Less than a year ago, the Wall Street Journal
alerted its national readership to what was happening in the tiny state
of Rhode Island. In a story headlined “Small State Gets Big Pension
Push,” the paper noted that the state’s “rollback of public-employee
retirement benefits has turned (it) into a national battleground over
pensions.” With the help of billionaire former Enron trader John Arnold and his partnership with the Pew Charitable Trusts,
conservative ideologues and Wall Street profiteers who engineered Rhode
Island’s big pension cuts were looking to export those “reforms” to
other states. Now, after two huge revelations in the last few days, we
know more about what that means in practice — we know the kind of
corruption and damage the “reforms” mean for taxpayers and retirees, and
we know what kind of new muscle is behind the effort to bring that
corruption and destruction to other states...
The full article is at http://www.salon.com/2013/10/23/wall_streets_favorite_democrat_wants_your_pension/
As we continue to point out on this blog, the forces behind the newly-filed anti-pension/anti-retiree health care initiative that covers UC consist of more than a handful of California mayors who are the public front for the effort. There is a Regents meeting coming up in November. Will there be discussion of this matter? Anyone telling UC president Napolitano she has a "problem"? Will there be some charts and graphs introduced by the president explaining what the initiative, applied to UC, will mean to the university budget? The impact on CURRENT employees and the campuses will be dramatic. The governor has been attending Regents meetings. Anyone talking to him? If he starts doing the math on what this means for UC, CalPERS, and CalSTRS, he might be in for a shock. Anyone at the Dept. of Finance telling him? Is the Legislative Analyst talking to the legislature?
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