Utility Worker Quotes

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The university is a vast public utility which turns out future workers in today's vineyard, the military-industrial complex. They've got to be processed in the most efficient way to see to it that they have the fewest dissenting opinions, that they have just those characteristics which are wholly incompatible with being an intellectual. This is a real internal psychological contradiction. People have to suppress the very questions which reading books raises.
Mario Savio
Production is carried on for profit, not for use. There is no provision that all those able and willing to work will always be in a position to find employment; an “army of unemployed” almost always exists. The worker is constantly in fear of losing his job. Since unemployed and poorly paid workers do not provide a profitable market, the production of consumers’ goods is restricted, and great hardship is the consequence. Technological progress frequently results in more unemployment rather than in an easing of the burden of work for all. The profit motive, in conjunction with competition among capitalists, is responsible for an instability in the accumulation and utilization of capital which leads to increasingly severe depressions. Unlimited competition leads to a huge waste of labor, and to that crippling of the social consciousness of individuals which I mentioned before.
Albert Einstein (Why Socialism?)
I use “anticapitalist” because conservative defenders of capitalism regularly say their liberal and socialist opponents are against capitalism. They say efforts to provide a safety net for all people are “anticapitalist.” They say attempts to prevent monopolies are “anticapitalist.” They say efforts that strengthen weak unions and weaken exploitative owners are “anticapitalist.” They say plans to normalize worker ownership and regulations protecting consumers, workers, and environments from big business are “anticapitalist.” They say laws taxing the richest more than the middle class, redistributing pilfered wealth, and guaranteeing basic incomes are “anticapitalist.” They say wars to end poverty are “anticapitalist.” They say campaigns to remove the profit motive from essential life sectors like education, healthcare, utilities, mass media, and incarceration are “anticapitalist.” In doing so, these conservative defenders are defining capitalism. They define capitalism as the freedom to exploit people into economic ruin; the freedom to assassinate unions; the freedom to prey on unprotected consumers, workers, and environments; the freedom to value quarterly profits over climate change; the freedom to undermine small businesses and cushion corporations; the freedom from competition; the freedom not to pay taxes; the freedom to heave the tax burden onto the middle and lower classes; the freedom to commodify everything and everyone; the freedom to keep poor people poor and middle-income people struggling to stay middle income, and make rich people richer. The history of capitalism—of world warring, classing, slave trading, enslaving, colonizing, depressing wages, and dispossessing land and labor and resources and rights—bears out the conservative definition of capitalism.
Ibram X. Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist)
These diverse effects of slavery and freedom are easily understood: … the men in Kentucky [neither] have zeal nor enlightenment … cross over into Ohio in order to utilize their industry and to be able to exercise it without shame … in Kentucky, masters make slaves work without being obliged to pay them, but they receive little fruit from their efforts, while the money that they would give to free workers would be recovered with interest from the value of their labors.
Alexis de Tocqueville
And in the same way, I’ve always given my best energy to things outside myself, believing that I’d be fine, that I was a workhorse, that I didn’t need special treatment or babying or, heaven help me, self-care. Self-care was for the fragile, the special, the dainty. I was a linebacker, a utility player, a worker bee. I ate on the run, slept in my clothes, worshiped at the altar of my to-do list, ignored the crying out of my body and soul like they were nothing more than the buzz of pesky mosquitoes.
Shauna Niequist (Present Over Perfect: Leaving Behind Frantic for a Simpler, More Soulful Way of Living)
Frosh (2002) has suggested that therapeutic spaces provide children and adults with the rare opportunity to articulate experiences that are otherwise excluded from the dominant symbolic order. However, since the 1990s, post-modern and post-structural theory has often been deployed in ways that attempt to ‘manage’ from; afar the perturbing disclosures of abuse and trauma that arise in therapeutic spaces (Frosh 2002). Nowhere is this clearer than in relation to organised abuse, where the testimony of girls and women has been deconstructed as symptoms of cultural hysteria (Showalter 1997) and the colonisation of women’s minds by therapeutic discourse (Hacking 1995). However, behind words and discourse, ‘a real world and real lives do exist, howsoever we interpret, construct and recycle accounts of these by a variety of symbolic means’ (Stanley 1993: 214). Summit (1994: 5) once described organised abuse as a ‘subject of smoke and mirrors’, observing the ways in which it has persistently defied conceptualisation or explanation. Explanations for serious or sadistic child sex offending have typically rested on psychiatric concepts of ‘paedophilia’ or particular psychological categories that have limited utility for the study of the cultures of sexual abuse that emerge in the families or institutions in which organised abuse takes pace. For those clinicians and researchers who take organised abuse seriously, their reliance upon individualistic rather than sociological explanations for child sexual abuse has left them unable to explain the emergence of coordinated, and often sadistic, multi—perpetrator sexual abuse in a range of contexts around the world.
