{"id":2213,"date":"2020-12-15T00:51:01","date_gmt":"2020-12-15T00:51:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=139309"},"modified":"2020-12-15T00:51:01","modified_gmt":"2020-12-15T00:51:01","slug":"no-work-little-work-too-much-work-ubi-diy-gig-economies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2020\/12\/15\/no-work-little-work-too-much-work-ubi-diy-gig-economies\/","title":{"rendered":"No Work, Little Work, Too Much Work, UBI\/DIY\/Gig Economies"},"content":{"rendered":"
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It\u2019s an unprecedented coalition of business networks that have come together to raise our ambition. Not just to help our individual CEOs succeed, we\u2019ll do that for sure. But to actually bring their voices together to help shift culture. So that the pushback on the BRT [Business Roundtable] from different business publications or other people within the business community lessens. So there\u2019s less of a headwind culturally for this type of leadership.\u00a0
\n\u2014 Jay Coen Gilbert, co-founder of B Lab and B Corporations [Source<\/a>]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

[These are not good people, and if anyone thinks otherwise, then, well, War is Peace, Truth is Lies, Hate is Love!]<\/p>\n

We Are Big Data’s Dregs<\/strong><\/p>\n

The great data dredge. Everyone’s hired through a digital head hunter, staffing firm, and the result is a continuation of atomizing society with no water cooler, so to speak, from which to complain about working conditions, to discuss the next austerity measure concocted by the boss\/management\/ CEO\/Corporation. No after work bull session at the local Chili\u2019s or T.G.I.F. to compare notes about those exploding gas tanks and caustic chemicals and faulty electrodes in the air bag systems.<\/p>\n

This is what Ford would have wanted, and this is what the heads of retail and data and manufacturing want. They\u2019ve already put most of us over a barrel with forced arbitration clauses, non-compete agreements (sic), and rule after penalty after threat after law after delimitation, that, well, in this knowledge (sic) economy and post-Industrial (sic) economy, the white collar and pink collar workers are hemmed in by management. More than the field hands picking this country’s lettuce!<\/p>\n

The hemming in is an oppression planned and sealed, and a deep seated zombifcation<\/em> of the “higher castes” and to be honest, people of the land, even those in struggle, in other countries that have been deemed shit-holes by Trump and Third World by Biden have more gumption about them, more ability to fight the systems, the oppressors, than any member of the Western Civilization.<\/p>\n

Just drive around your town or suburb, anywhere. Take a look at what and how the systems have been set up for and about the rich, for the money changers, for the money takers, for the dream hoarders. Take a look. How many bus stations, how many covered and art-imbued public amenities? How many public toilets, public waysides, public paths, public trails, public pedestrian overpasses, public bandstands, public gazebos, public museums, public eateries, public statues, signs, art, historical markers? How many trees and shrubs and open spaces set up for the public? How many picnic tables and interpretive trails, and …? How many tiny home villages for the houseless? How many community gardens? Theaters and cinemas for and by the people?<\/p>\n

Talk about dead and lobotomized citizens, as we have allowed the captains of industry and oppressors of finance and the legions of pushers of the realm rule: retailers, consumer crack salesmen\/women, middle managers, ant hill after ant hill of processors and facilitators of the entire house of cards built upon the dopamine hits of lizard drips of the brain. “I betcha can’t eat just one Lays potato chip,” now on steroids \u2013 “I betcha you can’t just have 3 big screen TVs in your pad … “And now you fill in that blank \u2013 Just look at the so-called Black Friday ads.<\/p>\n

Amazing, junk, junk and more junk. Families buying deep fryers and rice steamers and any number of electronic junk that they can\u2019t or don\u2019t know how to use. All that plastic and tin, diodes and LED screens. All of that planned obsolescence. Nary a word about the embedded energy, the packaging, the toil and slave labor, the life cycle analysis. Piles and piles of worthless junk, planned to break, parts planned to snap, wires planned and ready to melt.<\/p>\n

Planned Human Obsolescence<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is not a difficult thing to comprehend, \u00a0about socialism for the land and people versus capitalism for the elite and bankers and small group of sociopaths, who will fight tooth and nail (well, with a battalion of lawyers at $1500 an hour each, not really a fight per se) to push the poisons, hawk the faulty products, demand the welfare for the rich and corporations, and deposit all the externalities of their profit schemes onto the public and the commons\u2019 health.<\/p>\n

