Unemployment Ending Quotes

Sadism dominates the culture. It runs like an electric current through reality television and trash-talk programs, is at the core of pornography, and fuels the compliant, corporate collective. Corporatism is about crushing the capacity for moral choice and diminishing the individual to force him or her into an ostensibly harmonious collective. This hypermasculinity has its logical fruition in Abu Ghraib, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and our lack of compassion for our homeless, our poor, the mentally ill, the unemployed, and the sick. ... We accept the system handed to us and seek to find a comfortable place within it. We retreat into the narrow, confined ghettos created for us and shut our eyes to the deadly superstructure of the corporate state.

We can say without exaggeration that the present national ambition of the United States is unemployment. People live for quitting time, for weekends, for vacations, and for retirement; moreover, this ambition seems to be classless, as true in the executive suites as on the assembly lines. One works not because the work is necessary, valuable, useful to a desirable end, or because one loves to do it, but only to be able to quit - a condition that a saner time would regard as infernal, a condemnation.

Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you.

For their never-ending endeavours to obtain or retain wealth, countries desperately need companies, because they—unlike most human beings—have the means of production, and human beings, because they—unlike all companies—have the means of reproduction.

Somewhere on the Earth tonight, my Tylla, there is a Man with a Lever, which, when he pulls it, Will Save The World. The man is now unemployed. His switch gathers dust. He himself plays pinochle.

People keep asking what I do for a living and I keep saying that I don’t believe in making a living. That it’s a concept that has been twisted. I tell them I believe in making a life and money is a distracting object if there’s anything left at the end of the day and I just want to go on well. Make it through the day. So I smile and raise my glass and they laugh and take my hand, saying ”here’s to the youth”, pointing at me. And I might just be young and naive for I still believe in the freedom of choice of how to spend your life. So they toast to the youth, who still think she’s free, and that’s all fine by me.

Eric, you need to look at the whole picture," the PM said. "You look at the jobless as a huge pile of scrap and you're looking for what can be recycled. That's good. That's your job. But what you don't realise is that this pile of scrap itself serves a purpose. I need my zeros, Eric. They put fear in people; fear of crime and terrorism. They are a stark reminder to the stakeholders that what they despise today, they may end up joining tomorrow. It keeps them obedient. Remember that!

There is never a right time to break someone's heart. And anyone with even a microgram of sensitivity in his or her body will agonise for an age over that timing. Only problem is there is always some reason not to make someone unhappy. The day a relationship end, if that relationship was at all important to the suckers involved, becomes as important an anniversary as a wedding day or birthday. Obviously, the average person doesn't want to kick someone they once loved while that person is down.   It's not just hard times when someone is down that become obstacles to making your getaway. After times of bereavement, unemployment and general unhappiness, those events that should be happy ones also make some times off limits for the eager would- be dumper. Christmas, birthdays, Easter  all impossible. A clever person with a sensitive lover that they sense is not quite as into them as he or she used to be, could starve off the inevitable for years by carefully spacing out this crucial dates.

Almost as an article of faith, some individuals believe that conspiracies are either kooky fantasies or unimportant aberrations. To be sure, wacko conspiracy theories do exist. There are people who believe that the United States has been invaded by a secret United Nations army equipped with black helicopters, or that the country is secretly controlled by Jews or gays or feminists or black nationalists or communists or extraterrestrial aliens. But it does not logically follow that all conspiracies are imaginary. Conspiracy is a legitimate concept in law: the collusion of two or more people pursuing illegal means to effect some illegal or immoral end. People go to jail for committing conspiratorial acts. Conspiracies are a matter of public record, and some are of real political significance. The Watergate break-in was a conspiracy, as was the Watergate cover-up, which led to Nixon’s downfall. Iran-contra was a conspiracy of immense scope, much of it still uncovered. The savings and loan scandal was described by the Justice Department as “a thousand conspiracies of fraud, theft, and bribery,” the greatest financial crime in history. Often the term “conspiracy” is applied dismissively whenever one suggests that people who occupy positions of political and economic power are consciously dedicated to advancing their elite interests. Even when they openly profess their designs, there are those who deny that intent is involved. In 1994, the officers of the Federal Reserve announced they would pursue monetary policies designed to maintain a high level of unemployment in order to safeguard against “overheating” the economy. Like any creditor class, they preferred a deflationary course. When an acquaintance of mine mentioned this to friends, he was greeted skeptically, “Do you think the Fed bankers are deliberately trying to keep people unemployed?” In fact, not only did he think it, it was announced on the financial pages of the press. Still, his friends assumed he was imagining a conspiracy because he ascribed self-interested collusion to powerful people. At a World Affairs Council meeting in San Francisco, I remarked to a participant that U.S. leaders were pushing hard for the reinstatement of capitalism in the former communist countries. He said, “Do you really think they carry it to that level of conscious intent?” I pointed out it was not a conjecture on my part. They have repeatedly announced their commitment to seeing that “free-market reforms” are introduced in Eastern Europe. Their economic aid is channeled almost exclusively into the private sector. The same policy holds for the monies intended for other countries. Thus, as of the end of 1995, “more than $4.5 million U.S. aid to Haiti has been put on hold because the Aristide government has failed to make progress on a program to privatize state-owned companies” (New York Times 11/25/95). Those who suffer from conspiracy phobia are fond of saying: “Do you actually think there’s a group of people sitting around in a room plotting things?” For some reason that image is assumed to be so patently absurd as to invite only disclaimers. But where else would people of power get together – on park benches or carousels? Indeed, they meet in rooms: corporate boardrooms, Pentagon command rooms, at the Bohemian Grove, in the choice dining rooms at the best restaurants, resorts, hotels, and estates, in the many conference rooms at the White House, the NSA, the CIA, or wherever. And, yes, they consciously plot – though they call it “planning” and “strategizing” – and they do so in great secrecy, often resisting all efforts at public disclosure. No one confabulates and plans more than political and corporate elites and their hired specialists. To make the world safe for those who own it, politically active elements of the owning class have created a national security state that expends billions of dollars and enlists the efforts of vast numbers of people.

I stared at the price tags and thought, Why don’t you fucking kill yourself? I have that thought a lot, actually. Hey, did you know that people making less than $34,000 a year are 50 percent more likely to commit suicide? I looked it up. Did you know that number shoots up to 72 percent for the unemployed? I heard a guy on talk radio go on and on about how people on food stamps are living the good life off the government teat, and all I could think was, Yes, it’s such a party that sometimes we blow our fucking brains out rather than get humiliated by another government aid employee.

A life coach? What does that mean? It doesn’t mean anything, does it? So they ‘coach’ people on how to live their lives? Why don’t they mind their own fucking business? They only call themselves life coaches because they can’t get a job. Because they’re unemployable. And they haven’t got any qualifications either. Do you think they went to Uni to study life coaching? Of course they didn’t. And who do they coach anyway? Do people go to them and ask to be coached on their lives? I hardly think so. They’d see a psychiatrist or a psychologist or someone with a bit of clout, wouldn’t they? They don’t coach anybody at all, do they? They’ve made it all up. So, there you have it. At the bottom end of the otherworldly, metaphysical scale, even less developed spiritually than Orphans or Horace, are Life Coaches.

Beyond the queues, the vacancy screens listed jobs in a multitude of languages. Invariably, they were low-paid and short-term dead-ends. Nearby, people in headphones sat at a bank of machines: the blind and the illiterate force-fed with ‘opportunities’ by soothing machine voices. On the far wall, in large print, a poster declared: BEGGARS CANNOT BE CHOOSERS.

The Latin word finis has two meanings: the end or the finish, and a goal to reach. A man who could not see the end of his "provisional existence" was not able to aim at an ultimate goal in life. He ceased living for the future, in contrast to a man in normal life. Therefore the whole structure of his inner life changed; signs of decay set in which we know from other areas of life. The unemployed worker, for example, is in a similar position. His existence has become provisional and in a certain sense he cannot live for the future or aim at a goal. Research work done on unemployed miners has shown that they suffer from a peculiar sort of deformed time-inner time- which is a result of their unemployed state. Prisoners, too, suffered from this strange "time-experience." In camp, a small time unit, a day, for example, filled with hourly tortures and fatigue, appeared endless. A larger time unit, perhaps a week, seemed to pass very quickly. My comrades agreed when I said that in a camp a day lasted longer than a week.

What are the things that make adults depressed? The master list is too comprehensive to quantify (plane crashes, unemployment, killer bees, impotence, Stringer Bell's murder, gambling addictions, crib death, the music of Bon Iver, et al.) But whenever people talk about their personal bouts of depression in the abstract, there are two obstructions I hear more than any other. The possibility that one's life is not important, and the mundane predictability of day-to-day existence. Talk to a depressed person (particularly one who's nearing midlife), and one (or both) of these problems will inevitably be described. Since the end of World War II, every generation of American children has been endlessly conditioned to believe that their lives are supposed to be great -- a meaningful life is not just possible, but required. Part of the reason forward-thinking media networks like Twitter succeed is because people want to believe that every immaterial thing they do is pertinent by default; it's interesting because it happened to them, which translates as interesting to all. At the same time, we concede that a compelling life is supposed to be spontaneous and unpredictable-- any artistic depiction of someone who does the same thing every day portrays that character as tragically imprisoned (January Jones on Mad Men, Ron Livingston in Office Space, the lyrics to "Eleanor Rigby," all novels set in affluent suburbs, pretty much every project Sam Mendes has ever conceived, etc.) If you know exactly what's going to happen tomorrow, the voltage of that experience is immediately mitigated. Yet most lives are the same, 95 percent of the time. And most lives aren't extrinsically meaningful, unless you're delusionally self-absorbed or authentically Born Again. So here's where we find the creeping melancholy of modernity: The one thing all people are supposed to inherently deserve- a daily subsistence that's both meaningful and unpredictable-- tends to be an incredibly rare commodity. If it's not already there, we cannot manufacture it.

As Jeffrey Reiman points out in the Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison, the criminal justice system excuses and ignores crimes of the rich that produce profound social harms while intensely criminalizing the behaviors of the poor and nonwhite, including those behaviors that produce few social harms. When the crimes of the rich are dealt with, it’s generally through administrative controls and civil enforcement rather than aggressive policing, criminal prosecution, and incarceration, which are reserved largely for the poor and nonwhite. No bankers have been jailed for the 2008 financial crisis despite widespread fraud and the looting of the American economy, which resulted in mass unemployment, homelessness, and economic dislocation.

Labor-saving devices, led by the computer, are encouraging more production and more unemployment. Automation may thus be classified as both asset and liability. It can eliminate a great deal of dull, monotonous labor, but if unrelieved idleness is the end result, the cure may be worse than the disease. The evidence strongly indicates that man is a working animal—in the sense of needing an activity that involves hand and brain, and that makes sense to him.

Only those who have been on the receiving end of poverty, unemployment, homelessess, mental illness, domestic violence, racism, sexism or ageism can fully identify with others' reactions to those distressing experiences. Only those who have been members of marginalised minority can fully appreciate how that feels. [p50]

A CEO shouldn't get several hundred times the salary that the janitor is paid. An athlete shouldn't get several hundred times the salary that the waterboy is paid. A filmstar shouldn't get several hundred times the salary that the crew at the bottom are paid. I understand if you are not yet civilized enough to flatten the field completely – for you are an infantile species after all. But at the very least, do your best to reduce the gap - that is, if you intend to be human someday.

