Some lies will not die. As I have demonstrated repeatedly, Third Way is Wall Street on the Potomac. It is funded secretly by Wall Street (it refuses to reveal its donors), it is openly run by Wall Street, and it lobbies endlessly for Wall Street. Third Way, like every Pete Peterson front group, is dedicated to shredding the safety net as its highest priority and throwing the Nation back into a gratuitous recession through self-destructive austerity. <\/p>\n
Third Way, like other Pete Peterson front groups, supports privatizing Social Security. That is Wall Street\u2019s greatest dream, for it would increase their revenues by hundreds of billions of dollars. Eric Laursen documented Wall Street\u2019s effort to in his recent book: \u201c The People\u2019s Pension: The Struggle to Defend Social Security Since Reagan.\u201d Laursen describes the Third Way\u2019s leader as a Pete Peterson prot\u00e9g\u00e9. Peterson is a conservative Republican billionaire made wealthy on Wall Street, who has dedicated a billion dollars of his wealth to his assault on the safety net.<\/p>\n
I showed in these pieces how journalists and Republicans used Third Way\u2019s \u201cfalse flag\u201d status as a self-described \u201c center-left\u201d organization to add faux credibility to their arguments. The Republicans, for example, used comments by one of Third Way\u2019s founders deriding Elizabeth Warren as the centerpiece of ads trying to defeat Elizabeth Warren in her run for the U.S. Senate. Similarly, the Washington Post\u2019s ultra-deficit hawk, Robert J. Samuelson, used Third Way\u2019s support of austerity as faux evidence that even liberals who studied the question realized the need to inflict austerity on the Nation.<\/p>\n
One of my prior articles provides the finance background of every member of Third Way\u2019s governing board \u2013 exposing the total dominance by Wall Street and finance. My goal was to make it impossible for a journalist who did, even the most perfunctory research, on Third Way to describe it as a \u201ccenter-left\u201d organization (or any analogous term).<\/p>\n
I had not counted on the New York Times failing to clear such a tiny research hurdle. Sadly, on March 20, 2013 the New York Times gave prominent coverage to a study sponsored by Third Way, which the reporter called \u201ca center-left policy research organization\u201d in an article entitled \u201c As Men Lose Economic Ground, Clues in the Family.\u201d<\/p>\n