Escape to Chengdu

From Retirement Heist by Ellen Schultz:

It didn’t take benefits consultants long to realize that every dollar a company had promised a retiree—for pensions, prescription drugs, dental coverage, life insurance, or death benefits—was the equivalent of a dollar that could potentially be added to a company’s income. Suddenly, the $1 trillion that companies owed three generations of employees and retirees for pensions and retiree health benefits became potential earnings enhancements. Cuts generate gains, which lift earnings, which help the stock price, which boosts the compensation of the executives whose pay is based on performance. What CFO could resist that?

Not too many, and not for long. By the late 1990s, roughly four hundred large companies, most of which had well-funded or overfunded pension plans, had cut pension benefits, primarily by changing to a less generous cash-balance plan, which for many older workers was no different from freezing their pensions.

Pension managers faced a fresh conflict of interest: Should they manage the plans for the benefit of retirees? Pension law requires that the plan be managed for the “exclusive benefit” of its participants. But on this point, pension law is like a toothless dog: It might sound scary, but it has no bite. Short of outright theft of pension assets, employers have been fairly free to make a lot of self-interested decisions when it comes to managing pensions.

Accounting professors at Cornell and the University of Colorado examined hundreds of companies that had converted their pensions to a cash-balance formula and found the average incentive compensation for the chief executive officers jumped to about four times salary in the year of the pension cut, from about three times salary the year before. When companies didn’t change their pensions, CEO pay also didn’t change much. “You could have real economic wealth transfers away from employees,” concluded Julia D’Souza, a Cornell associate professor of accounting and lead author of the study.

Excerpts from pgs. 45-48 of Retirement Heist by Ellen Schultz:

To make up for the loss of the pension estimator, some IBMers launched a site on Yahoo! to compare notes and air gripes about the anticipated change. Finlay posted his spreadsheets and calculations, which gave his colleagues a way to measure how much their pensions would shrink. The site began getting fifteen thousand hits a day as many of IBM’s 260,000 employees around the world began picking apart virtually every actuarial assumption related to IBM’s calculation of benefits. “I’d like to think this group is too intelligent and motivated to let a bunch of corporate actuaries sell us down the river and think we’re too stupid to figure out their half-truths,” noted one worker.

…

Employees formed the IBM Employee Benefits Action Coalition, which began to complain to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the IRS, Congress, and anyone else who would listen. August is usually a slow month that finds lawmakers in areas with large IBM populations were besieged in town hall meetings by angry IBM constituents. The largest was in Vermont, where eight hundred people jammed into an art center in Winoosky for a meeting held by then Congressman Bernie Sanders. Sanders, a feisty independent, thought the IBM employees, who were asking IBM to let them remain in the old plan, had a point. “If converting to a new pension program doesn’t save a company any money, as some companies say, it should not be too expensive for companies to offer all of their employees the choice to remain in their original pension plan.”

…

Gerstner and other top managers were caught flat-footed by the backlash, and before long they were staging a partial retreat. The company agreed to allow 35,000 older employees to stay in the old pension, but it still saved plenty of money. The cash-balance plan boosted IBM’s pretax income in 1999 by $184 million, or 6 percent.

Through my life there trembles without plaint,

without a sigh a deep-dark melancholy.

The pure and snowy blossoming of my dreams

is the consecration of my stillest days.

But oftentimes the great question crosses

my path. I become small and go

coldly past as though along some lake

whose flood I have hardihood to measure.

And then a sorrow sinks upon me, dusky

as the gray of lusterless summer nights

through which a star glimmers—now and then—:

My hands then gropingly reach out for love,

because I want so much to pray sounds

that my hot mouth cannot find…

(Franz Kappus)

The anxieties and complaints against Roosevelt during his first term in office sound awfully familiar. Take a look at this excerpt from “The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes.” (Ickes was FDR’s Secretary of the Interior.)

Tuesday, March 12, 1935

[The Vice President and I] got to discussing the political situation and I found that he is even more anxious than I am about it. He told me very frankly that he was afraid. This was his exact expression and he used it several times. He said that last night he lay in awake in bed listening to the clock strike two, and then three, and then four, and then five. He was worrying about the political situation and the state of the country. He knows that the President has been losing ground very rapidly and he believes, with me, that Jim Farley hasn’t the slightest idea of what the state of mind of the country is.