Hell, there're already too many psychologists; too many everythings. Too many engineers, too many chemists, too many doctors, too many dentists, too many sociologists. There aren't enough people who can actually do anything, really know how to make this world work. When you thing about it; when you look at the way it really is; God, we've got - well, let's say, there's 100 percent. Half of these are under eighteen or over sixty-five; that is not working. This leaves the middle fifty percent. Half of these are women; most are so busy having babies or taking care of kids, they're totally occupied. Some of them work, too, so let's say we're down to 30 percent. Ten percent are doctors or lawyers or sociologists or psychologists or dentists or businessmen or artists or writers, or schoolteachers, or priests, ministers, rabbis; none of there are actually producing anything, they're only servicing people. So now we're down to 20 percent. At least 2 or 3 percent are living on trusts or clipping coupons or are just rich. That leaves 17 percent. Seven percent of these are unemployed, mostly on purpose! So in the end we've got 10 percent producing all the food, constructing the houses, building and repairing all the roads, developing electricity, working in the mines, building cars, collecting garbage; all the dirty work, all the real work. Everybody's just looking for some gimmick so they don't have to actually do anything. And the worst part is, the ones who do the work get paid the least.

If we decide to become mature enough, we might end up forcing some angels to become unemployed. We would take great care of ourselves without needing a guardian angel.

Sometimes it looks like you're going nowhere or that you're headed in the wrong direction. I'm learning that the decision itself is rarely the point. The point is becoming more fully ourselves in the presence of God, connecting with Him and with each other, and living our lives as though we believe He is good and beautiful. The point is being honest about where you are and what you need and then looking around in your own community for people to walk with you and with whom you can walk. I spent years wishing people would support me only to later realize I was waiting around for something to come to me when I was perfectly capable of going out and getting it. I'm convinced God is less interested in where we end up then He is in who we are becoming. Whether we're employed or unemployed, encouraged or discouraged, filled with vision or fumbling in the fog. More than anything, our Father just wants to be with us. The most common way He shows His "withness" to us is in the actual, physical presence of other people.

If, at the end of the war, the scientific organization, which had been created in order to liberate men for fighting and munition work, had been preserved, and the hours of work had been cut down to four, all would have been well. Instead of that the old chaos was restored, those whose work was demanded were made to work long hours, and the rest were left to starve as unemployed. Why? Because work is a duty, and a man should not receive wages in proportion to what he has produced, but in proportion to his virtue as exemplified by his industry.

As long as there are no routes back to full employment except that of somehow restoring business confidence, he pointed out, business lobbies in effect have veto power over government actions: propose doing anything they dislike, such as raising taxes or enhancing workers' bargaining power, and they can issue dire warnings that this will reduce confidence and plunge the nation into depression. But let monetary and fiscal policy be deployed to fight unemployment, and suddenly business confidence becomes less necessary, and the need to cater to capitalists' concern is much reduced.

Overall, the American Millennial demographic group falls into two categories. The first match the stereotype of entitlement and laziness and taking an extended adolescence between college and entering the workforce. The second . . . got screwed: they attempted to be adults, but got sideswiped by the combination of Boomers squeezing them out of the workforce, and the mass unemployment triggered by the 2007–09 financial crisis. Regardless of bucket, the Millennials lost years of meaningful work experience, and today are the least skilled of any equivalent age cohort in modern American history

Some of the leaders of the backlash said their name was an acronym for “Taxed Enough Already.” Maybe this was true at first. But the Tea Party was soon infused with paranoia that had nothing to do with taxes. While the ugliness caught Washington observers by surprise, anyone who had spent time in a battleground state recognized it instantly. Back in Ohio, volunteers had been told to check boxes corresponding to a voter’s most important issue: economy, environment, health care. But what box were you supposed to check when a voter’s concern was that Obama was a secret Muslim? Or a terrorist? Or a communist? Or the actual, literal Antichrist? How could you convince a voter whose pastor told them your candidate would bring about the biblical end of days? Other people were just plain racist. Outside an unemployment center in Canton, a skinny white man with stringy hair and a ratty T-shirt told me he would never, ever support my candidate. When I asked why, he took two fingers and tapped them against the veiny underside of his forearm. At first I didn’t understand. “You won’t vote for Obama because you’re a heroin addict?” It took me at least ten seconds to realize he was gesturing to the color of his skin.

rather than thinking about schooling that offers only two options, university or work, there ought to be an education system that ends just with qualifications in the humanities or sciences, because whoever ends up becoming, for example, a sanitation worker will need the intellectual training necessary to plan and program his or her own reemployment. This is not an abstract democratic and egalitarian ideal. It’s the same logic as that of working in a computerized society, which requires the same education for all and is modeled on the highest, not the lowest, standard. Otherwise, innovation will always and only produce unemployment.

The depression which spread over the world like a great conflagration toward the end of 1929 gave Adolf Hitler his opportunity, and he made the most of it. Like most great revolutionaries he could thrive only in evil times, at first when the masses were unemployed, hungry and desperate, and later when they were intoxicated by war.

Is not 'casual' labour the very secret and safety-valve of a safe and sound labour system generally?...In a complicated and commercial state constant employment at regular wages is impossible; while dole-supported unemployment, at anything like the wages of employment, is demoralizing to begin with and ruinous at its more or less quickly arriving end.

fear of that same death. An inferno of opposing desires. One day I stopped working. One day I stayed in bed. I stopped answering the phone, I just stopped. I let myself be dismissed from the high school where I was teaching, received unemployment, sick days, and later, social security. And later, much later, the earth, the trees, the rain. Especially the trees. Their certain endurance in this world, standing, in the same spot, moving and under the influence of everything around them, but they don't move, they never move until someone cuts them down. And even then, it doesn't necessarily end their lives—it's not easy to get rid of a tree. The stump sprouts and soon it's tall and dense again, growing wildly.

A man who could not see the end of his “provisional existence” was not able to aim at an ultimate goal in life. He ceased living for the future, in contrast to a man in normal life. Therefore the whole structure of his inner life changed; signs of decay set in which we know from other areas of life. The unemployed worker, for example, is in a similar position.

The Knights of Labor originated in the late 1860s and early 1870s in Philadelphia, but slowly expanded into the rest of Pennsylvania and finally became a national organization with 750,000 members. It encompassed many trade unions and was organized geographically rather than by occupation. “The Knights attempted to organize all American productive workers into ‘one big union’ regardless of skill, trade, industry, race or sex and were divided into local, district and national assemblies, with a centralized structure”155—although substantial autonomy was granted to local assemblies, which took the initiative in establishing hundreds of cooperative stores and factories. The national leadership was less energetic on this score than local leadership. The overarching purpose of the organization was, as its longtime leader Terence Powderly said, “to associate our own labors; to establish co-operative institutions such as will tend to supersede the wage-system, by the introduction of a co-operative industrial system.”156 To this end, the Knights lobbied politically, engaged in numerous strikes, lent their support to other radical social movements, and, of course, organized co-ops. Masses of workers genuinely believed that they could rise from being “rented slaves” to become cooperators in control of their work and wages, living in revitalized and stabilized communities, no longer subject to periods of unemployment. Cooperation was a religion for some of them.

How old is she now?” “Oh, she’s twenty now.” She hesitated. She was obligated to end our little chat with a stylized flourish. The way it’s done in serial television. So she wet her little bunny mouth, sleepied her eyes, widened her nostrils, patted her hair, arched her back, stood canted and hip-shot, huskied her voice and said, “See you aroun’, huh?” “Sure, Marianne. Sure.” Bless them all, the forlorn little rabbits. They are the displaced persons of our emotional culture. They are ravenous for romance, yet settle for what they call making out. Their futile, acne-pitted men drift out of high school into a world so surfeited with unskilled labor there is competition for bag-boy jobs in the supermarkets. They yearn for security, but all they can have is what they make for themselves, chittering little flocks of them in the restaurants and stores, talking of style and adornment, dreaming of the terribly sincere stranger who will come along and lift them out of the gypsy life of the two-bit tip and the unemployment, cut a tall cake with them, swell them up with sassy babies, and guide them masterfully into the shoal water of the electrified house where everybody brushes after every meal. But most of the wistful rabbits marry their unskilled men, and keep right on working. And discover the end of the dream. They have been taught that if you are sunny, cheery, sincere, group-adjusted, popular, the world is yours, including barbecue pits, charge plates, diaper service, percale sheets, friends for dinner, washer-dryer combinations, color slides of the kiddies on the home projector, and eternal whimsical romance—with crinkly smiles and Rock Hudson dialogue. So they all come smiling and confident and unskilled into a technician’s world, and in a few years they learn that it is all going to be grinding and brutal and hateful and precarious. These are the slums of the heart. Bless the bunnies. These are the new people, and we are making no place for them. We hold the dream in front of them like a carrot, and finally say sorry you can’t have any. And the schools where we teach them non-survival are gloriously architectured. They will never live in places so fine, unless they contract something incurable.

Is our society really made safer and more just by incarcerating millions of people? Is asking the police to be the lead agency in dealing with homelessness, mental illness, school discipline, youth unemployment, immigration, youth violence, sex work, and drugs really a way to achieve a better society? Can police really be trained to perform all these tasks in a professional and uncoercive manner?

Somehow many have convinced themselves that the man who pulled the United States back into some semblance of financial health, reduced unemployment to its lowest level in decades, secured health insurance for millions of citizens, ended one of our recent, all-too-intractable wars in the Middle East, reduced the staggering deficit he inherited from George W. Bush, and masterminded the takedown of Osama bin Laden actually hates America.76

A man who could not see the end of his “provisional existence” was not able to aim at an ultimate goal in life. He ceased living for the future, in contrast to a man in normal life. Therefore the whole structure of his inner life changed; signs of decay set in which we know from other areas of life. The unemployed worker, for example, is in a similar position. His existence has become provisional and in a certain sense he cannot live for the future or aim at a goal

A man who could not see the end of his “provisional existence” was not able to aim at an ultimate goal in life. He ceased living for the future, in contrast to a man in normal life. Therefore the whole structure of his inner life changed; signs of decay set in which we know from other areas of life. The unemployed worker, for example, is in a similar position. His existence has become provisional and in a certain sense he cannot live for the future or aim at a goal.

the most important instances of “injustice in exchange”—unemployment and inflation/deflation—result from party factions violating the basic principles of economic policy I show that from the Great Depression of 1929-33 to the Great Recession of 2007-9, all major U.S. financial crises can be traced to the dollar's role as chief official reserve currency—suggesting that to avoid similar future misfortunes, it's urgently necessary to end the dollar's “reserve currency curse.

The latin word finis has two meanings: the end or the finish, and a goal to reach. A man who could not see the end of his “provisional existence” was not able to aim at an ultimate goal in life. He ceased living for the future, in contrast to a man in normal life. Therefore the whole structure of his inner life changed; signs of decay set in which we know from other areas of life. The unemployed worker, for example, is in a similar position. His existence has become provisional and in a certain sense he cannot live for the future or aim at a goal.

