Workers future 2011

Workers are in a world of hurt. Anyone who thinks that the nation's leaders can improve this sorry state of affairs by hacking away Social Security, Medicare and the public schools are great candidates for involuntary commitment.

For a variety of reasons, there are not enough tax revenues being generated to pay for the basic public services that one would expect in an advanced country like the US. The rich are not shouldering their fair share of the tax burden. The wars and military spending continue to consume an insane amount of revenue. There are not enough decent pay jobs to ease some of the demand for public services while at the same time increasing the amount of taxes paid by ordinary workers.

Enormous numbers of workers are in grave danger of being left behind permanently. Businesses have figured out how to prosper without putting the unemployed back to work in jobs that pay well and offer decent benefits.

Corporate profits and the stock market are way up. Businesses are sitting atop mountains of cash. Put people back to work? Forget about it. It seems no one has bothered pointing out that these profits are the result of aggressive payroll cutting. Companies making do with fewer, less well-paid and harder working employees.

For American corporations, the action is increasingly elsewhere. Their interests are not the same as those of the workers, or the country as a whole. Harold Meyerson put it in The American Prospect: "Our corporations don't need us anymore. Half their revenues come from abroad. Their products, increasingly, come from abroad as well".

New ideas on a grand scale are needed. Leaders should be trying to figure out what to do about the future of the American workforce. The US can't thrive with so many of its citizens condemned to shrunken standards of living because they can't find adequate employment. Long-term joblessness is a recipe for social destabilization. It should not be tolerated in a country with as much wealth as the US. It's destructive, and it's wrong.

It's my belief that leaders of all stripes in national and international levels are seriously under estimating the unintended consequences that will derive from their inadequate list of priorities and inaction. History has shown us over and over what happens when certain problems that must be dealt with the most extreme sense of urgency are deliberately overlooked. Patience becomes very short fused and irrational behaviour takes over when people realize that the system in which they live is rigged and obscene levels of inequality are not properly addressed.