Free Republic

Pension funds in the UK are currently in talks to direct your retirement savings toward military spending. This move is part of a broader push to increase defense funding, with the goal of enhancing national resilience. The Mansion House Compact, a voluntary code signed by the largest pension providers in 2023, is now under review to include "national resilience" as one of its central objectives. This could lead to billions of pounds being channeled into the defense sector by encouraging pension funds to invest in arms companies. It’s hard to ignore the unsettling reality that your pension could be used...

A Minnesota retirement system for public school teachers under Gov. Tim Walz is “cooking the books” by vastly underreporting annual fees paid to Wall Street investment managers — and posting near-impossible gains tantamount to a “Madoff miracle,” a top pension investigator said. The state-run Teachers Retirement Association, or TRA, has publicly disclosed less than 10% of an estimated $2.9 billion spent on fees in the past 10 years, said Edward Siedle, a former Security and Exchange Commission lawyer and independent pension investigator. The TRA also posted gains claiming it beat its own custom benchmark over periods of one, five, 10,...

(The Center Square) – Taxpayers in the city of Chicago now owe more than $37 billion in unpaid pension costs after debts soared by at least $1.8 billion over the last 12 months. Data outlined in the city’s annual comprehensive financial report further highlights that the city’s four employee pension funds representing police officers, firefighters, municipal employees and laborers jumped by 5% in 2023. While Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson recently boasted of the city now being on the right track in terms of getting the city’s pension system in order, state Sen. Craig Wilcox, R-McHenry, sees things entirely different. “Unfortunately,...

Total Payout: Last year, Nashville’s pension system disbursed a staggering $205 million to retired public employees. That’s a substantial sum! High-Paid Retirees: Among the recipients, 68 individuals received pensions of $72,000 or higher. Notably, some former police officers secured impressive payouts: Michael Robinson: Collects over $187,000. Eric Snyder: Receives $139,000. Former Chief Steve Anderson: Retired in 2020 and enjoys a $126,000 pension.

The phrase “pension benefits” may come up a lot in the next several days as negotiations between the United Auto Workers union and the Big Three automakers go down to the wire to avert a strike. But for most private-sector US workers, pensions disappeared long ago. In a traditional pension, employers contribute, invest and manage retirement funds for their workers, who then receive guaranteed monthly checks for life after they retire. But over the past several decades, employers have either closed or frozen their pensions and turned instead to retirement savings vehicles like the 401(k), which put much more of...

(The Center Square) – Every man, woman and child in Illinois is on the hook for $37,000 for the state’s unfunded public pension liabilities, according to a new report. The seventh annual American Legislative Exchange Council's "Unaccountable and Unaffordable" report on public pension liabilities pegs the amount of debt across the nation at nearly $7 trillion. Illinois comes in second to last.

The vendor helps CalPERS identify member deaths and make sure that correct payments go to retirees and their beneficiaries.. The personal information of about 769,000 retired CalPERS members was exposed in a third-party data breach that was reported earlier this month. CalSTRS also said it was impacted by the breach and KCRA 3 is trying to learn how many of its members were impacted. CalPERS, the California Public Employees' Retirement System, is the nation's largest public pension fund. It serves more than 2 million members in its retirement system and more than 1.5 million in its health program. CalSTRS, the...

Despite only spending a few years in the classroom, taxpayers could end up shelling out over $200,000 in a public pension for AFT president Randi Weingarten.Randi Weingarten has spent only a small portion of her career in the classroom despite leading the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the second-largest national teachers union in the United States. Trained as a lawyer, Weingarten taught full-time for just three years and was a substitute teacher for three more. However, according to a report by Freedom Foundation, a think tank, she will collect over 15 years' worth of public pension when she retires. That...

New York City teachers, cops and firefighters lost nearly $30 million in pension funds tied to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. Critics accuse Comptroller Brad Lander, who is custodian of the pension systems, of favoring the “woke” bank over shareholders. Five city pension funds had a total of $41,867,214 invested in the doomed bank as of Jan. 31, according to data provided by the comptroller’s office under a Freedom of Information request by The Post.

As the Democrats push more spending in their new budget, Republicans in the House are having yet another debate about raising the debt ceiling. The topic of the national debt tends to elicit shrugs and yawns from most Americans, but maintaining current spending levels carries enormous consequences for everyone. If anyone doubts this, they need only to look at France to see what awaits them in the near future.Although most of the news on France has centered around President Emmanuel Macron’s recent visit to China, there is something much more consequential happening back in his home country. For weeks now,...

