Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Raid the pensions of Wall Street executives who created this economic and financial crisis, not our teachers

Attacking our teachers is like eating our seed corn. It is mean-spirited and frankly stupid. A good teacher is worth far more to society than a great bond trader, but a mediocre bond trader makes as much in a few weeks as a senior teacher makes in a year. 
Someone on CNN I believe flashed a figure of $52k for the average teacher compensation in Ohio. I was shocked - that it was so low. I am sure many bond traders and investment bankers would not get out of bed for such chump change; to begrudge this investment in our children's future is disproportionate and misdirected. 
Ohio is in trouble not because the unions demanded their members get a compensation package that included a decent retirement after a lifetime of service, but that the pension funds - at the urging of the current governor!! - were invested in the fraudulent mortgage-backed securities those highly paid Wall Street executives peddled on the rest of the world. Blaming the unions for massive Wall Street fraud (perpetrated by self-important MBAs whose compensation amazingly has rarely surfaced as an issue in all of this belt-tightening - we seem to be outraged a chemistry teacher makes $50k a year and will not have to eat cat food in retirement, but the idea that an investment firm's CEO receives tens of millions in dollars in compensation (and that much of that money can be traced directly to taxpayer largesse through the Bush-Paulson bailout) makes hardly a dent in anyone's budget projections). 
I am not a Marxist by a long stretch, but the older I grow and the more of this crap I see, the more I think he was on to something. The owners of capital cannot be trusted absolutely anymore than those heading government bureaucracies. The difference is that the former regularly steal tens of millions from their workers, shareholders, and all of us. They should be ashamed. 
If we wanted to really balance the budget we could raid the pensions and compensation pools for Goldman and Citigroup. They blew up our system and they, not teachers, should pay.

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