Jack Abramoff and Social Security

When Bush was determined to hand your retirement income over to Wall Street “reform” Social Security, one of his main spokesmen was Peter Ferrara.

Ferrara plugged the idea repeatedly in his newspaper column. Now it turns out that Ferrara was being paid by Jack Abram Off to push for Social Security “reform.” Some of Jack’s “clients” wanted Social Security hijacked “reformed,” and Off gave them his best and sleaziest bribery tactics.

Ferrara is a senior advisor with the Institute for Policy Innovation, a rightwing think tank. (How many of those Goddamn things are there?)

Business Week Online broke the story of Ferrara being on the take. So far he’s refused to provide Business Week with any information about his slippery activities.

However, he offered a public apology. He said “I do that all the time. I’ve done it in the past and I’ll do it in the future.”

OK, you’re forgiven.

Two of the newspapers he wrote for — the Manchester Union Leader and the Washington Times — publicly condemned Ferrara for being a sleazebucket. The Union Leader announced it would no longer be publishing his column. Their announcement was:

“When a columnist is a paid shill for a lobbyist — particularly a secretly paid shill — a trust has been broken. A journalist’s stock in trade is trust, and our op-ed pages are no place for columnists who have proven untrustworthy.”