5
#000000
#FFFFFF
For Immediate Release
February, 22 2013, 12:29pm EDT
Contact:
Harriet Rowan, harriet_rowan@prwatch.org, (608) 260-9713
Pete Peterson's "Fix the Debt" Astroturf Supergroup Poised to Exploit Sequester Debate to Advance Austerity Agenda
New Online Resource on the Funding, the Leaders, the Astroturf Partner Groups, and More from the Publishers of ALECexposed.org
Madison, WI
One of the most hypocritical corporate PR campaigns in decades is advancing inside the beltway, attempting to convince the White House, Congress, and the American people that another cataclysmic economic crisis is around the corner that will destroy our economy unless drastic action is taken.
The effort is being bankrolled by one of the wealthiest men in the nation. Peter G. Peterson made a fortune at the Blackstone Group on Wall Street. He conveniently cashed out with $2 billion shortly before the 2008 financial meltdown and now has pledged to spend $1 billion of that payout to convince Americans -- who overwhelmingly want to keep and strengthen Social Security and Medicare -- that these programs threaten our very existence as a nation.
His latest incarnation is the Campaign to Fix the Debt which was announced on the Peter G. Peterson Foundation website in July 2012. At least a 127 CEOs have signed up to the campaign some kicking in $1 million each. Accompanied by elder "statesmen" (many of whom have undisclosed financial ties to firms that lobby on deficit-related issues), plus four PR firms, 80 full-time staff members, 23 phony state chapters, and a raft of Peterson-funded "partner organization," Fix the Debt has targeted a budget of $60 million in "the first phase" of the project.
Campaign Moves Outside the Beltway to at Least 23 States
Phase two is now underway. Soon this astroturf supergroup may be coming to a state near you. Fix the Debt has launched 23 state chapters and plans to deploy staff to these states in campaign that "increasingly resembles a presidential race, with grassroots-style organizing and offices in places like New Hampshire, Ohio, Florida and Michigan," says Fortune magazine.
Their goal is to achieve a Simpson-Bowles style "grand bargain" on an austerity agenda for the United States by the nation's 237th birthday on July 4, 2013.
But many Fix the Debt firms pay a very low or even a negative average tax rate, contributing to the nation's deficit. Fix the Debt is secretly pushing for a major tax break that would exempt profits earned overseas by U.S. firms from taxation and encourage the offshoring of U.S. jobs. While the Fix the Debt CEOs call for cuts to Social Security, many of the publicly-traded Fix the Debt firms underfund their employee pension plans -- making their workers even more dependent on the popular social insurance plan that American workers pay into with each paycheck. Documentation, charts and further resources available on our Fix the Debt Main Page here.
Fix the Debt steering committee members have extensive ties to corporations lobbying to preserve dozens of costly tax breaks (such as the "carried interest loophole" that made Pete Peterson a rich man) that are not disclosed in their Fix the Debt bios. Click here to see a chart of these conflicts.
At least 90 state leaders are lobbyists. This too is generally not disclosed. See a chart of state leaders and lobbyists here.
New Online Resource on Campaign to Fix the Debt
The Center for Media and Democracy tracks the PR industry, front groups, and corporate spin. We launched the award-winning ALECexposed investigation in 2011. Rarely have we seen such a well-financed astroturf supergroup as Fix the Debt.
Today, CMD is pleased to unveil -- in partnership with The Nation -- a new resource on the Campaign to Fix the Debt, for the public and the media, that exposes the leaders, the Peterson-funded partners, the phony state chapters, the lobbyists and the stunt men (who convinced Alan Simpson to dance Gangnam Style) behind this massive PR effort.
This package includes:
Fix the Debt Astroturf Supergroup Portal Page
Fix the Debt's Leadership
Fix the Debt Leaders' Conflicts of Interest
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
Pete Peterson
Peter G. Peterson Foundation
Social Security
Medicare
and more.
The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) is a non-profit investigative reporting group. Our reporting and analysis focus on exposing corporate spin and government propaganda. We publish PRWatch, SourceWatch, and BanksterUSA. Our newest major investigation is available at ALECexposed.org. We accept no funding from for-profit corporations or the government. If you would like to make a financial contribution to support our work, please click here.
LATEST NEWS
As TrumpRx Scam Does Virtually Nothing, Big Pharma Jacks Up Prices on Cancer Drugs
"As they continue to hike prices, the pharmaceutical industry is also working overtime to block reforms that would lower them, and patients are paying the price."
Mar 23, 2026
A report released Monday found that Big Pharma has continued raising prices on dozens of cancer drugs, despite President Donald Trump's repeated false claims that he and his administration have slashed drug prices by a mathematically impossible 600%.
The analysis, conducted by Patients for Affordable Drugs, found that pharmaceutical companies increased prices on 64 oncology drugs in the first weeks of 2026, with the vast majority of price hikes coming in above the rate of inflation.
Patients for Affordable Drugs noted the heavy financial toll that paying for treatments takes on US cancer patients, and said the latest price increases would only exacerbate the crisis.