A lot of unemployment, though. We’ve got two closed factories and a rotting shopping mall that went bankrupt before it ever opened. We’re not far from Kentucky, which marks the unofficial border to the South, so one sees more than enough pickup trucks decorated with stickers of Confederate flags and slogans proclaiming their brand of truck is superior to all others. Lots of country music stations, lots of jokes that contain the word “nigger.” A sewer system that occasionally backs up into the streets for some unknown reason. Lots and lots of stray dogs around, many with grotesque deformities.

We cannot pick and choose whom among the oppressed it is convenient to support. We must stand with all the oppressed or none of the oppressed. This is a global fight for life against corporate tyranny. We will win only when we see the struggle of working people in Greece, Spain, and Egypt as our own struggle. This will mean a huge reordering of our world, one that turns away from the primacy of profit to full employment and unionized workplaces, inexpensive and modernized mass transit, especially in impoverished communities, universal single-payer health care and a banning of for-profit health care corporations. The minimum wage must be at least $15 an hour and a weekly income of $500 provided to the unemployed, the disabled, stay-at-home parents, the elderly, and those unable to work. Anti-union laws, like the Taft-Hartley Act, and trade agreements such as NAFTA, will be abolished. All Americans will be granted a pension in old age. A parent will receive two years of paid maternity leave, as well as shorter work weeks with no loss in pay and benefits. The Patriot Act and Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, which permits the military to be used to crush domestic unrest, as well as government spying on citizens, will end. Mass incarceration will be dismantled. Global warming will become a national and global emergency. We will divert our energy and resources to saving the planet through public investment in renewable energy and end our reliance on fossil fuels. Public utilities, including the railroads, energy companies, the arms industry, and banks, will be nationalized. Government funding for the arts, education, and public broadcasting will create places where creativity, self-expression, and voices of dissent can be heard and seen. We will terminate our nuclear weapons programs and build a nuclear-free world. We will demilitarize our police, meaning that police will no longer carry weapons when they patrol our streets but instead, as in Great Britain, rely on specialized armed units that have to be authorized case by case to use lethal force. There will be training and rehabilitation programs for the poor and those in our prisons, along with the abolition of the death penalty. We will grant full citizenship to undocumented workers. There will be a moratorium on foreclosures and bank repossessions. Education will be free from day care to university. All student debt will be forgiven. Mental health care, especially for those now caged in our prisons, will be available. Our empire will be dismantled. Our soldiers and marines will come home.

A “class analysis” does not necessarily begin and end with Marx’s nineteenth-century version, a version I regard as grossly inaccurate. The class struggle, moreover, does not begin and end at the point of production. It may emerge from the poverty of the unemployed and unemployables, many of whom have never done a day’s work in industry; it may emerge from a new sense of possibility that slowly pervades society—the tension between “what is” and “what could be”—which percolates through virtually all traditional classes; it may emerge from the cultural and physical decomposition of the traditional class structure on which the social stability of capitalism was based.

...a UBI is not a salve for a world of technological unemployment, or a powerful antipoverty measure, or a form of social dividend, or a way to boost the earnings of the working poor. Rather, it is all those things and more: a paradigmatic shift that would free people from having to do more work that they did not want to do at all. A UBI would, in essence, lop off the bottom of the psychologist Abraham Maslow's 'hierarchy of needs', where air, food, water, and shelter reside, with self-transcendence up at the other end. A UBI would give people the economic bandwidth to do what they wanted with their lives... Let the robots do the dirty work. Let the people do what they want.

I want to make it clear that I am not implying here that all housing issues can be solved through market solutions. Many cases of homelessness, for instance, particularly in affluent cities, stem from social welfare policies and require and immediate government action. It is important from the beginning to clearly separate emergency social welfare from housing policy. Too often, housing policy is conceived as an extension of social welfare applied to the middle class. In every large city, a small number of households - some may be one-person households - are unable to pay for their housing. They end up in the streets. These households may be permanently or temporarily disabled - physically or mentally - or may have experienced bad luck that results in long unemployment periods. It is certainly the duty of the government to provide a shelter for them as an emergency service. Once in an emergency shelter, social workers can identify those who are likely to be permanently unable to earn an income and then direct them toward a social housing shelter, where specialized staff will follow up on their case. Other homeless households may need only temporary help to find a job and a house they can afford before they rejoin the city's active population. The provision of homeless shelters is not part of housing policy, as it has little to do with supply and demand.

Fourteen years of sharing political power in the Republic, of making all the compromises that were necessary to maintain coalition governments, had sapped the strength and the zeal of the Social Democrats until their party had become little more than an opportunist pressure organization, determined to bargain for concessions for the trade unions on which their strength largely rested. It might be true, as some Socialists said, that fortune had not smiled on them: the Communists, unscrupulous and undemocratic, had split the working class; the depression had further hurt the Social Democrats, weakening the trade unions and losing the party the support of millions of unemployed, who in their desperation turned either to the Communists or the Nazis. But the tragedy of the Social Democrats could not be explained fully by bad luck. They had had their chance to take over Germany in November 1918 and to found a state based on what they had always preached: social democracy. But they lacked the decisiveness to do so. Now at the dawn of the third decade they were a tired, defeatist party, dominated by old, well-meaning but mostly mediocre men. Loyal to the Republic they were to the last, but in the end too confused, too timid to take the great risks which alone could have preserved it, as they had shown by their failure to act when Papen turned out a squad of soldiers to destroy constitutional government in Prussia.

I do not see, however, why a democratic state, armed with a legislature and the power to draw up a budget, cannot strive for a certain fairness in, for example, pension policies or tax policies, or support to the unemployed, or salaries to public employees, or assistance to the elderly living alone, people who have health problems, or those who, for various reasons, find themselves at the bottom of society. Every civilized state attempts, in different ways and with different degrees of success, to come up with reasonable policies in these areas, and not even the most ardent supporters of the market economy have anything against it in principle. In the end, then, it is a conflict not of beliefs, but rather of terminology.

The fall of France,’ wrote the American journalist Rosie Waldeck from Bucharest in 1940, ‘formed a climax to twenty years of failure of the promises of democracy to handle unemployment, inflation, deflations, labour unrest, party egoism and whatnot. Europe, tired of herself and doubtful of the principles she had been living by, felt almost relieved to have everything settled – not satisfactorily, but in such a way that it absolved her of all responsibility.’ Countess Rosie Waldeck was the American equivalent of Bella Fromm. The pen name of Rosie Goldschmidt-Graefenberg-Ullstein, she was a Jewish banker’s daughter who, after a number of divorces, ended up writing society columns and moving effortlessly in the most select circles, and who beneath all her charm

At all times it is a bewildering thing to the poor weaver to see his employer removing from house to house, each one grander than the last, till he ends in building one more magnificent than all, or withdraws his money from the concern, or sells his mill, to buy an estate in the country, while all the time the weaver, who thinks he and his fellows are the real makers of this wealth, is struggling on for bread for his children, through the vicissitudes of lowered wages, short hours, fewer hands employed, etc. And when he knows trade is bad, and could understand (at least partially) that there are not buyers enough in the market to purchase the goods already made, and consequently that there is no demand for more; when he would bear and endure much without complaining, could he also see that his employers were bearing their share; he is, I say, bewildered and (to use his own word) "aggravated" to see that all goes on just as usual with the millowners. Large houses are still occupied, while spinners' and weavers' cottages stand empty, because the families that once filled them are obliged to live in rooms or cellars. Carriages still roll along the streets, concerts are still crowded by subscribers, the shops for expensive luxuries still find daily customers, while the workman loiters away his unemployed time in watching these things, and thinking of the pale, uncomplaining wife at home, and the wailing children asking in vain for enough of food--of the sinking health, of the dying life of those near and dear to him. The contrast is too great. Why should he alone suffer from bad times?

In 1962, before he’d written “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine,” Good edited a book called The Scientist Speculates. He wrote a chapter entitled, “The Social Implications of Artificial Intelligence,” kind of a warm-up for the superintelligence ideas he was developing. Like Steve Omohundro would argue almost fifty years later, he noted that among the problems intelligent machines will have to address are those caused by their own disruptive appearance on Earth. Such machines … could even make useful political and economic suggestions; and they would need to do so in order to compensate for the problems created by their own existence. There would be problems of overpopulation, owing to the elimination of disease, and of unemployment, owing to the efficiency of low-grade robots that the main machines had designed.

In the meantime Chancellor Schleicher went about—with an optimism that was myopic, to say the least—trying to establish a stable government. On December 15 he made a fireside broadcast to the nation begging his listeners to forget that he was a general and assuring them that he was a supporter “neither of capitalism nor of socialism” and that to him “concepts such as private economy or planned economy have lost their terrors.” His principal task, he said, was to provide work for the unemployed and get the country back on its economic feet. There would be no tax increase, no more wage cuts. In fact, he was canceling the last cut in wages and relief which Papen had made. Furthermore, he was ending the agricultural quotas which Papen had established for the benefit of the large landowners and instead was launching a scheme to take 800,000 acres from the bankrupt Junker estates in the East and give them to 25,000 peasant families. Also prices of such essentials as coal and meat would be kept down by rigid control. This was a bid for the support of the very masses which he had hitherto opposed or disregarded, and Schleicher followed it up with conversations with the trade unions, to whose leaders he gave the impression that he envisaged a future in which organized labor and the Army would be twin pillars of the nation. But labor was not to be taken in by a man whom it profoundly mistrusted, and it declined its co-operation. The industrialists and the big landowners, on the other hand, rose up in arms against the new Chancellor’s program, which they clamored was nothing less than Bolshevism. The businessmen were aghast at Schleicher’s sudden friendliness to the unions. The owners of large estates were infuriated at his reduction of agricultural protection and livid at the prospect of his breaking up the bankrupt estates in the East. On

Lots of people have been taught to see homeless folks as the epitome of laziness, and to believe that laziness is the root cause of homeless people's suffering. This tendency to blame people for their own pain is comforting, in a twisted way; it allows us to close up our hearts and ignore the suffering of others. This same tendency also keeps us running endlessly on the hamster wheel of hyperproductivity. When we view homeless, unemployed, or impoverished people as victims of their own "laziness," our motivations to work backbreakingly hard gets stronger than ever. The fear of ending up homeless morphs into the fear of not working hard enough, which in turn makes life an endless slog of pushing ourselves past the brink and judging anyone who doesn't do the same. Lacking compassion for a struggling group of people actually makes it harder for us to be gentle with ourselves. Fighting the Laziness Lie can't stop at just encouraging people with full-time jobs to relax a bit and take more breaks.

As I write this note, it is May 2020, and the world is battling the coronavirus pandemic. My husband’s best friend, Tom, who was one of the earliest of our friends to encourage my writing and who was our son’s godfather, caught the virus last week and has just passed away. We cannot be with his widow, Lori, and his family to mourn. Three years ago, I began writing this novel about hard times in America: the worst environmental disaster in our history; the collapse of the economy; the effect of massive unemployment. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that the Great Depression would become so relevant in our modern lives, that I would see so many people out of work, in need, frightened for the future. As we know, there are lessons to be learned from history. Hope to be derived from hardships faced by others. We’ve gone through bad times before and survived, even thrived. History has shown us the strength and durability of the human spirit. In the end, it is our idealism and our courage and our commitment to one another—what we have in common—that will save us. Now, in these dark days, we can look to history, to the legacy of the Greatest Generation and the story of our own past, and take strength from it.

