Meet the Billionaires Using Their Immense Wealth to Make Life Miserable for Ordinary Americans

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http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/dave-johnson/54335/meet-the-billionaires-using-their-immense-wealth-to-make-life-miserable-for-ordinary-americans

Meet the Billionaires Using Their Immense Wealth to Make Life Miserable for Ordinary Americans
Economic Policy
by Dave Johnson | February 20, 2014 - 10:40am

Here is how it works these days: You start hearing about a big, national problem and then it becomes a drumbeat. First there are a few articles and columns mentioning that such-and-such is a problem. Then a number of articles appear, then a “study” from a “think tank” confirms the problem and sounds the alarm about how terrible it is, and then just as the issue seems to be the only thing you are hearing about a solution is presented. Of course, the solution always involves taking something away from you and giving it to some company or industry standing in front of a billionaire or three. The right question to start asking when you hear about these “problems” is which billionaire is driving this.

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1) Pete Peterson’s deficit/debt scare campaign and his ongoing effort to gut Social Security and other entitlements.Leading every list of billionaires pushing an issue is billionaire Pete Peterson and his forever war on government doing things to make our lives better, especially Social Security. Peterson leads the list because of reports of his pledge to spend $1 billion on his pet issue.

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2) 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.

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3) Charles Munger Jr. (near-billionaire and son of a billionaire)bankrolled California’s Proposition 20 in 2010 to create a “citizens redistricting committee” that took the process of drawing political districts out of the hands of California’s politicians. Munger and many Republicans believed this would immediately turn the state over to the Republicans because the districts were “gerrymandered”—rigged—to have a majority of “safe” Democratic-voting districts.