Greedy billionaire blows chance to cut Social Security

Loony billionaire Pete Peterson is probably furious that cuts to Social Security are becoming less of a possibility every day.  For years he's wanted to eliminate Social Security and Medicare and slash government spending. To that end, he created an astroturf group called Fix the Debt.

Fortunately, Peterson's  incompetent lieutenants made sure the Fix the Debt campaign backfired -- badly.

Real people fought back against the Fix the Debt billionaires, and they're winning: Congress raised the debt ceiling without a whimper recently. President Obama last week submitted a budget that keeps Social Security benefits at their current levels. A Gallup poll released a week ago shows American voters continue to view debt and the deficit as low priorities, despite the $40 million Fix the Debt spent to convince them otherwise.

Americans want jobs, and cutting government spending is exactly the wrong way to create them.

Fortunately for America's middle class, Fix the Debt was headed by two incompetents: corporate looter Erskine Bowles and crazy old coot Alan Simpson.

Bowles never understood that fixing the debt begins at home. He served as director of two corporations that required massive government bailouts --  Morgan Stanley and General Motors -- thus adding to U.S. government debt. Bowles was paid handsomely for looking the other way.He plundered corporations of $3.3 million for some very light duty, a few board meetings a year)

All you need to know about Alan Simpson is he actually compared Social Security to 'a milk cow with 310 million teats.'

Fix the Debt's comical attempts to persuade Americans they need to make do with less are recounted by the peerless Mary Bottari at the Center for Media and Democracy.

Bottari tells us Fix the Debt thought it would be a good idea to round up 100 CEOs to lecture Americans on how we need to expect less. Writes Bottari,

Grassroots groups were in no mood for advice from Fix the Debt CEOs, like Goldman Sach’s Lloyd Blankfein, who somberly explained to CBS News in November 2012 that Americans had to “lower their expectations.”

A worse spokesman could not have been found. Blankfein, after all, is CEO of the bailed-out investment bank also known as a 'great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.'

Sen. Bernie Sanders hit the roof and took to the floor of the Senate to denounce Blankfein's unbelievable arrogance.

Things got even tenser, as someone from the right-wing Heritage Foundation slugged a protester:

...protesters descended upon a Fix the Debt event for the first time, chanting loudly and rattling a senior presenter from the Heritage Foundation. Burke Stansbury from the Campaign for Community Change took a punch from the Heritage hysteric, and the throwdown was on.

Dozens of groups jumped into the fray, disclosing the conflicts of interest behind Fix the Debt's leadership council. State leaders, under pressure from community groups, were forced to resign. Bottari tells us they included  In Iowa, co-chair Dr. Andrea McGuire, former Congressman Dave Nagel, and State Rep. Bruce Hunter all resigned under pressure from the community group Iowa CCI. Michigan also lost its co-chair Jocelyn Benson. Virginia State Senator Ken Plum chose to pull his name, along with Juan Cotto of Washington State.

Some more entertaining lowlights:

• A group called Social Security Works entered a film in a contest sponsored by Pete Peterson and won.
• Economists at U-Mass Amherst made headlines around the world by uncovering mistakes in a study that supported Fix the Debt's argument that budget cuts create economic growth. 
• The Institute for Policy Studies released another damning report showing that Fix the Debt firms could gain as much as $173 billion if Congress adopted their proposed tax system, which would increase the debt. 
• Fix the Debt affiliate The Can Kicks Back launched a bus tour of college campuses with a German-made BMW. As part of the tour they collected cans -- all 800 of them, at a cost of $3,000 a can. 
• They were caught ghostwriting bogus op-eds for students in newspapers.

Their campaign backfired so badly that now Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Tom Harkin sponsored a bill to increase Social Security benefits.

And on Feb. 12, Politico reported that The Can Kicks Back was ... wait for it ... in debt.

Moral of the story: When real people fight back, they win.