You’ve probably heard of the “Romanian orphans.” It is likely that more than five hundred thousand children spent part of their early lives in the state-run institutional orphanages during the Ceauşescu regime in Romania; in 1989, when communism ended in the country, the public and press saw the horrible conditions these children had been subjected to. There were often forty to sixty babies or toddlers in a single large room, each in their own crib all day long, with only one or two caregivers rotating among them over the course of a twelve-hour shift. The children suffered deprivation, malnutrition, abuse, and more. Even after being removed from the institutions, they grew up with a range of deficits. Some had low IQs, others couldn’t walk, most had major problems forming and maintaining relationships. I worked with many children removed from these orphanages. In general, the longer the child was there, the longer the deprivation, the more serious the problems. Ironically, in some overcrowded institutions, children who had to share cribs ultimately did better. The Romanian orphans are now adults; for most of them, problems persist. As a group they are much more likely to be unemployed, have mental and physical health problems, and have difficulties with relationships.

The depression which spread over the world like a great conflagration toward the end of 1929 gave Adolf Hitler his opportunity, and he made the most of it. Like most great revolutionaries he could thrive only in evil times, at first when the masses were unemployed, hungry and desperate, and later when they were intoxicated by war. Yet in one respect he was unique among history’s revolutionaries: He intended to make his revolution after achieving political power. There was to be no revolution to gain control of the State. That goal was to be reached by mandate of the voters or by the consent of the rulers of the nation—in short, by constitutional means. To get the votes Hitler had only to take advantage of the times, which once more, as the Thirties began, saw the German people plunged into despair; to obtain the support of those in power he had to convince them that only he could rescue Germany from its disastrous predicament. In the turbulent years from 1930 to 1933 the shrewd and daring Nazi leader set out with renewed energy to obtain these twin objectives. In retrospect it can be seen that events themselves and the weakness and confusion of the handful of men who were bound by their oath to loyally defend the democratic Republic which they governed played into Hitler’s hands. But this was by no means foreseeable at the beginning of 1930.

Another potential challenge to my thesis is that I myself would be hypocritical to continue in biblical studies. However, while I concede that this would be true if I were pursuing biblical studies for the sake of keeping the field alive, I have instead used my work in biblical studies to persuade people to abandon reliance on this book. I see my goal as no different from physicians, whose goal of ending human illness would lead to their eventual unemployment. The same holds true for me. I would be hypocritical only if I sought to maintain the relevance of my profession despite my belief that the profession is irrelevant. If I work to inform people of the irrelevance of the Bible for modern life, then I am fully consistent with my beliefs. From a different angle, our work is part of the proliferation of books preoccupied with the finality of different aspects of the human experience. Perhaps the most famous recent example is Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man (2002), in which he argued that liberal democracy constitutes the "end point of mankind's ideological evolution," so that we should expect no new historical developments in world history. Fukuyama's thesis, of course, has been misunderstood to mean that historical events would end. However, the truth is that he has a more Hegelian view of history, in which history ends when a sort of stasis in the development of new ideas is reached. According to Fukuyama, liberal democracy cannot be superseded and will triumph over any other competing political idea; people will see its advantages and will universally adopt it. And so, in that sense, history will end.

ON THE MODUS OPERANDI OF OUR CURRENT PRESIDENT, DONALD J. TRUMP "According to a new ABC/Washington Post poll, President Trump’s disapproval rating has hit a new high." The President's response to this news was "“I don’t do it for the polls. Honestly — people won’t necessarily agree with this — I do nothing for the polls,” the president told reporters on Wednesday. “I do it to do what’s right. I’m here for an extended period of time. I’m here for a period that’s a very important period of time. And we are straightening out this country.” - Both Quotes Taken From Aol News - August 31, 2018 In The United States, as in other Republics, the two main categories of Presidential motivation for their assigned tasks are #1: Self Interest in seeking to attain and to hold on to political power for their own sakes, regarding the welfare of This Republic to be of secondary importance. #2: Seeking to attain and to hold on to the power of that same office for the selfless sake of this Republic's welfare, irregardless of their personal interest, and in the best of cases going against their personal interests to do what is best for this Republic even if it means making profound and extreme personal sacrifices. Abraham Lincoln understood this last mentioned motivation and gave his life for it. The primary information any political scientist needs to ascertain regarding the diagnosis of a particular President's modus operandi is to first take an insightful and detailed look at the individual's past. The litmus test always being what would he or she be willing to sacrifice for the Nation. In the case of our current President, Donald John Trump, he abandoned a life of liberal luxury linked to self imposed limited responsibilities for an intensely grueling, veritably non stop two year nightmare of criss crossing this immense Country's varied terrain, both literally and socially when he could have easily maintained his life of liberal leisure. While my assertion that his personal choice was, in my view, sacrificially done for the sake of a great power in a state of rapid decline can be contradicted by saying it was motivated by selfish reasons, all evidence points to the contrary. For knowing the human condition, fraught with a plentitude of weaknesses, for a man in the end portion of his lifetime to sacrifice an easy life for a hard working incessant schedule of thankless tasks it is entirely doubtful that this choice was made devoid of a special and even exalted inspiration to do so. And while the right motivations are pivotal to a President's success, what is also obviously needed are generic and specific political, military and ministerial skills which must be naturally endowed by Our Creator upon the particular President elected for the purposes of advancing a Nation's general well being for one and all. If one looks at the latest National statistics since President Trump took office, (such as our rising GNP, the booming market, the dramatically shrinking unemployment rate, and the overall positive emotive strains in regards to our Nation's future, on both the left and the right) one can make definitive objective conclusions pertaining to the exceptionally noble character and efficiency of the current resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And if one can drown out the constant communicative assaults on our current Commander In Chief, and especially if one can honestly assess the remarkable lack of substantial mistakes made by the current President, all of these factors point to a leader who is impressively strong, morally and in other imperative ways. And at the most propitious time. For the main reason that so many people in our Republic palpably despise our current President is that his political and especially his social agenda directly threatens their licentious way of life. - John Lars Zwerenz

It is easier to attain Marx's goal, however, if you do not have to rely on everyone being morally magnificent all the time. Socialism is not a society which requires resplendent virtue of its citizens. It does not mean that we have to be wrapped around each other all the time in some great orgy of togetherness. This is because the mechanisms which would allow Marx's goal to be approached would actually be built into social institutions. They would not rely in the first place on the goodwill of the individual.... One would expect any socialist institution to have its fair share of chancers, toadies, bullies, cheats, loafers, scroungers, freeloaders, free riders and occasional psychopaths...Communism would not spell the end of human strife. Only the literal end of history would do that. Envy, aggression, domination, possessiveness and competition would still exist. It is just that they could not take the forms they assume under capitalism - not because of some superior human virtue, but because of a change of institutions. These vices would no longer be bound up with the exploitation of child labour, colonial violence, grotesque social inequalities and cutthroat economic competition. Instead, they would have to assume some other form. Tribal societies have their fair share of violence, rivalry and hunger for power, but these things cannot take the form of imperial warfare, free-market competition or mass unemployment, because such institutions do not exist among the Nuer or the Dinka. There are villains everywhere you look, but only some of these moral ruffians are so placed as to be able to steal pension funds or pump the media full of lying political propaganda. Most gangsters are not in a position to do so. Instead, they have to content themselves with hanging people from meat hooks. In a socialist society, nobody would be in a position to do so. This is not because they would be too saintly, but because there would be no private pension funds or privately owned media. Shakespeare's villains had to find outlets for their wickedness other than firing missiles at Palestinian refugees. You cannot be a bullying industrial magnate if there isn't any industry around.

As I write this note, it is May 2020, and the world is battling the coronavirus pandemic. My husband’s best friend, Tom, who was one of the earliest of our friends to encourage my writing and who was our son’s godfather, caught the virus last week and has just passed away. We cannot be with his widow, Lori, and his family to mourn. Three years ago, I began writing this novel about hard times in America: the worst environmental disaster in our history; the collapse of the economy; the effect of massive unemployment. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that the Great Depression would become so relevant in our modern lives, that I would see so many people out of work, in need, frightened for the future. As we know, there are lessons to be learned from history. Hope to be derived from hardships faced by others. We’ve gone through bad times before and survived, even thrived. History has shown us the strength and durability of the human spirit. In the end, it is our idealism and our courage and our commitment to one another—what we have in common—that will save us. Now, in these dark days, we can look to history, to the legacy of the Greatest Generation and the story of our own past, and take strength from it. Although my novel focuses on fictional characters, Elsa Martinelli is representative of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children who went west in the 1930s in search of a better life. Many of them, like the pioneers who went west one hundred years before them, brought nothing more than a will to survive and a hope for a better future. Their strength and courage were remarkable. In writing this story, I tried to present the history as truthfully as possible. The strike that takes place in the novel is fictional, but it is based on strikes that took place in California in the thirties. The town of Welty is fictional as well. Primarily where I diverged from the historical record was in the timeline of events. There are instances in which I chose to manipulate dates to better fit my fictional narrative. I apologize in advance to historians and scholars of the era. For more information about the Dust Bowl years or the migrant experience in California, please go to my website KristinHannah.com for a suggested reading list.

Statistical discrimination explains why the police in the United States justify stopping black drivers more often. And how the Hindu majoritarian government of the state of Uttar Pradesh recently explained why so many of the people “accidentally” killed by the state police (in what are called “encounter deaths”) are Muslim. There are more blacks and Muslims among criminals. In other words, what looks like naked racism does not have to be that; it can be the result of targeting some characteristic (drug dealing, criminality) that happens to be correlated with race or religion. So statistical discrimination, rather than old-fashioned prejudice—what economists call taste-based discrimination—may be the cause. The end result is the same if you are black or Muslim, though. A recent study on the impact of “ban the box” (BTB) policies on the rate of unemployment of young black men provides a compelling demonstration of statistical discrimination. BTB policies restrict employers from using application forms where there is a box that needs to be checked if you have a criminal conviction. Twenty-three states have adopted these policies in the hope of raising employment among young black men, who are much more likely to have a conviction than others and whose unemployment rate is double the national average.31 To test the effect of these policies, two researchers sent fifteen thousand fictitious online job applications to employers in New Jersey and New York City, just before and right after the states of New York and New Jersey implemented the BTB policy.32 They manipulated the perception of race by using typically white or typically African American first names on the résumés. Whenever a job posting required indicating whether or not the applicant had a prior felony conviction, they also randomized whether he or she had one. They found, as many others before them, clear discrimination against blacks in general: white “applicants” received about 23 percent more callbacks than black applicants with the same résumé. Unsurprisingly, among employers who asked about criminal convictions before the ban, there was a very large effect of having a felony conviction: applicants without a felony conviction were 62 percent more likely to be called back than those with a conviction but an otherwise identical résumé, an effect similar for whites and blacks. The most surprising finding, however, was that the BTB policy substantially increased racial disparities in callbacks. White applicants to BTB-affected employers received 7 percent more callbacks than similar black applicants before BTB. After BTB, this gap grew to 43 percent. The reason was that without the actual information about convictions, the employers assumed all black applicants were more likely to have a conviction. In other words, the BTB policy led employers to rely on race to predict criminality, which is of course statistical discrimination.