President Joe Biden recently issued his first veto since taking office on Jan. 20, 2021. Biden rejected a bipartisan bill that would have required investment fund managers to take politics out of their investment decisions and to stay focused on providing the best return to their clients as much as possible. Why should you care? Because Biden was, in effect, saying it was permissible for fund managers, who have control of trillions of dollars in pension accounts, to take into consideration a company's ESG score (related to how it stands on racial justice, climate change and LGBT issues) when they...

The Biden administration forced a new ESG rule down Americans’ throats even as a backlash against ESG investments grows.President Joe Biden issued his first veto against a bipartisan bill that sought to protect millions of Americans’ retirement plans from woke investments. His action shows he prioritizes politics over Americans’ financial security.Early this month, the U.S. House and Senate passed a bipartisan resolution to prevent fiduciaries of retirement plans from subordinating financial returns to woke causes. Biden chose to ignore all the concerns and warnings, including those from his own party. Instead, he used his first veto to preserve a so-called...

Police fired tear gas and fought with violent black-clad anarchists in France on Thursday as more than a million mainly peaceful protesters marched against President Emmanuel Macron’s plan to raise the pension age. In a ninth day of nationwide protests, train and air travel was disrupted while teachers were among many professions to walk off the job, just days after the government pushed through legislation to raise the retirement age by two years to 64. In Bordeaux, photos showed the city’s town hall alight on Thursday evening. It was not immediately clear who was responsible for the fire, which was...

Paris police have banned gatherings in the city’s spots in areas around important government sites in an effort to end protests against France's plan to raise the state pension age by two years without a vote. "Due to serious risks of disturbances to public order and security … any gathering at Place de la Concorde and its surroundings as well as in the area of the Avenue des Champs-Elysées is prohibited," the police said, according to an AFP report. "People who try to gather there will be systematically evicted by the police." French President Emmanuel Macron has decided to push...

French President Emmanuel Macron’s cabinet has invoked an article of the French constitution to push through pension reform without a parliamentary vote, according to the AP. Protesters have demonstrated against a plan to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64 since mid-January, and the move is certain to incite an uproar. “We cannot bet on the future of our pensions and this reform is necessary,” French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne said.

Norway's sovereign wealth fund had investments in SVB Financial Group and Signature Bank that were valued last week at a combined 2.8 billion Norwegian kroner ($263.3 million), it said Monday.

Violent riots and economically damaging activist actions broke out in France on Tuesday as the country saw one of its biggest mass mobilisations of protesters in years in response to President Emmanuel Macron’s plan to raise the pension age from 62 to 64 years old. Millions of people took part in protests across 200 towns and cities in France on Tuesday, with the organising CGT union claiming that up to 3.5 million people flooded out onto the streets, while the French Interior Ministry put the number at around 1.28 million. The protests and accompanying trade union strikes were the sixth...

One of the most important policy battles of 2023 is already happening quietly and outside of the media spotlight. Indeed, many Americans are completely unaware that it is underway. It is over the Left’s ESG (environmental, social and governance)-driven investments and their corrosive effect on the country. Over the past two years, the Left has launched a determined campaign to advance their climate, gun-control, and abortion objectives not through legislation, but through the allocation and denial of capital. The proponents of ESG-driven investments are using woke investment firms like BlackRock to phase out fossil fuels, weaken agriculture, hobble the firearms...

Furious campaigners warned proposals to hike up the state pension age 11 years earlier than planned would leave the retirement plans of older workers in tatters.Employees aged 54 and under would be forced to delay quitting their jobs under plans floated by the Treasury. Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s team has examined bringing forward a planned rise in the pensionable age 68 by more than a decade to save billions. But Age UK said making 50-somethings wait longer for their pension would leave many struggling to make ends meet in later life. Charity director Caroline Abrahams said: “We feel strongly that there...

Paris (AFP) – A French policeman dealt a man with a camera such a strong truncheon blow during pension reform protests this week that he had to have a testicle amputated, the man's lawyer said Sunday. Images and footage from Thursday's demonstrations circulating online shows a policeman hitting a man on the ground between the legs, and then leaving. The man is seen holding a camera. Lawyer Lucie Simon said she was filing a complaint on behalf of her client, a 26-year-old Franco-Spanish engineer who was taking pictures of the gathering, for "voluntary violence that led to mutilation by a...