I Thought Steeling A Pension Was Illegal Mr. President

I Thought Steeling A Pension Was Illegal Mr. President

While GM workers are losing their retirement health benefits, their jobs, their life savings; while shareholders are getting nada and many creditors will get nothing, a few privileged GM lenders, J P Morgan and Citibank, expect to get back 100% of their loans to GM, about $6 billion in all.

How does this happen and why aren’t the Union’s lawyers all over this??

You see when a company goes bankrupt, everyone loses. Workers lose some contract wages, stockholders get wiped out and creditors get a piece of what's left. That's the law. What workers don't lose are their pensions and that includes the old-age health funds, already taken from their wages and held in their name.

This time though Steve Rattner, Obam’s Car Czar wants to grab the pension funds to pay off J P Morgan and Citi Group by demanding the bankruptcy court to simply give the money GM owes workers for their retirement health insurance held in trust and replace it with GM stock.

This is illegal..!!!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ERISA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pension_Benefit_Guaranty_Corporation

Pension money is protected from being seized in bankruptcy. Now though, the Obama Administration is demanding that money used to secure the old-age health funds, go to the very people who caused the financial melt down in the first place.

Under this plan GM’s pension assets are replaced with GM stock and this is illegal because the law requiring that companies, as fiduciaries, must "... act prudently and must diversify the plan's investments in order to minimize the risk of large losses." By "diversify" for safety, the law does not mean put 100% of worker funds into a single busted company's stock. Remember Enron who encouraged their worker to invest in Enron in their 401k plans.

Now we are going to throw thousands of workers out of work and give the money that would have funded the retiree’s health plan to J P Morgan and Citi Group, the same guys who have leeched up over one third of a trillion dollars in aid from you and me and replace it with worthless GM stock.

I got an idea let’s give the banks the stock and the pension plan keeps the cash.

If I had a business and ran its pension fund like this I’d end up in jail, but if the president and congress do it, it is business as usual in Washington DC.

Loyalty to country, always. Loyalty to the government when it deserves it." -- Mark Twain

“I believe we should be embracing the egalitarian ideals and rebellious spirit of the American Revolution, and challenge the orthodoxy of the military industrial complex corporate order, and empower workaday Americans so we can control our own economic and political destinies.”

Michael Chavers



Well as far as I’m concerned none of these guys in Washington know much about anything and are selling the American people to the corporate elites.

The Republicans and the Democrats are so beholding to big money, you and me, the average guy who has to get up each morning to a more uncertain future is footing the bill for the mess that started way back in the 80’s under Ronnie.

Bankers you want free market deregulation well when you screw up big time don’t come to me asking for money you have turned me down or gave me some high interest credit card bull crap and fixed the laws so it is hard to ever pay off the debt you suckered us into.

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Good articles to read:


I wholly support this regulation and it’s about 4 years too late.

Regulator to Detail Plan for Derivatives
By STEPHEN LABATON

WASHINGTON — The new chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission will ask Congress on Thursday to impose substantial new costs and restrictions on large banks and other financial institutions that deal in the complex and largely unregulated financial instruments known as derivatives.

Gary G. Gensler, the top regulator for futures trading, will provide significant new details of a plan announced three weeks ago by the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner. Mr. Gensler will disclose his proposal before the Senate Agriculture Committee, which oversees the commission.
Lawmakers said they had been told that Mr. Gensler would propose two sets of regulations — one set for the individual dealers of derivatives and a second set for the marketplaces where the instruments are traded.

Mr. Gensler has said that taken together, the two sets of rules would largely eliminate the loopholes that critics said would have weakened the Treasury secretary’s plan, although some expressed concern that the proposals still might not go far enough to fully address problems that contributed to the market collapse.

Read the whole article here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/business/04regs.html?_r=1&ref=business


Goodbye, GM

Monday 01 June 2009
by: Michael Moore | Visit article original @ MichaelMoore.com
I write this on the morning of the end of the once-mighty General Motors. By high noon, the President of the United States will have made it official: General Motors, as we know it, has been totaled.

