Too many things to talk about this week. The story about United Airlines going bankrupt and, with federal court approval, reneging on retirement benefits previously promised to long term employees has resulted in a lot of ink in the past few days about retirement plans in general and the relative security of the various types of plans. If private sector employers aren’t squawking that health care benefits are driving them out of business, then they’re squawking about what they’re contributing to retirement plans. The volume on those complaints has been turned up considerably since the guy who claims to be President started lusting after what’s left of the Social Security fund.

The type of retirement deal United had with its employees is insured by the federal government, but that insurance doesn’t even come close to what the company once promised. That means about 120,000 people who worked all their lives for a company that was a leader in the industry are seeing the company go belly up, and they’re looking at trying to retire on less than half what they were promised when they started. It’s kind of like hitting a million dollar lottery ticket only to find out that your take after taxes won’t even pay for your celebration party.

This is a complicated subject, but in the present political climate, it’s likely to keep getting bigger. Bush’s attack on Social Security is part of a broader strategy of tearing down all of the New Deal/Great Society social programs. A comfortable retirement after a lifetime of labor may no longer be part of the American dream. If you don’t want to work for someone else until you drop dead, you may be on your own to make some plans. That’s not so bad if you’re young enough, but pulling the rug out from under older workers or even people who already have retired could have far reaching consequences for the necessity of keeping the middle class middle.

I’m sure we’ll talk about this again. Right now, it’s safe to say that all retirement plans are under attack, even those vested funds for government employees. They represent huge pots of money, and the people who currently know the combination to the country’s safe are drooling over all that money. They have a little list of things to do with it which doesn’t include paying you and me to end our associations with the rat race as promised.

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I hope you heard Left Coast Radio earlier this week on KVMR talking about last weekend’s media reform conference. I heard a lot of inspiring remarks which point to a healthy future for freedom of speech, and this modest little corner of free speech has a couple of comments to add to that discussion. I heard a lot of talk about applying some restraints to what we call the corporate media, as though limiting the number of media outlets any one corporation may own could actually diminish the ability of all that corporate money to have its say. It can’t. The best we can hope for is to keep that corporate money from squashing all the other voices, and to keep the airwaves open for anyone. You could take all the newspapers, magazines and broadcast signals away from the corporations which currently own them and not diminish the influence of those corporations by even one vote. The real trick is not to take away their toys; it’s to erode their dominance of public opinion. The alternate media already exist, but precious few people are paying any attention. When public access TV and low-power, low budget radio start showing ratings even five percent of what commercial broadcasters get, corporate media will be terrified. When The Nation has five percent of the readership enjoyed by USA Today, the media world as we know it will have ended. We won’t have media reform until the people who read, listen and watch start believing it could be true even when it isn’t sponsored by Toyota and Pepsi. That’s a much tougher assignment than just reassigning a few broadcast frequencies.

In the current political climate, alternative media have all they can handle just hanging on by their fingernails, but these things tend to cycle around. I remember when right wing politics was discussed only in photocopied journals which seldom saw the light of day, the John Birch Society rented cheap storefronts to peddle its literature, and no one even could have imagined that some acid tongued right wing demogogue could take calls on the radio and command a national audience. Those are the people who are in charge right now, but with diligence and a little luck we can resist their inclination to silence all others until the ball rolls the other way again.

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You probably heard the local story about the Claim Jumpers restaurant chain telling a bartender that he couldn’t wear his yellow plastic Lance Armstrong cancer survivor bracelet on the job because it violated the company’s dress code. After the predictable negative publicity, the southern California based company changed its corporate mind with an amendment to its dress code exempting "bracelets representing qualified, national, health related, charitable organizations." It also promised a $10,000 donation to Armstrong’s foundation, but it doesn’t exactly sound like Claim Jumpers saw the bigger picture, let alone the light.

Then there was the high school kid in Atlanta who used his cell phone to take a call from his mother in Iraq. His call was forcibly interrupted by an "educator" who just couldn’t bear such a flagrant violation of the rule against cell phones in school. We love the letter of the law and to hell with the spirit. I have no empirical evidence to prove this assertion, but I’m pretty sure these rule abusers are the same people who get their view of the world from the corporate media.

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Finally, a little follow-up on our discussion last week of pulpit politics. Reverend Chan Chandler down in North Carolina read the graffiti on the wall and took a hike after failing in his attempt to kick all the Democrats out of his church, but maybe he won’t be treated so rudely in his next job. There’s a bill proposed in Congress to make it legal for the clergy to endorse candidates from the pulpit without jeopardizing the tax exempt status of their church. Hallelujah! Jesus is bored.