Yesterday, political leaders of both parties and media heavyweights convened to flatter and tout the preferences of one very influential man.
Meet Pete Peterson, the man who has made it a personal crusade to roll back decades of retirement security and induce panic about deficits and debt in Washington politicians. And when we say “made it a personal crusade,” we mean he’s invested in it to the tune of close to half a billion dollars, a new Huffington Post story reports.
According to a review of tax documents from 2007 through 2011, Peterson has personally contributed at least $458 million to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation to cast Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and government spending as in a state of crisis, in desperate need of dramatic cuts. Peterson’s millions have done next to nothing to change public opinion: In survey after survey, Americans reject the idea of cutting Social Security and Medicare.
Like the Koch brothers and other billionaires, Peterson has invested big in order to shape the political debate and push his ideological agenda. In addition to his own institute, Peterson—who served as Secretary of Commerce under Nixon—endows scholars at other think tanks, supports curricula at colleges, and even funds a newspaper, the Fiscal Times, that has partnered with the Washington Post. At least in elite Washington circles, Peterson’s influence is far-reaching, as evidenced by the appearance of former President Clinton, the Treasury Secretary, the Speaker of the House and Budget Committee chairman Rep. Paul Ryan at yesterday’s event. Peterson-style policy preferences are the unspoken ideology of Washington conventional wisdom, including much of the press. These ideas dominate the conversation among the “serious” pundits and think-tankers who help set national policies.
Let’s step away from the catered lunches and carpeted conference rooms for a moment, though, and talk about what the rest of the country has to say. Social Security and Medicare are a big part of what allows seniors to have dignity and peace of mind in retirement, especially as private-sector pensions have eroded. Nearly 2/5 of all the income earned by seniors comes from Social Security; for a majority of seniors, Social Security represents 50% or more of their income. For a quarter of elderly couples and half of elderly single people, Social Security makes up 90% or more of their income—literally all that stands between them and severe poverty. Most Americans pay into these systems, and they’re the only guarantee of security and health care we have after we retire. And contrary to the talking points of Peterson-promoted, paid-for panic, Social Security and Medicare aren’t facing an imminent crisis.
Peterson—a billionaire—never has to worry about dignity in retirement, about choosing between food and medicine, about having to work even when your health won’t allow it. Nor do members of Congress with their taxpayer-funded pensions, or well-paid TV hosts, lobbyists and think-tank presidents. They also feel the pressure of paying into the system much less than the majority of working people, since they only pay Social Security tax on the first $110,100 of their income.
So here’s a modest proposal for Peterson and the networks that advance his message. You can raise the retirement age to whatever you want—as long as, at age 65, every think-tanker, pundit and politician who pushes the fake crisis gets to swap places with a 65-year-old nurse, truck driver, hotel housekeeper or drill-press operator. Sound good?
There’s always a lot of noise on campaign trails about cutting taxes. But as the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) points out, the real question is: Whose taxes?
A new report by EPI finds that since 1995, the wealthiest of the wealthy in this country have gotten far more tax breaks than those in the middle- and lower-income brackets, with the average effective federal tax rates falling more than 9 percentage points for the top 0.01 percent of households and more than 6 percentage points for the remaining households in the top 1 percent. Effective tax rates also have fallen for households between the 20th and 99th percentile, but by less than 3 percentage points.
As EPI economist Josh Bivens writes:
With the Bush tax cuts scheduled to expire on Jan. 1, 2013, tax fairness is likely to be a prominent topic throughout the Presidential campaign.
When one man loses $2 billion, it’s bound to attract attention. So it’s no surprise that the talk of the financial world is the ten-digit loss that hit investment firm JP Morgan Chase last week.
The best explanation of the complicated way that JP Morgan lost billions comes from Heidi Moore, the New York bureau chief for Marketplace. In short, the trader Bruno Iskil, operating with the support of JP Morgan management, made a very risky bet involving corporate bonds—and lost.
This bungled effort by JP Morgan is especially embarrassing because it comes only a few years after the collapse of risky bets in the housing market helped send the economy into free fall and set big banks rushing to taxpayers for bailouts.
Now the U.S. Senate is set to hold hearings into JP Morgan’s loss, and critics like Sheila Bair have asked if JP Morgan has become “too big to regulate.” Meanwhile, CEO Jamie Dimon continues to insist, as he has for years, that we don’t need rules to rein in Wall Street’s actions.
In a great interview, Moore explains why the JP Morgan story isn’t just about one big loss from one set of trades.
…What this tells us is that a lot of banks still haven’t learned how to measure and control the financial risks they’re taking when they make these bets and what’s dangerous about that is that now they’re doing that with our deposits — the deposits in the actual bank…
They take these big risks because they want the big revenues, they want Wall Street back the way that it was, but the way that it was is the wrong place to be. And there’s no acknowledgment of that yet.
Short-term profits and executive compensation were prioritized over stability before the 2008 crash, we now know; it seems as though Wall Street—which is even more consolidated into big institutions now—hasn’t learned anything from the consequences of its irresponsibility then.
There’s nothing wrong with having a healthy financial industry; indeed, at its best the industry serves a lot of important functions in the economy and helps people save for retirement, start businesses and buy homes. The problem comes in when, instead of serving the rest of the economy, the financial sector overtakes it. An under-regulated banking industry that puts itself at the center of the economy exposes the rest of us to the risks it takes. And when this industry takes up a disproportionate share of the economy, it also ends up with an outsized voice in the political process, making it harder and harder to rein in.
Unfortunately, the culture of Wall Street doesn’t just promote big risks and low accountability. It also promotes the idea that the financial sector should be the center of economic and political life—and, as numerous news stories have shown, top executives are almost childishly sensitive about the suggestion that their privilege is outsized.
