Sept. 12, 2004 - 17:43 MDT

THE WONDERING JEW

EVER

There are many of us, I think, who wade through the blather and wonder if there is any possible way anyone can back up the assertions which keep flying about like mosquitos by the lake in the summer.

An article by Dave Carpenter of The Associated Press in this mornings Sunday The Denver Post has a few words I will quote. In part:

Pension uncertainties plague companies, older employees

"United Airlines' threat to terminate its four employee pension funds in bankruptcy has reverberated through the airline industry and beyond. Other companies are watching what would be the largest corporate pension default in U.S. history, some likely pondering scrapping their own funds to help remedy their financial ailments."

"And with 81 percent of corporate benefit plans underfunded according to Wilshire Associates Inc., workers are increasingly uneasy."

"Among those eyeing retirement benefits with less certainty these days is 56 year old Kay Nelson of Minneapolis, who has worked 26 years for the same company but worries about her fund's reliability. "I don't take that pension for granted anymore," she said, her concerns exacerbated by the $422 billion federal deficit and Alan Greenspan's comments about the need to trim the benefits for baby boomers."

"There is cause for concern," said John Hotz, deputy director of the Pension Rights Center, a Washington based workers' advocacy group. " but the general message to pension participants shouldn't be that the sky is falling . . . . If your company has a strong future, then your pension plan will in all likelihood be there for you."

"That's small comfort to people like Bob Holmbeck, a retired electrician and steelworker in Hibbing, Minn. Holmbeck, 64, worked for the National Steel Pellet Co. at its taconite plant in Keewatin, Minn, for 35 years. Less than a year after he retired in 2002, Holmbeck saw his pension reduced by more than 15 percent and lost all medical benefits. THe company's pension obligations were dumped onto the PBGC when U.S. Steel acquired National Steel in bankruptcy, but the agency is legally limited in the amount, it can cover, resulting in cutbacks for Holmbeck and thousands of others."

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It seems to me that Greenspan's comments about the need to trim benefits for baby boomers seems to show the big boys ideas on how to pull out of the hole they have dug for all of us. Every solution seems to come that the worker must make sacrifices to bail out damn fools and their companies who couldn't or wouldn't pay attention and make their companies actually successful, but who copped out and swapped lies to make the books look good and make unbelievable fortunes for themselves.

So, actual figures appear to show that our country is in a heck of a fix and it seems that they are actually true. Times are hard. No doubt about that. Now the bean counters want to kill pensions -- or radically cut them back, and the administration is trying to get overtime regulations cut. Health benefits being cut back too. The company I retired from very nicely hedged their solutions by hiring Point-of-service doctors to tend their employees and decided how much a year to contribute to that purpose. They offered the same amount to any HMO who participate. Each year now, the cost per visit increases, cost per procedure increases, and the cost for prescriptions increases. So the complete health care offered by the company depends on going to company doctors, more or less and accepting their level of service or trying to keep up with the costs on pensions that do not rise.

War overseas is no solution to our problems here it seems to me. Tax dollars gone not to be seen again. Men, materiel and money disappearing more rapidly than was thought possible by the terror preaching minions in charge of our welfare.

Along with that, I do not believe that de-regulation has helped anyone except for giant corporations.

From the other side of the administration's mouth comes the lauded, "Our economy is good, improvement rapid -- everything is okay -- don't worry. But watch out for terrorists. Yeah riiight ! ! ! ! To my way of looking at it, this current blather is the most oxymoronic non sequiturial words EVER . . . . . . . . .

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