| OLD AGE PENSION HELL AND ONLY A GOVERNMENT CAN SAVE US |
http://groups.google.com |
| Robert Morpheal, Bob Ezergailis, Morphealism (morpheal@yahoo.com) |
2008/12/16 09:06 |
OLD AGE PENSION HELL AND ONLY A GOVERNMENT CAN SAVE US
Government pensions are grossly inadequate in most nations, and need
to be rectified. There are far too many victims who have no recourse
as to making up for all the losses and inadequacies of pensions that
are imposed by the actions of others. Many people have been forced to
work hand to mouth. Others have broken work histories, due to being
forced to contract and take on temporary work, which provides neither
savings nor does it provide any corporate pension. Corporations have
also adopted more negative attitudes to moon lighting, and tend more
often to see such activities as an undesirable conflict of interest.
Despite unemployment levels and the sporadic, poorly planned, work
loads of many, long hours have become more customary, (particularly in
regions under American rather than European influence), in some work
places, further diminishing the capacity of workers to supplement
their inadequate wages. In some situations companies have found ways
to close their doors, taking pension dollars away with them, and even
reopening under new guises, in new places, the owners and investors in
the firms unscathed by their crimes against the workers. While such
situations are not as common as are failed corporate pension plans
that invested and lost funds, or the turn towards self managed (and
thus poorly and inexpertly managed) plans, they do form a fraction of
the problem. Government has been lax at best.
Socially there are negative trends that further impact the pension
crisis. Standards of attractiveness have been changed to job
stability, permanence of corporate occupation, salary level and perks,
as a primary characteristic of desirability in a mate, leaving many
disadvantaged even more desperately disadvantaged. Women who are
successful have not reversed the traditional trend of male support for
women, to support men who are not as successful. Instead they almost
always demand the male be more financially successful despite their
own successes.
The rising cost of finding a life partner, nor mate, and the increased
lack of genuineness in relationships further debilitates finances for
single individuals. Money that would have been saved, or better
utilized ends spent socially in the search for meeting social needs
that tend to be poorly met, with a wide range of teasing practices
costing dearly. Added to this is the impact of increasingly common
relationship based fraud, greatly increased by the actions of
foreigners from Africa, Russian Federation, and parts of Asia, but
something that has always been a less than adequately challenged part
of European and North American social practices.. Ageism, a more rigid
and more intensely and finely stratified class structure than some
decades ago, and the primarily American influenced push to more
extreme self centeredness add to the social barriers against social
remedies to the attaining of needs. While this has promoted the
trends, that is psychologically available only to a minority. The
often inappropriate push to that option may in fact be doing more
social harm than good in a large number of other instances. Clearly
the cost of living, and the costs of meeting needs, inclusive of
social inclusion, social recognition, social status, and social
opportunity of any type have grown, but the opportunities are less in
a very supply and demand dominated system. As the opportunities are
diminished, as to meeting other needs, the costs go up, further
straining scarce fiscal resources. Of course it is all meant to
social, and sexual, hell.
Added to this are negative trends making profitable independent
ventures very difficult to start, costly and socially challenged. More
challenged than some decades ago, and certainly more costly.
Collectivist ventures, and communal ventures have been made nearly
impossible by the American led politics of a post Cold War American
victory against communism. Unless that trend is reversed many more
viable options for achieving material progress in terms of production
and access to or owning the means of production, will continue to be
largely completely thwarted. That option removed from the scenario,
what remains is either excessive borrowing on a pie in the sky hope of
making it, or investing the failing nest egg into something to do that
might make money. In a society where big corporate marketing and
advertising gimmicks tends to control selling, and where there is as
much dependence on establishing a name brand, as big corporate names
are able to offer, the road is perilous at best. Establishing a name
costs a lot of money and it costs a lot of social capital which in
fact is also extremely expensive and leads to severe compromises in
terms of lifestyle and questionable, but socially attractive, habits.
