Pete Peterson Is Dead-- Guest Post By Jonathan Tasini

Author and labor activist-- former president of the National Writers Union-- Jonathan Tasini has been doing a phenomenal series of informative candidate interviews on his podcast, The Working Life, like the one above with Kaniela Ing. He manages to get all the candidates with the cutting edge ideas. Today he did the definitive obituary for Pete Peterson, the billionaire Wall Street crook who died Tuesday, age 91.

The Pete Peterson myth the media ignores
-by Jonathan Tasini

Should I be surprised by a fawning, embarrassing obituary for Pete Peterson? No. But, it ignores some very important truths about Pete Peterson and it is instructive about how other elites are treated in the traditional press.

1- The man made his fortune from piling up DEBT (more on that in a moment) to realize profits from buying and selling companies-- which cost tens of thousands of people good-paying jobs. His fortune came at great cost and pain to a lot of people and communities. NO MENTION OF THIS IN THE Times OBIT. Instead, he's treated like some genius and great pillar of the community

2- Despite having made a massive fortune piling up DEBT, Peterson spent years running around screaming about government DEBTS, and funding and promoting the entirely false narrative of a deficit/debt "crisis." Which simply does not exist. Which I wrote a book about here. He was singularly responsible for managing to convince an uncritical media and way too many Democrats that a crisis existed, leading to, among other things, the dangerous/lunatic Obama-appointed deficit commission-- better remembered as the "Catfood Commission" because if its recommendations had been implemented, calling for cuts in Social Security and Medicare, millions of seniors and others would be eating just that for 3 meals a day. As an aside: one reason I am skeptical about the drumbeat to depose Nancy Pelosi is that she, opposing her own president (Obama), said, at the time, there would be no cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

3- But this is how elites are treated in this country-- with amnesia or blatant disregard/ignorance of the truth. We just marked the 15th anniversary of the Iraq War-- yet neither George Bush nor Dick Cheney have been held accountable for their war crimes and lies to the public. The man sitting in the Oval Office today benefitted from years of fawning media coverage about his business "acumen," despite years of cheating thousands of people and bankruptcies-- not to mention blatant bigotry and despicable behavior towards women…and, yet, little of that was covered regularly, and, thus, we live with the hand-held-to-the-mouth shock coverage about each day's tweets when the character, behavior and record of this lowlife was abundantly clear years ago. If only one could hope that reading Peterson's obit critically would change perspectives…but, alas…