Pete Peterson

How broken is today's political debate? The only politician standing up for most Republican voters on today’s most burning political issue is. … a Socialist.

The question is whether we reduce the deficit only through spending cuts, or also by raising taxes on the rich. This should be an easy issue for Democrats to stand on ... and run on. A recent New York Times/CBS News poll showed that 72% of of those surveyed agreed that federal taxes should be raised for households making more than $250,000 - including 55% of Republicans. Yet even with the GOP leadership far to the right of the country on this issue, Democrats haven’t taken an unequivocal position.

Who's speaking for this Republican majority (and most everybody else) in Washington? Only Sen. Bernie Sanders, Socialist from Vermont. Sanders has unequivocally said that he won't support a deal to raise the debt ceiling unless it includes higher taxes on on the rich. Where are the Democrats? Nancy Pelosi's been marginalized from the discussions, even though a deal won't be possible without the support of Democrats in Congress. The White House and Harry Reid have refused to take a firm stand. more »

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This weekend the New York Times ran what seemed to be a somewhat overly flattering piece about right-wing anti-entitlement hawk Pete Peterson, and the piece included this paragraph:

Progressives like Mr. Baker or Richard Eskow of the Campaign for America’s Future often paint Mr. Peterson as a disingenuous tycoon who made his fortune from the low carried-interest tax rate (it allows hedge-fund operators to shield earnings from the government). They argue that Social Security’s trust fund — while supplied with Treasury bonds, not dollar bills — will nonetheless stay solvent for decades, and accuse Mr. Peterson of shrewdly couching entitlement reform as a way to protect future generations when, in fact, it is today’s elderly who will suffer.

That would be Dean Baker, prominent economist, who describes Peterson with considerable accuracy:

"“He’s not focused on the debt so much as on cutting Social Security and Medicare,” said Dean Baker, co-director of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research. “Even in the late ’90s, when we had a surplus, he was saying the same thing and the debt wasn’t in any obvious way a problem then.”

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Historians of the future will look back on this year as a turning point in the drive to dismantle a popular, self-funded program by convincing people that it's a "big government" initiative that "costs too much." Ours will be remembered as a time when superstition ruled the land, just as it did in ancient Europe - except that today we make sacrifices on the altar of tax magic, not black magic.

Whenever that day arrives, Robert J. Samuelson's latest Washington Post editorial will be a useful artifact for students of this demon-haunted time. more »

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Last Friday the White House partied like it was 1999. It was fascinating to see Bill Clinton back at the podium, and it's a pleasure to see a master of the medium at work. But the Administration's latest moves raise serious concerns about the future of Obama's Presidency. Clinton played the "centrist" angle brilliantly in the 1990s, artfully fusing Republican and Democratic positions and rescuing his own political fortunes. But times have changed, even if Washington's illusions have not.

Today the country's real center - the commonly-held set of goals and aspirations shared by Democrats, Republicans, and independents alike - has never been farther from the narrow right-leaning viewpoint that's still being peddled as a "centrism." If the White House and other Democrats buy into that illusion, as they seem to be doing, they'll lose the country. more »

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Right-wing billionaire Pete Peterson continues to use the Washington Post as an outlet for deceptive anti-tax and anti-government propaganda. His "Fiscal Times" is a factory for churning out James Frey-like mendacity, which the Post then deceptively packages and distributes as "journalism." For those of you who have forgotten, James Frey's deception, in his book A Million Little Pieces, was to pose as a former drug addict who got clean through the force of his own unaided will.

The Washington Post, on the other hand, poses as a newspaper.

The latest Peterson production, "Analysis examines what it's like to be a 'rich' family in America," is a grab-bag of misinformation and fiscal ignorance. This "analysis" was written by the latest Frey from Peterson's shop, someone named Karen Hube, and it's based on two phony premises: First, that "President Obama and others have repeatedly used (that level of income) to define what it means to be 'rich' in America today," and second, that it's a hardship to get by on $250,000 a year. more »

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Recently I wrote that the deficit-cutting projects and media campaigns sponsored by billionaire Pete Peterson all "focus on the same narrow band of options" that "reflect far-right positions," but nevertheless are usually described in the media as "moderate" and "bipartisan." more »

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Recent remarks by a would-be Social Security cutter highlight the unspoken agenda behind proposals that claim to "fix" the program by cutting benefits, all in the name of "deficit reduction." Social Security doesn't contribute to the deficit. But it can help decrease it, provided you have no moral qualms about raiding a Trust Fund created for other purposes. It's increasingly clear that this is exactly what some people have in mind. And, as we've come to learn, no would-be raid on America's retirement savings is complete without a lecture on morality.

Funny, isn't it? People who think it's immoral to walk away from an underwater mortgage are encouraging the government to welsh on a loan from the American people. They keep preaching about "thrift" even as their fingers drive deeper into working America's piggy bank. . more »

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We're working with some of the best state-level bloggers from around the country to help us tell the truth about key economic and social policy issues, and to draw the contrast between the rhetoric of the right and the progressive alternative. Please visit our CAF State Blogger Network page to see more. more »

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The Latest Battle to Take Social Security from the Middle Class, People of Color, and People with Disabilities more »

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This week Leonard Downie, the former Executive Editor of the Washington Post, attacked blogs in general and the Huffington Post specifically, saying they're "parasites" who live off "journalism produced by others." His comment would have carried more weight if Downie's old newspaper still produced all its own journalism, instead of outsourcing a portion of its reporting function to a bureau funded by a special interest group. (See correction/clarification, below.)

Downie's comment about blogs whose "opinions reflecting a predictable point of view on the left or the right of the political spectrum" unfortunately also applies to his former employer. This slant is most unforgivable in its news coverage, given that paper's claim of journalistic objectivity. In fact, the Post's coverage of Social Security and the budget deficit makes it the poster child for media outlets who are accelerating their own demise by compromising their professional standards in the pursuit of leaner business models. more »

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