The Pew Charitable Trust and Enron’s “smartest guy in the room” team up to create a phony pension crisis.

.

In an article for Salon, David Sirota exposes how a former Enron executive and an allegedly non-partisan research foundation have teamed up to create a phony nation-wide pension crisis.

Why?

To loot retiree’s money, of course.

But as outrageous as the blame-the-pensioners mythology from Detroit is, it is the same misleading mythology that is now driving public policy in states across America.

In Rhode Island, the state government slashed guaranteed pension benefits while handing$75 million to a retired professional baseball player for his failed video game scheme.

In Kentucky, the state government slashed pension benefits while continuing to spend $1.4 billion on tax expenditures.

In Kansas, the state government slashed guaranteed pension benefits despite being lambasted by a watchdog group for its penchant for spending huge money on corporate welfare “megadeals.”

In each of these states and many others now debating pension “reform,” Pew and Arnold have colluded to shape a narrative that suggests cutting public pension benefits is the only viable path forward. This, despite the fact that a) cutting wasteful corporate welfare could raise enough revenues to prevent such cuts; b) the pension “reform” proposals from Pew and Arnold could end up costing more than simply shoring up the existing system; and c) pension expenditures are typically more reliable methods of economic stimulus than corporate welfare.

Read the entire article here.