Funder of pension grab has meltdown
John Arnold, the former Enron trader who is supporting San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed and his mission pension slashing effort in California along with the think tanks and institutes like Pew, the Heritage Foundation and the Manhattan Institute, writes a diatribe in Philanthropy magazine defending his agenda. Note that he claims labor groups (special interests) spend billions compared to the thousands spent by “reformers” like him. LOL.
Before you read it, check out Matt Tiabbi’s description of John Arnold from a recent issue of The Rolling Stone magazine.
“In 2011, Pew began to align itself with a figure who was decidedly neither centrist nor nonpartisan: 39-year-old John Arnold, whom CNN/Money described (erroneously) as the “second-youngest self-made billionaire in America,” after Mark Zuckerberg. Though similar in wealth and youth, Arnold presented the stylistic opposite of Zuckerberg’s signature nerd chic: He’s a lipless, eager little jerk with the jug-eared face of a Division III women’s basketball coach, exactly what you’d expect a former Enron commodities trader to look like. Anyone who has seen the Oscar-winning documentary The Smartest Guys in the Room and remembers those tapes of Enron traders cackling about rigging energy prices on “Grandma Millie” and jamming electricity rates “right up her ass for fucking $250 a megawatt hour” will have a sense of exactly what Arnold’s work environment was like.” – Matt Taibbi
See story on John Arnold’s attacks on collective bargaining and unions on PubSecAlliance.
From John Arnold’s article in Philanthropy magazine entitled, “Attacks and Vitriol Will Not Deter Me From Supporting Fixes to Public Policy.”
The organized and very well-funded apparatus that exists to protect the financial and political stakes of entrenched interest groups is what leads to public policy that is skewed in favor of special interests and bad for America.
According to documents publicly filed by labor unions, organized labor spent $4.4-billion from 2005 to 2011 in political donations and activities. Combined, our foundation, advocacy organization and we personally have spent less than $10-million in 2013 on pension education and reform efforts, and we are among the largest grant makers in this area.
The political pressure these special interest groups can and do place on politicians is extraordinary. If you faced an election every few years, which would draw your attention—the billions spent by organized labor in political campaigns or the thousands spent by reformers?