Fix the Debt Leaders and Conflicts of Interest

The Campaign to Fix the Debt is the latest incarnation of a decades-long effort by former Nixon man turned Wall Street billionaire Pete Peterson to slash earned benefit programs such as Social Security and Medicare under the guise of fixing the nation's "debt problem." Fix the Debt biographies posted on the organization's website fail to reveal that their core leadership team is riddled with conflicts of interest. Public Accountability Initiative (PAI) examined federal lobbying records and found at least 13 steering committee members with financial ties to firms that lobby on deficit-related matters that are not disclosed in their Fix the Debt bios. These firms lobby to preserve dozens of costly tax breaks (including the “carried interest” tax loophole that made Pete Peterson a rich man) or to hold off new taxes, such as the “Robin Hood Tax,” a proposed financial speculation tax that could raise as much as a $1 trillion over 10 years.

The image and wiki table below detail the corporate ties and conflicts of interest by Fix the Debt leaders. Footnotes for each item are available in the wiki chart at the bottom.

These tables are part of the Center for Media and Democracy's investigation of this astroturf supergroup and related groups. Please visit our main SourceWatch page on Fix the Debt, the article on Fix the Debt's Leadership, and the Pete Peterson page for more.

Chart


For more information, see the table below.

Related Fix the Debt SourceWatch Articles

 * Fix the Debt
 * Fix the Debt's Leadership
 * Fix the Debt's Partner Groups
 * Fix the Debt's State Chapters
 * Fix the Debt's Lobbyists
 * Fix the Debt's Parent Group
 * Fix the Debt's Corporations
 * Peter Peterson
 * Peter G. Peterson Foundation
 * AmericaSpeaks
 * Simpson-Bowles Commission
 * Erskine Bowles
 * Alan Simpson
 * Social Security
 * Medicare
 * Medicaid