"Fix the Debt," Front for Austerity? Billionaire Pete Peterson Funds PR Effort to Cut Social Welfare

To watch the full report on Democracy Now!, visit With $85 billion acrosstheboard spending cuts, known as "the sequestration," set to take effect this Friday, a new investigation reveals how billionaire investors, such as Peter Peterson, have helped reshaped the national debate on the economy, the debt and social spending. Between 2007 and 2011, Peterson personally contributed nearly $500 million to his Peter G. Peterson Foundation to push Congress to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid while providing tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy. Peterson's main platform has been the Campaign to Fix the Debt. While the campaign is portrayed as a citizenled effort, critics like The Nation's John Nichols call the campaign a front for business groups. The Center for Media and Democracy has compiled its research on the website,

JOHN NICHOLS: "Pete Peterson is an old-school moderate Republican. He's not some sort of hard-line conservative. He's a very expensive suit, private jet, mineral water kind of guy. And he has been obsessed, for a number of years, with restructuring the U.S. economy, and particularly restructuring U.S. fiscal policy. This is an important thing to understand. Pete Peterson and the people around him do not want—or aren't, I would suggest, particularly interested in fixing the debt or dealing with deficits. What they're really interested in is taking advantage of a moment when the United States is looking at these issues to establish a very different approach to a host of issues. And at the core of this is changing the way that we look at retirement in this country, definitely undermining Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, changing those earned benefit programs into something very different than what they've been and something far less reliable, but also making an awfully lot of other cuts in programs that serve the great mass of Americans, while at the same time continuing and even advancing the tax breaks for billionaires and corporations that have helped to make Pete Peterson a very, very wealthy man.

He sold this idea to around 125 other CEOs and very wealthy people. They've all chipped in a whole bunch of money, millions and millions, perhaps as much as $60 million for the current campaign, to this "Fix the Debt" group. And this Fix the Debt group is the primary proponent in the United States today of austerity. They want to, quote-unquote, "cut our way to progress," as President Obama suggested, but in reality, it's cutting the way toward progress for them and cutting the way toward a real hard hit for the average working American and potentially a slowing of the economy that begins with the sequester but does not end there."

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