The Wolf of Sesame Street: Revealing the secret corruption inside PBS’s news division

[octoberlib]

On December 18th, the Public Broadcasting Service’s flagship station WNET issued a press release announcing the launch of a new two-year news series entitled “Pension Peril.” The series, promoting cuts to public employee pensions, is airing on hundreds of PBS outlets all over the nation. It has been presented as objective news on major PBS programs including the PBS News Hour.However, neither the WNET press release nor the broadcasted segments explicitly disclosed who is financing the series. Pando has exclusively confirmed that “Pension Peril” is secretly funded by former Enron trader John Arnold, a billionaire political powerbroker who is actively trying to shape the very pension policy that the series claims to be dispassionately covering.

In recent years, Arnold has been using massive contributions to politicians, Super PACs, ballot initiative efforts, think tanks and local front groups to finance a nationwide political campaign aimed at slashing public employees’ retirement benefits. His foundation which backs his efforts employs top Republican political operatives, including the former chief of staff to GOP House Majority Leader Dick Armey (TX). According to its own promotional materials, the Arnold Foundation is pushing lawmakers in states across the country “to stop promising a (retirement) benefit” to public employees.

Despite Arnold’s pension-slashing activism and his foundation’s ties to partisan politics, Leila Walsh, a spokesperson for the Laura and John Arnold Foundation (LJAF), told Pando that PBS officials were not hesitant to work with them, even though PBS’s own very clear rules prohibit such blatant conflicts.To the contrary, the Arnold Foundation spokesperson tells Pando that it was PBS officials who first initiated contact with Arnold in the Spring of 2013. She says those officials actively solicited Arnold to finance the broadcaster’s proposal for a new pension-focused series. According to the spokesperson, they solicited Arnold’s support based specifically on their knowledge of his push to slash pension benefits for public employees.

The news of PBS actively soliciting financing from billionaire political activists – and custom tailoring original program proposals for those financiers – follows a wave of damning revelations about the influence of super-wealthy political interests over public broadcasting. Thanks to collusion with PBS executives, those monied interests are increasingly permitted to launder their ideological and self-serving messages through the seeming objectivity of public television.

http://pando.com/2014/02/12/the-wolf-of-sesame-street-revealing-the-secret-corruption-inside-pbss-news-division/

[hootinholler]

1. Not entirely related..

WTF do brazillionaires gain from slashing public employee pensions?

I'm not seeing it. Why spend all that to do that? What's the ROI?

[octoberlib]

2. I don't get it either unless they

think it might result in even lower taxes for them.

[reusrename]

3. They are bankrupting cities and municipalities. They need a scapegoat.

The real culprit is interest on municipal bonds. Bonds paid for with the 12 trillion that was handed to them for free during the bailout.

Some say they have paid that money back, but they didn't, they bought bonds with it and then they paid back the money using worthless credit default swaps.

They need another scapegoat. Retired fire chiefs bringing home five figure salaries make an easy target.

[PotatoChip]

4. +1

[zeemike]

8. Plus when you bankrupt a city

You can buy up what they own at fire sale prices...it is all about owning the commons.

[reusrename]

14. Yep. They now have so much wealth they have run out of things to buy.

The only way to accumulate more wealth is to steal ownership of the commons from the public.

[okaawhatever]

5. A couple of things. First it's the easiest way to get rid of the government debt. The other way is

to increase corporate taxes back to their former levels. See how that works? Corporate income tax is currently only 9% of revenue collected. In the past, say before Reagan and maybe even Carter, it was closer to 30%. The easiest, and maybe only way, to keep corporate taxes artificially low, is to reduce services the government provides.
Another reason is public workers wouldn't have the benefit of retirement and would perhaps look at private companies since the two would be in direct competition. I think most would agree that a government worker makes less in salary, but the difference is made up in job stability, benefits and retirement. Those three things provide competition to private or publicly traded companies.
Another reason is that large state pension funds (the self-managed ones) are competitors on Wall Street. They're large enough share holders in many corporations to stop bad appointments to boards of directors and similar behavior that benefits only investment firms.

