The Public Accountability Initiative is the place to go to follow the money. The team that produces these reports is called “Little Sis,” the opposite of Big Brother. Little Sis recently posted an eye-opening analysis of the funders of Teach for America.
This post identifies the Hedge funders who hold large amounts of Puerto Rico’s debt and are demanding a reduction in pensions and public services (especially public schools). It also details how people can fight back.
Time is running out for retirees in Puerto Rico in the struggle to preserve their pensions: the Financial Oversight and Management Board has proposed cuts that would take effect July 1, 2019.1 If those cuts go through, around 167,000 families will be affected immediately in this new attack against Puerto Ricans’ living conditions.2 Vulture funds, on the other hand, stand to rake in millions in profits at the expense of the suffering of thousands.
Rather than helping retirees take care of their families, the pension cuts will instead channel the money to hedge fund billionaires to pay for their extravagant lifestyles.
But retirees can still fight back by mobilizing against the upcoming debt deal, pressing the legislature to vote against the bill allowing the restructuring, voting against the debt adjustment plan, and pressuring judge Laura Taylor Swain to not approve the plan.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I watched the Frontline piece on the demolition of pensions for teachers in Kentucky. All across America the defunding of everything that that offers our citizens the crucial services for the common good is disappearing. As health care becomes unaffordable, and they go after social security, the war on pensions continues.
This is the plan of the power-elite to impoverish Americans and create wage -slaves. But, for teachers, this ploy reduces the numbers of educated teachers who would chose to teach. It gives our kids, trained TFAs, and often, substitute teachers
They get willing serfs who will follow the mandates of corrupted administration, who care nothing about the kids, and use the ‘curricula’ and ‘online’ or ‘personalized learning’ ‘magic elixirs’ sold to them by them by the lobbyists, to end what our future citizens can know or do.
that truly was a frightening documentary in that it had no happy ending, nor even the feel of good things ahead: I kept telling myself, KY is a very red state, KY is a very red state…
Puerto Rico’s predicament is a sad and desperate one. Once again, the lack of regulation and laws allow hedge funds to gain access to pensions. Puerto Rico is a cautionary tale from which states can learn. Hedge funds are very politically active in order to gain access to their target pensions. New York should beware of the cozy relationship between Cuomo and his hedge fund supporters. These hedge fund managers are vultures that plunder and move on to their next bullseye. They are relentless schemers. Conflicts of interest are ignored as in this case, and they allow those that create the mess to benefit from the looting of pensions. Unfortunately, hedge funds have so much money they buy politicians to do their bidding.
We need to get the money out of politics and write laws that protect retirees’ public pensions. We need stricter rules for hedge funds instead of enabling their attacks. Their financial activities generate a lot of money for a few people while they destroy the economic security of many retirees. Overall, the fact that these brazen moves are permitted hurts, not helps the overall economy, is what we all should understand. I hope Puerto Rico can stage a “Hail Mary” that will help its people rebuff the attack.
Years ago, I received a private email from a man who was an African American hedge fund manager, managing private wealth. Surprisingly, he agreed with my criticism of his industry. He said that I should remember that hedge funds create nothing and produce nothing. They make money speculating.
When they speculate, they put working people out of work. These victims can no longer pay for as many goods and services. That was money that helped ignite the economy. Hedge funds take all that money that was active in the economy, use a relatively small amount of it and put the bulk of it into passive accounts or even offshore. It is a con game that is hurting working people.
Disaster capitalism like this is the worst. When your home is destroyed by a hurricane the investor class take it as an opportunity to raid your pension and take over your children’s school for profit. Heinous.
Hedge funds make lots of money for themselves and their investors, but as Diane’s headline suggests, they make a lot of misery for anyone else in their path.
The research of the Public Accountability Initiative into the financial backers of Carl Palidino (Buffalo school board member) greatly helped in understanding the American plutocracy. PAI’s accounting of Teach for America’s backers accomplishes the same.
A former Kaplan executive is leading the activities of the billionaire-funded Center for American Progress in Puerto Rico.
Tom Daschle, chair of the CAP board, was interviewed at the Hill today (Rising). No surprise he endorses Biden and, no surprise, he’s against impeachment. No surprise he supported NAFTA when he was Majority Leader in Congress.
At least, Rising’s host mentioned in passing that Daschle has a bi-partisan lobby shop for clients. I presume the Bipartisan Policy Center doesn’t take pro bono clients if their goals threaten business interests.
m4potw
June 12, 2019 at 4:11 pm
To whom it may concern:
Please take a look at Southern Viet Nam’s fate. I am so sorry for all high academic people in Hong Kong. Then sooner or later the USA Elaine Chao plus all her siblings will taste and experience. The Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell cannot protect her and himself under Trump.
Please watch a movie “John Wick-part 3” and visualize the “Black Water” mercenaries. Plus watch “American Made” in 2017 with Tom Cruise in a major role. These examples can help people to make up their determination in dealing with bad people.
Take an advice from President Ronald Reagan “Trust with verify” hahaha
Life is only difficult and complicated to people who are greedy, ego, blind compassionate. Most of all, life would be complicated to people who say that we work as a team without conscience. Back2basic
Is it time to take the guillotines out of mothballs and lubricate the blades but not with oil?
Hi Master guru Lloyd Lofthouse :
Please ask your rough students when you were young teacher that how dare they to intimidate a strong marine background like you. I wish all male and female teachers can be like you. I love it.
IMHO. body, mind and spirit needs to be achieved accordingly. I would suggest that guillotines plus machine guns to deal with invaders.