No sound strategy for studying fascism can fail to examine the entire context in which it was formed and grew. Some approaches to fascism start with the crisis to which fascism was a response, at the risk of making the crisis into a cause. A crisis of capitalism, according to Marxists, gave birth to fascism. Unable to assure ever-expanding markets, ever-widening access to raw materials, and ever-willing cheap labor through the normal operation of constitutional regimes and free markets, capitalists were obliged, Marxists say, to find some new way to attain these ends by force. Others perceive the founding crisis as the inadequacy of liberal state and society (in the laissez-faire meaning of liberalism current at that time) to deal with the challenges of the post-1914 world. Wars and revolutions produced problems that parliament and the market—the main liberal solutions—appeared incapable of handling: the distortions of wartime command economies and the mass unemployment attendant upon demobilization; runaway inflation; increased social tensions and a rush toward social revolution; extension of the vote to masses of poorly educated citizens with no experience of civic responsibility; passions heightened by wartime propaganda; distortions of international trade and exchange by war debts and currency fluctuations. Fascism came forward with new solutions for these challenges. Fascists hated liberals as much as they hated socialists, but for different reasons. For fascists, the internationalist, socialist Left was the enemy and the liberals were the enemies’ accomplices. With their hands-off government, their trust in open discussion, their weak hold over mass opinion, and their reluctance to use force, liberals were, in fascist eyes, culpably incompetent guardians of the nation against the class warfare waged by the socialists. As for beleaguered middle-class liberals themselves, fearful of a rising Left, lacking the secret of mass appeal, facing the unpalatable choices offered them by the twentieth century, they have sometimes been as ready as conservatives to cooperate with fascists. Every strategy for understanding fascism must come to terms with the wide diversity of its national cases. The major question here is whether fascisms are more disparate than the other “isms.” This book takes the position that they are, because they reject any universal value other than the success of chosen peoples in a Darwinian struggle for primacy. The community comes before humankind in fascist values, and respecting individual rights or due process gave way to serving the destiny of the Volk or razza. Therefore each individual national fascist movement gives full expression to its own cultural particularism. Fascism, unlike the other “isms,” is not for export: each movement jealously guards its own recipe for national revival, and fascist leaders seem to feel little or no kinship with their foreign cousins. It has proved impossible to make any fascist “international” work.

The most interesting aspects of the story lie between the two extremes of coercion and popularity. It might be instructive to consider fascist regimes’ management of workers, who were surely the most recalcitrant part of the population. It is clear that both Fascism and Nazism enjoyed some success in this domain. According to Tim Mason, the ultimate authority on German workers under Nazism, the Third Reich “contained” German workers by four means: terror, division, some concessions, and integration devices such as the famous Strength Through Joy (Kraft durch Freude) leisure-time organization. Let there be no doubt that terror awaited workers who resisted directly. It was the cadres of the German Socialist and Communist parties who filled the first concentration camps in 1933, before the Jews. Since socialists and communists were already divided, it was not hard for the Nazis to create another division between those workers who continued to resist and those who decided to try to live normal lives. The suppression of autonomous worker organizations allowed fascist regimes to address workers individually rather than collectively. Soon, demoralized by the defeat of their unions and parties, workers were atomized, deprived of their usual places of sociability, and afraid to confide in anyone. Both regimes made some concessions to workers—Mason’s third device for worker “containment.” They did not simply silence them, as in traditional dictatorships. After power, official unions enjoyed a monopoly of labor representation. The Nazi Labor Front had to preserve its credibility by actually paying some attention to working conditions. Mindful of the 1918 revolution, the Third Reich was willing to do absolutely anything to avoid unemployment or food shortages. As the German economy heated up in rearmament, there was even some wage creep. Later in the war, the arrival of slave labor, which promoted many German workers to the status of masters, provided additional satisfactions. Mussolini was particularly proud of how workers would fare under his corporatist constitution. The Labor Charter (1927) promised that workers and employers would sit down together in a “corporation” for each branch of the economy, and submerge class struggle in the discovery of their common interests. It looked very imposing by 1939 when a Chamber of Corporations replaced parliament. In practice, however, the corporative bodies were run by businessmen, while the workers’ sections were set apart and excluded from the factory floor. Mason’s fourth form of “containment”—integrative devices—was a specialty of fascist regimes. Fascists were past masters at manipulating group dynamics: the youth group, the leisure-time association, party rallies. Peer pressure was particularly powerful in small groups. There the patriotic majority shamed or intimidated nonconformists into at least keeping their mouths shut. Sebastian Haffner recalled how his group of apprentice magistrates was sent in summer 1933 on a retreat, where these highly educated young men, mostly non-Nazis, were bonded into a group by marching, singing, uniforms, and drill. To resist seemed pointless, certain to lead nowhere but to prison and an end to the dreamed-of career. Finally, with astonishment, he observed himself raising his arm, fitted with a swastika armband, in the Nazi salute. These various techniques of social control were successful.

I am speaking of the evenings when the sun sets early, of the fathers under the streetlamps in the back streets returning home carrying plastic bags. Of the old Bosphorus ferries moored to deserted stations in the middle of winter, where sleepy sailors scrub the decks, pail in hand and one eye on the black-and-white television in the distance; of the old booksellers who lurch from one ϧnancial crisis to the next and then wait shivering all day for a customer to appear; of the barbers who complain that men don’t shave as much after an economic crisis; of the children who play ball between the cars on cobblestoned streets; of the covered women who stand at remote bus stops clutching plastic shopping bags and speak to no one as they wait for the bus that never arrives; of the empty boathouses of the old Bosphorus villas; of the teahouses packed to the rafters with unemployed men; of the patient pimps striding up and down the city’s greatest square on summer evenings in search of one last drunken tourist; of the broken seesaws in empty parks; of ship horns booming through the fog; of the wooden buildings whose every board creaked even when they were pashas’ mansions, all the more now that they have become municipal headquarters; of the women peeking through their curtains as they wait for husbands who never manage to come home in the evening; of the old men selling thin religious treatises, prayer beads, and pilgrimage oils in the courtyards of mosques; of the tens of thousands of identical apartment house entrances, their facades discolored by dirt, rust, soot, and dust; of the crowds rushing to catch ferries on winter evenings; of the city walls, ruins since the end of the Byzantine Empire; of the markets that empty in the evenings; of the dervish lodges, the tekkes, that have crumbled; of the seagulls perched on rusty barges caked with moss and mussels, unϩinching under the pelting rain; of the tiny ribbons of smoke rising from the single chimney of a hundred-yearold mansion on the coldest day of the year; of the crowds of men ϧshing from the sides of the Galata Bridge; of the cold reading rooms of libraries; of the street photographers; of the smell of exhaled breath in the movie theaters, once glittering aϱairs with gilded ceilings, now porn cinemas frequented by shamefaced men; of the avenues where you never see a woman alone after sunset; of the crowds gathering around the doors of the state-controlled brothels on one of those hot blustery days when the wind is coming from the south; of the young girls who queue at the doors of establishments selling cut-rate meat; of the holy messages spelled out in lights between the minarets of mosques on holidays that are missing letters where the bulbs have burned out; of the walls covered with frayed and blackened posters; of the tired old dolmuşes, ϧfties Chevrolets that would be museum pieces in any western city but serve here as shared taxis, huϫng and puϫng up the city’s narrow alleys and dirty thoroughfares; of the buses packed with passengers; of the mosques whose lead plates and rain gutters are forever being stolen; of the city cemeteries, which seem like gateways to a second world, and of their cypress trees; of the dim lights that you see of an evening on the boats crossing from Kadıköy to Karaköy; of the little children in the streets who try to sell the same packet of tissues to every passerby; of the clock towers no one ever notices; of the history books in which children read about the victories of the Ottoman Empire and of the beatings these same children receive at home; of the days when everyone has to stay home so the electoral roll can be compiled or the census can be taken; of the days when a sudden curfew is announced to facilitate the search for terrorists and everyone sits at home fearfully awaiting “the oϫcials”; CONTINUED IN SECOND PART OF THE QUOTE

In Marx’s day, nobody ever thought of that technique of state intervention which is now called ‘counter cycle policy’; and, indeed, such a thought must be utterly foreign to an unrestrained capitalist system. (But even before Marx’s time, we find the beginning of doubts about, and even of investigations into, the wisdom of the credit policy of the Bank of England during a depression29.) Unemployment insurance, however, means intervention, and therefore an increase in the responsibility of the state, and it is likely to lead to experiments in counter cycle policy. I do not maintain that these experiments must necessarily be successful (although I do believe that the problem may in the end prove not so very difficult, and that Sweden30, in particular, has already shown what can be done in this field). But I wish to assert most emphatically that the belief that it is impossible to abolish unemployment by piecemeal measures is on the same plane of dogmatism as the numerous physical proofs (proffered by men who lived even later than Marx) that the problems of aviation would always remain insoluble. When the Marxists say, as they sometimes do, that Marx has proved the uselessness of a counter cycle policy and of similar piecemeal measures, then they simply do not speak the truth; Marx investigated an unrestrained capitalism, and he never dreamt of interventionism. He therefore never investigated the possibility of a systematic interference with the trade cycle, much less did he offer a proof of its impossibility. It is strange to find that the same people who complain of the irresponsibility of the capitalists in the face of human suffering are irresponsible enough to oppose, with dogmatic assertions of this kind, experiments from which we may learn how to relieve human suffering (how to become masters of our social environment, as Marx would have said), and how to control some of the unwanted social repercussions of our actions. But the apologists of Marxism are quite unaware of the fact that in the name of their own vested interests they are fighting against progress; they do not see that it is the danger of any movement like Marxism that it soon comes to represent all kinds of vested interests, and that there are intellectual investments, as well as material ones.

Most charities already target the poorest people in our communities: the homeless, the chronically unemployed, the unskilled, those living well below the poverty line. I think that's important and necessary. My philosophy as Good Sam is this. It's not only those who've hit rock bottom who deserve help. Corporate mergers, globalization, recessions, tax cuts for the super wealthy - these all the effect of punishing all Americans. What about those who appear to be getting by on their own? The man who works two jobs to put a roof over his family's head, who pays his taxes, yet still fights to makes ends meet?He doesn't qualify for food stamps or low-cost housing or handouts from charities. He's laboring longer, earning less, and has fewer job protections than he did twenty-five years ago. Yet few government programs or charities address his needs.... I gave to people in a wide variety of professions and financial circumstances. But most of the money went to the people who keep the factories and stores running, who fix our cars and our plumbing, who bake our bread and serve our coffee, who teach our children in school. They are the soldiers in our everyday lives, and they cannot and should not be forgotten.

What’s worse for you young people is that the unemployment rate isn’t even what you should really be worried about. What you should really be concerned about is the UNDERemployment rate as it speaks to precisely why you went to college. The underemployment rate is the percent of people who are not working at their full potential. So, if you went to college for accounting, but end up working as a bartender you are considered “underemployed.” The statistics vary, but the best official estimate (called U6) shows an underemployment rate considerably higher than the simple unemployment rate. Even worse than that, underemployment is typically higher in the 19-29 year old range, which means it’s even more likely you will not realize the full benefit of your degree.