But …\u00a0 Man, those “buts.” I talk all the time with great white saviors, who just start spewing at the mouth of the evils of socialism, and that, well, capitalism is good, and \u201cwe let Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg\u201d accumulate so much wealth and power, so it\u2019s our fault, and really, is it that bad we have these Titans who give us goods and services? This is like heaven compared to countries who push that bullshit democratic socialism crap. Do you know what the 10 pillars of socialism\/communism\/Marxism are?\u201d<\/p>\n

Try putting “debunking the critics of socialism” into the Google Gulag Search, and you shall receive so much hatred and polemics around anything tied to socialism on the first 50 pages of the search, that, well, you get the picture why these big white saviors will dare\u00a0 come up to me and challenge me the socialist on how and why socialism is bad-bad-bad while capitalism is god\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

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As these great white saviors are pushing a cart filled with two TV\u2019s, a new printer, two iPads, and junk junk junk, 50 pounds of kitty liter and a hundred pounds of dog chow. While walking past the two young men I am working with who are taking in shopping carts as part of their competitive work as people who happen to be living with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. These Great White Hopes are Blind to “them.”<\/p>\n

These great white saviors, well, it\u2019s all about survival of the fittest. All about the colonized mind. All about \u2013 \u201cyou majored in the wrong subject matter, sucker … born into the most messed up family, sucker grew up on that side of the railroad tracks, dufus … got stuck with those bills and foreclosures, sucker.\u201d<\/p>\n

Oh, the invisible hand of the oppressors, and these people \u2013 Biden and Trump supporters, what have you \u2013 are criminal thinkers, really, because with one huge swath of their inhuman brain, they disregard 90 percent of the planet\u2019s people.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey are all sucka\u2019s for being born where they are and from the loins of \u2018those\u2019 rotten people.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Sucker Borne Every <\/strong>Nanosecond<\/b><\/p>\n

Oh, and I am seeing more and more quasi-leftist stuff, saying, well, the left needs to embrace the Trumpies, to work with them on labor rights, on environmental rights, on health care for all, on all those issues, and not be so hung up on their misogyny, racism, classism, white Duck Dynasty Ted Nugent shit.<\/p>\n

Insanity, man. Leftists writing from the comfort of their offices, well, they are a dime a dozen. The reality on the ground is that this country has a cool 100 million or so hateful, resentful, ignorant of the world, pro-war, rah-rah, hate welfare of all kinds sort of people. They don\u2019t have to be Proud Boys and KKK. These people in this USA, the white ones, mostly, have come from that evil spawn stock, back even before SCD, Smith Colony Disease.<\/p>\n

Then, again, we have Democrats with a wilted big “D” who need their comeuppance, and who are just one half brain shy of a squid, and somehow, the other squids (sorry about the dispersion to cephalopods) with another load of brain cells missing need to be embraced, because, the GOP and Trumpies and the like want to move toward a truly socialist society?<\/p>\n

Again, the reality is some bad-ass slow, consistent and in many cases rapid death by a 1,000 capitalist cuts.<\/p>\n

I meet people in my new job, working with Adults with ID\/DD, to get job ready and jobs in the community \u2013 real jobs, not stuck in some sheltered workshop getting one-tenth the wage of anyone else in the same job.<\/p>\n

Sure, I am doing great work, god\u2019s work, the work of an angel (they really say this stuff to me, a commie, a devoted atheist), and while I get the gist of that, we talk about how it is my careers have been shit for pay, highly exploitive and yet highly regarded in some sense: teaching, social services, and, well, community journalism.<\/p>\n

\u201cHa-ha, you are doing these great services knowing you are not going to get rich doing it, but thank you for your service.\u201d<\/p>\n

Imagine that stupidity, that dense mentality. Imagine, the hard jobs that need doing in a broken capitalist society with wave after wave of damaged, chronically ill, economically strafed, mentally poisoned, generously precarious, and one paycheck away from bad ass disaster citizens on the precipice? PayDay Loans? That in and of itself defines capitalism. The Mafiosi aspect of this spiritually deserted society.<\/p>\n

