rick, unwittingly, has found the catch-22 in modern investing. EVERYBODY's EVERYTHING -retirement, college funding, etc... has been pushed into the "free market" of the stock exchange.
man cannot prosper on bonds alone. well, not til greenspan gets nutty and raises prime lending rates to 13% anyway.
before Enron became the feature of a verb(who enroned your ass?), if you had stock in them texans, you invest there and your kid might be able to go to a real college. Hell, Philip Morris changed their name to Altria so people could invest in them with less guilt.
I wish I could pull a Thoreau and tell my broker to avoid certain stocks, but then my kids won't have very much for college in their IRS-protected funds. I dont know day-to-day which 500 companies they might buy or sell on my behalf at any rate.
(They might have to go to ETSU, though I'd prefer OTR truck driving school over that.)
the very idea of modern investing for retiring is for the employee to save a lil cash, avoid taxes, then to take a lil' 401K profit and re-invest it every quarter for 40 years or so.
Once the idea of retirement was a "pension", and the company you worked for had control of the up and down of that. it was plodding, but generally secure for folks who could stick around long enough to divest (work at Tennessee Eastman Co. for about 50 years without dying of cancer, for instance). But now, the folks left working for Eastman don't want their own stinky stock. they want diversity- not in life, but demand it only in their portfolio of course. of course...
to recap our top story, Dick Cheney is still a criminal who should be eating humus in Gitmo. (I'd hate to be the canine on a leash that had to try and scare him) Unless he could get asylumn in Tehran, where his real friends reside, of course.
the real problem with "hell-a-burden" is the shit that has been happening since the war in IRAQ started. you know, the no bid fuck the taxpayer guaranteed contracts and the war profiteering in the last few months.
so lets all put on our flak jackets and camo helmets and sing the war profiteers theme song:
"D-I-C- see you in hell real soon,
K-C-H-E-N-E-Y-
why,
well, go fuck yourself.
Boy, do I feel better,
B-U-S-H-i-t!"
