I'm falling with a fever. Won't be pedicabbing it up for probably a week or two. Being sick isn't fun!
Have been reading a bit tonight. Sure glad I don't have a retail job where I'd have to slave away no matter how sick I was, or else be unable to pay the rent. Been there, done that, no fun.
So from tonight's reading, a few choice quotations:
One:
I've always been of the mind that unemployment benefit is provided for the well being of the middle and upper classes not the poor. As someone above said, if you take 3 million unemployed (as in the UK) and tell them that you won't feed them or house them are they supposed to shrug their shoulders and go and get a job? What if there aren't any jobs - and there aren't at the moment. So instead the middle/upper class subsidize the civility of the poor through taxation so that the poor don't start causing trouble.
Rather than throwing people on the scrap heap when the economy can't keep them employed it would be a better idea to repatriate the jobs we have lost to other countries. Like I have been saying for eons now, globalisation and 'free markets' make the rich richer but at the expense of the poor - and poorly educated in particular. The theory was that all the hum-drum jobs were supposed to have been shipped off to the orient and we in the west would all get nice new shiny jobs in 'hi-tech' or pharma. Well a few things were brushed under the carpet:
1) it doesn't take so many people to invent a new microchip or pill than to build cars, smelt iron ore or work in textile mills or agriculture. These hi-tech industries simply could not never soak up the unemployed.
2) it may not be politically correct to say it but not everyone is bright enough to work in hi-tech etc. The very nature of the work in more intellectual rather than muscular. And it really doesn't matter how good the schooling system is either. Some people just can't do mathematics and computer science.
3) The rest of the world is not going to sit there content in doing the drudge work - believe it or not the Indians and Chinese are quite capable of doing the hi-tech etc jobs too.
So millions of workers have been made redundant over the last decades, millions more have joined the workforce and now the only jobs are in the 'service sector' which are all poorly paid and more importantly do not have the same satisfaction as working in a heavy industry. So now the western consumer has less money with which to buy the imported goods which they would have made a generation ago.
The single most destructive ideology ever to spread its tentacles around the globe has been globalization and its bed pall the free-market. And to any one who thinks we are better off now than before the world embraced this cancer just ask, are we really? How many adults in the household does it take now to pay the bills? How much CO2 is there in the atmosphere? How full are the landfill sites with our rubbish? How much 'progress' has been made exactly? --
HAcland
Two
Living on the boundary of a low-income neighborhood, I witness that the people growing vegetable gardens are working middle-class folks, who like me, live on the boundary. The folks on food stamps do not have vegetable gardens, instead many smoke crack and drink beer as much as possible. Government assistance has it's place, but it should be short-term. If I was collecting unemployment for a year, I would be traveling the country with a backpack. If I was collecting unemployment for two months, I would find try to find a job. --gogetter
What do you think? I find that both of these can be true.
It may seem strange I'm posting aout social issues as founder of a bike taxi business. But at the same time, it isn't. I'm at the ground level. I see our local "rich" bougies and poor people alike. As long as humans have lived, we've always had poverty, war, homelessness, famine, plagues.
I don't think these will ever go away. In the near term I expect them to all intensify due to us running out of enough oil plus environmental degradation. But as MLK said, even if the world would end tomorrow, I'd plant a tree today.
Now back to getting well again.
