Re: NJ Senate Budget Committee hearing on proposed pension and health benefit legislation. Supported by Senate President Steve Sweeney and Governor Chris Christie. (Sweeney/Christie Pension and Health Benefit Reduction Bill )
By Catherine Austin Fitts
Teachers are non-violent, low paid, a high percentage are women, they are quite large in numbers and their collective bargaining rights and benefits are managed at the state level with separately identified pension funds. So cutting teacher benefits is the perfect place to abrogate contracts and benefits first.
If this is done effectively, the leadership can also assert much more centralized control of the existing pension funds, school cash flows (note part of the trick is to keep property taxes holding or rising while you do this) and bonding which are important sources of capital and profits, including to the financial section and Wall Street.
Best of all comes more control of the kids and their education, ultimately a primary source of wealth. Raising our kids is the single largest investment of most communities.
Then the effort can move on to state public employees and then to social security.
What happens with the teachers at the state level will have a dramatic impact on how the “financial coup d’etat” – the abrogation of benefits, theft of resources and re-engineering of government – play out throughout the US.
Of course saying that Governor Christie is wrong will not do it. He is trying to balance the books. So you have to shift the lines of the very framework, including the financial framework.
Bringing transparency to the existing violations of law and good practices in the management of state resources, how the teacher pension funds have been managed and could be managed and reinventing the financial paradigm are part of the opportunity.