Get a job!
Ok. I got bills to pay.
If I must do this unfulfilling job, may I at least spend only a small amount of my life at work? No. In order to make ends meet, you’ll need to work a lot. An awful lot. It will require 50, 60, or 70 hours per week. You’ll probably need to get a second job, and maybe a third. Now hold on here. This means I’ll be working all day long, almost every single day. I’ll have no more than just a few hours left to myself. Yes, that’s just the way it is.
Now what?
So we become dissatisfied with our lives. We feel unfulfilled. We experience emptiness, alienation and a vague general sense of resentment. Many people become depressed or turn to alcohol or drugs to relieve the mental anguish.
This is just the way it is, the System tells us. But hold on a second here — this is not some naturally occurring phenomenon. It’s not like, say, the earth revolving around the sun. Or the fact that our bodies require food to live. Or the fact that sometimes it rains.
I guess it is what it is.
Just the way it is? No. This System is by design.
And thus millions of Americans, as they toil away, believe they are “free.”
It is the greatest deception of all time. It is a real-life Matrix.
http://www.salon.com/2016/05/21/economic_inequality_the_toil_of_work_and...
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And then I was told
"We don't want to become Europe!"
" El pueblo unido jamás será vencido. The people united will never be defeated "
We have been screwed by Capitalism
Output per worker in 1960 was about $35 per hour. Output per worker today is about $110 per hour. That's an increase of 3.14, close to Pi. In 1960 only one member of a family needed to work to support the family. That means, that if all other things were equal, now you would have to work 12.7 hours per week to support your family. Back in the 50s we saw massive productivity increases and speculated about what will we do with all of the recreational time?
What went wrong?
Capitalsm, that's what went wrong. The wealthy owned everything and priced labor for maximum profit to the owners. Global trade helped enormously, as it made the US labor pool part of the global developing nation labor pool. On top of that wealth accumulated beyond imagination and demanded economic rent from the rest of us. None of this was necessary to develop the economy, even global trade. Krugman points out in one of his books that he wrote in the 1990s that closing off global trade would only have a very small impact on the economy. But for the wealthy, buying goods made with almost no labor cost meant massive increased profits. We could have achieved that same productivity gains through domestic means, technology, automation, and infrastructure.
We as labor constitute a market. Those who own the means of production will pay the lowest possible price of wages, period. If you find that concept repugnant then you are not a Capitalist.
The opposite of Capitalism is someone who believes in FDR's second bill of rights. That we have a right to a job with a living wage, a right to health care and a right to education but most of all we have a right to believe that the only purpose of a society is to maximize the life experience of all of it's members. But this runs contrary to the concept of Capitalism, where a few own all of the means of production and work to minimize their costs and maximize their profits. If you want a better society then the rules have to change, it's basic physics.
Capitalism has always been the rule of the people by the oligarchs. You only have two choices, eliminate them or restrict their power.
There's the problem
"our bodies require food to live"
And that is how we get trapped. One of the ways, anyway. Want food? Need money. How do you get money? Plug in to the matrix.
Of course, you could be lucky enough to be too defective to be useful for the matrix. Then you get a small portion of money and food, but at the expense of those plugged into the matrix, while not even a penny of the wealth of those who created this matrix is sent your way.
The Matrix is good
It keeps us safe. My little cacoon is warm and comfy. Don't bother me with politics. Not my job.
I'm sooo tired. Can you come back later? I need to get eight hours sleep so I can get up early for work. The boss is counting on me. Gonna make me a team leader!
"They'll say we're disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war." Howard Zinn
This conception of work and capitalism is beginning to circulate
around the body politic, thanks to people like Bernie Sanders, who, amongst many predecessors and contemporaries, who have made precisely that point. When I was in elementary school and high school, we students were propagandized about the glories of capitalism. This was during the Cold War against the evil Commies. Commies bad. Capitalism good.
In college, I read Das Kapital (in English) and had my eyes opened. What Karl Marx described was too close to home. I even read, also in English, Friedrich Engel's extension of Marx's work. The economic analysis of Marx about capitalism was, and still is correct. Unfortunately his proposed Communistic system was unworkable from both a practical sense as well as a psychological sense. Communism cannot work in a complex economy because there is perforce too much oversight and coordination necessary. The Soviets excelled at both oversight and coordination, much to their own harm, because that approached stifled inventiveness and ambition--other than the political type. On a psychologic basis, Marx's formulation of "from each according to his means, to each according to his needs" ignores too many human psychological facts. One of those is that there are makers and there are takers--by which I do not mean the owners of production. Look at any voluntary organization and you will see that the vast majority of the work is done by a few, while the remainder are mainly along for the ride. The epitome of this is the "80-20" rule. There are more analyses which can be made about ideal economic systems and flaws in existing economic systems. But the salient point heroes that the "proletariat" has largely not awakened to the truth of the plight--they too small, if they contemplate this at all. Why is the first task undertaken by a totalitarian regime, once assuming power, the eradication of the intellectuals? Because usually only the intellectuals have consciously analyzed their own plight (and their fellow citizens) and are capable of transmitting that information broadly. Sorry, c99 readers--but you would all be on the list.
This is an awesome speech by (nose-hold warning) Liz Warren
But she doesn't mention she who cannot be trusted. It saddens me because she really understands so much & could have been such an amazing supporter for Bernie. Anyway, I think the speech is worth reading; it's about economics what this country can do to improve the situation. It's from a market perspective, not a populist one, but still excellent. (I still can't forgive her.)
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/elizabeth-warrens-kick-ass-speech-...