‘Shared Sacrifice’: Hostess Used Employee Pensions to Fund Itself

[azmouse]

This is a good example of why taxes should be greatly increased on the very wealthy. Republicans call it "taxing success"... I say bullshit. It's taxing theft from the workers. The money should be returned to the workers who earned it, not stolen from them and given to the already obscenely comfortable.

Quote:Even as Hostess blamed the unions, creditors accused Hostess of manipulating executive salaries in an attempt to get around bankruptcy laws, with then-chief executive Brian Driscoll’s salary going to $2.55 million from around $750,000 while “other executives’ salaries were increased by from 35% to 80%.”

It’s hard to see how this is not embezzlement, but apparently this happens so often that award-winning investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal Ellen Schultz wrote a book about it called “Retirement Heist: How Companies Plunder and Profit from the Nest Eggs of American Workers.”

“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 (and) Overstate the burden of rank-and-file retiree obligations to justify benefits cuts while simultaneously using the savings to inflate executive pay and pensions.”

I don’t see any shared sacrifice. I see the workers sacrificing, or rather, sacrificing while unknowingly being robbed at the same time by the CEOs.

http://www.politicususa.com/betrayal-rem...uptcy.html

[Brewman_Jax]

Shared sacrifice? To the execs, that usually means that the workers sacrifice, we share.

"Taxing success" has been a RW buzz phrase for a while to allow the Top 1% to get away with not paying their fair share of taxes. They should not be allowed to brag about how they pay less in taxes than their secretaries.