Pension Systems and the Deadly Hand of the Market
By Judith Deutsch
May 25, 2018
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/05/25/pension-systems-and-the-deadly-hand-of-the-market
Unlike corporate shareholders and coop members, contributors to pension plans do not have a vote.
The Canadian Pension Plan [CPP} is believed by many to represent the caring face of Canada, while it is lauded as the “New Masters of the Universe” and “Maple Revolutionaries” by the OECD, G20, and the World Bank. “OECD analysts describe these Canadian funds as ‘pioneers in infrastructure investing’ that helped to establish infrastructure as an important and increasingly popular asset class.” It is no exaggeration to state that the CPP is “banking on death”, the title of Robin Blackburn’s comprehensive history of pensions. The Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade and here lists CPP investments in seventy three corporations supporting Israel’s military/police/surveillance/prison industrial complex.
Issue #66: CPP + Israel
Press for Conversion # 67
....
In 2016, private pension assets in OECD countries reached their highest-ever level at over US $38 trillion. Pension funds are part of a closed political economic system and its facilitating legalities. Representative are the links between the CPP, Imperial Oil, universities and think tanks, and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP) to “free, prior and informed consent”. While information is essential, particularly for indigenous people subject to land theft and to environmental contaminants, UN declarations are non-binding and unenforceable. Nonetheless, Anglo-Saxon democracies were the last to sign.
....
Indigenous consentis obstructed by many loopholes: the state’s claim of eminent domain, the Doctrine of Discovery justifying European expropriation of supposedly “empty” land (terra nullius), a clause of Canada’s Delgmuukw ruling on Aboriginal title that allows the Canadian government to infringe on title under specific circumstances, the Carter doctrine asserting U.S. entitlement to Canadian resources for national security purposes, trade agreements that pre-empt national laws, the Canadian Mining Act which “does not require that the holder of an exploration permit inform property owners of its existence … and that the permit can be acquired via the Internet with a simple click [so] that First Nations, property owners, and municipalities are ever informed or forewarned of the acquisition of a land claim on their land or territory.” The Canadian National Energy Board is made up of industry people whose consultations with Indigenous people and the general public are minimal.
....
Imperial Oil owns four facilities within 2 to 7 km from Aamjiwnaang. 40% of Canada’s petrochemical industry surrounds this small community. The water is so contaminated that it affects endocrine balance: two girls are born for every boy, and the effects on health have been substantiated by medical and legal reports and a charter challenge launched on behalf of the 800 member Aamjiwnaang community. In 2017 Imperial Oil’s flaring caused a five-hour massive explosion. Over 500 incident reports had been filed in 2014 and 2015 for spills and leaks in the Sarnia area: yet only one public warning had been issued through the municipality’s alert system. The government has still not installed an effective monitoring and warning system.
https://thenarwhal.ca/imperial-oil-could-face-charges-violent-flaring-incident
....
Imperial Oil is 69.6% owned by Exxon-Mobil, the corporation associated with Rex Tillerson and with deception of the public about climate change. Oil was discovered in Ontario in 1858, a year before Titusville Pennsylvania, and by 1880 the Imperial Oil Company was producing, distributing, and refining oil. In the 1950s Imperial Oil and smaller companies banded together to lease some 2 million acres in the tar sands and by the early 1960s there were generous, publicly funded incentives and loose regulations to promote extraction. Imperial’s Board of Directors come from Exxon-Mobil, from the conservative C.D. Howe Institute, from executive positions at the major universities. In 1975, the chair of Imperial Oil led other CEOs to form the Business Council on National Issues, now the Canadian Council of Chief Executives with close ties to the Canadian and U.S. governments. In 2014 Exxon published a detailed report that brushed aside concerns about climate change, “saying oil and gas will remain the dominant sources of energy through 2040…”
....
The current head of CPPIB is Heather Munroe-Blum.
