GRC vice-chair is billionaire’s lobbyist

Scott Hamberger, vice-chair of the Loudoun County Government Reform Commission “elevates” Pete Peterson’s “Campaign to Fix the Debt” in a recent LTE to the Leesburg Today. Visit fixthedebt.org and you’ll see a strange synchrony of fearmongering. All of the sudden, a bunch of grass tops groups covering a variety of demographics are informing us that “debt is bad.” And all the web sites of the collaborating groups look strangely similar. And the messaging is all the same.

That messaging reminds me of those “Car Cash” commercials. “Bring us your car title and you can drive away, smiling, with a hand full of cash.” Cash is good, and debt is bad, right?

Pete Peterson, the billionaire, who’s “mostly false” claims are parroted by Congressman Frank Wolf (R-VA) appears to be behind the scheme which is covered in depth in the week’s “The Nation” magazine and in a NY Times article titled “Public Goals, Private Interests in Debt Campaign“.

The Nation describes the “elevating” of the so-called debt controversy thusly:

Who does that elevating? Meet the Campaign to Fix the Debt, the billionaire-funded project that uses Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles as figureheads for a fearmongering campaign to convince Americans that the deficits the United States has run throughout its history have suddenly metastasized into “a cancer that will destroy this country from within.” It is the latest incarnation of Wall Street mogul Pete Peterson’s long campaign to get Congress and the White House to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid while providing tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy.

Peterson has poured an estimated half-billion dollars into schemes so unpopular, so economically unsound and so obviously self-serving that even conservative politicians run from them, as the implosion of the Simpson-Bowles commission illustrates. So Peterson has repurposed his project into what Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) Global Economy Project director Sarah Anderson calls “a Trojan horse” for “filthy rich tax-dodging hypocrites.” With a stable of CEOs, Peterson timed the launch of this new $60 million campaign to exploit the wrangling over the fiscal cliff, the debt ceiling and the sequester. Fix the Debt has signed up prominent Democrats and Republicans as spokespeople (many of whom have undisclosed financial ties to firms that lobby on deficit-related issues) and launched “astroturf” campaigns to create the fantasy that young people and seniors are concerned enough about debts and deficits to support Peterson’s austerity agenda.