The Washington State Investment Board (WSIB) is the agency responsible for investing all of the pension/dedicated funds controlled by the Washington State government, specifically the legislature. It openly defines and conducts itself like a private corporation, not a public agency.
This body was behind Issue 4215, the successful if disingenuous 2006 initiative to amend the state constitution to allow state monies in dedicated funds supplied by corporate natural resource extraction to be invested in corporate Wall Street investments, instead of being held in trust for higher education. Eighteen months later, the bottom fell out on Wall Street, devastating these funds while triggering increasingly draconian budget cuts and unaffordable tuition at state/community academic institutions.
Summary Analysis: Washington state investment board comprehensive annual financial report (CAFR) – 2010
The WSIB meeting minutes reflect what parties it turns to for counsel during this time of global financial crisis: the main persons listed as present, other than its staff and board of directors, are representatives of the major commercial investment firms of the international banking cartel, such as Goldman Sachs, State Street Global Advisors and Fidelity Mutual Asset Management. Others, such as regular citizens in attendance, are evidently not important enough to be listed in the minutes, just referred to in the aggregate as listed in the permanent agency record that can be obtained by FOIA request.
One distinguished personage recently present at a WSIB meeting was Madeleine Albright, former US Secretary of State, World Trade Organization (WTO) enabler and war criminal, who unrepentently authorized the international quarantine that killed a half million children in Iraq during the 1990s, the policy of US passivity during the Rwandan genocides and genocidal NATO military action in the Balkans in which the US government was a participant. She was invited to advise the WSIB staff and board concerning profitable foreign corporations, evidently from her vast experience in serving them.
Not one representative of alternative economic thought, such as Steven Zarlenga, Ellen Brown, Catherine Austin Fitts, Richard C. Cook, or Thomas Greco has ever been invited to their meetings, not even State Rep. Bob Hasegawa, the principal proponent for a public state bank, such as has successfully operated in North Dakota for over ninety years. In fact, the WSIB may be one of the quiet movers in a campaign to oust Hasegawa from the legislature by eliminating his present constituency via redistricting, as has been done against US Representatives Dennis Kucinich and Cynthia McKinney, who has also taken principled stands against the bank-based international crime syndicate that now controls most of the governments of the world, including that of Washington State.
The WSIB has over $5 billion dollars invested in the international banking cartel, with $34.9 billion dollars invested in the Bank of America, which also manages the state monies, further making hundreds of billions of dollars in service and consulting fees.
The WSIB and Bank of America are, unsurprisingly, two of the chief opponents of the efforts to create a Washington state bank, that, like the Bank of North Dakota for nearly a century, could wipe out state deficts and radically raise employment by substantially raising investment in local economies . For the past two years of severe depression in this state, they have even helped to defeat an effort to create a legislative study commission for a state bank, maintaining that a state bank would violate the Washington State constitution.
The obvious answer to this would be an effort once more to change the state constitution: if the WSIB can help initiate a state constitutional amendment to destroy the finances of Washington State through corporate Wall Steet investments of dedicated funds belonging to the people, the people of Washington State can help initiate a state constitutional amendment for a public state bank that could ensure that the monies of the sovereign people of this state would be invested in the sovereign people of this state, not in the bank-based international corporate crime syndicate that presently controls their surrogate state government .
Despite the grand pronouncements of the Washington State government about its efforts to protect human rights and the environment, the Washington State Investment Board has over $745 billion dollars invested in transnational corporations infamous for violating human rights and devastating the environment of our planet.
For example, the present governor of Washington State, Christine Gregoire, made her national reputation as the former state attorney general who spearheaded the successful multistate mega-lawsuit against the tobacco industry, extracting billions of dollars that could be used by state governments for benevolent purposes. Evidently, one of these benevolent purposes is to invest $_____ million dollars in the tobacco industry that the present governor once prosecuted.
Activists — particularly those who were involved in or closely followed the 1999 WTO Battle in Seattle — would be gratified to know that the Washington State Investment Board also has some $177.5 million invested in the World Bank, the financial arm of the World Trade Organization (WTO) that the activists in Seattle so powerfully protested, apparently to no avail in regard to the Washington State government.
