Ten days ago dailycensored.com published a scathing analysis of how the biggest predators on Wall Street have been invited in to plunder teacher pension funds -- especially in California and Texas, but throughout the country. Teacher pension trustees now say that there are vast "unfunded liabilities", and politicians like California Governor Jerry Brown are sharpening their knives while they provide quotes to the media about how funding for public employee pension obligations create budget deficits and force the state to impose harsh austerity cuts to essential public services. This is the prelude to demands for teachers and other public employees to accept cuts to their retirement income. Indeed, such proposals are already echoing in state houses and legislatures.

Investment from employee pension funds helped finance the boom on Wall Street. But when the crisis hit, Wall Street demanded -- and continues to demand -- multi-trillion dollar bailouts from the public by cuts in jobs and services to working and unemployed people. The big banks pretend to be "risk-takers" who deserve fat returns as compensation for their "risk". But as the story of teacher pension funds illustrates, it's our livelihoods-- our savings, our pensions, our essential services -- that are at risk. Not theirs. They demand and get bailed out over and over again. And they admonish us for being so careless with how we let our money be invested (invested by them, of course).

One of the important points to take away from the article is the culpability of the state teacher union leadership in standing idly by while over the past five years Wall Street hedge funds swooped in to prey on the pension funds. The story of such financialization isn't unique to teacher pension funds. Big capital is financializing and privatizing whatever can be privatized and financialilzed, commodifying or recommodifying much of what has long been public, in the process, wresting away gains fought for and won by working people over the past century and a half. These austerity attacks won't go away until people, who are and will be effected, collectively put their foot down and make them go away. 

Here's the DailyCensored article as originally published: http://www.dailycensored.com/financial-capitalism-and-the-us-teache...