000-seat Football Stadium Every Day -- What Can We Do About It?
AlterNet / By Jonathan Bloom

If there is anythingthat we wish to change in our children, we should first examine it and seewhether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves. Take ourenthusiasm for pedagogics. It may be that the boot is on the other leg. It maybe that we misplace the pedagogical need because it would be an uncomfortablereminder that we ourselves are still children in many respects and still need avast amount of educating.
C. G. Jung
"The Development of the Personality" (1934).In CW 17: The Development of the Personality. P.287

Ralston-Saul Raps

2011-09-22T08:51:00.000-07:00

Did It All On Your Own?

2011-09-21T14:28:00.001-07:00

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 708-711

2011-09-20T09:05:00.000-07:00

Hard times were common enough, but except in extremis most people retained land and tools, not to speak of common rights to woodlands, grazing areas, and the ability to hunt and fish. They were -- we would say today -- “self-employed.” Only when such means of subsistence and production became concentrated in the hands of merchant-capitalists, manufacturers, and large landowners did the situation change fundamentally. A proletariat -- those without property of any kind except their own labor power -- made its appearance, dependent on the propertied to employ them. If, for whatever reason, the market for their labor power dried up, they were set adrift.

Massive Unemployment: Proof That Global Capitalism Doesn't Work
By Steve Fraser and Joshua B. Freeman
September 11, 2011
Tomdispatch.com /
Via AlterNet

The extreme poverty rate among women climbed to 6.3 percent in 2010 from 5.9 percent in 2009, the highest rate ever recorded.

Women and children last
DIGBY
Hullabaloo

[W]e are attempting to use the logic of a scarce marketplace to negotiate things that are actually in abundance. What we lack is not employment, but a way of fairly distributing the bounty we have generated through our technologies, and a way of creating meaning in a world that has already produced far too much stuff.

...

We start by accepting that food and shelter are basic human rights. The work we do -- the value we create -- is for the rest of what we want: the stuff that makes life fun, meaningful, and purposeful.”
Douglas Rushkoff

I believe that as technology continues to develop a new approach will have to be adopted globally. Capitalism simply doesn’t work when technology surpasses the abilities of humans, and believe me that reality isn’t far away.
Technological Unemployment

March 22, 2011
By Josh Hunt

Eliminate The Vote for the Unproductive

2011-09-17T20:07:00.001-07:00

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 704-707

2011-09-12T09:49:00.000-07:00

The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, which has been polling over 1,000 adults every day since January 2008, shows that Americans now feel worse about their jobs — and work environments — than ever before. People of all ages, and across income levels, are unhappy with their supervisors, apathetic about their organizations and detached from what they do. And there’s no reason to think things will soon improve.
…
In fact, workers often expressed frustration, disdain or disgust.
Do Happier People Work Harder?
By TERESA AMABILE and STEVEN KRAMER
New York Times
Published: September 3, 2011

…briefcases and pinstripes, umbrellas and raincoats, and the musty scent of damp business wear. The silent faces are not animated by anticipation. Rather they seem steeled in preparation. Today each rider seems to be looking far away, or perhaps deep inside, preparing for a return to toil.
…
“I don’t want to go to school,” the girl cries.

“Believe me, I understand,” Mom says. “Grown-ups don’t always like going to work either, but we have to.”

“Why?”

“We just do,” Mom says. “Here, want some M&M’s?”
Summer’s Over; the Game Begins
By SETH SCHIESEL
New York Times
Published: September 7, 2011

Demographic

By
Dorianne Laux

It's time for me to walk to the bus stop
And sit down among them, the man
Tied into his wheelchair, the woman
With the humped back, time for me
To kneel and hold his cup while he adjusts
His books and his pack, look up at her,
Flowered blouse. His scratched glasses.
There's a sky full of rain that won't
Come down, pigeons asleep on the lawn,
And across the street pumpkins piled high
In front of the market, Xeroxed flyers
Stapled to the telephone pole. To the east
A day moon above the bridge, cars
Filing under like a school of fish,
And if I look down at my feet I won't
Knock over the plastic dish the blind man
Has filled to the brim for his dog. It's time
To go to work, to wait while they gather
Their belongings, while the metal mesh
Platform unhinges and bangs down,
Time to nod to the driver as he pulls
Back on the lever and a man lifts
Into the air, to cup her elbows, a thin wing
Sharpened by suffering, to enter
The threshold and stand among them,
Listen to their murmurs, the news
Of the day, to slip my hand through
The frayed canvas noose and hold on.

The Best American Poetry 2006

A free race cannot be born of slave mothers.
Margaret Sanger

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 701-703

2011-09-05T08:27:00.000-07:00

America now has more than four unemployed people for each opening.
Did We Drop the Ball on Unemployment?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
New York Times
Published: August 27, 2011

“We did everything we were supposed to,” said Stephanie Morales, 23, who graduated from Dartmouth College in 2009 with hopes of working in the arts. Instead she ended up waiting tables at a Chart House restaurant in Weehawken, N.J., earning $2.17 an hour plus tips, to pay off her student loans. “What was the point of working so hard for 22 years if there was nothing out there?” said Ms. Morales, who is now a paralegal and plans on attending law school.

Some of Ms. Morales’s classmates have found themselves on welfare. “You don’t expect someone who just spent four years in Ivy League schools to be on food stamps,” said Ms. Morales….

Generation Limbo: Waiting It Out
By JENNIFER 8. LEE
New York Times
Published: August 31, 2011

I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.
Harriet Tubman

Writers Exchange

2011-08-31T11:05:00.001-07:00

Email exchange with F.B. ("Bat Man"):

F.B. ("Bat Man"): Good morning.

Jack Saturday: Good morning to you!

F.B. ("Bat Man"): I have rapidly read through the writers' page on your website and I feel I must tell you that I disagree with much of what I read. Among the quotations you might add these by George Bernard Shaw:

"A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of Hell"

"The secret of being miserable is to have the leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not."

Jack Saturday: Hey Bat Man--

Nice to hear some genuine arguments, thanks for the material. I have to tell you that I agree with you!

There is a dividing line in talking about "work," that once pointed out, is obvious.
xxx
In the last couple of hundred years of "moralizing the proletariat," Industrialists and church authorities have very cleverly slipped in an imperative identification of the very word "work" with commodity labor, that is, "selling yourself to a boss" or to clarify, "to sell yourself to a master"-- and that propaganda, often beaten into children, has rejected all other forms of work. Working for a boss = obedience, so it would be more precise to speak of an "obedience ethic" than a work ethic. So to play "Shaw quotes toss," Shaw said: "Disobedience is the rarest and most admirable of the virtues."

Therefore, when someone just doesn't want to sell himself or herself to a master, the propaganda which over the centuries has become "self-evident," is a silent premise, that one is "lazy" or "doesn't want to work"-- or is "idle."

So there comes a time to point out the elephant in the room. Selling yourself to a master is one (unfortunate) form of "work." Outside of that, all over the world, are as many forms and sorts of work as you can imagine. "Work" generally means the overcoming of obstacles. Working on your garden is work, but not according to capitalist economists, whose job is to intellectually police the job (obedience) system. Learning to play a musical instrument is work, but not according to capitalist economists. Parenting, the most important work of all, is hard work, but according to capitalist economists, parents are "idle" or "doing nothing."

Study, learning of any kind can be work, but you have grown up immersed in the idea that it is "idle" if it isn't on the commodity market or through school (obedience training) toward the commodity market.

Buddhist meditation, according to one guru, is "virile effort." But not according to capitalist economists.
xxx

F.B. ("Bat Man"): It is very arguable that idleness is the ideal situation for producing even the most elevated form of art of any kind.
xxx

Jack Saturday: Indeed. Idleness is not productive at all. Artistic production is active and energetic. Incubating the art, though, that is, daydreaming, can appear "idle."
xxx

F.B. ("Bat Man"): Take Shaw himself, or Trollope. I seem to remember that Seneca was a swordsmith or something, but I can find nothing on this right now so may be confusing him with someone else. Primo Levi was a very happy chemist and worked till pension because he liked it. He wrote:
xxx

"Apart from prodigious and unique instants that fate can bestow us, to love one's job (which unfortunately is the privilege of few) constitutes the best concrete approximation to happiness on earth: but this is a truth not known to many."
xxx

Jack Saturday: Good example. "The privilege of the few" is no argument for the many, is it? -- despite that such an argument underlies the absurd excesses and profound miseries of the profit system in an age of abundance.

F.B. ("Bat Man"): I agree that not many people are lucky enough to have a fulfilling occupation, but Levi also says that it is not known to many that love of one's job is a practical path towards happiness--as opposed to idleness for instance. Work--to some extent, any kind of work--and thinking about other people are if nothing else a way to relieve tension and find meaning. This is psychology, not religion. Maybe Kafka would have gone crazy and killed himself if he'd been "fortunate" enough to share a room with his ego all day.