Lithuanian citizens are the rudest and most animalistic I have ever seen in Europe. They have no moral, no values, and no manners. They are always starring at others, judging with their eyes of ignorance and their very small conscience, they are very rude, they are impolite wherever you go, and their customer service is horrible. They never say sorry for anything and even offend you when you complain about their mistakes and lack of proper attitude. Besides, eating in Lithuania is a huge disaster. Food is often rotten, and commonly comes with either hair, stones of even glass, as I have found many times. These people should be ashamed to be part of Europe and be removed from the European Union. They waste money as I have never seen anywhere else and are very abusive in prices. Their prices are high but their quality level is not even suitable for animals. They represent a waste on foreign investments. Their youngest generation is also a disaster: Extremely ignorant, without any respect or education, they deserve to be unemployed and starve to death. Nobody in his right mind should ever employ a Lithuanian, marry a Lithuanian or be friend with a Lithuanian. Lithuanias are always trying to use their friendships to take advantage of others, especially if such people are outsiders. Lithuanian women are gold diggers and extremely promiscuous, especially towards men of other cultures, as if their pride was built on the number of sex partners they can have from the widest variety of nations from around the globe, especially if such men are wealthy. Nevertheless, Lithuanians are also extremely racist and ignorant about the planet they live in. They are selfish, sadistic and parasitic. Probably the same could be said about all baltic countries, namely, Latvia, but for now, it is suffice to say this statement is an undoubted fact for the country in analysis. If Latvian and Lithuanian sovereignty ever end within this generation due to major unemployment, massacres and civil wars, and the vast majority of its people perish, I would say Divine justice has been made on both nations.

It hung above his mantel, the painting of the headless hawk, and on those nights when he could not sleep he would pour a glass of whiskey and talk to it, tell it the stuff of his life: he was, he said, a poet who had never written poetry, a painter who had never painted, a lover who had never loved - someone without direction, and quite headless. It wasn't that he hadn't tried - good beginnings, always, bad endings, always. Vincent, white, male, 36, college graduate: a man in the sea, fifty miles from shore; a victim, born to be murdered, either by himself or another; an actor unemployed.

So who’s right: those who say automated jobs will be replaced by better ones or those who say most humans will end up unemployable? If AI progress continues unabated, then both sides might be right: one in the short term and the other in the long term. But although people often discuss the disappearance of jobs with doom-and-gloom connotations, it doesn’t have to be a bad thing! Luddites obsessed about particular jobs, neglecting the possibility that other jobs might provide the same social value. Analogously, perhaps those who obsess about jobs today are being too narrow-minded: we want jobs because they can provide us with income and purpose, but given the opulence of resources produced by machines, it should be possible to find alternative ways of providing both the income and the purpose without jobs. Something similar ended up happening in the equine story, which didn’t end with all horses going extinct. Instead, the number of horses has more than tripled since 1960, as they were protected by an equine social-welfare system of sorts: even though they couldn’t pay their own bills, people decided to take care of horses, keeping them around for fun, sport and companionship. Can we similarly take care of our fellow humans in need?

Black families can only prosper when we fix the problems that most hurt them--huge unemployment; racist and opportunistic ending and mortgage practices; diminished family and child care support for poor mothers; stunted retaining programs for black males who've made obsolete by technological advance (while penalizing employers who practice discrimination in hiring bl back males); and the political erosion of early childhood learning programs that are critical to success later in life.

The System The denunciation of a dictatorship’s crimes doesn’t end with a list of the tortured, murdered, and disappeared. The machine gives you lessons in egoism and lies. Solidarity is a crime. To save yourself, the machine teaches, you have to be a hypocrite and a louse. The person who kisses you tonight will sell you tomorrow. Every favor breeds an act of revenge. If you say what you think, they smash you, and nobody deserves the risk. Doesn’t the unemployed worker secretly wish the factory will fire the other guy in order to take his place? Isn’t your neighbor your competition and enemy? Not long ago, in Montevideo, a little boy asked his mother to take him back to the hospital, because he wanted to be unborn. Without a drop of blood, without even a tear, the daily massacre of the best in every person is carried out. Victory for the machine: people are afraid of talking and looking at one another. May nobody meet anybody else. When someone looks at you and keeps looking, you think, “He’s going to screw me.” The manager tells the employee, who was once his friend, “I had to denounce you. They asked for the lists. Some name had to be given. If you can, forgive me.” Out of every thirty Uruguayans, one has the job of watching, hunting down, and punishing others. There is no work outside the garrisons and the police stations, and in any case to keep your job you need a certificate of democratic faith given by the police. Students are required to denounce their fellow students, children are urged to denounce their teachers. In Argentina, television asks, “Do you know what your child is doing right now?” Why isn’t the murder of souls through poisoning written up on the crime page?

his second glass, ‘What are your plans?’ Deliberately, he had failed to specify which of them he was addressing. ‘Well,’ Derek replied defensively, ‘they’re a bit up in the air, actually. As of the end of the month, I shall be joining the ranks of the unemployed.’ Colin choked. ‘You mean Fithyan & Co. have sacked you?’ ‘Not exactly.

How can any of us even know what to believe anymore? Our culture’s full of so much phoniness and deception. Companies advertise products to make us believe that we will be more beautiful, more healthy, or live longer by consuming their products. We are seduced by lovers who feed their porn addictions when we’re asleep. We’re taught to believe that if we work hard and take risks, that we can achieve our dreams, yet youth unemployment is the highest it’s been in decades. Fairytales tell us that true love exists, but half of all marriages end in divorce.

Government-subsidized private sector job creation is one way forward. Recently, the federal government sponsored a promising short-term subsidized jobs program through something called the TANF Emergency Fund. States that chose to participate were allowed to use TANF dollars to provide employers (mostly in the private sector) with incentives to hire unemployed workers, targeting those on TANF or those who were in a spell of extended unemployment. Each state was given considerable leeway to design the program however it saw fit, often in close collaboration with employers. Across the District of Columbia and the thirty-nine states that took part in the program, employers created more than 260,000 jobs with an investment of only $1.3 billion dollars. Roughly two-thirds of participating employers said they created positions that would not have existed otherwise, and the businesses that took part expressed, on the whole, eagerness to participate in such a program in the future. Further, many participants remained employed after the subsidy ended, and those who had experienced significant trouble finding work especially made gains. Researchers who studied the program noted that it garnered “strong support from employers, workers, and state and local officials from across the political spectrum.” Creating a subsidized jobs program modeled on the TANF Emergency Fund would be one way to improve the circumstances of America’s $2-a-day poor.

How to Quantify Achievement Stories When hiring managers, recruiters, and staffing firms see a resume or LinkedIn profile or attend an interview with verbiage but no numbers, they don’t know what those words mean. In fact, they know next to nothing until you add the numbers that explain the impact of your work. Here’s how you can resolve this issue. Work With Finance Sometimes the impact of our work is not always clear. At times like this, reaching out to one of your friends in the Finance Department can be very helpful. Finance has access to numbers that are not always readily available to other departments. If you’re no longer with the company, explain to the Finance associate that the numbers he provides could make the difference in determining whether you land another position. Using a Range Per Lily Zhang of the Muse, one reason job seekers avoid quantifying is not knowing the exact number. Lily suggests using a range. Using my work experience, here’s what that means: Before: Chaired weekly product manager meeting. After: Chaired weekly meeting with 7 to 12 product managers so plans could be discussed and coordinated. Confusion and rework were eliminated. Frequency Lily shared that one of the easiest ways to add numbers is to identify the frequency with which you perform a given task. This can help the hiring manager understand how much you can handle. For example: Before: Responded to pricing requests from the Sales Force. After: Responded to 15 to 20 pricing requests from the Sales Force on a daily basis. Scale Everyone on the hiring side of the business loves when candidates provide numbers, because numbers explain the impact of what you’ve done. The most meaningful numbers are those associated with making money, saving money, and driving productivity. Here are a couple examples from my work experience: Before: Reduced time to perform Operations Manager’s role; after analysis showed tasks could be batched and performed at the end of the month. After: Reduced time to perform Operations Manager role by 66%; after analysis showed tasks could be batched and performed at the end of the month. Asked Director if I could take on the responsibilities of employees who were laid off. Before: Analysis revealed misconfigured offers; worked with other departments to correct errors. Implemented process to prevent future errors. After: Analysis revealed misconfigured offers; worked with other departments to correct errors. Recognized $7.2M. Implemented process to prevent future errors.

The intelligent machines narratives (chapters 13 and 14) are still much talked about, though they do not seem to have much economic impact at the moment. Machines do not seem to be very scary at the time of this writing, but should there be some adverse news about income inequality or unemployment, the contagion of scary forms of this narrative could reappear. A sudden increase in concerns about robots has happened before. A search on ProQuest News & Newspapers for articles containing both robot and jobs reveals that the number of articles almost tripled between the last six months of 2007 and the first six months of 2009. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, December 2007 was the peak month before the Great Recession, and the recession ended in June 2009.

Supposedly, all this bright new technology would provide new opportunities for employment, just like the IT boom at the end of the twentieth century. But the need for professionals could not be met because of a lack of intensive education and, frankly, intelligence. So the AIs took up the slack, leaving millions unemployed and unemployable.

Recall the 1970s, a decade that featured bubbles, busts, an end to the global gold exchange standard, devaluation of the dollar, mounting debt, risky financial innovation, monetary and fiscal experimentation, and oil supply shocks driven by geopolitical shocks. It all culminated in double-digit inflation, stubborn unemployment, and persistent recession. That is the corrosive condition known as stagflation, or stagnation with inflation.

By the end of spring 1942, New York City had begun to rise from a gloomy run of months. The United States Navy had won its first major victory at the Battle of Midway. Losses in the Battle of the Atlantic were horrific and still being censored, which was a good thing, as the Allies lost 213 ships in May and June alone. In New York City, however, business was beginning to boom, as a major boost in government spending cut unemployment in half. Servicemen from all over were beginning to filter through the city and spend their government paychecks on local entertainment.

One thing that is clear is that the future of employment will be very volatile. Our big problem won’t be an absolute lack of jobs, but rather retraining and adjusting to an ever-changing job market. There will likely be financial difficulties—who will support people who lost their old job while they are in transition, learning a new set of skills? There will surely be psychological difficulties, too, since changing jobs and retraining are stressful. And even if you have the financial and psychological ability to manage the transition, this will not be a long-term solution. Over the coming decades, old jobs will disappear, new jobs will emerge, but the new jobs too will rapidly change and vanish. So people will need to retrain and reinvent themselves not just once but many times, or they will become irrelevant. If three years of high unemployment could bring Hitler to power, what might never-ending turmoil in the job market do to democracy?

