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Learned Social Classism, Is Working Even Ethical?

November 25, 2012 by 6 Comments

As explained in the article Learning Careerism As A Moral Reward System; our society, specifically our education system teaches and prepared us for a careerist lifestyle.  Or simply put, working for money is considered success in our societies.

But not only does it teach us to work for currency.  Just as we are put down in school for having poor grades, in society we are put down and even ridiculed, almost as criminals, for having low paid jobs, and even more so for having no paid job at all.

This video shows how people are eager to help someone until people assume they are homeless, and that the homeless are also more eager to help people in need:

We live in a society where those with the most important jobs to our survival work long hours, often physically tiring and are not paid very much. There are only a few kinds of workers that we really need, farmers/food producers, construction/manufacturers, delivery, maintenance/repair, and public services such as hospital workers and good police.

As time goes on there is more automation, so there are less jobs available but more people and so more food, building, maintenance, healthcare, and so on is required.  However farmers are being paid less as time goes on, many selling their farms to get a different job, as their valuable work doesn’t even pay the bills.  Construction workers, store workers, repair services and delivery are often paid low or minimum wage.  Construction or farm work is much physically harder than sitting in an office trading stocks, yet those people are praised because they make more money.

There are often stories of fire-fighters and medical workers on strike because they are on a low wage or have poor quality working conditions, but these are the true heroes of our society, these people save us from death.  Farmers, medical workers and fire-fighters should be the highest rewarded and praised workers of society, not some of the least.

We should also give more credit to those who are building and maintaining places for us to live comfortably in.

It is shameful that the harder a job is, the less money the workers will make, and those who make the most money in society actually have the easier jobs and often work the least.

In our society even these workers that we require for survival are not made a priority, money is.  We are taught that if we work hard we can get a good job, and a good job pays well, most people still believe this and look up to those with ‘well-paid’ jobs and look down on those with a low paid job or those who are considered poor.

The truth is that in almost all cases the LESS-ethical the persons job, the more money they will earn.  We could consider the most ethical of all work to be charity work, helping those with less, yet most of this work is either volunteer work or paid minimum wage.  Those without jobs at all are looked down on, even when they volunteer to do charity work.  Looked down on by those who mess around with numbers to make bigger numbers (trading stocks and shares), or managers; people who make sure that other people work so that they can take a larger cut.

Our parents tried to teach us good ethics and morals, but then they told us to obey at school, which taught us that these twisted careerist ideologies were moral and ethical.

Those without any paid employment, often also without any debt are sometimes homeless, and our society also tells us that they are homeless because they are drug addicts or alcoholics, and therefore we should not help them, even though many of these people are not drug-addicts or alcoholics, and if they are, it is often a sickness that is created by the world they live in, they simply didn’t have enough money or got kicked out by an ex-partner.  Relationship breakdown and illness can happen to anyone.

So we have those who work very unethical jobs making ridiculously high amounts of money, those looked down on for having low paid work, even though it is physically more productive, those who are ridiculed for not having a ‘paid’ job or claiming some kind of state benefit, and then the homeless who cannot even apply for many kinds of state benefits or most jobs because they cannot complete the forms without a valid address, and often an email address or phone number; sometimes even the phone number must be a landline number, and of course to apply for a job most of the time these days a printed Résumé/CV is required.

Amnesty international reported that approximately 3.5 million people in the U.S. are homeless, many of them veterans.  It is worth noting that, at the same time, there are 18.5 million vacant homes in the country.

AP also reports that nearly 1 in 2 Americans have fallen into poverty.

CBS News reports that “According to a new report out this past week, poverty in America has reached its highest level since 1965″.

So as a whole this brings up a question, apart from a few specific careers, is paid work ethical?  How many ethical jobs do you know that are helping people to survive or live comfortably and are not profiting some corporation, or share holders, sat back, relaxing, watching the money you make entering their bank accounts.

