If you are still a worker, read Overworked America: The Great Speedup.

This will keep up as long as we buy into three fallacies: One, that to feel crushed by debilitating workloads is a personal failing. Two, that it’s just your company or industry struggling—when in fact what’s happening to hotel maids and sales clerks is also happening to project managers, engineers, and doctors. Three, that there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

Since I retired, I have always said that I got out just in time.  The American workplace was a rapidly declining environment.

Now I know why I had trouble getting along in my last two jobs.  (Besides my usual inability to get along with authority figures that is.)

My problem was I was too close to retirement and had enough economic security that I refused to give in.  I told my next to last boss, point blank, “Sure I could hire someone out of my own pocket to do the extra work you are asking me, but I refuse to do it.”

In a performance review with my last boss, I told him, “Yes, I am not as productive as I would like to be.  If at any time you feel I am not doing enough work to justify my salary, just tell me.  I will quietly retire.”

The pending bursting of the real estate bubble is what finally got me to sell my house in Oregon, retire, and move back to Massachusetts.  As I said, just in time.  Although, having a stock market crash just after retirement is not the best of timing.  But at least I was out of the real-estate market for good, I had bought the last house I ever intend to own.

The McClatchy News article Libya mission becomes a burden for Obama starts with the following paragraph:

More than 100 days after the United States and NATO allies launched what was supposed to be a quick air campaign in Libya, Pentagon officials concede that the effort has little strategic value for the U.S., and the alliance’s desired outcome there remains unclear.

So, after 100 days even the Pentagon is leaking information that many of us knew from day 1.  President Obama loses face when he stands before us and tells us things that we clearly know to be untrue.

With economic issues pressing us, unemployment at an unacceptably high level, our supposed efforts to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama can hardly afford to be telling us fairy tales about why we should enter a new quagmire.

The story goes on to say:

Perhaps undercutting Obama’s rationale for war, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, in a series of exit interviews ahead of his retirement, has begun to describe the U.S. involvement as payback to NATO nations — which depend on Libya’s oil reserves — for joining American troops in fighting in Afghanistan, which was mainly a war about U.S. strategic interests.

“These allies, particularly the British and the French, and the Italians for that matter, have really been a big help to us in Afghanistan. They consider Libya a vital interest for them. Our alliance with them is a vital interest for us. So as they have helped us in Afghanistan, it seems to me that we are in a position of helping them with respect to Libya,” said Gates, who opposed U.S. involvement in Libya from the beginning, last week on the PBS NewsHour.

Apparently even though Gates knew from the start that it was all about oil, he is still being a little coy about our own interests.    See my June 11 post, In A Pure Coincidence, Gaddafi Impeded U.S. Oil Interests Before The War.