Yet, now, these great leftist warriors are saying the Trumpies and the GOP of the world \u2013 the log cutters, the mill workers, the truckers, the blue collar millionaires \u2013 that they want workplace rights, the right to strike, the right to squat, the right to refuse bad and dangerous work; that they want to be able to shut down polluting industries, and the right of the people to take over industries? That these Trumpies and GOP want universal health care, universal rights for all people. That these GOP and Trumpies want real education, more education, holistic education, writing and thinking across the curriculum, across disciplines, across industries. That the GOP-Trumpies will work so-so well with organizers and \u201cthe people\u201d over defunding and holding to task \u201cthe police-backed\u201d banks-warehouses-fulfillment centers. Right!@#$%<\/p>\n

So how does anyone on both sides of the manure pile called USA politics square this fact?<\/p>\n

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Ahh, the world\u2019s 26 richest people currently have the same amount of wealth as the poorest 3.8 billion\u2014down from 61 people in 2016. As the rich get richer, sea levels are rising, tribalism is flourishing, and liberal democracies are regressing. Even some of the wealthiest nations are plagued by job insecurity, debt, and stagnant wages. Ordinary people across the political spectrum are increasingly concerned that the system is rigged against them. Trust in public institutions is near an all-time low.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

So that Google search got one hit on the “other side” of the dividing line (not really) \u2013 \u201cWhat the Right Gets Wrong About Socialism. As Scandinavia shows, it does feature plenty of public ownership\u2014but also a thriving economy.\u201d1<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n

Sure, we get this from the Norwegian:<\/p>\n

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Norway\u2019s success has not come without costs\u2014wealth accrued through oil and other extractive industries has had harsh ecological consequences. But students there and across Scandinavia graduate without the horrifying debt burdens of their U.S. counterparts. Those who sustain injuries in traffic accidents never have to beg bystanders not to call for an ambulance, for fear of drowning in medical debt. Norwegian diabetics don\u2019t need to crowdsource their insulin. As seniors, they don\u2019t spend their golden years working at Walmart or living in their vehicles. Their homes were not repossessed en masse by banks during the Great Recession. Extensive public ownership shields Norwegians from the harshest aspects of unfettered capitalism.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But then he attacks North Korea and Venezuela for being failing socialist countries, and without the context of the international transnational monetary criminal system of sanctions and debt and theft of Venezuela\u2019s treasury, and war war war with Korea still on the hot plate. Then the illegal maneuvers of governments like the USA and supported by all those others, including Norway, in its attack on Venezuela\u2019s elected leaders and support of the dirty rich racist opposition groups, that is not mentioned.<\/p>\n

Yep, there is a link in the Norwegian’s piece to another article \u2013 July 2018, \u201cThere is Nothing Inherently Wrong with State Ownership\u201d by Matthew Bruenig over at Current Affairs Magazine<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Again, short anemic, and an essay in response to an attack on Norway and Sweden and \u201csocialist\u201d countries in the Nordic category by a New York Times \u201c<\/em>writer,\u201d a Bret Stephens, who is sloppy and makes untrue claims in this piece, \u201cDemocratic Socialism Is Dem Doom.\u201d<\/p>\n

No Richard Wolf and no Michael Parenti or any thousands upon thousands of thinkers who know about societies and economies and cultures and ecologies who could put this tripe to rest. This is it?<\/p>\n

Hemming Us In<\/strong><\/p>\n

Imagine, a 69-year-old working in a deli at a national chain. \u201cI was once a speech therapist with a thriving private practice. And then my retirement went bust, thanks to Enron.\u201d So, Molly works with a terrible limp, arthritis everywhere and almost no hair left. Fryers, slicers, prepping, and she runs it. Since age 55, when not only her measly retirement went bust, but the speech therapy arena turned more and more into high end certification racket, and gobbled up by, well, monopolies, agencies that scarf up the independents, or make it impossible to compete against the aggregators and services felons.<\/p>\n

Then another guy, James, working the parking lot, bathrooms, carts, etc., making a wage when he started at this national grocery chain, of $9.75 an hour. He busts his butt, and we talked about his chronic heart failure, the meds he takes each month, all of that, including the pace maker and other aspects of his life, at age 60. He is at $12 an hour after five years with this outfit, and he tells me his supervisor likes his work, and his helping the other cart people, so much so that he is in for a wage increase to $15 an hour. He has to wait 90 days for the higher ups to approve that.<\/p>\n

