“Oh So Good, But Oh So Wrong”: A Well Respected Man For Those Who Are Already Wealthy
Whenever I hear about U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), I can’t help thinking of the lyrics from the old Kinks song “A Well Respected Man.” Yes, a number of people seem to think that Ryan is “oh so good, and he’s oh so fine and oh so healthy in his body and his mind.” Indeed, Mitt Romney must have chosen Ryan as his running mate because “he’s a well respected man about town, doing the best things so conservatively.”
Ryan certainly looks the part, doesn’t he? What’s not to love about this kind-looking, young man, with the warm smile, twinkling blue eyes and thick head of hair? His serious demeanor at just the right photo moment shows us how much he cares for all of those struggling middle-class families. He even looks the part of the working-class man when he rolls up his sleeves.
Sadly, this nice-looking and apparently very respectable guy is getting it all wrong when it comes to his vision for the United States. He draws from the same old, worn-out Republican playbook. How many times do we have to hear about reducing taxes on the wealthy so they can be “job creators” before it just becomes a joke? Honestly, we already have lower taxes for the wealthy, so why haven’t the jobs been created?
The only jobs that seem to be created are the ones for the accountants and the attorneys as they broker deals so the wealthy can buy up even more oceanfront property. Seriously, people, how out of control are the tax laws in this country when someone like Romney can pay $12 million in cash for a home, demolish that home, rebuild on the site and then insist on having his property taxes reduced? Is anyone buying this “job creator” lunacy anymore?
Of course, if wouldn’t be the good old Republican Party line if Ryan didn’t redirect the public’s attention away from the wealthy and directly onto some poor, single parent just trying to get by. Oh, no, we can’t have any “entitlements” for the working poor.
I mean, Ryan wants people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. It doesn’t matter if they don’t have any boots; that’s just too bad for them. I’ve always thought it was odd that even though Republicans are notorious for their suspicions about evolution, they do seem to embrace that whole survival-of-the-fittest thing.
Even if you worked all of your life, paid into Social Security and expect to get on Medicare, you’re just asking too much of America, according to Ryan. Balancing the budget on the backs of working-class men and women is the overriding philosophy behind Ryan’s plan for America.
The bottom line is that Ryan is the choice for those who are already wealthy. I guess he is “A Well Respected Man” for that crowd. For everyone else, he’s oh so wrong.
By: Rose Locander, JSOnline, August 13, 2012
“Rage Against Paul Ryan”: Perhaps He Was Moshing When He Should Have Been Listening
No musician has been more identified than Tom Morello with the uprising against the crony capitalism of Wall Street speculators and Washington pawns like Paul Ryan.
Morello, the Grammy Award—winning guitarist with Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave who has earned an international following with his musically and politically charged performances as the Nightwatchman, followed the wave of protests that swept Egypt and other Mideast countries at the start of 2011.
A Woody Guthrie-inspired advocate of mass protests, rallies, marches and in-the-streets campaigning for economic and social justice, Morello loved the reports from Cairo. And he kept up with each new report from Tahrir Square.
Then, one night, he and his wife were watching the protests, and he saw something odd. Snow.
It doesn’t snow in Cairo.
But it does in Madison, Wisconsin.
“I was watching the demonstrations in Cairo with my then-pregnant wife,” Morello says. “The report went from 100,000 people on the streets of Cairo to 100,000 people on the streets of Madison. And I remember saying, What the hell is going on? Where did this come from?”
When he heard it was a union struggle that had brought masses of Wisconsinites to the streets in winter, Morello wanted to grab his guitar and fly immediately from his home in Los Angeles to Madison.
He wasn’t at all sure his wife would approve. But, Morello recalls, she was two steps ahead of him. “She said: ‘Our sons are going to be union men. You’ve got to go.’ ”
Morello went, with a crew of fellow musicians that included The Street Dogs and legendary MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer, to Madison and on to the Occupy Wall Street protests against corporate corruption and political abuses that have concentrated power in the hands of the new-generation robber barons who have occupied the top one percent of American business and political life.
So you can imagine Tom Morello’s response when the New York Times reported that newly minted Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan “lists Rage Against the Machine, which sings about the greed of oil companies and whose Web site praises the anti-corporate Occupy Wall Street movement, among his favorite bands.”
