Editorial: Secretary Chao Should Block the Union Raid on Pension Funds

Earlier today, Americans for Limited Government announced that it had formally asked Labor Secretary Elaine Chao to launch an immediate investigation into a well-orchestrated plan by top union officials, environmentalists, and political interest groups to raid worker pension funds in order to push the green agenda.

Should the Secretary find that the coalition, which calls itself the “Investor Network on Climate Risk” (INCR), is, indeed, undertaking such a raid, as it has already announced, it would appear to be a clear violation of the government’s strict fiduciary standards under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA). And should the INCR plan be fully implemented, it would place billions of dollars of worker retirement funds at an unprecedented and unacceptable risk.

In a letter hand-delivered to Secretary Chao one week ago, ALG president Bill Wilson warned, “Union officials are putting the retirement security at grave risk to pursue a dubious political agenda. This is more than irresponsible, it may in fact be a crime in violation of ERISA.”

ERISA explicitly limits the investment of worker pension funds to the “exclusive purpose of providing benefits to participants and their beneficiaries; defraying reasonable expenses of administering the plan.” Dating back to December of 2007, the Department of Labor has repeatedly informed union officials that it rejects “a construction of ERISA which would rend the Act’s tight limits on the use of plan assets illusory, and which would permit plan fiduciaries to tap into ERISA trusts to promote myriad public policy preferences ….”

Get full story here.

See Above

By William Warren

ALG Editor’s Note: William’s award-winning cartoons published at GetLiberty.org are a free service of ALG News Bureau. They may be reused and redistributed free of charge.

Get full story here.

ALG Editor’s Note: As noted by the following featured commentary, unless America moves from a one-party system sometime soon, it may continue to function like a banana republic:

The Politics of Same

By Fred Reed

It seems to me that America's difficulty in facing the country's problems is not that we have the problems, but that we can't face them or won't--that the machinery of government and means of political change have frozen, congealed, clotted. Solutions are often possible, but movement toward them isn't. The optimistic might see this as a challenge, others as rigor mortis.

Consider immigration Depending on one's politics, various solutions are possible: accept the immigrants and try to assimilate them, stop immigration and send the illegals back, or somewhere between. We do none of these things. There is no policy. Apparently we can't have a policy. We just suck our thumbs and wait to see what will happen.

Education. The schools are terrible, we all know it and have known it for decades, but we can't do anything about it. This isn't a case of not knowing what to do--there is nothing mysterious about teaching children to read--but of being unable to do anything at all. A hardened glue of teachers' unions, political correctness, and racial politics makes change impossible. What we have is not policy but resignation. There is a lot of that going around.

Get full story here.