All children need to be strengthening their physical exercises along with chess games at level kindergarten to grade 5. Music, Paint, Sports, Liberal Arts and Science will be emphasized from middle school and upwards to university level. I have been there and done that. May
Thank you. My teaching career ended in 2005 after thirty years.
Machine guns are messy. I prefer sniper rifles fired from a great distance. They are very accurate and there is a much smaller risk of collateral damage.
Blades are up-close, swift, and very quiet. I carried more than one blade when I was in Vietnam and taught myself how to throw one about twenty feet and hit a target with accuracy. I have probably lost that skill by now. If you don’t use it, you will lose it.
The last 16-years of my teaching years, I partnered with another English teacher and we sponsored a student chess club that met in my classroom at lunch every day. The room was often full of teens playing chess, even some of the tough boys that belonged in gangs and were not great students. We even had a four-way chess set and when I joined three students to play that game, they often teamed up to beat me. I enjoyed every game, lose or win. The four-way chess game taught the younger players the benefits of diplomacy and also how fast an alliance can change for the worse.
The irony of the guilotine was that it was exercised more on the undeserving poor than the guilty autocrats during its heightened use in the Reign of Terror. Rumor and innuendo replaced justice in the panic that followed the Austrian invasion, not but a few miles from Paris. Autocratic Parisians fled in the face of jacobin victory as society spiraled out of control. It all ended with Napoleon, arguably just and ther autocrat. Nic Hanaur, self-described plutocrat and previously mentioned on this blog, predicted that the pitchforks might come out if we do not respond to the divide in wealth. I shudder to think what might come of this. I shudder to think what will happen if nothing is done.
If a large number of working-class people get mad enough to turn into a mob and they bring out the pitchforks, I don’t want to be anywhere near that crazy, out of control mob.
Once that angry mob forms and spreads across the country until there are millions of them, the best place to be is as far from them as possible.
Cities will burn and anyone that gets in their way that doesn’t want to join the mob will become collateral damage.
And what you said about the elite in 18th century France will happen again as the U.S. elite flies away to places like New Zealand where they probably already have homes to escape to and since the wealthy and powerful elite have already set up hidden offshore accounts, they will still be able to afford to support their elite lifestyles while the crazed mob back in the U.S. destroys everything they can to vent their anger at the elites that are gone.
Hi Guru Master Lloyd Lofthouse:
I did not brag myself but the truth is I just declared to my Mom that I did not want to live in hot country like VN. Most of all, I did not respect the culture in which men can overpower women. So, she told me that I would not be married later. That was a heartily laugh to me.
If my Mom was still alive, she could not believe that her youngest daughter who had endured twice shipwreck. I have learned martial art, skating, and drumming and participate in soccer, skiing, and singing. I played skipping and wrestling with my husband before we married. Yes, I decided to marry him because he has a very gentle and caring personality besides good looking and smart.
In 1995, I decided to visit my country first and last. This was the opportunity for my husband and my only son to know my family and also the tomb of my parents. All my siblings think that my husband is so gentle and my son is so smart in speaking any language that they taught him at the age of 4. They thought I am so lucky. Hahaha.
I am truly compassionate with a logical mind. So God has saved me in danger in the past many times. Truly, I cannot go to Heaven or Hell. That is why I am still on Earth, hahaha.
I am truly very tough and rough but very logical, not dumb rough or rock hahaha.
To marry and to have a child is a blessing to recognize the difference between perseverance and obstinacy in each people and each stage of their life. i am now useless. Thank you to show me the quality of a teacher with a conscience like you although you were a tough marine in young age.
Respectfully yours,
May
I do not think you are useless. Eventually, if it hasn’t already happened, you will become a grandparent and then you will be called on to step up and help raise a child again.
Dear Lloyd Lofthouse:
Thank you for your kind and encouraged words.
Finally, I accept my own Karma.
I would be like Ganges Khan if I reborn after dead in Ocean. No empathy and no sorry for all bad people even trivial or grave mistake to humanity. Yes, very messy according to you with machine gun and nuclear or chemical weapon to the bad plus innocents surroundings.
That is why I need to survive and suffer two strokes but only useless and very weak. Gradually, my beautiful brain will be deteriorated. I have debated within me for many years since I was in the ocean twice. I have witnessed too many unpleasant and ignorant people from very well to do, to lots of educated people but in prison by communists.
I hope that Hong Kong high educated people will be smart in 2019 to avoid to be like in Southern VN. Truly, fame, fortune and the love for humanity will not distract my focus of being enlightenment.
You character and personality that I admire very much. You will enjoy the enlightenment with practice. I have done it but the love for humanity has dragged me down, seriously. Sigh!!!
I have been kind of very well rounded in both academics and streetwise since I was 4. So, I truly have enough with the love for humanity.
Respectfully yours,
May
At Credo Action (unrelated to Stanford), there’s a petition demanding debt relief for Puerto Rico.
Hi Linda:
Regardless whether a petition is successful or not, just think clearly how the rich to live without servants???
My Mom was told us a fable about the witch fed children to be fat then eat them (Hansel and Gretal, I think). I wonder how Venture capital can eat that Puerto Rico Island without pitchforks after them and their loved ones = collateral dammage from local.
Would you and anyone like to visit that Island? Back2bsic
Disaster capitalism infiltrates when citizens are vulnerable and recovering from devastation. Venture philanthropists and hedge funders are the predators who take the most prized possessions from drowning men instead of helping them.
Pitch forks and guillotines are the option of a collective of people living in the 50 states