Jack Saturday: There are all kinds of things in Maybe-land, you seem to prefer the most miserable.
xxx

F.B. ("Bat Man"): Most people wish they could do nothing all day and work to earn the kind of money that will allow them to do so,

Jack Saturday: "Most people"-- but not you, perhaps? I personally have never met anyone who wants to do nothing all day.

F.B. ("Bat Man"): except that when they succeed or they win a lottery, they sometimes spend the money in six months and do drugs etc. Because--thank God!--most people have no significant artistic tension and, however much they complain of their jobs, they wouldn't know what to do with their time. They have no calling so that they can at least "bear" jobs that are objectively horrid. Although--no, not "objectively": I suspect that if a man were intelligent and observant and perceptive enough, no job would be completely alienating.
xxx

Jack Saturday: The joy of working for Wal-Mart and going "home" to sleep in their car because they can't afford rent? The pleasure of writing ads with subversive messages to children that it is cool to smoke? The delight of working making weapons to drop on innocent families abroad? Make a game of it, make it fun! How about Hitler's promise of jobs for depressed Germany? Helpers hired at Auschwitz were quoted as saying something like "a job is a job." Maybe Primo Levy would approve! I hope that that particular example reveals that the loose term "work" has been glued to selling labor to a master, and then stuffed with morality, so that people don't even question the morality of the job itself, or whether it has a positive or destructive effect on the community. Obey! Do what you're told, and you're cool. Only wage-slavery is honorable work. Hitler gave us all a peek into the results of "virtuous" obedience. Arbeit Macht Frei is the motto over the entrance to Auschwitz. Eichmann argued the "virtue of obedience" at his trial in Jerusalem.
xxx

It's probably right that your choice of words excludes at least half-- more now-- of the working population, women, 50% (in Canada) of whom are sexually harassed on the job, and afraid to file complaints for fear of being fired. Perhaps they are not intelligent or observant.
xxx

F.B. ("Bat Man"): Also, hardships have been a blessing for scores of writers. Including Kafka: who knows what vapid prose he would've written had he not had exactly that sort of job.

Jack Saturday: Maybe-land! I'll try it myself: If freed, Kafka would have written superlative, joyful brilliant prose expressing happiness and guiding us to freedom. "Ode To Joy" in novel form. I like my Maybe-land story better than yours.
xxx

F.B. ("Bat Man"): Or Dickens, or Jack London, or Shakespeare, or Mark Twain. Dostoevskij went to prison. Take Hemingway: he couldn't have had much time to write when he was a small-time reporter, but he killed himself not then but when he was a rich writer who had all the leisure in the world to write... what? The good life is almost invariably a curse for an artist. Some of the people you quote seem to be contending that living and its demands are an obstacle to writing, but I think that you can only write yourself, and if you're nothing you can write of nothing. Many writers have turned drunkards when they got into some money and "finally" could devote all their time to writing--except they hadn't a single decent line in them any more.
xxxxxx
Jack Saturday: Here's a transcription of a bit from a Robert Bly talk, starting by quoting William Blake: "Too much sorrow is like a blight in the tree. Was the tree ever helped by its blight?"-- "and don't go round and say now that the fruit is the consequence of the blight. That's what the confessional poets did, they did so much damage that way-- saying their art came out of their blight, and Blake says 'don't you lie to me.'"
xxx

F.B. ("Bat Man"): I myself write. I have never been published and I never may be published, but I don't believe anyone owes me anything--the world, or the "system" or anyone else. Besides, if "it" owed _me_ something, everyone else would deserve as much.

Jack Saturday: Exactly! Notice that my site is titled, "The World Owes You A Living." You-- and me both. And everyone else on the planet.

Ever use a road, Bat Man? Did you build it yourself? A car--or a bicycle-- built it from scratch, did you? A telephone-- strung it up yourself? A computer-- cooked it up independent of the thousands of inventors and laborers who came before you? You "earned" the billion-dollar systems you use and take for granted every day? Ever read a book from a library? Use an electric light? It is too obvious for many to see the tremendous wealth they take for granted that came from the laborers and inventors of history, whom they can never pay. History gave you those things, from hydro systems to transportation systems bringing you your food to combines that farm it-- whether or not it "owed" you these things. You got them anyway. I suggest you give up all that stuff and go naked into the woods, if you think it spoils people to accept our industrial heritage.

F.B. ("Bat Man"): I do believe that writers should be supported more, but it's a very fine line between getting a shelter and money because you write and writing because it affords you a shelter and money. But mostly I wanted to write to you because I felt the main idea in most of those quotations--at least when you read them all together so that they form a sort of pattern--is that work is bad.
xxx

Jack Saturday: Wage-Slavery is bad-- not work. I don't believe writers should be supported any more than anyone else; everyone, none excluded, should be supplied with the living essentials, and decent hygienic systems-- why? Because humans have created a horn of plenty, and it is immoral to keep that huge supply to 1% of the population who have so little imagination and so much power that they try to kill the imagination in generations of children.
xxx

F.B. ("Bat Man"): and that ideally most people ought to have the possibility of doing whatever they chose with themselves. Thank God they can't! Saramago mentions "most of the earth's inhabitants": they "work to get by" trapped in the drudgery of their meaningless jobs. For one thing, it's your choice to attach no meaning to _whatever_ you do; also, if those people could do without their jobs, most of them would shoot heroin rather than write the Divine Comedy over again.

Jack Saturday: Ah! So you are tempted to shoot up, are you? The devil has work for your idle hands, eh? Trace that line back, you'll find yourself in an austere old stone protestant church; that string is tied to the mouldy skeleton of John Calvin, the serial killer and sexual predator, the "father of the work ethic."

F.B. ("Bat Man"): Saramago himself had his share of boring jobs, I seem to remember. Then he became a successful writer: no doubt he became a happier human being--which maybe is more important than art--but as a writer I have doubts he will survive Steinbeck or Dostoevskij. He writes exactly the kind of thing you'd expect of an idle writer: he has all the time and paper in the world and not a drop of hard-earned wisdom.

Jack Saturday: Perhaps you should write to the Nobel committee and ask them to withdraw his prize.

F.B. ("Bat Man"): Or consider the case of all those university professors turned novelists who are satisfied with their occupations and have enough time to write. They have no real urgency to write creative prose and their novels are ultimately irrelevant in many cases.

Jack Saturday: Irrelevant to whom, my friend? I'm not saying you don't have the right to judge literature and set yourself above, for instance, the Nobel committee-- but hey, everyone has the same credential to judge. But anyone who lets you decide what is relevant to them is an unfortunate case.
xxx

F.B. ("Bat Man"): And what about Henry Miller? "Starve to death"? He may have starved, but not to death; at least not before he turned 88 years of age.

Jack Saturday: He said "starve to death" rather than "earn a living." So he quit a lousy job (read Tropic of Capricorn) and risked starvation to follow a calling, and arrived!

F.B. ("Bat Man"): Rilke said to the famous "young poet" that "life is always right".
xxx

Jack Saturday: Yes, and as I quoted Brendan Behan in the quotes Pages, "A job is death without the dignity."

Among those quotations was Thoreau: "I don't need the police of meaningless labor to regulate me." Calvin said that "the damned must police each other." You sound like a great spokesperson for Calvin's damned police, F.B. and if you have writing talent, perhaps it would be best to find a master to tell you what, when, and how to write.
xxx

F.B. ("Bat Man"): I can't explain why I couldn't keep my disagreement to myself, but there it is.

Jack Saturday: Same here!

