Jack Saturday

Monday, December 31, 2007

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations 190-192

… one significant milestone has gone strangely unnoticed: the 200th anniversary of Jan. 1, 1808, when the importation of slaves into the United States was prohibited.

This neglect stands in striking contrast to the many scholarly and public events in Britain that marked the 2007 bicentennial of that country’s banning of the slave trade. There were historical conferences, museum exhibits, even a high-budget film, “Amazing Grace,” about William Wilberforce, the leader of the parliamentary crusade that resulted in abolition.

In the United States, however, slavery not only survived the end of the African trade but embarked on an era of unprecedented expansion.
from
Forgotten Step Toward Freedom
By ERIC FONER
New York Yimes

Published: December 30, 2007





To sell one's labour power on the market is to enter into a relationship of subordination with one's employer -- it is to become a slave to the employer/master. The only major differences between a slave and a worker is that a worker is only a slave at work while a slave is a slave twenty-four hours a day, and slaves know that they are slaves, while most workers do not think of themselves in such terms.
L. Susan Brown
Does Work Really Work?
Taken from Kick It Over 35






The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.
Bertrand Russell,
In Praise Of Idleness











Monday, December 24, 2007

The Least Of These My Sisters






















Sorry-- you're brown.












According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, more than 25,000 people die of starvation every day, and more than 800 million people are chronically undernourished. On average, a child dies every five seconds from starvation.
Answers.com, Starvation











Wednesday, December 19, 2007

The average [US] Federal prison cell is 80 square feet—yet it costs taxpayers roughly $170,000 to build and activate and another $24,500 per year to confine a Federal inmate. At present, BOP incarcerates over 174,000 inmates, of which nearly 27,000 are in contract beds. This represents a $25-billion investment and almost $4 billion in annual costs.
THINKING OUTSIDE THE “80-SQUARE-FOOT” BOX






Here you've got a guy, say he's used some of the "killer weed," marijuana (competition for the Republican pushed tobacco). Does it make sense to spend $43,700.00 a year to lock the guy in prison? Wouldn't there be a great advantage to letting him be a taxpayer instead of a tax-spender?

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations 188-189

Robert Theobald, the British socio-economist, in an address to the special conference on Social Welfare Policy in Canada when he pointed out that modern psychological theory takes the opposite view: that man will strive for self-realization if he [sic] is provided with the means to satisfy his basic needs. The present system operates on the theory that an individual must be forced to earn his own living by making his condition so unpleasant that toil will appear more attractive. But, said Theobald, "If man is drawn to the goal of self-realization as his [sic] immediate needs are met, then the present welfare system is the very factor which is preventing many from realizing their own potential and contributing to the needs of society."
Pierre Berton,
The Smug Minority, pp. 108







The guaranteed income at a reasonable level will abolish poverty tomorrow.

There's no reason why a person should have to hold a job in order to survive today.
Robert Theobald

Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotation 187


I define a free society as one in which there is no social coercion compelling the individual to work.