My Conversation with Pete Peterson

Pete Peterson, co-founder and senior chairman of The Blackstone Group, will give $1 billion to his new foundation, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, to help solve some of the country's biggest economic problems. In my recent conversation with him, we also talked about how he sees the current economic crisis, sovereign wealth funds, and his relationship with Blackstone co-founder and CEO, Steve Schwarzman. Here is a part of that conversation:

Comments

[Purple Girl]

Seems some of these old Crooks are seeking redemption.
How can someone like him discuss OUR lack Of Savings when firms like his helped th ePrivate Banking firm called th e'Federal Reserve' steal all our money out the back door?We need to no jus "overhaul ' the banking System we need to tear it dwon and start again- Without such Gamblers or covert operatives like the "FED's". Why hav ea US treasury that is only an agency "Yes Man' to these Criminals. Freeze & Seize and Prosecute for Treason- they have intentional sucked Our country Dry!

[PacificGatePost]

Don't look to his type for answers, he has none ...

http://pacificgatepost.blogspot.com/2008/02/america-for-sale.html

Meantime, Rose asked one valid question on "rules".

[joebhed]

Charlie, thanks for having me on your show to explain to everyone that we do have some surface problems with the US economy, but as long as nobody panics, we can get still richer on this bubble.
One of the big problems - we don't save in this country.
We need to keep growing the economy so that people like me can get richer, while the middle-class gets poorer.
In order to have wars and prosperity for ordinary rich folks like us, we pretend there is no downside to borrowing from China, other unfriendly sovereigns and whomever will buy our debt, which is payable by the way, by the US taxpayer, to the HOLDER of those debts.
Charlie, what's wrong with this picture?
I wish those who think we're going to hell in a handbasket would tell us what the alternatives are.
There are no alternatives. (see below)
We have to keep on borrowing, and indebting the US taxpayer.
Because we just aren't saving enough.
Charlie, thanks for letting another fat-capitalist mouthpiece come on your show.
We bring it so much upper-class.

Please. Please. Please.
Read.
http://www.neweconomics.org/gen/uploads/CreatingNewMoney.pdf

"the issuing power of money should be taken from the
banks, and restored to the people to whom it belongs".
Thomas Jefferson

"the government should create, issue and circulate all the currency and credit needed to satisfy the
spending power of the government and the buying power of consumers."
Abraham Lincoln

[outnow]

I read another interview with Pete Peterson. He is very concerned with the amount owed in entitlements. Your other article about the fractional reserve system of money is very good also. To save our monetary system we need to rethink some of the fundamentals. This is not rocket science yet few understand enough to question the status quo.

[joebhed]

Thanks for the note, and the compliment.
If you read the New Economics Foundation treatise that I linked to, you will see that there IS an answer to the so-called Entitlement obligations of the motherland.
And, you are right about the monetary system, in its essence, not being rocket-science.

To quote Honest Abe in a different battle:
"I have two great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me, and the financial institutions in the rear. Of the two, the one at my rear is the greatest foe. The government should create, issue and circulate all the currency and credit needed to satisfy the spending power of the government and the buying power of consumers. Money will cease to be master and will become the servant of humanity. Democracy, thus, will rise superior to the money power."

[digoweli]

Reference this month's Scientific American article called "The Economist Has No Clothes" by Robert Nadeau. It articulates the 100 year fraud that the economists and the wealthy have perpetrated on the American people, the Environment, the Culture and the Nation's educational and health care systems as well as the minority and poorly born's equality in the legal system of the United States. The second industrial revolution began with the wealthy making a pledge to be caretakers of the nation's Cultural Institutions, to make jobs available for upward mobility and educational systems that would provide a future for the nation's youth. Today, the cultural institutions only service the wealthy upper 1%, downsizing is the way you become productive, the educational system k-12 is a wreck and they are taking on the pitiful health care and Social Security net that we have from their depression.