F.B. ("Bat Man"): Goodbye

F.B.
xxx

Jack Saturday: Take care, F.B.

xxx
Here's a chunk of Henry Miller for your further reading pleasure:

Henry Miller: In a few months I was sitting at Sunset Place hiring and firing like a demon. It was a slaughterhouse, so help me God. The thing was senseless from the bottom up. A waste of men, material and effort. A hideous farce against a backdrop of sweat and misery. But just as I had accepted the spying so I accepted the hiring and firing and all that went with it. I said Yes to everything. If the vice-president decreed that no cripples were to be hired I hired no cripples. If the vice-president said that all messengers over forty-five were to be fired without notice I fired them without notice. I did everything they instructed me to do, but in such a way that they had to pay for it. When there was a strike I folded my arms and waited for it to blow over. But I first saw to it that it cost them a good penny. The whole system was so rotten, so inhuman, so lousy, so hopelessly corrupt and complicated, that it would have taken a genius to put any sense or order into it, to say nothing of human kindness or consideration. I was up against the whole system of American labor, which is rotten at both ends. I was the fifth wheel on the wagon and neither side had any use for me, except to exploit me. In fact, everybody was being exploited-- the president and his gang by the unseen powers, the employees by the officials, and so on and around, in and out and through the whole works. From my little perch at Sunset Place I had a bird's eye view of the whole American society. It was like a page out of the telephone book. Alphabetically, numerically, statistically, it made sense. But when you looked at it up close, when you examined the pages separately, or the parts separately, when you examined one lone individual and what constituted him, examined the air he breathed, the life he led, the chances he risked, you saw something so foul and degrading, so low, so miserable, so utterly hopeless and senseless, that it was worse than looking into a volcano. You could see the whole American life-- economically, politically, morally, spiritually, artistically, statistically, pathologically. It looked like a grand chancre on a worn-out cock. It looked worse than that, really, because you couldn't even see anything resembling a cock any more. Maybe in the past this thing had life, did produce something, did at least give a moment's pleasure, a moment's thrill. But looking at it from where I sat it looked rottener than the wormiest cheese. The wonder was that the stench of it didn't carry 'em off. . . . I'm using the past tense all the time, but of course it's the same now, maybe even a bit worse. At least now we're getting it full stink.
Henry Miller, Tropic Of Capricorn

Layin' Pipe

2011-08-30T18:19:00.000-07:00

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 698-700

2011-08-29T15:30:00.000-07:00

Workers in China’s export heartland of Guangdong make $200 a month assembling the consumer goods Americans hold so dear. In Jiangsu, they make $175. It seems that isn’t cheap enough.

Terry Gou, the founder and chairman of Foxconn, which employs one million workers in China making Apple iPads, H.P. computers and other electronic devices, announced at a company party in Shenzen last month that he would deploy a million robots at his plants by 2013 to do much of the labor currently performed by human hands.
Cheap Robots vs. Cheap Labor
New York Times
Published: August 14, 2011

Most people in analysis are there because nobody has had time to see them or hear them. They’ve spent their lives trying to please somebody else, so they’ve never found their own values.

Marion Woodman

Awake

I am awake now. Wow. How long has it taken me to realize that nobody on this earth has the right to tell me what to do? Oh, there are plenty folk who have bestowed upon themselves the right to say what I should do, and many of these people have had the support of others who also believe in hierarchies. But if I sit with the idea long enough, it becomes unfamiliar. Bosses? Yes, they pay me to produce for them something that will make them more money than they pay me, but that should be the limit of the exchange. How is it that I have been acting as if these folk have some extra power over me? Some mystique.

Now that I am awake, though, I cannot even sell my time to them for money, because they insist on telling me HOW to produce the thing they are buying from me. What's worse, they sometimes set up mini bosses, little replicas of themselves to enforce their idea of optimal labor. Even more deplorable, is that they don't allow me to use my full spectrum of powers on their behalf. They request the least creative or effective products from me. Did I say request? I meant demand to the exclusion of any improvement.

Pesky thing about waking up is that I am going to have to change the entire way I run my life. Because now, the very notion of having a boss is anathema. I just can't do it. Stay tuned for the revolution. Let the fires burn.

Posted by White Picket Dense at 10:58 PM

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom: 2 Poems

2011-08-22T08:29:00.000-07:00

And They Obey

Carl Sandburg

Smash down the cities.
Knock the walls to pieces.
Break the factories and cathedrals, warehouses
and homes
Into loose piles of stone and lumber and black
burnt wood:
You are the soldiers and we command you.

Build up the cities.

Set up the walls again.
Put together once more the factories and cathedrals,
warehouses and homes
Into buildings for life and labor:
You are workmen and citizens all: We
command you.

Internal Exile

Richard Cecil

Although most people I know were condemned
years ago by Judge Necessity
to life in condos near a freeway exit
convenient to their twice-a-day commutes
through traffic jams to jobs that they dislike,
they didn't bury their heads in their hands
and cry, Oh no! when sentence was pronounced:
FORTY YEARS ACCOUNTING IN DULUTH!
or TENURE AT SOUTHWEST MISSOURI STATE!
Instead, they mumbled, not bad. It could be worse,
when the bailiff, Fate, led them away
to Personnel to fill out payroll forms
and have their smiling ID photos snapped.
And that's what they still mumble every morning
just before their snooze alarms go off
when Fluffy nuzzles them out of their dreams
of making out with movie stars on beaches.
They rise at five a.m. and feed their cats
and drive to work and work and drive back home
and feed their cats and eat and fall asleep
while watching Evening News's fresh disasters-
blown-up bodies littering a desert
fought over for the last three thousand years,
and smashed-to-pieces million dollar houses
built on islands swept by hurricanes.
Its soothing to watch news about the places
where people are dying (literally) to live
when you live in a place with no attractions-
mountains, coastline, history-- like here,
where none aspire to live, though many do.
A great place to work, with no distractions
is how my interviewer first described it
nineteen years ago, when I was hired.
And, though he moved the day that he retired
to his dream house in the uplands with a vista,
he wasn't lying- working's better here
than some misplaced attempt at having fun.
Is that the way it is where you're stuck too?

Professor Talks Sense

2011-08-17T16:24:00.001-07:00

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 696-697

2011-08-15T20:39:00.000-07:00

Our leaders have asked for “shared sacrifice.” But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched.
While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks.
…
If you make money with money, as some of my super-rich friends do, your percentage may be a bit lower than mine. But if you earn money from a job, your percentage will surely exceed mine — most likely by a lot.
…
Some of my brethren may shun work but they all like to invest. (I can relate to that.)

I know well many of the mega-rich and, by and large, they are very decent people. They love America and appreciate the opportunity this country has given them. Many have joined the Giving Pledge, promising to give most of their wealth to philanthropy. Most wouldn’t mind being told to pay more in taxes as well, particularly when so many of their fellow citizens are truly suffering.
…
My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice.
Stop Coddling the Super-Rich
By WARREN E. BUFFETT

New York Times

Published: August 14, 2011

Given modern technology and wealth, American citizens should not be living in poverty. The statistics demonstrate that we now live in a neo-feudal society. In comparison to the wealthiest one-tenth of one percent of the population, who are sitting on top of tens of trillions of dollars in wealth, we are essentially propagandized peasants.

The fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans are struggling to get by, while tens of trillions of dollars are consolidated within a small fraction of the population, is a crime against humanity.
EXCLUSIVE: Analysis of Financial Terrorism in America: Over 1 Million Deaths Annually, 62 Million People With Zero Net Worth, As the Economic Elite Make Off With $46 Trillion
David DeGraw

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 694-695

2011-08-08T14:11:00.000-07:00

America has already reached a pinnacle of productive efficiency and prowess impossible to imagine just a century ago. Yet, the Productivity Dividends of an entire era of progress have remained undeclared. It's as if we do not understand, as a people, how to move into the assurance of abundance that we have already collectively created.

Apprehending Postscarcity

Currencies go into and out of circulation, not distribution. It's not about redistribution at all, lunkheads, it's about sustainable global resource circulation. If you clot up 43% of your blood in 1% of your body, it doesn't matter where the clot is; the whole body is going down. People and societies are complex adaptive biological systems, not rigorous, reductionist mathematical formulations.

Capitalism ++

Rich man's guru: Bore us with luxury

Enough?

2011-08-05T07:36:00.000-07:00

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 692-693

2011-08-01T08:46:00.000-07:00

A fifth former News International employee who worked with News Of the World journalists at this time said its reporters were under "unbelievable, phenomenal pressure," treated harshly by bosses who would shout abuse in their faces and keep a running total of their bylines. Journalists were driven by a terror of failing. If they didn't regularly get stories, they feared, they would be fired. That meant they competed ruthlessly with each other.

Special Report: Inside Rebekah Brooks' News of the World

By Georgina Prodhan and Kate Holton
LONDON | Sat Jul 16, 2011 8:31am EDT
Reuters

We hear a lot about "austerity". Well, austerity has to, finally, visit the super-rich. There are millions (sic) of millionaires and billionaires in the United States and Europe. As governments go bust, the trillions of dollars of these people must be heavily taxed or confiscated to end the unending suffering of the other 95% of humanity. My god, do I sound like a (choke, gasp) socialist?
William Blum

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 689-691

2011-07-25T17:19:00.000-07:00

There’s an old quotation, attributed to various people, that always comes to mind when I look at public policy: “You do not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed.” Now that lack of wisdom is on full display, as policy elites on both sides of the Atlantic bungle the response to economic trauma, ignoring all the lessons of history.
The Lesser Depression
By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York TimesPublished: July 21, 2011

Many critics have scoffed at Murdoch’s transformative education rhetoric and his goals to “extend the reach of great teaching.” Is this “philanthropic” initiative to evaluate teachers and students through standardized test scores a testament to his commitment to “great teaching,” or might it reveal a different sort of dedication—one to earning great profit?

