Posted on 06/24/2006 10:28:20 AM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
This is the pension squeeze companies aren't talking about: Even as many reduce, freeze or eliminate pensions for workers -- complaining of the costs -- their executives are building up ever-bigger pensions, causing the companies' financial obligations for them to balloon.
Companies disclose little about any of this. But a Wall Street Journal analysis of corporate filings reveals that executive benefits are playing a large and hidden role in the declining health of America's pensions. Among the findings:
• Boosted by surging pay and rich formulas, executive pension obligations exceed $1 billion at some companies. Besides GM, they include General Electric Co. (a $3.5 billion liability); AT&T Inc. ($1.8 billion); Exxon Mobil Corp. and International Business Machines Corp. (about $1.3 billion each); and Bank of America Corp. and Pfizer Inc. (about $1.1 billion apiece).
• Benefits for executives now account for a significant share of pension obligations in the U.S., an average of 8% at the companies above. Sometimes a company's obligation for a single executive's pension approaches $100 million.
• These liabilities are largely hidden, because corporations don't distinguish them from overall pension obligations in their federal financial filings.
• As a result, the savings that companies make by curtailing pensions for regular retirees -- which have totaled billions of dollars in recent years -- can mask a rising cost of benefits for executives.
• Executive pensions, even when they won't be paid till years from now, drag down earnings today. And they do so in a way that's disproportionate to their size, because they aren't funded with dedicated assets.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Yet the masses still don't grab the reins of these out of control corporations...they don't vote their shares in their own best interests, and let this inbred system suck them dry. :-(
WSJ is better than this, promoting Marxist gobbledygook.
I don't see how reporting on the state of corporate pension funds amounts to class warfare...
It is promoting fiscal responsibility.
If workers want to earn fat pensions then they should become more motivated instead of producing widgets for 30 years.
Pointing out that these greedy executives are stealing companies from their owners is not Marxist.
I agree that something has to be done to strengthen shareholders' rights. It is ridiculous what is going on in corporate governance and executive compensation these days.
It's just like what happens in government, where you have a highly compensated professional managerial class in the civil service that is constantly expanding their numbers and constantly padding their already-generous benefits. People grumble, but somehow no reform ever takes place.
I'm certainly not in favor of the government setting limits on executive wages, and you can certainly make a case that the real superstars of corporate America earn their high salaries. Good for them. But taken as a whole, the small shareholders are being looted by armies of parasitic, mediocre MBA's.
-ccm
Oooooooo.........
It's not Marxism to observe that the corporate power structure has deformed capitalism, to the detriment to shareholders and consumers.
Many DO vote their [our] shares in their [our] own best interests ... but, even when one owns a large chunk of shares ... it does no good when the rules are set up so that even if all shareholders vote against, or withhold their votes entirely from, a particular proposal [or board member] ... that proposal/board member can be passed/elected by one vote ... his own.The folks coming out of the business schools learned how to manipulate the system. They have infiltrated the boards of most corporations and have loaded up the boards with their cronies ... and the individual shareholder has been left out in the cold while they have feathered their nests and raided the corporations. It has become a matter of you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours. Severe limitations should be imposed on these cross-corporation crony deals. Further severe limitations should be imposed on how many boards one can sit on.
Nothing short of a revolution will put an end to it.
I can get some more sugar in that Koolaid?
This isn't about capitalism. It's about pension funds. P-E-N-S-I-O-N F-U-N-D-S.
If the workers want to make widgets, fine. If they wish to do something more with their lives, that's also fine. But the motivation of the workers is not what this article's about.
Guess you never heard of Social Security, eh?
you better hold your mouth quite different, when speaking to ME face to face, that is, if you want to keep your teeth!
Ooooh, now I'm scared. "Momma!"
>I don't see how reporting on the state of corporate pension funds amounts to class warfare...<
Just aimed at creating a little friction here and there, doncha think?
I can't type so good ---
You from Enron, by any chance?
Why aren't the workers the CEO's? Are they 1. Not smart enough? 2. Not ambitious enough? What is it?
Bob Palmer got $53 million for destroying Digital Equipment Corporation and putting 100,000 people out of work. And that was in 1997.
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