Here's a brief excerpt from Matt Taibbi's
Rolling Stone article Looting the Pension Funds:
Today, the same Wall Street crowd that caused the crash is not merely rolling in money again but aggressively counterattacking on the public-relations front. The battle increasingly centers around public funds like state and municipal pensions. This war isn't just about money. Crucially, in ways invisible to most Americans, it's also about blame. In state after state, politicians are following the Rhode Island playbook, using scare tactics and lavishly funded PR campaigns to cast teachers, firefighters and cops – not bankers – as the budget-devouring boogeymen responsible for the mounting fiscal problems of America's states and cities.
Not only did these middle-class workers already lose huge chunks of retirement money to huckster financiers in the crash, and not only are they now being asked to take the long-term hit for those years of greed and speculative excess, but in many cases they're also being forced to sit by and watch helplessly as Gordon Gekko wanna-be's like Loeb or scorched-earth takeover artists like Bain Capital are put in charge of their retirement savings.
It's a scam of almost unmatchable balls and cruelty, accomplished with the aid of some singularly spineless politicians. And it hasn't happened overnight. This has been in the works for decades, and the fighting has been dirty all the way.
There's $2.6 trillion in state pension money under management in America, and there are a lot of fingers in that pie. Any attempt to make a neat Aesop narrative about what's wrong with the system would inevitably be an oversimplification. But in this hugely contentious, often overheated national controversy – which at times has pitted private-sector workers who've mostly lost their benefits already against public-sector workers who are merely about to lose them – two key angles have gone largely unreported. Namely: who got us into this mess, and who's now being paid to get us out of it.
The siege of America's public-fund money really began nearly 40 years ago, in 1974, when Congress passed the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, or ERISA. In theory, this sweeping regulatory legislation was designed to protect the retirement money of workers with pension plans. ERISA forces employers to provide information about where pension money is being invested, gives employees the right to sue for breaches of fiduciary duty, and imposes a conservative "prudent man" rule on the managers of retiree funds, dictating that they must make sensible investments and seek to minimize loss. But this landmark worker-protection law left open a major loophole: It didn't cover public pensions. Some states were balking at federal oversight, and lawmakers, naively perhaps, simply never contemplated the possibility of local governments robbing their own workers.
Politicians quickly learned to take liberties. One common tactic involved illegally borrowing cash from public retirement funds to finance other budget needs. [...]
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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2004—Violence in Iraq Belies Claims of Calm, Data Show:
One of the best foreign correspondents writing for the SCLM is Rajiv Chandrasekaran(WaPo). if I'm not mistaken, he actually tells us at times he can't get out and about in Iraq, so parts of the stories are from Iraqis who can. Check this out from the Akron Beacon Journal's public editor discussing the paper's reporting of 'bad news':
"I used to jump in a car and drive out to places like Fallujah and Baqubah to write about attacks, to get a sense of what was really happening on the ground. No longer," Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Baghdad bureau chief for the Washington Post, said in an online chat last week. "The roads are too dangerous, the threat of kidnapping too great." |
Imagine another reporter admitting to that? Judith Miller, take notes. |
Tweet of the Day:
House Republicans Issue Ransom Demand: Implement Romney Plan or the Economy Gets It
http://t.co/... #4jobs #2futures #p2 #tcot
— @BlueDuPage
On
today's Kagro in the Morning show: A KITM filibuster today! (And it was great.) We unraveled the non-filibuster Cruzapalooza situation, then went right from
Greg Dworkin's round-up (ACA polling, GOP civil war skirmishing, WaPo's "How eight lives would be affected by the health law") to
Armando's exploration of a possible "Grand Bargain" on the ACA and the sequester, to
GideonAB's thoughts linking campaign finance reform, obesity and national security! (Seriously, it worked!)
High Impact Posts. Top Comments. Overnight News Digest.