“Selfishness As Virtue”: The Narcissistic Politics Of Paul Ryan And The Servicing Of The Super-Rich Generation Of Termites
Often labeled a “reformer” for his determination to privatize Medicare and Social Security, Paul Ryan on closer inspection appears to be simply another Republican politician – like his new patron Mitt Romney – whose first priority is his own self-interest.
Both the ideology and the legislation he champions prove that he is utterly sincere in his admiration of Ayn Rand, the kooky libertarian author who elaborated her philosophy in a book candidly titled The Virtue of Selfishness. (The flavor of this 1964 essay collection can be gleaned from its original title, The Fascist New Frontier. Its first draft included a Rand screed that compared President John F. Kennedy with Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.)
Ryan is a millionaire – one of the most affluent members of Congress – chiefly owing to a series of inheritances from his own family and the family of his wife, an Oklahoma heiress. And like Romney, he would certainly benefit from the tax proposals in the “Ryan budget,” which provides even greater benefits for wealthy families like his own than the Bush budgets that he supported during the past decade. The Romney-Ryan ticket’s chief policy preoccupation, in fact, is cutting their own taxes yet again while gutting government functions that serve the middle class (while raising taxes on them).
But the self-serving short-sightedness epitomized by Ryan’s ideas extends well beyond cutting taxes for himself and people like him. Consider his voting record on energy and environmental issues, where he has been a faithful servant of Big Oil and “skeptic” of climate change caused by carbon emissions.
That record happens to coincide perfectly with the interests of his wife Janna and her father, a lawyer representing oil and gas interests. Ryan and his wife have already inherited millions of dollars from a trust established by her family; and they own shares in several companies leasing property in Oklahoma and Texas to energy firms that benefit from taxpayer subsidies protected in Ryan’s budget. Although Ryan occasionally complains about “corporate welfare,” he and Romney both oppose any reduction in the multi-billion-dollar tax breaks enjoyed by the oil and gas industry.
As for Ryan’s own inherited wealth, it is money that mostly came from the huge construction company established by his great-grandfather in the 19th century. Ryan Incorporated’s success grew from the construction of railroads, then highways, airports, bridges and other basic public infrastructure – in short, from government contracts. (Its website proudly outlines the company history and notes that today “the Company performs residential, commercial, industrial and power site work, landfill construction and capping and full-service golf course building/remodeling for both public and private customers.”
But while Ryan benefited personally from more than a century of construction that helped to create American society and a prosperous middle class, his budget serves only the super-rich generation of termites who would allow U.S. infrastructure to crumble, rather than provide sufficient resources to maintain and modernize it. Should the Ryan budget ever become law, very little or no federal money will remain available in future decades for such basic purposes of government. That is fine with him, evidently because Ryan’s own fortunes are no longer tied to the family construction business. (His cousins who still run the company would be wise to vote for anyone but him.)
Then there is Ryan’s longtime obsession with abolishing Social Security as a public insurance system, which first drew attention to him during the Bush administration in 2005. The Bush White House suffered political disaster by pursuing a privatization plan as he urged them to do. Strangely, while Ryan is decades away from retirement age, he has already collected Social Security in the form of survivor benefits. For two years he received a check every month, following the tragic early death of his father when the future Congressman was only 16 years old.
Thanks to Social Security, Ryan was able to save money for college – a story similar to that of Senator Al Franken’s wife Franni, who lost her father at an early age and attended college thanks to federal survivor benefits. But while Franni Franken’s experience ensured that she and her husband became staunch defenders of Social Security, Ryan is eager to deprive future orphans of the guaranteed support that he received.
If selfishness is truly a virtue, then Ryan is without peer. His ideas comprise a taxonomy of narcissistic public policy – from taxes to climate change, infrastructure, and social insurance — that would surely gratify his idol.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, August 15, 2012
“Not Just A One Trick Pony”: Paul Ryan Is More Than Just A Guy Who Wants To End Medicare
Rep. Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney’s new vice-presidential pick, is best known as the author of and lead cheerleader for a budget plan that would decimate the social contract and require the middle class to pay for massive tax breaks for the wealthy. But it would be a mistake to focus just on his horrible economic ideas. Paul Ryan is not just a one-trick pony.
