Category Archives: Work

Podcast News Updates

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the-5th-horseman

There’s been another string of relevant news podcasts in the past few days so it’s time for another roundup post.

Last week Rob Kall of OpEdnews.cominterviewed Peter Ludlow a professor of linguistics and philosophy, on topics including systemic evil, whistleblowers and hacktivism:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/rob-kall-bottom-up-radio-show/id359765013

On Friday, Abby Martin of Breaking the Set did an excellent job deconstructing the corporatocracy on Coast to Coast AM with John Wells:

http://www.mediaroots.org/abby-martin-deconstructs-the-corporatocracy-on-coast-to-coast-am/

On Monday Nellie Bailey and Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report covered a wide range of important topics including an update on the corporate plan for Detroit (an American apartheid), the struggle to raise the minimum wage in Seattle, and Dave Swanson’s (of WarIsACrime.org) analysis of the multitude of lies in Obama’s recent UN speech : Listen to Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network, with Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey – Week of 9/30/13.

From Traces of Reality there were two great consecutive shows. On 9/30 host Guillermo Jimenez interviewed Kevin Gallagher, director of Free Barrett Brown.  Brown is the journalist who faces a 105 year sentence, the bulk of which is related to charges associated with pasting a link in a chat room. On the 10/1 episode, Guillermo is joined by Vice President of The Future of Freedom Foundation, Sheldon Richman. They cover topics including the “government shutdown”, the national debt, taxation, private property, the “social contract,” and the fallacy of the “consent of the governed.”:

9/30

10/1

Government Shutdown: Hate the Players, Hate the Game

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Today marks the first day of the latest government shutdown due to failure of the House and Senate to agree on a spending bill. The main point of contention was Obamacare, which Republicans fought to repeal or delay. This conflict can be seen as a symptom of political polarization which, as multiple studies have shown, increases as economic inequality increases. This might seem counter-intuitive to those aware of how both parties receive money from the same corporations. Still, they get paid varying amounts from different corporations and they need to at least appear to be responsive to needs of constituents. Differences between the majority of Democrat and Republican representatives are analogous to differences between neoliberals and neoconservatives. There’s subtle differences in approach and emphasis but both ultimately serve the corporate-security state.

Many will blame the shutdown on Republicans who oppose Obamacare, but will it really increase access to affordable healthcare? It may have been better to delay implementation in order to work out glitches in the bureaucracy and computer systems. Obamacare has already had the unfortunate side-effect of businesses replacing full-time positions with part-time positions, and without any controls over the rising cost of premiums we should expect to see further rate increases. There may be minor improvements but far less than what would have been provided through single-payer and public option alternatives. If we had a Medicare-for-all system as Green Party candidate Jill Stein proposed, we’d have a system people already support providing comprehensive coverage with far less bureaucratic waste and at a fraction of the cost.

One of the many sickening aspects of the government shutdown is that government agencies that truly need to be shutdown, like the NSA, CIA, FBI, DEA, etc., remain essentially untouched. What will be shutdown or reduced are services related to health, work safety, food assistance, housing, education, parks and museums, regulatory agencies, and labor. Once again, money junkies in power have demonstrated their incompetence at doing things they care little about (ie. providing jobs and services that actually help poor and working class people). However, they have proven to be extremely good at funneling more money to themselves and their cronies while consolidating power. On the surface, the shutdown may appear self-defeating, but both parties can benefit by blaming the other side and can more easily push through questionable legislation in an atmosphere of crisis. Just like the sequestration last Spring, it’s a form of austerity which benefits big banks while screwing over average citizens.

Bangladeshi Workers Fight for Living Wage

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Photo: Reuters

Garment workers block a street during a demonstration in Gazipur, Bangladesh 9/23.  Photo: Reuters

Last Saturday, Garment Sramik Samannay Parishad, a federation of trade unions in garment sectors, organized a rally of over 50,000 workers to meet their different demands including raising minimum monthly salary to about $100. Bangladesh’s apparel industry, which supplies many Western brands such as Walmart, Gap and Macy’s, has been under a spotlight after several deadly work-related tragedies, including the collapse of a mega-factory on April 24th that killed more than 1,130 people.

The current minimum wage in Bangladesh is $38 a month, but factory owners and government have been in talks to increase it. When the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA) announced they would only agree to a $7.75 raise on Monday, demonstrations increased to an estimated 200,000 workers and spread to the major industrial hubs of the city. About 400 factories were shut down, some of them vandalized, vehicles were damaged and major roads barricaded. At least 60 people were injured in clashes with the police, who have fired tear gas and rubber bullets at the crowds.

