Wednesday, June 28, 2006

Robin Hood in Reverse

Many US companies are stealing from the poor, the middle class, and just about everyone else, to give to the rich...

This is the pension squeeze companies aren't talking about: Even as many reduce, freeze or eliminate pensions for workers -- complaining of the costs -- their executives are building up ever-bigger pensions, causing the companies' financial obligations for them to balloon.

Companies disclose little about any of this. But a Wall Street Journal analysis of corporate filings reveals that executive benefits are playing a large and hidden role in the declining health of America's pensions.

If you work for a major US corporation (GM, Pfizer, B of A, the list goes on), it's quite likely that your own pension is being raided to pay for the company's executive pensions.

If you own stock in a major US corporation, it's quite likely that your stock is undervalued because that corporation's profitability is suffering to pay its executive's pensions.

Even if you you're just an ordinary working stiff, then the US economy is suffering (impacting all of us) and the government's tax base is being eroded (contributing to the deficit which you're paying for with your taxes) because major US corporations are screwing everyone to pay for their executive pensions.

Robin Hood, where are you when we need you?

~ Trendar

Tuesday, June 27, 2006

First They Came for the Journalists...

If we allow the government to attack the press simply for publishing the truth, we enable suppression of free speech. By refusing to resist them, we encourage them to continue their path inexorably towards totalitarianism. The press is the first domino in the sequence to that end. They are already cowed and cowardly (or worse, complicit). Once the government has silenced the press, the internet and the blogs will inevitably be next. If we aren't willing to lie down in front of this slowly, inexorably advancing tank, individually or collectively, we will be crushed anyway. We must speak out now, while we still can.

"A man who won’t die for something is not fit to live." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

~ Trendar

Apollo's Oracle

The Oracle has awakened.