Checkmate? The pawns in the game

Sometimes, you just have to sit back and regroup.

Since my last column, “Taxes? Poverty has become a business,” I have been catching up on email, rereading old comments and welcoming new readers who have just gotten around to reading my series of columns on responsibility, the growing role of social services and a generation of people who have become dependents of society.

And nothing has changed. Readers continue to rant that the quality of life in Connecticut is moving downhill like a mud slide, social services have turned into a poison, and corporate greed has the nation’s CEOs playing the game of thrones as they suck up companies and lay off people to be the biggest and best in the land.

And that has left the nation’s governor’s playing their own game of thrones as they one-up each other with bigger tax credits and other incentives to lure big business and hundreds and thousands of jobs to their state.

We’ve seen how the exodus of a General Electric can hurt the state and now taxpayers — who are already under siege — are growing more bitter as other corporations line up to get their piece of the pie to stay while children, veterans, able-bodied people and the elderly wait in food lines.

The hallmarks of hard work, loyalty and competence that secured job stability and a better life for people are being challenged as the landscape has changed for the American worker, leaving tens of millions mired in low-wage jobs and tens of millions who can’t find goodpaying jobs. The question is why? Companies are no longer struggling — many because the American taxpayer bailed them out. So where are the jobs? Why is big business not providing the jobs this country and its people so desperately need?

Maybe it’s because we live in a country where CEOs are rewarded with millions in pay and stock options for keeping wages low and profits up and that generally means laying people off.

Code words such as “efficiency, streamline and future goals” are used to justify putting parents and individuals on the unemployment line, disrupting families and taking the food out of kids’ mouths.

But one thing is for sure. It certainly has nothing to do with money, no matter how loudly they protest.

Stock markets went on the third-longest rally in American history under former President Barack Obama, with the market soaring to historic heights. Only FDR and Bill Clinton did better. When Obama left office, the market was up 210 percent from the time he entered the White House.

And that trend seems to be continuing under President Donald Trump, with the stock market skyrocketing to even greater heights.

So, once again, where are the jobs?

Why hasn’t the stress that banks and big business put on taxpayers over the last eight years gotten some relief — particularly here in Connecticut where experts have long known the cause?

Ten years ago, Pete Goia, an economist with the Connecticut Business Industry Association, said during an editorial board that there were 10,000 jobs waiting in Connecticut to be snapped up but the state didn’t have the skilled labor it needed to fill them.

Ten years later, those jobs appear to be still waiting on applicants as our legislators grapple with funding for technical schools to prepare people for jobs in manufacturing and to become plumbers, electricians, cabinet makers and mechanics.

Ten years ... and nothing has been done or what has been done has had little impact, except on the wallets of taxpayers.

It is no wonder social service offices are packed with people like rush hour congestion on Interstate 95.

Maybe taxpayers should just form massive groups and flash mob social services offices and boardrooms and demand to know what is going on.

I don’t have the brains of a Yalie but I do have common sense — and that tells me Connecticut would be better off with people working and everyone contributing.

So why isn’t common sense prevailing here?

We need good-paying jobs not only to relieve the burden on taxpayers but also to restore faith in our system, allow the common worker to stand back on his or her own two feet and return social services to the role it was created to do — help the truly less fortunate.

But our future may depend on revisiting our past.

Whatever happened to the guidance and wisdom our forefathers left us to follow: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Those are powerful words meant to keep us united as one country and one people. But right now, there is no perfect union and certainly no domestic tranquility — at least not for the common American worker.

The stock market is roaring, Wall Street is cheering, Fortune 500 companies are cheering, CEOs and top level management are cheering and accountants are working furiously to ensure that cheer continues.

The only ones not cheering are we, the people, — or, I should say — we, the taxpayers, who are on the frontlines picking up the cost in this financial game of thrones of CEOs and lawmakers.

For them, it’s checkmate; for us, we are merely the pawns in the game.

How can you not be angry?