Michael Salter (Organised Sexual Abuse)
The Average Occidental- be he a democrat or a Fascist, a Capitalist or a Bolshevik, a manual worker or an intellectual- knows only one positive "religion", and that is the worship of material progress, the belief that there is no other goal in life than to make that very life continually easier or, as the current expression goes, "independent of nature". The temples of this "religion" are the gigantic factories, cinemas, chemical laboratories, dancing halls, hydro- electric works; and its priests are bankers, engineers,film stars, captains of industry, record-airmen. The unavoidable result of this craving after power and pleasure is the creation of hostile groups armed to the teeth and determined to destroy each other whenever their respective interests come to clash. And on the cultural side the result is the creation of a human type whose morality is confined to the question of practical utility alone, and whose highest criterion of good and evil is material progress.
Muhammad Asad (Islam At The Crossroads)
Trump doesn’t happen in a country where things are going well. People give in to their baser instincts when they lose faith in the future. The pessimism and anger necessary for this situation has been building for a generation, and not all on one side. A significant number of Trump voters voted for Obama eight years ago. A lot of those were in rust-belt states that proved critical to his election. What happened there? Trump also polled 2–1 among veterans, despite his own horrific record of deferments and his insulting of every vet from John McCain to Humayun Khan. Was it possible that his rhetoric about ending “our current policy of regime change” resonated with recently returned vets? The data said yes. It may not have been decisive, but it likely was one of many factors. It was also common sense, because this was one of his main themes on the campaign trail—Trump clearly smelled those veteran votes. The Trump phenomenon was also about a political and media taboo: class. When the liberal arts grads who mostly populate the media think about class, we tend to think in terms of the heroic worker, or whatever Marx-inspired cliché they taught us in college. Because of this, most pundits scoff at class, because when they look at Trump crowds, they don’t see Norma Rae or Matewan. Instead, they see Married with Children, a bunch of tacky mall-goers who gobble up crap movies and, incidentally, hate the noble political press. Our take on Trump voters was closer to Orwell than Marx: “In reality very little was known about the proles. It was not necessary to know much.” Beyond the utility that calling everything racism had for both party establishments, it was good for that other sector, the news media.
Matt Taibbi (Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another)
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.
Chris Hedges (America: The Farewell Tour)
Echoing right-wing racist rhetoric, liberal organizations routinely smear "illegitimate," nonpacifist resistance as senseless and the work of irrational "thugs." And yet it is precisely marginalized groups utilizing these tactics--poor women of color defending their right to land and housing; trans* street workers and indigenous peoples fighting back against murder and violence; black and brown struggles against white supremacist violence--that have waged the most powerful and successful uprisings in US history. It is extremely advantageous to the powers that be for these groups to be deterred from the risks of militant self-defense, resistance, or attack. We refuse a politics that infantilizes nonwhite and/or nonmale groups, and believes that the are incapable of fighting for their own liberation, as the old saying goes, by any means necessary. Original pamphlet: Who is Oakland. April 2012. Quoted in: Dangerous Allies. Taking Sides.
Tipu's Tiger
technology leads to lower costs when it replaces workers' salaries. It does the opposite when it requires more highly-trained workers to utilize that technology. Higher education, medicine, dentistry and the legal profession all provide examples.
Robert B. Archibald (Why Does College Cost So Much?)