How Rupert Murdoch Could Get His Hands On Your Kid's Information--And It's Legal

AlterNet / By Erica Hellerstein,
July 20, 2011

And, of course, to ever improve the dumbing down of the population. --Jack

By presenting only protocols, outcome-based education (which is, in reality, mind control or "programming") is the openly stated goal of public schooling, not general, understanding-based education. Our country is populated by the products of this policy of having "only" protocols presented and committed to memory. These "products" are designed to be obedient soldiers, pliable employees, imprudent consumers of goods and services, and otherwise uncritical servants of established corporate and statist interests.

In not being trained to think critically and creatively, students are programmed in reading and thinking only to the level of abiding to instructions (e.g., reading a procedural manual or slavishly following edicts from "on high" issued by so called authorities).

Unfortunately, this is a mind numbing action which becomes insidiously habituated. To be under the rule of task masters; to be dictated as to what to think by others or via the media; to labor under the illusion of being a well-informed individual; to become a stillborn adult, a life-long adolescent - these are the results of our century old institution. The ideal of self-determination is trampled mercilessly and in its place grows self-alienation. In being aggressively indoctrinated not to think . . . that is, in being programmed against our very nature, is it any wonder most of us live in a constant state of low-level fear and are anxiously disoriented in an ocean of chaos without the ability to judge as to what are appropriate and beneficial goods and values?

Tragedy & Hope

Trivium 5-Page Summary

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 686-688

2011-07-18T08:55:00.000-07:00

Last week I spent a few days in the Deep South — a thousand miles from the moneyed canyons of Manhattan and the prattle of Washington politics — talking to everyday people, blue-collar workers, people not trying to win the future so much as survive the present.

They do hard jobs and odd jobs — any work they can find to keep the lights on and the children fed.

x
No one mentioned the asinine argument about the debt ceiling. No one. Life is pressing down on them so hard that they can barely breathe.
…
They are people whose bodies melt every night in a hot bath, then stiffen by sunrise, so much so that it takes pills for them to get out of bed without pain.
They, Too, Sing America

By CHARLES M. BLOW
New York Times
Published: July 15, 2011

History's economic and political power structures have always fearfully abhorred idle people as potential troublemakers, yet Nature never abhors seemingly idle trees, grass, snails, coral reefs, and clouds in the sky... ...I noted that nature did not require hydrogen to "earn a living" before allowing hydrogen to behave in the unique manner in which it does. Nature does not require that any of its intercomplementing members earn a living.
R. Buckminster Fuller

The intelligent use of the world's resources will provide for all human needs, and we have more than enough resources to take good care of every person on earth.
Jacque Fresco

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 684-685

2011-07-11T11:57:00.000-07:00

What, after all, is work? Nuances aside (as insightful as exploring them can be), work is production forced by and for survival. Its objectionable aspect isn't production, it's forced labor to live.

Bob Black

Until I was well into my thirties I almost always thought of my jobs as interruptions, intrusions into the parts of life on which I could become closest to being me. But gradually, by thousands of steps, each as insignificant as the twitch of a second hand, we get broken in, by infinitesimal stages we change, from rebellious colts to seasoned, stolid wheelhorses. Somehow we come not merely to accept the harness, but to need it. To be deeply uneasy, even deeply afraid, without it.

G. J. Meyer
Scenes From The Downsized Life
July 1995 Harper's

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 682-683

2011-07-04T19:41:00.000-07:00

Learning is significantly important for Laszlo. Learning leads to differences and creativity--and creates "true individuals."

The human mind has led to the creation of more technologically sophisticated societies, advanced societies that have somewhat freed themselves from the basic sphere of survival. In turn, an advanced society--more free from the raw struggle of survival-- propagates culture. Of course this is true for individuals too! Such advancement allows both persons and societies to pursue "higher needs" such as aesthetics, intellectual pursuits, and the quest for ultimate meaning.

Consciousness In The Cosmos: Perspective of Mind: Ervin Laszlo
Beatrix Murrell

I would love to know how to set us free, whether it be a word, strategy, different approach…whatever. I am willing to try. The desire to be free is definitly winning, unfortunately the need for money to live is keeping me still, at least I have recognized I am a slave and so tired of it all. You get no where at times in jobs.
Kristen Perrotta said on Your Thoughts on How to Become Free

May 5, 2011

I hear you, Kristen.

Millions of Americans feel the same way.

gerry

Gerry Spence's blog

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 680, 681

2011-06-27T07:38:00.000-07:00

True guilt is guilt at the obligation one owes to oneself to be oneself. False guilt is guilt felt at not being what other people feel one ought to be or assume that one is.

R. D. Laing (1927-89), British psychiatrist,
The Self and Others, ch. 10 (1961)

First I was dying to finish my high school and start college; And then I was dying to finish college and start working; Then I was dying to marry and have children; And then I was dying for my children to grow old enough so I could go back to work. But then I was dying to retire. And now I am dying.

Unattributed at
Reflection of Perfection blog

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 678, 679

2011-06-20T08:10:00.000-07:00

Of course, the same men and women who rampaged so freely after the hockey game have today returned to their mind-numbing jobs and are once again the kind of repressed, tax-paying, dissociated people who keep the whole mess going. And that fact I find more terrible and alarming than all the broken windows and burning cars.
Thank God for the Hockey Hooligans:Coming of Age in Canada
By Kevin D. Annett
Thanks to Lucas Trottier and June Bender

i see all of the insanity around me & i want nothing to do with it or others in my behafe but in the system i live in in the USA if i do not work for money i can not have food so i die.
all the jobs there r, r just jobs that Whore you & HURT OTHERS I DONT WANT TO LIE ANY MORE OR POISON OTHERS or make mean humans rich.

so there is no job that a decent or good human can have so all i can see is to die off in protest like gondi in our world it is ok to be killed if it is from being poor...xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
vishesfishes
comment on
Jacque Fresco - Are we educated yet?

Wise Old Man

2011-06-16T16:16:00.001-07:00

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 675-677

2011-06-13T12:37:00.000-07:00

[M]uch of the profits American companies are realizing comes from the firing of their employees.
U.S. Companies Making Record Profits -- Because They Invest in Machines, Not Workers
Steven D
Booman Tribune
Fri Jun 10th, 2011

Companies that are looking for a good
deal aren’t seeing one in new workers.

Workers are getting more expensive while equipment

is getting cheaper, and the combination is encouraging

companies to spend on machines rather than people.
Companies Spend on Equipment, Not Workers
By CATHERINE RAMPELL
New York Times
Published: June 9, 2011

Contractors for Fruit of the Loom, Hanes and Levi’s worked in close concert with the US Embassy when they aggressively moved to block a minimum wage increase for Haitian assembly zone workers, the lowest-paid in the hemisphere, according to secret State Department cables.

The factory owners told the Haitian Parliament that they were willing to give workers a 9-cents-per-hour pay increase to 31 cents per hour to make T-shirts, bras and underwear for US clothing giants like Dockers and Nautica.

But the factory owners refused to pay 62 cents per hour, or $5 per day, as a measure unanimously passed by the Haitian Parliament in June 2009 would have mandated. And they had the vigorous backing of the US Agency for International Development and the US Embassy when they took that stand.
…
In April 2008 Haiti was rocked by the so-called Clorox food riots, named after hunger so painful that it felt like bleach in your stomach.
WikiLeaks Haiti: Let Them Live on $3 a Day

The Nation

Dan Coughlin and Kim Ives

June 1, 2011

The World Owes You A Living

2011-06-11T13:51:00.000-07:00

Hi friends! Come on over to my radio station, I've taken episode 1 of my 6-part associational documentary The World Owes You A Living off the store shelf and put it up for all to hear for free on my Extraordinary Discourse podcast. Thanks to those who bought copies of the CDs, from college students listening on their bicycles to nurses, to the actress who said "even my parents liked it" to teachers who used it in their courses, to the writers and journalists and professors who affirmed it, especially those who took the time to write reviews, particularly C. L'Hirondelle of L.I.F.E., J. Hughes of IEET, Karl Widerquist of BIG , and the British artist Edward Picot.
AA

if there is trouble in trying to download episodes from the podcast site, you can download at Internet Archive, here.
AA