Today's Teamster News 11.24.13

Teamsters contract to bring less than 2 percent raises  Ironton Tribune   ...The first Teamsters contract for employees of the Lawrence County Sheriff’s Office will bring them raises over the next three years...
Anheuser-Busch InBev, Teamsters Conclude Round of Contract Talks  CBS St. Louis   ...Teamsters Local 6 Principal Officer Ron Shy says the three-week-long local talks wrapped up last night with what he says are a “couple of unresolved issues” they will take to the national talks that open in St. Petersburg, Florida on December 2...
Middletown Boro, Teamsters local reach agreement on holiday decoration volunteers  Fox 43   ...Earlier this fall, Arnold announced the Borough would be forced to suspend the decorating activities this year after members of Teamsters Local 776 filed grievances seeking compensation for the work the volunteers did last year...Under the terms of the settlement agreement, the union recognizes the Borough’s right to use volunteers so long as such use does not result in employee layoffs...
Walmart Protests Promised To Be Even Bigger This Black Friday  Huffington Post   ...Walmart workers and their supporters are planning to kick off this year's holiday shopping season with protests at 1,500 Walmart stores around the country on Nov. 29...
Civil Society Groups Demand Transparency and User Protections in TPP  Electronic Frontier Foundation   ...Civil society groups are coming out in force against the secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations, following Wikileaks' publication of the “Intellectual Property” chapter...
An Orgy of Thieves  Counterpunch   ...There was indeed a vast criminal class coming to full vicious potential in the 1990s: a group utterly vacant of the most elementary instincts of social propriety, devoid of moral fiber, selfish to an almost unfathomable degree. The class comes in the form of our corporate elite...
Analysis: U.S. businesses back Tea Party Republicans after shutdown  Reuters   ...Eight of the most active business PACs wrote checks totaling $84,750 to 56 Republicans in the Senate and the House of Representatives after they voted against an October 16 deal to re-open the government that had been shut down since October 1 and avert an imminent debt default...
End the 1 percent’s free ride: Taxing land would solve America’s biggest problems  Salon   ...Just tax the stuff that humans had nothing to do with creating, and therefore have no basis to claim ownership over at all. You’ll find that almost all of it is “owned” by the fabled 1 percent...
Robert Samuelson Is Upset that the Government Gives One Thousand Times as Much Money to Billionaires Like Peter Peterson as It Does to Poor Children  Center for Economic Policy and Research   ...we should look at the billions of dollars in interest paid out on government bonds to rich people like Peter Peterson without taking account of the fact that Peterson and his billionaire friends paid for these bonds...
Watch economic insecurity spread like a virus over a quarter-century  Washington Post   ...the two great transformations of the economy over the late 20th century have been the rise in inequality and the increasing risk that households and workers bear...
Caught in a Revolving Door of Unemployment  New York Times   ... joblessness lasting more than six months is a major factor preventing people from getting rehired, with potentially grave consequences for tens of millions of Americans...
Susan J. Demas: How the Democrats blew it after Right to Work (opinion)  Michigan Live   ...they filed a couple long-shot lawsuits and essentially decided to give up...
Ohio unions optimistic about shifting Right to Work landscape  Keep Ohio's Heritage   ...Following this month’s colossal failure of the Ohioans for Workplace Freedom Election Day signature push, labor groups believe that Ohio voters are beginning to make their choice clear at the ballots...

Beware of cuts to Social Security, Medicare

Another attack on working- and middle-class Americans is coming, it's coming soon and it's coming from Congress. 

More talks will take place 12 weeks from now, and they'll likely end in an agreement to cut Social Security, the most effective program ever to keep seniors out of poverty. The cuts will be swaddled in jargon -- "chained CPI" -- but don't be fooled. It's a cut. 

And they'll likely cut Medicare, too, the most popular and cost-effective health insurance program in the country.

As Richard Eskow put it in a recent Huffington Post:

In twelve weeks or so our new system of government-by-crisis will resume its regularly scheduled programming: more threats, more confrontations, and even more extreme rhetoric. 

There are only a few ways this could play out, and most of them involve cuts to Medicare and Social Security. The ones which don't probably involve either A) catastrophic gridlock or B) a mobilized citizenry. The reason you should be concerned is that Democrats as well as Republicans are starting to talk like the Fix the Debt loonies, greedy billionaires willing to destroy the middle class in order to get more tax cuts for themselves. Democrats who've indicated support for cuts to  include President Obama, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

Our allies at Social Security Works have a petition (the video above is theirs too) you should sign if you don't want Congress to cut Social Security and Medicare. Click here to sign it.

Hammered: The con artists attacking your Social Security and Medicare

The greedy con artists trying to lower your Social Security and Medicare so they can lower their own taxes are having a rough time of it lately. People are catching on to their grift.

For example, the Fix the Debt swindlers tried to hold a Twitter live chat yesterday. Fix the Debt is the billionaire-funded group that likes to lecture the rest of us on how to make do with less. While they, you know, make do with more.

