{"id":179325,"date":"2021-02-15T12:01:07","date_gmt":"2021-02-15T12:01:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=179325"},"modified":"2021-02-14T09:22:26","modified_gmt":"2021-02-14T09:22:26","slug":"the-great-divorce-of-the-century","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/02\/the-great-divorce-of-the-century\/","title":{"rendered":"The Great Divorce of the Century"},"content":{"rendered":"

The COVID pandemic\u00a0has\u00a0pushed the\u00a0close-knit\u00a0relationship between work and money towards a\u00a0bitter\u00a0divorce.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

DhanCreators Blogs<\/p><\/div>\n

13 Feb 2021 –<\/em> Millions lost their jobs and their money, some kept their jobs and their money, and others got even more money without doing much. This situation didn\u2019t start with the pandemic, but it became more \u2018in your face\u2019 and it has created a social disaster, with hour-long lines at food pantries.<\/p>\n

In the U.S. alone, 20 million people lost their jobs almost overnight. If\u00a0you were working in a restaurant, a cultural institution, a club, or a theater, you were out of luck, out of work and without any income. If you were working in a job that allowed for remote work, however, you got to keep working, and the money kept rolling in. As it turns out, many of the people in lower wage work lost their jobs, while most of those earning higher wages kept theirs, and, in some cases, even saw their assets rise during the pandemic. Where is the fairness in that? No modern society should be developed with this type of structure.<\/p>\n

On top of that, we still have a crazy system where most peoples\u2019 health insurance is linked to their work<\/strong>. So in the middle of one of the worst health crises in a century, many of the 20 million who lost their jobs also lost their access to health insurance.<\/p>\n

For centuries work has been accepted as the main distributor of wealth, either as compensation for time worked or through payment for\u00a0objects produced. It\u2019s clear today, however, that work doesn\u2019t have the force\u00a0nor capacity to really\u00a0redistribute the growing concentration of capital.\u00a0Household incomes have grown only modestly in this century, and household wealth has not returned to its pre-recession levels. Economic inequality, whether measured through the gaps in income or wealth between richer and poorer households, continues to widen, and it is anticipated that the post-pandemic economy will only exacerbate this trend (it is being described as K-shaped \u2013 the top half will keep going up while the bottom half will trend down).\u00a0Income growth in recent decades has slanted steadily toward upper-income households: some 82% of money generated in 2017, according to Oxfam, went to the richest 1% of the global population while the poorest half saw no increase at all.\u00a0Here in the US, the middle class, which once comprised the clear majority of Americans, is fast shrinking.<\/p>\n

The answer to this, we are told, is to invest more. During\u00a0the\u00a02008 crisis,\u00a0however, millions of people\u00a0who had worked hard for decades saw their pensions\u00a0and retirement savings\u00a0vanish\u00a0overnight in the stock market. The work had\u00a0been done but the money\u00a0was gone<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

And yet listen to any standard\u00a0politician,\u00a0be they Democrat, Republican, or even Independent, and you will hear the popular mantra of \u201cjobs, jobs, jobs,\u201d as if that is the solution to\u00a0everything. This allows them, after being elected, to justify increased military spending, polluting\u00a0factories, and obscene corporate tax breaks, all in the name of \u201ccreating jobs.\u201d This is the tactic being used against Native\u00a0Americans to push them off their\u00a0sacred\u00a0lands, so they can build oil pipelines. And for all their talk about the importance of work, \u00a0these politicians do little on behalf of workers rights, which are being eroded year by year, and instead allow corporations to have more and more influence on workplace policy.<\/p>\n

In reality, the notion of work is all about control<\/strong>.\u00a0 About controlling you and your behavior, what you can do and cannot do, what time to start and when to finish, what you can wear, when you can take a break or go on vacation. In some places, every few years they expect you to move, from city to city or country to country.\u00a0 And \u00a0now, in this new \u201cgig economy,\u201d you can be your own\u00a0boss, with no capital, no clients and no\u00a0strategy, just a serviceman to a corporation on a day to day basis \u2013without \u201cbeing employed.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a free society people should be able to\u00a0spend\u00a0their time\u00a0and energy\u00a0doing something that has meaning for them.<\/strong> They should be engaged in working together to build the kind of\u00a0society that we all\u00a0aspire to. If you are really interested in moving our world forward, interested in helping the development of the human being, this your issue. Although very few want to touch this matter, we need to move beyond this debilitating relationship between work and money.\u00a0This divorce will have enormous consequences for our lives and the society at large. imagine not having to spend 30 or more years waiting for retirement so you can start living.<\/p>\n

We need to break the basic conditioning of birth, education, work and retirement.<\/strong> There is no natural law underlying this cycle. Our contribution to this world starts at the minute of our birth, when we become a Human Being. If we want our society to evolve, we can\u2019t keep spending the majority of our time, energy, and emotions doing something meaningless. We should be able to offer what we have, develop our best qualities, and open ourselves to learn, to love, to build, to discover, to share, and to imagine a new world.<\/p>\n

We will have to redefine almost everything. What is the meaning of life, what is freedom, what is education?<\/strong> Imagine spending 15 years in school learning to respond to one question only:\u00a0What is the contribution that I really want to make to this world?<\/p>\n

I will let you respond to that question and, please, don\u2019t worry so much about money.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>David Andersson – Citizen journalist, photograph and publisher, starting back in the 80\u2019s with the Humanist Movement by publishing a neighborhood newspaper in Paris. Today, David is the coordinator of NYC bureau for<\/em> Pressenza and is hosting a talk-show call<\/em> Face 2 Face. The show is broadcast on Youtube and Facebook.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – pressenza.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

13 Feb 2021 – Millions lost their jobs and their money, some kept their jobs and their money, and others got even more money without doing much. This situation didn\u2019t start with the pandemic, but it became more \u2018in your face.\u2019 COVID has pushed the close-knit relationship between work and money towards a bitter divorce.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":179326,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[232,176,1070,359],"class_list":["post-179325","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-in-focus","tag-capitalism","tag-money","tag-plastic-money","tag-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179325","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179325"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179325\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/179326"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}