Just Books Only: PROFIT

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

RETIREMENT HEIST: How Companies Plunder and Profit From the Nest Eggs of American Workers

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Washington Post book reviewers

Nov 25, 2011 ARCHIVES | Entertainment | COLUMNS

Ellen E. Schultz
Portfolio
ISBN 978-1591843337
245 pages
$26.95

Reviewed by Kelly Johnson

Hey, Occupy Wall Street. Here's a book to rally around. Looking for a study of the wealth disparity that's sent you to the streets? Ellen E. Schultz offers a guide. "Retirement Heist" is a concise and alarming look at how - in the span of a generation - the 1 percent has looted the futures of the 99 percent.

Schultz wields expertise from years of investigative reporting on the retirement crisis for the Wall Street Journal. Time was, she writes, when pension funds had "such massive surpluses that the companies could have fully paid their current and future retirees' pensions, even if all of them lived to be ninety-nine and the companies never contributed another dime."

With slick accounting tricks, Schultz writes, corporate America has funneled billions of dollars out of pension funds. Many companies used the money to pay for downsizing - covering early-retirement buyouts, which are considered voluntary, instead of imposing a layoff and cash severance. Some funds were simply terminated, and the money was used to offset operating expenses. And so, company by company, a great surplus dwindled.

To replenish the pension funds, companies cut benefits, Schultz writes. Their gains were immediate: Earnings got a boost. The companies' obligations were cut. Their bottom lines were bolstered. It took much longer for workers' losses to register: In many of the cases Schultz cites, workers realized the damage only once they were old and sick and had little in the way of resources to embark on a protracted legal battle.

It's utterly depressing, and that's just the start. Having plundered the pensions, companies exploited 401(k) plans to borrow money cheaply. With pensions underfunded or frozen, they dug into retiree health plans. The trend of tying executive pay to performance only made matters worse, Schultz explains, leading, for instance, to the death-benefit bamboozle, whereby companies take out life insurance policies on their employees. When a worker dies, even if he's long since found other work or retired, the company cashes in on the death benefit, tax-free. In many of these cases, the payout to the company dwarfs whatever benefit might go to the next of kin.

Schultz provides an anatomy of every abomination and shows how it unfolded in individual lives. The aggrieved were engineers and miners, pro football players and pilots. Distressingly, they appeared powerless to stop this bilking or defend themselves against it. If the retirement industry isn't reined in, she concludes, we'll be right back where we were in the 1930s, and "society - and taxpayers - will be paying for services to support the millions of elderly, formerly middle-class Americans."

Kelly Johnson can be reached at johnsonkl(at)washpost.com.

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Thursday, September 1, 2011

WRITING MOVIES FOR FUN AND PROFIT: How We Made a Billion Dollars at the Box Office and You Can, Too!

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Washington Post book reviewers

Aug 5, 2011 ARCHIVES | Entertainment | COLUMNS

Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon
Touchstone
ISBN 978-1439186756
322 pages
$23.99

Reviewed by Louis Bayard

Who exactly are the intended readers for "Writing Movies for Fun and Profit"? Nominally, it's an instruction manual that covers everything from the best screenwriting software (Final Draft) to the correct length of a script (100 to 110 pages for a comedy, a little more for a drama) to the arcana of pitch meetings and credits and arbitration.

But who are we kidding? That book isn't this book. The book whose authors are pictured in bikinis, waving sheaves of cash. The book with the gallery of mock-testimonials. (Paul Rudd: "These guys are proof that with no training and little education, anyone can make it as a screenwriter.") The book that superstrikes the word "fun" each time it crops up and litters every page with block letters.

"Oscar Wilde we ain't," declare Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon, and they prove their point with the following quip: "Writing and drinking go together like Oscar Wilde and little boys." It's hardly worth noting that Wilde liked grown men. This is just the kind of blunderbuss joke we might expect from the scenarists behind "Herbie: Fully Loaded" ("a total piece of (expletive)," they acknowledge), "Balls of Fury" (guys playing Ping Pong) and, most profitably, "Night at the Museum," which became, while my head was turned, the highest-grossing live-action comedy of all time.

Truth be told, it's part of the authors' charm that they freely recognize, and revel in, their lowbrow status. "Writing Movies" hails not from the Cahiers du Cinema but from the belly of the beast, and it glitters with bottom-feeder wisdom. "If all else fails: ADD THE WORDS 'IN 3-D' UNDERNEATH YOUR TITLE ON THE TITLE PAGE."

A modern-day auteurist might cling to the notion that art, or something like it, emerges from this morass of contracts and severance, perks and parking spots, memos and conference calls and draft piled upon draft. Garant and Lennon beg to differ: "Making a truly great studio film, given the parameters and the number of people involved, is ... almost impossible."

And, like SoCal Machiavellis, they would have us give up on the very idea of a great film. "No one asks movies to be complicated or challenging or enlightening -- They just want movies to be entertaining. That's why they paid their 11 bucks." In one breath, the authors are crowing about how much money they've earned; in the next, they're taking potshots at indie filmmakers such as David Lynch. "Ninety-five percent of Americans, if you forced them to watch 'Eraserhead,' would want to punch that movie in the face and would punch YOU in the face for making them watch it."

I now hazard a prediction that "Eraserhead" will enjoy a much longer afterlife than "Night at the Museum." Samuel Johnson may have been right when he said that no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. But what of the blockheads who write for nothing but money?

A slim distinction, maybe, and in this case, maybe pointless. Garant and Lennon are card-carrying cards, co-creators of Comedy Central's blowzily funny "Reno 911!" mockumentary. More than creators, participants: Lennon's hot-panted Lt. Dangle has joined Steve Carrell's Michael Scott in the annals of ineffectual TV bosses. The suspicion arises that the "authors" of "Writing Movies" are just a couple more characters in the Garant-Lennon canon and that somewhere behind this smoke screen of capitalist gloating, two clever Bolsheviks are having a good laugh at the Hollywood tsars.

Or else they're just making another pile of dough.

Louis Bayard is a novelist and reviewer. His most recent book is "The School of Night."