Texas Target for Takeover: Lessons From Detroit

The Bathification Of Texas Workers

With the bankruptcy of Detroit, Texas politicians and lawmakers argue that it’s time for the privatization of the state’s employee pension fund.

By Walker Prescott Lowe for CPW News Service

 

    

     As Michigan Judge Steven Rhodes deals with the question of whether or not Detroit’s retiree’s have the right to choose their own legal representation in their bankruptcy proceedings, Texas politician and lawyers are using the specter of a similar default in the Lone Star State to move cities toward privatization of the mega-wealthy Texas Employees’ Pension Fund.
   

     The Official Committee of Retirees, the group that represents the Michigan employees has argued that the Michigan law, an emergency management law used by Governor Rick Snyder to authorize the July 18 bankruptcy filing, was unconstitutional because it stripped the retirees of their right to choose their representatives.

     “We are seeing a shift in Texas from the time-honored funding and management of the Texas Employees’ Pension Fund as a state-wide and state-run pension fund into the private sector which was the push made, as we all well remember, as part of the de-regulation thrust to reduce the size of government during the Reagan and Bush Administrations.  Even Bill Clinton favored some aspects of this move.  The problem is, of course, that the pension fund isn't the government's really, but the workers'.   They earned it.   If those funds had not been properly managed in the lead up to Paulson’s 2008 bail out of Wall Street, the results could have been catastrophic for Texas employees.  With many pension funds being directed into the credit default sludge-bucket the pensioners would have been smacked really hard,” said Molly Urban a retired school teacher from the Stephenville, Texas area.

     “Texas was ground zero for the Savings and Loan scandal of the 1980’s and of the Enron nightmare in 2000 and 2001.  You cannot eliminate Texas from the 2008 bail out when you consider that Hank Paulson was former Texas Governor and President George Walker Bush’s appointee. In 1992  a book by Peter Brewton, The Mafia, CIA and George Bush, showed that GWB’s father had deep connections to the Saving and Loan scandal which fueled, according to the CIA's Stew Webb, even the Iran-Contra debacle,” said Kurt Corson Sibley of Bridge City, Texas.   Sibley further noted the testimony of former CIA agent, Gene "Chip" Tatum, who provided a clear picture of just how the building boom of the 80's and the accompanying "Savings and Loan Scandal" of which Neil Bush's Silverado Savings in Denver, was a part.

      “George Walker Bush led the effort to privatize the University of Texas Endowment Fund which created UTIMCO and which then went on to help subsidize government gone wild.   When I tell people that they look at me like I’m crazy, but when you see that the funds are invested in one after another company that profits from America’s wars then it becomes quite clear,” said  Sibley.  “Texas oil runs Wall Street.  No oil and no moving electronic ticker tape.  Texas oil is the tail that wags the Wall Street dog,” Sibley argues.  "American industrial technology is exceptional, no matter what Vladimir Putin poots and pees in his illogical diatribes.  In fact, Anthony Sutton has argued vehemently that the U.S. exported its technology to the Bolsheviks and then the U.S.S.R. to give its legs when it was creeping out of the Stone Age.  This is a claim that respected U.S. National Security Advisor, member of the Council on Foreign Relations and, more importantly... the father of Mika Brezenski,  Zbigniew Brezenski has confirmed.  What is not exceptional in either nation is an elevated sense of statesmanship and humanity.  Basically it's all gang warfare and fight promoting on a  grand scale," said Sibley.

     “GWB put every one of his good buddy cronies on the UTIMCO Board and I promise that there isn’t a single player in that group that would ever want to come close to passing for a plaintiff’s lawyer or union organizer….which the state employees really are….a union of state workers,” said Sibley.  Sibley believes that privatized sovereign dollars, as in college endowments and employee pension funds, are Bain capital's dream if they can get their grubby hands on it.  The money would, like with UTIMCO, be used to give the appearance of legitimacy of hedge fund companies that in turn fund other companies which rush to the war-time contracting tax-dollar money spigot at Washington.  "And the road goes on forever," said Sibley noting the eight ways that Bain used other peoples' money to gut companies.  "The firemen and police put out fires.  These other guys come along and start them world-wide traveling on the firemens' and policemens' and teachers' dime and if anyone gets in their way at home they start fires here, too.   It's the old Catch-22 of the Military Industrialist Complex."

      Like Sibley, John Whittington Brown, of Mexia, Texas, a retired school teacher whose son is a retired fireman, said, “the profiteers line up at the sovereign dollar feeding trough like so many over stuffed pigs.  This is exactly what happened when Texas attorney turned health care mogul, Richard Scott, became the recipient of the largest Medicare fraud fine in U.S. history with his oversight of Columbia/HCA Hospitals Systems when it was fined $1.7 billion before he was retired by the Columbia/HCA board with a $400 million pension so that he could go to Florida, run for Governor, and fill the office previously held by Jeb Bush,” said Sibley who noted that the Florida is "either the most uninformed assembly of flabby grey hairs or sun seeking mobsters and good fellas on the planet." 

     Sibley noted that the brother of GWB's press secretary, Scott McClelland whose grandfather was for years President  of the Texas State Bar and who would eventually turn on Bush, was the head of the U.S. Medicare/Medicaid office in Washington during Rick Scott's oversight of Columbia/HCA.  Sibley noted that Scott had united Columbia with the Tennessee-based HCA which was owned by Senator William Frist, a close friend of GWB, with help from Richard Rainwater.  Rainwater another Bush friend and former partner with Bush in the Texas Ranger baseball franchise, a team that Jose Conseco said was "as rife with performance enhancing drugs as Lance Armstrong's fanny", the team would be bought by UTIMCO Chairman, Dallas billionaire, Thomas O. Hicks.  "When General David Petraeus was accidently shot at Fort Campbell, Kentucky it was Frist who plugged the holes," said Sibley noting Petraeus fainting spell when he appeared before Congress to report on the state of the Iraq War.

