U.S. Pensions Plundered By Corporate Greed

Title: U.S. Pensions Plundered By Corporate Greed, Author Says

Source: Yahoo Finance

Date: September 26, 2011

From the article:

Meanwhile, New York Times columnist and economist Paul Krugman, noted in a piece last week titled "The Social Contract," that while the middle gets squeezed, the rich keep getting richer in both real and relative terms.

"...the Congressional Budget Office — which only go up to 2005, but the basic picture surely hasn't changed —show that between 1979 and 2005 the inflation-adjusted income of families in the middle of the income distribution rose 21 percent. That's growth, but it's slow, especially compared with the 100 percent rise in median income over a generation after World War II. Meanwhile, over the same period, the income of the very rich, the top 100th of 1 percent of the income distribution, rose by 480 percent. No, that isn't a misprint. In 2005 dollars, the average annual income of that group rose from $4.2 million to $24.3 million."

If the average worker didn't have enough to worry about, Ellen Schultz - an award-winning Wall Street Journal reporter and author of Retirement Heist: How Companies Plunder and Profit from the Nest Eggs of American Workers -- says that in some instances the fat paychecks of the top paid executives are coming directly out of the pocket of average workers.