This resulted in a model of the macroeconomy as consisting of a single consumer, who lives for ever, consuming the output of the economy, which is a single good produced in a single firm, which he owns and in which he is the only employee, which pays him both profits equivalent to the marginal product of capital and a wage equivalent to the marginal product of labor, to which he decides how much labor to supply by solving a utility function that maximizes his utility over an infinite time horizon, which he rationally expects and therefore correctly predicts. The economy would always be in equilibrium except for the impact of unexpected ‘technology shocks’ that change the firm’s productive capabilities (or his consumption preferences) and thus temporarily cause the single capitalist/worker/consumer to alter his working hours. Any reduction in working hours is a voluntary act, so the representative agent is never involuntarily unemployed, he’s just taking more leisure. And there are no banks, no debt, and indeed no money in this model. You think I’m joking? I wish I was.
Steve Keen (Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor Dethroned?)
Corrupt utility companies require a corrupt legal system to protect them from their own sickened workers and the masses.
Steven Magee
You know that when a group of utility workers are withholding their customer service identification cards, they are likely engaging in some form of illegal activity at your home.
Steven Magee
Arguably insane utility workers that blatantly harass law abiding customers is likely to become more frequent as the long term effects of biologically toxic radio frequency (RF) radiation exposures from their transmitting smart meters continues to emerge.
Steven Magee
I WOULD OFTEN think back to that Santelli clip, which foreshadowed so many of the political battles I’d face during my presidency. For there was at least one sideways truth in what he’d said: Our demands on the government had changed over the past two centuries, since the time the Founders had chartered it. Beyond the fundamentals of repelling enemies and conquering territory, enforcing property rights and policing issues that property-holding white men deemed necessary to maintain order, our early democracy had largely left each of us to our own devices. Then a bloody war was fought to decide whether property rights extended to treating Blacks as chattel. Movements were launched by workers, farmers, and women who had experienced firsthand how one man’s liberty too often involved their own subjugation. A depression came, and people learned that being left to your own devices could mean penury and shame. Which is how the United States and other advanced democracies came to create the modern social contract. As our society grew more complex, more and more of the government’s function took the form of social insurance, with each of us chipping in through our tax dollars to protect ourselves collectively—for disaster relief if our house was destroyed in a hurricane; unemployment insurance if we lost a job; Social Security and Medicare to lessen the indignities of old age; reliable electricity and phone service for those who lived in rural areas where utility companies wouldn’t otherwise make a profit; public schools and universities to make education more egalitarian. It worked, more or less. In the span of a generation and for a majority of Americans, life got better, safer, more prosperous, and more just. A broad middle class flourished. The rich remained rich, if maybe not quite as rich as they would have liked, and the poor were fewer in number, and not as poor as they’d otherwise have been. And if we sometimes debated whether taxes were too high or certain regulations were discouraging innovation, whether the “nanny state” was sapping individual initiative or this or that program was wasteful, we generally understood the advantages of a society that at least tried to offer a fair shake to everyone and built a floor beneath which nobody could sink.
Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
You should be wary of workers that are committed to the toxic agenda of their company.
Steven Magee
Utility workers are the laboratory rats of the 5G wireless radiation industry.
Steven Magee
..technologies are being created to help us beat jet lag. Researchers at the University of Michigan are developing an app called Entrain, which uses sophisticated math and data analysis to tell users how and when to utilize light to more quickly shift their sleep cycle in a new location. And then there is Re-Timer, an eyeglasses-like piece of headwear that can be used not just by travelers but also by shift workers who need to make regular adjustments to their circadian rhythm, especially in the winter. Worn over the eyes, it exposes the wearer to a simulation of outdoor light, which, when used in the morning, can help reset our body clock so that we can fall asleep at the right bedtime.
Arianna Huffington (The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life, One Night at a Time)
.” They say wars to end poverty are “anticapitalist.” They say campaigns to remove the profit motive from essential life sectors like education, healthcare, utilities, mass media, and incarceration are “anticapitalist.” In doing so, these conservative defenders are defining capitalism. They define capitalism as the freedom to exploit people into economic ruin; the freedom to assassinate unions; the freedom to prey on unprotected consumers, workers, and environments; the freedom to value quarterly profits over climate change; the freedom to undermine small businesses and cushion corporations; the freedom from competition; the freedom not to pay taxes; the freedom to heave the tax burden onto the middle and lower classes; the freedom to commodify everything and everyone; the freedom to keep poor people poor and middle-income people struggling to stay middle income, and make rich people richer. The history of capitalism—of world warring, classing, slave trading, enslaving, colonizing, depressing wages, and dispossessing land and labor and resources and rights—bears out the conservative definition of capitalism.