[reusrename]

12. This has nothing at all to do with government debt.

It's about stealing pension funds. They want to get the money out of the funds and into their pockets.

Here's how it works:

Taxpayers give trillions to the banksters under the bailout.

The banksters have no safe investment other than municipal bonds for these funds. Real estate is a disaster and gold is too expensive.

The municipal bonds are not even a very safe investment because most municipalities cannot afford to pay back the interest on the bonds anyhow, but they have a way around that.

They convince the taxpayers that pension funds are what is bankrupting their city, not the principle and interest on these bonds.

They convince the taxpayers to raid the pension funds in order to give the money to them.

Now, what's really infuriating here, what really makes them the scum of the earth, is that the taxpayers are the ones that lent this money to themselves in the fist place. IT WAS THEIR MONEY!

The bailouts took this taxpayer money and instead of lending it directly to the municipalities to keep the economy going, they gave it to the banksters for free. The banksters gave the taxpayers back a lot of worthless paper but they took this real money and lent it to the municipalities.

Now they want to put these trillions into their own pockets. And the only place where there's that much money lying around is in these pension funds.

And that's how you steal another 12 trillion from the people.

[lostnfound]

19. Partly ideology but also opportunities to profit

Like anything else that gets privatized, a pension program slashed and sold off to be "managed" by some new entity is an opportunity to profit. Create a crisis or a perception of a crisis, then appear with a "solution". (My old boss used to call it the 'match-pump' theory.. (secretly) light a fire with a match, but be standing nearby ready with a water pump to (publicly) put out the fire once it really gets roaring. People will see you are a hero.) Or some 'Shock Doctrine' tactics going on.

If they can convince the public that the pensions are bloated and mismanaged, then the politicians can be "persuaded" to cut benefits and turn the pension funds over to a new firm to manage them. In fact, if a few years ago, you were able to convince the state to invest their pension funds a few years ago in your favorite snake oil company, you could make a killing with a 'pump and dump' scheme (happened in Ohio, if I recall); then now when the pension fund is underfunded, you can make another tidy profit by getting the state to simultaneously cut pension obligations and hand it over to the professionals at your (fill-in the blank Fund Management Experts, Inc.)

If there's a large river of money flowing that's under your control, it's not so hard to siphon some of it your way.

[bbgrunt]

6. k and r

[bemildred]

7. Obvious and to be expected once Congress de-funded them.

Commercial stations don't like the competition, it's bad enough already.

[Chathamization]

9. About a decade ago they created a show for the WSJ editorial page and a show for Tucker Carlson

I never caught the Tucker Carlson program, but the WSJ editorial page program (called The Journal Editorial Report) was as bad as one could imagine. It was like watching the crazier shows from Fox on PBS.

[Laelth]

10. k&r for exposure. n/t

-Laelth

[heaven05]

11. it's a damn shame

what a lot of money in the wrong hands is doing to the working poor people and just plain poor folk of this country. A damn shame!

[JDPriestly]

13. PBS is another radio station and TV station that I cannot stand.

They have this monotone, exaggeratedly cute way of presenting stories. Ughhh.

There is something terribly phony and put-on about PBS.

Try Pacifica Radio instead, KPFK in Los Angeles has Thom Hartmann on as well as news programs like Democracy Now and Ian Masters' show. Fantastic coverage without the phony cheeriness.

[freshwest]

15. It was always there, just covered up better. n/t

Last edited Wed Feb 12, 2014, 03:42 PM - Edit history (1)

[Enthusiast]

16. As I pointed out, this nation, and its media, is completely off the rails.

I will not turn on PBS except for Moyers.

[Enthusiast]

17. "former Enron trader John Arnold"

That's all you need to know.

[onethatcares]

18. sweet geebus,

just how many billionaires are there?

While growing up the word "millionaire" was reserved for a few, now it seems like the first trillionaire will be minted

and he'll buy the country in one complete credit default swap.

I keep getting this sinking feeling we're fucked.

[WillyT]

20. Total And Utter Betrayal...

& Rec !!!