The Supreme Court has just refused to hear a case that let major banks complicit in the Enron fraud off the hook from paying damages to investors hurt by the scandal.

As a story in The Washington Post said:

The ruling is a staggering setback to the movement to expand investor rights. Often, financial experts say, business partners and corporate advisers are the only deep pockets left to tap after a scandal-ridden company has succumbed to bankruptcy.

If this was not enough, only a few days earlier the court ruled that third parties can’t be held liable for damages in cases where they aided schemes to commit fraud. The case, known as Stoneridge Investment Partners v Scientific-Atlanta, is also bad news for working families.

Why?

It’s simple. Think about the mortgage crisis, for example. Mortgage brokers and investment banks built a system in which they generated huge fee revenues and then passed off risk to investors. These risky mortgages were packaged by Wall Street bankers to sell to investors like our public pension funds.

Now that there’s a mortgage crisis, our retirement funds could be hit by losses that would make Enron look pennyante. Meanwhile, the parties responsible have less to fear now because, just like the banks involved in the Enron scandal, they may be immune from litigation.

In the end, the failed CEOs who led these companies walk about with hundreds of millions of dollars as working people are left holding the bag. This is why the fight for investor rights is also our fights because, ultimately, it’s things like our mortgages and our retirement that are on the line.

The General Accounting Office has just released a study called “State and Local Government Retirement Benefits—Current Status of Benefit Structures, Protections & Fiscal Outlook for Funding Future Costs.”

Download the report here: http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d071156.pdf

State and local government employees represent 12% of the nation’s workforce. Nearly 7 million retirees or their families receive post-employment benefits.

The GAO found that most state and local pension funds are well funded. The GAO calculates that ongoing contributions to pensions should increase to (on aggregate) 9.3% of payroll from the existing average of 9%.

For retiree health care, if funding continues to be on a “pay as you go” basis, the cost, as a percentage of aggregate payroll, will rise from the current 2% of payroll to 5% of payroll in year 2050. The GAO estimates for retiree health care are hardly alarming. Governmental employers, on average, should have little difficulty absorbing a 3% (real) growth in payroll costs over the next 42 years.

The report also has an abundance of data about pension governance, prevalence of public sector Defined Benefit and Defined Contribution plans, and the legal protections of pension and retiree health care benefits.

Whether it’s inspecting highways, plowing snow, directing traffic, driving buses, or designing roads and bridges, AFSCME transportation workers keep America moving.

If only the Bush administration would see things the same way.

Over the last few years, transportation workers across the country have endured corporate takeaways, shrunken paychecks and terminated pensions. The present administration, which has never met a job it didn’t want to privatize or send abroad, has sat idly by as corporations do what they please.

It is time to tell the government and the privateers that enough is enough. In the spirit of solidarity with our sisters and brothers of the International Association of Machinists, thousands of union members and representatives will gather today at the National Mall in Washington, D.C. for a “Transportation Day of Action.” Presidential candidates and labor leaders including President McEntee and Secretary-Treasurer Lucy will be speaking.

AFSCME alone represents nearly 140,000 transportation workers. We have an opportunity to show them and thousands of others in the transportation sector our support. Let’s make sure their message is heard in the White House and in the halls of Congress.