Further episodes will appear over the upcoming months.
AA

Best wishes to all
AA

Jack

Valediction

2011-06-09T08:42:00.000-07:00

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 673-674

2011-06-06T06:57:00.000-07:00

…the worker is left with a catch-22: either he [sic] can continue to earn wages disproportionate to the labour power he is putting in, or he can walk out on his contract but face the destitution that soon accompanies transition into the world of unemployment. His predicament is a tragic one indeed, and he is blinded to any prospect of radical change by the ideology instilled in him by the political superstructure, dass Arbeit macht Frei. He is unable to cultivate himself – and so transcend ideology – because he has neither the time nor the means, and so he is increasingly alienated from his creative potential, his peers (due to the competition for work), at times his family, and above all, himself. He is held captive by the capitalist.
…
Where does the graduate fit into all of this? It’s probably obvious. By virtue of the fundamental principle of the LTV, the graduate intern is actually worse off – at least in the short-term – than Marx’s noble proletarian. This is quite simply because his labour power is being handed over to the capitalist for free. It almost resembles a feudal system, wherein the serf worships the squire; the intern, desperate to raise himself into the upper echelons of the capitalist sphere, takes what he can get, even if he receives no wage over a period of months, and as long as the work doesn’t resemble what he views as ‘poor man’s labour’. He will be easily fobbed off by the oft illusory sugar cubes the capitalist dangles in front of him. And his predicament is not so much tragic as it is pathetic…
…
what would Karl Marx make of this? As I said, he would laugh in disbelief, disbelief that the capitalist system has created slaves within its own class. Disbelief that these slaves have been ‘culturally enlightened’ and supposedly see the flaws in the system, yet continue to submit themselves to exploitation. They are a sub-culture existing within the middle class itself, and they are full of contradictions: impoverished yet decadent; desperate but unwilling; culturally enlightened yet utterly naive – they are magnets for exploitation.
WWMD- what would Marx do?
Interns Anonymous

Each of us has some kind of tenacious family ancestry to call on in our work. No matter the glass and steel look of our office, somewhere in each of our backgrounds lies a layered, gritty complexity, an inheritance of people who came through. Life is too difficult to survive without tenacity and perseverance, and we all hold an unroken thread of survivorship by the very fact that we are here, the latest in a very long line of survivors. Some of our ancestors were dogged, silent, and inarticulate in their holding on, some courageously outspoken, but imagine their disappointment in each of us, looking from the perspective of the particular heavens they inhabit, when we do not take another step for them. When we do not make a frontier of our own lives. If they were quiet in their own lives, they must want us to speak out; if they were loud and vociferous, they must want us to be more tempered and wiser with the fire, but none of them surely, can stomach our willigness to hide ourselves in a bland compliance to powers or careers to which we have made ourselves slaves.
David Whyte
Crossing The Unknown Sea

Viewer Discretion Advised

2011-06-02T07:14:00.001-07:00

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 670-672

2011-05-30T09:14:00.000-07:00

The latest economic numbers have not been good. Jobless claims rose last week….

…

When the economy weakened in the first quarter, Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, and Obama administration officials said the slowdown was just a blip and growth would soon pick up. Today, many Wall Street economists are saying much the same thing: any day now, things will improve…

The Economy Is Wavering. Does Washington Notice?
By DAVID LEONHARDT
New York Times
Published: May 26, 2011

At just five feet tall and 86 pounds, the HRP-4 may be the office grunt of tomorrow. The humanoid robot, developed by Tokyo-based Kawada Industries and Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Sciences and Technology, is programmed to deliver mail, pour coffee, and recognize its co-workers' faces. On Jan. 28, Kawada will begin selling it to research institutions and universities around the world…
…
the HRP-4 doesn't goof around on Facebook, spend hours tweaking its fantasy football roster, or require a lunch break. Noriyuki Kanehira, the robotic systems manager at Kawada, believes the HRP-4 could easily take on a "secretarial role...in the near future." Sooner or later, he says, "humanoid robots can move [into] the office field."
…
As a result of breakthroughs in technology, however, a new breed of machines may soon be filing papers and pushing the mail cart. In a 2007 issue of Scientific American, Bill Gates predicted that the future would bring a "robot in every home." In the foreseeable future, though, it may be a robot in every cubicle…
The Robot in the Next Cubicle By Eric Spitznagel
Bloomberg.co

Man [sic] did not enter society to become worse than he was before, nor to have fewer rights than he had before, but to have those rights better secured. His natural rights are the foundation of his civil rights... Natural rights are those which appertain to man in right of his existence... Society grants him nothing. Every man is proprietor in society, and draws on the capital as a matter of right.
Thomas Paine
Rights Of Man

Gabor Maté

2011-05-26T09:47:00.000-07:00

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 668-669

2011-05-23T09:06:00.000-07:00

It has been reported that Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s defense might be that any encounter was consensual — that, in effect, “she asked for it.” During my time managing, the only thing a housekeeper ever asked me for was to leave early, or have Christmas off (both of which I had to deny — as I said, the housekeeper’s is the hardest job in the hotel). All she wants to do is finish up her work and go home to her family.
Behind Closed, Sequentially Numbered Doors
By JACOB TOMSKY
New York Times
Published: May 22, 2011

On April 19th, McDonald's launched its first-ever national hiring day, signing up 62,000 new workers at stores throughout the country. For some context, that's more jobs created by one company in a single day than the net job creation of the entire U.S. economy in 2009. And if that boggles the mind, consider how many workers applied to local McDonald's franchises that day and left empty-handed: 938,000 of them. With a 6.2% acceptance rate in its spring hiring blitz, McDonald’s was more selective than the Princeton, Stanford, or Yale University admission offices.
How the McEconomy Bombed the American Worker
The Hollowing Out of the Middle Class
By Andy Kroll
TomDispatch.com

Violence

2011-05-20T09:04:00.000-07:00

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 666-667

2011-05-17T09:51:00.000-07:00

Women express a greater desire than men to maintain what they consider a healthy balance between work and life outside their job.

Yes, that’s it.

Did you catch that?

Women simply don’t want to sell our soul to all the B.S. that comes with fitting into the traditional business model. (Key word there being traditional.)

I don’t see this shift as a bad thing, or a sad thing, or some huge problem that needs to be addressed. I see it as a celebration that women are standing up for what we want. We simply want to choose where, when, and how we want to work. And the traditional, male-designed workplaces don’t offer this option. That’s why women are running away in droves from climbing the corporate ladder.
…
They are creating their own definitions of success.

Women are leading the change for combining business with humanity, with family, with—dare I say it—love.

Don’t get me wrong… I applaud the women who paved the way up the corporate ladder. They showed us anything was possible, and women are still sorely needed at the top of our nation’s corporations.

But I’m seeing more women than ever choose something different.

Something better.
Are Women Less Tolerant of the Bullshit That Comes With “Success”?
Ali Brown
Forbes

Our way of life is a crock of shit. Two people slaving in the most meaningless, excruciatingly mind-numbing jobs for the benefit of stock owners frequently cannot afford a life with security and autonomy. They live in worry about how to pay the bills. They spend their days doing what they're told by some jackass who doesn't give a damn about them, and probably barely cares about the company they all work for.
Waytoomanybottlesofrum

Wise Woman

2011-05-14T18:03:00.001-07:00

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 664-665

2011-05-09T12:37:00.000-07:00

After more than a quarter-century as a professional economist, I have a confession to make: There is a lot I don’t know about the economy.
If You Have the Answers, Tell Me
By N. GREGORY MANKIW
New York Times
Published: May 7, 2011
N. Gregory Mankiw is a professor of economics at Harvard.

What's disappearing is the middle, the decent-paying jobs that helped expand the American middle class in the mid-twentieth century and that, if the present lopsided recovery is any indication, are now going the way of typewriters and landline telephones.

…
What's causing this polarization? An obvious culprit is technology.
How the McEconomy Bombed the American Worker
The Hollowing Out of the Middle Class
By Andy Kroll
TomDispatch.com

Don Tapscott, Whole New Paradigm

2011-05-06T13:15:00.001-07:00

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 661-663

2011-05-02T13:27:00.000-07:00

Spain's jobless rate tops 21% as all major sectors lose jobs
Headline
Al Goodman,
CNN World
April 29, 2011

About one-fourth of Egyptian workers under 25 are unemployed, a statistic that is often cited as a reason for the revolution there. In the United States, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in January an official unemployment rate of 21 percent for workers ages 16 to 24.

My generation was taught that all we needed to succeed was an education and hard work. Tell that to my friend from high school who studied Chinese and international relations at a top-tier college. He had the misfortune to graduate in the class of 2009, and could find paid work only as a lifeguard and a personal trainer. Unpaid internships at research institutes led to nothing. After more than a year he moved back in with his parents.

Millions of college graduates in rich nations could tell similar stories.

Educated, Unemployed and Frustrated

By MATTHEW C. KLEIN
New York Times
Published: March 20, 2011

Mr. Ishizawa, who was finally allowed to leave, is not a nuclear specialist; he is not even an employee of the Tokyo Electric Power Company, the operator of the crippled plant. He is one of thousands of untrained, itinerant, temporary laborers who handle the bulk of the dangerous work at nuclear power plants here and in other countries, lured by the higher wages offered for working with radiation. Collectively, these contractors were exposed to levels of radiation about 16 times as high as the levels faced by Tokyo Electric employees last year, according to Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, which regulates the industry. These workers remain vital to efforts to contain the nuclear crisis at the Fukushima nuclear plants.

