Stealing Your Pension: The Daily Show Looks At The 1% Reverse Robin Hood

[There Is No Spoon]

By Nicole Belle

The Daily Show
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I don't think that this fact can be overemphasized as we have various corporate media and political pundits seek to minimize Occupy Wall Street: We are the richest nation in the world. There is a massive amount of wealth here, enough to keep each and every citizen living at a very comfortable level. The problem is that there is also a staggering income inequality as well, more so than in some third world nations, like Trinidad and Tobago, Mozambique and Tunisia. Again, the richest nation in the world cannot serve its citizens as equitably as Mozambique. In a word: unacceptable.

One of the ways that Wall Street has caused this massive shift of wealth strictly to the top 1 percent is in the way corporations have decimated pension funds. Investigative journalist Ellen Schultz wrote the book Retirement Heist: How Companies Plunder and Profit from the Nest Eggs of American Workers to illustrate how these corporations have pulled a reverse Robin Hood and robbed from the working poor to give yet even more to the rich. From the publisher's description:

Quote:...
Drawing on original analysis of company data, government filings, internal corporate documents, and confidential memos, Schultz uncovers decades of widespread deception during which employers have exaggerated their retiree burdens while lobbying for government handouts, secretly cutting pensions, tricking employees, and misleading shareholders. She reveals how companies:

• Siphon billions of dollars from their pension plans to finance downsizings and sell the assets in merger deals
• Overstate the burden of rank-and-file retiree obligations to justify benefits cuts while simultaneously using the savings to inflate executive pay and pensions
• Hide their growing executive pension liabilities, which at some companies now exceed the liabilities for the regular pension plans
• Purchase billions of dollars of life insurance on workers and use the policies as informal executive pension funds. When the insured workers and retirees die, the company collects tax-free death benefits
• Preemptively sue retirees after cutting retiree health benefits and use other legal strategies to erode their legal protections.
  

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http://crooksandliars.com/nicole-belle/s...-show-look

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This is extremely disturbing. While Republicans were in change and relaxing regulations, companies were turning their pension funds into profit centers and shifting funds from the average workers pensions into the executive funds, all the while claiming they were in the poor house.

[nofurylike]

thank you for posting that, TINS.



outrageous reality.

[azmouse]

The wealthy despise the poor.
We're finally seeing eyes open to this reality with the Occupy movement.