Enlarged Stupid

The last thing I want is for this space to be the home of the perpetually indignant. That said, I came across this piece in the Wall Street Journal and couldn't resist a trip to the soap box.

At a time when scores of companies are freezing pensions for their workers, some are quietly converting their pension plans into resources to finance their executives' retirement benefits and pay.

In recent years, companies from Intel Corp. to CenturyTel Inc. collectively have moved hundreds of millions of dollars of obligations for executive benefits into rank-and-file pension plans. This lets companies capture tax breaks intended for pensions of regular workers and use them to pay for executives' supplemental benefits and compensation.

Wow. It's takes a special kind of suspension of reality and belief to convince yourself this won't backfire. Best case scenario: It ends up screwing your company into the ground. Worst case scenario: Crap like this brings down government intervention on a scale not previously envisioned by anyone. Or we could go big picture and look at this in a historical context. The last time corporate America treated it's employees with this kind of contempt was the first quarter of the twentieth century. How did that work out for them?

I finished The Fourth Turning a few weeks ago. Its a bit of a diffuse read, but the very short version of their thesis is that American history moves in waves. About every 80 to 100 years it goes really sideways and gets stretched to the breaking point. Do the math: Revolution & Continental Congress, Civil War, Great Depression, 2000 to ..... One of the big reasons the authors attribute to the above timespan is that everyone that was alive during the previous rupture is dead, so no one remembers how much it sucked. Scary thing about the book is it was written in 1997 and some of their short term predictions have pretty much come to pass. Things like this WSJ fiddling-while-Rome-burns article looks like another log on the coming fire.

Ares