[Ed. note: New Seminal community member Lee A. Saunders is the Secretary-Treasurer of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, AFL-CIO, which represents 1.6 million workers. He was elected at the union’s 39th International Convention in July 2010. Please extend him a warm welcome.]

Last week, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission did something it has never done before. It charged the state of New Jersey with fraudulently misleading investors about the health of the state’s pension plan. From 2001 to 2007, the SEC charged, the state gave out false information about the state’s retirement funds. They cooked the books. Now investors, taxpayers and retirees are left to clean up the mess.

Robert Khuzami, Director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement, said: “The State of New Jersey didn’t give its municipal investors a fair shake, withholding and misrepresenting pertinent information about its financial situation.”

It is not just investors who are not getting a fair shake. Taxpayers and retirees are being abused as well. While the state failed to adequately invest in their retirement funds and misled investors, New Jersey’s public employees faithfully made their payments into the funds. Public employees in the Garden State contribute 5.5 percent of their compensation to their retirement fund, and earn an average annual benefit of $20,349.

Now the state’s policy of underfunding the retirement security of state employees has been exposed. As The Wall Street Journal noted this week: “The problems go back nearly 15 years, to when the then-relatively healthy state decided to borrow $2.8 billion and stick it in its pension funds in lieu of making contributions from tax revenues.”

The state compounded the problem by using accounting gimmicks, giving investors the false impression that everything was fine. And governors from both parties failed to make required payments into the funds. Earlier this year, for example, Governor Chris Christie failed to make the state’s required $3.1 billion payment.

No one should be surprised that New Jersey’s fraud against investors, retirees and taxpayers began with tax giveaways for the rich. Lost revenue from income tax cuts enacted from 1994 through 1996 – under GOP Governor Christine Todd Whitman – totaled $14 billion, and sales tax cuts totaled $10 billion. That’s more than enough to fill the hole in the state’s pension funds.

We have every right to be angry with irresponsible public officials in New Jersey. If anything, they got off the hook easy, with the SEC failing to name names or fine the officials who conducted the fraud. Sadly, other states have been just as irresponsible. Many have lost revenue by passing unwise tax cuts, then underfunded their pension plans and used accounting gimmicks to hide their inadequate investments. Investors, taxpayers and retirees all benefit when there is accountability and transparency in pension funds.

Those who read my posts (and there are a lot more of you than I ever thought there would be) know that I am not really a fan of divisive politics. This comes from the teachings of my Mom, who spent her political career reaching out to Republicans to get things done in Washtenaw County. Her argument was always that while you might hammer your opponents in today’s fight, you’re probably going to need them to get tomorrows work done. It is generally good advice, but it is predicated on the premise that your opponents want to get things done and really are working for the best solution for everyone.

Sadly Mom’s good advice can not be used right now. There has been too big a shift in power in the nation for us to look at the Republicans as any kind of honest partner in anything. The efforts of the folks like the ultra-wealthy Koch brothers have shifted our discourse so far to the right that things which would have had politicians thinking about spending more time with their families in the past can be said with a straight face and taken as serious.

[Ed. note: Facebook's censorship has already taken a toll on community members here at The Seminal, too, as this diary demonstrates. Take action here to help protest this corporate stifling of political speech.]

Back in October 2009 my friend Bill Levin, co-founder of ReLegalize Indiana, started a Facebook Page to get things going for our effort to legalize medical cannabis and industrial hemp in Indiana. This was before I got involved in organizing the effort with Bill, and it was this Facebook page that prompted me to get involved in the first place.

I came onboard the campaign in December, we officially organized in January. The page was established in mid-October; by Christmas it had 7500 fans and by mid-January we were approaching 12,000 fans on the page and were growing by 150 people a day. Then it all went away.

Facebook blocked our entire page. The page was (and might still be) there in the system with those thousands of Hoosiers as friends, but you can no longer get to it because of the block by Facebook.

We were told a copyright violation was alleged and that if the party that claimed copyright violation didn’t sue us within ten days our page would revert back to normal.

It’s August now and we have never been sued by the alleged copyright holder and Facebook refuses to answer any emails from us. And if you have ever gone looking for a phone number for Facebook you will not find one with a human you can speak to. You keep getting ran around a voicemail system until you give up.

So today when I heard about the Just Say Now campaign ad being censored it brought back all of these memories. Why is Facebook censoring marijuana activists across the country? Who is leaning on them to do so? Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerburg has a lot of explaining to do.