Florida Gets Bitch-Slapped

Josh Marshall has an incredible story about how Florida's state employee pension fund just bought out Edison Schools, a company that gets "contracts to run public schools on a for-profit basis and to do it better and more cheaply."

... Things looked awfully bad until last week when Florida's state employee pension fund announced it was buying up all of Edison's stock and taking the company private --- for a cool $174 million. That's got to be the shrewdest investment the fund has made since it bought millions of shares of Enron just as the company entered its death spiral --- including 1.3 million shares just two weeks before the company declared bankruptcy. As the St. Pete Times aptly noted yesterday, this gives "Florida the distinction of being essentially the sole owner of the nation's largest and perhaps most financially imperiled school management business." The three member board of trustees of the fund is chaired by Florida Governor Jeb Bush, a big supporter of privatized schools and a big supporter of Edison. So, you start a company to privatize education and take on the teachers unions. Your company fails miserably both in terms of the market and academic success. Then after you've hollowed the company out to cover your other bad debts friendly pols come along to bail you out with a couple hundred million from the teachers (and other public employees') pension fund. I love symmetry.

I feel sorry for the helpless Florida folks who have their hard-earned funds in the state pension, but, if Florida hasn't figured out by now that their government is corrupt ant that they need to look out for themselves until Democrats regain political power, then they deserve what they get. After all, they gave Bush to the rest of us, so screw 'em.