Hickey, Baker Rip CNN/Peterson Deficit Show

http://ourfuture.org critiques CNN's decision to air four hours of programming based on conservative deficit propaganda from the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, a decision subjected to a forceful take-down by Campaign for America's Future co-director Roger Hickey and Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

CNN scheduled "I.O.USA: America's Money Crisis" to air during the weekend of April 10 and 11. "What we're seeing here is a real campaign to get the country to focus on things like cutting Social security and Medicare as opposed to focusing on jobs, growth and investment," Hickey says.

Baker notes that Peterson has committed about $1 billion of the wealth he earned on Wall Street to this effort, and adds that Peterson, along with much of the media "has fundamentally mischaracterized both the near-term deficit problem and the long-term deficit problem" — a problem, Baker says, was created "by people like Pete Peterson and the folks on Wall Street" who wrecked the economy and created the need for the government to spend billions on Wall Street bailouts and on the consequences of a collapsed economy.

We've called on CNN to either cancel this program or make it more balanced by including progressive solutions for addressing the budget deficit.

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• Deficit commission
• Pete Peterson
• federal budget
• Social Security
• Medicare
• progressive politics