I'm in the blue state of CA and we are seeing lots of organized PR around taxpayer bailouts for our public pension funds. It's part of the push to turn everyone against the "highly" paid public worker. But there is more to this story.
Wall Street and large corporation hate our biggest fund CalPers because it is one of the major advocates for real capitalism and shareholder rights. Google "CalPers shareholder rights" and you'll get a cornucopia of information.
Just this week the Financial Times wrote about a major victory in the fight here
Calpers claimed a high-profile scalp this week, as the largest US pension fund by assets under management won a shareholder vote to improve corporate governance at Apple, the second-largest US company by market capitalization.
The non-binding resolution should pave the way for similar reforms to the way board members are elected elsewhere, correcting an anomaly that sees the US as the last developed market not to impose majority voting for directors on listed companies.
“Even Russia, that bastion of shareowner democracy, allows for some form of shareholder director nominations,” says Anne Sheehan, director of corporate governance for the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, which has joined Calpers and Florida’s pension fund in the campaign.
The whole article is very much worth the read to understand just how far down the rabbit hole of oligarchy our financial system has fallen over the decades.
Another news story from the past few weeks is this here
The California Public Employees' Retirement System is suing Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., its ex-executives, and a number of bond underwriters for fraud and of making materially false statements about mortgage-backed securities losses. CalPERS, a $229 billion public pension fund, owned about $700 million Lehman bonds and 3.9 million shares of Lehman bonds when Lehman filed for bankruptcy in September 2008. Because of the economic crisis, CalPERS funds lost $100 billion in value from September 2008 and March 2009.
In its securities fraud complaint, CalPERS accused Lehman of “dramatically” borrowing to fund its real estate investments from 2004 to 2007—high-risk activity that investors were not told about. Other defendants include ex-Lehman Chief Executive Richard S. Fuld Jr., ex-Lehman Chief Financial Officers Erin Callan and Christopher O'Meara, 9 Lehman directors, and 33 others firms, including Wells Fargo Securities, Citigroup Global Markets Inc., and Mellon Financial Markets. The defendants allegedly failed to disclose not just Lehman’s exposure to Alt-A lending and subprime, but also its mortgage-related assets' true value.
The dirty little secret that Wall Street and the Koch brothers want to keep is that Wall Street caused the short fall in revenue to fund public service employees with fair benefit packages not the teachers, firefighters, police and sanitation workers.
We bailed them out when they needed it, shouldn't they now bail taxpayers out now that we need it? They are rolling in the big bonuses again after all.
Addition:
This weekend "Inside Job" won an Oscar for Best Documentary. Most of the MSM has adopted a "radio silence" but Dylan Ratigan did cover this important part of the story. You can view a 10 minute piece including a great interview with Phil Angelides, Chair of the Financial Services Inquiry Commission here at MSNBC
For the text of this go here