#erisa

[savabatcannon]

I miss Pyre

[bitchesgetriches]

✨NEW POST!✨

Long-Term Disability Insurance Is a Necessity… and a Scam

All month long we're covering disability rights issues in honor of Disability Pride Month.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Lisa Needham at Daily Kos:

Conservative Texas District Judge Reed O’Connor took time out of his packed schedule of trying to destroy the Affordable Care Act to hand down a genuinely unhinged decision. According to O’Connor, American Airlines violated federal law by offering 401(k) plans that included funds managed by investment companies with environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) goals. It’s the newest—and dumbest—front in the war on “woke.”  The Employee Retirement Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) requires people who manage retirement investments to act in the best interests of their participants. This is a good thing! It means that fund managers can’t put their own financial interests first and must diversify a fund’s investments to minimize the risk of significant losses.  This lawsuit arose when a former pilot sued American Airlines in 2023, saying it violated ERISA by mismanaging 401(k) funds. Was it because somehow the company lined its pockets with the hard-earned cash of retirees? Nope. Was it because the company’s 401(k) funds were performing terribly? Nope. It was because American Airlines hired BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager that oversees trillions of investment dollars, to manage its retirement funds. Several years ago, BlackRock started positioning itself as a leader in its focus on environmental sustainability in investing. In 2021, BlackRock, then the second-largest holder of Exxon stock, cast a proxy vote on behalf of activist investors who wanted climate-conscious directors on the corporation’s board.  Lest this make it sound like BlackRock was just one step away from partnering with Greta Thunberg or something, the company still has billions invested in fossil fuels and runs the world’s largest Bitcoin fund. It’s a fund manager, not Santa Claus. BlackRock also spent the last year retreating from its previous support for climate activism, which is unsurprising given that 11 red states recently sued over it.  The usual suspects, like Florida, Louisiana, and Texas, have also pulled state assets out of BlackRock, but the American Airlines lawsuit was the first successful attack on ESG investing in 401(k) plans. 

[...] Conservatives are treating the elimination of ESG and DEI efforts as if the boot of government is finally off their backs, allowing corporations to finally unleash their true potential. But these sorts of actions—committing to net zero emissions and ensuring diversity and equity in the workforce—weren’t the scary, woke socialist ideas of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, or Nancy Pelosi. Rather, they’re actions that corporations took in an attempt to make themselves appear more attractive within a capitalist, free-market framework.  But conservatives are no longer interested in a free market—hence the screaming about “woke capitalism.” With Trump back in office, they’ll get to use the heavy hand of government to reward only the corporations that share Trump’s climate-denying, white supremacist, anti-trans views. 

The right’s war on ESG and DEI will have disastrous consequences.

[starboymakr]

doodles I made for people on twitter

[cloe8810]

^ I barely desinged this diva ^

[ellishyde]

since summer erisa's coming out, here's a drawing i did a while back! im still proud of it :)

[raynewton]

Second part of Pyre queer headcanons!

Lendel - anti-sexual and anti-romantic, thinks sex is an abominable mind's softening, like alcohol

Almer - hetero; perky and confident girls make his heart race

Dalbert - he's too old for all those youthful characterizations of love, he wants to bask in the sun

Barker - hetero, this leader of the toughest pack has seduced many a domestic cur and dashing huntress

Udmildhe - Yslaaaaach!

Deluge - hetero; ladies of the heart are nothing to him (and what is contraception?)

Tamitha - asexual and aromantic, but may have let a winged sister warm her nest once or twice in her young life.

Manley - pansexual; flirting is his social style, sleeps with all Chastity, has orgies every spring (none of his many partners have left unsatisfied)

Ignarius - bi; male, female, or two at once, it doesn't matter, he's happy with all of them, as long as everyone is having a good time.

Oralech - bi + demiromantic; willing to share warmth and receive in return, but gaining his trust is very difficult

Gareph - pansexual; every time he got a punch from life, instead of sadness he chose to spend the night in someone's hot embrace (now scares Oralech with tales of a threesome with wyrms)

Iq'sa - hetero, looking for the strongest, wealthiest and smartest imp for her future chicks

Brighton - incel, jealous of everyone who has sex or at least one date

Erisa - bi, but hates men after abusive behavior; very clumsily tries to flirt with girls

Fikani - bi + xenosexual, if she falls in love, it's for life

[mrshuji16]

Catching up on my doodles!

Here's another another art dump!

Tam & Gril belong to @scribbasock!

[fortnite-headcanons]

Mad Mochi is in a relationship with Erisa.

Fortnite Headcanon #972

[epsilonzolton]

The fact that this isnt a shirt that Epic Games physically sells is a shame

whats worse (in my brain at least) is that apparently it is a real shirt given out to Epic employees for free i want it so bad.