When we do get paid, a high percentage of that money gets cut to go to government as income tax, however we give them another chunk of money from VAT, another tax, then depending on where you live there are multiple other taxes such as state tax, council tax, road tax, import tax, property tax, inheritance tax, and so on…

Click for larger image

Filed Under: Banks, Consumerism, Corporations, Economy, Employment, Equality, Featured, Financial Crisis, Housing, Income Inequality, Money, Poverty, Safety, Taxes, Unions, Welfare Benefits

Learning Careerism As A Moral Reward System

November 17, 2012 by 2 Comments

The concepts of consumerism and careerism are predominant in first world countries, and are increasing in countries with less “advanced” economies too, but why?

The definition of careerism or a careerist is “the characteristics associated with one who advances his career even at the expense of his pride and dignity.”  Simply looking at this definition, many of us instantly assume ‘it has nothing to do with my career’.

Image source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1026998/Parents-told-attend-Maths-lessons-children-improve-primary-results.html

As a child we are brought up by our parents or carers, usually with a mixture of two learning methodologies, the first of which is a reward based learning system, where a child is rewarded for doing good and importantly, doing as they are told.  The second is the opposite side of the same coin, a punishment based system, punished for disobeying and for doing bad.  In general parents try to give children the best morals and ethics that they are able to comprehend for themselves.

Image source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/27/florida-education-model-reform

However that same parent then tells the child to do as they are told at school.  The child goes to school and learns a very systematic, rigid and standardised education without much flexibility, creativity, play, freedom, and importantly, without parental guidance.  Parents tend to assume that the governments education programmes have our children’s futures and interests at heart, usually the teachers also believe this.

When we reach 11/12 in the USA people are moved from Elementary school to Middle School, until 14/15 where people are moved to High School. Typically in the UK children go to Secondary School from 10/11/12 until 15/16, why change schools, and why between 10 and 12?

Some school uniforms also represent “smart” worker clothing. (Image from: http://www.theuniformshoponline.co.uk/secondary-school-uniforms.php)

Puberty, during this time of questioning, rebelling against our parents as authority figures to find our own path, we are given alternative answers by our new schools.  A lot of these school changes are careerist ideologies, once we reach these ages we are taught that we need to get the grades to get a job because having a job is successful; the better the grades the better the career and pay, right?

In the USA this is pushed even farther as children must pass tests to even get to the next grade/school year, a very early way of learning a careerist promotion based system and also something that appears to be non-optional.  Those who do not follow these rules are ridiculed as they are held back, just as people in society are ridiculed for having a low paid job or no job at all.

The poor or jobless considered by many of the rich, the media and the government to be worthless people of society that do not deserve, because they haven’t worked enough.. Even when these people volunteer to do charitable work they are perceived as some kind of hippie scum.

It’s important to note that government taxes and bank’s debt interest are two other ways of getting something without working for it.

Monopoly Money

All along our parents tried to teach us good morals and ethics; what is good and what is bad.  Schooling takes over and teaches us that more obeying and work is good, and anything else is bad.  By the time we leave school we have learned that working is good and money is a replacement of our parents reward based system.

There’s no longer a reward based system for doing good, now there is only a reward based system of working for currency by obeying. Numbers printed on paper or a computer screen.  This is now where our morals are firmly based in society.

Continues to: Learned Social Classism, Is Working Even Ethical?

Filed Under: Consumerism, Economy, Education, Equality, Featured, Income Inequality, Money, Poverty, Taxes, Welfare Benefits

Americans Toss Out As Much As 40% Of Their Food, Study Says

August 28, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Originally posted by Tiffany Hsu on LATimes.com, August 21, 2012

Americans waste up to 40% of their food, according to a new report from the Natural Resources Defense Council. (Beth Hall / Bloomberg News)

Americans are throwing out nearly every other bite of food, wasting up to 40% of the country’s supply each year – a mass of uneaten provisions worth $165 billion, according to a new report from the Natural Resources Defense Council.

An average family of four squanders $2,275 in food each year, or 20 pounds per person per month, according to the nonprofit and nonpartisan environmental advocacy group.

Food waste is the largest single portion of solid waste cramming American landfills. Since the 1970s, the amount of uneaten fare that is dumped has jumped 50%. The average American trashes 10 times as much food as a consumer in Southeast Asia, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Such profligacy is especially unwarranted in a time of record drought, high food prices expected to get higher and families unable to afford food, according to the council. Efforts are already in place in Europe to cut back on food waste.

But American consumers are used to seeing pyramids of fresh produce in their local markets and grocery stores, which results in $15 billion annually in unsold fruits and vegetables, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. In restaurants and home kitchens, massive portions often end up partly in the trash.

Half of American soil and many other key resources are used for agriculture – the Natural Resources Defense Council says wasted food eats up a quarter of all freshwater consumed in the U.S. along with 4% of the oil while producing 23% of the methane emissions.

In its report, the council urges the government to set a target for food-waste reduction. Companies should look for alternatives in their supply chain, such as making so-called baby carrots out of carrots too bent to be sold whole at the retail level.

The study also asks Americans to learn when food goes bad and to become less averse to buying scarred or otherwise imperfect produce. The average consumer should also save and eat leftovers, researchers said.

Source:  http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-food-waste-nrdc-20120821,0,7810321.story

Filed Under: Consumerism, Food, Health, Money, USA

Gold Stockpiling: Is It Worth It?

August 20, 2012 by 2 Comments

Originally posted by weare1776.org on August 18, 2012

Author:  Alec Scheer

 

Alternative news websites, such as my own, are generally perceived by their fans to perform the service that mainstream media (MSM) should perform, but either can’t or won’t. Our job is to spread the message of truth and liberty and to act as the watchdog over government, a role that MSM has all but abandoned.

Every day we see ads and articles on alternative news websites like Info Wars (www.infowars.com) and Occupy Corporatism (www.occupycorporatism.com) addressing the imminent banking/financial collapse, which is bound to happen. It is not a question of if, but of when. These ads and articles suggest that everybody buy gold or other precious metals. When a friend recently pointed out this gold scheme, I did my own research into the matter and arrived at the conclusion that there is, in fact, a giant confidence game being pulled off by the wealthy elite. My intent is to alert you to the potential for fraud and to dispel some of the misconceptions.

Business Insider (www.businessinsider.com) has published an article entitled “Soros Reveals Stake in Facebook” in which it is stated that George Soros “completely dumped his stakes” in Citigroup, JP Morgan, and Goldman Sachs. Here is an excerpt from that article:

According to the report, Soros completely dumped his stakes in Citigroup (420,000 shares), JP Morgan (701,400 shares) and Goldman Sachs (120,000 shares), leaving him with no position in any major financials at all.

Before and after dumping his shares, Soros and many other banksters have been stockpiling gold and other precious metals. The following excerpt is from Mini Web (www.miniweb.com) describing the latest trend in gold buying with regard to Soros:

According to SEC filings George Soros has been back buying gold – and this on its own has probably given a lift to the gold price, with many big money investors likely to see that as a lead to follow.

Now, let us put all of the legitimate financial collapse theories aside and focus on this theory: Since Soros is selling, followed by Paulson (Forbes article), the idea seems to be that the public will soon follow. The reason as to why this would happen is because the public, noticing the activities of the investors who are presumed to have the “inside scoop,” will sell their shares in the stock market and proceed to buy gold, just like the elites who are setting the trend. Next thing you know the sheeple mindset kicks in and many others start buying gold because “oh, well, the Wall Street insiders (elitist crooks) are buying gold, so they must be preparing for something—I  should buy some gold, as well.” This mentality actually creates the demand for gold, but who will supply the gold? Well, it is this simple: while you were being duped by the stock market, men like Soros and Paulsen were stockpiling gold in preparation for snookering you again. How are they duping you again? After stockpiling mass amounts of gold, they pull out their shares from the market creating a panic, which causes the public to follow suit selling their shares and following the gold buying trend. These deceptive acts of investors such as Soros and Paulsen alter both the supply and demand of gold and other precious metals, which in turn influences the market rates of these commodities, artificially driving the prices up or down at will. Essentially the people who will supply the gold to the public now demanding it will be the wealthy interests who drove the price up in the first place knowing they could con the public into a massive scam via an artificial panic, and a gold purchasing spree. When it is all said and done, the bankers will have pulled off another get rich quick scheme.

Remember, that this is a trend created by the people we oppose because they so consistently act contrary to the best interests of the people. It is rather simple:

They buy gold, and then sell their shares.

