Pension Cuts & Privatization
Ed. Note: Here are a few stories I came across over the weekend that I thought were important to share. – Cynthia
Retirees Win Pension Fight
A group of retirees whose pensions were cut three years ago have won a lengthy battle with the multibillionaire Ira Rennert, a mining industrialist, onetime junkbond king and owner of a Hamptons mega-mansion.
The retirees’ victory is only the second time in 42 years that the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation has required a company to unwind a pension “termination” — a dreaded deal in which a bankrupt company cuts off a pension fund and leaves it for the government to take over. The government insures company pensions, but its insurance is limited, so retirees can face sharp losses.
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Alarm Bell: Federal Employee Pension Cuts
Politicians in states around the country have moved in recent years to rein in the pensions of government employees, which in many cases had become more generous and less risky than those of their private sector counterparts.
Now that movement may be breaching yet another firewall: the pensions of federal employees.
Last week, the board of the Tennessee Valley Authority Retirement System, the pension program for roughly 11,000 workers and 24,000 retirees at the venerable New Deal-era agency, approved a tentative plan to lower the system’s funding shortfall by reducing benefits. The plan will be implemented later this year if the T.V.A.’s management and board go along with it.
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Charter Schools Today, Private Police Tomorrow
Police unions and associations should keep their eye on all attempts to privatize the public sector. Today it’s the schools and prisons, tomorrow it’s your local law enforcement agency.
In Oakland recently 70 teachers showed up to a school board meeting in matching green and black T-shirts and paraded in a circle, chanting, “Charter schools are not public schools!” and accusing the superintendent of doing the bidding of “a corporate oligarchy.”
The superintendent is facing a rebellion by teachers and some parents against his plan to allow families to use a single form to apply to any of the city’s 86 district-run schools or 44 charter campuses, all of which are competing for a shrinking number of students.
The superintendent is one of a cadre of superintendents who have been trained in an academy financed by the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation. Like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, Mr. Broad, a Los Angeles billionaire who made his fortune in real estate and insurance, is one of a group of businessmen with grand ambitions to remake public education.
His foundation has pumped $144 million into charter schools across the country, is embroiled in a battle to expand the number of charters in his home city, and has issued a handbook on how to close troubled public schools.