The Public Pension "Crisis" Is Just the Latest Unprosecuted Wall Street Crime

There is no repository of public funds that the banksters have not looted with impunity so that taxpayers have to not only suffer the loss of their money, but pay double to replace what Wall Street stole.

In Kentucky, nonprofit agencies lured into the state pension system are filing suit to get out before they lose every last penny.

Mike Wynn at the Courier:

Two more quasi-governmental agencies have filed suit to pull out of the state’s troubled retirement system, arguing that they should have never been allowed to join the pension plan more than a decade ago.

Frontier Housing in Morehead and Housing Oriented Ministries Established for Service in Whitesburg filed the joint complaint in Franklin Circuit Court last week.

They are asking a judge to declare them ineligible to participate in the County Employees Retirement System, which faces more than $6.2 billion in unfunded liabilities.

SNIP

CERS is the largest of several pension plans at Kentucky Retirement Systems — the pension program for state and local workers that has $17 billion in unfunded liabilities and administers one of the worst-funded plans in the nation.

In Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi explains how Wall Street is stealing funds for public pensions.

Or watch the video as Matt Taibbi joins Amy Goodman, and Juan Gonzalez of Democracy Now! to discuss his new article.

Matt Taibbi: "The primary focus of my piece, there were a couple of things. Number one, how did these funds come to be broke the first place? I think everyone realizes that states are in fiscal crises or having trouble paying out their obligations to workers. One of the reasons is that at least 14 states have not been making their annual required contributions to the pension fund for years and years and years. So essentially, they have been illegally borrowing from these pension funds, sometimes going back decades. Another focus of the piece was the solution that a lot of sort of Wall Street funded think tanks are coming up with now is to get higher returns by putting these funds into alternative investments like hedge funds. In a lot of cases what I’m finding is that the fees that states are paying for these new hedge funds and these new types of alternatives investments are actually roughly equal to the cuts that they are taking from workers. Like in the state of Rhode Island, for instance, they have frozen the cost of living adjustment and the frozen cola roughly equals the fees that they’re paying to hedge funds in that state. So essentially it is a wealth transfer from teachers, cops, and firemen to billionaire hedge-funders."

 Time to face facts: Wall Street is no longer an asset to the U.S. or world economy, if it ever was.  It is now a monster liability that we can no longer afford.

Imprison everybody involved in financial speculation, confiscate all their assets, burn Wall Street to the ground and salt the earth so nothing rises there again.