Ryan’s a bit of a metalhead, with a taste for Led Zeppelin, Metallica and—as he told CNN—“a lot of grunge” bands that are not frequently identified with the extreme social conservatism and the free-market economic theories of Austrian economists. He a kid growing up in Janesville, Wisconsin, he listened to radio rockers like John “Sly” Sylvester, who has since become a Wisconsin talk-radio legend and one of Ryan’s edgiest critics.
Rage has for years ranked high on Ryan’s playlist. The congressman says he really likes the music—which he plays loud while working through his daily ninety-minute exercise regime—if not necessarily the seminal band’s “fight the power” lyrics.
Morello, for his part, does not really like Ryan.
“Paul Ryan,” Morello explained in a blistering statement he wrote for Rolling Stone, “is the embodiment of the machine our music rages against.”
Morello’s no Democratic apparatchik. He’s been more than willing to criticize the policies of President Obama.
But he’s raging against Ryan.
“Paul Ryan’s love of Rage Against the Machine is amusing, because he is the embodiment of the machine that our music has been raging against for two decades. Charles Manson loved the Beatles but didn’t understand them. Governor Chris Christie loves Bruce Springsteen but doesn’t understand him. And Paul Ryan is clueless about his favorite band, Rage Against the Machine.,” Morello writes. “Ryan claims that he likes Rage’s sound, but not the lyrics. Well, I don’t care for Paul Ryan’s sound or his lyrics. He can like whatever bands he wants, but his guiding vision of shifting revenue more radically to the one percent is antithetical to the message of Rage.”
The guitarist who has a long history of radical activism and radical songwriting asks: “I wonder what Ryan’s favorite Rage song is? Is it the one where we condemn the genocide of Native Americans? The one lambasting American imperialism? Our cover of “Fuck the Police”? Or is it the one where we call on the people to seize the means of production? So many excellent choices to jam out to at Young Republican meetings!”
“Don’t mistake me,” Morello continues, “I clearly see that Ryan has a whole lotta ‘rage’ in him: A rage against women, a rage against immigrants, a rage against workers, a rage against gays, a rage against the poor, a rage against the environment. Basically the only thing he’s not raging against is the privileged elite he’s groveling in front of for campaign contributions.
The Morello, who’s got Woody Guthrie’s eye for the teaching moment, observes:
You see, the super rich must rationalize having more than they could ever spend while millions of children in the U.S. go to bed hungry every night. So, when they look themselves in the mirror, they convince themselves that “Those people are undeserving. They’re…lesser.” Some of these guys on the extreme right are more cynical than Paul Ryan, but he seems to really believe in this stuff. This unbridled rage against those who have the least is a cornerstone of the Romney-Ryan ticket.
But Rage’s music affects people in different ways. Some tune out what the band stands for and concentrate on the moshing and throwing elbows in the pit. For others, Rage has changed their minds and their lives. Many activists around the world, including organizers of the global occupy movement, were radicalized by Rage Against the Machine and work tirelessly for a more humane and just planet. Perhaps Paul Ryan was moshing when he should have been listening.
Perhaps Paul Ryan should put that in his iPod and play it.
By” John Nichols, The Nation, August 17, 2012
“Private Fears”: How Ryanization Threatens The GOP
There is the idea of having Paul Ryan on the Republican ticket, and then there is the reality.
If conservative ideologues are over the moon at having their favorite conviction politician as Mitt Romney’s vice presidential running mate, many Republican professionals — particularly those running this fall — are petrified. They freely express private fears that Democrats will succeed in Ryanizing the entire GOP.
What’s striking is not just that down-ballot Republican candidates are distancing themselves from Ryan’s proposals, particularly on Medicare, but that Romney won’t take ownership of them either, except in vague terms. Worse, the Romney apparatus is forcing Ryan to distance himself from his own budget. It was sad to watch Ryan dancing around these issues on Fox News Tuesday night and having to say that Romney is the boss. How long before conservatives start producing “Let Ryan Be Ryan” bumper stickers?
Oh, yes, and Ryan could not explain when his fiscal plan would balance the books (presumably because the right answer is somewhere past 2030). “I don’t know exactly when it balances,” Ryan told Brit Hume. So much for specificity.
