Retirement? What retirement?

Last weekend I received my benefits enrollment package from my new employer. Part of this package was forms to enroll in the company's actually quite good retirement plan. I'm eligible for the "catch-up" contribution that you can do when you are over 50, but I had to even think twice about contributing to the plan at all. In the end I bit the bullet and decided to kick in a sizable percentage, but put almost all of it into a fixed rate fund earning just over three percent a year.

People who are close to retirement age, or already in retirement, who are invested in stocks at all, are pretty much screwed at this point. If you're in your twenties or thirties, you have plenty of time to make it up, depending on how long a global economic collapse takes to recover. I'm refusing to even look at my statements, but after having been well along the way to putting away not a lavish, but a solid chunk of money for retirement, I'd say that about half of it is gone. With sixteen years to go. And that's with a relatively balanced investment strategy.

And I'm one of the LUCKY ones, at least so far. I at least have a job (so far) and so does Mr. Brilliant. But it seems like the entire world economy is collapsing, and here we are with a guy in the White House who can't wait to drive away from yet another of the colossal screwups that have characterized his entire sorry-ass life, a Republican ticket consisting of a senile old man in an Ambien sleepwalk, and an apocalyptic white supremacist lunatic; and the electoral Jackie Robinson.

That's not to diminish Barack Obama one bit. The man is ferociously smart, and if anything can be done to try to put this Humpty Dumpty of a nation back together again he can. What worries me is whether he, if he manages to prevail over Sarah Palin's whipping white racists into a frenzy and over Republican attempts to disenfranchise Democratic voters, is going to have the trust of enough of the population and the kind of bold vision it's going to require to even start cleaning up the mess that George W. Bush and his "haves and have-mores" cronies are going to leave him.

For decades, politicians have been telliing us that if you play by the rules you can thrive in this country. Republicans are resorting to their customary "Blame the Negroes" (sic) strategy in deciding that it's minorities having the temerity to think that they should be able to have a piece of the homeownership pie for the global economic collapse. This kind of blamemongering that elevates a minority population into a myth of massive economic power used to be reserved for the Jews. But for Republicans, appeals to racism have always been powerful weapons for them, why should they stop now?

Meanwhile, all over the country, there are American workers who DID take the initiative and make the sacrifice of current spending in order to put money away for retirement. And we are all getting screwed while Henry Paulson shovels more of our money into the pockets of AIG -- while that company plans yet another luxury junket for independent agents as a bribe for selling AIG products.

I've long said that by the time I reach retirement age, they'll be lining baby boomers up against the wall and shooting us -- just because there are so many of us. I used to think this would be a bad thing. Now I'm not so sure. A quick exit might be the best thing by that point.