Take away THEIR pension, but don’t touch MINE
By Will Collette
Today, the RI General Assembly begins a special session that will take Rhode Island
It wasn’t so long away that we had a consensus in this country that old age security was not just a nice thing, but a basic right. Starting with the passage of the Social Security Act in 1935, then the expansion of private pensions due to efforts by labor unions in the 1950s, the passage of Medicare in 1965 and on until the rise of “trickle-down economics,” we believed it was an obligation of our society to look after senior citizens.
 |
| Social Security saved US from a break-down in social order. Here's a soup kitchen in Chicago, run by Al Capone |
The basic approach to old age security was the “three-legged stool” comprised of a person’s savings (encouraged even more so when Congress enacted the laws that created 401-k retirement accounts in the 1980s), Social Security and defined benefit pensions. Medicare provided the essential health care safety net.
We are now in the process of smashing the three-legged stool to bits.
First, emboldened by Ronald Reagan’s anti-union policy, employers started to break their unions. With union strength sapped by endless attacks, employers starting cutting, and then terminating or abandoning their traditional pension plans.
Employers pushed weakened unions into accepting “two-tier” contracts that allowed existing members to continue to count on their pensions, but ended them for new hires. The problem with that compromise is that those new workers weren’t paying into the pension funds the older workers counted on, so those pensions dried up and died.
Rather than recognize the need to strengthen unions in the private sector as the one best hope, maybe the only hope, of winning back their pensions, private industry workers started feeling the burning pangs of envy when they heard that public sector workers, who kept their unions strong, still had good pensions.
“That’s not fair,” these private sector workers would say, especially after getting a good dose of Rush Limbaugh or other right-wing talk radio into their systems. “Those public employees should be as screwed over as we are.”
Now Rhode Island
Now supposed you’re one of those average retired public employees, not the rare high roller public pensioner (e.g. state court judges). The average state pensioner gets a pension of around $30,000 a year. Much of that benefit was actually paid for by the worker during his or her working life.
When you retire, you make a life based on the new arithmetic of your new “fixed income” status. You add the amount you were promised as a monthly pension payment to your monthly Social Security, plus whatever you plan to draw down from your savings. And you work with that.
In the new reality, you can’t count on your pension to do what you were promised – private sector employers are dumping their pensions and public sector employers are under pressure to cut pensions. Republicans in Congress are determined to undermine Social Security and either slash or privatize Medicare.
And your savings in your 401-k plan are subject to the radical shifts in the markets. Unless you put all your savings into bank accounts, where they earn almost no interest, you ride the daily roller coaster as the stock, bond, commodity and international markets rise and fall.
That kind of life sucks. It makes a lot of older Americans very angry. A lot of them decided the solution was to watch Fox News and listen to Glenn Beck tell them that it’s all the government’s fault and off they go to a Tea Party rally to denounce President Obama for causing all that ails them.
It’s not the fault of Ronald Reagan. Not George Bush I. Certainly not George Bush II. Not Enron or AIG or Goldman Sachs or Lehman Brothers or Citibank or Bank of America
It’s all Barrack Obama’s fault. And public employee unions.
So the solution is to take away public employee pensions. Because the only way to improve the economy is to ensure there is more poverty among elderly retirees.
And then let’s go after undocumented workers and cut all benefits to poor people and cut government spending (except the military) and then spin around on one foot until we get dizzy and fall down.
What the hell has happened to us that we have such rampant mass insanity driving public policy in this country?
We will not build an economic recovery in this country until we get it into our heads that we need strategies that lift people up, not drag them down. We need to put this country back to work, and cutting government to the bone is not going to do that. We need to restore the American middle class, and we can’t do that until working people stop blaming each other for their troubles. We need an educated work force and quality education for all is the only way. We need to hold the criminal class on Wall Street accountable for their role in driving us to this point.
Maybe it’s good that the Tea Party rose up, spouted the lines it was feed by Fox News and the Koch Brothers, largely got its way in the 2010 elections, but then failed. Evidence of its failure is there for all to see in the array of fools running for the Republican nomination for President.
Now, finally, we’re seeing some semblance of a popular movement dedicated to these fundamentals of economic justice in the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Some organizations get the connection - if we let the right-wing agenda of divide-and-conquer work, sooner or later it will come back and bite us. The American Association of Retired People (AARP) is mailing this flyer to all its Rhode Island members:
