Is There A War On Pension Plans? Billionaire John D. Arnold’s attack on public-employee pensions. Have you heard that the biggest problem facing our states, counties and cities is the bloated, lavish, insane level of money that goes to public-employee pensions? Of course you have, and that’s partly thanks to billionaire John Arnold. Arnold got his start at Enron trading natural gas derivatives. After Enron he used his Enron money to form an energy-trading hedge fund. Now he is using his fortune to fund various philanthropic causes, including helping to keep Head Start running when Republicans recently shut down the government. Unfortunately he has also dedicated part of his fortune to gutting public-employee pensions. In a September report for the Institute for America’s Future, the Plot Against Pensions (which has excerpts posted on Salon), David Sirota showed how the Pew Charitable Trusts was working in partnership with (and funded by) Arnold. The findings in Sirota’s report include: Conservative activists are manufacturing the perception of a public pension crisis in order to both slash modest retiree benefits and preserve expensive corporate subsidies and tax breaks. The Pew Charitable Trusts and the Laura and John Arnold Foundation are working together in states across the country to focus the debate over pensions primarily on slashing retiree benefits rather than on raising public revenues. Then last week, in The Wolf of Sesame Street: Revealing the secret corruption inside PBS’s news division at PandoDaily, Sirota revealed how PBS’ WNET had solicited Arnold to fund a two-year series of “news” shows named “The Pension Peril” that would promote cutting the pensions of public employees. In this story, Sirota wrote: “In recent years, Arnold has been using massive contributions to politicians, Super PACs, ballot initiative efforts, think tanks and local front groups to finance a nationwide political campaign aimed at slashing public employees’ retirement benefits. His foundation which backs his efforts employs top Republican political operatives, including the former chief of staff to GOP House Majority Leader Dick Armey (TX). According to its own promotional materials, the Arnold Foundation is pushinglawmakers in states across the country “to stop promising a (retirement) benefit” to public employees.”
Posted on: Thu, 04 Dec 2014 15:03:57 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015