Thanks Arthur, Question: Can there be political will in the face of ruin? I've personally run that process for years but few people are willing to walk as close the edge as I and my family do. For example, we spend everything on the Art and the community and go monthly from hand to mouth with no perks such as retirement. One of the members of list spoke of the need to only have $100,000 per year to live comfortably. Today, the rising prices and the fewer students make it harder than ever and sacrifices necessary but my record at my death will be significant. Things to remember because I worked to create significant products. I already have my place in the history of American music simply with what I have done with composers. There are other things as well. But you have to be comfortable with creativity and edginess as a way of life. Someone called it the old "die broke" theory. But when I read that book (Die Broke) I was surprised that he didn't realize that Artists and Indians had been doing that for generations because those who didn't grew addicted to money and lost their souls. Who is more lost than the pitiful billionaires today amassing collectables from people who WERE significant? Sitting Bull's and Custer's rifles. Jefferson's lousy wine. They will collect my trash as well but they will not have been me or understand me. Who is more pitiful than those who consider that the fragile paper or hard stones that they place their souls within can disappear in a moment? They belong to paper, we belong to the earth.
REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Arthur Cordell Sent: Thursday, September 30, 2010 4:10 PM To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION' Subject: Re: [Futurework] Not a very positive picture . Your system doesn't work Ed, Arthur, Chris, Harry, Spencer, Tom, etc., etc, etc. Your system doesn't work. You need to think harder and write. Or is the fact that Futurework has been quiet on my computer mean I've been banned or removed from the list? ===================== Maybe silence is consent. The system works for some and doesn't work for most. Many ideas have been put forward to make things better. The ideas are out there but political will is lacking. Arthur From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ray Harrell Sent: Thursday, September 30, 2010 3:18 PM To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION' Subject: Re: [Futurework] Not a very positive picture The problem is a system that must generate progress through surplus (profit). That redefines sustainability and stability into stagnation and creates a situation that is at best chaotic with lots of Private Enterprise viruses eating at the root of the tree of prosperity. Their only comparison is to the failure of "communism" which was really a "King" system with an elite advisory legislature. Their inadequate version of our counsel system. Either way they are both western products in a culture that admires aristocracy more than anything. It's your system Ed. That's what those first Nation's folks have had to deal with all of their lives. But it doesn't really work without the church beating them over the head for being evil. Untrammeled they are just dog eat dog and inefficient. Take for example, two things on the web. Dictionary. Com and Babelfish. They used to be open use and had great reference. Good etymological sources and reasonable translations for some languages. But there was no profit in that and everyone jumped on the copyright wagon and now we have an inferior free product and if you buy Babylon or any of the other for profit products they gum up your system because they operate like an invading army. They are also inferior translations. I put a German or Italian art song text in and they can't translate it. I'm still driven back to my library and the hard copy. For a brief moment there was a promise by capitalism has closed the door and information, just like what happened with the telephone system, is fragmented and disconnected. The rule for you white folks is the opposed of "We are all connected." It's "we are all disconnected in order to make a profit." Because there are no regulations to keep the flow of information open, the creative small sector slowly succumbs to the big for profit sector and what we get are private governments of wealthy stockholders unchecked by anyone. Even the Supreme Court has sold out. So it's the system Ed. Your system doesn't work Ed, Arthur, Chris, Harry, Spencer, Tom, etc., etc, etc. Your system doesn't work. You need to think harder and write. Or is the fact that Futurework has been quiet on my computer mean I've been banned or removed from the list? REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ed Weick Sent: Thursday, September 30, 2010 2:57 PM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION Subject: Re: [Futurework] Not a very positive picture Partly because some recent US Presidents had a strange faith in supply side and trickle down economics, very rich Americans have become much richer and poor Americans have become much poorer, while the middle class has declined. Presidents Reagan and G.W. Bush believed that giving large tax cuts to the very rich and to business would "trickle down" into investment that would boost the economy and employment. It simply didn't happen that way. The rich liked the extra money that the tax cuts gave them and hung onto it. It's difficult to assess where Obama is with regard to all of this. I believe he intends to put an end to Bush's tax cuts for the rich before long and make other adjustments to taxes and tax credits, but he's not in a very strong position to do anything right now. Ed ----- Original Message ----- From: Ray Harrell <mailto:[email protected]> To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME <mailto:[email protected]> DISTRIBUTION,EDUCATION' Sent: Thursday, September 30, 2010 12:25 PM Subject: Re: [Futurework] Not a very positive picture Of more interest to me is the frozen capital at the top and we refuse to tax them to free some of it for work in the economy. REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ed Weick Sent: Thursday, September 30, 2010 10:07 AM To: [email protected] Cc: [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] Not a very positive picture >From yesterday's Washington Post. Ed _____ As 44 million Americans live in poverty, a crisis grows By <http://projects.washingtonpost.com/staff/articles/katrina+vanden+heuvel/> Katrina vanden Heuvel Tuesday, September 28, 2010 It's clear that the Great Recession battered those on the bottom most heavily, adding 6 million people to the ranks of the officially poor, defined as just $22,000 in annual income for a family of four. Forty-four million Americans -- one in seven citizens -- are now <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/16/AR201009160 2698.html> living below the poverty line, more than at any time since the Census Bureau began tracking poverty 51 years ago. Shamefully, that figure includes one in five children, <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/angela-glover-blackwell/poverty-in-black-whit e-an_b_721124.html> more than one in four African Americans or Latinos, and over 51 percent of female-headed families with children under 6. These numbers are bad enough. But dig deeper -- as Georgetown University law professor Peter Edelman has been doing for nearly 50 years in his battle against poverty -- and the story told by these figures is even more staggering. Edelman points out that 19 million people are now living in "extreme poverty," which is under 50 percent of the poverty line, or $11,000 for a family of four. "That means over 43 percent of the poor are extremely poor," said Edelman, who served as an aide to Sen. Robert Kennedy (D-N.Y.) and in the Clinton administration before resigning in protest over welfare reform that shredded the safety net. "That's over 6 percent of the population, and that figure has just been climbing up and up." Edelman says that the number of people living at less than two times the poverty line ($44,000 for a family of four) is equally significant. "Data shows that's really the line between whether or not you can pay your bills," said Edelman. "That has reached 100,411,000 people. That's 33 percent of the country. That's the totality of the problem -- whether you call it poverty or not." For too long we have accepted the narrative -- promoted by well-funded conservative think tanks -- that claims people who are struggling are to blame for their troubles, and at the same time we don't have effective anti-poverty policies. So tackling the problem is seen as wasteful. "So many people think it's their own fault," said Edelman. "They don't see the structural problem in our economy." But with so many in poverty, that narrative has become harder to sustain during the Great Recession, and so renewed work is being done to take on poverty and its structural underpinnings. [If you want to read more, go to: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/28/AR2010092802 356.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions _____ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
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