Link: http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2009-06-14/peter-peterson-education-american-dreamer-twelve-rebroadcast

Indulge with me in a fabulous fantasy: you have $1 billion to give away, and you want to put it where it will do the most good. How would you invest it? Medical research? Education? Fighting famine? Alternative energy sources? Maybe you’d want to spread it around, since $1 billion is a vast sum, a thousand times $1 million.

Follow up:

Believe it or not, there are more than 400 billionaires in the United States, more than any other country, more than any other continent even. Some of them, like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, are widely familiar. One, Michael Bloomberg, is mayor of New York City. Forbes magazine keeps track of them, and in 2010, it ranked Peter G. Peterson as Number 488 of the world’s richest people and termed his fortune “self-made”. He made his paltry $2 billion came when Blackstone, the private equity firm of which he was a founder, went public.

I heard Peterson on the Diane Rehm Show a year ago , and recently, I went back to listen again to see if I found his interview as preposterous as I recalled. I wasn’t disappointed. Peterson starts off talking about his humble roots, of his immigrant father who ran a 24-hour coffee shop in Nebraska to put his children through college. (Peterson is a graduate of Northwestern and got an MBA at the University of Chicago.) The occasion of his appearance on Rehm’s show was the publication of his book, “The Education of an American Dreamer.”

Rehm let him talk about his childhood, the death of an infant sister that sent his mother into a psychiatric hospital for two years, and the psychotherapy that enabled him to see how his addiction to work had ruined his previous marriage. He sounds like a wise man, sympathetic even. Peterson was Secretary of Commerce in the Nixon Administration (seven presidents and ten administrations ago), he’s been chair of the New York Federal Reserve and CEO of Lehman Brothers (before it went public) and was appointed by President Clinton to a panel studying the federal deficit, entitlement programs and tax policies. He is married to Joan Gantz Cooney of Children’s Television Workshop fame.

Finally, his real agenda becomes clear, and it’s not about the book.

He wants to convince the crew who grew up on Sesame Street that this great land of ours can no longer afford Social Security and Medicare payments for the Baby Boomers who are approaching retirement age, and he’s set up a billion-dollar foundation to get his message across. There’ll be video games and segments on MTV aimed at the young people who are his audience. Peterson explained he is concerned about the future of the American Dream and the $44 trillion these two “entitlement” programs will require.

He wasn’t talking about drug-addled celebrities or mortgage bankers or hedge fund operators but the rest of us when he described the dominant American cultural attitude as, “I want it all, I want it now, and I don’t want to pay for it.” Peterson’s even willing to forego his monthly Social Security check. “We must all make sacrifices,” he adds.

A billion will buy a pretty big campaign I remember thinking, but surely no one will take him seriously in the midst of the biggest recession since the Great Depression. I was happy when one of Rehm’s callers took on Peterson for being patronizing and insensitive to the plight of ordinary Americans. After all, we had just bailed out enormous banks (talk about entitlement) and we still haven’t addressed compensation for executives and traders, whom even Peterson admits, made multiple millions as they swung the market back and forth, whether or not they contributed to the bottom line.

Baby Boomers, that large demographic group born just after World War II, have the reputation of being spoiled (protested the Vietnam war, celebrated sexual liberation) but their retirement is more subject to the whims of Wall Street than most. It is they who often bought those sub-prime mortgages, were denied pensions that corporations offered their parents, and poured their 401 Ks into a stock market that the traders manipulated to their own advantage. Worse, if they went into non-profits or jobs financed by state governments, chances are their pension payments will be negatively affected by still-legal derivative trading and worthless instruments with AAA ratings. They have swelled the ranks of the unemployed and their chances for finding equally remunerative employment are dim. Should they be entitled to Social Security and Medicare? You betcha!

As someone who looks forward to the second Wednesday of every month when a check hits my account, I think I was, to use Peterson’s term, “anesthetized.” I didn’t even read William Greider’s excellent and well-tempered article, “Whacking the Old Folks,” http://www.thenation.com/article/whacking-old-folks in the June 7 edition of The Nation when a friend alerted me.

But I could no longer ignore the threat when on Tuesday I found a message from Nita Chaudhary at MoveOn’s political action unit calling for a full court press to counter an Obama deficit commission similar to the one in the Clinton years. Indeed, its chairs are Erskine Bowles, often referred to as corporate America’s best friend in the Clinton White House, and former Wyoming Republican Senator Alan Simpson.

This crisis, Chaudhary points out, is largely a result of cutting taxes on the rich during the Bush administration while fighting two wars , and you’d think Democrats would organize a progressive response. Instead they’re paralyzed.

But I’m awake now, so, here’s my list of suggestions in no particular order:

1. Recruit Big Bird to warn young people that their parents are about to take a hit for Wall Street. Will they be able to pick up the slack when Mom and Dad run out of funds?
2. Call or write your Representative and Senators to let them know you feel passionate about this issue. (It won’t hurt to call again when some organization asks for your help, but an independent, self-motivated contact from you will carry weight now.)
3. Create an electronic game showing how many retirees’ benefits the average billionaire could carry.
4. Press for extension of FICA deductions to the top of the income scale.
5. Make a video of any Social Security recipients who will tell you what those checks mean to them and send it to Peterson, Bowles and Simpson.
6. Organize seminars for Boomers to help them figure out how long the money in they’ve put away for retirement will last without a boost from Social Security and Medicare.
7. Implore Al Gore to do another slide show and take along his lockbox.
8. Let the AARP know that they’d better not cave into deficit mania as they did when they went along with G.W. Bush’s Part D drug giveaway to big pharma.
9. Publicly and repeatedly ask every Republican and Blue Dog Democratic candidate if they oppose cutting Social Security and Medicare.
10. Demand repeal of the Bush tax cuts.
11. Send a father you know a Father’s Day card promising to fight for his retirement entitlements.
12. Get Betty White to star in a new sit-com about old people before the New Deal.
13. Get Betty White to star in a new sit-com about billionaires in retirement.
14. Send MoveOn a donation for their campaign.
15. Enlist First Mother-in-Law Marian Robinson to have a sit-down with the president about his obligation to the aging.

Add your own while there's still time. None of us want to revisit the “creativity” forced upon the denizens of the Great Depression. Now’s the time for progressives to let Democrats know that Social Security and Medicare are not baubles to be dangled in front of deficit hawks from either party. What they get in return will indeed be cold comfort.

You betcha!