by Dennis Rahkonen

American workers are deliberately being turned into little more than glorified peons. Their good union jobs have been outsourced to peanut-pay locales overseas, and those lucky enough to find any replacement employment at all must try making ends meet with annual wages averaging $9,000 less than before. Benefits and pensions have broadly been whittled away to uselessness, or eliminated altogether. Recent data disclosed that U.S. poverty climbed for the third straight year, as did the number of our citizens without health insurance. Nearly 45 million of us are medically uninsured, a larger total than the entire population of many world countries. In a high percentage of those countries, however, affordable, single-payer insurance protects everyone. What an embarrassment for America to be so backward in such a key human regard! Our shameful decline is humiliatingly evident in other pivotal areas as well....

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Sept04/Rahkonen0904.htm