Pension power and China on my mind this morning.

On pension, kudos to Bill Patterson and his band of pension-fund activists at the AFL-CIO. They forced Waddell & Reed, a Kansas-based financial services firm, to pull out of the business-funded (ready for an Orwellian-sounding title) Alliance for Worker Retirement Security (AWRS), the coalition pouring millions of dollars in support of the Bush social security privatization plan.

As Bill noted in the March 8th edition of the Financial Times (subscription required),

As the details of the Bush plan come out, and the investing public studies this proposal, opposition is growing and the investment management community is having clear misgivings about promoting a plan that is perceived as a conflict of interest.

In English, what Patterson and his folks did was say bluntly to these firms: if you want the business of managing multi-billion union pension funds, get the hell out of AWRS.

It worked. More of this kind of financial leverage work is needed. A new slogan? “Workers’ Pension Funds of the World Unite!” Okay, so it needs some work.

And over to China. All I can say is “duh” after reading The New York Times’ front page story today describing how imports of textiles from China to the U.S. rose 75 percent. And those figures may be understated since a large percentage of Chinese imports go through other countries such as Honk Kong. This was expected and shouldn’t come as some great surprise (I wrote about this looming issue in “Of Trade, Quotas and Fairness”). And the worst is yet to come. Hundreds of thousands of jobs in the U.S.—and perhaps 30 million around the world—are at risk. Hail the wonders of so-called “free trade.”