According to a post by Jill Tucker on the San Francisco Chronicle’s political blog, “the California Teachers Association jumped on the Occupy Wall Street bandwagon Thursday, throwing the weight of 325,000 state teachers behind the movement for ‘tax fairness and against corporate greed.’”

This comes only a week after Dale Kasler reported in the Sacramento Bee that CalSTRS is about to seek more money from California taxpayers to help address its $56 billion unfunded liability. According to a recent post by pension blogger Ed Mendel, a contribution increase of $4 billion a year over the next three decades will be required to close the gap.

Perhaps California taxpayers should consider pitching tents outside the CalSTRS headquarters building in Sacramento. — Jack Dean

By Daniel Pellissier

In a transparent attempt to divert attention from billion-dollar losses and unfunded liabilities that will last two generations, CalPERS released its own study of the fund’s economic impact trying to take credit for $26 billion in economic activity generated by its generous retirement benefits. Of course, the economic impact would be the same if General Motors, Boeing or IBM had made those same retirement payments out of a $230 billion fund, so there is no credit to be earned for merely sending out checks.

The CalPERS-sponsored study does not detail how most of the money they hand out comes from taxpayers. Across California, public employee contributions to pension costs range from nothing, up to 35%, making most of the money in the fund returns on taxpayer contributions. In addition, CalPERS is charging its member agencies higher costs to make up for severe market losses in 2008 that will take two generations of higher taxes to repay.

So while CalPERS tries to convince Californians that they are helping the economy, their increasing demands for tax dollars is draining the economy — taking money needed to fund our schools and build our roads — and giving it to 55-year-old retirees. That’s nothing to be proud about.

Daniel Pellissier is president of California Pension Reform.

By John Schwada / Fox News LA

California’s Pension Battle Gets Ugly: MyFoxLA.com

To read the accompanying news story, click here.

Everywhere you turn these days, your public sector unions are hard at work, protesting cutbacks to public sector unions. Andrew Klavan of City Journal exposes the charming charm of your unionized civil servants:

Will this Alabama town’s bankrupt pension fund have nationwide consequences? The state’s governor, Bob Riley, comments on Fox News:

Tuesday’s ongoing downpour in Southern California caused all kinds of outages here at PensionTsunami’s international headquarters — phone lines, DSL lines and even the cable TV we rely on to keep us informed and entertained while working. So if you don’t see a new headline summary appear on the site by around 2:00 pm Pacific Time, it means that we’ve been swamped by nature and we’ll catch up on Thursday.

We decided to take advantage of the four-day Thanksgiving weekend to take a break from the never-ending Pension Tsunami. We’ll be back covering the latest depressing news on Monday.

Back in June, an anonymous video producer sent us the link to a humorous production that created quite a stir — mostly generated by an Orange County union official who claimed to be terribly offended by it.

Well, we just received another link, and here’s the video:

It will be interesting to see which union official claims to be offended this time, and why.

Be sure to visit the CalPERS $100,000 Pension Club searchable database to see why this issue is such a big problem.

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Following last week’s conference in DC, your editor is attempting to squeeze in a vacation with family in Massachusetts this week. But since the news never stops — and the volume of pension-related news is, in fact, escalating (along with the pension crisis) — I’ll do my best to keep you informed of key events.

– Jack Dean