It's just amazing that public pension funds - and private pension funds that are holding the savings of private sector workers - are investing so heavily in the stock market that has been very crucial to the war on worker living standards. It's been 35 years of relentless assault on the working class, the stock market has been at the center of it, and funds in the name of workers have been very crucial to that whole process.

Journalist Doug Henwood examines the political and economic roots of the $1.7 trillion public sector pension funding gap - from decades of investment in private equity to offset the contribution cuts of state and local politicians, to the larger crisis in which the fate of the working class is tied to the same financial instruments and actors that benefit from their demise.

Doug and Liza Featherstone wrote the report Wall Street Isn’t the Answer to the Pension Crisis. Expanding Social Security Is. for In These Times.