Intentionally or not it's an assault on wages, it's an assault on domestic manufacturing, and it provides yet another market for finance. The pressure on delivering the quarterly bottom line ensures that costs are minimized, and one major cost is always labor. Others include meeting safety and environmental regulations, but if you offshore labor you've offshored these as well. So to ensure that we as participants in the 401k (or 403b) have enough to retire on, given that wages have decoupled from productivity and haven't even tracked inflation, we want maximum returns from the market, further putting pressure on wages.
It gets even better: savings accounts pay very little interest, nowhere near inflation. Money market accts and CDs pay better, but still lose money in real terms (or did until this year). The vast majority of wage earners who can put some money away are basically left with 401k's or other market based retirement account, or real estate to make up for hammered wages. The former puts pressure on their wages, the latter ... didn't work out so hot. The stock market is a useful investment device, both for investors and companies. But if we're to rely on it for a policy of retirement accounts we need far stronger rights for labor.
This is fairly ancient history, with so many, many instances over the years up to the present day.
Many will recall JFK's father, Joseph Kennedy, flunked high school then easily made entrance to Harvard. Also, John Lilly and Cal Tech. The list goes on and on.
One need only look at several Yale grads: Ralph Nader and George W. Bush - and compare and contrast their student records prior to acceptance.
Higher education in America, like everything else, is a complete sham.
I think you need more evidence, more documentation in your post...
but at the same time I believe it, but we need facts to prove it, even if just some isolated evidence that has come out per particular universities.
I believe most are accepting 90 credit hour and less undergraduate degrees directly into U.S. PhD programs, with stipends all the while Americans must have a 120 credit hour or greater degree and then are not getting funding because they enter the Masters program, but we need aggregate statistics (which I am sure are lacking!)
Most 401(k) plans you have to invest in the limited number of mutual funds that your employer has in the plan; you don't have the choice of going with an FIA or zero-coupons.
The main problem with the 401(k) program is really how it is sold- as a retirement program when it is nothing more than the standard gambling-on-the-market-and-hope-the-house-doesn't-eat-you-alive Vegas retirement that most investment plans now are.
It is NOT a sufficient replacement for a defined benefit pension plan, social security, or even your run-of-the-mill charity annuity- but that's how it's being sold to the gullible workforce.
-------------------------------------
Maximum jobs, not maximum profits.
Was a possible *alternate explanation* for why things are the way they are in the NHS. You know what you call my "anti-choice" views- there's a good deal of fear among social conservatives right now about health care rationing, they see it as yet another place where mere profit wins out over human life. They're afraid, and rightly so, of getting some exotic cancer and then having a bureaucrat, looking at "the numbers", tell them that their life isn't worth a $40,000/year treatment regime.
Whenever I run into that attitude, I tell them that they'd get pretty much exactly the same treatment from their HMO- who would drop them like a hot potato for getting cancer.
But this says that *American Medicare* doesn't have to go the same way- all we need to do is pick different performance indicators.
-------------------------------------
Maximum jobs, not maximum profits.
I wouldn't call it a "documentary" per say, more of a video manifesto, but most thought provoking to be sure.
Talk about behavior modification and behavioral sociology/psychology....
uh, duh, people are going to try to preserve the status quo and save their jobs, first and foremost.
I think one an analyze a system for inefficiencies but prescribing the solutions...one had better be aware of real live human beings and how they are, hard and long on solutions.
If it wasn't real live people in that segment it would have been hilarious.
But isn't this true from other inane policy changes?
i.e. IBM at one point did performance reviews with the number of lines of code someone wrote. So, needless to say they got "bloat code", with millions of lines of code that did almost nothing but make the application much more inefficient.
I have to wonder if the rationing we've seen in England's NHS isn't caused *specifically* by performance measures trying to save money.
-------------------------------------
Maximum jobs, not maximum profits.
It's interesting to note that pension funds provide much of the financing for all those "leveraged buyout" deals by private equity firms; union pension funds and state pension funds - perhaps inadvertently? - funding more unemployment and the dissolution of corporations.
I suspect someone, or more some people, at Cerberus profited from those credit default swaps written against the Chrysler debt/bonds. That is usually the way it works.
Cerberus itself doesn't have a particularly sterling track record - they lost almost $2 billion to that Bernie Madoff scheme - and Snow, while quite rich, didn't get that way from brilliant business development or creat - more from the destruction of business. And Quayle....no comment needed on that draft-evading "super patriot"....