Ibram X. Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist)
I keep using the term “anticapitalist” as opposed to socialist or communist to include the people who publicly or privately question or loathe capitalism but do not identify as socialist or communist. I use “anticapitalist” because conservative defenders of capitalism regularly say their liberal and socialist opponents are against capitalism. They say efforts to provide a safety net for all people are “anticapitalist.” They say attempts to prevent monopolies are “anticapitalist.” They say efforts that strengthen weak unions and weaken exploitative owners are “anticapitalist.” They say plans to normalize worker ownership and regulations protecting consumers, workers, and environments from big business are “anticapitalist.” They say laws taxing the richest more than the middle class, redistributing pilfered wealth, and guaranteeing basic incomes are “anticapitalist.” They say wars to end poverty are “anticapitalist.” They say campaigns to remove the profit motive from essential life sectors like education, healthcare, utilities, mass media, and incarceration are “anticapitalist.” In doing so, these conservative defenders are defining capitalism. They define capitalism as the freedom to exploit people into economic ruin; the freedom to assassinate unions; the freedom to prey on unprotected consumers, workers, and environments; the freedom to value quarterly profits over climate change; the freedom to undermine small businesses and cushion corporations; the freedom from competition; the freedom not to pay taxes; the freedom to heave the tax burden onto the middle and lower classes; the freedom to commodify everything and everyone; the freedom to keep poor people poor and middle-income people struggling to stay middle income, and make rich people richer. The history of capitalism—of world warring, classing, slave trading, enslaving, colonizing, depressing wages, and dispossessing land and labor and resources and rights—bears out the conservative definition of capitalism.
Ibram X. Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist)
The Indian vessels, a contemporary British observer wrote, ‘united elegance and utility and are models of patience [sic] and fine workmanship.’ Indian workers were considered expert in all shipbuilding materials—wood, iron and brass
Shashi Tharoor (An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India)
Having worked for a utility company, I was aware of how corrupt they are with their own workers. What really surprised me is how corrupt utilities are with their own customers!
Steven Magee
[Q: What would you change if you could?] I would probably make care an organizing principle in our economy. I would try to reorganize our economy so that care in all of its forms-care for neighbors, care for family, care for children, care for elders, care for friends, care for co-workers-is a fundamental principle in every arena of civic and economic life. I would want us to have all the support we need, so that the caregiving relationships in our lives would be upheld as some of the most important and valuable. People who provide care would feel recognized and valued, and be able to support their families. We would utilize care as a way of reinventing our relationships and our structures of value-it would change everything.
Ai-jen Poo
The most disappointing of the jobs I had was the ‘Green’ solar photovoltaic industry. I had three jobs in the field. Two of them had a constant pressure to work very long hours. I remember my neighbor commenting that he would see me leave for work in the dark and come home in the dark! One of the jobs had completely overloaded me with the work of many workers and refused my daily requests for more staff! I left the ‘Green’ industry and have never pursued another job in it.
Steven Magee
I have had so many negative interactions with electrical utility workers that I now avoid interacting with them!
Steven Magee
I had to call 911 numerous times regarding strange unidentified utility company workers at my home. The utility company harassment of me continued to elevate with each 911 call. It ultimately concluded with an illegal disconnection of my electrically air-conditioned home from the electrical grid for several days in Tucson, Arizona, USA. Despite repeatedly reporting the ongoing utility company harassment to the Pima County Sheriff, no one was ever prosecuted by them. This set of toxic incidents is what prompted me to become a police corruption researcher.
