Fair and balanced???

The FOXNews of budget agreements. That’s the best description of the debt ceiling compromise passed by the House yesterday and by the Senate today.

No matter how many times FOXNews calls itself “fair and balanced”, the hard evidence tells the real story of slanted and faux news at the Murdoch network.

The same PR charade was used by President Obama to sell the bi-partisan compromise on lifting the debt ceiling. All his talk of a balanced approach that called for shared sacrifice for all turned out to be the equivalent of the “fair and balanced” FOXNews mantra.

The $1 trillion immediate deficit reduction in the agreement is all spending cuts. We’re told that the “balanced and shared sacrifice” part of deficit reduction will come from the special joint committee to be established to shave off another $1.5 trillion from the deficit. Don’t hold your breath.

The wealthy and multinational corporations have a firm grip on both parties (especially the Republicans) in Congress and the President. The big campaign contributions and highly paid Washington lobbyists will make sure that we don’t close the abuse of offshore tax havens by multinationals that will cost us $1 trillion in lost revenue over the next 10 years. Another $700 billion over the next decade will be lost because we won’t ask the wealthiest in the country to simply pay the same level of taxes from the 90’s (the last time we had a balanced budget).

And while the wealthiest Americans and multinational corporations are required to sacrifice, the rest of us, small businesses and our whole economy will feel the pain of our sacrifice.

I spoke with Christian Dorsey of the Economic Policy Institute yesterday. His organization projects that just with the first $1 trillion in spending cuts our nation will lose up to 2 million jobs over several years. The reason—unemployment benefits won’t be extended and the payroll tax holiday will end. That will mean a lot less money flowing into the pockets of consumers who will then spend less. Less consumer spending means hard times for small businesses and fewer jobs.

Add another $1.5 trillion in spending cuts according to this deal and here comes another recession. The wealthy will survive just fine and so will the multinational corporations. The rest of us—not so much.