Fundamentally, the 401(k) was recognized as a scam from its inception - a way to negate pensions, while increasing the assets of corporations and the stock market.
The Bush Administration had hoped to forestall the meltdown by privatizating social security and feeding those revenues into the stock market/Wall Street, but fortunately failed in that regard - granting we serfs (and soon-to-be serfs) a bit more time.
The 401(k) should always be recognized for what it is - paper entries bolstering the reported value of said corporations.
I think maybe a two tier system, enable private but keep working on an effective, efficient system. I believe that is true in Finland, UK, where one can go to a private, for profit MD and many of them work in the public system but also run private clinics, almost as a part-time thing.
But I am convinced they must get the entire sector, the entire making profits off of sick people, well, out.
We know from watching stocks and finance every day the "projections of growth" from the health care sector, stock picks, quarterly earnings and so on and how investors are banking on a huge surge in elderly sick people...
(ignoring the fact more and more people cannot afford to get sick at all).
I think they need to wipe all of that out, or significantly regulate it, something.
The thing is, the U.S. is the last to consider health care a basic right and as such, one would think we could study all of the other models, mistakes all of these other nations have made in designing a new system.
Right now they won't even look at that! I mean this is inane, we just have these health profiteers, lead by the insurance companies looking to preserve their profits instead of a complete redesign of a new system.
That's what I see going on at the moment although some blog posts on what the details are in these "negotiations" are in order so we are aware of the latest details.
I hate to bring up a funny, but "lockbox" comes to mind.
I thought this was social security but we need something.
Not only is the 401k from traditional pensions a rob of retirement, so any have nothing in their 401ks. From emergencies to the stock market to bad companies to being laid off, etc....they are gone, gone, gone.
Just cut the companies out of the mix altogether, except for taxes. That way our companies aren't unfairly burdened by legacy expenses and then can compete with foreign competitors on a level playing field.
Pensions are superior to 401(k)s because people who die young subsidize the people who live longer. Plus, they are run by professionals who don't get tricked as easily into paying extra fees.
On the personal side, the pensioner can plan his living standards based on a set scale, rather than trying to save enough, but not too much.
Was the prospect of rationing. I know it can and actually in many cases does happen in our multi-payer system. But I know it happens in single-payer cases. As someone who is disabled, this scares the crap out of me.
Is a guaranteed version of the 401(k). One in which some form of insurance is taken out by the companies managing 401(k) accounts that makes sure they have a floor of 0% return, and cannot be allowed to go negative on their return, even if there's only $1 in the account.
-------------------------------------
Maximum jobs, not maximum profits.
As the farmhand said to Jean and Lionel Hardcastle on the only political/economic episode of As Time Goes By:
"Look around the village. There's not much wrong with it. So let them build their bypass and go around us, leave us in peace."
That's what those who value freedom enough to force it on others forget: Not everybody has their level of ambition. And for the rest of us, knowing our place and staying in our place, has a zen like freedom all of it's own- if you are able to make a living doing what your father did, and what your father's father did, and what your father's father's father did, that's a security that money can't buy.
-------------------------------------
Maximum jobs, not maximum profits.
I think the first two cases of corporate imperialism would be the Dutch East Indies Company and the British East Indies Company.
Their record for anything other than shareholder wealth was disastrous.
I disagree. We need to get rid of the entire idea of the FED. It worked ok for small scale, but like most economic systems, it fails on the large scale.
We need an antitrust lawsuit against the FED, and we need to replace it with 50 individual state-controlled banks who can each adjust their own rates of check clearance to effectively get around Section 1 Article 10 bans on state tariffs and states coining money.
-------------------------------------
Maximum jobs, not maximum profits.
If a bit small:
A small Saturn with a diesel engine and a biofuel generator on a 1000 lb trailer.
Basically just an oil press for various types of vegetable oil, combined with a filtering reactor and an electric pump that a survivalist or farmer could park at the edge of a rapeseed or other oil bearing seed field, and create one's own biofuel to run in the car.
-------------------------------------
Maximum jobs, not maximum profits.
