moonraven, December 3 at 10:05 am Link to this comment

Snide comments from the Great Unwashed Five Year Old set will never be acted upon.

He says while acting upon (commenting is such) them.

Snide comments from the Great Unwashed Five Year Old set will never be acted upon.

The editors apparently believe we all have time to write completely different posts for every thread?

Da noive a dose guys! Imagine, an expectation of comments related to the article under which those comments appear.

This poster especially should honor the mantra that ,if you ain’t got nothing to say, don’t say it. What would a KKK-like organization but dedicated to the sole interests of Moonraven be called?

I am going to TRY to post this poem on two threads.  The editors apparently believe we all have time to write completely different posts for every thread?

INTIMATIONS OF THE NEXT WORLD

22.

“In the henhouse he will leave only to die, the cock
crows hymns to liberty because he has been given two perches.”
Fernando Pessoa, THE BOOK OF DISQUIET

Hillary Clinton
clumps around Myanmar in
a turquoise pantsuit,
but in the museum of
marionettes in Lisbon

the most popular
Burmese puppets are either
the generals or
the alchemists. Portugese
political puppets smile,

blush and confess the
risks of more austerity,
while 2 million state
employees in the UK
walk off their jobs protesting

the gleam in the eye
of their government
officials, knives poised
above the gordian knot
of their pensions, their lifeline,

while here in Lisbon
the general strike fizzled
and fell on its face,
and Los Angeles police
chase off the folks camped out in

front of city hall,
while a team of Mexican lawyers
denounce Calderon
at the world criminal court.
Crimes against humanity

are are all the rage now;
as the ex-president of
the Ivory Coast
is brought to The Hague, many
others still wait in the wings,

and the most brilliant
puppet in Lisbon is a
woman in a chair
called A Piece of Soul Goes Out
of the Body through a Scar.

bluokie- Thanks for that….

The contract between citizen and government is seemingly null and void. The contract signers are now corporation and government.

mrfreeze - The easiest way to think of pensions is as deferred compensation, part of your current pay is set aside for your retirement now instead of being paid now.  This was part of the New Deal era reforms (overall from unionization and not mandated by the government).  This was one of the major pillars of the building the middle class.

In the recession of the ‘80’s, many corporations complained to the administration of St. Reagan about the “burden” of their pension plans, even though, by law, they were set aside, due to the employees contributions.  Being the world’s most successful corporate spokesmodel and a total shill for oligarchs, his administration was more than happy to allow the plutocracy to do as it pleased with its pension funds, most of which went into their pockets.  It was during this time that a new agency was formed, insurance in the style of the FDIC, to guarantee a portion of pensions for a required premium.  It gave rise to junk bond traders, as pension funds were just sitting there waiting to be looted.  As an aside, the 401(k) came into existence, not as a retirement vehicle, but as a way for the well to do to defer taxes.

The attack on public workers is related to the attacks on Social Security, another large pile of money that needs to be redistributed upward.  Civil Service employees, despite a well funded propaganda campaign, make about 20% less than the similar jobs in the private sector, but relatively secure employment and retirement benefits were a part of the bargain.  Civil Servants are also one of the last bastions of unionization, though the differences between private and public unions are large, they are a sticking point to the plutocrats that they still exist.

As an example, during Bush2 draconian measures were passed against the USPS setting up rules for full funding of all pension expenses using inflated numbers for future obligations along with other expenses dreamed up to put it in the red.  That way a grandmother in Miami, instead of putting $5 in a birthday card
and spending .40 to send it to Seattle, can spend $20 to send it FedEx, while FedEx enjoys the exported cost of publicly funded airports and Air Traffic Control.  Considering how many veterans work for the Post Office it adds a whole new nuance to “Support the Troops”.

In short, its just another way for the plutocrats to enrich themselves at everyone else’s expense, with help from the government they own.

The spirit of William Blake lives! Build Jerusalem comrades!

Yes, they would like to see all those ‘privileges’ eliminated because they don’t know their own history, especially their corporate history and they have been brainwashed by the education they’ve received and by the mainstream media. It’s called ‘divide and conquer’.

The truth was contained in a speech Eugene Debs made in court on a charge of contempt of court. ‘It seems to me,’ said Debs, ‘that if it were not for the resistance to degrading conditions, the tendency of our whole civilization would be downward. After a while, we would reach the point where there would be no resistance and slavery would come’. And in the oratory of Tom Watson, the ‘populist leader of Georgia’ pressing for racial unity of workers: ‘You are kept apart that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings’. Or in the passionate speeches of Mary Ellen Lease, another great populist orator in Topeka, Kansas in 1890.

‘We want the accursed foreclosure system wiped out…We will stand before our homes and stay by our firesides by force if necessary and we will not pay our debts to the loan shark companies until the government pays its debts to us’.

So powerful has the unity of corporations, the law and the media been, that in the 21st century these demands and insights still go unheeded.

diamond - Hey, I’m certainly on the side of the citizens regarding this issue and I really couldn’t care less about the “size” of their pensions….but that’s exactly the reason I’m asking the question…which you partially answered:

Who (or what institutions) has been able to make a case that the public sector should pay the price for the sins of the financial classes/institutions? Here in the States, I find far more people who would love to see the benefits of public employees diminished or eliminated altogether.

“What exactly have the public sector workers done/not done to have their pensions scrutinized (and attacked) in this way?”

They haven’t done anything. That’s why they’re so damn angry. They are being punished for the excesses of the rich and ruthless. I heard someone on radio the other day talking about tax havens and he claimed that the City of London is a tax haven. 80% of derivatives originate in the City of London. The rich have created a crisis which will take years to fix and meanwhile their representatives in politics are raiding everyone’s pensions and social security support to pay the debt these idiots have created. But it’s worse than that. The Tories are using this crisis to dismantle every bit of social justice that exists in Britain while the rich get away with their crimes. You are thinking exactly the way they want you to think: asking how big their pensions are etc. when that has no relevance whatsoever to what is going on.

None of this is new, of course.

Even when the law acted against elements of corruption, as in the Sherman Anti-Trust Act passed in 1890, it was neutralized by other sections of the law- most notoriously by the Supreme Court.

‘In 1895 (the Supreme Court) interpreted the Sherman Act so as to make it harmless. It said a monopoly of sugar refining was a monopoly in manufacturing, not commerce, and so could not be regulated by Congress through the Sherman Act (U.S. vs. E.C. Knight and Co).  But it also said that the Sherman Act COULD be used against interstate strikes because they were a restraint of trade’. Later the same court would refuse to break up the Standard Oil and American Tobacco monopolies.

Small wonder that a New York banker toasted the Supreme Court in 1895 and called it, the ‘guardian of the dollar, defender of private property…’ (49). In 1886 alone, the Supreme Court repealed 230 state laws that had been passed to regulate corporations. By this time too, the Supreme Court had accepted the argument that corporations were legally ‘persons’ and their money was property by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.  Of course, it was necessary to conceal this from as many citizens as possible, especially workers.

From ‘A People’s History of the United States’ by Howard Zinn

I’m sincerely curious…

Does anyone have some fact & figures about the pensions of these public employees: how much on average does one get, how much does the government want to cut, etc.?

I know government and private industry leaders are always complaining that public service workers have bloated pensions/retirement benefits (especially here in the U.S. they complain). What exactly have the public sector workers done/not done to have their pensions scrutinized (and attacked) in this way?

I wonder if they’ll join the Iranians in trashing their embassy?