As I sit here in GM's birthplace, Flint, Michigan, I am surrounded by friends and family who are filled with anxiety about what will happen to them and to the town. Forty percent of the homes and businesses in the city have been abandoned. Imagine what it would be like if you lived in a city where almost every other house is empty. What would be your state of mind?

It is with sad irony that the company which invented "planned obsolescence" - the decision to build cars that would fall apart after a few years so that the customer would then have to buy a new one - has now made itself obsolete. It refused to build automobiles that the public wanted, cars that got great gas mileage, were as safe as they could be, and were exceedingly comfortable to drive. Oh - and that wouldn't start falling apart after two years. GM stubbornly fought environmental and safety regulations. Its executives arrogantly ignored the "inferior" Japanese and German cars, cars which would become the gold standard for automobile buyers. And it was hell-bent on punishing its unionized workforce, lopping off thousands of workers for no good reason other than to "improve" the short-term bottom line of the corporation. Beginning in the 1980s, when GM was posting record profits, it moved countless jobs to Mexico and elsewhere, thus destroying the lives of tens of thousands of hard-working Americans. The glaring stupidity of this policy was that, when they eliminated the income of so many middle class families, who did they think was going to be able to afford to buy their cars? History will record this blunder in the same way it now writes about the French building the Maginot Line or how the Romans cluelessly poisoned their own water system with lethal lead in its pipes.

So here we are at the deathbed of General Motors. The company's body not yet cold, and I find myself filled with - dare I say it - joy. It is not the joy of revenge against a corporation that ruined my hometown and brought misery, divorce, alcoholism, homelessness, physical and mental debilitation, and drug addiction to the people I grew up with. Nor do I, obviously, claim any joy in knowing that 21,000 more GM workers will be told that they, too, are without a job.

But you and I and the rest of America now own a car company! I know, I know - who on earth wants to run a car company? Who among us wants $50 billion of our tax dollars thrown down the rat hole of still trying to save GM? Let's be clear about this: The only way to save GM is to kill GM. Saving our precious industrial infrastructure, though, is another matter and must be a top priority. If we allow the shutting down and tearing down of our auto plants, we will sorely wish we still had them when we realize that those factories could have built the alternative energy systems we now desperately need. And when we realize that the best way to transport ourselves is on light rail and bullet trains and cleaner buses, how will we do this if we've allowed our industrial capacity and its skilled workforce to disappear?

Read the full article here:

http://www.truthout.org/060109A


THE BATTLE OF COAL RIVER VALLEY

Thursday, June 4, 2009 | Posted by Jim Hightower

"You've got to stand for something," sings John Mellencamp, "Or you're gonna fall for anything,"
Folks in West Virginia's Coal River Valley are no longer falling for the long litany of lies they've gotten from coal company executives and bought-off politicians. The corporate elites of the state have literally been destroying mountains, forests, streams, wildlife, livelihoods, human health, and whole communities in Appalachia by using a brutal and contemptible form of coal mining called "mountaintop removal."

For years, people here have tried the usual political and legal channels to stop this corporate assault – yet it continues. So people are now putting themselves on the line. "Somebody has to do something about it," says one Mountaineer, "so we do the little things we can."
One of those "little things" includes
Read the full article here:

http://jimhightower.com/node/6833



ACT NOW TO SAVE 3,500 GOOD AMERICAN JOBS

Tuesday, May 26, 2009 | Posted by Jim Hightower

Back when I had a job requiring me to wear suits, my brands of choice were Hart Shaffner Marx and Hickey Freeman. Fine suites they were, too – good cut, fine craftsmanship, fair price. Made me look mighty snappy, which isn't easy.
Both of those brands are now united in Hartmarx Corporation, which employs 3,500 top-quality workers in places like Rock Island, Illinois, and Rochester, New York. But now, those jobs and the future of Hartmarx, the largest maker of menswear in the nation, are in doubt.
http://jimhightower.com/node/6826