This creates a panic.

The public follows suit by demanding gold.

The bankers who stocked up in preparation for this demand then supply the gold to the purchasers demanding it.

They rake in mass amounts of money from an artificial panic/gold buying scheme they devised.

I want to point out that a monetary system would not be effective in a complete financial collapse because it would not benefit anyone; however, a system of barter would benefit everyone because people would exchange their resources for other services/resources.

Think before you buy. Resist the lies. Open minds. Spread liberty worldwide.

 

Source: http://weare1776.org/1441/us-news/gold-stockpiling-is-it-worth-it/

Filed Under: Banks, Consumerism, Corporations, Economy, Financial Crisis, Money

Black Friday Sales Start With Pepper Spray Stampede

November 26, 2011 by 1 Comment

Woman pepper-sprayed her rival bargain-hunters as 152m expected to flock to stores

Shoppers in the US kicked off their annual “Black Friday” orgy of consumerism amid scenes of pushing, pulling, running and – in one case – pepper-spraying their way through the doors of the nation’s shops and malls. 

The annual tradition, when many stores open early with cut-price sales on the day after Thanksgiving, has become a source of controversy amid frequent scenes of near-rioting and injuries as mobs of people crowd into big-name shops.

But few can have expected even the most determined of bargain-hunters to adopt the brutal tactics of one female shopper in a Los Angeles suburb who attacked her rivals with pepper-spray: a substance more recently associated with police brutality against Occupy Wall Street protesters.

At least 20 people, including several children, were injured as the woman deployed her weapon. “I heard screaming and I heard yelling. Moments later my throat stung. I was coughing really bad,” said Matthew Lopez, a shopper who recounted his story to the Los Angeles Times.

The woman, whom witnesses said appeared to be defending an X-Box games console, has not been found or yet identified. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the gigantic store remained open amid the mayhem and other shoppers continued to roam the aisles filling their trolleys with goods.

The incident occurred late on Thanksgiving evening as the Walmart – like some other stores – had pushed back its Black Friday opening to begin late on Thursday.

The day gets its name from the idea that the period after Thanksgiving marks the part of the year when many shops finally get in the “black” and start turning a profit for the year.

But America in 2011 is stranded in a moribund economy marked by sluggish growth and a headline jobless rate stuck around 9%. Many retailers have pinned their hopes on a strong shopping season in the run up to Christmas and will be looking pouring through data from Black Friday for signs of increased spending.

Experts expect 152m people to hit the shops over the Black Friday weekend, up 27% on last year, with many retailers hoping for a desperately needed shot-in-the-arm to consumer spending in a still battered economy.

Even Apple, which has until now eschewed a discounting policy, cut its prices for one day on Friday.

Elsewhere in America the queues and rush to get through the doors was a little more steady and less violen than in Los Angeles. There were several shooting incidents, in Florida and in North Carolina, but it was far from clear these were directly linked to Black Friday shopping.

Yet, despite the problems, millions of people queued up outside stores in order to be first inside and snap up some of the bargains on offer on anything from TVs and consumer electronics to fashion and furniture. At Macy’s in New York an estimated 9,000 people waited in the street for a midnight opening.

In recent years, as media coverage of the event has grown and scenes of rioting and stampedes have become more common, Black Friday has drawn its share of criticism.

However, this year, as the Occupy movement has sprung up across the country, shoppers in some parts of America have also been joined by protesters trying to persuade them to put down their bags and go home, or at least avoid large chains and shop smaller and more locally.

Some campaigners called for a boycott of stores by consumers, though judging by the mayhem and huge queues that had little impact. Elsewhere protests were held at stores. At Macy’s in Manhattan a small group of people chanted “Occupy it, don’t buy it” to waiting shoppers.

In places such as Seattle protesters planned to hold rallies outside Walmarts in the city. In the small city of Boise, Idaho, a local Occupy group aimed to dress up as the undead to symbolise “consumer zombies”.

In Iowa “flash mobs” of protesters were set to target malls to try and convince shoppers to stay or away or think more politically about their purchases.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/nov/25/black-friday-sales-pepper-spray-stampede

Filed Under: Consumerism, Corporations, Violence, Weapons