Brace yourself. In coming weeks you’ll hear there’s no serious alternative to cutting Social Security and Medicare, raising taxes on middle class and decimating what’s left of the federal government’s discretionary spending, on everything from education and job training to highways and basic research.

“We” must make these sacrifices, it will be said, in order to deal with our mushrooming budget deficit and cumulative debt. 

But most of the people who are making this argument are very wealthy or are sponsored by the very wealthy: Wall Street moguls like Peter Peterson and his “Fix the Debt” brigade, the Business Roundtable, well-appointed think tanks and policy centers along the Potomac, members of the Simpson-Bowles commission. 

The AFL-CIO is launching a campaign and gearing up its 700,000 online activists to tell Congress that the proposals by both Republicans and Democrats on the federal budget deficit “Super Committee” to slash Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are “simply unacceptable,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said in a telephone press conference this morning.

The nation’s postal unions and allies are fighting back against proposals to close post offices and mail processing centers, and change USPS regulations to eliminate overnight delivery of first class mail, and change two-day delivery to three days.  You can join by signing a petition to your senators and representatives to preserve the nation’s mail service. Click here or here to sign the petition.

When housing prices began to take a dive, revenues to state and local governments plummeted. Housing construction shuddered to a halt, creating ranks of unemployed workers who began drawing unemployment benefits rather than paying local taxes on their previously middle-class salaries. The businesses of suppliers and  service-providers to contractors were forced into downturn. And many states continued to cut taxes, causing a perfect storm of budget woes for the states.

At a time when Congress is focusing on cutting federal spending, the National Priorities Project has launched a new interactive tool that offers people across the nation a way to understand and respond to national budget decisions.

In a letter to President Obama, 70 progressive groups urge the president to use tonight’s address to the nation on jobs and the economy to present a plan that is “big, bold and creates jobs directly.”

The only thing congressional Republicans have done about the nation’s job crisis is to make it worse by standing in the way of  job creation and pushing a budget proposal—which Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) equates to ”applying leeches to a patient who needs a transfusion.”

Where are the jobs? Not in the budget agreement reached over the weekend and passed 269-161 last night by the House. The budget deal, which the Senate passed moments ago, is bad  for our country and especially bad for working people. It undermines the nation’s ability to solve the real crisis—America’s jobs crisis.

Outside the navel-gazing world that has become Washington politics, where deficit-cutting is king and jobless workers ignored (with a few notable exceptions), 25 million are unemployed, underemployed or have stopped looking for work, and wages are essentially flat. Workers are struggling to get work that, in many cases, just doesn’t exist (there are 4.7 workers for every ONE job).

If you’ve been following the news on the various proposals to reduce national spending as part of a deal to raise the national debt ceiling, you’ll have heard politicians from both parties bandy about phrases like “tough choices” and “shared sacrifice” and “taking on sacred cows.”