Steven Magee (Toxic Electricity)
similar to the power tools used by construction workers. The key is to let the tools do the work. When I was young, I routinely used a handsaw to cut wood. One day my father let me use his newly purchased circular saw. I took the power saw in hand and began to cut a piece of wood. I applied the same pressure to the power saw that I would have applied to a hand saw. My father tapped me on the shoulder and told me to ease up on the pressure and let the saw do the work. The techniques in this book are based on similarly sound principles. Simply apply the techniques and relax, be yourself, and let the techniques do the work. You will be amazed at the results. 2. You must actually use this new knowledge in dealing with people in your everyday life. Knowing the best way to do something is great, but only when you actually utilize what you have learned. Always remember that knowledge without action is knowledge wasted. 3. You need to constantly practice what you have learned. Friendship skills are like skills in general. The more you use them, the more proficient you become; the less you use them, the quicker you lose them. If you
Jack Schafer (The Like Switch: An Ex-FBI Agent's Guide to Influencing, Attracting, and Winning People Over (The Like Switch Series Book 1))
In fact, though not immigrating to a “refugee state” according to the definition used here, most of the Jewish immigrants to Israel during the early years of statehood were undoubtedly refugees—people who could not return home for fear of persecution. Yet for the institutions of the migration regime, they were primarily an important demographic factor, in terms of both their ethno-demography—after all, the Jewish state needed Jewish inhabitants—and their utility as workers, soldiers, and agricultural settlers. In keeping with the terminology of the day, they were “human material” of value for the project of building the state.16 German expellees were also a significant source of labor for the subsequent “economic miracle,” though the refugee state conceptualized them mainly as clients to support
Jannis Panagiotidis (The Unchosen Ones: Diaspora, Nation, and Migration in Israel and Germany)
Utility in West Germany was in a different compartment of the migration regime overall—namely, the guest worker regime, which began to take off around the same time and which explicitly targeted labor migrants for their economic value.
Jannis Panagiotidis (The Unchosen Ones: Diaspora, Nation, and Migration in Israel and Germany)
human being and bolt on extensions that let them take full advantage of Economics 2.0, and you essentially break their narrative chain of consciousness, replacing it with a journal file of bid/request transactions between various agents; it’s incredibly efficient and flexible, but it isn’t a conscious human being in any recognizable sense of the word.” “All right,” Pierre says slowly. “I think we’ve seen something like that ourselves. At the router.” Sirhan nods, not sure whether he’s referring to anything important. “So you see, there are limits to human progress—but not to progress itself! The uploads found their labor to be a permanently deflating commodity once they hit their point of diminishing utility. Capitalism doesn’t have a lot to say about workers whose skills are obsolete, other than that they should invest wisely while they’re earning and maybe retrain. But just knowing how to invest in Economics 2.0 is beyond an unaugmented human. You can’t retrain as a seagull, can you, and it’s quite as hard to retool for Economics 2.0. Earth is—” He shudders. “There’s a phrase I used to hear in the old days,” Pamela says calmly. “Ethnic cleansing. Do you know what that means, darling idiot daughter? You take people who you define as being of little worth, and first you herd them into a crowded ghetto with limited resources, then you decide those resources aren’t worth spending on them, and bullets are cheaper than bread. ‘Mind children’ the extropians called the posthumans, but they were more like Vile Offspring. There was a lot of that, during the fast sigmoid phase. Starving among plenty, compulsory conversions, the very antithesis of everything your father said he wanted . . .” “I don’t believe it,” Amber says hotly.
Charles Stross (Accelerando)
Human problems need human solutions and a keen understanding of how humans behave. Humans are also the key to innovation and productivity in any organization. Workers of a company are its assets – not expenses. As assets they should be developed, nurtured, trained, and retained because they become more valuable over time. They also need to be utilized effectively.
Mansur Hasib (Cybersecurity Leadership: Powering the Modern Organization)
According to the cost-accounting rules that everybody has used in the past, we’re supposed to balance capacity with demand first, then try to maintain the flow,” I say. “But instead we shouldn’t be trying to balance capacity at all; we need excess capacity. The rule we should be following is to balance the flow with demand, not the capacity. “Two, the incentives we usually offer are based on the assumption that the level of utilization of any worker is determined by his own potential,” I tell them. “That’s totally false because of dependency. For any resource that is not a bottleneck, the level of activity from which the system is able to profit is not determined by its individual potential but by some other constraint within the system.
Eliyahu M. Goldratt (The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement)
Those regulators in turn soon allowed some of the state’s utilities to start levying a hefty fee on customers who wanted to put panels on their roofs, at which point Solar City’s business dried up. It started laying off workers and closing down its distribution centers.
Bill McKibben (Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?)
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