Posts Tagged: Equity
News
Calpensions: After the board was told last April that CalPERS could not track the incentive payments, known as “carried interest,” a wave of media criticism grew with stories in the New York Times late last month and Fortune magazine last week. A pension fraud investigator, Edward Siedle of Benchmark Financial Services, launched an Internet fund-raising campaign on Kickstarter to raise $750,000 for a “forensic investigation” of the California Public Employees Retirement System.
Opinion
When I was a member of the electrical engineering faculty at the University of Michigan in the early 1990’s, I will never forget what the head of our department would invariably say to me whenever I stayed in the lab to work late. “Why are you still here,” he wanted to know. “Don’t you have a family to go home to?” From equal pay for equal work to access to health care and a host of other issues, it should be obvious to any thinking person that we don’t have the level playing field valued by so many Americans.
News
The apparent suicide last week of Alfred Villalobos, who faced a bribery trial next month, is a sad end for a former CalPERS board member paid more than $50 million by firms seeking money from the big pension fund. Most of his fees came from private equity firms during the years leading up to the financial crisis in 2008. Some call the period private equity’s “golden years,” when leveraged buyouts of corporations yielded huge profits.
News
Death certificates are the latest battleground for gay rights advocates trying to ensure that the gender a person identifies with in life carries over into death. A bill introduced recently aimed at ensuring the death certificates of transgender persons reflect their chosen gender is the latest legislative effort to vouchsafe the rights of this small category of Californians.
The CalPERS' governing board during a meeting several years ago at the pension fund's headquarters. (Photo: CalPERS board)