They are emblematic of Japan’s two-tiered work force, with an elite class of highly paid employees at top companies and a subclass of laborers who work for less pay, have less job security and receive fewer benefits. Such labor practices have both endangered the health of these workers and undermined safety at Japan’s 55 nuclear reactors, critics charge.

Japanese Workers Braved Radiation for a Temp Job

By HIROKO TABUCHI

New York Times

Published: April 9, 2011

Slaves And Prozac

2011-04-29T10:38:00.000-07:00

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 659, 660

2011-04-25T09:33:00.000-07:00

Every individual relies on thousands of individuals in society, and historically many more tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. In fact, it's been calculated that this technological inheritance is responsible for something like ninety percent of the wealth that's generated today. It's just an immense inheritance. So the question is, who does that inheritance belong to? Who should be the beneficiary of all that technological development from the past?
Linda McQuaig

We have become a Capitalocracy. Our country is ruled by money. The lack of paper money or digital money is no longer a limitation. I repeat, money is not a limitation. The lack of resources is the only limitation that we have. Technology allows us to preserve and extend the amount and use of our resources. This is where your real wealth is. Citing the lack of money, the deficit, the size of government or fiscal responsibility as an excuse for not taking care of the people and the people's business is complete nonsense coupled with incompetence. These problems should have been solved 90 years ago.
COMMON SENSE 3.1

Sources Of Crime and Sociopathic Leaders And Followers

2011-04-21T06:58:00.000-07:00

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 657-658

2011-04-18T09:52:00.000-07:00

With the exception of climate change, the most significant and most important change that I would pursue in Parliament is the change in the way that income support is delivered. Instead of the current inefficient hodge-podge of programmes that stigmatize users and can often discourage moves to independence, I would promote a guaranteed livable income which explicitly recognizes our commitment to deliver the basic necessities to every Canadian. From this base, all Canadians would have an incentive to work to their ability in order to build a better life for themselves and their families.
We are spending a lot of money to keep people in poverty. It is not only morally wrong, it is stupid too.
Adriana Mugnatto-Hamu,
Green Party Candidate
For Toronto-Danforth
XXX

If you understand the true value and magnitude of technology, then you should understand there is no need for poverty, recessions, depressions, homelessness, unemployment, underemployment, deficits and the lack of healthcare. There is no need for the payment of bank interest, there is no need for taxes of any kind and there is no need to saddle our children with our debt and on and on. That means we are doing everything wrong. I understand that’s hard for a great many of us to believe. We are use to letting our government and big business do our thinking for us, so I will keep it very simple. For the most part, our technology has changed our world from a world of scarcity to a world of abundance. That means our old limitations don’t exist. We live in a totally different but opposite paradigm. If we persist in our old ways, we are dead.
COMMON SENSE 3.1

Young Turks and Joe Bageant

2011-04-15T09:01:00.000-07:00

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 654-656

2011-04-11T09:17:00.000-07:00

Why should I let the toad work

Squat on my life?

Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork

And drive the brute off?

Six days of the week it soils

With its sickening poison -

Just for paying a few bills!

That's out of proportion.

Lots of folk live on their wits:
Lecturers, lispers,
Losels, loblolly-men, louts-

They don't end as paupers;

Lots of folk live up lanes

With fires in a bucket,

Eat windfalls and tinned sardines-

they seem to like it.

Their nippers have got bare feet,

Their unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets - and yet
No one actually starves.

Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that's the stuff
That dreams are made on:

For something sufficiently toad-like

Squats in me, too;

Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,

And cold as snow

from

Toad

Philip Larkin

VVV

The hours of folly are measur'd by the clock, but of wisdom: no clock can measure.

William Blake

I was beside the master craftsman,

delighting him [sic] day after day,

ever at play in his presence,

at play everywhere on his earth,

delighting to be with the children of humanity.

And now, my children, listen to me

Happy are those who keep my ways.

Sophia (Wisdom),

Proverbs 8
(emphasis JS)

Automation Is Here

2011-04-07T12:06:00.000-07:00

These are the final three in an eight-part series available on YouTube. The full version is also available there, for the leisurites among us. These are WOL videos (Wow Out Loud).
Jack

Anti Wage-Slave, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 650-653

2011-04-04T08:32:00.000-07:00

Since modern man [sic] experiences himself both as the seller and as the commodity to be sold on the market, his [sic] self-esteem depends on conditions beyond his control. If he is "successful," he is valuable; if he is not, he is worthless. The degree of insecurity which results from this orientation can hardly be overestimated. If one feels that one's own value is not constituted primarily by the human qualities one possesses, but by one's success on a competitive market with ever-changing conditions, one's self-esteem is bound to be shaky and in constant need of confirmation by others. Hence one is driven to strive relentlessly for "success," and any setback is a severe threat to one's self-esteem; helplessness, insecurity, and inferiority feelings are the result. If the vicissitudes of the market are the judges of one's value, the sense of dignity and pride is destroyed.
Erich Fromm

According to Thompson an industrial work structure required a disciplined workforce. The fear of punishment or starvation was part of the processes of discipline, but for workers to be really effective they needed to feel committed to their work: this required the invention of the ideology of work, which originally had its roots in religion.

…the Protestant work ethic identified by the sociologist Max Weber enters the discussion. In the case of the weaving communities studied by Thompson the people were Methodists: it was Methodism, which stressed the value of discipline, hard work and frugality. Capitalists found it much more efficient to turn the labourer into his own slave-driver by inculcating in him an ideology of thankless, unrewarded toil in exchange for a place in heaven. `They weakened the poor from within, by adding to them the active ingredient of submission; and they fostered within the Methodist Church those elements most suited to make up the psychic component of the work-discipline of which the manufacturers stood most in need.’ (Thompson, 1963: 355).
Molly Scott Cato

Hard as it can be to land a job these days, getting one may not be nearly enough for basic economic security.
…
many of the jobs being added in retail, hospitality and home health care, to name a few categories, are unlikely to pay enough for workers to cover the cost of fundamentals like housing, utilities, food, health care, transportation and, in the case of working parents, child care.
Many Low-Wage Jobs Seen as Failing to Meet Basic Needs
By MOTOKO RICH
New York Times
Published: March 31, 2011

Should the nation’s wealth be redistributed? It has been and continues to be redistributed to a few people in a manner strikingly unhelpful.

Kurt Vonnegut

Wise Old Man

2011-03-31T20:06:00.000-07:00

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 647-649

2011-03-28T08:03:00.000-07:00

The master, the corporate power structure, has an insidious, built-in guarantee against reform, one that preserves the master’s perpetual power. The rich slave exploits the poor slave. The rich slave often accumulates hundreds, even thousands of times more wealth than the poor slave — usually from the sweat and toil of the poor slave. To justify his excesses, the rich slave proclaims he has worked harder and is self-made, while the poor slave is said to be irresponsible, lazy or stupid and entitled to what he earns which is often a mere pittance. By reason of his self interest, the rich slave refuses to recognize and renounce his own slavery and to join the poor slave in a mutual quest for freedom. Instead, the rich slave will fight for the master, the said corporate power structure, against his poorer brothers and sisters. But a few rich slaves are beginning to realize that riches do not provide freedom. Riches create only a different genre of slavery.

…

I say the master is dead because the corporation does not breathe, nor love, nor feel. Our life’s breaths can be counted, and to contribute our limited breaths for the greed of a dead master is monstrous at best. And slavery itself is a form of death. Yet slaves can be taught to embrace nearly any degradation, any dehumanizing condition – to love it, fight for it and to die for it, even with gratitude.

Gerry Spence

There are now approximately 14 million Americans who want a job and can't find one. According to the National Employment Law Project (NELP), if they stood side by side, they'd stretch from Bangor, Maine to Los Angeles, California and back.
8 Unemployed for Every Job Opening: What Are They Supposed to Do Once Their Benefits Run Out?
AlterNet / By Joshua Holland
AAA

Forbes magazine reports that there are 199 more billionaires this year than last. Moreover, the combined wealth of the world's 1,210 billionaires now totals $4.5 trillion dollars, up by nearly a trillion dollars from a year ago. So, see, the economy is not stuck in the doldrums, as so many party-poopers keep saying.

…

…their vast piles of wealth will soon begin to tinkle down on you and me -- just you wait and see!