Intentionally or not it's an assault on wages, it's an assault on domestic manufacturing, and it provides yet another market for finance. The pressure on delivering the quarterly bottom line ensures that costs are minimized, and one major cost is always labor. Others include meeting safety and environmental regulations, but if you offshore labor you've offshored these as well. So to ensure that we as participants in the 401k (or 403b) have enough to retire on, given that wages have decoupled from productivity and haven't even tracked inflation, we want maximum returns from the market, further putting pressure on wages.
It gets even better: savings accounts pay very little interest, nowhere near inflation. Money market accts and CDs pay better, but still lose money in real terms (or did until this year). The vast majority of wage earners who can put some money away are basically left with 401k's or other market based retirement account, or real estate to make up for hammered wages. The former puts pressure on their wages, the latter ... didn't work out so hot. The stock market is a useful investment device, both for investors and companies. But if we're to rely on it for a policy of retirement accounts we need far stronger rights for labor.
This is fairly ancient history, with so many, many instances over the years up to the present day.
Many will recall JFK's father, Joseph Kennedy, flunked high school then easily made entrance to Harvard. Also, John Lilly and Cal Tech. The list goes on and on.
One need only look at several Yale grads: Ralph Nader and George W. Bush - and compare and contrast their student records prior to acceptance.
Higher education in America, like everything else, is a complete sham.
I think you need more evidence, more documentation in your post...
but at the same time I believe it, but we need facts to prove it, even if just some isolated evidence that has come out per particular universities.
I believe most are accepting 90 credit hour and less undergraduate degrees directly into U.S. PhD programs, with stipends all the while Americans must have a 120 credit hour or greater degree and then are not getting funding because they enter the Masters program, but we need aggregate statistics (which I am sure are lacking!)
Most 401(k) plans you have to invest in the limited number of mutual funds that your employer has in the plan; you don't have the choice of going with an FIA or zero-coupons.
The main problem with the 401(k) program is really how it is sold- as a retirement program when it is nothing more than the standard gambling-on-the-market-and-hope-the-house-doesn't-eat-you-alive Vegas retirement that most investment plans now are.
It is NOT a sufficient replacement for a defined benefit pension plan, social security, or even your run-of-the-mill charity annuity- but that's how it's being sold to the gullible workforce.
-------------------------------------
Maximum jobs, not maximum profits.
your return? An FIA will give you access to the DOW/S&P/Bonds, etc. and you don't take negative years. Downside is you give up positive points.
I guess if someone doesn't like risk they can invest in zero-coupons. There is safety but I don't think people would like the returns on that safety.
Was a possible *alternate explanation* for why things are the way they are in the NHS. You know what you call my "anti-choice" views- there's a good deal of fear among social conservatives right now about health care rationing, they see it as yet another place where mere profit wins out over human life. They're afraid, and rightly so, of getting some exotic cancer and then having a bureaucrat, looking at "the numbers", tell them that their life isn't worth a $40,000/year treatment regime.
Whenever I run into that attitude, I tell them that they'd get pretty much exactly the same treatment from their HMO- who would drop them like a hot potato for getting cancer.
But this says that *American Medicare* doesn't have to go the same way- all we need to do is pick different performance indicators.
-------------------------------------
Maximum jobs, not maximum profits.
I wouldn't call it a "documentary" per say, more of a video manifesto, but most thought provoking to be sure.
Talk about behavior modification and behavioral sociology/psychology....
uh, duh, people are going to try to preserve the status quo and save their jobs, first and foremost.
I think one an analyze a system for inefficiencies but prescribing the solutions...one had better be aware of real live human beings and how they are, hard and long on solutions.
If it wasn't real live people in that segment it would have been hilarious.
But isn't this true from other inane policy changes?
i.e. IBM at one point did performance reviews with the number of lines of code someone wrote. So, needless to say they got "bloat code", with millions of lines of code that did almost nothing but make the application much more inefficient.
I have to wonder if the rationing we've seen in England's NHS isn't caused *specifically* by performance measures trying to save money.
-------------------------------------
Maximum jobs, not maximum profits.
It's interesting to note that pension funds provide much of the financing for all those "leveraged buyout" deals by private equity firms; union pension funds and state pension funds - perhaps inadvertently? - funding more unemployment and the dissolution of corporations.
I suspect someone, or more some people, at Cerberus profited from those credit default swaps written against the Chrysler debt/bonds. That is usually the way it works.
Cerberus itself doesn't have a particularly sterling track record - they lost almost $2 billion to that Bernie Madoff scheme - and Snow, while quite rich, didn't get that way from brilliant business development or creat - more from the destruction of business. And Quayle....no comment needed on that draft-evading "super patriot"....
