General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Pete Peterson bankrolled debunked austerity study, could make billions off safety net privatization [View all]JHB
(37,128 posts)...he'd recoup everything he's sunk into think tanks and astroturf efforts.
He's been beating this drum since the 70s, and it's always the same tune no matter how conditions change. In his articles in the New York Review of Books in 1982 warning of a coming SS crash, he told of how Social Security was set up during the depressions, when conditions were very different: back then few people had pension plans, while 'now' (meaning 1982) over half did and they were well-funded. In 2013, with those pensions gutted by union-busting and looting by private equity firms like Peterson's Blackstone Group, the argument is that "Social Security was never meant to be a complete retirement plan".
I like a quote from John Hess (from 1997) about Peterson:
Now to return to the question with which we began: How does Peterson find the time to make all that money? It would seem to be the new-fashioned way of tapping the gusher of wealth flowing from the economy. Peterson took his severance pay to Schwartzman and formed the Blackstone Group, which played the arbitrage game, bought up failing companies, shopped the savings-and-loan auctions, and made money.
A towboat operated by one of their subsidiaries and piloted by a man who had flunked his licensing exam seven out of eight times hit a railroad bridge and caused 47 deaths. Another Blackstone company drilled a hole in the Chicago River and caused that city's costliest disaster since the Great Fire. A major partner resigned last October under the cloud of an ugly scandal alleging fraud.
These things happen. Peterson is a busy man. Journalists may be forgiven for not connecting him with these misfortunes, or even knowing about them. What is not forgivable is their swallowing his ideological book, line and sinker.