There Was a Crooked Country

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

30 September 13

oth David Sirota and Matt Taibbi have a piece of a story that demonstrates conclusively a number of things, including: 1) that, while we all watch the sideshow being performed by their legislative sublets in Washington, the country's real owners are continuing to loot what remains of its wealth; 2) that nothing is ever forever, not even the stigma of being hip-deep in the despicable antics of a thieves paradise like Enron, and 3) that there is no genuine political constituency behind the restoration of the American middle-class I'm going to link to the Taibbi because it seems to me to be a little more clearly written, but the story is basically the same -- simply, that there is no pile of money anywhere in the country, no matter how large or small, and no matter how vital to the people who were depending upon it, to which the grifters in the financial-services "industry" do not feel entitled as fuel for their unquenchable greed. They will destroy lies because they have contempt for those lives. They will wreck people because those people are wreckable, and they will do it laughing. Remember the Enron e-mails about the ginned-up California energy crisis? I do.

In 2011, Pew began to align itself with a figure who was decidedly neither centrist nor nonpartisan: 39-year-old John Arnold, whom CNN/Money described (erroneously) as the "second-youngest self-made billionaire in America," after Mark Zuckerberg. Though similar in wealth and youth, Arnold presented the stylistic opposite of Zuckerberg's signature nerd chic: He's a lipless, eager little jerk with the jug-eared face of a Division III women's basketball coach, exactly what you'd expect a former Enron commodities trader to look like. Anyone who has seen the Oscar-winning documentary The Smartest Guys in the Room and remembers those tapes of Enron traders cackling about rigging energy prices on "Grandma Millie" and jamming electricity rates "right up her ass for fucking $250 a megawatt hour" will have a sense of exactly what Arnold's work environment was like.

They represent the single most parasitic enterprise ever to rise in this country and there simply is no countervailing power on the other side that is willing to fight them. The other side has utterly whored itself out.

Here's what this game comes down to. Politicians run for office, promising to deliver law and order, safe and clean streets, and good schools. Then they get elected, and instead of paying for the cops, garbagemen, teachers and firefighters they only just 10 minutes ago promised voters, they intercept taxpayer money allocated for those workers and blow it on other stuff. It's the governmental equivalent of stealing from your kids' college fund to buy lap dances. In Rhode Island, some cities have underfunded pensions for decades. In certain years zero required dollars were contributed to the municipal pension fund. "We'd be fine if they had made all of their contributions," says Stephen T. Day, retired president of the Providence firefighters union. "Instead, after they took all that money, they're saying we're broke. Are you fucking kidding me?"

And, of course, there is lying, and the abject failure of business journalism involved here, too.

A study by noted economist Dean Baker at the Center for Economic Policy and Research bore this out. In February 2011, Baker reported that, had public pension funds not been invested in the stock market and exposed to mortgage-backed securities, there would be no shortfall at all. He said state pension managers were of course somewhat to blame, but only "insofar as they exercised poor judgment in buying the [finance] industry's services." In fact, Baker said, had public funds during the crash years simply earned modest returns equal to 30-year Treasury bonds, then public-pension assets would be $850 billion richer than they were two years after the crash. Baker reported that states were short an additional $80 billion over the same period thanks to the fact that post-crash, cash-strapped states had been paying out that much less of their mandatory ARC payments. So even if Pew's numbers were right, the "unfunded liability" crisis had nothing to do with the systemic unsustainability of public pensions. Thanks to a deadly combination of unscrupulous states illegally borrowing from their pensioners, and unscrupulous banks whose mass sales of fraudulent toxic subprime products crashed the market, these funds were out some $930 billion. Yet the public was being told that the problem was state workers' benefits were simply too expensive.

Read the whole thing. Read all of both pieces. And realize what a surface sham this democracy has become for the people who need it the most.