Pension to McGill’s former principal Munroe-Blum rankles employees | Montreal Gazette
She is Principal and Vice-Chancellor of McGill University and her directorships include the Association of American Universities, the Conference Board of Canada, Rio Tinto, CGI (oil and gas sector), the Royal Bank of Canada (mining). She is a vocal opponent of the academic boycott of Israeli universities McGill
https://electronicintifada.net/conte...heid-wall/7073
https://electronicintifada.net/content/ivory-tower-behind-apartheid-wall/7073
Her combined pension entitlements gave her the richest package of any university president in Canada at a time when Quebec universities were being asked to absorb $124m in cuts.
The main variables in providing social security have been whether to provide universal or selective coverage, to what degree it should be publicly funded, and the sources of funding. Traditional communities characteristically developed a range of ways to care for their members, whereas nation states came late, if at all, to take on social security, and originally only for selected groups like military men or senior state functionaries. “It was not until the epoch of the French Revolution and its Declaration a the Rights of Man and the Citizen that the first proposals were heard for the paying of pensions as of right to all citizens who had reached an advanced age and were in want.” It was the “unlikely executor of the social legacy of French republicanism … Otto von Bismarck, who established the first universal pension system in 1889.” The modest 1935 U.S. Social Security Act provided a minimal benefit. Initially it did not cover non-waged women’s work or Black people. Its strengths were that it was a federal program, that it was comprehensive and not voluntary, and that it had its own autonomous administration
Despite hopes that social security would be a stepping stone to a socialized society, insufficient benefits necessitated supplementary pensions. From the 1970s, pension fund managers took advantage of the erosion of New Deal protections and of the inflow of capital from abroad, and by the 1990s pension funds became a powerful driver of financialization. The trajectory has been from state responsibility for universal benefits at one end, to private pension funds based on individual contributions. In the cases of the Enron and Nortel Network bankruptcies, pensioners took huge losses as their plans were not guaranteed, and money from asset sales were prioritized for paying legal fees, creditors, and fund managers.
The erosion of state responsibility for social security was further exacerbated by the concerted assault on unions, a factor in the decline of cross-border class solidarity. The inclusion of union representatives on pension boards does not effectively change the “fund-first” principle of fiduciary duty that weights profit over social justice and the public interest. Not untypical is the case of American and Canadian pension fund investments in Chile’s privately owned water utilities despite a mass social movement within Chile to re-nationalize water.
By Judith Deutsch
May 25, 2018
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/05/25/pension-systems-and-the-deadly-hand-of-the-market
Unlike corporate shareholders and coop members, contributors to pension plans do not have a vote.
The Canadian Pension Plan [CPP} is believed by many to represent the caring face of Canada, while it is lauded as the “New Masters of the Universe” and “Maple Revolutionaries” by the OECD, G20, and the World Bank. “OECD analysts describe these Canadian funds as ‘pioneers in infrastructure investing’ that helped to establish infrastructure as an important and increasingly popular asset class.” It is no exaggeration to state that the CPP is “banking on death”, the title of Robin Blackburn’s comprehensive history of pensions. The Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade and here lists CPP investments in seventy three corporations supporting Israel’s military/police/surveillance/prison industrial complex.
Issue #66: CPP + Israel
Press for Conversion # 67
....
In 2016, private pension assets in OECD countries reached their highest-ever level at over US $38 trillion. Pension funds are part of a closed political economic system and its facilitating legalities. Representative are the links between the CPP, Imperial Oil, universities and think tanks, and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP) to “free, prior and informed consent”. While information is essential, particularly for indigenous people subject to land theft and to environmental contaminants, UN declarations are non-binding and unenforceable. Nonetheless, Anglo-Saxon democracies were the last to sign.
....
Indigenous consentis obstructed by many loopholes: the state’s claim of eminent domain, the Doctrine of Discovery justifying European expropriation of supposedly “empty” land (terra nullius), a clause of Canada’s Delgmuukw ruling on Aboriginal title that allows the Canadian government to infringe on title under specific circumstances, the Carter doctrine asserting U.S. entitlement to Canadian resources for national security purposes, trade agreements that pre-empt national laws, the Canadian Mining Act which “does not require that the holder of an exploration permit inform property owners of its existence … and that the permit can be acquired via the Internet with a simple click [so] that First Nations, property owners, and municipalities are ever informed or forewarned of the acquisition of a land claim on their land or territory.” The Canadian National Energy Board is made up of industry people whose consultations with Indigenous people and the general public are minimal.