For instance, while Ryan preaches Ayn Rand’s gospel of economic greed and personal freedoms, he isn’t so fond of individual freedom when it comes to gay people or women. In fact, when it comes to reproductive choice, Ryan is nostalgic for the 1950s. He co-sponsored a so-called “Personhood bill,” which would classify abortion as first-degree murder and outlaw some of the most common types of birth control. A similar bill in Mississippi was rejected last year by 55 percent of voters. That’s right: on reproductive freedom and birth control, Paul Ryan is to the right of Mississippi.
That’s not even to mention Ryan’s support for last year’s “Let Women Die” bill, which would have allowed hospitals to refuse abortions to women, even if their lives were at risk. He also voted, along with most of his Republican House colleagues, to completely eliminate Title X, the program that provides family-planning services, including affordable contraception, to low-income women.
In a rambling essay in 2010, Ryan asserted that Roe v. Wade was a Supreme Court error “virtually identical” to the Dred Scott decision, in which the court ruled that African Americans had no rights as citizens. If Romney’s pick of Robert Bork to head his judicial advisory committee wasn’t clue enough, we now know exactly what would happen to reproductive rights under a Romney-Ryan administration.
Ryan had one brush with support for gay rights back in 2007, when he voted for an early version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, a few minutes after voting to kill the bill. But since then, he’s fallen in line with the Right, opposing future versions of ENDA, hate crimes protections, adoption by gay couples, allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military and of course anything resembling marriage equality. Now he feigns indifference to the whole issue, saying, “I don’t know why we are spending all this time talking about this.” He should ask a few LGBT people why we’re spending time “talking about this”: they might be able to explain why the issue of equal rights is more than a distraction from his plan to gut Medicare.
And then there are the other issues where the Corporate Right and the Religious Right have conveniently found themselves in agreement. Ryan is in the distressingly large “if it’s snowing out, global warming can’t be real” camp, or what the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer calls a “biblical view of the environment.” He speaks the language of the Religious Right’s pick-and-choose approach to the Constitution, saying in his nomination acceptance speech, “Our rights come from nature and God, not government. We promise equal opportunity, not equal outcomes” — code for a Christianist government and the destruction of the social safety net, the twin goals of today’s unified Corporate and Christian Right.
Ryan not only speaks the language of the Religious Right, he is one of them. Ryan is a confirmed speaker at the upcoming Values Voter Summit, a yearly confab hosted by the anti-gay, anti-choice Family Research Council, Liberty Counsel and American Family Association. There, he’ll join right-wing luminaries including anti-Muslim activist and conspiracy theorist Jerry Boykin, anti-Planned Parenthood prankster Lila Rose, and Kamal Saleem, who bills himself as a reformed ex-terrorist… and who is widely considered to be a fraud. The event is a must-attend for candidates who want to appeal to the farthest extremes of the Religious Right, which clearly Romney and Ryan are more than happy to do.
Paul Ryan has a friendly demeanor and an earnest desire to make his case about his terrible economic policy. But we shouldn’t let his focus on turning Medicare into a coupon distract us from the fact that he also wants to bring women’s rights and gay rights back decades and cater to those who think the government should be run exclusively by and for evangelical Christians.
Paul Ryan is the whole package: massive tax cuts for billionaires on the backs of the middle class, plus the Religious Right’s wish list of regressive social policies. In his choice of Paul Ryan, Massachusetts Mitt has sent a rare unambiguous signal about where he wants to take this country. And it’s nowhere we should want to go.
By: Michael B. Keegan, The Huffington Post, August 14, 2012
“Self Interest At The Highest”: Romney And Ryan’s Disdain For The Working Class
Mitt Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate underscores the central question posed by this campaign: Should cold selfishness become the template for our society, or do we still believe in community?
