Passage2

Itused to be that people were proud to work for the same company for the whole oftheir working lives. They’d get a gold watch at the end of their productiveyears and a dinner featuring speeches by their bosses praising their loyalty.But today’s rich capitalists have regressed to the “survival of the fittest”ideas and their loyalty extends not to their workers or even to theirstockholders but only to themselves. Instead of giving out gold watches worth ahundred or so dollars for forty or so years of work, they grab tens and evenhundreds of millions of dollars as they sell for their own profit the companythey may have been with for only a few years.

Thenew rich selfishly act on their own to unfairly grab the wealth that thecountry as a whole has produce

Thetop 1 percent of the population now has wealth equal to the whole bottom 95percent and they want more. Their selfishness is most shamelessly expressed indownsizing and outsourcing because these business maneuvers don’t act to createnew jobs as the founder of new industries used to do, but only out jobs whilekeeping the money value of what those jobs produced for themselves.

Tokeep the money machine working smoothly the rich have bought all thepoliticians from the top down. The president himself is constantly leavingWashington and the business at the nation because he is summoned to “fundraisingdinners” where fat cats pay a thousand or so dollars a plate to warm their wayinto government not through service but through donations of vast amounts ofmoney. Once on the inside they have both political parties busily tearing upall the regulations that protect the rest of us from the greed of the rich.

Themiddle class used to be loyal to the free enterprise system. In the past, thepeople of the middle class mostly thought they’d be rich themselves someday orhave a good shot at becoming rich. But nowadays income is being distributedmore and more unevenly and corporate loyalty is a thing of the past. The middleclass may also wake up to forget its loyalty to the so-called free enterprisesystem altogether and the government which governs only the rest of us whileletting the corporations do what they please with our jobs. As things stand, ifsomebody doesn’t wake up, the middle class is on a path to being downsized allthe way to the bottom of society.

It can be inferred from the first paragraph that people used to place a high value on ____.