Workers at a Caterpillar plant in Joliet, Illinois, have been on strike to protest their company’s attempt to freeze wages and pensions for several years. The company is demanding these concessions despite making billions of dollars in profits and paying its CEO $17 million.

Last week, Gov. Pat Quinn (D-IL) visited the striking workers, lending them financial support in the form of a $10,000 check:

Striking Caterpillar employees received a show of support Friday, when Gov. Pat Quinn visited the Joliet picket line to meet workers and donate $10,000 to a food fund set up for their benefit.

“We believe that when somebody in our state needs a helping hand, we help them out,” Quinn said to the cheering crowd. “As governor of our state, I wanted to make sure that, tomorrow, this big food drive here gets a good start. So, I gave a $10,000 check.”

Members of the International Association of Machinists Local 851 have been on strike for over three months. Friday’s visit was Quinn’s first and it followed up an appearance by U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) earlier in the week.

In recent decades, rates of unionization fell alongside middle-class incomes, leading to skyrocketing income inequality. The pay of executives was detached from that of workers, with the typical worker currently having to work 244 years in order to earn what the average CEO makes in one year.

Now, companies like Caterpillar are trying to exacerbate those trends, cutting wages and pensions even when they’re flush with cash. In addition to furthering the gap between the wealthiest Americans and the rest of the population, actions such as these will increase poverty and lower the standard of living for America’s workers.

Our guest blogger is Sally Steenland, Director of the Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Now that Mitt Romney has picked Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) as his running mate, Ryan’s radical budget constitutes Romney’s economic platform. The Ryan-Romney budget is based on a number of false and dangerous notions: that an unfettered free market can provide all that society needs, that slashing critical programs for struggling families while cutting taxes for the rich will make the nation stronger, and that ruthless individualism and selfishness trump community.

Not surprisingly, faith leaders condemned the Ryan budget — and the philosophy behind it — when it was first introduced in the House of Representatives last year. They intensified their criticism when the House passed the Ryan budget this spring. Here’s some of what them said:

– Catholic nuns, priests, and friars have called the Ryan budget “immoral,” a “severe failure,” and the “height of hypocrisy.” Sister Simone Campbell led a 17-city “Nuns on the Bus” tour this summer to visit faith-based social service programs that would be hurt by cuts proposed in the Ryan budget. Last week her organization, NETWORK, and the Franciscan Action Network invited Mitt Romney to spend a day with them visiting the poor in order to meet the people who’d be affected by their budget cuts. NETWORK issued a statement after the Ryan-VP announcement saying, “We agree with Catholic Bishops that Paul Ryan’s budget fails the test of Catholic Social Teaching since it deliberately harms people at the economic margins.”

– Catholic bishops have called the Ryan budget “unjustified and wrong” and failing a moral test. In April the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops sent a public letter to the House of Representatives saying that the federal budget must “protect poor, vulnerable people.”

Diverse other faith leaders have condemned the Ryan budget as “immoral” and “irresponsible” for cutting safety net programs while protecting the richest from shared sacrifice. Here is what they’ve said:

– Lisa Sharon Harper from Sojourners: “It is simply unconscionable to balance the budget on the backs of struggling Americans while protecting tax breaks for millionaires. Churches and faith-based nonprofits are already fighting an uphill battle to meet the needs of their communities. They don’t need politicians making their work even harder because Congress is dead set on politicizing a simple duty of common sense governance.”

– Rabbi Jack Moline of the Rabbinical Assembly: “The poor are not statistics….it is unimaginable to look in the face of a child who would go hungry without government assistance and say, ‘Sorry — we need to reduce the deficit.’”

– Rev. Gabriele Salguero of the National Latino Evangelical coalition: “Budgets reflect our deepest moral commitments. Politicians ought to remember that protecting vulnerable families and children is at the center of the biblical command to care for the poor.”

The globally popular English soccer club Manchester United made its initial public offering on Friday, and has been trading essentially flat since then. As ThinkProgress noted, Manchester United’s IPO highlighted the absurdity of the so-called JOBS Act — championed by Congressional Republicans and signed by President Obama in April — which allowed the club to avoid a host of securities laws and disclosures.

