KTRS manages $18.5 billion dollars in public assets. The system is about 51 percent funded and 49% underfunded.
Kentucky lawmakers have failed to pay the state's actuarially-required contribution to the pension system.
The Kentucky General Assembly during this 2014 year's legislative session funded KTRS at around 50 percent of what the retirement system requested and needed. They contend that funding teacher pensions is stealing money from other public services, the same argument echoed across the state and the nation.
This is the onerous face of avaricious austerity plans by the capitalist class bent on stealing worker's pensions and destroying the bargaining power of future and current retirees.
But Kentucky is not alone; the cyclone of austerity and secrecy is moving like locusts across America as Wall Street seeks greater and greater profits to hold up a beleaguered system of financial capitalism.
The Cannibalization of the public commons
All over the country public pension funds are being cannibalized by the one percent.
Take the California State Teacher Retirement System (CalSTRS).
An "internal study" of CalSTRS indicates that the public-school pension fund faces a $64 billion deficit, according to the Sacramento Bee, dated February 4, 2013 (http://blogs.sacbee.com/capitolalertlatest/2013/02/california-teachers-pension-fund-faces-64-billion-deficit.html#storylink=cpy=).
As I wrote in 2013:
"CalSTRS receives money from the state, from local school districts and from teachers themselves, but the source of the funds income is also highly dependent on investment earnings located in Wall Street. The entire system remains in danger" (http://www.dailycensored.com/financial-capitalism-and-the-us-teachers-pension-fund-fraud/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+Dailycensored+(Daily+Censored)).
So, in California, neo-conservatives like California Governor Jerry Brown, have been sharpening their knives while they mendaciously provide quotes to the corporate media about how funding for public-employee pension obligations creates state budget deficits and 'forces' the state to impose harsh austerity cuts to essential public services. They pit workers against workers in their obsequious obedience to Wall Street, just like what the legislatures are doing in Kentucky.
All of this is the prelude to demands for teachers and other public employees to accept cuts to their retirement income, as they are told they must give-up more monies they earn to support and subsidize a pension-fund system that is being directed solely by the Wall Street beggar-masters.
The culpability of the state teacher-union leadership in standing idly by over the past several years while Wall Street hedge funds swooped in to prey on the pension funds is a repugnant tale of larceny, theft and accessory to crime. Teachers' unions have become the wheel men for the Wall Street crime consortium.
California State Teacher Retirement System (CalSTRS) hires hedge funds to manage teacher pensions
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