United's pension plans - Hey, let's privatize Social Security

(thanks to the nyt for running an article that dares to tweak the nose of wall street...)

Had anyone listened to Doug Wilsman, tens of thousands of United Airlines employees would not be facing big cuts in their pensions. And the federal agency that guarantees pensions might not be struggling with its biggest losses ever.

So who is Doug Wilsman? He is a retired pilot and a former fiduciary of United's pension plan for pilots, and in 1987 he discovered that the company had abandoned its older, tried-and-true approach of investing retirees' money in bonds timed to pay when the pensions came due. Instead, it had bought into the promises of Wall Street that it could put less money into the plan - and take out more later - if it just put most of the assets into the stock market.

[...]

"Everybody knows stocks are cyclical," Mr. Wilsman said last week. So is the airline business. All along, he said, he thought it was almost inevitable that both would one day go south at the same time, with catastrophic results - which is just what happened this year.

does anybody else but me think that THIS might be precisely the reason bush's idiotic plan to privatize social security has died a thousand deaths...? raise your hands... but does a tragedy of this magnitude cast a pall over the insanely greedy, mutant monstrosity that is waiting to gobble up any hard-won gains of po' folk...? hell, no...

Given Mr. Wilsman's prescience, one might think that experts would be examining how United's investment strategies contributed to the demise of its pension funds - and whether similar scrutiny elsewhere could prevent more pension plans from crashing.

Not a chance. Congress, regulators, lobbyists and the news media are all scrambling to find out what has gone wrong with the pension system. Hearings have been convened in the wake of United's default, chief executives examined under oath, bills introduced in Congress, numbers crunched. But virtually everyone is looking at the rules covering how much money a company puts into a pension plan every year - not at what happens to the money after that.

when, for god's sake, are we gonna cast off the yoke of the super-rich whose only goal in life is to amass more money from those who are in the worst position to part with it...?

Submit To Propeller
Tweet