Word: pension
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...Social Security. Any critic of the geometric rise of Social Security payouts is looked upon as a reactionary who would condemn the aged and disabled, the widows and orphans to a life of impecunity on a diet of Alpo. Yet the most articulate critic of this increasingly straitened pension system hardly looks or sounds like a modern Marie Antoinette...
...major example is new York City. When the fiscal crisis came crashing down three years ago, the city had to plead with its employees' pension funds for a bail-out. Basically, the city was penalized for providing more social services than anyone else: tuition-free colleges, welfare payments above rock-bottom poverty level and so forth. Blatant mismanagement gratly contributed to the city's problems. But the main feature of the crisis was New York's scuba-diving tax base, resulting from the flight of industrial capital. Companies fled for many reasons, ranging from the ones which relocated in Stamford...
...York pension funds had been reinvested in the city to create jobs, along the lines of community development efforts now taking place in harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, the city's tax base could have supported a high level of social services. But the choice for the Graybelt is no longer just more or fewer social services, but whether or not regional depression will set in. The choice is between a stable, job-providing economy and an economy that pushes us down, down, down, until we're just like Taiwan...
...battle to free up pension funds for social capital is just beginning. As a first volley, Rifkin and Barber's The North Will Rise Again makes a convincing case for alternative uses of pension capital. It also serves as a timely antidote to peter Drucker's 1976 apologia for the status quo, The Unseen Revolution: How Pension Fund Socialism came to America. Drucker's notion that "the United States is the first truly 'Socialist' country" is so much sheepdip. The fact that public and private pension funds "own" more than one-third of America's equity capital means nothing...
...first step in establishing alternative uses of pension funds may be decided in a Supreme Court ruling this year on the Daniels case. A retired Teamster named John Daniels unexpectedly found himself bereft of pension benefits because of a three-and-a-half month layoff in his 20 years employment. Daniels sued, maintaining that the pension was an investment, and that he had been defrauded. District and circuit courts have upheld Daniels against theTeamsters. The Labor Department lined up the the Teamsters, while the securities and Exchange Commission sided with Daniels. If the Supreme Court rules that, indeed, a pension...