The man had gone to a bank machine in his neighborhood to withdraw some money. As he was leaving the machine, he was jumped by two, large plainclothes men. They threw him onto the concrete sidewalk, face down, and jumped on him, pinning him to the ground. Two more beefcakes joined in the assault. They removed his identification papers from his pockets, looked through them, and then stood up. "Sorry," they said, "looks like we have the wrong person." They gave him a business card, identifying themselves as RCMP officers (Canada's federal police), and then walked away.

The man stumbled home and an ambulance was called. The hospital diagnosed him with several cracked ribs, lacerations to his face and other parts of the body, and possible internal injuries. He is looking for legal help, but in the meantime cannot return to his job as a drywall installer. "This is what happened all the time in Portugal before 1974," my co-worker recalled. He grew up there. In 1974, a popular revolution overthrew a fascist dictatorship that had been in power for many decades.

Roger Annis
Vancouver, British Columbia  
 
Railroad retirement system
For many months now, officials of the United Transportation Union, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, and the other railroad unions, have waged a loud campaign promoting the "Railroad Retirement and Survivors' Improvement Act of 2001." This bill, which has been approved by wide margins in Congress, would provide for modest improvement in rail workers' pensions and reductions in the age of retirement. It would allow money placed into the Railroad Retirement system to be put in stocks and bonds on the private capital market.

Such a program ties rail workers' retirement funds directly to the ups and downs of the stock market and the capitalist economy as a whole. The California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS), one of the largest pension funds in the country, is reported to have lost around $40 million from its holdings in the collapsed energy company Enron, for example. The California teachers' retirement fund lost around $20 million from Enron stock. While direct investment in Enron stock constituted a small percentage of CalPERS's huge holdings, it points to the vulnerability of workers' pension funds as the capitalist economy goes into recession. Workers' pension funds today constitute enormous sums of money available for use by the capitalists. Since 1993, CalPERS had put up more than $400 million to fund various Enron energy development projects, from which, according to one pension fund official, they were lucky to get out of without losing money. The railroad retirement scheme now before Congress simply hands billions of dollars over to Wall Street banks and investment houses to use as they see fit.

Jim Altenberg
San Francisco, California

The letters column is an open forum for all viewpoints on subjects of interest to working people.

Please keep your letters brief. Where necessary they will be abridged. Please indicate if you prefer that your initials be used rather than your full name.  
 
 
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