Roger Goodell and the 1 Percent's War On Pensions

By Charles Pierce, Esquire Magazine

17 September 12

hat Roger Goodell, lord high commissioner of the National Football League, is a well-kept tool of the various plutocrats who own the franchises in the league over which he ostensibly presides is well beyond dispute at this point. But, as he currently helps the league commit consumer fraud on a weekly basis by entrusting the game to scab referees, he also is giving the game away on how exactly the people who pay his salary feel about people who work on salary generally in this country. Here's the head of the NFL Referees Association, even before this latest weekend of high-rent grifting:

"The key is the pension issue," [Scott] Green told HuffPost, adding that the pensions have been around since the mid-1970s. "A lot of our guys have made life-career decisions based on assuming that pension would be there."

In facing a pension freeze, the NFL refs have plenty of company. Corporations across the country have been trying to switch their employees from traditional defined benefit pension plans to cheaper, less reliable defined contribution plans. Just one example is Con-Ed, which recently locked out workers as it tried to phase out employees' traditional pensions and move them to 401(k)s.

And then, from the man himself:

"From the owners' standpoint, right now they're funding a pension program that is a defined benefit program," said Goodell, who was in Washington on Wednesday attending a luncheon hosted by Politico's Playbook. "About ten percent of the country has that. Yours truly doesn't have that. It's something that doesn't really exist anymore and that I think is going away steadily."

(Gotta love that "Yours Truly" touch. Rog is suggesting to the Politico buffet-grazers that he's really one of them. He'd sell them all for car-fare if it put another million in Jerry Jones's pocket.)

That's the tell, right there. This is the technique that has worked - alas, too successfully - for the one percent in almost every industry in America. People don't really have pensions anymore because the financial-services industry helped the one percent loot them for the benefit of folks like Willard Romney, which they were able to do because they were encouraged to bust unions and force people into 401K's, which sank with the rest of the economy while they were stealing everything that wasn't nailed down. Now look, over there: That teacher/fireman/NFL referee has something you don't have! That person stole it from you. Go get 'em. We'll wait right here on our piles of money while you and him fight.

Defined-benefits pensions "don't really exist" anymore because of deliberate acts of politicians that encouraged their wholescale destruction by American business. We didn't "evolve" from them to 401K's. We got them stolen out from under us. Roger Goodell is just the latest front man.