Greedy Conservative Millionaires and Billionaires are Coming After your Pension

http://www.occupydemocrats.com/riches-beyond-the-dreams-of-avarice/

For months during last year’s presidential campaign, there was much said about the Republican tax plan and its creative inaccuracy that was satirized by President Clinton, in his terrific speech at the Democratic National Convention that become known as… “It’s arithmetic.”

At the same time, there were a number of threats by Republican Oligarchs against the job security of their employees over Obamacare, and now their cause du jour is pension reform.  What these CEO’s all have in common besides their hatred for the President is that they are either billionaires or billionaire wannabes.

In a post yesterday by Pulitzer Prize winning author Gary Cohn, “A Hedge-Fund Billionaire From Texas is Waging War on California Pensions”, brings to the our attention the efforts of John Arnold and The Arnold Foundation, a Texas based foundation which according to Cohn “is clearly in the forefront of nationwide efforts to scale back pensions for state and municipal workers.”  Arnold sponsored a secret pension summit along with David Koch, at which they had their representatives and representatives of several California based secular and religious based organizations whose mission is to privatize pension plans under the guise of fiscal responsibility.  They attempted to suggest despite its secrecy that it was a bi-partisan gathering of the fiscally concerned. The token democrat was San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed, who has opposed same-sex marriage and the raising of minimum wage and now he is a pension-cutter.

“The current system has allowed politicians to promise one level of benefits without fully funding them,” the Arnold Foundation’s McGee told Frying Pan News in an email last week. “Across the U.S., state and local governments have underfunded workers’ benefits by at least $1 trillion.” McGee added that: “We discussed the need to deal responsibly with accumulated pension debt, secure benefits that have already been earned, and create a system that is affordable, sustainable, and secure.”

There is no question that reform is necessary because some of the pension funds that rely upon investment to fund future liabilities have had difficulty.  CalPERS is the giant investment fund that supports California’s public employee retirement system and its ability to do that has a lot to do with how well it does with its return on investments. According to its mission statement “CalPERS has generated strong long-term returns by effectively managing investments to achieve the highest possible return at an acceptable level of risk. CalPERS portfolio is diversified into several asset classes, so any weaknesses in one area are offset by gains in another. The Board follows a strategic asset allocation policy that targets the percentage of funds invested in each asset class.” There are obvious concerns given significant unfunded liabilities that CalPERS succeeds in its mission. To protect itself, California under Gerry Brown has implemented contentious pension reforms, with claims for exemptions now making their way through the Courts.

A former professor, a secular Conservative for whom I have great respect, once said to me “that it is a silly way of living to aim at amassing vastly more money than one would possibly need, but a lot of people live silly lives.” It is hard to believe that Arnold, Koch, Adelson, and the Waltons, just to name a few are silly rich, and in the words of my professor, continue to live silly lives.

These Republican Oligarchs have “riches beyond the dreams of avarice”, a well-known line uttered by Dr. McCoy in Star Trek IV,  but actually attributed to the 18th Century poet and essayist Samuel Johnson. It is a wonderful quote, which is poetic in its flow.  Avarice according to Webster means an ‘insatiable desire for wealth or greed’– Johnson is trying to tell us that certain people have a desire for riches beyond their dreams for greed.

These folks are not civic minded and not concerned about unfunded pension liability. It is not likely that any municipality’s inability to meet its pension demands will affect any of these people directly. It is much more likely they just want to generate more access to more income and wealth. Given the conservative nature and mission of organizations like CalPERS, these Right wing Oligarchs have limited access to the pension fund’s billions. They are looking for the pension fund equivalent of deregulation, in order to complete their access to the middle class’s money that began with the repeal of Glass-Steagall.

What is really behind the Right’s push for pension reform advocated by former San Diego Republican mayoral candidate, San Diego City council member Carl DeMaio, who is also a Fellow at the libertarian leaning Reason Foundation, and attendee at the Arnold Foundation secret meeting, has been a push to replace San Diego city employees’ pensions with a 401(k)-type substitute. It sounds like simple Arithmetic—a whole lot less concern about underfunded pension commitments, and unrestricted access for the Arnold’s of the world to the billions in more business for his Hedge Fund and Wall Street.