Ignored by both presidential candidates in their attempts to woo voters, the hidden agenda of corporate America and its two parties of savage attacks on social programs is on the cards.

When Congress passed a budget in 2011 and raised the debt ceiling, they ducked the issue of what programs to cut until after the elections. This was a way for both parties to avoid responsibility for unpopular budget cuts. Now, unless Congress agrees otherwise, massive automatic across-the-board cuts are set to take place over the next ten years in both defense and non-defense spending, to take effect on December 31. These cuts will total an estimated $109 billion in 2013. Also, the Bush-era tax cuts are set to expire.

These cuts would affect over 1,000 government programs, including government salaries and private sector contracts for research, air traffic control, border patrol, food safety, the FBI, housing programs, food assistance, after-school programs, and education grants. FEMA’s ability to help in emergencies would be undermined.

Not only would this be an immediate catastrophe for people who rely on these programs, it would also be a major economic disaster. “The U.S. fiscal cliff represents the single biggest near-term threat to a global economic recovery,” the Fitch Ratings service said in a recent analysis. “The dramatic fiscal tightening implied by the fiscal cliff could tip the U.S. and possibly the global economy into recession. At the very least, it would be likely to halve the rate of global growth in 2013.”

Eighty CEOs of major U.S. corporations, including Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, General Electric, and JP Morgan Chase, contacted both presidential candidates urging them to pull back from the fiscal cliff. Not surprisingly, they recommended cutting entitlement programs for working people and lowering taxes for the wealthy.

Cuts in Medicare and Medicaid

Both parties would like to rescind this agreement and instead cut long-term entitlement programs that benefit working people such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Obama is determined to successfully deliver a “grand bargain,” which broke down last year due to the refusal of Republicans to raise taxes under pressure from Tea Partiers. Now, after the Republicans were defeated in the recent elections, they are on the back foot and much more likely to make a deal with the president.

We should be under no illusions that Obama will go to bat for working people. Proposals that we can expect to see were documented in Obama’s deficit commission. These included: increasing the retirement age, increasing premiums for Social Security, and reducing benefits and eligibility for Medicare and Medicaid.

Obama told MSNBC “There’s no doubt that our first order of business is going to be to get our deficits and debt under control. We’ve already made a trillion dollars worth of cuts. We can do some more cuts. We can look at how we deal with the healthcare costs in particular under Medicaid and Medicare in a serious way.”

We need to say: “Hands off Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security!” Instead, we need a massive increase in taxes on the super wealthy and big business as well as cuts in military spending. This cannot be achieved by pressuring Democratic politicians, who are now betraying the will of voters by attempting to make a deal with Republicans. The Democratic Party has shown time and time again how they put the interests of Wall Street and capitalism before those of workers and their voters.

The corporate media claims the country is broke and that everyone must tighten their belts.

The fact is that working people have been tightening our belts for decades. But the super-rich haven’t. This deficit is the result of 30 years of shifting wealth from working people to the super-rich and big business.

Richest 1% Have Benefited

Since 1977, the share of national income taken home by the richest 1% of Americans doubled from 9% to over 20% today. The richest 0.1% – just 150,000 households – tripled their share of income, now earning as much as the poorest 120 million Americans combined. Thirty years ago, the average CEO made 30 times what the average worker did; today, top executives make 263 times more than the average worker (http://www.ips-dc.org/reports/executive_excess_2010).

In the 1950s, the highest income earners paid a tax rate of 91%, while today it is just 36%. But even this dramatically misrepresents the situation. The richest Americans earn far more from capital gains and dividends than salaries. So the effective tax rate of the richest 400 Americans was just 17% in 2007, down from about 30% in 1995 (Business Week, 4/7/2011). As Warren Buffett likes to point out, he pays a lower effective tax rate than the people who clean his office!

The vast majority of the deficit, $9 trillion, is held by private investors – mainly banks and billionaires. In 2010, U.S. taxpayers paid $415 billion in interest, most of which went to rich investors (U.S. Department of the Treasury, 11/1/2010). It is unacceptable at a time of mass unemployment, poverty, and home foreclosures to continue making payments to these rich investors whose policies got us into this mess.

Build Movement in the Streets

We need to build on the energy and dynamism of Occupy Wall Street. We need to mobilize hundreds of thousands and millions into the streets. We need all unions and social organizations to join with Occupy to call their members and supporters into the streets until these programs are protected.

We need to refuse to make any more payments to these super-rich corporate owners on Wall Street. Instead, we need to take these huge banks into public ownership and run them in the interests of the 99%. Only by building a powerful movement to challenge capitalism and building a new social system based on the needs of the 99% can we end these deficits and at the same time provide jobs and decent living standards for all.

The title of this same article printed in Justice newspaper issue #86 was slightly different: “Fight the Bipartisan Budget Cuts – Hands Off Medicare and Social Security.”