Ed, Let me focus on two things.
1. Labor saving innovation, 2. The "progress" of price increases. If a car helps you drive up a mountain, what you become insensitive to is the Mountain and your body as a psycho-physical instrument in need of conditioning. My apartment is slowly killing me although it allows me to talk to you. Labor or Labour saving devices in the long term are irrelevant to the real meanings of life. As for economic progress. I paid my voice teacher in New York City $65 an hour for voice lessons. That allowed him to have an apartment, along with rent control, where he could have a studio and hold classes to the benefit of American Culture and allowed him to go to some retreat in the summer where all of the students could work 24/7 on their culture and identity and develop a significant increase in virtuosity and intelligence no matter where they ended up in the economy. Today I would have to make seven times that $65 per hour with a rent controlled apartment to simply keep up. I have a full quiver of tools and a million dollars in education that I still am paying towards with lessons even today. You have to keep up or quit. I don't come close to the salary of my 1965 teacher and neither does my teacher who is considered at the very top of his profession. Also I have no rent control and instead of an apartment where I can teach classes and do the work that I was trained, I have two rooms and six thousand books and a Steinway. Not complaining. Complaining is useless. The fact is that America suffers as it loses its complex identity and becomes more feral and obese. It serves no one for the upper 2% to have the funds they do since they hoard it for their class and capital is required for all. Landlords benefit from being in the cultural capital of America but they are slowly turning New York City into an environment hostile to culture through the curtailing of the ways that culture was able to exist. Note, I am not speaking of Garth Brooks trinkets and trash. There's plenty of money for simple entertainment. If you want to know that that's like. Move to Tulsa. REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ed Weick Sent: Thursday, September 30, 2010 8:09 PM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION Subject: Re: [Futurework] Not a very positive picture I guess you're right Ray, it's my system, except that, by virtue of retirement, I'm no longer in it. I was in it for quite some time after I went to university and got my degrees, etc., but I wasn't born into it. My parents were immigrants, total peasants from central Europe, from Poland and Germany. When they got to Canada, they tried to fit in, but it was very difficult. I still remember their stories from my childhood about how they were pushed around by "the English" -- people who had a much large stake in Canada than they had. All of that is long gone, and you're right, I bought in and it's my system and even though I personally am well looked after I tend to quite pessimistic about where the system's going. And I'm especially concerned about where it's taking my kids and especially their kids, my grandkids. Given the progress of labour saving innovation, globalization, developing scarcities, and population growth, I really wonder where the system is taking them and what kinds of lives they will be stuck with. I don't think I still have the energy to do very much about all of that. I've spent much of my working life trying to fix the system that our northern Native people have had to work and compromise with, and that's about all I can do. Next life, maybe. Ed ----- Original Message ----- From: Ray Harrell <mailto:[email protected]> To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION,EDUCATION' <mailto:[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, September 30, 2010 3:17 PM 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 _____ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
_______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