The banking industry saw the last decade—a decade of light regulation, big profits, high compensation, and the increasing financialization of the economy—as a golden age. The big banks are spending a lot in the political arena to try and keep it that way. The JP Morgan losses are a hint that we shouldn’t let an unsustainable banking industry continue to run our economy.
…This isn’t just another blip in the news cycle. This is not the way pundits entertain themselves. This is a warning. It tells us that the machinery of finance isn’t quite working right.
Flashback to November 2010: As Republican governors win victories across the country, the race in Minnesota comes down to a nail biter. Eventually, Democrat Mark Dayton wins the governorship, beating Republican Tom Emmer by just under 9,000 votes, or 0.42 percent of votes cast.
Working America organizers and canvassers were part of the ground game that put Dayton over the top, and boy, are we glad we did.
Over the last 18 months, the radical anti-worker legislature in Minnesota have passed bill after bill, none of them having to do with the promises of jobs from the 2010 campaign. Gov. Dayton’s veto pen was the only thing keeping many harmful policies at bay: ending Minnesota’s status as a right-to-bargain state, voter suppression, limiting consumers’ rights to class-action suits, a Florida-style “Stand Your Ground” gun bill, and even a bill that would protect asbestos companies from liability.
In all, Gov. Dayton vetoed 10 bills passed by the Republican-controlled Minnesota legislature that are modeled after ALEC legislation. Check out the list.
To get around the veto, GOP legislators voted to put the voter suppression bill to a referendum in November as a Constitutional Amendment. However, as the legislative session ended last week, they decided not to similarly put a harmful bargaining rights bill on the November ballot.
Why? There are lots of reasons, but a significant number of GOP legislators did not want to want the situation over the border in Wisconsin to come to them; enormous protests, national labor support coming into the state, and a complete political standstill.
GOP state Rep. Tony Cornish cited the prospect of “millions of dollars coming in from other states, and thousands of people. Buses emptying out, banners, people camping.” In other words: the fear of becoming the next Wisconsin…Sen. Benson says that the threat of union payback at the ballot box “was enough to divide our caucus.” She attributes her colleagues’ reticence to their “justified concern that the unions, with their massive coffers, will come after people in swing districts.”
They also expressed that they didn’t want a repeat of last year’s Ohio referendum, where a high-profile
“Citizen Veto” of Gov. Kasich’s union-busting law continues to reverberate. Josh Eidelson of Salon calls them the “Cold Feet Caucus.”
As the session came to a close, some Republicans instead opted to reach across the aisle, working with Dayton to approve the construction of a new Vikings stadium. “Thanks to strong leadership from Governor Mark Dayton, Legislative DFLers, and several Republicans on job creation, the 2012 session was redeemed,” said Minnesota AFL-CIO President Shar Knutson in a statement, “Between a jobs & infrastructure bill and a new stadium in downtown Minneapolis, tens of thousands of Minnesotans will soon be going back to work in good-paying, family sustaining jobs.”
That’s not to say Minnesotans can rest easy. In addition to holding anti-worker legislators accountable, the battle to defeat the voter suppression constitutional amendment is just beginning.
However, if that close election in 2010 had gone the other way, Minnesota working families would be in a much more perilous position: those 10 ALEC bills are just a sampling of what these radical legislature could have passed. From their rights to collectively bargain to their access to the courts, Minnesotans have a lot of reasons to be thankful for Gov. Dayton’s veto pen.
The following is a guest post by Sylvia Bly, a Cleveland Working America member.
Recently, I went to a U.S. Senate field hearing in Cleveland about House Bill 194. I heard arguments for and against HB 194, a bill that’s a real stinker to me. Its main objectives are to make it much harder to cast your vote, count fewer votes and remove local control for each county.
The courtroom was pretty formidable, but once the hearing started, I was transfixed on the due process I was witnessing. This hearing went to the heart of the issue: HB 194 would impede voters from exercising their rights. Listening to Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL), our own Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), and Congresswoman Marcia Fudge (D-OH) was inspiring, but it also dredged up some memories of a time of great turmoil in our nation.
I remember when I was a young girl and Jim Crow laws were in place in the Southern states. Jim Crow laws, which existed until 1965, were all about a “separate but equal” status for African-Americans. During the ‘60’s our nation was embroiled with civil unrest between those who wanted to keep minorities “in their place” with all the economic, educational and social inadequacies, while others fought to right these wrongs. I think about how my own mother was born a mere nine years after women won the right to vote. So now in Ohio and across the nation, we’re witnessing new legislation to turn back the clock and erase so much of the progress that’s been made to empower all of us to fully participate in our elections.
HB 194 was supposedly introduced to address voter fraud. But how come, when asked, none of the panelists in support of HB 194 could present a single documented case of such fraud? That reinforced my suspicion that the real reason for HB 194 is voter suppression. If I had my say, any legislator who wants to introduce a bill that restricts my opportunities to vote should have to prove the need for these changes. Otherwise whatever party is in office could finagle legislation in favor of their own party’s agenda. That’s not democracy, people.
Abraham Lincoln said it best in the Gettysburg Address when he wrote that our government is a “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” Every provision in HB 194 is a huge step backward and undermines the very foundation of our Republic. I’m having such a difficult time comprehending how any legislator who takes an oath of office to ensure their constituents’ inalienable rights would work to get around not just the letter of the law, but more importantly, the spirit of the law. We pay their salaries with our tax dollars; these legislators are supposed to be working for us.
I guess my fellow Working America members and I need to work even harder to make sure our elected officials in Columbus are listening to working families across the state. Join me and become a super activist in Ohio.