Hemming in. Working hard jobs at an old age to keep bad health insurance that is part of a for-triple-profit system of penury and theft. Oh, stories of an item being charged 18 times more during this Covid \u201ccrisis.\u201d<\/p>\n

A study that revealed hospitals may be charging as much as 18 times over their costs.<\/p>\n

Nurse Jean Ross \u2013 \u201c Yes. Again, unconscionable, but that seems to be the way in this country. Up to 18 times. So, for example, if your true cost \u2014 it\u2019s called the charge-to-cost ratio, or CCR \u2014 if your true cost for your service is $100, they are, in many cases, charging up to $1,800. And they do it because they can.\u201d This from a study<\/a> put out by National Nurses United.<\/p>\n

Sit on the Ground and Try and Pull Yourself Up by Bootstraps<\/strong><\/p>\n

Those great white hopes, those big happy white males and big happy white females who voted for Trump and then those that believe Biden is better, well, that\u2019s what we have \u2013 \u201cJust let it take place, and that\u2019s the way the Capitalist Cookie crumbles. What would Cuba be doing? The great invisible hand will fix things!\u201d<\/p>\n

Where I currently work \u2013 a small non-profit \u2013 the amount of software and tracking-time management apps and all the government agencies I have to get my mandatory trainings on and get my certifications renewed, well, it\u2019s almost daunting. That’s the squeeze, the money train to the middle men, having nothing to do with my job, my humanity, work.<\/p>\n

This is a non-for-profit agency working with adults with ID\/DD.<\/p>\n

Imagine all those warehouses and factories and office buildings and other places where the atomization was already on overdrive before the plan-pandemic.<\/p>\n

Now, with the lockdowns, the on-line doom dungeons, and alas, with more and more AI and IT measures in place to keep us out of each other\u2019s social distance arena, things are really degrading big time.<\/p>\n

Teaching to the New\u00a0<\/strong>Technology<\/b><\/p>\n

I want to look at another gig I had \u2013 substitute teaching. Not just the bad working conditions of the public schools and anxious teachers and idiotic principals and the dictatorial superintendent. Let\u2019s look at the payrate. Look at this \u2013 substitute teachers, K12, in Oregon, on the Coast, now managed by a Tennessee outfit. Note the hourly rate, and of course, coming into substitute teaching, a teaching certificate is required, and that means, well, most teachers like me, we have master\u2019s degrees. That Oregon licensing costs another cool $400 to get the license and jump through the hoops. We get no mileage expended to get to and from very remote schools.<\/p>\n

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Job details — $14 an hour; Full-time\/ Part-time; The State of Oregon requires all substitute teachers to hold an active Oregon Teaching License, Restricted Substitute Teaching License, or an Oregon Reciprocal License.\u00a0 As leaders in the education staffing space since 2000, ESS specializes in placing qualified staff in daily, long-term, and permanent K-12 school district positions including substitute teachers, school aides, and other school support staff. With more than 700 school district partners throughout the US, ESS supports the education of more than 2.5 million students every day.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I had been teaching as a substitute a year ago. I had been hired by the District, and my contacts were through the District. I was making $80 for four hours and $160 for seven. In many cases I could get called in late and then get ready, make the drive in the rural county, get to the school and still \u00a0get the full day\u2019s pay rate. That\u2019s more than $18 an hour, and alas, I got to know the teachers who wanted me when they had planned absences, and the school secretaries also knew me.<\/p>\n

There is a shortage of substitutes, and, well, if things were better all around, substitutes could be integrated more seamlessly and holistically to provide amazing outside the box perspectives and teaching.<\/p>\n

Not so in Lincoln County, as is true of most counties, with plenty of Administrators, plenty of bullshit curriculum cops, plenty of teach-to-the- test zombies running roughshod over the entire project of working with our youth, our kids, our aspiring young adults.<\/p>\n

This staffing \u201csolution\u201d is killing again teachers getting together, working with the district, getting to know people in the district, airing grievances with the district. Everything goes through this Tennessee outfit. Complaints go nowhere, and if you get a complaint leveled against you by a school, ESS will NOT go to bat. They have taken that $18 an hour and whittled it to $14 an hour. Then, they probably charge more than just that $4 per each hour taught to the DIstrict. Add to the fact they will manage who gets called, how they get called. These people are running call centers, data dredging centers, and know zilch about the schools, the roads, the weather, the culture, the teachers, the students.<\/p>\n

