You have to read this piece today by The New York Times’ Mary Williams Walsh, who, by my way of thinking, has done one of the best jobs in the MSM (and even the non-MSM) in covering the debacle facing the private pensions system.

Walsh chronicles the business strategy of one Robert Miller which can be summed up thus: he buys up struggling companies and turns them around using one central strategy–dumping the company’s pensions plans, ususally on to the federal government’s Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. Here’s what Walsh says: “The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation has become an increasingly popular option for private-capital funds and other investors who are seeking to spin investments in near-bankrupt industrial companies into gold. The key is to shift the responsibility for pensions, which weigh as heavily as bank loans on a company’s balance sheet, to the pension corporation.”

I’ve been watching this for some time and, not too long ago, wondered why the progressive movement isn’t making a much bigger deal out of the destruction of the private pension system in America. I know that part of the reason is that those pensions usually exist only for lucky unionized workers. But, the message that companies are stealing workers’ hard-earned money–pensions, we sometimes forget, are deferred wages–should resonate among a big slice of the population.