Lessons from Kentucky: Stay informed, stay alert, keep your powder dry, and be prepared to protest again and again.
Last night, the Kentucky legislature adjourned a special session that was supposed to fix the state’s public sector pensions, because they were unable to untangle a complex problem on short notice.
But Randy Wieck warns that the fight is far from over.
Fred Klonsky explains here:
A week ago the Kentucky Supreme Court struck down a pension theft bill that was passed by the Kentucky legislature in the dark of night last March under false pretensions as a sewage bill and signed by Governor Matt Bevin.
Thousands of red-shirted Kentucky teachers hit the streets in protest.
The bill stripped all the ‘local provision of wastewater services’ language out of SB151 and replaced it with language cutting pension benefits and language that would essentially privatize an already massively underfunded pension system.
That bill, SB 151, was the bill that the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled as unconstitutional last week.
No sooner had the Court ruled than I received word from pension activist Randy Wieck. Randy is a Kentucky teacher who has been fighting pension theft for years.
“This is a ruling merely on the method of passing reforms, not the madness of pension theft, ongoing for many years,” wrote Randy.
Randy was right.
Republican Governor Matt Bevin called a pre-Christmas special session of the state legislature on Monday in order to try again to cut public employee pensions.
Two bills were introduced by a GOP committee chair that constituted a revised version of the pension “reform” bill struck down by the Kentucky Supreme Court for violating transparency.
Read on.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
When Kentucky’s Republican governor claims that the state is “at least $38 billion short of the money it needs to pay benefits over the next three decades,” what he’s talking about is something called an “unfunded liability” — and perhaps neither he, and certainly nearly everybody else, actually knows what a pension plan’s “unfunded liability” actually is: One thing that it ISN”T — it isn’t an actual current debt. Here’s what an “unfunded liability” actually is, and why it’s in the news so much:
The label “unfunded liability” regarding public pension plans is in the news because Wall Street wants to convert public pension plans into lame 401(k) plans from which Wall Street banks and financial firms can reap a steady stream of billions of dollars in “management fees”. So, they have created a phony issue called ‘unfunded liability” that they use to convince people who don’t know what an unfunded liability is that the taxpayers are on the hook for piles of money. In simple terms, an “unfunded liability” is just an actuarial accounting process in which you take the current year’s small state contribution to the pension plan, which is typically a very small amount relative to a state’s overall budget (in most states it is no more than 5 cents of the state’s budget dollar), and then you add up each small annual contribution for the next 30 years, and the 30-year total is called the “unfunded liability”. It’s not an amount of money that the state actually owes at the moment, it’s just a sum of the small amounts over the next 30 years. For example, California contributes about $6 billion a year to the state pension plans out of the state’s $125 billion budget — that’s just 5 cents of the state’s budget dollar. When you add up that small yearly contribution over the next 30 years to get the “unfunded liability”, it totals $180 billion — and that’s the number that the enemies of public pensions use to scare people who don’t have a clue what an “unfunded liability” is…but what it is, is just the 30-year sum of a small annual budget cost that more than pays for itself in the amount of income taxes retirees pay on their pension income and in the number of jobs and amount of purchases that result from them spending their pension check. In nearly all states the “unfunded liability” annual amount is no more than 5 cents on a state’s budget dollar. And, as reported in the Los Angeles Times and other unbiased news sources, the spending by retirees of their state pension more than makes up for that 5 cents by generating sales taxes and supporting tens of thousands of jobs in retail, services, and manufacturing whose workers pay income taxes and also spend, more than making up for that 5 cents. Ending public pensions would eliminate all that economic activity and all those jobs. Former Rockefeller Foundation head Peter Goldmark has warned that cutting off public employee pension plans is for states “the economic equivalent of having a stroke.”
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Manufactured crises are what the Koch’s do best so that disaster capitalism can prevail.
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“Unfunded liability?” It’s most definitely funded, the pension contribution is deducted from each and every paycheck of the teacher for however many years that teacher teaches until retirement. The pension is deferred compensation, not some gift.
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Well, this is Kentucky. What can you expect?
