Ruffled feathers and retirement blues for many

0 Comments | Oakland Tribune, May 16, 2006 | by Column by Susan Young

IT WAS a tough week.

On Wednesday, Chris Daughtry got the boot on "American Idol." I'm trying not to place blame, but I think it was people like my friend Ann Marie Buonanno who keeps placing calls for Elliott Yamin and thought Chris had plenty of support.

Come to the blog and we'll grieve together. Or you can tell me what a dolt I am for thinking he would win.

At 8 tonight on Fox, we'll be treated to the final three -- Elliott, Taylor Hicks and Katharine McPhee -- singing three songs. One will be selected by record producer Clive Davis, one by the "Idol" judges and the third chosen by the singer.

(Mike Judge, creator of "King of the Hill," said in an interview last week he likes that Taylor is on the show because there's no way any Fox executive would have let him on the air if the decision had been left to them.)

Things started downhill last Tuesday when the man on the other end of the phone identified himself only as a guy from New Jersey. He read my review that day of the bird flu movie and wondered if he was safe.

Are you kidding me?

In the final scene of that schlocky ABC "Fatal Contact" flick, we see a flock of African birds apparently infected with the deadly virus and ready to finish the U.S. off. I wrote that our only hope was shooting them out of the sky before they arrived.

That merited calls and e-mails attacking me for advocating mass bird murder.

Come on, people.

It reminded me of the time my then-young son was playing the computer game "Oregon Trail," an educational game about pioneers overcoming obstacles to go westward. There's a part in which you can shoot buffalo, but if you shoot too many you are admonished that you could wipe out the herd.

So here was John, shooting so many the carcasses were piling up all over the computer screen. I went ballistic, telling him he was wiping out an entire species.

"Um, it's a game mom," he answered, looking at me like I was the last loony in the bin. "If it was real, I wouldn't kill the herd, I promise."

So, for all of you out there concerned I'll grab a shotgun during migration, I promise I won't harm a single feather. And I ask hunters to show the appropriate restraint as well.

"Fatal Contact" was a really bad movie, and it's not the only place where the avian flu is being exploited as story fodder. Last Friday, CBS' "Numb3rs" tried it out with bodies of Asian girls found washed up on the beach and one testing positive for avian flu.

Apparently, bird flu taps into real fears, and TV writers just can't wait to use that paranoia to their advantage. But those concerns are best addressed by the World Health Organization and real doctors and scientists, not TV producers and TV critics.

So log on to the World Health Organization Web site at http:// www.who.int for real information on the problem.

"Frontline: Can You Afford to Retire?" 10 tonight KQED-Channel 9

As for me, I think I have a better chance surviving avian flu or winning "American Idol" than I have of comfortably retiring at any age.

This documentary serves as a cautionary tale to baby boomers hoping to spend their golden years relaxing as their parents before them.

For those in middle and lower middle income brackets, it doesn't look like that can actually happen.

The reason is that lifetime corporate pensions and 401(k) employee contribution plans are in serious trouble.

While this documentary spends way too much time in the beginning talking about what happened at United Airlines, the point is a good one. Under current bankruptcy laws, those who negotiated the United reorganization filled their pockets while the corporate retirement pension fund was drained.

"Bankruptcy is a way to take legal promises and burn them," professor Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard specialist in bankruptcy law, says in the film. "Chapter 11 has become an effective tool for reorganizing a business."

It was also a way for companies like United to dump underfunded pension plans on the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, a federal agency now running a $23 billion deficit.

That meant that people like Pat O'Neill, who retired from United in 2002, found that after the reorganization they had to start paying for their own health benefits and had their pensions reduced by about one-third.

"That was money that I worked for, that I earned... it's flat wrong for a company to have to go back on their word as far as your pension," O'Neill says in the documentary. "I'm going to be forced to stay working because of what United Airlines and the bankruptcy laws said they could do."

Not everyone lost their pensions, of course. United CEO Glenn Tilton got special protections for his personal retirement benefit.

"Our current CEO has decided to keep his $4.5 million pension," United flight attendant Robin Gilinger says in the film. "It was unfair that he was keeping his in his contract and we were having to give ours up."

For those with 401(k) plans, the forecast is even bleaker. Most people aren't putting enough money away in the 401(k) plans, or are making investment mistakes. The experts used in the documentary say the majority of people don't know how to make their own investments, and therefore aren't getting the most out of their 401(k)s. In addition, the percentage of money they can put into a 401(k) isn't adequate to meet retirement goals.