Corporate America's New Plan to Loot Our Pensions and Shred Our Social Safety Net

[Joanne98]

It's the latest battle in the corporados' decades-long assault on the middle class.

Riffing on the first few paragraphs of an excellent new article from Alternet:

While our social safety net is under attack, record corporate profits are deemed off-limits in discussions about how to close the budget gap. With our severe economic crisis in its fourth year, the crisis itself is about to be 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 in part by hammering private-sector unions into submission. This was accomplished, in part, by putting labor back into competition with itself, i.e. by finding and utilizing plenty of very competitive (low-cost) labor elsewhere around the globe. Industrial production was offshored, deregulated, and used to launch frontal assaults on labor rights, organizing and solidarity.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Corporate-America-s-New-Pl-by-Richard-Clark-101218-621.html

[Enthusiast]

1. The right wing PTB of this nation (the world?)

will never be satisfied until they return us to a 19th century Dickensian existence. What face can we put on these horrible Alan Simpson type people? If I had to pick one face that best represents these filthy rich assholes I would pick George W Bush. Here is a guy that was literally born on third base thinking all the while he had hit a triple. Now with a permanent lowering of the estate tax we can cultivate a growing crop of these wonderful people. Life will be grand.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acLW1vFO-2Q

[WingDinger]

2. There will come a trigger. Which they will not recognize, that makes villians of the militant wealth

[saras]

5. What makes you think they'll stop there?

The world of Dickens was filled with charity workers, muckrakers, reformers and idealists, all of which the current crop is working hard to remove from the planet. I don't honestly think there's any limit to how low they will go if they are not stopped - why not Vlad the Impaler? Elizabeth Bathory? They're perfectly good historical models.

[fasttense]

6. What does PTB stand for?

[Enthusiast]

7. Powers That Be. The powerful

behind the scene that control the nation. Like the Koch brothers, BP, Rupert Murdoch and those that profit from the military industrial complex. The man behind the curtain.

[Johnny Harpo]

3. Heck...They Already Looted Our Pensions....

watch out...those just above 250K per year will be next.

Bet they won't be so smug when it's their turn.

[Sherman A1]

4. Precisely

So many pensions plans (such as they are any more) have been taken over by the Feds. Even my own defined benefit plan was put on notice for being in trouble, starting next year our "multiplier" is cut by $10.00 per yearly service credit in order to help make up the shortfall. I expect further adjustments down the road, just hoping that something will be left when it's my turn. It was a good pension plan at one time.