Cliff wrote in message . ..
Down the good old neocon drain?
snip
As a consequence of the recent Bush administration's decision this
year to allow companies with unfunded pension plans to forego $80
billion in payments currently due and required by law to bring their
plans into balance, the PBGC now faces total unfunded pension
liabilities or more than $278 billion.
snip ===================
In [too] many cases the latest surge in mergers, acquisitions, etc. is
being financed using capital that is not legitimately under the
control of the speculators and manipulators engaging in these
activities. Indeed, they have no money at risk, leading to the
situation that they reap any profit, but the pensioners, stockholders,
and taxpayers are stuck with any losses.

A case in point is the acquisition of Sears by K-Mart. A google
search on K-mart + pension, Sears + pension, and k-mart + bankruptcy,
clearly shows that the money being used properly belongs to the
defined benefit pension fund participants and not the corporations.
Additional funding is available for K-mart only because they stiffed
their creditors and stockholders through their chapter eleven
reorganization in 2002.

It is not at all clear that this merger is being done because of any
fiduciary duty of management to maximize shareholder value, or simply
to enrich selected corporate officers. The observation that the art
of finance consists of passing money from hand to hand until it
disappears seems to be largely correct in this context.

There should be legislation in place to prohibit any such acquisitions
or mergers if the companies involved have not fully funded their
defined benefit pension plans, have had a chapter eleven
reorganization in the prior 10 years in which any creditor lost money,
or have stuck the PBGC [that is the tax payers and other pension
plans] with their pension obligations.

If we don’t get what we want, we get what we deserve.


GmcD