"Cancer drugs are among the most expensive drugs on the market, costing $74,000 more on average than non-cancer drugs," the group explained. "More than 42% of cancer patients in the US fully depleted their savings within two years of diagnosis to cover their care. More than half of Americans with cancer go into debt because of the cost of their care."
Making matters worse, the group added, is that Big Pharma is heavily lobbying Congress to pass legislation that would further delay small molecule drugs, including "widely used, high-cost cancer treatments," from becoming eligible for Medicare price negotiations.
Merith Basey, CEO of Patients for Affordable Drugs, stressed that the latest price increases were unacceptable given that "cancer is a leading cause of death among American seniors, and the treatments patients rely on are already among the most expensive."
"Yet as they continue to hike prices, the pharmaceutical industry is also working overtime to block reforms that would lower them," added Basey, "and patients are paying the price."
While the Patients for Affordable Drugs report focuses on cancer drugs, a December report from Reuters found that at least 350 branded medications are set for price hikes in 2026, including “vaccines against Covid, RSV, and shingles,” as well as the “blockbuster cancer treatment Ibrance.”
The total projected number of drugs seeing price increases in 2026 is significantly higher than in 2025, when 3 Axis Advisors estimated that pharmaceutical companies raised prices on 250 medications. The median price increase for drugs in 2026 is projected at 4%, roughly the same as in 2025.
All of these price increases have come despite Trump's false claims that he has lowered the prices of drugs to the point where pharmaceutical companies would actually be paying patients to take them.
An analysis released last week by the Center for American Progress (CAP) found that the president's TrumpRx initiative, which was created to purportedly offer Americans cheaper prescription drugs, offered genuinely lower prices on "exactly one" of the 54 medications listed on its website.
CAP also found that nearly one-third of the drugs available on the TrumpRx website have generic alternatives that were cheaper than what was being offered, and that the website made no mention of this.
Keep Reading
Show Less
'Every Key Climate Indicator Is Flashing Red' in New UN Report
“Humanity has just endured the 11 hottest years on record," said the secretary-general of the United Nations. "When history repeats itself 11 times, it is no longer a coincidence. It is a call to act."
Mar 23, 2026
The annual State of the Global Climate report by the United Nations' top meteorological agency was released Monday, marking the first time the authors of the report have included the Earth's energy imbalance as a key indicator of the climate emergency.
The World Meteorological Organization's (WMO) inclusion of the imbalance only provides more evidence of what scientists have been warning for decades: The continued extraction of fossil fuels is causing heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide and methane to build up in the atmosphere and is causing planetary heating, which is leading to extreme weather including wildfires, drought, and severe hurricanes and cyclones.
The State of the Global Climate report explains that in a stable climate, incoming solar energy is roughly equal to the amount of energy leaving the Earth.
But with greenhouse gases at their highest level in the atmosphere in at least 800,000 years, that equilibrium has been thrown off, and the energy imbalance—which has increased steadily over the past two decades—is at its highest since the observational record began in 1960.
Instead of leaving the Earth system, energy is increasingly staying in the planet's surface and deep within the oceans.
Ashkay Deoras, a research scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Science at the University of Reading in the UK, who was not associated with the report, compared the trapped energy to a hot room.
“If you open the window, naturally, you will allow the hot air to escape,” Deoras told The New York Times. “But now what is happening is that, because of all these greenhouse gases, they are just trapping more and more heat. The planet is just not getting a chance to cool down.”
The report emphasized that the higher temperatures humans feel at the Earth's surface—which have been the hottest in history over the past 11 years—represent just 1% of the excess energy that isn't leaving the planet system.
Five percent of the excess heat is stored in continental land masses, while more than 91% is stored in the ocean.
As fossil fuel emissions have increased and built up, the ocean has been absorbing about 18 times the energy used by humans each year for the past two decades, according to the report.
“Scientific advances have improved our understanding of the Earth’s energy imbalance and of the reality facing our planet and our climate right now,” said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo. “Human activities are increasingly disrupting the natural equilibrium and we will live with these consequences for hundreds and thousands of years.”
UN Secretary-General António Guterres emphasized that in addition to the energy imbalance, "every key climate indicator is flashing red" in the new report.
Last year was the second- or third-hottest year on record, depending on the data set, owing to La Niña conditions that temporarily cooled the planet. Earth was about 1.43°C warmer than the pre-industrial average, and 2024—when hotter El Niño conditions were in effect—remains the hottest year with global temperatures averaging 1.55°C above pre-industrial levels.
About 3% of excess energy warms and melts ice, and ice sheets on Antarctica and Greenland lost significant mass in 2025, while the average Arctic sea-ice extent last year was the lowest or second-lowest on record.
The loss of Arctic and Antarctic ice is driving the long-term rise in the global mean sea level, with was around 11 centimeters higher at the end of 2025 than it was in January 1993, when satellite records began.
“The State of the Global Climate is in a state of emergency. Planet Earth is being pushed beyond its limits," said Guterres. “Humanity has just endured the 11 hottest years on record. When history repeats itself 11 times, it is no longer a coincidence. It is a call to act."
The secretary-general added in a video posted on social media that the world must "accelerate a just transition" to renewable energy to protect "climate security, energy security, and national security."
