The Dow hit a record high yet for most of America this means little. While some fawn and fan over the high rise stock market, here are some stories that actually matter to real people with real lives.
The loss of the Hostess Twinkie is a symbol of a new era for the American worker. Chemical cupcakes usher in the race to the economic bottom, where the new business operandi is the stripping of worker wages and benefits. Gone are middle class incomes and lifestyles for most. Here are temporary jobs, no benefits and assuredly no retirement. America has been sliced, and diced, just like Wonder Bread.
Multifactor productivity for the private business sector excluding farms had the largest increase in the history of record keeping for 2010. So states the BLS in their report.
There are 150,917,735 wage earners in this country for 2009. That said, 24,315,992 of them earned less than $5000. 50% earned less than $26,261 in 2009. There are only 0.794% of wage earners who get more than $250,000 per year and only 1.266% of American salaries are over $200,000.
During the Clinton years much was said about "bridging the digital divide." On Charlie Rose recently Leo Apotheker, CEO of German software giant SAP referred to enterprise-wide computer networks as a "nervous system." In listening I drifted back to the time just before the event of 9-11. What if government computers (at C.I.A., F.B.I., etc.) had all been able to "talk" and share/analyze/intelligate aggretized data? What if there had been an interchangeability and exchangeability? Aren't these largely the kind of "hi-tech" public works projects we need in today's economy?
The loss of the Hostess Twinkie is a symbol of a new era for the American worker. Chemical cupcakes usher in the race to the economic bottom, where the new business operandi is the stripping of worker wages and benefits. Gone are middle class incomes and lifestyles for most. Here are temporary jobs, no benefits and assuredly no retirement. America has been sliced, and diced, just like Wonder Bread.
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