I am sure they will not be allowing teachers to get a few extra hours pay if they are called in late and end up working a partial day. I am sure there are all sorts of cost-cutting (human-killing measures) this Education Staffing Solutions outfit deploys.<\/p>\n

And, they probably pay Google for a net cast to see how many hits on the world wide web Education Staffing Solutions gets mentioned or Yelped or rated on Indeed or Linked In. You can only imagine if I was still employed as a substitute teacher, through ESS, that conversation happening, as ESS would be the outfit that would be managing me, so to speak. Finding this article criticizing them, well, sayonara subbing Mister Paul Haeder.<\/p>\n

Management fees, man, and government (local, city, county and state, and federal) giving up oversight and decent livable wages for all the agencies and the public utilities (that we could have) and everything else, gone to middle and middle and middle men.<\/p>\n

Again, these warped folk with ESS probably backed Trump and believe in Capitalism on Steroids, while they make bank on all the public entities across the land, AKA, public schools.<\/p>\n

That the bus systems for schools is now outsourced from sea to shining sea, that again, defines the bottom line of pathetic capitalism. All the food cooked in cafeterias, outsourced to Sodexo. There is nothing local anymore, and these multinationals, these huge stockholder and stock board run outfits, they are making money off of us, US taxpayer, and in that formula, they are welfare recipients, and mostly welfare cheats, and with ESS, they are ripping off the very people that do the work \u2013 teachers, para-educators, more.<\/p>\n

My comeuppance it seems was being banned from the entire District because of a few students I was in charge of at a local high school accused me of “upsetting” them when we were having a classroom discussion about homelessness, about epigenetics and families, about poverty, about the potential for many people to become substance abusers. We were talking about the books Of Mice and Men<\/em> and Animal Farm<\/em>.<\/p>\n

What happened was La-La-Land level stuff, and while I think some students are crackpots, and little versions of really bad parents, I am ready to deal with crackpots and talk them off their cliff.<\/p>\n

I did not get my day in court, so to speak, and I was not allowed to explain what could have been the students\u2019 (three of them) hysteria, and I had no chance to query the people involved or bringing in the rest of the classroom students who were both inquisitive and enthralled to have a well-traveled, well-read, well-educated, well-experienced person like me in their classroom, albeit, temporary.<\/p>\n

And ESS did nothing to defend me, protect me, or gain some sort of redress. That was a year ago.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a positive story<\/a> — “Musings on a Monday After Teaching High School Get You Down? Nope!”<\/p>\n

Another<\/a> — “Professor Pablo and Fourth Grade Enlightenment in Lincoln City”<\/p>\n

Education By and Because of the Corporation<\/strong><\/p>\n

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The backdrop of my teaching debut \u2026 was a predicament without any possible solution, a deadly brew compounded from twelve hundred black teenagers penned inside a gloomy brick pile for six hours a day, with a white guard staff misnamed \u2018faculty\u2019 manning the light towers and machine-gun posts. This faculty was charged with dribbling out something called \u2018curriculum\u2019 to inmates, a gruel so thin [that this school] might rather have been a home for the feeble-minded than a place of education.
\n\u2014 John Taylor Gatto, “The Underground History of American Education<\/a>,”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I did get a bird\u2019s eye and on-the-ground look at the elementary, middle and high schools in this District. I have done substituting elsewhere, as in Vancouver, Seattle, Spokane and El Paso. Things are not looking good for youth. And I have written about that fact decades ago, and, yes, way before COronaVIrusDisease-2019, and, now, in a time of stupidity, fear, self-loathing, and complete loss of agency, the world is flipped around and, in most cases, crushed for our young people.<\/p>\n

Did I mention fear, and while this Intercept<\/em> piece below is a superficial look at the digital divide, there is so-so much more to write about this lockdown and social (pariah) distancing. It is a caste system on steroids. Calling it \u201cremote learning\u201d is doublespeak, oxymoronic.<\/p>\n

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In agro-industrial Watsonville, California, English-language learners struggle with remote learning. It\u2019s much easier for students in a nearby Bay Area suburb.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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