British colonial disdain for human rights even left its mark on the English language. The word “coolie” was borrowed from a Chinese word that literally means “bitter labor.” The Romanized first syllable coo means “bitter” and the second syllable lie mimics the pronunciation of the Chinese logograph that means “labor.” This Chinese word sprang into existence shortly after the Opium War in the nineteenth century when Britain annexed several territories along the eastern seaboard of China. Those territories included Hong Kong, parts of Shanghai, Canton city (Guangzhou) and parts of Tianjin, a seaport near Beijing. In those newly acquired territories, the British employed a vast number of manual laborers who served as beasts of burden on the waterfront in factories and at train stations. The coolies’ compensation was opium, not money. The British agency and officers that conceived this unusual scheme of compensation—opium for back-breaking hard labor—were as pernicious and ruthless as they were clever and calculating. Opium is a palliative drug. An addict becomes docile and inured to pain. He has no appetite and only craves the next fix. In the British colonies and concessions, the colonizers, by paying opium to the laborers for their long hours of inhumane, harsh labor, created a situation in which the Chinese laborers toiled obediently and never complained about the excessive workload or the physical devastation. Most important of all, the practice cost the employers next to nothing to feed and house the laborers, since opium suppressed the appetite of the addicts and made them oblivious to pain and discomfort. What could be better or more expedient for the British colonialists whose goal was to make a quick fortune? They had invented the most efficient and effective way to accumulate capital at a negligible cost in a colony. The only consequence was the loss of lives among the colonial subjects—an irrelevant issue to the colonialists. In addition to the advantages of this colonial practice, the British paid a pittance for the opium. In those days, opium was mostly produced in another British colony, Burma, not far from China. The exploitation of farmhands in one colony lubricated the wheels of commerce in another colony. On average, a coolie survived only a few months of the grim regime of harsh labor and opium addiction. Towards the end, as his body began to break down from malnutrition and overexertion, he was prone to cardiac arrest and sudden death. If, before his death, a coolie stumbled and hurt his back or broke a limb, he became unemployed. The employer simply recruited a replacement. The death of coolies in Canton, Hong Kong, Shanghai and other coastal cities where the British had established their extraterritorial jurisdiction during the late 19th century was so common that the Chinese accepted the phenomenon as a routine matter of semi-colonial life. Neither injury nor death of a coolie triggered any compensation to his family. The impoverished Chinese accepted injury and sudden death as part of the occupational hazard of a coolie, the “bitter labor.” “Bitter” because the labor and the opium sucked the life out of a laborer in a short span of time. Once, a 19th-century British colonial officer, commenting on the sudden death syndrome among the coolies, remarked casually in his Queen’s English, “Yes, it is unfortunate, but the coolies are Chinese, and by God, there are so many of them.” Today, the word “coolie” remains in the English language, designating an over-exploited or abused unskilled laborer.

Discrimination against minorities and immigrants. High unemployment. Murder of innocent people. Politicians controlling women's choices. Lack of treatment for mental health issues. Never Ending Wars. Current headlines? No. They have made news for hundreds of years. "Little did I know that my novel's themes would be ones of current interest," Helene Uhlfelder says about her first novel, Secrets & Deceptions: A Three-Generation Mystery. "The inspiration for Secrets & Deceptions came when I began learning more about my heritage and family – what they had lived through in both Germany and America. I didn't plan to write about the societal issues facing us today.

Jim Cramer’s Mad Money is one of the most popular shows on CNBC, a cable TV network that specializes in business and financial news. Cramer, who mostly offers investment advice, is known for his sense of showmanship. But few viewers were prepared for his outburst on August 3, 2007, when he began screaming about what he saw as inadequate action from the Federal Reserve: “Bernanke is being an academic! It is no time to be an academic. . . . He has no idea how bad it is out there. He has no idea! He has no idea! . . . and Bill Poole? Has no idea what it’s like out there! . . . They’re nuts! They know nothing! . . . The Fed is asleep! Bill Poole is a shame! He’s shameful!!” Who are Bernanke and Bill Poole? In the previous chapter we described the role of the Federal Reserve System, the U.S. central bank. At the time of Cramer’s tirade, Ben Bernanke, a former Princeton professor of economics, was the chair of the Fed’s Board of Governors, and William Poole, also a former economics professor, was the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Both men, because of their positions, are members of the Federal Open Market Committee, which meets eight times a year to set monetary policy. In August 2007, Cramerwas crying outforthe Fed to change monetary policy in order to address what he perceived to be a growing financial crisis. Why was Cramer screaming at the Federal Reserve rather than, say, the U.S. Treasury—or, for that matter, the president? The answer is that the Fed’s control of monetary policy makes it the first line of response to macroeconomic difficulties—very much including the financial crisis that had Cramer so upset. Indeed, within a few weeks the Fed swung into action with a dramatic reversal of its previous policies. In Section 4, we developed the aggregate demand and supply model and introduced the use of fiscal policy to stabilize the economy. In Section 5, we introduced money, banking, and the Federal Reserve System, and began to look at how monetary policy is used to stabilize the economy. In this section, we use the models introduced in Sections 4 and 5 to further develop our understanding of stabilization policies (both fiscal and monetary), including their long-run effects on the economy. In addition, we introduce the Phillips curve—a short-run trade-off between unexpected inflation and unemployment—and investigate the role of expectations in the economy. We end the section with a brief summary of the history of macroeconomic thought and how the modern consensus view of stabilization policy has developed.

What happens when you're comfortable is that you end up getting deeper and deeper into a “good” life that prevents you from living a "great" life and accomplishing what you really dream about.

Which is where the next ambitious ALG project comes in: African Leadership Unleashed, or ALU. Led by Fred Swaniker, ALU is a plan to establish a network of 25 universities across the continent by the end of the decade—Africa’s Ivy League—each of which will have 10,000 students. The first ALU has already opened in Mauritius. The idea is to apply the exact same boutique model of the African Leadership Academy to tertiary education. Once the 25 colleges are built and running, it will mean that every four years 250,000 young Africans trained in business, government, ethics, social policy, medicine and the arts will be entering the workforce. Among them will be the new generation of Africa’s leaders. Says Swaniker, “Hundreds of thousands of university graduates on the continent today are not equipped with the skills to lead change. About 45 percent of university graduates in Africa today are unemployed. This is a tragedy. I want to change this by applying ALA’s model in a tertiary space to provide the critical skills and leadership experience necessary for success.” Swaniker announced the project in a powerful talk at TEDGlobal 2014 in Rio de Janeiro titled “The Leaders Who Ruined Africa, and the Generation Who Can Fix It.” The talk has been downloaded over 1 million times and is a powerful and inspiring manifesto for this, the African Century.

Five important goals are listed below. If we can achieve these goals, in a context where robots are dramatically increasing productivity and doing more and more of the mindless work that wastes human potential, we will have an economy whose strength and growth defies imagination. How do we achieve these goals? Goal #1 - For the strongest possible economy, we need to create the largest possible pool of consumers, and those consumers need to have money to spend. Goal #2 - For the strongest possible economy, we need maximum economic stability. Every economic downturn has occurred when people stop spending money, either because they don't have money to spend through unemployment, or because they are afraid to let go of their money for fear of future unemployment. Consumers need to have confidence in the economy, both on the spending and the receiving ends of the equation. Goal #3 - For the strongest possible economy, we need to create the largest possible pool of innovators - people who create innovative new businesses, new inventions, new products, new art (films, music, etc.) and new intellectual property. Capitalism is strongest when new ideas are maximized. Goal #4 - For the strongest possible economy, we need for people to invest in these new ideas, both individually and in groups. An idea is nothing unless it is put into action. Without the money provided by investment, there can be no new businesses and no new products. Goal #5 - For the strongest possible economy, we need for people to have maximum freedom. People need the freedom to choose the products they want from an open marketplace of maximum size. They need to be free to start businesses of their own. They need to be free to work on their ideas and carry them as far as possible. At the same time, people need to be free to take time off and relax as they so choose. The notion that people should have to work 60 hours a week to make ends meet is the antithesis of freedom.

consider a young Tunisian man pushing a wooden handcart loaded with fruits and vegetables down a dusty road to a market in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid. When the man was three, his father died. He supports his family by borrowing money to fill his cart, hoping to earn enough selling the produce to pay off the debt and have a little left over. It’s the same grind every day. But this morning, the police approach the man and say they’re going to take his scales because he has violated some regulation. He knows it’s a lie. They’re shaking him down. But he has no money. A policewoman slaps him and insults his dead father. They take his scales and his cart. The man goes to a town office to complain. He is told the official is busy in a meeting. Humiliated, furious, powerless, the man leaves. He returns with fuel. Outside the town office he douses himself, lights a match, and burns. Only the conclusion of this story is unusual. There are countless poor street vendors in Tunisia and across the Arab world. Police corruption is rife, and humiliations like those inflicted on this man are a daily occurrence. They matter to no one aside from the police and their victims. But this particular humiliation, on December 17, 2010, caused Mohamed Bouazizi, aged twenty-six, to set himself on fire, and Bouazizi’s self-immolation sparked protests. The police responded with typical brutality. The protests spread. Hoping to assuage the public, the dictator of Tunisia, President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, visited Bouazizi in the hospital. Bouazizi died on January 4, 2011. The unrest grew. On January 14, Ben Ali fled to a cushy exile in Saudi Arabia, ending his twenty-three-year kleptocracy. The Arab world watched, stunned. Then protests erupted in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Jordan, Kuwait, and Bahrain. After three decades in power, the Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak was driven from office. Elsewhere, protests swelled into rebellions, rebellions into civil wars. This was the Arab Spring—and it started with one poor man, no different from countless others, being harassed by police, as so many have been, before and since, with no apparent ripple effects. It is one thing to look backward and sketch a narrative arc, as I did here, connecting Mohamed Bouazizi to all the events that flowed out of his lonely protest. Tom Friedman, like many elite pundits, is skilled at that sort of reconstruction, particularly in the Middle East, which he knows so well, having made his name in journalism as a New York Times correspondent in Lebanon. But could even Tom Friedman, if he had been present that fatal morning, have peered into the future and foreseen the self-immolation, the unrest, the toppling of the Tunisian dictator, and all that followed? Of course not. No one could. Maybe, given how much Friedman knew about the region, he would have mused that poverty and unemployment were high, the number of desperate young people was growing, corruption was rampant, repression was relentless, and therefore Tunisia and other Arab countries were powder kegs waiting to blow. But an observer could have drawn exactly the same conclusion the year before. And the year before that. Indeed, you could have said that about Tunisia, Egypt, and several other countries for decades. They may have been powder kegs but they never blew—until December 17, 2010, when the police pushed that one poor man too far.

My involvement, from my very first days in Haiti, caused me to rethink the common practice of American groups coming in and building, or supporting, orphanages without truly understanding the situation in Haiti. Especially since the plague of unemployment is so huge that it is believed 80 percent of all orphans end up in orphanages as a result of poverty. These “poverty orphans” are brought to orphanages mostly because their parents are unable to pay for food and school. Normally, American orphanages, or American-supported orphanages, pay for schooling for the children as well as for food, so to struggling parents these institutions look like the best and only option. However, with as many as 80 percent of orphans having a living parent, the rage to come to Haiti and build orphanages for these children seemed both broken and incongruous. I realized that often what America thinks is the best for children is sometimes just a quick fix, a temporary Band-Aid that may ultimately exacerbate the situation. I knew there had to be a better way.

Collins consolidating power. When it came to news about Collins, there was nothing, as if it never happened that he announced the elections nullified. However, the stock market prices were in a free fall, down at least two thousand points since that morning. The stock market reporter was saying the stock market hadn’t been that bad since the Second Great Depression of 2008 to 2016. If the market were to get even lower, the results could resemble the original Great Depression from one hundred years prior. Gas prices would soar even higher, electric rates would hit the stratosphere, food would get more expensive, and unemployment would definitely hit 1930’s rates of unemployment. However, the reporter wouldn’t blame the stock market crashing on anything,

With industrialization has come a general depreciation of work. As the price of work has gone up, the value of it has gone down, until it is so depressed that people simply do not want to do it anymore. We can say without exaggeration that the present national ambition of the United States is unemployment. People live for quitting time, for weekends, for vacations, and for retirement; moreover, this ambition seems to be classless, as true in the executive suites as on the assembly lines. One works not because the work is necessary, valuable, useful to a desirable end, or because one loves to do it, but only to be able to quit- a condition that a saner time would regard as infernal, a condemnation. This is explained, of course, by the dullness of the work, by the loss of responsibility for, or credit for, or knowledge of the thing made. What can be the status of the working small farmer in a nation whose motto is a sigh of relief: "Thank God it's Friday?

