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.