America's Underpaid Workforce

"About 10% of American consumers are unemployed and too many of the other 90% are underpaid -- according to JPMorgan Chase, which recently told private banking clients that U.S. salaries are now at a 50-year low relative to company sales and GDP. At the same time, the average profit margins of major companies have risen to nearly 13%- the highest level since the 1960s. The steady shrinkage of wages and benefits, Chase has calculated, is responsible for 75 percent of the boom in corporate profit margins. “To state this more simply, profits are up because wages are down.” Why are American workers going in reverse? Simple: They no longer have any leverage. Unions have withered, and the unemployed will be only too glad to take your job, as will 2 billion Asians who’ll work for half your pay. So the money produced by everyone’s hard work gets funneled to the guys at the top, or stays on the balance sheet. For anyone who draws a paycheck, this is
catastrophic.

Where’s the outrage?"

by Harold Meyerson from The Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/corporate-americas-chokehold-on-wages/2011/07/19/gIQAL2ieOI_story.html

http://tinyurl.com/42qxspe

Greenspan and Bush Jr.

Alan Greenspan Now Candid --

Now that President Bush is unpopular, Alan Greenspan is "suddenly" very candid. In his new book, in which his publisher pays him $8.5 million to tell the American people what he should have told them when his views might have had an impact, the former Fed chairman says that:
he “fiercely” opposed Bush’s tax cuts;
deficits DO matter; and,
the Iraq war is about oil.

http://theweek.com/article/index/237/best-business-commentary
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119040316144335515.html 

                             Greenspan and Bush Jr.
                                        I'll scratch your back and...???