If you end up doing only one thing from this entire book, let it be this: stop being angry with yourself. That alone is enough to radically alter your health, your relationships, your job, and your life. Don’t be angry with yourself for not saying the right thing. Don’t be angry with yourself for forgetting to do something you said you would do. Don’t be angry with yourself for not finishing that project as fast as everyone else at work. Don’t be angry with yourself for finishing school late, for being unemployed, for being single. Don’t be angry with yourself for not saying what you wanted to say or not doing what you wanted to do. Regardless of what choices you have made, let go of the habit of self-anger. It doesn’t serve you. It never has and it never will.

Unemployment is not the end of your life. It is the beginning of a bright future. “For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end.” Jeremiah 29:11.

inhabitants paid cripplingly high taxes. Which meant that we would, too. Oh brilliant! We’ll be even more skint by the end of the month than we are already… But for your Danish krone, I learned, you got a comprehensive welfare system, free healthcare, free education (including university tuition), subsidised childcare and unemployment insurance guaranteeing 80 per cent of your wages for two years.

Wednesday, 16 November 2011: United States (US) senator Bernie Sanders gives a remarkable speech, which is worth quoting at some length: There is a war going on in this country.… I am talking about a war being waged by some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in this country against the working families of the United States of America, against the disappearing and shrinking middle class of our country. The reality is that many of the nation’s billionaires are on the war-path, they want more, more, more. Their greed has no end.… The reality is that many of these folks [the wealthy] want to bring the United States back to where we were in the 1920s. And they want to do their best to eliminate all traces of social legislation, which working families fought tooth and nail to develop to bring a modicum of stability and security to their lives.… While we struggle with a record breaking deficit and a large national debt, caused by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, caused by tax breaks for the wealthy … caused by the Wall Street bailout, driving up the deficit, driving up the national debt, so that people can say oh my goodness, we have got all of those expenses and then we got to give tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires, but we want to balance the budget. Gee, how are we going to do that? Well, obviously, we know how they are going to do that. We are going to cut back on health care … education … childcare … food stamps, … we surely are not going to expand unemployment compensation, … we got a higher priority, … we have got to, got to, got to give tax breaks to billionaires.

Between 1929 and 1930, one-third of the hard-pressed private agencies went under, unable to raise the money they needed. As Hastings Hart, a pioneering child-welfare leader, pointed out, it was time for government to step in with far more than it had ever done to deal with this unprecedented crisis. In September 1931, with Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt leading the way, the New York State Legislature finally passed the first law giving relief to the unemployed. By the end of December 1933, what was called Home Relief had started all over New York City. This was the beginning of the change from the dominance of private philanthropy to the dominance of public welfare, and the recognition that citizens had a right to expect to be taken care of. But getting help wasn’t made easy or pleasant. William Matthews, head of the Emergency Work Bureau in New York City, protested, “The whole damn theory of the thing is to make relief giving so unpleasant, so disagreeable, in fact so insulting to decent people that they stay away from the places where it is given.” As William Bremer detailed in his book Depression Winters, recipients of private and public charity were subject to scrutiny, told what they could and could not buy, and even accompanied by “voluntary shoppers” who supervised their purchases. Buying cigarettes, beer, candy, pies, and cakes was forbidden. And no cash changed hands. Recipients were given bags of coal and clothing, food tickets, and rent vouchers, and storekeepers were forbidden to give them change in cash.

Forbearance or Deferment: Which Way to Go? Repaying student loan is a long journey as The Student Loan Help Center CEO, Bruce Mesnekoff said, at times you might face some potholes on the road, making your ride a bit difficult but there are some ways you can opt for help. Student loan forbearance and deferment are such two options which help you when you are facing money crunch and need some time to repay your student loans. Both of the options are specific to every individual depending on your financial state. Forbearance or deferment can be considered if you want to postpone your repayment for some duration or want to decrease the amount. Both of these are discussed in detail in this article. Forbearance Forbearance is used when you are facing monetary issues for a short period of time i.e. when you know you will come out of the money problems soon. Forbearance is provided for maximum period of one year at one time.Now there are two kinds of forbearance, mandatory and discretionary. When forbearance is must it’s called mandatory and this happens when: Your student loan repayment is 20% or more of your grossly monthly income. You are eligible for public loan forgiveness You are enrolled in dental internship or medical internship You are serving in a national service position Forbearance may or may not be provided by servicer if you are facing financial crunch or illness. One word of caution here would be to at least pay your interest every month because during forbearance you accruemonthly interest and if you don’t pay it as it gets added to principal. As a result you have to a pay huge amount at the end of the loan and also after forbearance is over to become current. Deferment Deferment also works onsimilar lines as forbearance. Though there is one advantage that subsidized direct loan, Perkins loans, federal Stafford loans do notaccrue interest during deferment, only non-subsidized loans accrue interest. You can defer loan repayment for the entire duration if you are in school or on military duty. If you are unemployed or facing any financial hardship the deferment period is of three years. You can qualify for deferment under following circumstances: If you are in school If you are on active military duty If you are qualifying for Perkins loan cancellation If you are unemployed If you are receiving federal or state assistance. Using deferment or forbearance is good option to keep your account “current” and save it from becoming delinquent or going in default. It saves your credit rating. If provided the opportunity to choose out of the two, always try and go for deferment if you can qualify for it as it’s more economical than forbearance. Contact The Student Loan Help Center to know more about Consolidation of your Student Loans.

The revelation that the White House had jiggered official unemployment statistics by not counting ‘people no longer looking for work’, led many Americans to be suspicious that the same people who lied about the number of Americans out of work, would likewise falsify election returns. Honest election workers in various cities revealed that tens of thousands of registered voters were dead, but still registered to vote. A majority of the honest workers were subsequently fired, triggering even more voter anger.

Beyond grief lay Coolidge’s accurate perception that in the 1920s Mellon’s and his own policies were yielding the good that the men had predicted. Today we estimate that the highest level of unemployment under President Coolidge had been 5 percent in the year he was elected. From there it dropped to 3.2 percent in 1925 and then into the twos and ones. Citizens could afford all the new products. There was nothing bubbly about the potential for productivity gains. By the end of 1925 Ford’s peak production was 8,500 a day, up substantially from the 6,000 from a few years before. Overall in the years from 1923 to 1929 car production would double.

Greece can balance its books without killing democracy Alexis Tsipras | 614 words OPINION Greece changes on January 25, the day of the election. My party, Syriza, guarantees a new social contract for political stability and economic security. We offer policies that will end austerity, enhance democracy and social cohesion and put the middle class back on its feet. This is the only way to strengthen the eurozone and make the European project attractive to citizens across the continent. We must end austerity so as not to let fear kill democracy. Unless the forces of progress and democracy change Europe, it will be Marine Le Pen and her far-right allies that change it for us. We have a duty to negotiate openly, honestly and as equals with our European partners. There is no sense in each side brandishing its weapons. Let me clear up a misperception: balancing the government’s budget does not automatically require austerity. A Syriza government will respect Greece’s obligation, as a eurozone member, to maintain a balanced budget, and will commit to quantitative targets. However, it is a fundamental matter of democracy that a newly elected government decides on its own how to achieve those goals. Austerity is not part of the European treaties; democracy and the principle of popular sovereignty are. If the Greek people entrust us with their votes, implementing our economic programme will not be a “unilateral” act, but a democratic obligation. Is there any logical reason to continue with a prescription that helps the disease metastasise? Austerity has failed in Greece. It crippled the economy and left a large part of the workforce unemployed. This is a humanitarian crisis. The government has promised the country’s lenders that it will cut salaries and pensions further, and increase taxes in 2015. But those commitments only bind Antonis Samaras’s government which will, for that reason, be voted out of office on January 25. We want to bring Greece to the level of a proper, democratic European country. Our manifesto, known as the Thessaloniki programme, contains a set of fiscally balanced short-term measures to mitigate the humanitarian crisis, restart the economy and get people back to work. Unlike previous governments, we will address factors within Greece that have perpetuated the crisis. We will stand up to the tax-evading economic oligarchy. We will ensure social justice and sustainable growth, in the context of a social market economy. Public debt has risen to a staggering 177 per cent of gross domestic product. This is unsustainable; meeting the payments is very hard. On existing loans, we demand repayment terms that do not cause recession and do not push the people to more despair and poverty. We are not asking for new loans; we cannot keep adding debt to the mountain. The 1953 London Conference helped Germany achieve its postwar economic miracle by relieving the country of the burden of its own past errors. (Greece was among the international creditors who participated.) Since austerity has caused overindebtedness throughout Europe, we now call for a European debt conference, which will likewise give a strong boost to growth in Europe. This is not an exercise in creating moral hazard. It is a moral duty. We expect the European Central Bank itself to launch a full-blooded programme of quantitative easing. This is long overdue. It should be on a scale great enough to heal the eurozone and to give meaning to the phrase “whatever it takes” to save the single currency. Syriza will need time to change Greece. Only we can guarantee a break with the clientelist and kleptocratic practices of the political and economic elites. We have not been in government; we are a new force that owes no allegiance to the past. We will make the reforms that Greece actually needs. The writer is leader of Syriza, the Greek oppositionparty

I figure I'll win the fight in twenty years or so anyways when I end up with a decent life and their unemployed and living at home.

All sorts of people are for it. Numerous senators and representatives—of the Right and Left—have expressed their purpose to establish universal military training when the war ends. The great and glamorous industry is here—the industry of militarism. And when the war is ended the country is going to be asked if it seriously wishes to demobilize an industry that can employ so many men, create so much national income when the nation is faced with the probability of vast unemployment in industry. All the well-known arguments, used so long and so successfully in Europe … will be dusted off—America with her high purposes of world regeneration must have the power to back up her magnificent ideals; America cannot afford to grow soft, and the Army and Navy must be continued on a vast scale to toughen the moral and physical sinews of our youth; America dare not live in a world of gangsters and aggressors without keeping her full power mustered … and above and below and all around these sentiments will be the sinister allurement of the perpetuation of the great industry which can never know a depression because it will have but one customer—the American government to whose pocket there is no bottom.16

My task to keep everyone focused wasn’t easy. A cartoonist pictured two workers in hard hats on a scaffold, one about to jump, holding a notice that he had been fired. The other guy was on a telephone, asking: “Can we get Gene Cernan up here to give Smith that ‘It’s not the end, it’s the beginning’ speech again?” There were a lot of Smiths out there, for some 13,000 Cape workers had lost their jobs over the past several years, and another 900 would get pink slips as soon as we blasted off. Many of the Grumman troops literally worked themselves into unemployment when our lunar module went out the door at Bethpage, and more would be gone at the moment of liftoff. But during one visit there, a supervisor told me, “We’re giving you our heart and soul on this one, Geno. This is the best LM that’s ever gonna fly.” That