To understand the elation Democrats feel about the Ryan choice, it’s useful to canvass their reactions in what will be one of the hardest battleground states for President Obama to hang onto. In 2008, Obama became the first Democratic presidential candidate in 32 years to carry North Carolina. Now it is, with Indiana, one of the states most likely to move back to the GOP. “We’re at the pink end of the spectrum,” Rep. David Price, a Democrat who represents the Research Triangle area, said in a phone interview.
To Price, Ryan offers a double opportunity for the Democrats. The swing voters in his own district, he says, “are pretty practical and not enamored of the doctrinaire, ideological approach that Ryan exemplifies.” The very reasons that ideologues admire Ryan are the reasons that independents and moderates may be put off by him.
On top of that, Price said, “the issues of Medicare and Social Security are toxic for Ryan.” White voters in the current over-65 generation, more conservative than the New Deal era electoral cohort that has largely passed on, are now the base of the Republican Party. By putting Medicare on the ballot, Ryan threatens to push away core Republican voters.
That’s why Romney went up so quickly with advertisements attacking Obama for reducing spending on Medicare. One longtime Democratic organizer of senior citizens I spoke with here — his organization doesn’t let field staff speak for the record — noted that John McCain defeated Obama by eight points among voters over 65. “If Obama can cut that margin from eight to five, he wins,” the organizer said. “He doesn’t have to win that demographic. Closing the gap is a win.” His analysis is especially apt in North Carolina, where McCain beat Obama by 13 points among seniors.
Already, the North Carolina Democratic Party is out with lots of numbers — in other circumstances, Ryan might appreciate its wonkery — showing how the Ryan budget would hurt certain voter groups in the state. The party says that “1,368,646 North Carolinian seniors would be forced onto vouchers when they retire,” referring to the number of near-elderly citizens who would be affected a decade from now by Ryan’s idea of changing Medicare into a premium-support program. Repeal of the Obama health-care law, the party says, would move “154,884 North Carolina seniors back into the prescription drug ‘donut hole.’ ”
Walton Robinson, the Democrats’ state communications director, has his eye on a very specific demographic group that Ryan might move: older white rural women without college educations. Obama remains competitive in this state because of a large lead among female voters. Shifting this “one holdout group” Obama’s way, Robinson says, “could drive that gender gap even further apart.”
State Sen. Linda Garrou, a pro-business Democrat who has represented Winston-Salem for 14 years, is retiring after a Republican reapportionment broke up her district. She agrees that Ryan will help Democrats among older voters but is especially worried about Republican education cuts at all levels of government. She casts the choice as fundamental.
“The Romney/Ryan plan,” she said, “seems to say, ‘I’ve got mine, you get yours the best you can, the heck with you.’”
Americans often oppose government in the abstract but actually want it to do quite a lot. Thanks to Paul Ryan, this year’s debate will be anything but abstract.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 15, 2012
“Lest We Forget”: Medicaid, Not Medicare Is Biggest Target For Conservatives
At the risk of sounding like a broken record on this subject, I devoutly hope that in their rush to tie Mitt Romney to Paul Ryan’s Medicare proposal, progressives don’t forget that there has never been much space between the two running-mates on the national health care program Ryan’s budget would really destroy: Medicaid. Wonkblog’s Suzy Khimm has a reminder today:
Paul Ryan’s Medicare overhaul may be the most controversial part of his budget.But the proposed cuts to the program are not the biggest cuts in the plan.
As Ezra notes, Ryan’s cuts to Medicare “are only 60 percent as large as the cuts to Medicaid and other health-care programs.” What’s more, his biggest change to Medicare wouldn’t kick in until 2023—the start date for his voucher-based premium support program. By comparison, Ryan’s cuts to Medicaid are more drastic, and they start sooner: Between 2013 and 2022, it would make nearly $1.4 trillion in cuts to Medicaid that “would almost inevitably result in dramatic reductions in coverage” as well as enrollment, according to the non-partisan Kaiser Family Foundation.
Over the next 10 years, the Ryan plan would cut Medicaid by $642 billion by repealing the Affordable Care Act and by $750 billion through new caps on federal spending—a 34 percent cut to Medicaid spending over the next decade, according to Edwin Park of the Center and Budget and Policy Priorities.
Who would that impact? First, by overturning the ACA, the Ryan plan would prevent 11 million people from gaining Medicaid coverage by 2022, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s latest estimates….