Fundamentally, the 401(k) was recognized as a scam from its inception - a way to negate pensions, while increasing the assets of corporations and the stock market.
The Bush Administration had hoped to forestall the meltdown by privatizating social security and feeding those revenues into the stock market/Wall Street, but fortunately failed in that regard - granting we serfs (and soon-to-be serfs) a bit more time.
The 401(k) should always be recognized for what it is - paper entries bolstering the reported value of said corporations.
I think maybe a two tier system, enable private but keep working on an effective, efficient system. I believe that is true in Finland, UK, where one can go to a private, for profit MD and many of them work in the public system but also run private clinics, almost as a part-time thing.
But I am convinced they must get the entire sector, the entire making profits off of sick people, well, out.
We know from watching stocks and finance every day the "projections of growth" from the health care sector, stock picks, quarterly earnings and so on and how investors are banking on a huge surge in elderly sick people...
(ignoring the fact more and more people cannot afford to get sick at all).
I think they need to wipe all of that out, or significantly regulate it, something.
The thing is, the U.S. is the last to consider health care a basic right and as such, one would think we could study all of the other models, mistakes all of these other nations have made in designing a new system.
Right now they won't even look at that! I mean this is inane, we just have these health profiteers, lead by the insurance companies looking to preserve their profits instead of a complete redesign of a new system.
That's what I see going on at the moment although some blog posts on what the details are in these "negotiations" are in order so we are aware of the latest details.
I hate to bring up a funny, but "lockbox" comes to mind.
I thought this was social security but we need something.
Not only is the 401k from traditional pensions a rob of retirement, so any have nothing in their 401ks. From emergencies to the stock market to bad companies to being laid off, etc....they are gone, gone, gone.
Just cut the companies out of the mix altogether, except for taxes. That way our companies aren't unfairly burdened by legacy expenses and then can compete with foreign competitors on a level playing field.
Pensions are superior to 401(k)s because people who die young subsidize the people who live longer. Plus, they are run by professionals who don't get tricked as easily into paying extra fees.
On the personal side, the pensioner can plan his living standards based on a set scale, rather than trying to save enough, but not too much.
Was the prospect of rationing. I know it can and actually in many cases does happen in our multi-payer system. But I know it happens in single-payer cases. As someone who is disabled, this scares the crap out of me.
--------------------------------------------
www.venomopolis.com
characteristics to a fix rate annuity.
We are facing a serious crisis with retirement security.
The stock market is not the best place for retirement savings.
Is a guaranteed version of the 401(k). One in which some form of insurance is taken out by the companies managing 401(k) accounts that makes sure they have a floor of 0% return, and cannot be allowed to go negative on their return, even if there's only $1 in the account.
-------------------------------------
Maximum jobs, not maximum profits.
As the farmhand said to Jean and Lionel Hardcastle on the only political/economic episode of As Time Goes By:
"Look around the village. There's not much wrong with it. So let them build their bypass and go around us, leave us in peace."
That's what those who value freedom enough to force it on others forget: Not everybody has their level of ambition. And for the rest of us, knowing our place and staying in our place, has a zen like freedom all of it's own- if you are able to make a living doing what your father did, and what your father's father did, and what your father's father's father did, that's a security that money can't buy.
-------------------------------------
Maximum jobs, not maximum profits.
I think the first two cases of corporate imperialism would be the Dutch East Indies Company and the British East Indies Company.
Their record for anything other than shareholder wealth was disastrous.
I disagree. We need to get rid of the entire idea of the FED. It worked ok for small scale, but like most economic systems, it fails on the large scale.
We need an antitrust lawsuit against the FED, and we need to replace it with 50 individual state-controlled banks who can each adjust their own rates of check clearance to effectively get around Section 1 Article 10 bans on state tariffs and states coining money.
-------------------------------------
Maximum jobs, not maximum profits.
If a bit small:
A small Saturn with a diesel engine and a biofuel generator on a 1000 lb trailer.
Basically just an oil press for various types of vegetable oil, combined with a filtering reactor and an electric pump that a survivalist or farmer could park at the edge of a rapeseed or other oil bearing seed field, and create one's own biofuel to run in the car.
-------------------------------------
Maximum jobs, not maximum profits.
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