When it comes to enlightening us all--whether you' re a student or recent graduate or a seasoned professional in our current employment market (or, often, lack thereof), the Net offers you and us two truly great educators to help you get your bearings about what' s really going on in our economy, our job market, and our world.

Far from being one of "those wild-eyed liberals," Paul Craig Roberts, a former assistant secretary of the United States Treasury under and a former assistant editorial page editor for The Wall Street Journal, is as American Establishment as they come.  Importantly, Roberts, a former "insider" among those in power if ever there was one, often comes up with some of the sanest and most sober--and most sobering--analyses of vital national and world issues.

While I don' t agree with everything Roberts writes or says, I recommend his articles to anyone trying to make sense of what' s really going on, especially when it comes to our economy and job market, to Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East, to the regime of George W. Bush, and like subjects.

Perhaps the most powerful--and telling--observation from Roberts, so familiar with how those in power operate and what they seek (especially with regard to the issues we working people face in modern America), comes from a piece he wrote last fall. 

The United States is the first country in history to destroy the prospects and living standards of its labor force. It is amazing to watch freedom-loving libertarians and free-market economists serve as apologists for the dismantling of the ladders of upward mobility that made the America of old an opportunity society.

America is seeing a widening polarization into rich and poor. The resulting political instability and social strife will be terrible.

America' s "labor force" and its "propects and living standards" means you, me, and most of the rest of us--and your, my, and our futures.

Meanwhile, the Web site of author and social critic Barbara Ehrenreich, author of several bestsellers including Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch, which detail her personal experiences investigating, respectively, the worlds of low-wage work and white-collar unemployment, includes an online forum with plenty of powerful postings.

Among the most notable and knowledgeable are those of one "LaborSpecialist," a self-described Vietnam veteran and a retired long-time labor-market analyst for the U.S. Department of Labor.  His detailed explorations of what is really going on with our economy, our labor market, and our lives, pocketbooks, and futures--yours and mine--are not only revealing, but frightening.

Among the many threads in Ehrenreich' s forums where LaborSpecialist and others write about these issues include these:

As with much of what Roberts now writes, I only wish LaborSpecialist were mostly or all wrong but, like some of you, having myself experienced many of the very economic travails they (like many others, including Ehrenreich) both chronicle all too well over the 25 years or so I' ve been in the post-college employment world, I must say--they' re usually all too correct.