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Friday, January 9, 2009
Close to quittin’ time…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
on a Friday afternoon, time for another little bit of travelin’ music, and this one’s a classic.
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Israel accused of blocking aid to wounded civilians
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It is always hard to know what is really happening in a war zone. First reports are always wrong, as the saying goes. And in its invasion of Gaza, Israel has contributed to the problem by refusing to allow journalists to view events firsthand.
However, if true and authenticated by later reporting, this graphic story coming out of Gaza — reported in The Washington Post — is chilling. The editors at the Post surely understood the gravity of the allegations before going to print, and I’m sure made every effort to nail it down.
“JERUSALEM, Jan. 9 — Emergency workers said they rescued 100 more trapped survivors Thursday and found between 40 and 50 corpses in a devastated residential block south of Gaza City that the Israeli military had kept off-limits to the International Committee of the Red Cross for four days.
Relief agencies said they feared more people remained in the rubble of several shattered houses in the Zaytoun neighborhood. Red Cross officials said that they began receiving distress calls from people in the houses late Saturday but that they were blocked by the Israeli military from reaching the area until Wednesday.
“There are still people under demolished houses — we are sure of it,” said Khaled Abuzaid, an ambulance driver for the Red Cross who treated survivors at the site Wednesday and Thursday. “But without water or electricity, we are sure they will die.”
In an interview at al-Quds Hospital, a Red Cross medical center in Gaza, Abuzaid said rescue workers found 16 bodies Wednesday in a large room of a house in Zaytoun: seven women, six children and three men, all members of the al-Samuni family.
Most had sustained trauma injuries from shelling, but many had gunshot wounds as well, he said. Four children, weak but alive, were found lying under blankets, nestled next to their dead mothers, Abuzaid said. Red Cross officials had said earlier that 12 adult bodies had been found in the house but otherwise corroborated Abuzaid’s account.
He said Israeli soldiers told the crew of Red Cross and Palestinian Red Crescent workers in advance that they were forbidden to take cameras, radios or cellphones to the site. It is standard practice for crews to carry such equipment on rescue missions.
The Red Cross has accused the Israeli military of repeatedly refusing to grant permission for ambulances to go to Zaytoun, even though soldiers were stationed outside the damaged houses and were aware people were wounded inside. In a statement issued early Thursday, the agency called the episode “unacceptable” and said the Israeli military had “failed to meet its obligation under international humanitarian law to care for and evacuate the wounded.”
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Why Social Security is not a 401(k)
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“The stock-market rout has ignited a crisis of confidence for millions of Americans who manage their own retirement savings through 401(k) plans.
After watching her account drop 44% last year, Kristine Gardner, a 35-year-old information-technology project manager in Longview, Wash., feels no sense of security. “There’s just no guarantee that when you’re ready to retire you’re going to have the money,” she says. “You either put it in a money market which pays 1%, which isn’t enough to retire, or you expose yourself to huge market risk and you can lose half your retirement in one year.”
Many retirement experts have come to a similar conclusion: The 401(k) system, which has turned countless amateurs like Ms. Gardner into their own pension-fund managers, has serious shortcomings.
“This is the biggest test that the 401(k) plan has seen to date, and it has failed,” says Robyn Credico, head of defined-contribution consulting at Watson Wyatt Worldwide, noting that many baby boomers are ready to retire. “We’ve put people close to retirement in a very challenging position.”
The most obvious pitfall is that 401(k) plans shift all retirement-planning risks — not saving enough, making poor investment choices, outliving savings — to untrained individuals, who often don’t have the time, inclination or know-how to manage them. But even when workers make good choices, a market meltdown near the end of their working careers can still blow their savings to smithereens.
‘That seems like such a fundamental flaw,’ says Alicia Munnell, director of Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research. ‘It’s so crazy to have a system where people can lose half their assets right before they retire.’”
Like most people, I’ve taken a pretty big hit in my 401(k) plan. But I don’t think you can blame that on a flaw in the program, nor is there any way to regulate the risk out of such a system. If you get a stock market crash of this magnitude, any stock-based retirement plan is going to be hurt. Period. I understand the impact it has had on people close to or in retirement, but there’s no solution to it.
However, this is a damn fine illustration why it would have been foolish to tie Social Security benefits to the market. If SSI payments had fallen in addition to the collapse of 401(k) accounts, the pain would have been doubled for millions of people. As it is, the defined-benefit basis of Social Security at least provides a firewall in retirement.
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