For instance, under the law, the 134-year old club was allowed to file as an “emerging” company, as Ed Mierzwinski of U.S. PIRG wrote:

The venerable English football club Manchester United, founded in 1878, is expected to file an IPO today under a new deregulatory U.S. law, the so-called JOBS Act of 2012, that passed overwhelmingly despite opposition from U.S. PIRG and other investor protection organizations, because it was supposedly intended to help newer, smaller, “emerging” companies go public without dealing with pesky securities law requirements designed to deter fraud and chicanery.

As Marketwatch noted, calling United is an “emerging” company is a “questionable concept for the operator of an 134-year-old football club.” The offering raised $234 million for the club, valuing it at more than $2 billion.

And the club is far from the only entity gaming the JOBS Act. The misnamed law has already allowed significant financial shenanigans, as shell companies with no employees are popping up and filing as “emerging,” giving bigger businesses a way to take advantage of the law’s lax disclosure provisions.

“The Glazers [Manchester United's owners] have really shielded this operating company from investors, so the confidential nature of the IPO is particularly concerning in this case,” Francis Gaskins, President of IPO Desktop, told CNN Money. “They’re the poster child for what’s wrong with this law.”

On the campaign trail, Mitt Romney has consistently attacked the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law, which aimed to reform financial regulation in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Both Romney and his economic advisers say that they would repeal the law entirely, and they have given no indication of what they would do to upgrade a regulatory framework that so obviously failed.

But Romney’s running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), has written a budget — approved by House Republicans — that, while it doesn’t repeal the law entirely, removes one of its most important aspects, known as resolution authority. This power, which the government did not have in 2008, would allow the unwinding of failing financial firms without resorting to ad hoc bailouts. Under the process, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp would dismantle collapsing, yet too-big-to-fail, banks, and any loss to the taxpayer would be recouped from the sale of the failed bank’s assets.

This is a much better alternative to the strategy employed in 2008, when financial behemoths were allowed to continue their existence after receiving hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars. Then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson has said that the resolution authority power the Ryan budget repeals would have been useful during the crisis in 2008. “We would have loved to have something like this for Lehman Brothers. There’s no doubt about it,” Paulson said. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has said the same thing: “If a federal agency had had such tools on September 16, they could have been used to put AIG into conservatorship or receivership…That outcome would have been far preferable.”

Ryan himself has been a bit all over the place on financial reform, writing a budget that guts an important aspect of it but, at one time, seeming to endorse the concept of breaking up too-big-to-fail banks. Ryan also seemed to endorse the Volcker Rule, which is meant to prevent banks from engaging in risky trading solely for their own benefit.

But he also opposes singling out the biggest banks for more stringent regulations, calling such a move “not healthy.” And he is now half of a ticket that is calling for removing Dodd-Frank entirely, allowing the casino-like mentality of Wall Street to continue unabated.

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) will hit the campaign trail today in his first week as Mitt Romney’s running mate. Deservedly, much of the attention on Ryan so far has been regarding his radical budget, which hugely shifts taxation down the income scale and guts important government investments.

But Romney’s budget also includes substantial reductions to key federal investments and the social safety net, in order to cut taxes for the wealthy and maintain sky-high defense spending. In fact, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted, Romney’s budget would require even deeper cuts to spending that Ryan’s, in order to keep defense spending at an arbitrarily set percentage of the economy:

– Under the Ryan plan, core defense spending (the defense budget other than war costs and some relatively small items such as military family housing),[11] would total about $5.7 trillion over the ten-year period 2013-2022. The Romney plan would increase core defense spending to $7.9 trillion. The Ryan plan increases core defense funding modestly relative to the existing BCA caps, but core defense would nevertheless decline to 2.6 percent of GDP by 2022. In contrast, Governor Romney would increase core defense to 4 percent of GDP.

– The Ryan plan would cut entitlement and discretionary programs (outside of core defense and net interest) by $5.2 trillion over ten years.[12] The Romney proposal would cut this spending by between $7.0 trillion and $9.6 trillion, depending upon whether the budget is balanced. Thus, Governor Romney’s ten-year cuts would range from one-third deeper than those in the Ryan budget to almost twice as deep as the Ryan cuts.

These cuts would have severe consequences for individual programs, including potentially throwing 13 million people off of the food stamp program.

As Bloomberg News noted, Ryan’s tax plan involves giving slightly more away to the wealthy than does Romney’s, but Romney more than makes up for it with his budget’s gutting of programs that aid the middle-class and low-income Americans. And he does it in order to preserve a level of defense spending that has nothing to do with defense priorities, but is simply a number that Romney decreed is necessary.