Norm Scott, retired NYC teacher and active fighter against corporate reformers, posted a four-year-old article by Matt Taibbi about billionaire Dan Loeb, whose hedge fund solicits money from pension funds. Dan Loeb is the guy who recently made headlines by slandering a black legislator as worse than the KKK.
He is the chair of Success Academy Network. He hates teachers’ unions, but he loves their pensions.
TAIBBI’s article is a must-read. Taibbi reminds us that Randi Weingarten took the lead in removing from his fund any pension funds she has anything to do with.
Does your pension fund invest with Loeb’s hedge fund?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
You would hope they were not still invested with Loeb or Mercer . It was addressed 4 years ago . The question is was anything significant done about it. 1978 there was a book “The North Will Rise Again ” the theme, unions would use their massive pension funds to alter the behavior of corporate America .
Instead as states or employers cut contributions to Pensions the trustees agreed to riskier investments in order to assure higher returns .Going from bond funds all the to unregulated hedge funds. Turning those funds over to the vultures like Loeb. The AFT may have addressed this somewhat by picking and choosing investment managers but the entire process is destructive to the power of Labor .Wall Street is in the business of maximizing profit . They can not change the price of raw materials . They have competitors to compete against in pricing .So labor is where you can extract more profit ,outsource it to the non union south, then out of the country , crush it.
The 401k was added as a secondary pension to many union plans with existing Defined Benefit Plans, instead of increasing the contributions to the existing plan ,further diffusing the power to use plans as a political (economic power) weapon. Now putting investment decisions into the hands of individual workers. So if thousands of unions could not act in concert ,millions of individuals are just where right wing billionaires want your pensions to be .
So the Idea of Socially Responsible Investments has given way to inherent greed of the markets.
The union movement needs to go nuclear with an investment strategy that cripples Wall Street . No matter what it costs those funds in lost returns ..
It wont.
Monday will be the one-year anniversary of the HBO showing and YouTube posting of John Oliver’s classic and hilarious takedown of charter schools (first broadcast / posted on YouTube on August 21, 2016).
By Monday, the piece is on target to hit 8 million views (it will make that number by Monday or shortly afterwards).
On that score, let’s watch it one more time:
Joel and everyone,
I like the idea in the last paragraph of the Rolling Stone article: excising the fees hedge fund managers take. How might teachers and public education advocates go about trying to make that happen?
An organization, Americans for Financial Reform has a petition letter at its site that describes 3 proposed U.S. laws.
Nice! Thank you.
Working against pensions- TIAA-CREF, 6th largest financial institution.
TIAA-CREF is possibly the largest manager of college endowments.
It is the retirement plan of many college professors.
I’m curious if AFT, which represents some professors, have even mentioned the activities of TIAA-CREF to members
what is the procedure for finding out this information. Is there a state by state chart on Loeb? There needs to be regarding public school teachers.
or maybe a state by state list would be a very bad idea. Mum should be the word.
The AFT put out a list of fund managers unfriendly to labor .What effect that had on the individual locals ?
Does the AFT and NEA send letters to members and retirees asking them to contact their pension funds? Do they send staff to schools to inform them of the threats?
I saw a letter from a teachers pension fund that told members that there would be no cost of living increases going forward. The letter said nothing that connected their financial loss to the political landscape. The letter called for no action.
Linda
I am going to guess that the AFT has a monthly journal
I will further stipulate their was an editorial. Or two or three …. ….
I am going to guess that any of the larger affiliated locals have monthly
papers or flyers that they mail or hand out.
I will further stipulate that officers of the various locals meet in Regional and National conferences. Where these issues are discussed . (It is a perk of the job) .
I am going to stipulate further that these locals have monthly meetings .At which these issues could have been addressed.
But I am also a realist and know from 44 years of being in a Union., that the Union movement has been terrible in reaching its members . That it took two months after Walker attacked public workers in Wisconsin for it to get a mention at a meeting of a NYC local with 20,000 members. That many just toss the journals in the garbage unopened and few rarely attend a union meeting, till it is time to express their displeasure at a contract .
But it is worse than that . What union leader in his right mind, forgetting their fiduciary responsibility to the pension funds , would turn to the memberships and say our pensions invested in Wall Street will cost us our future and our pension . I am putting them into non speculative investments like ‘Canadian’ (LOL) Treasury notes at 1.5 % . The shave you take on your pension could save your Job. Who would shoot him first . The active member or the retiree.
Today I had a heated discussion about Cuomo’s recent Public Private Partnership Projects for NYCs airports and Pen Station . I doubt many agreed with me , that the short term gains in employment are not worth the long term risk to the Union Trades . All they see is a paycheck . And thus as Jay Gould said
“I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.”
there was . Edit
Bleak.
Reminds me a bit of Gov. Rauner of Illinois. If I recall correctly Governor Rauner made his fortune at least partially by managing Chicago pension funds, but when he became governor and no longer managed/profited from them he stated that the state can’t afford them.
Rauner should refund his commissions on pension funds
Same with Kasich. He got the pensions to invest in Lehman Bros. They took the hit when Lehman went bankrupt. Kasich walked away with $400 mil.
Yet major media ignores these facts when these jokers campaign for office!!!
Many years ago, Jeb Bush and his cronies invested teacher pension funds in Edison Schools, the privatization corporation that eventually failed
Ohio STRS invested in private schools also. The board seemed indifferent about the fund management’s investment selection.
In related news, Trump and the GOP are gutting the Social Security administration by stealth and behind the scenes. From dc report(dot)org, by Sarah Okeson: Retirees may have to wait longer to complete the paperwork to receive Social Security benefits because Trump is offering early retirement to workers at the Social Security Administration.
About 15,000 of the agency’s 62,000 employees would qualify or about 1 in four employees.
Marilyn Zahm, the president of the Association of Administrative Law Judges, said the agency is already understaffed. The agency has about 10% fewer employees than it did in 2011. The agency has a backlog of about 1.1 million disability claims.
“People wait two years for a hearing,” Zahm said. “That is not good public service.”
The early retirement program at the Social Security Administration is part of Trump’s goal to shrink the federal workforce. The Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department are also offering retirement incentives.
“We are disappointed that at a time when the agency is already underfunded and understaffed, SSA is continuing to offer inducements for senior staffers to retire early,” Max Richtman, the president and CEO of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, wrote in a column for The Hill. “With demand for its services growing, the agency needs more experienced manpower, not less.”
Link for the above article: https://www.dcreport.org/2017/08/17/white-house-pushes-social-security-staff-cuts/
Much like the VA was under funded for years as work loads went through the roof with Bush wars and Vietnam vets reaching retirement.
Then you make a big investment that only represents a quarter of the money needed . “Look we threw money at it and it didn’t work Privatize it. “
I left out the obvious . Public Schools
Just as Trump wants to defund Ibamacare and let it “implode,” he wants to underfund every federal function–except the military!–and let the entire government implode. The military will control the riots and civil disorders that accompany the collapse of the government.
OPERS continues to invest with hedge funds even after Hedge Clippers documented for them that they had no special sauce for delivering better returns.
Mother Jones.com did a piece on this
Who Shredded our Safety Net
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/04/who-shredded-our-safety-net/
Trump isn’t the only psychopath and malignant narcissism in the world. Management of Hedge Funds seems full of these monsters.