So, Wall Street got to really fuck workers once — when the greedy bastards who cratered the economy with their foolish games, they put millions of people into the streets, people who lost their jobs because of the greed. While not a single high-ranking financial leader is in jail, the greedy bastards are coming back for a second time to fuck workers — this time trying to screw them out of pensions.

This is an astonishing tale:

Wall Street is taking America’s biggest pension fund to court this week, for a long-awaited battle over who takes the losses when a city goes bust — workers and retirees, municipal bondholders, or both.

Stockton, Calif., declared Chapter 9 bankruptcy last year after suffering one of the country’s sharpest riches-to-rags swings when the mortgage bubble burst. Struggling to stay afloat, Stockton has slashed tens of millions of dollars’ worth of city services — firefighters, senior centers, library programs for at-risk children — and said it would cut its municipal bond repayments to a degree never seen before in a municipal bankruptcy.

But it has drawn the line at slowing down its current workers’ pension accrual, or cutting the benefits its retirees now receive.

Mutual funds that hold the threatened bonds, and the insurers that guarantee them, have cried foul, citing the principle that in bankruptcy, similar classes of creditors must be treated the same way. Their objections have prompted the federal bankruptcy judge handling Stockton’s case, Christopher M. Klein, to schedule a four-day trial this week, starting Monday.

And:

Cities, school districts and local governments all over the country have promised their workers pensions that looked reasonable in better times, but have turned into budget-busters since the financial crisis. Local taxpayers are increasingly unwilling to shoulder the rising costs, yet conventional wisdom has it that public pensions cannot be reduced. Some officials are quietly wondering if that means not even in bankruptcy.

Let’s be clear about a few things. It’s bullshit to write an article that pretends like this whole thing happened as almost a natural thing. If you read the second block of text above, you’d think, “oh, there weren’t real people, the greedy bastards, who caused the financial crisis”. No, it just happened somehow. And, so, all of a sudden pensions are “budget busters since the financial crisis”.

Point two: these were not unreasonable pensions. The only problem is that Wall Street, along with the entire business community and aided and abetted by cowardly politicians, spent 30 years screaming the entirely false rhetoric that significant taxes were bad for business. And, so, what happened is the tax base disappeared, leaving workers to shoulder more of the burden — and so cities were left with less money to pay reasonable pensions.

Do not buy the complete and utter bullshit that pensions have ever been too generous. The only generous thing that has taken place in the public sector is the generosity politicians have shown to the elite.