But the good news is, anyone who identifies with a label . . . Southerner, conservative, Christian, GOP, whatever, will sooner than later lose their labels and simply realize what it means to have a dignified and equitable life, and therein might be a wake-up call for Kentuckians to stop voting they way they do . . . Stop this belief system in the branding of Mitch McConnell and recognize that the gentle, almost turtle-like soft face is a front for the cold blooded and plutocratic reptile that he really is . . . . And his snake wife is no better . . . .
To the guillotines!!! Same fate for the Georgia state legislature!!!!!
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YOU GOT THAT RIGHT!
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Kentuckians and West Virginians would be better informed about Mitch McConnell and the rest of the GOP leeches if the money flow from the tech tyrants and hedge funds to DINOS was shut off. The money buys silence and acquiescence from some Dems. and, outright support for anti-union, anti-pension and pro-privatization by some Dem. politicians e.g. Jared Polis in Colo., Hakeem Jeffries in N.Y., Cory Booker in N.J., and Joe Mancin in W.Va.). It also buys policy recommendations from the largest “liberal” think tank, a group that critics describe as lobbyists and a branch of the Dem. establishment.
Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 11/9 showed teachers are fighting alone with no national reinforcement from a party that should be in opposition to the GOP. The film showed that even the national and state unions encouraged the teachers to weaken their positions.
With friends like that, the American worker needs no enemies.
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YES.
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Please let us know how to get in touch w/you: in a post several days ago, I noted that you were looking for people from certain states–IL being one of them–to join you in some pension action (a multi-state lawsuit?) I’m interested! Thanks.
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I’m not the person you asked to respond. However, if he doesn’t, there’s an organization that may be of help in finding pension actions-
the National Pension Protection Coalition.
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Gov. Bevin told a local TV station, in reference to the teachers’ strike, “I guarantee you somewhere in Kentucky today a child was sexually assaulted that was left at home because there was nobody there to watch them.” I have a question for Matt. “What experience leads him to assume kids are targeted by bullies in their homes?”
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The comment (that’s out of place) I just wrote above was directed to Dr. Randy Wieck.
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EVERYONE can contact me, RANDY WIECK at TRELF on Facebook: message me. Teacher Retirement Legal Fund, or on TWITTER @teachlegalfund. I am currently trying to organize a multi-state, pro-se underfunding and transparency lawsuit to jolt the AGs of RI, NJ, KY, ILL and CA – for starters- into action along the line of the tobacco settlement.
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I don’t know if it fits into a legal case but, the Koch (State Budget Solutions), SIEPR staff, and Arnold activities and rhetoric ultimately resulted in the loss of COLA’s for Ohio teachers. The excuse given was the change in the unfunded liability metrics.
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Idaho is either next to the bottom or tied with Utah for having the lowest teacher salaries in the nation. No wonder teachers leave. Nobody should have to work 2-3 jobs to survive. I’m a retired teacher from the state of Illinois. It was tough being a single parent and times have gotten worse for today’s teachers.
HUNDREDS OF IDAHO TEACHERS LEAVING THE CLASSROOM BEFORE RETIREMENT AGE
Clark Corbin 12/20/2018
BOISE — The State Board of Education took a hard look at Idaho’s teacher shortage Thursday and learned the problem is actually one of attrition.
Christina Linder, the State Board’s educator effectiveness program manager, said the problem is that hundreds of newer Idaho teachers leave the classroom every year, well before retirement age.
According to Linder’s research, Idaho’s annual turnover rate of 10 percent exceeds the national rate of 8 percent. Last year, 1,613 Idaho teachers left the teaching profession. About 80 percent of them (1,080) left teaching for reasons other than retirement….
Teacher evaluations have become increasingly important in Idaho because the Legislature tied a teacher’s ability to earn a raise to performance on teacher evaluations. Over the past four years, Idaho Education News and the Professional Standards Commission have documented inaccurate teacher evaluations — including instances of administrators not following state law or rules.
“https://www.idahoednews.org/news/hundreds-of-idaho-teachers-leaving-the-classroom-before-retirement-age/?utm_source=republish&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=republish”
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