And wait. And wait. And keep waiting.
Congress Making Themselves and Friends Richer, While Everyone Else Struggles to Make Ends Meet
Jim Hightower
truthout

Anti Wage Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 645, 646

2011-03-21T12:21:00.000-07:00

It took a long time to drive into people’s heads the idea that it is legitimate to rent yourself. Now that’s unfortunately pretty much accepted. So that’s internalizing oppression. Anyone who thinks it’s legitimate to be a wage laborer is internalizing oppression in a way which would have seemed intolerable to people in the mills, let’s say, a hundred and fifty years ago. …
Noam Chomsky

Schools and universities, on their knees for corporate dollars and their boards dominated by hedge fund and investment managers, have deformed education into the acquisition of narrow vocational skills that serve specialized corporate interests and create classes of drone-like systems managers.
Hris Hedges
Power Concedes Nothing Without a Demand
Truthdig

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 641-644

2011-03-14T17:37:00.000-07:00

The CEO of the company I work for got a six-figure bonus while the rest of us were told to work harder and generate ideas to make the company "more competitive in the marketplace" or other such business-speak drivel that my co-workers seem to eat up. No bonuses, no raises.
SomeoneElseNotMe

Labor automation through technology is at the bottom of every social transformation in human history.
Peter Joseph

what happens when peoples’ jobs are automated in a world where money is life? Gotta eat to live, gotta steal to eat, otherwise we get along. If every citizen were given an automatic stipend sufficient to support a modest life, thefts would plummet. You might complain about taxes or wealth redistribution, but mark my words, you are already taxed and your wealth is already redistributed: every time you shop, you pay a markup to offset theft, a highly inefficient and twisted dark-world version of basic income which rewards the unscrupulous.
…
Innovation Needs Basic Income

Conventional laboratories and research provide incremental progress, but they suffer diminishing returns. Bound by the need to put food on the table, would-be innovators are forced to take the cautious road. Real innovation needs thinking outside the box, and it is inherently risky and dangerous. Basic Income is needed so that people can pursue their ideas without the horrible prospect of losing the game of capitalism. Sure, most ideas will lead nowhere, but the occasional idea will revolutionize everything. In our society, when an idea leads nowhere, it’s a financial disaster. As teachers are being laid off, universities are hiring fewer professors, and automated education looms troublingly on the far horizon, there are fewer and fewer fallback positions for the failed innovator, and without a guaranteed stipend, doing anything new or risky will become increasingly suicidal. We need to avoid that, and provide a fertile environment for innovation, by guaranteeing everybody we won’t let them go hungry if their idea doesn’t pan out.
Ten reasons for guaranteed minimum income
Xmanuel

1. fix GOVERNMENT INEFFICIENCY: CITIZEN DIVIDEND

Use a portion of income taxes to just simply pay us a $50,000 per year dividend instead of sending our taxes down an unresponsive government bureaucracy sinkhole.

2. fix LABOR INEFFICIENCY: AUTOMATION

We get more productivity from people doing leisure activities than jobs. Machines should do all the jobs and people should do all the leisure activities. Use existing automation technology to immediately eliminate the need to do 70% of all the jobs we do and make working a job optional.
Demand The Good Life

Cheap Energy

2011-03-10T10:39:00.000-08:00

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 639-640

2011-03-07T12:21:00.000-08:00

“From a legal staffing viewpoint, it means that a lot of people who used to be allocated to conduct document review are no longer able to be billed out,” said Bill Herr, who as a lawyer at a major chemical company used to muster auditoriums of lawyers to read documents for weeks on end. “People get bored, people get headaches. Computers don’t.”

Computers are getting better at mimicking human reasoning — as viewers of “Jeopardy!” found out when they saw Watson beat its human opponents — and they are claiming work once done by people in high-paying professions. The number of computer chip designers, for example, has largely stagnated because powerful software programs replace the work once done by legions of logic designers and draftsmen.

Software is also making its way into tasks that were the exclusive province of human decision makers, like loan and mortgage officers and tax accountants.
…
Mike Lynch, the founder of Autonomy, is convinced that “legal is a sector that will likely employ fewer, not more, people in the U.S. in the future.” He estimated that the shift from manual document discovery to e-discovery would lead to a manpower reduction in which one lawyer would suffice for work that once required 500 and that the newest generation of software, which can detect duplicates and find clusters of important documents on a particular topic, could cut the head count by another 50 percent.

The computers seem to be good at their new jobs.
Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software
By JOHN MARKOFF
New York Times
Published: March 4, 2011
AAA

It’s no longer true that having a college degree guarantees that you’ll get a good job, and it’s becoming less true with each passing decade.

…

We need to guarantee the essentials, above all health care, to every citizen.

Degrees and Dollars

By PAUL KRUGMAN

New York Times

Published: March 6, 2011

(Emphasis JS)

Happiness and Motivation

2011-03-02T14:48:00.000-08:00

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 636-638

2011-02-28T13:15:00.000-08:00

The most controversial of the plans is the universal basic income, whose best-known contemporary proponent is Philippe van Parijs, a professor of economic and moral philosophy at the Catholic University of Louvain, in Belgium.
…
Mr van Parijs replies that the liberal principle of neutrality among conceptions of the good life, as articulated by such philosophers as Ronald Dworkin and the late John Rawls, demands that the state not favor the industrious (the "crazy," as Mr. van Parijs facetiously calls them) over the lazy.
David Glenn

AAA

If you want to be free, there is but one way; it is to guarantee an equally full measure of liberty to all your neighbors. There is no other.
Carl Schurz (1829 - 1906)

aaa

zzz

If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have paradise in a few years.

Bertrand Russell

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 633-635

2011-02-21T09:32:00.000-08:00

The whole art of Conservative politics in the 20th century is being deployed to enable wealth to persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power.

Aneurin Bevan,
Labour Party (UK) minister, 1897-1960

Thanks to Bill Blum

It is impossible for any man [sic] to contribute to the social system the physical equivalent of what it costs that system to sustain him from birth until death – and the higher the physical standard of living the greater the discrepancy. If, in addition to his food, he receives also the product of modern industry, this is due to the fact that material and energy resources happen to be available and, as compared with any contribution he can make, constitute a free gift from heaven."

M. King Hubbert, Man-Hours and Distribution.

The working class has several functions in a stratified society, including:

Labor for the enrichment of the rich, preferably cheap labor that is obedient, docile, and quiet.

Personal servants for the rich, to make their lives more convenient and give them a pleasant rush of power and prestige.

Guardians for the rich, to keep the poor in line.

Fighters for the rich, to advance their interests abroad.

Killing for the rich, when killing advances those interests; often, it's a part of advancing their interests abroad.

Dying for the rich.

The rich use the rest of society as pawns to maintain and advance their lifestyles of luxury, prestige, power, and comfort. We are no more than their slaves, and this is how they like it. It must give them a thrill. Our lives mean nothing in this system. All our joys and suffering, all our love and struggle: they are meaningless in this system. Only in our capacities as workers, cops, soldiers and so on are we valuable according to the needs of this system. This is why we are only paid for performing these functions, and few if any guarantees of leisure time, maternal time, sick time and so on exist. All except advancing the economic interests of the masters is just fluff.

waytoomanybottlesofrum

thanks to Deb Howell for the cartoon

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 631-632

2011-02-15T09:15:00.000-08:00

Traditionally, economists have argued that while new forms of automation may displace jobs in the short run, over longer periods of time economic growth and job creation have continued to outpace any job-killing technologies. For example, over the past century and a half the shift from being a largely agrarian society to one in which less than 1 percent of the United States labor force is in agriculture is frequently cited as evidence of the economy’s ability to reinvent itself.

That, however, was before machines began to “understand” human language. Rapid progress in natural language processing is beginning to lead to a new wave of automation that promises to transform areas of the economy that have until now been untouched by technological change.

“As designers of tools and products and technologies we should think more about these issues,” said Pattie Maes, a computer scientist at the M.I.T. Media Lab. Not only do designers face ethical issues, she argues, but increasingly as skills that were once exclusively human are simulated by machines, their designers are faced with the challenge of rethinking what it means to be human.
…
it is possible, for example, to envision systems that replace not only human experts, but hundreds of thousands of well-paying jobs throughout the economy and around the globe. Virtually any job that now involves answering questions and conducting commercial transactions by telephone will soon be at risk. It is only necessary to consider how quickly A.T.M.’s displaced human bank tellers to have an idea of what could happen.
A Fight to Win the Future: Computers vs. Humans
By JOHN MARKOFF
New York Times
Published: February 14, 2011
AAA

In recent years, for instance, there have been hundreds of studies on the various genes that control the differences in disease risk between men and women. These findings have included everything from the mutations responsible for the increased risk of schizophrenia to the genes underlying hypertension. Ioannidis and his colleagues looked at four hundred and thirty-two of these claims. They quickly discovered that the vast majority had serious flaws. But the most troubling fact emerged when he looked at the test of replication: out of four hundred and thirty-two claims, only a single one was consistently replicable. “This doesn’t mean that none of these claims will turn out to be true,” he says. “But, given that most of them were done badly, I wouldn’t hold my breath.”

