In a recent article appearing in Politico magazine, Charles Lewis, founder of the grandly titled Center for Public Integrity, an outfit dedicated to aggressive investigative journalism, tells a tale from the 1980s about his less than grand experiences with the legendary CBS TV show 60 Minutes.
Well, you see the dilemma: tell the truth about PGP’s hard work for Japan and other foreign nations, or save the boss’s chopper rides. Eventually, Lewis did the safe thing, and deleted Petey from the bit. In the past decade or so, Petey’s become better known, not as a spokesman for Japan Inc. but rather for spending about a billion in cash—a lot of it his—to persuade America that it’s time to cut Social Security benefits now! I don’t have as much of a problem with Pete lobbying for Japanese companies rather than American companies as I suspect Lewis did, but I find it a bit rich that a guy who has been riding to his weekend getaway in a chopper1 for the past 30 years thinks he should be the one to decide whether ordinary Americans get $1,000 a month or $1,100 as they creep towards death.
Afterwords
I previously linked to a piece in the Columbia Journalism Review about a “Cut Social Security Now!” article appearing in the Washington Post by Elaine S. Povich and Eric Pianin, two employees of the Fiscal Times that quoted Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, and cited data from “Peterson-Pew Commission on Budget Reform,” the cream of the jest being that the Fiscal Times, the Concord Coalition,and the PPCBR were all Peter G. Peterson-created entities, said cream going unreported by the Post. More recently, I also linked to a piece by Alec MacGillis in the New Republic, justly ridiculing the Peter G. Peterson Foundation’s recent “Fiscal Summit,”
- Riding to his weekend getaway in a chopper at company expense, of course. ↩︎
