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* Jobs * Trade Deficit * FCC

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HOLLY SKLAR
Co-author of the book Raise The Floor: Wages and Policies That Work For All Of Us, Sklar said today: “If you want to stimulate unemployment, deficits and inequality, keep cutting taxes. More than 2 million jobs have been lost on President Bush’s watch. Like the 2001 tax swindle, the 2003 tax cuts will hurt the economy, not help it. The Bush team wants to remake the tax system for the wealthy, increasingly exempting money from investments while taxing paychecks. They want a big deficit, as Reaganites did, to strangle public services they don’t like. In the words of Reagan budget director David Stockman, ‘Greed came to the forefront. The hogs were really feeding.'”
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DOUG HENWOOD
Editor of the Left Business Observer, Henwood said today: “Like most big things, the trade deficit has many causes — the erosion of U.S. manufacturing, the growth in outsourcing, an overvalued currency, low savings rates. But unlike many big things, a lot of people are ignoring it. To fund this massive deficit, the U.S. needs about $2 billion every business day of capital inflows from abroad — and Bush’s military buildup and tax cuts will only increase the need. Is running up giant foreign debts while telling the rest of the world what to do a sound political or economic strategy?”
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ROBERT McCHESNEY
Today, the FCC is meeting in Washington. Author of Rich Media, Poor Democracy and research professor in the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, McChesney said today: “The FCC would typically delay decision-making as it has been asked to do in this case. But that would mean more scrutiny, and the FCC is avoiding that. The public has spoken: it is diametrically opposed to letting fewer media companies own more and more. Around 99.9 percent of the 9,000 public comments to the FCC has opposed relaxing the media ownership rules. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that there are more Americans who would like to see Osama bin Laden’s bust on Mount Rushmore as there are who want the monopoly media the FCC is rushing to permit. The stakes are so high that we need to do the exact opposite of what the FCC is trying to do: we need wide open public debate and deliberation on what media ownership policies make the most sense to promote a democratic society.”
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JANINE JACKSON
Jackson is program director of the media watch group FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting).
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GAEL MURPHY
An activist with CodePink, a women’s peace group, Murphy is participating in protests at the FCC today.
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167