[sircoconutrat]

Cat Queen! I made something of her new skin!

[savabatcannon]

[bitchesgetriches]

Long-Term Disability Insurance Is a Necessity… and a Scam

Did we just help you out? Tip us!

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Matt Ford at TNR:

There are more than 800 federal judges in the United States. None of them create as much work for their colleagues as Reed O’Connor, a federal judge who serves in the northern district of Texas. For nearly two decades, O’Connor has delivered one ideologically driven ruling after another. No matter how many times those decisions are overturned by the appellate courts and the Supreme Court itself, he persists.

In his latest haphazard ruling, O’Connor held last week that American Airlines violated its legal obligations to employees by allowing BlackRock, the company’s 401(k) manager, to consider “environmental, societal, and governance” factors when making investment decisions and casting proxy votes. If upheld on appeal, the ruling threatens to upend the entire retirement plan industry by opening 401(k) managers to litigation and penalties for using ESG factors as part of their investment strategies—something that nearly every manager has done in recent years. At issue in the case is whether the airline violated its legal obligations to employees by investing their 401(k) plans with BlackRock, one of the nation’s three largest investment managers, while the investment firm pursued environmentally and socially conscious goals. The class-action plaintiffs claimed that the airline financially harmed its 401(k) participants by not sufficiently scrutinizing BlackRock’s ESG principles when investing and casting proxy votes in shareholder meetings.

BlackRock currently manages more than $10 trillion in retirement funds. Like nearly all such managers, it adopted a series of ESG policies over the last decade. Those policies led it to use its proxy voting powers on behalf of shareholders to encourage companies to adopt more socially and environmentally conscious policies. In perhaps the most famous episode, it sided with a group of activist investors in a 2021 proxy vote to put three members on ExxonMobil’s board who would push for investments in renewable energy. The plaintiffs claimed that this approach violated the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, also known as ERISA. The law sets basic standards for pensions and employee benefit and retirement plans offered by employers. Those employers have a fiduciary requirement to administer their plans on behalf of their employees to minimize risk, avoid conflicts of interest, and so on. Two of these obligations are known as the “duty of prudence” and the “duty of loyalty.”

In the plaintiff’s telling, considering ESG issues when making investment decisions violates these duties because they inherently reduce the fund’s performance. “[American Airlines and its subsidiaries] have violated ERISA by selecting and retaining ESG funds that pursue nonfinancial or nonpecuniary objectives like ESG social policy objectives, rather than investment funds that have the exclusive purpose of maximizing financial returns for investors,” they argued in their complaint.

[...] The split ruling leads to a paradoxical result: In its telling, American Airlines violated ERISA by not challenging BlackRock’s ESG efforts in general and the ExxonMobil vote in particular, but would have also violated ERISA if it had imprudently dropped the management firm after the ExxonMobil vote. O’Connor tried to square the circle by describing the retirement plan industry as “oligopolist” and “cartel-like,” and claiming that “industry norms are not enough to safeguard against breaches of loyalty,” but the paradox remained. This mishmash of a ruling is par for the course with O’Connor. The judge became famous in the 2010s for habitually ruling that the Affordable Care Act was unconstitutional. In 2018, he ruled that the entire law was unconstitutional because a Republican-led Congress had zeroed out the individual mandate’s penalty. The decision was widely condemned as lawless, even by some of the ACA’s critics. In 2021, the Supreme Court nixed the lawsuit on standing grounds in a 7–2 ruling, with even Justice Clarence Thomas voting to uphold the ACA. More recently, O’Connor butchered the Indian Child Welfare Act through a series of profound misreadings of Indian law and precedent, again leading to a 7–2 reversal by the justices. O’Connor is also widely seen as an extremely friendly judge to conservative legal interests. Right-wing plaintiffs routinely file lawsuits in his division in hopes of getting them assigned to him. Elon Musk, the far-right CEO of X, updated the company’s terms of service last fall to require that any user lawsuit brought against X be filed in O’Connor’s division in Texas, even though the company is headquartered in California. It is unsurprising that the plaintiffs chose his court to file an anti-ESG lawsuit in, or that he might be interested in enforcing right-wing policy goals. Last December, for example, O’Connor threw out a proposed plea deal between the Justice Department and Boeing over its 737 MAX crashes because of a provision that would have required a federal monitor to be selected “in keeping with the [Justice] Department’s commitment to diversity and inclusion.” The judge claimed that “the parties’ DEI efforts only serve to undermine this confidence in the government and Boeing’s ethics and anti-fraud efforts.”

Right-wing activist judge Reed O’Connor is on a rampage against ESG retirement planning.

[ratboyhole]

these two are fucking dating, 100%

[hisauthor]

Wip wip wip wip Erisa (Fortnite Survey Version)