Bill Greider has a must-read piece in the Feb. 28th issue of The Nation on the potential power of public pensions to reshape public policy. The potential use of public pension funds, which is essentially money invested on behalf of unionized public employees, has been talked about for more than twenty years. But, we’ve got some more aggressive types out there who have their fingers on the purse strings of those funds.

Here’s the first paragraph of Greider’s piece:

While dispirited Democrats stew over their party’s uncertain future, they might check out an unusual cluster of progressive “activists” forming within their ranks. Some politicians with real muscle are pursuing far-ranging possibilities for reforming the economic system. Their potential for driving important change is not widely recognized, perhaps because the reformers are drawn from unglamorous backbenches of state government–treasurers, comptrollers, pension-fund trustees. Yet these state officials, unlike the minority Democrats in Congress, have decision-making power and control over enormous pools of investment capital. They are fiduciaries who manage the vast wealth stored by state governments in public-employee pension funds, invested in behalf of working people–civil servants, teachers and other types of public workers–who as future retirees are “beneficial owners” of the capital.