Just don’t get hoodwinked into believing that Curt Schilling is not one of them.

[Dark n Stormy Knight]

25. Barrels of money went to Schilling while the politicians introduced plans to cut pensions of

public workers.

Not surprisingly, Schilling happily accepted the sweetheart deal, Rhode Island’s state government failed to monitor what the taxpayer subsidy to his company was being used for – and then Schilling’s firm promptly lost all the money, leaving Rhode Island taxpayers on the hook for $112 million in principal and interest payments. If you’re counting, that’s a rough cost of $272 for every household in the state.

The same year that this subsidy deal was crafted, Rhode Island voters elected financial industry executive Gina Raimondo (D) state treasurer. Upon taking office – and at the same time the state was so flush with cash it was handing millions over to Schilling and writing checks for its annual $356 million in corporate subsidies – Raimondo began demanding cuts to public workers’ pension benefits. As the Providence Journal reported, her plan “raised the minimum retirement age, suspended annual cost-of-living increases and replaced the state’s defined-benefit pension with a hybrid that includes a 401(k)-style plan.”

http://pando.com/2014/02/07/how-a-100000-check-exposes-the-politics-of-pension-theft/

Sadly, the D after Raimondo's name is not a typo or a FoxNoise lie.

It was an ingeniously diabolical scheme. Under the guise of “reform,” a Democratic state official had devised a way to pretend to help balance the state’s budget exclusively through cuts to worker benefits, thereby preventing serious cuts to corporate welfare programs like the ones that gave $75 million to a baseball-player-turned-tech-executive. At the same time, the new system may actually raise costs for the state and most certainly hands over more pension money to the financial industry – aka one of of Raimondo’s biggest campaign contributors. And for such an effort, Raimondo was vigorously defended by front groups like Third Way, which are funded primarily by the very financial industry that has so benefited from her “reforms.”

http://pando.com/2014/02/07/how-a-100000-check-exposes-the-politics-of-pension-theft/