As the mass demonstrations continue, the government has yet to publicly announce a decision on wages, but it has a vested interest in keeping them low since many ministers in Bangladesh’s parliament own factories. Besides boycotting stores and joining anti-sweatshop organizations, is there anything people in the West can do to support workers in Bangladesh and other countries used for cheap labor? One solution which has already been implemented in Switzerland and Egypt is a “maximum wage”. For example, Larry Hanley of the Amalgamated Transport Workers Union proposed a law that would limit an employer’s income to no more than 100 times the salary of their lowest-paid employee. Rather than putting a cap on earnings, it would maintain a fixed ratio between the executives at the top and employees at the bottom. Given that six Walmart heirs own more wealth than the bottom 40% of Americans ($102.7 billion), it seems a maximum wage for the U.S. is long overdue though admittedly unlikely given the current corrupt political system.

Sources:

http://rt.com/news/bangladesh-garment-protest-clashes-244/

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/9/23/tens-of-thousandsprotestlowwagesinbangladesh.html

http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90777/8410310.html

http://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/should-there-be-a-maximum-wage

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jul/31/bernie-s/sanders-says-walmart-heirs-own-more-wealth-bottom-/

Schools are Becoming Privatized Prisons

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A lot of interesting analysis has been coming out recently about the problematic education system, and it’s not just on obvious longstanding issues such as lack of funding and overcrowded classrooms. Peter Gray of Salon.com wrote in his article “School is a Prison – and damaging our kids”:

Parents send their children to school with the best of intentions, believing that’s what they need to become productive and happy adults. Many have qualms about how well schools are performing, but the conventional wisdom is that these issues can be resolved with more money, better teachers, more challenging curricula and/or more rigorous tests.

But what if the real problem is school itself? The unfortunate fact is that one of our most cherished institutions is, by its very nature, failing our children and our society.

School is a place where children are compelled to be, and where their freedom is greatly restricted — far more restricted than most adults would tolerate in their workplaces. In recent decades, we have been compelling our children to spend ever more time in this kind of setting, and there is strong evidence (summarized in my recent book) that this is causing serious psychological damage to many of them. Moreover, the more scientists have learned about how children naturally learn, the more we have come to realize that children learn most deeply and fully, and with greatest enthusiasm, in conditions that are almost opposite to those of school.

Read the full article here: http://www.salon.com/2013/08/26/school_is_a_prison_and_damaging_our_kids/

David L. Kirp of Slate.com writes about three new books which pick apart arguments for charter schools and vouchers in his article: The Wrong Kind of Education Reform

Today at Truthout there’s an op-ed by Marion Brady which critiques the Common Core State Standards program: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/18638-a-quiz-on-americas-core-curriculum

Jan Irvin and Clint Richardson discuss Common Core in great detail in this lengthy but well-researched conversation at Gnostic Media:

mp3 link: http://www.gnosticmedia.com/podcast/GnosticMedia_PC_173_ClintRichardson_pt8_CommonCOREeducation_md.mp3

For more great information about the history and problems of compulsory education, check out John Taylor Gatto’s site: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/

From the BBC series “Monkey Dust” (NSFW):

Workers of the World…Relax

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Though written more than 20 years ago, this essay by Bob Black is more relevant today than ever. It is possible to find personally fulfilling and rewarding work that allows for a decent standard of living, but is far too rare and inaccessible for too many people within the current dominant system. From “The Abolition of Work” :

But modern work has worse implications. People don’t just work, they have “jobs.” One person does one productive task all the time on an or-else basis. Even if the task has a quantum of intrinsic interest (as increasingly many jobs don’t) the monotony of its obligatory exclusivity drains its ludic potential. A “job” that might engage the energies of some people, for a reasonably limited time, for the fun of it, is just a burden on those who have to do it for forty hours a week with no say in how it should be done, for the profit of owners who contribute nothing to the project, and with no opportunity for sharing tasks or spreading the work among those who actually have to do it. This is the real world of work: a world of bureaucratic blundering, of sexual harassment and discrimination, of bonehead bosses exploiting and scapegoating their subordinates who—by any rational-technical criteria – should be calling the shots. But capitalism in the real world subordinates the rational maximization of productivity and profit to the exigencies of organizational control.

The degradation which most workers experience on the job is the sum of assorted indignities which can be denominated as “discipline.” Foucault has complexified this phenomenon but it is simple enough. Discipline consists of the totality of totalitarian controls at the workplace—surveillance, rotework, imposed work tempos, production quotas, punching-in and -out, etc. Discipline is what the factory and the office and the store share with the prison and the school and the mental hospital. It is something historically original and horrible. It was beyond the capacities of such demonic tators of yore as Nero and Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible. For all their bad intentions they just didn’t have the machinery to control their subjects as thoroughly as modern despots do. Discipline is the distinctively diabolical modern mode of control, it is an innovative intrusion which must be interdicted at the earliest opportunity.

…Work makes a mockery of freedom. The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren’t free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or-else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smaller details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are answerable only to the higher-ups, public or private. Either way, dissent and disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to the authorities. All this is supposed to be a very bad thing.

Read the entire essay here: http://deoxy.org/endwork.htm