Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1171-1173

Just one weapons system, the F-35, a fighter jet that has been grounded because it does not work, has cost $49 billion per year since the program begin in 2006. Hayes Brown of Think Progress made a list of what that money could have been spent on instead. It could have bought a mansion for every homeless person or fed every school child in the US, funded every humanitarian crisis or provided global security through the UN or provided funding to rebuild America.

Why People Are Organizing to End U.S. Empire

AlterNet / By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers
[emphasis JS]

Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. In the Middle Ages when the feudal lords who inhabited the castles whose towers may still be seen along the Rhine concluded to enlarge their domains, to increase their power, their prestige and their wealth they declared war upon one another. But they themselves did not go to war any more than the modern feudal lords, the barons of Wall Street go to war. The feudal barons of the Middle Ages, the economic predecessors of the capitalists of our day, declared all wars. And their miserable serfs fought all the battles. The poor, ignorant serfs had been taught to revere their masters; to believe that when their masters declared war upon one another, it was their patriotic duty to fall upon one another and to cut one another's throats for the profit and glory of the lords and barons who held them in contempt. And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose, especially their lives.
Eugene V. Debs, Canton (Ohio) Anti-War Speech (June 16, 1918)

The French philosopher Simone Weil, an academic and revolutionary activist, decided to take a factory job in 1934 - she worked in 3 factories.

"In the factory the very basis of my self respect was radically destroyed within two or three weeks by the daily experience of brutal constraint- I was forced to recognize that the sense of personal dignity that I had thought internal to me actually depended entirely on external circumstances [sic]-and don't imagine this provoked in me any rebellious reaction- no- on the contrary it produced the last thing I expected from myself- docility: the resigned docility of the beast of burden."

Simone Weil

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1168-1170

Humans who feel the urge to take it easy but remained burdened by a recalcitrant work ethic might do well to consider that laziness is perfectly natural, perfectly sensible and shared by nearly every other species on the planet.

Natalie Angier

In the world to come, each of us will be called to account for all the good things God put on earth which we refused to enjoy.

The Talmud

A just society, Terman proposed, would assign professions by IQ so that high- scorers received leadership roles while those with lower scores were assigned to various types of manual labor: "substantial success" required an IQ of at least 115, while the maximum I.Q. required for a barber was set at 85 and IQ 75 was deemed an unsafe risk in a motorman or conductor. Presuming that those who had failed to survive society must be the most unfit of all, Terman even launched a study of the IQs of "hobos and the unemployed." To his utter disbelief, average hobo IQs ranked above those of motormen, firemen and policemen.

The IQ Fallacy,

Part 2

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Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1165-1167

…it's interesting that the recent news of job market "improvement" doesn't mention that of the 10 occupation categories projecting the greatest growth in the next eight years, only one pays a middle-class wage. Four pay barely above poverty level and five pay beneath it, including fast-food workers, retail sales staff, health aids and janitors. The job expected to have the highest number of openings is "personal care aide" -- taking care of aging baby boomers in their houses or in nursing homes. The median salary of an aid is under $20,000. They enjoy no benefits, and about 40 percent of them must rely on food stamps and Medicaid to make ends meet, plus many are in the "shadow economy," vulnerable to being cheated on the already miserly wages.

To measure the job market by quantity -- with no regard for quality -- is to devalue workers themselves. Creating 217,000 new jobs is not a sign of economic health if each worker needs two or three of those jobs to patch together a barebones living -- and millions more are left with no work at all.
Creators Syndicate / By Jim Hightower 
The Terrible News Economists Are Trying to Hide About American Jobs
AlterNet

[emphasis JS]

The Way of Heaven

Is like stretching a bow.

The top is pulled down,

The bottom is pulled up.

Excess is removed

Where more is needed, it is added.

It is the Way of Heaven

To remove where there is excess

And add where there is lack.

The way of people is different:

They take away where there is need

And add where there is surplus.

Who can take his surplus and give it to the people?

Only one who possesses the Tao. 

Lao Tzu,

Tao Te Ching

But many Americans are well-educated and work hard. For example, schoolteachers. Yet they don’t get the big bucks. Last year, those 25 hedge fund managers made more than twice as much as all the kindergarten teachers in America combined. 

...

Second, ignore the rhetoric about “job creators” and all that. Conservatives want you to believe that the big rewards in modern America go to innovators and entrepreneurs, people who build businesses and push technology forward. But that’s not what those hedge fund managers do for a living; they’re in the business of financial speculation, which John Maynard Keynes characterized as “anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be.” Or since they make much of their income from fees, they’re actually in the business of convincing other people that they can anticipate average opinion about average opinion.

Now That’s Rich

Paul Krugman

New York Times

MAY 8, 2014
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Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1162-1164

I was never so poorly treated, undervalued, underpaid and overworked than as an adjunct professor in three different unversities. This is a shameful system. Universities should be forced to hire consultants such as the authors of this article. Students pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to be taught by miserable, angry, exploited people who generally have no voice in university policy, no contract, no benefits or even their own office in which to prepare lessons, correct papers or receive students.

Anne, Woodstock, NY 

Comment section,

Why You Hate Work

By TONY SCHWARTZ and CHRISTINE PORATHMAY 30, 2014

New York Times

Sunday Review

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We have the garment industry allowing the poorest amongst us die in overstuffed factories, chemical plants engulfing an entire town in Texas, McDonalds/Walmart steals from their cashiers/janitors, Wall St scams. skims 401Ks with legality, equity locusts harvest pensions under the cover of bankruptcy law, and then some pundit calls this toxic environment the Invisible Hand. It may be invisible but it feels like it punches many of us in the gut as a managemnt strategy.
G. Morris NY and NJ
comment section
Wage Theft Across the Board
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
New York Times
APRIL 21, 2014

Rather naively, while growing up I did as I was told. There wasn't any reason to question, there was an order to the world and this is what you had to do to live in it. So I went to school, college and then university. I got qualified in information systems management because I had an interest in working with computers. This is the stuff online business runs on, so it seemed like an appropriate choice in the information age. In 2009 I got my degree, despite the recession I set out into what I believed to be the next inevitable step and looked for employment.

The end of 2013 and I am still looking for work... No matter how many jobs are applied for, both in my field or entry level, no one was interested in someone who didn't pop into existence with a couple of years of on the job experience under their belt. In 2010 I managed to get a voluntary administrative role at Remploy, which only lasted a few months as the government cuts shut the factory down. Today I've managed to get volunteer work as a retail assistant in a charity shop since March, but rarely if ever get a response to any job applications; even with the shop experience on the CV. I also do voluntary work helping to dig over beds in the local allotment during weekends, not job seeking related but I enjoy gardening and the one at home is block paved.

The government talks about people such as myself like we're scum, they're only concerned about youth unemployment; which I was once upon a time. We're demonised in the media for not working but I cannot force employers to hire me. They have A4E breathing down my neck, who seem to do nothing to help me find work but threaten to sanction me if I miss one of their useless appointments. I fear for when my time runs out and I'm forced onto the work programme under threat of sanctioning, were I'll likely have to provide free labour for the very companies who never responded to my job applications.
AnnoyedDragon
Comment on
Why does everyone have to work?
[emphasis JS]

Think BIG

Allen Sheahan, 5 min 10 sec