corrente

The fox was very sick and needed food so he wouldn't die.
So the sly fox convinced the hens to give him a portion of their nest eggs so he would be all better. The End.

Keeping in mind the Edison/Liberty Partners venture in Florida.
(See "Pigeon Drop" below)

William Greider, writing for the September 29 issue of the Nation, discusses the problem of financial service companies who invest clients money against those clients best interests. All too often when that client money belongs to a labor union pension fund.

Greider:

Organized labor is widely disparaged as a weak and anachronistic force in American life, but, in one important matter, the labor movement is the vanguard: determined to reposition the capital that effectively belongs to working Americans to serve the true interests of those workers and, therefore, society's long-term interests too. Labor may be greatly weakened from its heyday, but one thing it possesses is capital assets--the power of the $400 billion in union-managed pension funds and the trillions in public-employee pension funds, where labor unions can exercise real influence over the patterns of investment.

[...]

Morgan Stanley, the "all-service" financial house, provided one of the most blatant examples of how Wall Street firms betray their clients from organized labor. Three Morgan Stanley analysts issued an advisory on investment strategy in November 2002 urging investors: "Look for the union label...and run the other way." Labor officials were not amused. Scores of union pension funds hire Morgan Stanley for investment advice and park huge sums in the firm's various investment funds. As the labor clients raised protests, Morgan Stanley changed its tune, drafting a pro-union declaration for the AFL's approval.

Beware of the fox that crows like a rooster.

The primary target for education and informed pressure, however, are the pension fund trustees, starting with the Taft-Hartley pension funds that are directly supervised by labor and management representatives. Until quite recently, most labor trustees have been as passive and conventional as their corporate counterparts. "The culture of the financial industry is intimidating," Blackwell explains. "The trustees are spirited off to conferences in Hawaii or wherever there's a golf course, and the fear of God is put into them on their fiduciary responsibility. On top of that, these trustees are workers. They don't have the time to become experts, or the technical and legal support to question the investing decisions. So we are providing that."

"The capital that belongs to working people should serve their purposes and values; right now it doesn't," - Ron Blackwell, head of the AFL-CIO's corporate affairs department

Read full article: The Soul of Capitalism | A transformation of Wall Street's core values is possible, using financial tools." By William Greider, The Nation Sept., 2003.

Blog Resource: Visit the Joe Kenahan Center for insight on labor issues.