18 AMERICAN POLICE BEAT: JUNE 2017 I magine the follow- ing scenario. A major city agency decides it’s going to completely revamp and reform its en- forcement model based on a report from consultants. The report suggests that cops be disarmed, no jail time for anything but triple- murders and a reduction in the number of line person- nel of 54 percent. Then everyone finds out that the so-called consul- tants were actually the most successful local criminals, drug dealers and murder- ers – which would explain their ideas to “reform the agency.” It sounds crazy, right? Well check out this head- line from the Arizona Re- public: “Study concludes Arizona’s public-safety pen- sion fund among worst-per- forming in nation!” According to the article, the PSPRS (the state’s pen- sion system for first respond- ers, politicians and prison guards) not only gets really crappy returns on invest- ments, they also pay some of the highest management fees to the people that picked said investments. This is a big problem, say the folks that ran the num- bers. Who are they, by the way? According to Arizona Re- public, “The Pew Charitable Trusts, a Philadelphia-based non-profit that has exten- sively researched public pensions,” are the very smart people we need to listen to before it’s too late. After all, a “charitable trust” would never be look- ing to screw cops out of a decent retirement, right? If you read American Police Beat, the Pew Charitable Trusts might sound famil- iar. That’s because Pew is in bed with a guy named John Arnold. He’s a billionaire that made his money at En- ron and Wall Street. But more importantly Ar- nold, along with his wife, are very excited about getting your retirement money out of your pension fund. According to an article from David Sirota in 2013: “This Pew-Arnold partner- ship began informally in 2011 and 2012 when both organizations marshaled resources to try to set the stage for retirement benefit cuts in California, Florida, Rhode Island and Kansas. With legislative success in three of those four states, Pew and Arnold created a formal partnership in late 2012 that targeted another three states, Arizona, Ken- tucky and Montana.” Now make no mistake, The Arizona public pen- sion system is in fact a total disaster. In 2016, the fund spent nearly $129 million on in- vestment management fees, while earning less than one- percent return on its invest- ments. But again, that dire warn- ing is coming from a guy that wants to get his hands on our money. According to David Sirota, the pension reform hustler is relatively straight forward: “The bait-and-switch at work is simple: The plot forwards the illusion that state budget problems are driven by pension benefits rather than by the far more expensive and wasteful cor- porate subsidies that states have been doling out for years. That ends up focus- ing state budget debates on benefit-slashing proposals, When the guy telling you your pension’s in trouble is a former Enron dude that got rich turn- ing off the lights on little old ladies, you might want to take the advice with a grain of salt – or a metric ton of salt. and therefore downplay- ing proposals that would raise revenue to shore up existing retirement systems. The result is that the Pew- Arnold initiative helps the right’s ideological crusade against traditional pensions and helps billionaires and the business lobby preserve corporations’ huge state tax subsidies,” Sirota wrote back in 2013. The hard part of course is keeping your eye on the ball and never forgetting that bil- lionaires have precious little use for law enforcement of- ficers or other government workers like teachers, nurses and firefighters. They just want your retire- ment funds in an account where they get roughly two- thirds of the money you kick in by the time you’re retired. Pension thieves say pensions are in serious trouble “My family got all over me because they said Bush is only for the rich people. Then I reminded them, ‘Hey, I’m rich’.” – Charles Barkley NSA WEBINAR SERIES Featuring a new educational webinar on the second Thursday of each month at 2:00pm ET. Visit www.sheriffs.org/webinarsapb to view upcoming and archived webinars.