The Fix the Debt Twitter live chat didn't go so well, according to Business Insider. "'Fix the Debt' just felt Twitter's sweet, trollish wrath," reported BI's Steven Perlberg. Here are some choice tweets:

David Dayen:

@ddayen Do you believe increased tax receipts from faster economic growth would reduce the deficit? Or do you not have a calculator? #fixthedebtqa

Kyle McGuiness

@Emcee_Gee Which is preferable: Arduous entitlement reform, or just beating up grandparents and stealing their SS checks every month? #fixthedebtqa

Brett Banditelli

@banditelli Will you be willing to cut Ed Rendell's consulting benefits as much as #ChainedCPI cuts seniors benefits? #fixthedebtqa cc: @fixthedebt

Sam Seder

@SamSeder Favorite Cat Food for a quick nosh? #fixthedebtqa

Then the conversation turned to the utter failure of the twitter chat:

Kurt Lynch

@KurtLynch12 Is your PR guy regretting the making of this hashtag yet? #fixthedebtqa

If that was bad, the naked capitalism blog did a priceless takedown of another hustler who wants to throw granny under the bus: billionaire hedge fund manager Stan Druckenmiller.

Druckenmiller, the naked capitalist explains, is a financial speculator who bears a lot of the guilt for the 2008 collapse that is making life so miserable for young people these days (i.e., disastrously high unemployment). Now he's fomenting generational warfare with much the same message the Fix the Debt hustlers are promoting:

He’s going to college campuses and telling students that things suck (which they know full well) and they need to go after Boomers who are gonna get too much in entitlements if things don’t change.... 

...Druckemniller has not only been one of two or three biggest Republican donors for the better part of two decades, he’s been firmly aligned with the aggressive “shrink government/cut taxes” effort, back to being a strong ally of Newt Gingrich. For Druckemmiller to point at Boomers and act as if he’s part of the solution, as opposed to one of the long-standing proponents of tax cuts, which among other things were one of the big causes in the rise in government debt levels under George Bush, is remarkably disingenuous.

And she concludes:

...he was a major sponsor of the very policies that have helped impoverish American youth. Perhaps Druckenmiller is making such an aggressive and public disinformation tour because he knows that if young people were to turn on the old, he’d be one of the most deserving targets for their vengeance. 

If only they'd just crawl back to their mansions...

Meet the greedy billionaire who wants to destroy Social Security

Pete Peterson may be the dumbest and meanest person on the planet. Sadly, he's also the luckiest.

He's lucky because he made billions by virtue of being a not-very-bright social climber and corporate predator. He's lucky because he persuaded a Democratic president of the United States to propose cutting Social Security, something no Democrat and few Republicans want to happen.

For those of you who haven't encountered Pete Peterson, he's a retired vulture capitalist who marshaled a bunch of oligarchs into the Fix the Debt coalition. As is the case with most billionaire-funded groups (can you say "Americans for Prosperity"?), Fix the Debt pretends to be exactly what it isn't.

The Fix the Debt CEOs don't give a rat's ass about fixing the debt. They just care about cutting retirement and health benefits for most Americans so they can pay fewer taxes and get bigger government contracts.

The Center for Media and Democracy exposed the people and the motives behind Peterson's astroturf supergroup in PetersonPyramid.org.

Peterson rallied the crème de la crème of the 1% to his cause. Hiding their self-serving motives and wrapping themselves in patriotic language of "shared sacrifice," 127 CEOs have signed up to his Campaign to Fix the Debt. Accompanied by elder "statesmen" (many of whom have gone through the revolving door and have undisclosed financial ties to firms that lobby for tax loopholes and other corporate welfare that contribute to the deficit), plus four PR firms, 80 full-time staff members, 23 phony state chapters, and a raft of Peterson-funded "partner organization," Fix the Debt has targeted a budget of $60 million in "the first phase."

You may remember, by the way, how Peterson made headlines opposing the main causes of the U.S. budget deficit: the Bush tax cuts and putting two wars on a credit card. Oh, wait, no he didn't...

Peterson's autobiography, "Education of an American Dreamer," reveals a sheer quantity of stupid exceeded only by a sheer quantity of greed and dishonesty. He claims to be an advocate of "free markets" (you know, as in Somalia, where the absence of government allows the creation of widespread prosperity. Oh wait, no it doesn't...). As a free-market advocate, Peterson conveniently ignores the link between government spending and commercial activity. He draws no lesson from hischildhood in Kearney, Neb. There, his father prospered by opening a cafe near a state college, a government-subsidized railroad and an Army Air Force base.