I was embarrassed by Peterson's social blindness. I don't want the world to think that he represents the best that America can do. Does this result justify the death of millions of first Nation's peoples in the conquest of this country or the benefits derived from the movement and murder of 60 million slaves from Africa? Such grotesque arrogance is why the world considers America to be a cultural backwater and why America has to legislate English as its language. We are a bazaar, a market that worships a superstitious entity called the "invisible hand" based in outmoded and discredited 19th century sciences. Digoweli

[outnow]

I will check out the Scientific American article. It is a good point about Peterson that he lacks a social vision. He can do the math but without compassion for other people he just keeps going back to the fact that his family were poor immigrants. So what. That should mean compassion, not personal entitlement. He will get old and die. He cannot take it with him. My advise to all such people is to give it all away.

[digoweli]

outnow,

A really good book on all of this was written 44 years ago by the theater critic of the New York Times Walter Kerr. He documented the points the current article makes. The name of the book is "The Decline of Pleasure" and I would highly recommend that everyone read it if you want to know the root of your current misery. digoweli

[joebhed]

Say, about that charade or fraud as you called it.

Is it not all part of this same plan?

"The truth is well known among our principal men now engaged in forming an imperialism of capital to govern the world. While they are doing this, the people must be kept in a condition of antagonism. By thus dividing the voters we can get them to expend their energies in fighting over questions of no importance to us, except as teachers to lead the common herd. Thus by discreet actions we can secure all that has been so generously planned and successfully accomplished"
The Bankers" Magazine, USA, 1892

And isn't it a fraud that has been exposed before?

"Every effort has been made by the Federal Reserve Board (FED) to conceal its powers, but the truth is - the FED has usurped the Government. It controls everything here (in Congress) and it controls all our foreign relations. It makes and breaks governments at will."
Congressman Louis T. McFadden
- who was then for ten years the Chair of the Committee on Banking and Currency of the Congress of the United States.

I think its time.

[Give Peace A Chance]

Amazing how the filthy rich corporatist blames the poor. Americans don't save because they are struggling to pay predatory lending mortgages, for ExxonMobil's record profits, and food prices that are souring out of control. And amazingly Peterson is on your show for free advertising his foundation.

Charlie, please try to bring some balance to your show. That is, if you wish us to watch it.

[fedupwiththis]

They wanted cheap labor. They got cheap labor. Now it's labor's fault that labor doesn't have any savings. Even the fascist Henry Ford knew that better worker pay means more consumption of manufactured goods. The problem is we don't manufacture anything anymore. Now we have labor and nothing to do. Yes, it's our fault for not saving enough. It's his classes fault for taking all the f__king money!

[SamEllison]

Charlie, I like Pete Peterson but he keeps throwing out that $44 Trillion number without putting a length of time on it. Thirty years? Infinity? What?
To have this discussion we really need to be truthful. I'm tired of half-Roves(truths).

[appleknocker]

Please don't expect more than half-truths from Peterson. he's been peddling this anti-Social Security propoganda since at least 1994 that I can remember. At that time, he was saying that if we didn't cut benefits NOW, we were doomed. You would never guess from reading him that some equally plausible projections show the trust fund solvent for at least the next 75 years. And of course he and his Wall Street buddies are salivating at the prospect of skimming the money now being paid into the SS system.

[intopolitics]

Peterson says he doesn't know why Americans don't save more.
Er, maybe because we aren't rich like you.

[archvixer]

Thank you Skeeter. You're absolutely right. I happened to see the interview last night and was amazed at how these supply-siders are still banging the drum. I guess it has worked our really well for them.

btw - what's with this entry from Charlie Rose? Is this a paid advertisement to HuffPost? It's absolutely worthless.

[Skeeter05]

I was repeatedly depressed by Mr. Peterson's comments. In each topic he covered, he personified the inherited wealth syndrome.

Everything can be improved if only we'd reduced the social security income of those with no other income and medical services can be improved if the elderly are cut off from those services. Otherwise our financial system will be reduced to rubble.

In case you forgot, Mr. Peterson, social security was implemented to reduce elderly poverty, which poverty was the natural result of employers not providing any retirement income. Ask the Enron employees, the airline employees, and all the others whose retirement income was not funded or dissipated.