     According to R.O. Ewers of Texarkana, Texas the commandeering of the Texas Employees’ Pension Fund is being led by two Houston attorneys with deep connections to the Bush power base in Texas.  Patrick C. Oxford and Bill King.   Both are lawyers associated with the law firm of Bracewell and Giuliani, formerly Bracewell and Patterson.    Patrick C. Oxford, Bracewell and Giuliani’s managing partner oversees a firm once home of Robert L. Clarke, Ronald Reagan's Comptroller of the U.S. Currency.   Oxford is also front and center at the Greater Houston Partnership.

     Bill King, also with Bracewell and Giuliani, is the agent for James R. Bath, the Texas National Guard roommate of GWB and owner of Southwest Airport Service  Inc. and appears in the company's Texas incorporation records.   Bath figured significantly into Michael Moore’s film, Fahrenheit 911, though, according to Ewers, “that film didn’t go far enough in showing that Bath was the close associate of the Saudi Royal banker, Khalid Bin Mahfouz, who together bought the Houston Gulf Manor Airport for the Bin Laden family...the Saudi Royal's leading engineering dynasty.   Fifteen of the nineteen 911 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia and we invaded Iraq,” said Sibley, noting the proximity of the popular airport among NASA astronauts to the petroleum refineries nearby and the unusual pass that the Bin Laden family received in exiting the country after 911.    “That airport was razed after 911 and turned into residential home sites,” he said.



from the U.S.-Arab Chamber of Commerce web site.

 

     Ewers noted that before joining Bracewell and Patterson, Giuliani had, as Mayor of New York City and previously that city's leading crime fighter, worked closely with GWB’s first choice for Director of Homeland Security, Bernie Kerik.     Kerik had also been the head of security for the Iraqi Provisional Government under L. Paul Bremer while fellow Texan, Stuart Bowen, had been in charge of Iraqi Reconstruction Program which has also faced charges of corruption.  “Kerik went to prison on corruption charges,” said Ewers.  "More importantly," said Ewers, "Kerik was replaced by Col. Theodore 'Ted' Westhusing, the University of Texas educated West Point ethics teacher who was charged with training an indigenous Iraqi security force before his questionable suicide four hours after his confrontation with General David Petraeus in the Green Zone over U.S. contractor corruption."

     “I hope to God that the fire fighters and policemen in Texas are aware that Bill King is closely related to their retirement programs and pushing for the privatization of those funds," said Ewers who noted that when the Harris County Medical Examiner's Office under Washington D.C.'s former Medical Examiner,  Dr. Joyce Carter,  had to be investigated for mismanagement,  it was scrutinized by the nation's Iran-Contra investigator, Michael Bromwich.   Bromwich,  whose indictments in Iran-Contra stopped short President Reagan and Vice-President Bush did include Oliver North, John Poindexter, Elliot Abrams and Casper Weinberger .   "I also hope that as with some northern cities like some Burroughs of New York  where the criminal elements control the police through groups like their 100 Club that pay widows a supplement when their husbands are killed on the job, that we don’t have the same problem in Texas.   It would be awful if a mass exodus of Texas' leading lawmen like New York's Serpico have to hide out in the Swiss Alps.   I thought about asking Rick Hartley, the head of the Houston 100 Club about this, but then I thought, hell he may be from the same family that passed the Taft-Hartley Bill targeting the Unions in America and I might end up floating face down in a Louisiana swamp or in Mexico on Falcon Lake.  This is stacking up to be classless class warfare and in many ways the players haven't changed much from the time of the Civil War when the real issue was not slavery, but the transfer of wealth....anybody's and everybody's.   I'm thinking of how Granville Dodge, the kingpin in the Credit Mobilier scandal hightailed it to Texas when he faced imprisonment for his part in the Union Pacific's land scandal and E.H. Harriman's Union Pacific would employ Prescott Bush, a founding partner at Brown Brother's Harriman, and GWB's grandfather.  Not much changes when you consider that 40 Union Generals who fought alongside Dodge and William Tecumseh Sherman...Sherman who along with George C. Bragg.... handed the San Francisco leg of the Union Pacific's Transcontinental railroad to Leland Stanford in the 1850's.  That was just before Sherman and Dodge rode to Vicksburg and Atlanta to destroy the eastern terminus, Savannah, Georgia and the Mississippi crossing at Vicksburg for the Southern Transcontinental Railroad laid out in the 1850's by Jefferson Davis.  Those 40 Generals are buried in the same Cincinnati  cemetery alongside the Skull and Bones founder, Alphonzo Taft.  Of course, if you take away peoples' hard earned livelihood they might as well be slaves and things are stacking up for an interesting showdown,”  said Ewers.  "These firemen, police officers and teachers may have defended the plunderers and swallowed their Pavlovian training regimens, but it's altogether different when their self-proclaimed masters turn on them, too," said Ewers who noted that "Michele Obama worked for the Springfield, Illinois Republican law firm of Sidley Austin which defended Mrs. Mary Todd Lincoln whose husband was a lawyer for the  Illinois Central Railroad and, therefore, a Union Pacific ally and water carrier."

Dodge felt that Texas offered an excellent hiding place and giving what is now transpiring in Texas as an assault on employees' future, it seems not much has changed.