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Richard and Joe discuss problems with the pension system and potential solutions to protect the pension plans of retirees with Ed Beltram and Karen Freidman.
Ed Beltram
As the Vice President – Communications for the National Retiree Legislative Network (RLN) since 2008, Ed Beltram brings five decades of diverse communications experience to his position. He has served as a metropolitan newspaper reporter, a public information officer for an Oklahoma education agency and a public relations manager for a major food processing company. Ed retired from Lucent Technologies (now Nokia) in 2001 with 31 years of service. For 28 of those years, he was the communications and human resources manager at the company’s telecommunications equipment manufacturing plant in Oklahoma City. The last three years were in Denver where he had communications responsibility for the company’s sales teams in the western half of the country. He had many years of community service in Oklahoma City on boards of directors including Junior Achievement, Boy Scouts of America Council, Leadership Oklahoma City and Food Bank. He and his wife, Sherry, live in Woodland Park, Colorado.

National Retiree Legislative Network
Based in Washington, D.C., the National Retiree Legislative Network (NRLN) is dedicated to representing the interests of retirees and future retirees. Formed in 2002, the NRLN endeavors to secure federal legislation for retirement income security and reduce the cost of health care along with preserving Social Security and Medicare. The NRLN is a non-profit, non-partisan, grassroots coalition representing more than 2 million retirees who came to the NRLN from retiree associations, NRLN chapters and as individual members who have retired from nearly 200 different U.S. corporations and public entities. Members live in all 50 states and practically all Congressional districts and are working together to preserve the retirement benefits they earned during their many years of employment. For more information about the NRLN, visit our website at www.nrln.org and www.facebook/nrln1.

Karen Friedman
Karen Friedman is the Executive Vice President and Policy Director of the Pension Rights Center, the country’s only consumer rights organization that works exclusively to promote and protect the retirement security of workers, retirees and their families. For more than 25 years, Karen has worked to shape and implement public policy and strategies and solutions to improve the nation’s retirement income programs and provides a uniquely creative voice in finding innovative ways to promote the issue.

Karen directs the “Pension Promises Campaign” to promote comprehensive solutions to improve the funding of underfunded multiemployer plans, while protecting retirees’ benefits, and is also leading PRC efforts to develop retirement plans that serve today’s and tomorrow’s retirees. She coordinated Retirement USA to promote the need for a new universal, secure and adequate pension system on top of Social Security, and also developed and directed the Conversation on Coverage, an unprecedented seven-year-long national public policy dialogue to bring together experts of divergent views to develop common ground solutions to expand pensions and savings. A graduate of Georgetown University, Karen was named one of the top 40 Influencers of Pension Policy by Institutional Magazine and is a member of the National Academy of Social Insurance.

Pension Rights Center
Founded in 1976, the Pension Rights Center is a nonprofit consumer organization committed to protecting and promoting the retirement security of American workers, retirees, and their families. For more than four decades, the Center has acted as a consumer watchdog to preserve key protections, secured the adoption of a dozen federal laws and regulations, helped thousands of people obtain wrongfully-denied pensions, authored numerous publications to explain complex rules, and served as an indispensable resource for the media. The Center has an unparalleled reputation for credibility, hard work, and an untiring commitment to securing economic justice for America’s workers, retirees, and their families.

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