But fresh starts for a company like Westinghouse aren’t so easy anymore. Westinghouse, which messed up its industrial businesses for decades and blew about 5 billion bucks in the financial-services biz, can’t just send the broadcasting company off to begin life anew. Reason: the Feds, specifically the U.S. Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. (PBGC), a little-known agency that guarantees workers’ pensions up to about $32,000 a year. Westinghouse, you see, has a hole in its pension fund big enough to swallow a few of the nuclear generators the company used to make during its heyday. And the Feds don’t want Westinghouse leaving its pensioners in the lurch.
Here’s the full story. Westinghouse estimates that its pension funds have $1.5 billion less in assets than the claims of current and prospective retirees. Though it would dearly love to do so, the broadcasting company can’t just walk away from those obligations, all but $50 million of which are owed to industrial workers. Why? Because, fortunately, pension laws won’t allow it. Thanks to changes often overlooked on Wall Street, companies can no longer merely split into pieces and, in the process, leave underfunded pensions behind.
Without a deal, the new broadcasting company will remain obligated to honor the industrial company’s pensions. That wouldn’t much please Wall Street, because it would effectively add $1.4 billion to the $5.8 billion in debt that the broadcast company will inherit in the split. That would be a bummer for Westinghouse’s stock price, the elevation of which is the main point of the exercise. To get the broadcasting company off the hook and make the Street happy, then, Westinghouse has to make the PBGC happy. It will probably do so by tossing more cash or stock into the funds, or by having the broadcasting company guarantee some pension obligations.
This isn’t just Westinghouse’s problem. Take a look at last week’s announcement involving the pension agency, AT&T and AT&T’s computer subsidiary, NCR. AT&T plans to make NCR a separate company on Dec. 31. To ensure that AT&T won’t get stuck for its subsidiary’s slightly underfunded plans, NCR agreed to pay more into its pension funds than would otherwise be required. It also gave the funds a claim on $80 million worth of corporate property.
Note: the Feds put the screws to NCR over a shortfall amounting to only $85 million by the company’s math. That’s peanuts. Westinghouse, by contrast, has for years been near the top of the PBGC’s annual list of the biggest pension shortages. Companies like GM and Chrysler had multibillion-dollar shortfalls a few years ago, but took care of the problem by sticking oodles of cash and securities into their pension funds during their recent fat years. By contrast, Westinghouse, which hired Michael Jordan as chairman in 1993, hasn’t had any fat years.
Pension problems? What problems? Westinghouse says that its new industrial companies will begin life free of debt and will have no problem keeping up their pension payments, which over a period of years will cover today’s shortfalls. Maybe so, but don’t bet on it. Clearly, the Feds won’t. They’ll recognize the obvious: that Westinghouse’s pensioners would be more secure if they had claims on both the industrial and the broadcasting businesses, as they do now. The agency and Westinghouse have been talking since May, and you can expect the PBGC to extract a nice, fat settlement before blessing any split. Look for a deal to be struck by next summer, when the split is supposed to take place.
Workers should be cheering. So should taxpayers, whose credit backs the agency’s pension guarantees. Fresh starts are all well and good. But so is the idea of making corporations clean up their pensions before giving them one.
title: “Breaking Up Is Hard To Do” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-04” author: “Isidra Baker”
Nick Hornby’s novel was set in London. Screenwriters D. V. DeVincentis, Steve Pink, Cusack and Scott Rosenberg wittily reset it in Chicago, and Stephen Frears directs with unassuming brio. “High Fidelity” is a sympathetic but unusually incisive portrait of the stunted male ego, perpetually trapped in an adolescent tape loop of sexual insecurity, paranoia and fantasy. Rob–who pours out his woes directly to the camera, taking us into his confidence–is a deeply flawed guy, but it’s impossible not to like him or cheer him on as he stumbles his way into belated adulthood. Cusack is a master at playing smart, frazzled, self-flagellating hipsters, and the movie, propelled by his arias of angst, lets him strut his best stuff.
Cusack may be in every scene, but he’s not the only source of hilarity. At his store, he is saddled with two employees so far gone in their musical geekdom as to make Rob seem a model of sanity. Todd Louiso, as the pale, tremulous, socially retarded Dick, and Jack Black, as the bullying, volatile musical snob Barry, are the movie’s inspired Laurel and Hardy. Among the women past and present in Rob’s life are Lili Taylor, Lisa Bonet, Joelle Carter and Catherine Zeta-Jones, all of whom shine. But it’s Hjejle’s slightly chilly Laura, an intriguing mix of masculine and feminine, about whom Rob obsesses like a broken record. Can he win her back? This romantic-comedy trope is the least compelling part of the movie: there’s no great spark between the actors. Even so, “High Fidelity” never feels formulaic. It’s an inside job, refreshingly specific. You don’t feel there were armies of studio execs breathing down the filmmakers’ necks, trying to reach for the lowest common denominator. “It wasn’t spectacular,” Rob reminisces about first meeting Laura. “Just good–really good.” The same could be said for “High Fidelity.”
