Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 855-857

A new report by the respected National Employment Law Project (nelp.org) titled “Big Business, Corporate Profits, and the Minimum Wage,” said that “the majority (66 percent) of low-wage workers are not employed by small businesses but by large corporations.” The 50 largest of their employers are mostly “in strong financial positions.” And note this finding by NELP: “The top executive compensation averaged $9.4 million last year at these firms.” This means that the bosses, before taking a lunch on January 2, made more money than a minimum wage worker makes in a year. Talk about the corrosive effects of inequality which have been fed by the top one percent taking 93 percent of the income growth in 2010, according to Holly Sklar of Business for a Fair Minimum Wage (businessforafairminimumwage.org).

Ralph Nader

The Democratic Party Sleeps on FDR’s Legacy

August 8, 2012
[emphasis JS]

  The most dangerous force in the industrialized world does not come from those who wield radical creeds, whether Islamic radicalism or Christian fundamentalism, but from legions of faceless bureaucrats who claw their way up layered corporate and governmental machines. They serve any system that meets their pathetic quota of needs.

Chris Hedges

TheCareerists

By the time of Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street (1853), acedia had lost the last of its religious reverberations and was now an offense against the economy. Right in the heart of robberbaron capitalism, the title character develops what proves to be terminal acedia. It is like one of those western tales where the desperado keeps making choices that only herd him closer to the one disagreeable finale. Bartleby just sits there in an office on Wall Street repeating, "I would prefer not to." While his options go rapidly narrowing, his employer, a man of affairs and substance, is actually brought to question the assumptions of his own life by this miserable scrivener -- this writer! -- who, though among the lowest of the low in the bilges of capitalism, nevertheless refuses to go on interacting anymore with the daily order, thus bringing up the interesting question: who is more guilty of Sloth, a person who collaborates with the root of all evil, accepting things-as-they-are in return for a paycheck and a hassle-free life, or one who does nothing, finally, but persist in sorrow?
Nearer, my Couch, to Thee
Thomas R. Pynchon
[emphasis JS]