'Fix the Debt' Readies Its Trojan Horse for Next Budget Fight

[xchrom]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/01/03-12



Over the last three months, the Fix the Debt campaign, led by more than 100 big company CEOs, has unleashed a firestorm of ads, blanketing political news web sites and entirely plastering the Capitol South Metro station used by most Congressional staffers.


In late October, the Institute for Policy Studies began exposing the Fix the Debt campaign's Trojan Horse. While they presented themselves as a patriotic bipartisan group, merely seeking a “balanced” deal, their own lobby materials revealed they were out to use the fiscal cliff as an opportunity to win massive new corporate tax breaks paid for with cuts to earned benefit programs like Social Security and Medicare.

The hypocrisy was stunning. We documented, for example, how many of the campaign’s leaders had contributed massively to the national debt through tax-dodging tricks. Twenty-four of them had even paid their CEOs more in 2011 than their firms paid in corporate income taxes. We also calculated that the average Fix the Debt CEO calling for cuts to Social Security themselves had pension assets of $12 million, enough to garner a $65,000 monthly retirement check starting at age 65.

[drm604]

1. K&R

[redstatebluegirl]

2. These are the Groups Average People do not Know about

Bringing them to light is vital to our democracy. Our country is being hijacked by corporations and old money...

[moondust]

3. Bill Clinton presumably fixed the debt.

By fixing the deficits.

Where were these guys when Bush & Co. were passing tax cuts and starting wars that undid Clinton's good work? Were they, by any chance, standing in line with their hands out?

[PETRUS]

4. K&R