[lbo-talk] Re: worker freedom of choice

snitsnat snitilicious at tampabay.rr.com
Sat Mar 26 18:51:08 PST 2005


BTW, to Leigh: As for it getting weirder here in LimpDick. Why bless yo' heart, y'aint seen nothing yet! This isn't weird at all. It's good ol' states' rights sentiments applied to the local level. by cracky, as gramps would say, OUR judge from PIEnellas county made the decision and ain't no on gonna come heeyah an' tell us dif'rent. In a weird way, it's almost heartening, innit?

it's exactly these kinds of splits in the government we're gonna need some day. that people are actually capable of it is a good thing. our job is to get them to start being capable of it a lot more and about the right things. Now there's a platitude!

At 07:45 PM 3/26/2005, tully wrote:
>On Saturday 26 March 2005 07:19 pm, jthorn65 at sbcglobal.net wrote:
> >I thought this list over-represented unemployed persons? That's my
> > recollection anyway.
>
>I guess I've not been here long enough to tell. But first glance sure
>doesn't look that way to me.


:) Welcome to the LBO SNIT POLL! I'm your LBO greeter for this shift! Cart?

I've appended the 'poll' John spoke of. John's right that the unemployed are overrepresented in the poll. However, the N was pretty low and the poll not statistically representative. It'd be nice to do it again and see if we could get more participation. Bad weekend for it, though.

Who's up for doing it again?

So, tully, about the minimum wage: is that who constitutes the working class? Or are those the only people who don't have a choice but to consume destructive products?

Do you have, as they say in corp-a-feelia land, a metric. Is there a theory and corresponding defintion and measurement for determining when you are effectively at the point of being able to afford to make choices that are, uh, free?

I reuse coffee filters. That means it costs me .5 cts a day instead of 2 cts. I've figured out that I save a whopping $1.86 a year or sumpin'! And they're the brown kind, too! Don't tell me to buy a french press either. The last person that told me that - grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Lessee I don't flush the toilet most of the time when I just pee.

Is that helping?

And I just realized that it's saving us de nada. Water bill remains the same. I'd like to know what is up with THAT.

Also, Deb and I would like you to go over our Gourmet Dining On Welfare shopping lists and recipes we created for DRR and let us know if they are morally correct.

Juuuuuust pushin' your foot. But the serious question is this. Years ago, when the CFC thing was going on, I was involved with activists who were tryig to promote the understanding that it wasn't the underarm deodorant that was causing all the problems, it was the factory in town making typewriters, etc.

Is there any good evidence that working on the individual level will change much? I'm not saying that, b/c it doesn't change a whole lot it's a bad idea. Rather, I think it's a bad idea for other reasons. I just wanted to fetishize those metrics again.

Oh, one thought occured to me. Is it just me? It's my experience that Crunchies are not much in favor with the broad population. My empiriical research suggests that it is ALL. About.The.Patchouli. :)

BUTT, seriously, I don't think moralizing, alone, is going to do much for the cause. For one thing, it's incorrect to say that "lowest price is given greater weight than ethics". First, lowest price *is* ethical. It *is* a moral choice -- you just don't like it. :) Neither do I, but I wouldn't call making decision by price unethical or even non-ethical. Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations as a continuation, a companion to, his Theory of Moral Sentiments. His argument was that the market had a certain ethic and that ethic was appropriate there and there alone. By pursuing economic morality in the economic sphere, you would yeild the Greatest Wealth for the Nation. In his Theory of Moral Sentiments, he'd argued that another morality existed in civil society (family, church, etc) and that ethical system of d-making should stay in that sphere. If we did that, we'd have the "good society."

Now, you may not like those ethics, but they are still ethics.

Here's the poll: ------

Hmmmmm. Looks like we're about "normal" WRT to life cushiness, hours we labor, and income here at LBO -- at least among the very small percentage who took the poll (much lower numbers this time since it was an income question. In that, LBOers are just as 'shy' as the rest of the U.S. -- which is really not a good thing for labor in general, is it? [add. shouldn't we be very vocal about wages as Ehrenreich suggested the low-income ought to be?]

Anyway, I didn't analyze the per cap income poll since it isn't a very helpful question. Per cap info in the LBO poll doesn't make much sense when compared to national numbers.

Cushy Life Poll:

yes 37% 14

no 45% 17

Life o' Riley 8% 3

I have a tushy life. 8% 3

On average, how many hours do you work each week.

Up to 40 hrs 47% 18

More than 40 hrs 54% 21

What is _your_ income?

< $10,000 24% 9 $10,001 - $15,000 11% 4 $15,001 - $25,000 8% 3 $25,001 - $35,000 8% 3 $35,001 - $45,000 5% 2 $45,001 - $55,000 8% 3 $55,001 - $65,000 8% 3 $65,001 - $75,000 8% 3 $75,001 - $85,000 8% 3

> $85,000 13% 5



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