The new economy.

The constant resounding drumbeat of unleashed, cruel and inhuman capitalism is that you, what you do, what you make are are worth nothing.

You are a smudge on the face of the world who gets paid the smallest fraction of what the bloated leaders of giant corporations gets paid. Protection, which used to take the form of "christianity," that is love of one's fellow man, has evaporated. Minimum wages are starvation wages--when indexed for inflation, lower than they were 40 years ago. Job security in an era of globalization has disappeared. There's always slave labor somewhere else that is cheaper and more abuseable. And unions have all but disappeared.

Of course, we slash--eviscerated--programs like food stamps while the aforementioned corporate fatties get their "business meals" subsidized by tax payers.

The latest example of this comes from Boeing.

Boeing which gets massive tax breaks records record profits.

Then attempts to slash the pay of its highly-skilled workers (threatening to relocate to Rick Perry's serfdom, Texas) if its workers do not accept paycuts and the evisceration of their pension fund.

As Pulitzer-winner Timothy Egan wrote in Thursday's "New York Times," "This is how the middle class dies, not with a bang, but a forced squeeze. After a global corporation posts record profits, it asks the state that has long nurtured its growth for the nation’s biggest single tax break, and then tells the people who make its products that their pension plan will be frozen, their benefits slashed, their pay raises meager. Take it or we leave. And everyone caves."
The same, of course, is happening in our business, sans the tax breaks.
The downward pressure on wages.
The complete lack of job security.
And the Croesus-like pay of a few at the top.
We used to value workers.
No more.
They are a "cost-center" to be squeezed.
Read Egan here.
And find a way to fight.