High FidelityDisney Opens March 31
title: “Breaking Up Is Hard To Do” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-27” author: “Barry Lamp”
If gay couples think it’s tough to get married, they may find it’s even harder to split up. Few want to think about it on the way to the altar, but “we’re not immune to relationship problems,” says David Buckel, an attorney who directs the marriage project at Lambda Legal. Though all it takes is a romantic weekend to tie the knot under Canada’s just-passed same-sex marriage law or get linked by civil union in Vermont, both places require at least one member of the couple to establish residency for a year before granting a divorce or official dissolution. Of the roughly 5,000 civil unions performed so far in Vermont, the only state that legally recognizes the same-sex commitments, 85 percent went to out-of-staters.
That has left other states grappling with what to do when civil unions sour–and whether standard divorce laws can apply. A West Virginia family-court judge agreed to use divorce laws to dissolve a civil union there last year. But Connecticut courts dismissed the divorce case filed by Glen Rosengarten, who decided to end his 15-year relationship shortly after he and his partner got a civil union in Vermont. Dying of AIDS, Rosengarten wanted to preserve his estate for children from an earlier marriage, says his lawyer Gary I. Cohen. “He had incredible anxiety about it–he really wanted closure in his life,” Cohen says. Rosengarten appealed to the state Supreme Court, but died before the case was heard. Medical bills ate up his estate, so inheritance became a moot point too.
Without access to divorce, all the benefits gay couples get with a civil union–shared property, adoption rights, insurance–must be undone one by one. If they can’t dissolve the union, they may not be free to enter into a new union or marriage, either. “It shoves gay people into a no man’s land where they have to fight it out for themselves,” says Evan Wolfson, director of Freedom to Marry. “Because it’s not marriage, people don’t have one of the automatic protections that comes with marriage.” Gay couples can’t hope to erase the pain that comes with parting. But after last week, there’s at least a chance they may one day get a little more help when things fall apart.
title: “Breaking Up Is Hard To Do” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-26” author: “Eduardo Mollette”
You know, when we met I had hopes and dreams for us, just like any other iPod owner would have. I thought about growing old together and how, in 2050, when the Smithsonian came calling for an iPod to put in its permanent collection, they’d pick you. Why? Because of your unparalleled playlists. On “Summer Lovin’,” as an August sun set, we’d start with Mozart’s “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik,” which would transition, almost too perfectly, into Gershwin’s “Summertime,” then merge, seamlessly, into “Legs.” OK, well, maybe we could do without the ZZ Top, but you know… I’m sorry, I’m just really confused right now.
What I don’t understand is why you choose not to be so many of the things you could be to me, mainly a means to expand my musical horizons. (Thanks, though, for drowning out the impromptu mariachi bands on the subway. That’s nice.) Time and again I put hip, new albums on you, power you up–then find myself inexplicably turning your little wheel until I hit some old, familiar favorite. And it’s never one that’s going to get me dancing, like in your ads. It’s usually some ridiculously depressing song from high school that I’ve rediscovered, like Morrissey’s “Everyday Is Like Sunday”–on a Wednesday, no less. I mean, how could you let me go on such sad iTunes benders? If you loved me, you wouldn’t let me buy “Oh Sherrie,” “Sister Christian” and “Eye of the Tiger” in one sitting. You and your insatiable appetite for ’80s songs, I swear.
I don’t like who I am anymore when I’m with you. Before you entered my life (I’ll never forget that cold, December night… or was it January?), I’d put a disc in my CD Walkman and let that band rock me until it could rock no more, even if every song on the album wasn’t a winner. You, with your hundreds of options, have turned me into some sort of iJunkie: every tune has to take me higher than the one before it. No human being can handle the pop perfection that is Fountains of Wayne, followed by a few from Squeeze, and Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.,” and not be in a sugar coma for the rest of the day. I’ve got a job to do, all right?
iPod, I love you, I really do. I want you to know, that despite everything, I’m glad we had our time together. But I think we have irreconcilable differences. Plus, I’ve kind of been eying a Mini.
Love, Bret