If states maintained their current level of spending for each Medicaid patient, 19 million more people would have to be cut from the program in 2021 because of Ryan’s block-grant reform, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. If states managed to curb health-care spending growth in Medicaid, 14 million beneficiaries would still lose Medicaid coverage under the Ryan plan. And that’s on top of the 11 million Americans who would lose Medicaid coverage because the Ryan plan would repeal Obamacare. So all in all, Ryan’s cuts could mean as many as 30 million Medicaid beneficiaries lose their coverage.
Yeah, yeah, I know, old folks vote and in the last two cycles a majority have voted Republican, and po’ folks don’t vote so much, and far more already vote Democratic. But Lord a-mighty: 30 million people potentially losing their health insurance because Romney and Ryan think they need to show more moral fiber. Given Romney’s support for the entire Ryan Budget, that doesn’t even get into the damage wreaked on efforts to help the poor escape from total dependence on cash assistance or private charity by the combined cuts to Medicaid, food stamps, and the earned income tax credit that budget contemplates. And on top of all that, many millions of indigent seniors depend on Medicaid for nursing home care.
So before progressives decide to devote all their time to endless arguments over exactly which term to use for what the Ryan Budget proposes to do to Medicare—vouchers, cost-shifts, abandonment, abolition-of-Medicare-as-we-know it—don’t forget about Medicaid. That’s the Great Society safety net program with the biggest bullseye painted on it.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, August 13, 2012
“Phony Hawkery”: Paul Ryan Is A Conservative Ideologue Who Couches “Right Wing Social Engineering”
This is something that other people have mentioned, and Jamelle brings up in his extremely helpful post about Paul Ryan, but it really needs to be emphasized: Paul Ryan is not a “deficit hawk.” No matter how many times the news media tell us, it doesn’t make it true. As I’ve said before, you can’t call yourself a deficit hawk if the only programs you want to cut are the ones you don’t like anyway. Show me someone who’s willing to cut programs he favors (Ryan isn’t), and would actually take potentially painful measures to balance the budget (Ryan wouldn’t), and that’s a deficit hawk. Ryan, on the other hand, is a conservative ideologue who couches what Newt Gingrich appropriately called “right-wing social engineering” in a lot of talk about making tough choices. But I’ve never actually seen Paul Ryan make a “tough” choice, at least one that was tough for him. There’s nothing “tough” about a conservative Republican who tells you he wants to slash Medicare and Medicaid, increase defense spending, and cut taxes for the wealthy. That’s like Homer Simpson telling you he’s making the tough choice to skip the salad and eat three dozen donuts instead.
But oh boy, have the media ever bought into the idea of Ryan as the courageous budget-cutter. “A Beltway Budget Hawk Gets a Chance to Sell Vision” says The Wall Street Journal. “Paul Ryan: Hawk on Budget and Tea Party Darling” says the Philadelphia Inquirer. “We know Paul Ryan is a budget hawk. But what about other issues?” says the Christian Science Monitor. And that’s just a few headlines; there are hundreds of stories referring to Ryan as a “fiscal hawk,” a “budget hawk,” and a “deficit hawk.”
So why does he get described this way so often? I think it’s because the establishment media have become devoted to a particular narrative, which says that the country is deeply threatened by the future growth of Social Security and Medicare, and anyone who has the “courage” to propose cuts to those programs is a hero (Time‘s Michael Grunwald did an excellent examination last year of all kinds of people weirdly praising Ryan’s courage). And even if, like Ryan, you also want to slash taxes and increase the deficit, you’re still a hero.
It’s strange how you never see the members of the congressional Progressive Caucus, who want to cut defense spending and bring in more tax revenues than Ryan does, described as “deficit hawks,” or, heaven forbid, “courageous.” Representative Jan Schakowsky, for instance, put out a plan that balances the budget in a much shorter amount of time than Paul Ryan’s plan, but does so primarily through a combination of tax increases and defense cuts. Nobody calls Schakowsky a “deficit hawk” or praises her “courage” on fiscal issues, even though her proposal is far more realistic and less cruel than Ryan’s. Could it have something to do with the fact that your average Washington 1 percenter actually thinks slashing programs for the poor and cutting taxes for the wealthy is a smashing idea?
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, August 13, 2012
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