"Generation Limbo: Waiting it out" August 31, 2011 by Jennifer L. Lee, New York Times.
Recent College Graduates Wait for Their Real Careers to Begin

Why can't Dick and Jane get a real job? What happened? Harvard English Major graduates... waiting, and waiting.

Well, guess what. The long and the short of it is that the popular big business model is about as moral as food packing industries were back when child labor was allowed.

Let's take the banking industry, the same industry that has done such wonderful things lately as derivative speculation and real estate bubbles, allowing, in deregulation, predatory lending, interest rate games, and so many things that simply speak of a lack of respect for the consumer and the individual? Oh, yeah, real examples of self-made millionaires... at what cost to the rest of us and our old man's pension? It is representatives of this same industry that we ask to sit on boards and be trustees of our liberal arts institutions.

These youngsters, in the prime of life, what have we thrown them, but waiting tables, and waiting and waiting. And perhaps I might disclaim that I could serve as an older poster child of these recent grads in limbo.

How 'bout if we asked industry and big business to have a moral side... How 'about we asked them to ask themselves if their business decisions are moral, rather than just profit minded? Intellectual property rights, yes, it gives a fair number of lawyers a job, but are such tools being used to in a way that helps the economy in a broader way?

Examples: Monsanto, proprietary patent, cruelly enforced, of genetically modified soybeans... Corn, Big Beef... Cargill, Tysons, the producers of about the most inorganic food you could possibly, in a million years, in Hitler's worst mind, come up with. Yes, I take this from FOOD INC., the documentary, without researching them as I should... having little else to go on, but you hear the truth and it sounds right, doesn't it.

Big companies hire their punks, their thugs. That's part of how it works. The companies, like those of the pharmaceutical companies, who would also want to push stuff that's bad for you as well as the good, like the big banks, they hire and pay well, and wave a carrot in front of all they want to seduce, and that works. Maybe that's what these kids intuitively sense, that they and the rest of the world are better if they take a humble job that at least isn't outright immoral, not part of the system.

Sad to say all these things. Sad to think of talents wasted. Sad for one to admit to himself that he's not accomplishing much good in the world.