The cost to health, of gaining social capital, can easily exceed the
capital to be gained. Some do succeed in that way, but the damage is
far more severe than it ever was before. Added to that is the trend in
a society that is taught to disregard talent, skills, and abilities,
that are failing to make money. The piece of trash blessed with a high
price tag takes on a higher value than the carefully crafted and
meticulously original demonstration of real talent if the latter does
not command the same high price. That transformation of values is
somewhat consistent with the decline in quality, durability and
design, of much of mass produced culture. There are no lasting values
there. It is toss and replace at a relatively low cost, and change the
style regularly rather than anything enduring. The individual has
little to offer, if anything, in that mass market oriented culture and
society, to compete with its transformed values. Most give up long
before they succeed, wasting their capital and losing social capital
along the way, as they lose status for trying and not having as much
money to spend on social capital as do their peers. After all it costs
limited. Much more limited in instances of real need for success. Of
course the increased difficulty for many, as to finding a partner, is
further worsened by the sacrifices necessary to achieve any
independence, or to supplement sparse other means. Failure to make
gains further disadvantages the social side of life, further
tightening the noose and plunging the individual further into the
social and economic abyss. Luck might have saved the individual from a
worse level of hell, but the lure of something interesting to do, in
an increasingly repetitive and routine oriented society, perhaps
socially limited and alone in life anyway, due to lack of sufficient
fiscal success symbols and social capital acquisition, plus the need
for improved security beyond what fickle corporate existences tend to
offer, can be irresistible and even more so for anyone with any
exceptional talent. So the road to hell is even more paved with good
and valid intentions, but the hell can be the same.
While all of that needs to be changed, and values need remedy, that in
itself cannot resolve the growing and immanent problem of pensions.
Clearly the real solution is to increase pensions, and to fund them
via the inevitable nationalization of some gainful and potentially
stable means, such as banking. If it is done now. Banks stole much of
the pension investment of many and it is only fair.
The banks have stolen pension funds from many who trusted them to make
their meager savings grow. The mutual funds that showed such promise,
run by what was reputed to be the best talent in the industry, mostly
all lost money, suddenly and unexpectedly. The bankers and investment
counselors all counseled their clients to remain in it for the long
haul, and that it would pick up if given time. Well the losses
continued with small peaks and larger valleys. For most of the lucky
nothing much was made, and they broke near even. For the unlucky,
their meager savings were significantly dwindled. The banks got their
fee, for what proved to be a very poor service, failing on most of its
promises. Now we have another round of severe attrition, where mutual
funds again have taken a massive hit that they can likely never
recover from. Nevertheless many investment counselors are still
proclaiming the faith, and counseling their clients to stay in it, and
that it will recover and turn a profit for them in the long haul.
Lifetimes are clearly not that long and working lives, to pension age,
even less so. Where does the faith collapse into disbelief ? The
marketing, advertising, spin doctoring, is too effective. That too has
led the lemmings over the financial cliff and onto the fiscal rocks
below.
What is the answer to this chronic illness that is so debilitating to
pension incomes and pension hopes ? When corporate means, unable to
buy good and reliable investment services from financial institutions,
have abandoned such means and left the permanent and thus benefitted
employees to fend for themselves in RRSP, matching funds, self managed
investment hell ? When banks have proven the utterly failed
inadequacy of their wisest investment counsel, and have shown that
even they cannot buy sufficient expertise to turn a small savings into
claiming it is not in the business.
Well, government needs to get into the business. What is the most
practical way ? Make the banks pay for the pensions that they
diminished, essentially stole with their mass marketing, advertising,
and proven to be utterly false promises. How can government make banks
pay for all of that fiscal and self serving misdemeanor ? Government
can nationalize banking, and from well governed, well regulated,
financial management, government can take the profits that the banks
would have taken for themselves, and pay adequate pensions to workers
who otherwise have no chance to either achieve them or make up for the
massive losses that fiscal mismanagement and outright fraud, in
addition to false promises by nearly every private financial
institution regarding nearly every seemingly lucrative investment
plan, have caused to most pension oriented and advantaged investors.
Not only that, but it would provide pensions for the disadvantaged
who, in society as it has been manipulated to be, have no real chance
to invest into pensions, in any real way, due to the pressing number
of other costly needs, and due to the changed nature of work and
social capital in a world where they are made victims by those
depriving them of adequate options and adequate means.
Robert Morpheal
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