Reimagining Journalism: The Story of the One Percent
I was especially curious about the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation, which I’d never heard of. Going to its website, I discovered that it’s yet another of the dozens of trade groups and associations dedicated to protecting Wall Street’s interests in Washington. Others include the Financial Markets Association, the Financial Services Roundtable, the Global Financial Markets Association, the Institute for Financial Markets, the Private Equity Growth Capital Council, and the Securities Industry Finance Markets Association. All of these organizations have powerful boards, sizable budgets, and considerable influence, yet no one is watching them.
.. From the Times I learned that the fund-raisers Singer hosts in his apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side can net more than $1 million a session, and I read in The Wall Street Journal that he was instrumental in the selection of Paul Ryan as Mitt Romney’s running mate in 2012. In a detailed profile of Singer in Mother Jones, Peter Stone noted that Elliott Management has frequently been called a “‘vulture fund’ because a chunk of its profits comes from buying distressed companies’ or countries’ debt at a steep discount.” In 2012 a subsidiary of the firm, seeking to extract full payment from Argentina for some bonds on which it had defaulted, had an Argentine naval vessel impounded in a Ghanaian port. In 2004, Singer contributed $5,000 to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which attacked John Kerry’s war record, badly damaging his presidential bid.
.. From Paul Blumenthal at The Huffington Post I learned that four hawkish-on-Israel billionaires—Singer, Sheldon Adelson, Home Depot founder Bernard Marcus, and Seth Klarman, the head of the private investment house Baupost—gave a combined $11.5 million to anti-Iran groups from 2011 through 2013 (while also giving $115 million to Republican Party Super PACs in the 2012 and 2014 elections).
.. As secretary, Duncan filled many top positions with people with ties to both Broad and Gates.*
The policy implications of all this were nicely summed up in an interview I found on YouTube with Stanley Katz, a professor of public affairs at Princeton and a longtime student of nonprofits. These megafoundations, he said, “have been able to leverage their resources in such a way that their policies have been adopted by state boards of education, local boards of education, and the federal Department of Education.” The result is that “the K–12 policy of these megafoundations is pretty much the K–12 policy of the United States of America.” It’s an illustration, Katz said, of how in today’s America private money can buy public policy.