LAURA AND JOHN ARNOLD FOUNDATION
“. . . the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. According to its
website, it
concentrates
on a handful of subjects, including education, criminal justice, "research integrity," "evidence-based policy and innovation," and "sustain- able public finance." On that last matter,
the foundation says that it
works to promote fiscal sustainability
and the effective oversight
of public funds. We are funding efforts to help
governments evaluate the impact
of tax policies and design public pension systems that are
affordable, sustainable,
and secuAll of which sounds quite
laudable. A little probing, however,
shows that John Arnold for years worked at Enron, trading
in natural gas derivatives. In
2001, he
reportedly helped earn the company three quarters of a billion dollars, for
which he received an $8 million
bonus. When Enron collapsed, Arnold
set up a hedge fund in Houston
that specialized in
natural gas trading. Ten years later, he
was worth about $3 billion. In 2012, he
retired from
the fund and set up his foundation.
Since then, Arnold
has led a campaign to cut public employees'
retirement benefits, making
large contributions
to politicians, Super
PACs, ballot initiative efforts, and
think tanks.
As
part of that campaign, the Arnold Foundation
gave $3.5 million to WNET, the
public television station in
New York, to support production of a two-year
news series called The Pension Peril, to
be shown on PBS. The foundation's involvement
was not explicitly
disclosed. In a February 2014 article
for Pando, an
online magazine covering Silicon Valley, David
Sirota revealed Arnold's involvement
and noted that the show (which had already begun airing)
echoed many of the
same pension-cutting themes that he was promoting in state legislatures.
Amid growing
pro-tests,
PBS decided to return the grant and suspend the
series, citing internal rules that deem the existence of a clear connection between the interests of a proposed funder and the
subject matter of a program
unacceptable. . . . .
|
On Inside Philanthropy, David Callahan noted that the Arnold/PBS case is hardly
unique.”
Massing, Michael, ‘How to Cover the
One Percent,’ The New York Review, January 14, 2016, pp: 74-76.
