Exclusive: Rolling Stone’s Taibbi Responds to Raimondo Comments
Friday, September 27, 2013
Following yesterday's statement from Rhode Island General Treasurer Gina Raimondo's office to his article in Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi responded today to GoLocal with the following.
Exclusive: Taibbi Responds to Raimondo
"For the record, I appreciate Treasurer Raimondo's thorough response. I understand this is a tough issue and there are heated opinions on all sides. She was gracious enough to speak to me at some length before the article came out, and she did so probably knowing that the article was going to be critical. She clearly believes she is pursuing the correct policies and the fact that she was and is willing to openly engage critics in discussions about those policies is absolutely to her credit.
However, nothing in the response released by her spokesperson Joy Fox yesterday makes me believe that we got the story wrong.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTRaimondo dismisses me and her union critics as politically and ideologically motivated, which is fine and understandable. But she doesn't acknowledge that her own decisions and policies are similarly political and ideological. She presents herself as merely a technocrat who "puts politics aside" to do what's best for Rhode Island.
But this is wrong on its face. The pension reform debate is the ultimate political and ideological argument. It's a bitter fight over resources, a dispute over which members of society will have to make sacrifices and which ones will not.
The advocates of pension reform, not just in Rhode Island but across the country, believe that ordinary public workers -- teachers, police, firemen -- are inherently overcompensated, politically over-empowered by unions, and receive unsustainably high incomes and benefits. They also believe that the solution to the nation's fiscal problems lay in asking these workers to make the first financial sacrifices -- something Raimondo (like other politicians in other states) often describes as "making tough choices." (By coincidence, these tough choices also seem quite often to involve privatizing large amounts of public retirement money into the hands of the financiers who stand behind these politician-advocates of pension reform.)
All of this falls in line with certain trends in political thought nationwide. A lot of people these days genuinely believe we must invest in employers first and foremost, and that ordinary wage-earners, public or private, are essentially drains on the bottom line, whose benefits especially are luxuries we can't afford.
It would be silly to deny that a lot of people find this ideology convincing. But it's certainly an ideology. That's why it's disingenuous when Treasurer Raimondo describes my article as political propaganda, when she had no such reservations about the public relations efforts of organizations like EngageRI and the Manhattan Institute, groups that not only supported her politically, but which have clear financial interests in this debate. But this a common tactic, dismissing critics of pension reform as ideologues clouded by frustration and unreason, while pension reform itself -- well, that's just math.
Having interviewed public workers in Rhode Island and in many other states, I know that state employees on the whole are absolutely willing to make sacrifices, if they're needed to help states get out of fiscal crises. What they resent is being told they're the cause of these crises and that the size of the sacrifices they must make is beyond debate and just mathematical fact. Time and again, when they ask questions about the reform plans, they're dismissed as recalcitrant ideologues unwilling to accept reality. This is condescending and I think they're right to be angry about it. Talking about omitting facts, most of these people haven't been told even part of the story about the widespread crime and fraud in the mortgage/finance sector that caused the crash and put the retirement savings of people all over the country in jeopardy. Going forward, they were also not told about things like high management fees, the role of consultants and placement agents, and other such dubious nooks and crannies of pension reform.
All of which is a long-winded way of saying that I think politicians like Raimondo would do better to stop pretending that pension reform is somehow not about politics. This whole thing is political, on all sides."
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