How private equity firms use public pension funds to screw other workers

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Originally published at: How private equity firms use public pension funds to screw other workers | Boing Boing

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But rather, because those lawmakers think that everyone — particular public employees — should be required to invest their capital into anything that will give them the most ROI, no matter how much it destroys the planet, or their own livelihoods, or anything else.

This and the “make the numbers by any means necessary for the quarterly report to The Street” encapsulates, perfectly, the fundamental sickness of the American capitalism model. It’s no longer about sustanability and growing the economy, it’s about whatever we can do to extract as much money, in the shortest amount of time, from anything, and we’ll worry, if at all, about the consequences at a later date.

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image

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Cross posted from:

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here’s a similar situation where pension fund investments are helping to undermine the lives of the people paying into them

( exporting water from arizona )

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Texas made it illegal to invest pensions or any other state funds in any fund that uses ESG. Why? Because those funds might not invest in oil. Several are now banned, despite being deeply invested in oil companies

https://www.axios.com/2022/08/25/texas-bans-blackrock-ubs-esg-backlash

Capitalism makes everything worse. The pursuit of monetary profit above all other forms of value is terrrible

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Oh good, another reason to be depressed.

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This should be yet another wake-up call to non-unionised workers to organise their shops. It should be, but 40 years of neoliberal propaganda about unions will blunt it.

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Index funds consistently outperform PE and highly managed funds, anyway. It’s a bad investment in addition to being self-harmful.

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Every day, multiple times a day on BoingBoing (or anywhere else, really). I do wonder if this is any different than any other time in history. It seems worse to me, but problems of the past are inevitably going to look quaint. On the other hand, they also very rarely get fixed, so it just keeps piling up.

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Well that’s just Brigadoon stage capitalism. (Maybe some Mamet.) E’ybody start a ‘Stage 4’ or is that (repeatably) unrehearsable?

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that’s probably a fair number of pension fund managers trying to justify their jobs, i imagine. :confused: hard to ask for the big bucks if you can’t hand wave and say it’s all very complicated

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An interesting counterpoint to private equity’s stranglehold over the economy and society is a competing vision of how people’s pension funds could be invested.

In the 1970s, Swedish economist Rudolf Meidner , in collaboration with Olof Palme’s government, proposed that the trade-union backed pension funds in Sweden should gradually acquire a controlling stake in the nation’s businesses , in order to fund future pensions and social benefits. This would have used the rising pension savings of working people to take over and democratise the corporate sector, rather than leaving it to the psychopathic maxim of profit maximisation above all else.

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Without strict rules on how the pension funds ran the companies under their control, that could easily lead to the same outcome of one group of workers being squeezed to give another group of workers a comfortable retirement.

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Not just the American capitalism model. Capitalism itself leads to these outcomes. It never was about sustainability.

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