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Cinema Verité? (Hardly)
Some of the most frightening
and nightmarish themes or concepts can be found in, of all things, children’s literature
and film. Hansel and Gretel face likely
cannibalism trudging through the deep woods, a Little Red Riding Hood looks under
the blanket for a loving grandmother but finds a ravenous wolf, three little
pigs build homes hoping for a safe future and find anything but, etc. It seems life can digest pretty much all our
hoped-for dreams.
Now, in a new film created
under Governor Pat Quinn’s signature direction, Grimm’s redundant themes of a
safe future cut untimely short for the innocent is once again manifested (on
the little screen).
The Pension
Squeeze
(
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H62W9iLfKv4
) appears just in time for the late year rush toward both cinema awards and the
Veto Session in Springfield. What makes
the film so very unsettling is not necessarily all the menacing props placed haphazardly
within the video: a huge carrot-colored cartoon python squeezing our Capitol Building,
a business-type narrator who looks like a thinner version of Ty Fahner, a
pathetically incompetent teacher on a background slide who is about to be eaten
by little Hansels and Gretels.
That last image is a lesser
theme (or leitmotif for you English teachers) of educator incompetence, which
gallops more than runs through all state and Tribune media documentation of
pensions. But I digress. Back to the film.
The well-dressed, unctuous
narrator sprints the audience through over two thousand years of pension
history and describes the simplicity of pensions and how they work in less than
two minutes; on the other hand, he exhorts an authenticity that will give many unprepared
viewers a false sense of veracity. Don’t
be fooled.
For example, “If you
the worker contribute to a pension fund, we the employer will contribute to
that fund AND we’ll invest it with the interest going back into the fund
and when the employee is ready to retire, he or she will receive regular
payments or annuities from the fund.”
Fact Check: TRS, SERS, SURS, and other pension funds are
depositories for the contributions of active workers, and they maintain an
investment service with the annual funds coming from its members. The
State of Illinois does not maintain a commensurate fund nor did it ever.
Once again: “Sometimes the government employers
made smaller payments into the fund than they had promised. And the investments we made with that pension
fund? The Great Recession hit those
investments hard (sound of explosion – narrator cringes).”
Fact Check: Sometimes?
In fact, since 1953, the state of Illinois had made full payment to the pension
fund on just two consecutive annual occasions.
Governor Quinn has been enthusiastic to declare that these two full
pension payments were made during his administration. On the other hand, public employees paid in
fully for every year, 1953 and on. By
the way, there was NO investment
fund for public employees kept by the State of Illinois that was affected by
the Great Recession.
The Pension Squeeze narrator
wrings his hands and laments over the longer lives, earlier retirements, and
increased healthcare costs for public worker retirees. What’s
a state to do? According to our
storyteller these costs are making it impossible to provide for education (shot
of a hopeless student), public safety (image of pained policeman), and public
safety (medical center being buried under orange cartoon snake). Making a specious
if not tenuous connection, the narrator adds “In Illinois the slice of the budget pie devoted to pensions has
tripled in just five years.”
Fact Check: In actuality, the required cost for pensions
for next year will drop from 2012 costs several hundreds of thousands. It is the unfunded liability that the
storyteller conveniently forgets to tell the viewer about that makes for increased
costs: it is not increasing ages, etc.
The unfunded liability is the debt service and interest owed for all
those years the State of Illinois “sometimes” did not pay in what was required.
Several, like Rep. Franks of
Marengo, are criticizing the Office of the Governor for creating something so
“juvenile,” while others like Rep. Tom Cross of Oswego are happy Quinn has
produced something at all (Garcia, Monique & Pearson, Rick. Pension marketing called juvenile. Chicago Tribune. 19 November 2012). Governor Quinn hopes that this video will
become the subject of table talk among families during Thanksgiving and fuel a
new grass-roots movement to…?
Most agree that the video is
short on solutions, but few in the media or in politics have been bold enough
to call it glaringly short on accuracy.
Maybe the best family table
discussions would entertain questions of governmental responsibility, promises not
kept, the consistent undercutting of the middle class, or even an avoidance of
true political statesmanship. To do that
would be to look for real long-term fixes in the chronic, systemic revenue
shortages Illinois faces annually. Some
politicians may suggest we need to first stop the bleeding, but should we do so
by bleeding those who did their part?
Happy Thanksgiving and please
pass the Twinkies.
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