Workshop, Sunday Dec. 16 - 2007 Victoria BC

World leaders are determined to rev up the engine of economic growth to drive us over the edge of destruction… Are you inadvertently handing them the keys?

Economic Planetary Defense Training:
Getting out of the economic rut of destruction

SUNDAY - DECEMBER 16 - 2007
1:00 - 3:30 pm Burnside Gorge Community Centre
471 Cecelia Rd. (off Jutland, between Gorge & Burnside), Victoria, BC
Organized by Livable Income For Everyone (LIFE)

Download Poster (8.5 x 14 - colour)
Doors open 12:30. Event start at 1:00. Please arrive between 12:30 and 12:45 and bring your own refreshments. Email for more information or questions.

Directions: The Burnside Gorge Community Centre is off Jutland Road on Cecelia ( parallel to, and between, Gorge and Burnside). If walking or biking, you can access the centre off of the Galloping Goose bike trail, watch for signs between Gorge and Burnside. You can also enter the address into Google Maps or Map Quest. If driving or busing, get onto Jutland Rd. between Burnside and Gorge. Get onto Cecelia Rd. next to the old Burnside elementary school, continue past the school. At end of Cecilia is the Centre.

Discussion points...

"The Kyoto regime, under which some countries have found it easier to reduce harmful emissions than others, expires in 2012: The world's leaders have to decide next month what regime should replace it… The synthesis [report] doesn't reflect recent research that's found CO2 emissions, which rose by 1.3 parts per million in previous decades, have jumped by three ppm since 2000." --Scientists' global warnings shouldn't be ignored, Ian Dutton, Victoria Times Colonist, Nov. 21, 2007

" 'You cannot as a government talk about reducing GHG [green house gas] emissions unless you're prepared to talk about reducing consumption, pure and simple. That's the big question no one wants to talk about." Les Leyne, quoting MLA Leonard Krog, Times Colonist, November 7, 2007, A16.

"Yes, we saw the climate changing, but what were we to do?"
-- Richard Lipsey, Globe and Mail, Oct. 10, 2007

"The Premier's new Climate Action Team isn't getting the thumbs-up from big labour.
BC Federation of Labour President Jim Sinclair… is worried some of the panels recommendations could also mean job losses." VANCOUVER/CKNW(AM980), "Labour wants a seat at the climate table", Nov, 20 2007

"Al Gore: [quoting Upton Sinclair] ‘It is difficult to get a man to
understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding
it.’" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0497116/quotes

Roundtable Discussion on work: July 14, 2007

Presentation and Discussion - Dec. 16 - 2006 - Victoria BC

John Calvin - 1509-1564 (advisor to 21st century social policies)
our world for now
robot animation from car commercial

Is hard work causing Global Warming?
The work ethic in the age
of global warming and robotics and automation

SATURDAY - DECEMBER 16 - 2006
1:00 pm Central Downtown Library seminar room
735 Broughton St. (Between Douglas and Blanshard), Victoria, BC

Note: attendance will be closed after 1:10 pm to
facilitate more effective discussion. If you want to attend this event but cannot arrive before 1:10, please email us to let us know.

Download the poster (600 kb;pdf)


Background Information:

On the Work Ethic
The History of the Work Ethic
Selling the Work Ethic
Audio clips on the work ethic
Links to websites from WhyWork
Productive vs. Unproductive
The world owes you a living
Dependence is not a dirty word

Links to articles on Global Warming
Atlantic Current came to halt for 10 days in 2004
Climate changing faster than predicted
Oceans in Distress
More wars and conflict over resources
Canadian environment pays for US oil thirst
Thawing permafrost could unleash tons of carbon
The megalist of climate change impacts

 


Automation, robotics and technology

"..60 per cent of all the jobs in the U.S.A are not producing any real wealth -- i.e., real life support. They are in fear-underwriting industries or are checking on other checkers, etc. The majority of the jobs occasion individuals to use three to four gallons per day in their automobiles to go to and from work -- at true cosmic costing, this means 4 million dollars per worker per day. ...it would save the planet earths' energy account 500 trillion a day to give all the non-wealth- producing workers their full pay to stay at home."
Buckminster Fuller (engineer) Critical Path, 1980.

" The computer will prove to society that it will pay to introduce automation wherever feasible and to allow the machines to work twenty-four-hour days while paying yesterday's workers in full to stay home. " Buckminster Fuller

 

"Only a fraction of the available human labour in the world is now needed for the production of the total amount of consumption goods necessary to live. Under a completely laissez-faire economic system this fact is bound to lead to unemployment."
Albert Einstein, 1954, "Ideas and Opinions"

 


"That at a time when the machines can turn out enough production for everybody, it is no longer necessary to force people into factories, or into offices, or into jobs unless they want a beer... The guaranteed income allows the individual to take risks, to do what he thinks is important without dropping out of society. Thirdly, the guaranteed income would have a major decentralizing effect on society... [individuals] can decide that they want a totally different form of town, city, village. They can opt for a garden city, an educational city, whatever seems to them to be important, because the sources will not come from a firm, they will come from the government. Fourth, there will be the development of new kinds of work organizations, particularly which I have called the consentive type... The possibility of voluntary work, of course, is also greatly increased." Robert Theobald, New Technologies and Institutional Change, 1965

"the economic goal of any nation as of any individual,
is to get the greatest results with the least effort...
It is for this reason that men use their ingenuity to develop
100,000 labour saving inventions. ...
The progress of civilization has meant the reduction
of its employment not its increase."

Henry Hazlett, Economics in One Lesson, 1946.

Read debate between Tech Pro and Anti-Confabulator about jobs and technology
( from the LIFE Letters section )

Robot videos: Hyundai dancing auto-factory robots (advertisement with digital robots)
Sony dancing robots (actual robots)
I, Robot will empty your bedpan
military swarm robots
household robots to fetch tea and tidy house
hospital robots
cyberguard security professionals

Read the LIFE pages for automation and economic gluts

Thank you to Women For Water for sponsorship of this event

Event - August 26 2006- Victoria BC

Film and discussion - Saturday, August 26
1:00-4:00 pm (doors open 12:30)
Sunset Room - 1810 Store Street B
(back of Value Village)

Did you know that Martin Luther King Jr. was not only in support of a Guaranteed Livable Income but that there are now only two groups in Victoria and only a few social justice groups in Canada who support a Guaranteed Livable Income...

Come and learn about Martin Luther King and why poor people have been falsely accused of causing their own poverty.

1:00 -3:00 Documentary on Martin Luther King’s campaigns during the last few years of his life: the Civil Rights movement and his Poor People’s Campaign. 3:00-4:00 discussion.

"The solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income." --Martin Luther King, Chaos or Community, 1967

Organized by Livable Income For Everyone (LIFE) Email: gli2020@shaw.ca

Thank you to the Public Service Alliance of Canada for sponsorship for this event through their Make Poverty History campaign.


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