Peterson seems aware of his own dishonesty only once in the book, when he admits he was thrown out of MIT for cheating. He copied a paper from Roy Cohn, the anti-gay anti-communist who turned out to be gay. Peterson instead graduated from Northwestern University and then social climbed his way to the top of an advertising agency. Then he became CEO of Bell & Howell, a movie projector manufacturer.

Though Peterson writes about his love of building businesses, he mostly recounts how he cut costs at dying companies. At Bell & Howell he failed to steer the company into the digital age.

The most telling section of the book comes during Peterson's time in Washington. He followed his pal Sen. Chuck Percy to the nation's capital, where he fought off a tax aimed at punishing corrupt philanthropic foundations. That would prove useful later when he started the Peter G. Peterson Foundation to Destroy America.

In the 1970s, Peterson became an assistant to President Richard Nixon on economic affairs. He recounts how he worked with Henry Kissinger to use economic policy to achieve diplomatic goals, a key a tenet of free-market economics. Oh wait, no it isn't...

As Commerce secretary, Peterson was a "reshaper of trade policies;" in other words, he wiped out trade barriers that protected good U.S. jobs. He also helped seal the 1972 grain deal with Russia, which hurt America's small farmers, consumers and taxpayers but helped big export companies whose executives had inside knowledge of the transaction.

Peterson then parlayed his Washington connections into a job on at Lehman Brothers, a Wall Street firm that cooked its books and went bankrupt in 2008.  At Lehman, Peterson sold off American businesses like Bridgestone to Japanese companies. He also pocketed money by enabling CEO plunder as a member of corporate "compensation committees."

In the middle of Peterson's account of how he helped dismantle the U.S. economy, he presents a scene of breathtaking hypocrisy. He describes how he took time out from selling old-line U.S. companies to the Japanese to tell President Ronald Reagan his concerns about the trade deficit. Yup, the trade deficit he helped create. Stupid or dishonest? You make the call.

Peterson then goes on to co-found Blackstone, a private equity firm, where he pioneered the practice of loading companies with debt, extorting management fees from them and then kicking them to the curb when they start to fail. In a rare insightful moment he warned against his partner's lavish 60th birthday party -- because it would look bad. As John Carney wrote in Business Insider,

Someday when the perfect book is written about the financial excesses of this decade, the opening chapter will take place at Blackstone founder Steve Schwarzman's 60th birthday party. Held at the Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue, the party is said to have cost $3 million and featured a performance by Rod Stewart.

Peterson and Schwartzman then took Blackstone public, which made Peterson a billionaire but didn't work out so well for investors. Peterson was so concerned about fixing government debt that he insisted on paying taxes on his gains at the normal 35 percent rate instead of the 15 percent rate for Wall Street banksters. Oh, wait, no he didn't ... Well, at least he said it was unfair.

Unfortunately, this self-righteous old fool wasn't content to destroy U.S. jobs and business enterprises during his career as a corporate predator. As a retiree, he wants to destroy the retirement and health benefits that ordinary Americans work so hard to earn. And he's annoying the hell out of us with his lectures on how we need to live with less.

Why is Pete Peterson so cruel? Perhaps one answer lies in his unhappy childhood. He was bullied by his father and his classmates:

I was labeled a sissy by the other boys in those circumstances, and I suppose I was...

My father enforced with his hands the importance of respect for him and his rules. If I came home even five minutes late at night, he slapped me...

And now, the nation weeps for Peterson's past suffering.

Oh, wait, no it doesn't...

Memo to billionaires: Don't lecture us on living with less

A young multimillionaire preaches living with less in a New York Times op-ed. An old billionaire scolds government for spending on Social Security and Medicare through an astroturf supergroup called Fix The Debt.

Please, make them stop.

If we had to choose between noxious plutocrats, though, we'd choose the young multimillionaire, Graham Hill. He's just writing nonsense in a newspaper. The old one, Pete Peterson, is spending a fortune to consign Americans to poverty and early death.

But the online publication Gawker took such entertaining offense at the young multimillionaire's presumption, we thought we'd share it.

