17 IV. A COMMENT ON US PENSION FUND HISTORY I want to make a few comments about the histo- ry of US pension funds because I have a different viewpoint from that of the official narrative. After World War II, the United States lead the implementation of the Bretton Woods System, building and enforcing a global open trade model. To take advantage of this model, it was important to the US leadership to create a stable labor force and maintain stable labor relations. Pension funds were one of the benefits used to create those stable relations. Pension funds also helped to centralize capital to finance the growth of the large multinational corporations designed to compete successful- ly in the Bretton Woods system. Instead of workers taking home their full pay and saving privately, corporations created a vehicle where- by employees put a certain portion of their pay into a centrally controlled pool. This served as a form of capital aggregation and control. I often refer to the Department of Justice as being in charge of the “control, centralization and concentration of cash flow.” I call the Patriot Act the ‘Control and Concentration of Cash Flow Act’. Promoting centralized pension vehicles has been part of this effort to control capital. Pension funds helped to shift the Unit- ed States from a country in which most savings were controlled by households to a model characterized by centralized savings into pools that could be managed and directed centrally. This also meant capital could be controlled and invested – even drained – in ways that were remarkably invisible. If you want to build a global juggernaut of both multi-nationals and the national security state, you need an enormous flow of capital. Pension funds were an essential vehicle to control and concentrate cash flow to do so. As the corporate system grew, globalization kicked in. Suddenly you could change your relationship with labor because you could access a labor market globally and play those workers off against each other. The Neoliberal economic and trade experiments in Argentina and Chile pioneered by Professor Milton Friedman and his brethren of the Chicago School of Econom- ics, which had devastating and long-lasting consequences for those countries, are further evidence of Mr. Global’s tampering with prop- erly functioning labor markets. This process was turbocharged after the adaption of the Uruguay Round of GATT and the creation of the World Trade Organization in 1995. If you haven’t watched the Sir James Goldsmith video on globalization, it is a marvelous introduction and explanation of that system and how devastating it has been to labor in Europe, the United States and the developed world. Sir James Goldsmith’s 1994 Globalization Warning Even though globalization renegotiated the corporate relationship with labor, the leadership still wanted and needed to maintain centrally controlled capital. The question was: How do you keep the central control and get out of pro- viding the rich benefits? Of course, switching to defined contribution plans was one of the ways that happened. Dumping pension funds on the PBGC after the agency was created in 1974 was another. The most significant challenge, however, was what would happen when the baby boomers started to retire. Society has aggregated and