by Michael Snyder
"Our economy is being transformed at a faster pace than we have ever experienced before. Thanks to giant leaps in the field of artificial intelligence, human labor is not as valuable as it once was. All over the world, millions of human workers are being replaced and that trend is only going to accelerate. For those that have already retired or are on the verge of retirement, this isn’t that big of a deal. But for younger workers, this is absolutely terrifying. There is no loyalty in corporate America today. The moment that AI can do your job more efficiently than you can, you could be out the door. This is already happening at some of the biggest companies in the entire country. Good paying jobs are evaporating all around us, and as a result the gap between the wealthy and the rest of us is absolutely exploding.
I knew that the employment marketplace was changing really fast, but the results of a brand new survey that was just released still completely shocked me. According to that survey, 99 percent of corporate executives are planning AI-related job cuts
within the next 2 years…
"A new study from consulting firm Mercer finds that virtually every employer is planning to cut jobs due to the technology (2). The 2026 Global Talent Trends report spoke with 825 C-suite leaders, along with 1,650 HR leaders, and a jaw-dropping 99% of the executives surveyed said they expect AI to lead to at least some headcount reduction in the next two years. Nearly as many (98%) said they are also planning organization design changes in that same time period.
Meanwhile, just 32% of the CEOs surveyed said they believed the workforce can combine both human and machine worker capabilities in an optimal manner, despite just under two-thirds saying they felt that redesigning work to incorporate automation will drive the greatest return on investment."
If your job does not require much thinking or creativity, your job is potentially in danger. Just look at what is happening at Meta. 1,400 highly paid workers in Washington state
are about to get the axe…"Meta’s artificial intelligence overhaul is now hitting one of the country’s largest tech corridors, with the Facebook parent company preparing to cut nearly 1,400 workers across Washington state.
New filings submitted to Washington state officials show Meta will begin terminating employees in Seattle, Bellevue, Redmond and remote positions starting July 22 as the company restructures operations around AI initiatives. The filings provide one of the clearest looks yet at how Meta’s broader workforce overhaul is affecting employees on the ground after the company announced plans last week to eliminate roughly 10% of its workforce while shifting thousands of workers into AI-focused roles."
Sadly, it isn’t just workers in Washington state that will be affected by the “artificial intelligence overhaul” that they have planned. Overall, Meta is letting approximately 8,000 workers go
in this latest round of layoffs…"Welcome to another day of corporate America hemorrhaging engineers and other white-collar workers with insurmountable student debt as AI adoption accelerates. This era will likely be remembered in history as the great “white-collar purge,” and the response will be continued hatred of data centers.
We’ve been covering for weeks that today is D-Day for Meta Platforms employees, who have finally learned their employment fate at the company that owns Facebook and Instagram. Bloomberg reports that the new round of layoffs affects roughly 8,000 roles globally, with engineering and product teams expected to be at the center of the cuts as CEO Mark Zuckerberg reduces labor in favor of GPUs."
In this environment, it doesn’t matter how hard you work or how much you have sacrificed for the company. If those at the top think that they can make more money by squeezing you out, you will be gone.
PayPal is making plenty of money, but they are apparently looking at cutting
one-fifth of their entire workforce…"PayPal is reportedly weighing cuts of up to 20% of its workforce as the payments giant ramps up cost-cutting efforts under new leadership. The potential layoffs come as PayPal faces mounting pressure on profitability despite continued revenue growth."
Who is going to step up to replace the six figure jobs that are being lost? Needless to say, the truth is that most of the good jobs that are disappearing are never going to be replaced, and that is just going to make the gap between the rich and the poor even worse. Today we are living in a K-shaped economy, and even the Federal Reserve is admitting that this has resulted in
“a remarkable increase in food insecurity”…
"The so-called K-shaped economy is now linked to “a remarkable increase in food insecurity,” according to a new blog post by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Large segments of the population are facing high levels of financial strain, according to a post published on Wednesday, based on data from the Survey of Consumer Expectations.
Among this group, lower- and middle-income households have been hardest hit by prolonged inflation. A greater share of their spending is allocated to goods that have seen prices soar since the pandemic, such as housing, food and utilities, causing them to cut back on groceries, the researchers found. In this environment, tens of millions of Americans are skipping meals on a regular basis because they simply do not have enough money for groceries."
So if you always have plenty of food to eat, you should count your blessings. In general, those over the age of 45 are doing fairly well. But those that are age 45 or younger control
just 11 percent of the nation’s wealth…To paraphrase the late jazzman Mose Allison, young Americans ain’t got nothing in the world these days. Americans ages 45 and under control only 11% of the nation’s wealth, according to household data from the Federal Reserve. In other words, nine-tenths of America’s assets belong to the older half of America. People ages 45 and over make up about 42% of the nation’s population, and about 54% of the adults.
I was stunned when I saw those numbers. There is a reason why Americans have never felt as bad about the U.S. economy
as they do right now. Mass layoffs are being conducted all over the country and the cost of virtually everything just keeps going up.
Thanks to the crisis in the Middle East, the average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States
has now reached $4.46…Now, gasoline prices are also dragging down the lower prong of the K. The national average gasoline price reached $4.46 a gallon as of Wednesday, up about 40% from a year ago, according to AAA. If the crisis in the Middle East is not resolved soon, things will get a lot worse.
And that is really bad news for people like
57-year-old Kris Massey that are barely scraping by each month…Kris Massey stood at a jeweler’s counter last month, hoping to sell a couple of her grandmother’s gifted pieces to possibly cover some bills. Even though Massey, a 57-year-old nurse practitioner, makes six figures a year, her financial situation has grown untenable. Years of fast-rising prices and a recent monthslong bout of unemployment had taken their toll. She worked two jobs from 2012 to 2023, but a second job is not an option after an extensive back surgery. Her retirement was drained when she was out of work. “I’m just trying to hang on,” she told CNN.
Can you imagine selling off your prize possessions just so that you can make it through another month? This is the reality that we live in now.
For 51-year-old Bill Brantner, any extra spending at all
has become a thing of the past… For Brantner, there’s absolutely no wiggle room now. There’s no discretionary spending – no movies, no restaurants, no driving around town, no new clothes, no new shoes; his coffee is whatever’s available in the breakroom; his bumper is strapped on with Gorilla Tape. “If I sign a lease again, and they raise my rent again, I can’t do it; if they raise my insurance premiums again, I can’t do it,” Brantner said. “They have squeezed every drop of blood that there is to be squeezed out of this stone.” Come next May, if his rent is hiked for a fifth consecutive year, he might have to resort to living in his car outside of Colorado Springs city limits, where sleeping in a vehicle isn’t illegal.
The U.S. economy has been in a state of decline for decades. For a long time, our leaders tried to hide what was happening, but now the truth is becoming apparent to everyone. Those at the very top of the economic pyramid are still thriving, but virtually everyone else is really struggling. The middle class is being systematically dismantled and the ranks of the poor are rapidly growing. I have been warning about all of this since the early days of the Obama administration, and now a time of reckoning is at hand."
o
"There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success."
“And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed. The great owners ignored the three cries of history. The land fell into fewer hands, the number of the dispossessed increased, and every effort of the great owners was directed at repression. The money was spent for arms, for gas to protect the great holdings, and spies were sent to catch the murmuring of revolt so that it might be stamped out. The changing economy was ignored, plans for the change ignored; and only means to destroy revolt were considered, while the causes of revolt went on.”
“...and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”
- John Steinbeck, "The Grapes Of Wrath"
Freely Download "The Grapes Of Wrath", by John Steinbeck, here:
.jpg)