Gawker writes in "It Would Be Great if Millionaires Would Not Lecture Us on Living with Less":

Meet Graham Hill. Graham Hill became a multimillionaire at a very young age when he sold his internet company in 1998. Good for him. We would not be telling you about Graham Hill at all, except for the fact that he wrote a remarkable op-ed in the New York Times Sunday Review yesterday in which he instructs you, the common man, on the virtues of "Living With Less." He bases this prescription on the wisdom he has learned on his own personal journey, from millionaire with a big house and many material possessions to millionaire with a smaller house and fewer material possessions, but just as many liquid assets. And what did it take for this millionaire to learn that his 3,600-square-foot Seattle home, personal shopper, and cars and furniture and other expensive baubles just weren't worth it?

For me, it took 15 years, a great love and a lot of travel to get rid of all the inessential things I had collected and live a bigger, better, richer life with less.

Aha! All it takes is a leisurely decade or so of world travel with "Olga, an Andorran beauty" to come to the conclusion that less is more. Make a note, average Americans.

If it weren't for his relentless attacks on Social Security and Medicare, we would not be telling you about Pete Peterson. He made his billion dollars on Wall Street after walking through that revolving door in Washington. Somehow he thinks that entitles him to lecture us on why we need to be poor.

The Center for Media and Democracy exposes the fraudulence and hypocrisy behind Peterson's crusade to wipe out the middle class:

Peter G. Peterson has long used his wealth to underwrite numerous organizations and PR campaigns to generate public support for slashing Social Security and Medicare, citing concerns over "unsustainable" federal budget deficits. Full of apocalyptic warnings, Peterson failed to warn of the $8 trillion housing bubble, but conveniently sold his private equity firm Blackstone Group on the eve of the financial crisis. He later pledged to spend $1 billion of the money from the sale to "fix America's key fiscal-sustainability problems," launching the Peter G. Peterson Foundation in 2008. As of 2011, the Huffington Post reported that Peterson had personally given $458 million to the Foundation. 

Peterson told the Washington Post that he gave Fix the Debt $5 million in funding.

Fix the Debt is comprised of CEOs, many of whom underfund their companies' pensions. Many have ties to firms that lobby for tax breaks like the carried interest tax loophole that made Peterson rich. Many are defense contractors who have no interest in fixing any debt. CMD exposes the whole scam here.

But maybe there is someone worse than Grahm Hill or even Pete Peterson: Roger Williams, a Congressman with massive debt who bloviates about the need to balance the budget. ThinkProgress reports:

A Republican Congressman on the House Budget Committee whose car dealership has at least $2.5 million in debts insisted on Wednesday that companies and individuals must balance their budgets “every single day.” The comments came during a day-long hearing about Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) spending plan, which achieves balance within 10 years. 

“I’m a small business owner,” Rep. Roger Williams (R-TX), began. “I have owned and operated my business for over 41 years and I still operate it,” he said, before linking the government’s budget to the financial well-being of families and businesses and suggesting that the federal books should resemble the practices of every day Americans.

Oh, please.

Liz Warren grills Fed chairman on $83B bank subsidy (VIDEO)

Massachusetts Teamsters worked hard for Elizabeth Warren's election to the U.S. Senate because she gets what the big banks are doing.

In the clip, Warren is referring to a recent Bloomberg analysis that showed U.S. taxpayers are giving $83 billion in annual subsidies to too-big-to-fail (and too-big-to-jail) banks:

The banks that are potentially the most dangerous can borrow at lower rates, because creditors perceive them as too big to fail. 

Lately, economists have tried to pin down exactly how much the subsidy lowers big banks’ borrowing costs. In one relatively thorough effort, two researchers ... put the number at about 0.8 percentage point. The discount applies to all their liabilities, including bonds and customer deposits... 

Small as it might sound, 0.8 percentage point makes a big difference. Multiplied by the total liabilities of the 10 largest U.S. banks by assets, it amounts to a taxpayer subsidy of $83 billion a year. To put the figure in perspective, it’s tantamount to the government giving the banks about 3 cents of every tax dollar collected. 

The top five banks -- JPMorgan, Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., Wells Fargo & Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. - - account for $64 billion of the total subsidy, an amount roughly equal to their typical annual profits.  

Outraged yet? If not, consider this:  JPMorgan, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup are all linked to the F**k Americans Fix the Debt Campaign. Perhaps we should give Wells Fargo chairman John Stumpf credit for not being a flaming hypocrite like the others.

Oh, and we knew F**k Americans Fix the Debt is full of crap anyway.