Who says that Google does nothing but taketh away?
In a bit of late-breaking news in a week that's been curiously full of news related to the retirement and investment business – AIG lawsuit and the departure of DOL chief Hilda Solis included – we see that the all-knowing and all-powerful Google has, in a strange turn of fate, helped a couple of Rhode Island communities solve their pension problems.
As an odd but certainly welcome reward for their own work in a federal probe into the super-massive Google's role in distributing ads for illegal prescription drug sales, the cities of North Providence and East Providence can use the money to shore up their pension plans, which were as upsidedown as could be.
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Turns out that Google was forced to forfeit $500 million for turning a blind eye to the online drug ads: Each of those communities rakes in $60 million of that, and rather than buying $60 million worth of fire engines or SWAT team training programs (there's always that seemingly endless Homeland Security money for that), they made a great decision to put the money toward their pension plans.
It's sort of like the biggest Crime Stoppers payoff ever. Sort of.
And quite impressive, actually. Especially considering North Providence and East Providence are indeed like the lottery winner who, given the opportunity to blow his windfall on Lamborghinis and houseboats, decides to invest it wisely. Very mature, indeed.
In a world where everybody else's public pension plan is severely in the red – even the bigger-than-big California Public Employees' Retirement System grudgingly admitted they'd only made 0.14 percent profit last fiscal year, as if they'd put their billions in one of those No Fee Checking Accounts at a bank in a strip mall – it's a nice outcome for a group of hard-working cops and firefighters.
Especially in a state with a particularly troubled pension system, one that's seen its attempts to repair some almost unrepairable shortfalls dragged into federal court.
And as for Google, $500 million sounds like a lot but … we must remember that this is Google we're talking about, not AOL. Ironically, using Google to Google "Google" reveals that the company made a paltry $37.9 billion in 2011.
One suspects there may be more cases of payouts as the king of the search engines (you Alta Vista'd anyone recently?) comes to term with issues ranging from readily accessible movies and TV shows on foreign streaming sites to the whole issue of intellectual copyright – not to mention paying authors and journalists royalties for materials reprinted on the Web.
In the meantime, a nice surprise for the firefighters of Rhode Island. If only the school teachers of Pennsylvania or the retired municipal clerks of Illinois could be so lucky.
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