In this age of war our addiction to fossil fuels is destabilizing the climate, global economy & global security.
Now more than ever, we must accelerate a just transition to renewable energy.
Renewables deliver climate security, energy security & national security. pic.twitter.com/TrphJ2Zwa2
— António Guterres (@antonioguterres) March 23, 2026
Saulo noted that the impact of catastrophic planetary heating grew increasingly evident in 2025, with "heatwaves, wildfires, drought, tropical cyclones, storms, and flooding" causing thousands of deaths and billions of dollars in economic losses.
The World Weather Attribution found that a heatwave across the western US last week would have been "virtually impossible" without the climate emergency. Climate researchers also concluded last summer that devastating floods in central Texas were caused by "very exceptional meteorological conditions," and the climate crisis "supercharged" the conditions that led to the extreme rainfall and flooding that killed 1,750 people in South Asia late last year.
Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump—whose country is the largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases—has taken steps to weaken the world's ability to respond to the climate emergency, withdrawing from dozens of climate- and energy-related international treaties and slashing climate research and emergency response spending.
Trump has also pushed for more fossil fuel emissions—investing in the expensive, pollution-causing coal industry; demanding that the Pentagon obtain energy from coal plants; and mandating oil and gas lease sales.
"The way ahead," said Guterrres, "must be grounded in science, common sense, and the courage to take urgent climate action."
Keep Reading
Show Less
Israel Defense Minister Deploys 'Gaza Model' in Lebanon, Ordering Destruction of Villages
One expert called the policy “an open admission of intent to commit ethnic cleansing.”
Mar 23, 2026
Israel is planning to use Gaza as a "model" for its expanding assault on Lebanon, its defense minister said on Sunday as he pledged to begin the demolition of homes in border villages.
In a statement Sunday, Defense Minister Israel Katz said he and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had ordered the Israel Defense Forces to "immediately destroy all the bridges over the Litani River that are used for terrorist activity, in order to prevent the passage of Hezbollah terrorists and weapons southward."
He also said he'd ordered the military to "accelerate the destruction of Lebanese homes in the border villages in order to thwart threats to the Israeli settlements—in accordance with the Beit Hanoun and Rafah model in Gaza."
Dylan Williams, the vice president for government affairs at the Center for International Policy, described the invocation of this "Gaza model" as "an open admission of intent to commit ethnic cleansing" in Lebanon.
The two cities Katz referred to were largely wiped off the map during the Gaza genocide.
Beit Hanoun, a city on the northeastern edge of the Gaza Strip, which once had a population of more than 50,000 people, had nearly all of its structures totally "flattened" by Israel's bombing and was totally depopulated, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in mid-2025. The far-right in Israel has pushed for Jewish Israeli settlers to move in and build settlements on the territory.
Rafah has been similarly devastated, with nearly 70% of the structures "wiped out" according to an October 2025 investigation by the Center for Information Resilience.
At the time that Israeli forces moved into Rafah in mid-2024, it was the last refuge for more than 1 million Palestinians who'd been displaced from their homes elsewhere in the strip. UN experts described the attack on Rafah as a culmination of a monthslong campaign to “forcibly transfer and destroy Gaza’s population," with more than 800,000 people being forced to flee.
Human Rights Watch said on Monday that Katz's announcement demonstrated "an intent to forcibly displace residents, destroy civilian homes, and conduct strikes that could target civilians" in Lebanon as well.
Already, more than 1 million civilians in Lebanon, from the area south of the Litani River and in Beirut's southern suburbs, have become displaced following orders from the Israeli military to evacuate their homes.
Katz has said hundreds of thousands of Shiite civilians will be forbidden from returning from their south of the Litani "until the safety of Israel’s northern residents is guaranteed," and he has said Israel “will not hesitate to target anyone who is present near Hezbollah members, facilities, or means of combat.”
Human Rights Watch has said these indefinite displacements raise the concern that Israel is perpetrating the war crime of forced displacement and doing so based on religion.
“The Israeli military does not get to decide when civilians lose protections afforded by international law, nor should it be allowed to prevent displaced residents from returning to their homes based on some undefined ‘safety’ standard,” said Ramzi Kaiss, Lebanon researcher at Human Rights Watch. Deliberately targeting civilians, civilian objects, and others protected under international law would be a war crime, and countries supplying Israel with weapons need to realize they are risking complicity in war crimes too.”
Since the latest outbreak of hostilities at the beginning of March following the launch of the US-Israeli war against Iran, at least 1,024 people in Lebanon have been killed in Israeli attacks, including 79 women and 118 children, according to a report from Lebanese authorities this weekend.
Last week, the United Nations Human Rights Office reported that Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon have "destroyed hundreds of homes and civilian infrastructure, including healthcare facilities."
“For over two years, Israel’s allies and European states that purport to support and uphold human rights have buried their heads in the sand as atrocities continue in Lebanon, as in Gaza,” Kaiss said. “Atrocities flourish when there is impunity, and other countries should no longer stand by as they continue.”
Keep Reading
Show Less
Most Popular