Corporate America's Plan to Loot Pensions Is Latest in Decades-Long Assault on the Middle Class

[marmar]

AlterNet / By Arun Gupta

Corporate America's Plan to Loot Our Pensions Is the Latest Battle in Decades-Long Assault on the Middle Class
While the safety net is being withered by attrition, record corporate profits are deemed off-limits for discussion about closing the budget gap.

December 18, 2010 |


The severe economic crisis, now in its fourth year, is being used to batter the remnants of the social welfare state. Having decimated aid to the poor over the last 30 years, especially in the United States, the economic and political elite are now intent on strangling middle-class benefits, namely state-provided pensions, health care and education.

The initial neoliberal assault under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher reorganized the capitalist economy and hammered private-sector unions into submission. This was accomplished by putting labor back into competition with itself by off-shoring industrial production, through deregulation and with frontal assaults on labor rights, organizing and solidarity.

Similarly, the current attack is a two-pronged effort to reorganize state social services, either by eliminating or privatizing them, and decimate public-sector unions whose workers provide those services. While the safety net is being withered by attrition, police and spying agencies are getting more powers and funding, and the wealth of the super-rich and record corporate profits are deemed off-limits to taxation to close any government budget gap.

Simply put, the elderly are superfluous to capitalism. With high rates of joblessness the “new norm,” more and more people are being made disposable. This leads to an efficient if brutal logic: cutting old-age income and health care will make it easier to scrap old, useless workers. In fact, this reality is already coming to pass. One study published in 2008 found that over a 16-year period life expectancy had declined for many poor American women — precisely those who are disproportionately represented among the elderly heavily dependent on Social Security and Medicare. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/economy/149226/corporate_america%27s_plan_to_loot_our_pensions_is_the_latest_battle_in_decades-long_assault_on_the_middle_class_/

[ladjf]

1. Corporate America is "killing the goose that laid the golden egg"

and they know it but don't care. Why? Because by the time the "goose" has breathed it's last gasp, the CEO's will have retired with their multi-million dollar parachute.

Lunacy is the order of the day. Nature doesn't suffer lunatics for very long.

[Larkspur]

2. Obama is the perfect tool for Corporate America to rob us of our Social Security

He'd rather kiss Wall Street's a@@ and call their farts perfume or cologne than walk with those of us on Main Street. That's why he sneers at FDR, who will continue to be one of our greatest Presidents, while history will bury Obama next to Herbert Hoover.