Retirement Heist: How Companies Plunder And Profit From The Nest Eggs Of American Workers (2011) - Plot & Excerpts
I finished this book weeks ago, but neglected to add to my review.This book is 100% factual, and has been meticulously researched. The author has gone to great effort to understand some very complicated, underhanded, and downright evil financial skulduggery on the part of big corporations.This book reads like a thriller novel but it is (sadly) all true.If you want to understand how millions and millions and millions of American workers have been duped into. Beginning in 1983 and continuing into the present, please make an effort to obtain this book and read it. The only way we as citizens can ever hope to stop this out-right robbery is by becoming informed and then constantly communicating with our Congress Critters.Right now Congress does not listen to their constituents once they have been elected into office. They listen only to big-money, and the big-money concerns are essentially writing all the laws that allow them to easily cheat the rest of us.The more loud we become the more chance there is that the Critters might actually start listening. And if you're busy dinner Congress critters do not listen, vote them out.the situation with employee retirement plans as already gone south in a big way, which the author explains clearly. Unfortunately, there are many more retirement plans which are in the gun sights of corporate big shots. Employee retirement plans that were fully funded and even over-funded in the early 1980s, have systematically been rated in a number of ways.Through some diabolical bookkeeping tricks, fully funded employee retirement plans were used to pay exorbitant executive "compensation" and even more exorbitant executive retirements. Of course, the executives never had a bona fide retirement plan, nor were they ever contributing one red cent to their own retirement plans.Instead, the employee retirement plans were raided to provide compensation and retirement funds for the executives, and is still going on today.Of course, these dastardly executives and various corporate boards are never satisfied with becoming obscenely wealthy at the expense of their employees' retirement security.Judging by how the GOP in particular have set their sights on Social Security, I fully expect the GOP and their wealthy handlers to successfully begin raiding Social Security strictly to add to their own wealth.I will be re--reading this book in the near future. wow, depressing read indeed about the various scams, slippery contract language, tax avoidance schemes, etc. used by companies to get out of pension or/and retiree health care obligations to employees and instead lard up "executive compensation". As someone who's never had a pension plan, I could have used more discussion of 401k/403b plans, of which she is somewhat dismissive. To my knowledge, defined benefit pensions are just not coming back for most workers, but even as history it's a remarkable story packed with shameless details of companies putting the screws to ex-employees. I had some trouble following the accounting details at times, which I guess is part of how these things work. Corporations may be "people too, my friend" as Mitt R reminds us, but that doesn't mean they're always nice people.
What do You think about Retirement Heist: How Companies Plunder And Profit From The Nest Eggs Of American Workers (2011)?
Ahhhh corporations....the benevolant dictators of the West.
—laura
Too depressing, but makes you want to fight back!
—Livia