....
Imperial Oil owns four facilities within 2 to 7 km from Aamjiwnaang. 40% of Canada’s petrochemical industry surrounds this small community. The water is so contaminated that it affects endocrine balance: two girls are born for every boy, and the effects on health have been substantiated by medical and legal reports and a charter challenge launched on behalf of the 800 member Aamjiwnaang community. In 2017 Imperial Oil’s flaring caused a five-hour massive explosion. Over 500 incident reports had been filed in 2014 and 2015 for spills and leaks in the Sarnia area: yet only one public warning had been issued through the municipality’s alert system. The government has still not installed an effective monitoring and warning system.
https://thenarwhal.ca/imperial-oil-could-face-charges-violent-flaring-incident
....
Imperial Oil is 69.6% owned by Exxon-Mobil, the corporation associated with Rex Tillerson and with deception of the public about climate change. Oil was discovered in Ontario in 1858, a year before Titusville Pennsylvania, and by 1880 the Imperial Oil Company was producing, distributing, and refining oil. In the 1950s Imperial Oil and smaller companies banded together to lease some 2 million acres in the tar sands and by the early 1960s there were generous, publicly funded incentives and loose regulations to promote extraction. Imperial’s Board of Directors come from Exxon-Mobil, from the conservative C.D. Howe Institute, from executive positions at the major universities. In 1975, the chair of Imperial Oil led other CEOs to form the Business Council on National Issues, now the Canadian Council of Chief Executives with close ties to the Canadian and U.S. governments. In 2014 Exxon published a detailed report that brushed aside concerns about climate change, “saying oil and gas will remain the dominant sources of energy through 2040…”
....
The current head of CPPIB is Heather Munroe-Blum.
Pension to McGill’s former principal Munroe-Blum rankles employees | Montreal Gazette
She is Principal and Vice-Chancellor of McGill University and her directorships include the Association of American Universities, the Conference Board of Canada, Rio Tinto, CGI (oil and gas sector), the Royal Bank of Canada (mining). She is a vocal opponent of the academic boycott of Israeli universities McGill
https://electronicintifada.net/conte...heid-wall/7073
https://electronicintifada.net/content/ivory-tower-behind-apartheid-wall/7073
Her combined pension entitlements gave her the richest package of any university president in Canada at a time when Quebec universities were being asked to absorb $124m in cuts.
The main variables in providing social security have been whether to provide universal or selective coverage, to what degree it should be publicly funded, and the sources of funding. Traditional communities characteristically developed a range of ways to care for their members, whereas nation states came late, if at all, to take on social security, and originally only for selected groups like military men or senior state functionaries. “It was not until the epoch of the French Revolution and its Declaration a the Rights of Man and the Citizen that the first proposals were heard for the paying of pensions as of right to all citizens who had reached an advanced age and were in want.” It was the “unlikely executor of the social legacy of French republicanism … Otto von Bismarck, who established the first universal pension system in 1889.” The modest 1935 U.S. Social Security Act provided a minimal benefit. Initially it did not cover non-waged women’s work or Black people. Its strengths were that it was a federal program, that it was comprehensive and not voluntary, and that it had its own autonomous administration
Despite hopes that social security would be a stepping stone to a socialized society, insufficient benefits necessitated supplementary pensions. From the 1970s, pension fund managers took advantage of the erosion of New Deal protections and of the inflow of capital from abroad, and by the 1990s pension funds became a powerful driver of financialization. The trajectory has been from state responsibility for universal benefits at one end, to private pension funds based on individual contributions. In the cases of the Enron and Nortel Network bankruptcies, pensioners took huge losses as their plans were not guaranteed, and money from asset sales were prioritized for paying legal fees, creditors, and fund managers.
The erosion of state responsibility for social security was further exacerbated by the concerted assault on unions, a factor in the decline of cross-border class solidarity. The inclusion of union representatives on pension boards does not effectively change the “fund-first” principle of fiduciary duty that weights profit over social justice and the public interest. Not untypical is the case of American and Canadian pension fund investments in Chile’s privately owned water utilities despite a mass social movement within Chile to re-nationalize water.
