Death and Texas 2
I wish I could say that this is hard to believe: trying to play three-card monte with teachers’ lives.
But it isn’t. And it’s been lying low for eight years.
Perry’s budget director, Mike Morrissey, laid out a pitch that was both ambitious and risky, according to notes summarizing the meeting provided to The Huffington Post.
According to the notes, which were authenticated by a meeting participant, the Perry administration wanted to help Wall Street investors gamble on how long retired Texas teachers would live. Perry was promising the state big money in exchange for helping Swiss banking giant UBS set up a business of teacher death speculation.
All they had to do was convince retirees to let UBS buy life insurance policies on them. When the retirees died, those policies would pay out benefits to Wall Street speculators, and the state, supposedly, would get paid for arranging the bets. The families of the deceased former teachers would get nothing.
The Republican Party has sold its soul for a mess of pottage.
Read the whole thing or listen to EYKW, where I learned of it.
August 29, 2011 at 6:49 pm
It’s what we’ve come to expect from the Texas psychopath. It would be surprising if there weren’t a couple new and even more odious things discovered every week.
August 29, 2011 at 9:56 pm
The faster they come out, the better.
These people are scary.