The Vice President on several occasions has shown to me a vein of liberalism which I had not expected to find in him. Today he said that if the Democrats failed to carry the election next year, it would be many, many years before the country would again vote for a liberal Adminstration. He remarked that he didn’t pretend to be any more patriotic than anyone else, but that he did love his country and he wanted it to be a country of a happy, contented, and prosperous people. He said that if Roosevelt is not re-elected, a reactionary Republican will succeed him and that then will follow either a fascist government or a communist one. He could actually foresee a revolution in certain circumstances. He spoke with deep feeling and with sadness. After all, he is a pretty substantial and sturdy character. I have come to feel a growing regard and respect for him. There isn’t any doubt that he has the real welfare of the country at heart.

He feels that this Administration has done little to satisfy the expectations of the people for a liberalized Government. He said we had done practically nothing along liberal lines, although he referred to the slight changes in the banking laws, the Securities Commission, and one or two other matters. I urged him to go to the President and tell him frankly how he felt, but he said the he couldn’t do this unless the President should invite his opinions. 

Harold Ickes, FDR’s Secretary of the Interior, published three huge volumes of his diary written during Roosevelt’s terms in office. 

It is a glorious document of history. And it’s been out-of-print since the 1970’s. 

“An effort is being made to deport Harry Bridges, an able and aggressive labor leader, on the ground that he is an undesirable alien. Miss Perkins sent some records on the matter to the Senate Committee on Immigration at the insistent request of Senator Copeland. She related this at the last Cabinet meeting and the President nearly jumped down her throat for sending up records which he flet were confidential departmental records. Homer Cummings agreed with him that the administrative departments did not have to produce everything in the way of information that a legislative committee might request. 

The President told Miss Perkins that we would be happy if she could discover that Boake Carter, the columnist and radio commentator, who has been so unfair and pestiferous, was not entitled to be in this country. It appears that an investigation of his record is being made. I also understand that Carter knows he is being investigated.

- Sunday, Feb. 6, 1938 (excerpt, pg. 312)

I was reading this passage from “When Things Fall Apart” by Pema Chodron and it called to mind the 2008 presidential campaign and our celebration (obsession?) with “hoping” for a better future. Maybe that wasn’t such a good idea.

The word in Tibetan for hope is rewa; the word for fear is dopka. More commonly, the word re-dok is used, which combines the two. Hope and fear is a feeling with two sides. As long as there’s one, there’s always the other. This re-dok is the root of our pain. In the world of hope and fear, we always have to change the channel, change the temperature, change the music, because something is getting uneasy, something is getting restless, something is beginning to hurt, and we keep looking for alternatives.

In a nontheistic state of mind, abandoning hope is an affirmation, the beginning of the beginning. You could even put “Abandon hope” on your refrigerator door instead of more conventional aspirations like “Every day in every way I’m getting better and better.”

Hope and fear come from feeling that we lack something; they come from a sense of poverty. We can’t simply relax with ourselves. We hold on to hope, and hope robs us of the present moment. We feel that someone else knows what’s going on, but that there’s something missing in us, and therefore something is lacking in our world. 

Rather than letting our negativity get the better of us, we could acknowledge that right now we feel like a piece of shit and not be squeamish about taking a good look. That’s the compassionate thing to do. That’s the brave thing to do. 

“I don’t understand how you have no money,” I told her.

“Get me Maureen Orth,” she grumbled, referring to another writer for Vanity Fair. “Have you looked at all the documents Jessica sent you?” I had. For months I had been receiving emails from Jessica LaBrie, a 33-year-old administrative assistant in Vancouver who told me Courtney’s music has “saved my life”; she was then part of the so-called “Twitter Army” of random fans Courtney had asked, via Twitter, to help her investigate… LaBrie had also sent me attachments, including a “Timeline—as per Ms. Love-Cobain’s Dictation,” decorated with lavender highlights.

Courtney Love is crowdsourcing legal research on Twitter among fans. Fans like Jessica LaBrie. This is strange and beautiful and somehow restores my faith in the universe.

To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am no solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look up at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds will separate between him and what he touches. 

The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable.

The production of a work of art throws a light upon the mystery of humanity.

The standard of beauty is the entire circuit of natural forms—the totality of nature; which the Italians expressed by defining beauty as “il piu nell uno.” Nothing is quite beautiful alone; nothing but is beautiful in the whole.

petersutherland:

ski boot blanket @ still house gallery

(via proper-nouns)