Corporate America Wants Your Pension

I just read John Balzar’s Dec. 18 commentary, “Pension Fund Is About to Go the Way of Your 401(k),” regarding President Bush’s helping corporate America reduce everyone’s pension fund by saying they are only trying to help the younger workers out. Has everyone in Washington gone crazy? First we get raped by Wall Street and I lose almost all value in my 401(k); then Enron and the rest of the energy companies try to “game” the California energy system. A major health industry provider is accused of defrauding the U.S. government.

The government is pouring trillions of dollars into a program to shoot missiles out of the sky that anyone with a scientific background (and backbone) has called bad science. The phone companies are all but bankrupt, along with the airlines. Forget about Iraq....

I end up getting laid off by a large soft-drink corporation after working 14 long, hard years (losing my ability to accrue any more pension benefits) because another company said it could do the work for less expense. This second company then hires me and tries to get me to falsify my paperwork, forcing me to quit. Now my elected officials want to allow these corporations to drive the nail in deeper?

I must ask (after reading the Dec. 17 article in Business about Bush’s presence at a 1997 Enron party where there were jokes told about accounting practices), has everyone in this country decided to loot what’s left? And people wonder why so many have given up voting.

Dave Gunall

Ventura

After reading Balzar’s commentary on company pension funds, the corporate connection (Enron, etc.) to the Bush administration and the corporate greed that continues unabated, I have to wonder when and by whom the preamble to the Constitution was changed from “We the people

What voice do common citizens have in all of this?

Mitch Holder

Thousand Oaks