You have not seen anything yet, there is no amount of greed that is too much to be placed on the backs of working men and women.

As automakers dropped their latest batch of awful sales numbers on the market on Tuesday, reinforcing the gloom spreading across the economy, the troubles confronting American workers seemed to intensify.

Plummeting home prices have in recent months eliminated jobs for hundreds of thousands of people, from bankers and real estate agents to construction workers and furniture manufacturers. Tighter lending standards imposed by banks in the wake of huge mortgage losses have made it hard for many Americans to secure credit — the lifeblood of expansion in recent years — crimping the appetite of consumers, whose spending amounts to 70 percent of the economy.

Joblessness has accelerated, and employers have slashed working hours even for those on their payrolls, shrinking the size of paychecks just as workers need them the most.

No great surprise. When you have an economy that hasn't generated real increases in wealth for most people over the past two decades--because of meager, if any, raises in wages, increasing loss of health care and an ever-increasing false pensions also known as 401(k)s--people are not going to be in a happy place. Why does that seem so obvious to us but seems to escape the notice of pundits, prognosticators and politicians who were all happy-go-lucky during the time when bubbles that would pop expanded and wages that didn't grow but stagnated?

On top of this, the greed of the masters of wall street and business goes on unabated.

For nearly five years, Richard A. Grasso was vilified for the riches he reaped while running the New York Stock Exchange.

But last Tuesday, a court ruled that Mr. Grasso could keep the $139.5 million he was paid.

Mr. Grasso, who symbolized for many the exuberance and excess of the now-faded bull market, won the final round in his long legal battle over the compensation he amassed during his eight years as head of the Big Board, when the New York State Court of Appeals threw out the remaining claims against him.

Only in America would there be a fight over whether $139.5 million is too much money for one person to be paid, and there is an additional $48 million he was to be paid in subsequent years that apparently he will also get so, far be it for, Grasso to have to scrimp by like the rest of us--it looks like a nice figure of $187 million, give or take half a mil.

We can all thank the greedy Grasso because he has now saved the glorious free market where anyone can earn obscene amounts of money. Ironically, the case ended not so much as a vindication of Grasso but because of a technicality:

The appeals court concluded that the attorney general has no standing to sue Mr. Grasso since the exchange has been converted from a nonprofit entity to a for-profit corporation, negating the attorney general’s ability to sue on behalf of the public rather than for private shareholders.

So Grasso gets to count his millions.

There we have it, in a nutshell. Most Americans are headed for a very dark future, certainly in the short term, in part because the greedy like Grasso, who fancied themselves as great managers of American capitalism, could, and can, only see one goal in the American enterprise--how do I get the most for myself, regardless of the pain being felt by 99 percent of the people.

You have a say this election year and you can help change the direction of America, remember your vote is your voice.