According to Ioannidis, the main problem is that too many researchers engage in what he calls “significance chasing,” or finding ways to interpret the data so that it passes the statistical test of significance—the ninety-five-per-cent boundary invented by Ronald Fisher. “The scientists are so eager to pass this magical test that they start playing around with the numbers, trying to find anything that seems worthy,” Ioannidis says. In recent years, Ioannidis has become increasingly blunt about the pervasiveness of the problem. One of his most cited papers has a deliberately provocative title: “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.”

The problem of selective reporting is rooted in a fundamental cognitive flaw, which is that we like proving ourselves right and hate being wrong. “It feels good to validate a hypothesis,” Ioannidis said. “It feels even better when you’ve got a financial interest in the idea or your career depends upon it.
Annals of Science
The Truth Wears Off
Is there something wrong with the scientific method?
by Jonah Lehrer
The New Yorker

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 628-630

2011-02-08T11:33:00.000-08:00

"if you don't like your job or income you can always go elsewhere."
…
* If a lifestyle that doesn't involve work is feasible, then work can be thought of as voluntary.

* If a workplace you like is feasible, then a job you don't like can be thought of as voluntary.

* If living dirt cheap is feasible, then working for a low income can be thought of as voluntary.

Lorraine Lee

AAA

Realizing that direct competition with foreign industry on a straight labor basis would mean swiftly decreasing wages per hour and longer hours and decreasing buying power of the public, and compounding all the industrialization trends, America's labor will realize that its function is not to increase jobs, but to multiply the wealth and to expand the numbers benefited by the wealth at the swiftest possible rate.
R. Buckminster Fuller
AAA

AAA

The factory system also threatened the promise of economic reward--another key premise of the work ethic. The output of products manufactured by factories was so great that by the 1880's industrial capacity exceeded that which the economy could absorb (Rodgers, 1978). Under the system of home and workshop industries, production had been a virtue, and excess goods were not a problem. Now that factories could produce more than the nation could use, hard work and production no longer always provided assurance of prosperity.
Roger B. Hill, Ph.D.

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 625-627

2011-02-01T14:21:00.000-08:00

While Wall Street is pumping, Main Street bleeds.

Teacher, My Dad Lost His Job. Do We Have to Move?

By MICHAEL WINERIP

New York Times

Published: January 30, 2011

“There is a feeling among young generations that no matter how hard we try, we can’t get ahead,” said Shigeyuki Jo, 36, co-author of “The Truth of Generational Inequalities.” “Every avenue seems to be blocked, like we’re butting our heads against a wall.”
…
Last year, 45 percent of those ages 15 to 24 in the work force held irregular jobs, up from 17.2 percent in 1988 and as much as twice the rate among workers in older age groups, who cling tenaciously to the old ways. Japan’s news media are now filled with grim accounts of how university seniors face a second “ice age” in the job market, with just 56.7 percent receiving job offers before graduation as of October 2010 — an all-time low.
…
“There is a mismatch between the old system and the young generations,” said Yuki Honda, a professor of education at the University of Tokyo. “Many young Japanese don’t want the same work-dominated lifestyles of their parents’ generation, but they have no choices.”
In Japan, Young Face Generational Roadblocks
By MARTIN FACKLER
New York Times
Published: January 27, 2011

Ayn Rand was … the progenitor of a sweeping “moral philosophy” that justifies the privilege of the wealthy and demonizes not only the slothful, undeserving poor but the lackluster middle-classes as well.

In the real world, however, Rand herself received Social Security payments and Medicare benefits under the name of Ann O'Connor (her husband was Frank O'Connor).

As Michael Ford of Xavier University's Center for the Study of the American Dream wrote, “In the end, Miss Rand was a hypocrite but she could never be faulted for failing to act in her own self-interest.”
Ayn Rand Railed Against Government Benefits, But Grabbed Social Security and Medicare When She Needed Them
By Joshua Holland
AlterNet
January 29, 2011

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro Freedom Quotations Of The Week 623, 624

2011-01-25T08:12:00.001-08:00

Consider: A corporate leader who increases profits by slashing his work force is thought to be successful. Well, that’s more or less what has happened in America recently: employment is way down, but profits are hitting new records. Who, exactly, considers this economic success?
The Competition Myth
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: January 23, 2011
AA

TOIL and grow rich,
what’s that but to lie
with a foul witch
and after, drained dry,
to be brought
to the chamber where
lies one long sought with despair.
William Butler Yeats

Anti Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 621-622

2011-01-17T08:56:00.000-08:00

Logs of Jared L. Loughner’s conversations with fellow players in an online game of strategy show a young man who has become frustrated by his inability to find a job, who views his early education as tantamount to slavery…
In an Online Game Forum, Tucson Suspect Lashed Out
SARAH WHEATON
New York Times
January 14, 2011

aaa
…the UK's Institution of Mechanical Engineers has delivered... A report out this week shows how humanity already has at its disposal all the tools to make room for as many as 9 billion people.

There are "no insurmountable technical issues in meeting the needs of 9 billion people... sustainable engineering solutions largely exist", the engineers write in Population: One Planet, Too Many People?
…
Another report out today also sets a high note, declaring that it is possible to feed the future 9 billion without trashing the planet.
Housing 9 billion won't take techno-magic
12 January 2011 by Fred Pearce
New Scientist

Anti-Wage Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 619, 620

2011-01-11T14:33:00.000-08:00

Except for the height of the housing boom -- October 2007 through June 2008 -- real GDP is now higher than it has been in the entirety of U.S. history.
…
The story runs as follows. Before the financial crash, there were lots of not-so-useful workers holding not-so-useful jobs.
10 Percent Unemployment Forever?
BY TYLER COWEN, JAYME LEMKE
Foreign Policy Magazine
JANUARY 5, 2011
AAA
One of my son’s friends who graduated from the University of British Columbia last spring with a business degree has been looking for work. He’s applied everywhere, in search of something even remotely connected to his area of study. No luck.
So now this bright, educated 22-year-old who got solid grades has begun sticking flyers through people’s mail slots offering his services to do odd jobs, anything to put a few bucks in his pocket.
…for now, many of our university grads will have to content themselves with cleaning gutters for a living – if they’re lucky.
What’s the matter with kids today? Well, no jobs, no money …
Gary Mason
Globe and Mail
Thursday, Dec. 16, 2010

Peter Joseph

2011-01-07T14:43:00.000-08:00

You'll need the time and popcorn for this longer video:

Senator Speaks

2011-01-07T11:50:00.001-08:00

Public Sector Losers

2011-01-07T11:48:00.001-08:00

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of the Week 616-618

2011-01-03T12:23:00.001-08:00

Seriously, what we’re looking at over the next few years, even with pretty good growth, are unemployment rates that not long ago would have been considered catastrophic — because they are. Behind those dry statistics lies a vast landscape of suffering and broken dreams. And the arithmetic says that the suffering will continue as far as the eye can see.
Deep Hole Economics
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: January 2, 2011
AAA

Real growth at two-percent? Really, where? Technically we're not in a recession, I guess technically my uncle and millions more who lost their homes just technically relocated. Maybe you think flipping tainted burgers for ignorant, obese, poor people constitutes meaningful employment. When several thousand job seekers show up for thirty open positions it is indicative of systemic failure. "If people really want to work there is work." Yeah, and the poor are poor because they are lazy and it's their own fault and they should just "pull themselves up by their own bootstraps" and blah blah blah bullshit.
NewRevolution
AAA

America’s biggest — and only major — jobs program is the U.S. military.

Over 1,400,000 Americans are now on active duty; another 833,000 are in the reserves, many full time. Another 1,600,000 Americans work in companies that supply the military with everything from weapons to utensils. (I’m not even including all the foreign contractors employing non-US citizens.)
America’s Biggest Job Program – the U.S. Military
Robert Reich

Anti-Wage-Slave, Pro-Freedom Quotations 612-615

2010-12-28T10:49:00.001-08:00

The slogan on New Hampshire license plates is "live free or die." These license plates are manufactured by prisoners in the state prison in Concord.
yourmindblo wn.com
AAA
AA
Michael Jordan makes more money from Nike annually than all of the Nike factory workers in Malaysia combined.
OMG FACTS
AAA
aaa
aa
As a college professor, I vividly see this jobs/education mismatch when I run into former students still waiting tables at local restaurants years after getting their B.A. or master’s degrees.
Janet Belsky
Murfreesboro, Tenn., Dec. 15, 2010
New York Times

AAA
aaa
Columnist Pat Buchanan said expanding these benefits means “more people will hold off going back looking for a job.” And Fox News’ Charles Payne applauded the effort to deny future unemployment checks because he said it would compel layabouts “to get off the sofa.”
…
Of course, this story line makes no sense. From liberal Paul Krugman to archconservative Alan Greenspan, economists agree that joblessness is not caused by unemployment benefits. With five applicants for every job opening, the overarching problem is a lack of available positions—not a dearth of personal initiative.
3 Reasons Right-Wing Lies About Joblessness Stick
David Sirota