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This decline, starts with Government loosening the rules for Corporate Greed, to access money you and I were forced to take out of our Pay Checks. Those in Government that did this, are the congress, the Senate, and the President, it could not have been accomplished without all three participating, as any one of them could have derailed this. If you don't vote, then you voted for the destruction of your retirement. If you voted, as the media told you to vote, then you voted for the destruction of your retirement. If you payed attention to who represented you and voted against those who help Corporate Greed at all times, you may have voted well, but did you educate enough of your fellows to make a difference? After all, we're all in this planned economic decline together, and yours and my labor and homes and land are the assets that are to balance the deficit, that is now larger then.... our gross national product. Scott -------------------------------------------------------------------------- >From America Magazine -- http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=13234 (johnmac -- JFK said "*My father told me that businessmen were sons of bitches and now I believe him*" (when steel prices were raided) People with pension plans might agree) Great American Ripoff By Claire Shaeffer-Duffy Retirement Heist How Companies Plunder and Profit From the Nest Eggs of American Workers By Ellen E. Schultz Portfolio. 256p $26.95 You know the whine. Bloggers, pundits and media stories have repeated it often enough. Companies should not be faulted for Americas retirement-and-pension crisis. It was unforeseen economic factorsan aging workforce, increasing health care costs, an outmoded pension system and the stock market debaclethat necessitated slashing retiree benefits and forgoing pension plans for new employees. Not so! says Ellen Schultz. Retirement Heist argues that todays crisis, far from being a demographic accident, was manufactured by company executives and their facilitatorsbenefit consultants, insurance agencies, banks and industry lobbyiststo enrich the few. An award-winning investigative journalist who used to write for The Wall Street Journal, Schultz has reported on the so-called retirement crisis for more than a decade. She has pored over Securities and Exchange Commission filings and company memos, read transcripts for court cases challenging cuts in benefits and sat through congressional hearings on pension law and conferences for actuaries. With this insiders knowledge, she documents a tale of mind-boggling thievery and greed. Retirement Heist provides an important and shocking back story on an issue that is affecting millions of American workers. According to Schultz, the looting began in earnest more than 20 years ago, when pension funds were still flush. Many corporate pension plans had such massive surpluses they could have fully paid their current and future retirees pensions, even if all of them lived to be ninety-nine and the companies never contributed another dime, she writes. By 1999, surpluses at some companies had reached laughable levels: $25 billion at G.E., $24 billion at Verizon, $20 billion at AT&T and $7 billion at I.B.M. Rather than celebrate this security, employers bemoaned their inability to access these assets and pushed for the government to loosen the rules of withdrawal, which it did. With the spigot open, corporate siphoning of wealth, already a chronic problem, intensified. Retirement Heist methodically catalogues how the siphoning occurred. Exploiting loopholes and flexibility in new federal accounting rules, employers use their pension plans to finance downsizing, cover the cost of retiree health benefits and boost executive pay. They lay off older workers just before their pensions will spike, inflate retiree medical costs to increase profit and conceal the liability of executive benefits in pension plans for the rank-and-file. Schultz says the latter practice explains the current drag on many pension funds. By 2008 executives were receiving more than one-third of all pay at U.S. companiesmore than $2.1 trillion of the $6.4 trillion total compensation, she notes. The strategies employed show remarkable audacity. Some companies purchase life insurance policies on their employees, often without their knowledge, to use as tax shelters for executive benefits. Others decrease their health care obligations with creeping take-aways. The maneuver entails paring down medical benefits for several years in increments too small to warrant a lawsuit, then suddenly slashing them. When retirees challenge the reduction in court, the company argues that employees lack of action on the small cuts signaled tacit approval for the reduction. G.E. monetized its pension assets by selling a unit to another company, then handed over more pension money than was needed for the transferred retirees in exchange for a higher asking price. Schultz says a succession of such swaps, as well as other practices, left G.E.s once-flush pension plan $6 billion in debt by 2011. Can pension plans be saved? Schultz thinks not. They are a thing of the past, she believes, and their replacements, 401(k)s, are not the great equalizers they were purported to be. She warns us that the retirement industry is going global and already has big plans for Social Security. Retirement Heist specifically scrutinizes the scurrilous practices of Americas large corporations. The inequities documented border on the fantastical. While the book cites some individuals for their singular irresponsibility and greed, the main culprit in Schultzs tale is the take-what-you-can-get-away-with mind-set that has infected so much of the finance industry. The ledgers used in the corporate world come from a planet few of us inhabit. Capital is divorced from labor, product or even innovation. Vast sums of money appear and disappear with a wave of the actuarial hand. Amid the wizardry, American workers, many of whom have given decades of their lives to a company, are reduced to portfolios of assets and liabilities. There is pushback to this de-humanization. Some of the books most poignant and inspiring sections are its David-and-Goliath accounts of aging and ailing retirees challenging cuts to their already meager benefits. More often than not, Goliath wins, but the pursuit of Motorola for unexplained pension deductions by the feisty retiree Fred Loewy marks an impressive win for the Little Guy. Readers unfamiliar with the workings of the finance industry might struggle to track the labyrinthine shenanigans recorded here. Persevere. You or someone you know could be affected by the monetary maneuverings described. Reading Retirement Heist brought to mind Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreichs searing and witty examination of the minimum wage. Like Ehrenreich, Schultz explains and interprets the dollars-and-cents data on her topic, always keeping the American worker at the center of her calculus. While the revelations in Retirement Heist infuriate and frighten, they can also inspire a re-evaluation of our notions of security. Nest eggs, after all, are fragile. Why not, then, invest in treasures that neither moth, nor rust nor profit-obsessed employers can consume? *Claire Shaeffer-Duffy, a freelance writer, is a member of the Saints Francis and Thérèse Catholic Worker Community in Worcester, Mass.* © 2012 America Press Inc. *** FAIR USE NOTICE. 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