Feuding bourgeois as politicans and speculators make off with taxpayer money and worker's pension funds

I'm gonna git you sucka

No way man

While the capitalist class is united in their efforts to make workers and the poor pay for their economic crisis this doesn’t mean that they don’t have some minor differences between themselves over various issues. The level of corruption and theft is a contentious issue as there is a certain amount of stability needed to conduct business; but there’s not much honor among thieves.

Steven Rattner, private equity speculator and all-purpose waster has been having a war of words with New York Attorney General, Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo’s office has filed civil lawsuits against Rattner claiming he did some underhanded stuff (using “special favors” they call it. Don’t you love the words they use?) to win a $150 million investment from the NY state pension fund. Cuomo’s office says Rattner “…stole from the taxpayer’s, defrauded the state pension fund and then lied to this office about it.” (1) Stealing from the taxpayers? Defrauding us of our pensions? Surely this cannot be? I ask myself with amazement.

I was a shop steward, a worker’s representative in the workplace for over 20 years and felt real lucky when I got a five-day suspension down to 3. On one occasion, when the evidence was so overwhelmingly against them, I won $5000 each for two co-workers without going to arbitration. But these guys are something else.

Cuomo has offered Rattner a deal; a $26 million dollar fine and a lifetime ban on working in the securities industry in New York. But get this: Rattner thinks this is unfair, is “disproportionate to the alleged offense”, and is negotiating his sentence. It’s an alleged offense because Rattner is innocent you see. I remember a suit a couple of older black workers had against our employer for racial discrimination, denying them promotions. The suit went on for ten years and the boss eventually settled but admitted no guilt on the "alleged" racism. Why would they? Racial discrimination is illegal in the US; the nerve of those old guys. The settlement was just a gesture of goodwill.

There have been back and forth accusations of threats and nastiness by the attorneys for these two feuding bourgeois. Cuomo apparently referred to one of Rattner’s lawyers, a woman, as “too cute by a hair”, and another one as a “thug”. Cuomo says that Rattner and his attorney’s have threatened him with “retribution” via Rattner’s buddies in the media business. “We will not be threatened or extorted by Rattner and his cronies,” says a Cuomo spokesperson.

Public service requirment

On the pension issue, Rattner is accused of buying information from other civil servants for access to New York’s $125 billion “Common Retirement Fund”. And according to the WSJ, Rattner “arranged for a company to distribute a low-budget film ‘Chooch’.” The brother of the retirement fund’s chief investment officer happened to be the film’s producer. No conflict of interest there.

This is what they do with our money, folks. These two are Democrats, Cuomo and Rattner. But they are all absolutely rotten. Politics for them is an opportunity to plunder the wealth of society, dig their snouts deep in to the public trough.

As long as the capitalist class and their flunkies control the allocation of capital like pension funds they will always do this. They are the legal mafia. But as the wording with a graphic on an earlier blog pointed out, “you can’t stop human suffering with a turkey sandwich”. And we won’t stop them stealing our pensions and tax funds by relying on one of “their” Attorney Generals filing a lawsuit.

Capital like that in pension funds should be centralized in pools by region or industry and under the democratic control and management of elected representatives of workers and the middle class. The same with bank deposits so capital can be allocated in a productive way, productive for society that is. This does not mean the nationalization of individual’s savings but the allocation and use of this national pool of capital by democratically elected committees of workers and the middle class. Such committees though would take in the billions of dollars that the corporations have stolen from those that create the wealth to ownership. We do not need to recognize a corporation as a person; it’s not in our interests to do so.

Bye the way, the private equity investor Rattner does admit that there is a “line” when trying to “secure” business from a pension fund, but he was on the “right side” of it.

(1) Wall Street Journal 11-30-10.