1". . . the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (PBGC), the government agency that guarantees the benefits of millions of workers and retirees in more than 30,000 traditional defined-benefit pension plans, has a record $23 billion deficit, the result of taking over the pension plans for companies such as Bethlehem Steel, Polaroid, US Airways and United Airlines that have fallen on hard times. In 2000, the agency operated with a $10 billion surplus. That deficit may top $30 billion by year end and according to the New York Times article, if nothing is done, the deficit will mushroom to more than $100 billion within two decades." While affected retirees will probably receive some relief from PBGC, it will not be a dollar for dollar match with their original pension benefit. If companies continue to shed themselves of their pension liabilities, it is only a matter of time according to Time that 'individuals will assume all the risks for their retirement, just as they did 100 years ago.' . . ." - quoted document
Day Care and Public Schools Seen by the Wise as Subsidy for Investor’s Profit
by DNews reporter A. G. Kaiser
The need for preschool and/or daycare begins with the downsizing, wage repression, and generally retrograde social context of the past 35 years. The reduction of incomes has led to the necessity that both parents work to support the family, with a bare bones existence in the worst cases, in a growing percentage of the population. Thus preschool and daycare serve the investor’s greed for increased profit by allowing the labor pool to grow, which drives down wages and salaries, forcing families to seek care for their children. Only then can both parents work so they can have enough money to consume the products they need to live. Those are the same goods they made or moved by their cheap labor and on which the investors profits are founded. When unsupervised children disrupt the community, the same greedy employers decry the moral decay and dissipation of family values that their low wages cause. They do this disservice to the community, by keeping both parents working to increase the wealth of the elite investors and breaking up the family life in the process. Hypocrisy doesn’t begin to describe the evil of rich investors or the media and politicians they own and control.
To the extent that the lowest income families qualify for state assistance, our tax money subsidizes the cheap labor predicated high profits of the greediest and most unscrupulous investors. The same investors are given tax cuts by the current administration and congress so the people who suffer from the low wage high profit pyramid scheme must also pay the taxes in the long run. The only question that remains is, since most consumers won’t be paid a living wage and must borrow to keep the economic wind blowing, how high can this debt kite fly?
Looking for an Honest Person or That’s My Lot
We couldn’t approach any of the rich elites - only the middle class shills who front for them. But they’re too fearful of losing the pittance for which they’ve sold US out, to say anything at all. So DNews asked ordinary real people, young and old, white and non white, poor and poorer to comment on a hypothetical contemporary task of Lot. Here are some of their comments. The ones that met our standards for intellectual honesty could only have come from outside the boardroom and certainly outside the oblivion of middle class complacency.
A young inner city woman in her late twenties said the following to us. - "Find an honest person? That’s like the expectation of fairness in the market place. They say this is a meritocracy in which we all get what we deserve. They don’t say that the cheat codes aren’t issued to poor white, black and Mexican kids, when they don’t tell US how this game is actually played."
A self employed suburban senior who is living beneath the poverty level had this to say. - "If you’re looking for sincere, honest people of good will, move to a planet that doesn’t provide life support for our kind. Or . . . just stick around here. Our elite investors are busy transforming the Earth to that sterile state, while using their corporate media to convince US it’s for our own good and it’s what we want. Come to think of it they’ve done the same to sell the wars that kill our kids and protect and expand the wealth of the community that they’ve hoarded for themselves. Worse, we can never expect to win any war that is enriching the elite through systematic looting of the treasury by profiteering contractors. There’s too much money to be made by 'sticking to the course' and prolonging the conflict indefinitely, as the count of our dead and maimed children continues to climb. The privatization and government contracting scams are among the greatest parasitic diseases with which the human culture has ever been afflicted."
A dilettante or maybe not historian spoke forth. - "The first American Revolution threw off the wealthy elite of king and royalty and sought to create a land where sincerity and honesty would be valued, because they knew true freedom required such virtues or it wouldn’t be lasting. The corporate empire is owned by elite rich investors, whose antecedents have resisted true freedom and democracy from the beginning. Their dishonesty of lies and dissembling have restored America to a pre revolutionary condition."
Another very similar thought. - "The American revolution has failed, like most revolutions have failed, because the wealthy elite class remains in power, with only some faces at the table changed to appease the workers whose labor is the real basis of every economy. Delusion in our world of lies and misdirection is exclusive of real freedom."
This anonymous comment must be from a student of Carlos Marques. - "How can we expect honesty and good will when the theory of our economy mandates taking as much as we can from the community’s production for ourselves by any means, fair or foul, as long as they don’t transgress an inadequate legal code designed only to protect satisfactorily the wealth of the elite rich? We aren’t even honest with ourselves. For instance we grow up knowing, as if by intrinsic knowledge, (actually it’s constantly being internalized and re-internalized as we’re bombarded by the media advertisers and their journalist and politician shills) that socialism is synonymous with central control and both are evil.
"In America at least, it’s a virtually uncontested assertion that New York City is the financial capital of the world. It’s often said that if anything happens to New York the economy will be paralyzed. The aftermath of 9/11 is pointed to in support of that belief. It is a matter of faith. It is, when it gets down to it, the faith in the inevitability of centralized power and bureaucratic control, in support of an economic elite class. In a schizoid state, we contradict ourselves as we project, with the help of the politician, journalist and advertiser dogs of the rich elite, the sins of capitalism onto socialism.
"The economy doesn’t originate at the place of central control, New York, in our case. The economy originates at the place the goods are made: not with the investors who profit from them but the workers who make them. That we would allow ourselves to be paralyzed for the want of goods that don’t come within 100 miles or are ever touched by those whose economic tyranny has been rewarded with ownership and control over our lives, is a measure of our stupidity."
Another concludes that the biggest lie about Iraq is not related to WMD. - "Iraq violence has grown steadily since the ‘liberation.’ I doubt anyone would have Saddam back but most Iraqis probably miss the dependable water supply, electricity, telephone, gasoline, food and shelter. These are not little things. Even our troops have unhealthy food, shelter and protection. These offenses speak to US of the real reason our sons and daughters are dying there. Halliburton-KBR and other American profiteers have been paid hundreds of billions of our tax money (most of which they’ve stolen through supplying low quality goods and inadequate performance) to restore services, rebuild infrastructure and to feed and supply the troops in Iraq. That money really isn’t ours. We borrow it from Asians and it merely passes through our treasury on the way to the pockets of investors in the corporate empire who own our country and US! This is like Lay and Skilling looting Enron and all it could borrow for personal profit except the victims aren’t a single corporation and its employee/investors but the entire country/community. The perps are the 0.25 % of the population who are the elite rich investors and who own 95% or more of everything. The principle must be: ‘contract to perform what anyone wants or needs but never really do anything but token work.’ If a project is actually completed, if what is promised in the contract is delivered, there will be no more money to be made by promising it. And the lower the quality of the product you do deliver, the more money you make. Come to think of it, this applies to corporate medical providers, insurance, pharmaceutical companies, bankers and the entire service economy. Of course banking and finance in general have always been the most lucrative frauds. They never did have a real product. They are purely abstract, imaginary operations that create only inflationary money. They are a thoroughly parasitic burden on the real production of the community."
contact me:
Greg Kaiser
email to
agkaiser1@gmail,com
I'll feed myself and provide other necessary resources so that I may continue to write.
A G Kaiser
archive of Delusanews issues