Romney wanted the election to be seen as a referendum on the success or failure of President Obama’s economic policies. Instead, he has revealed that the campaign is really a choice between two starkly different philosophies. One could be summed up as: “We’re all in this together.” The other: “I’ve got mine.”
This is not about free enterprise, and it’s not about personal liberty; those fundamental principles are unquestioned. But for at least the past 100 years, we have understood capitalism and freedom to exist within a larger context — a complicated, real-world, human context. Some people begin life at a disadvantage, and it’s in the national interest to open doors of opportunity for them. Some people make mistakes, and it’s in the national interest to create second chances. Some people are too young, too old or too infirm to care for themselves, and it’s in the national interest to secure their welfare.
This sense of the balance between individualism and community fueled the American Century. Romney and Ryan apparently don’t believe in it.
It is well known that Ryan, at least for most of his career, has been enamored of the ideas of Ayn Rand, the novelist (“Atlas Shrugged,” “The Fountainhead”) whose interminable books tout self-interest as the highest, noblest human calling and equate capitalist success with moral virtue. Ryan now disavows Rand’s worldview, primarily because she was an atheist, but he lavishly praised her ideas as recently as 2009.
What about Romney? While he has never pledged allegiance to the Cult of Rand, his view of society seems basically the same.
At least three times in recent days, as part of his response to President Obama’s “You didn’t build that” peroration, Romney has told campaign audiences variations of the following: “When a young person makes the honor roll, I know he took a school bus to get to the school, but I don’t give the bus driver credit for the honor roll.”
When he delivered that line in Manassas on Saturday with Ryan in tow, Romney drew wild applause. He went on to say that a person who gets a promotion and raise at work, and who commutes to the office by car, doesn’t owe anything to the clerk at the motor vehicles department who processes driver’s licenses.
What I hear Romney saying, and I suspect many others will also hear, is that the little people don’t contribute and don’t count.
I don’t know whether Romney’s sons ever rode the bus to school. I do know that for most parents, it matters greatly who picks up their children in the morning and drops them off in the afternoon.
It may not be the driver’s job to help with algebra homework, but he or she bears enormous responsibility for safely handling the most precious cargo imaginable. A good bus driver gets to know the children, maintains order and discipline, deals with harassment and bullying. Romney may not realize it, but a good driver plays an important role in ensuring a child’s physical and emotional well-being — and may, in fact, be the first adult to whom the child proudly displays a report card with all A’s.
School bus drivers don’t make a lot of money. Nor, for that matter, do the clerks who help keep unqualified drivers and unsafe vehicles off the streets. But these workers are not mere cogs in a machine designed to service those who make more money. They are part of a community.
The same is true of teachers, police officers, firefighters and others whom Romney and Ryan dismiss as minions of “big government” rather than public servants.
And what do the Republicans offer their supposed heroes, the entrepreneurs who start small businesses? The few who succeed wildly would be rewarded with tax cuts so huge that they, like Romney, might one day have a dressage horse competing in the Olympics. Most of those who just manage to scrape by, or whose businesses fail, could look forward to only as much health care in their senior years as they are able to afford, and not one bit more.
This is a campaign Democrats should relish. The United States became the world’s dominant economic, political and military power by recognizing that we are all in this together. School bus drivers, too.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 13, 2012
“Simply A Number Decreed As Necessary”: Romney’s Budget Plan Requires Even Deeper Cuts Than Ryan’s
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) will hit the campaign trail today in his first week as Mitt Romney’s running mate. Deservedly, much of the attention on Ryan so far has been regarding his radical budget, which hugely shifts taxation down the income scale and guts important government investments.
But Romney’s budget also includes substantial reductions to key federal investments and the social safety net, in order to cut taxes for the wealthy and maintain sky-high defense spending. In fact, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted, Romney’s budget would require even deeper cuts to spending that Ryan’s, in order to keep defense spending at an arbitrarily set percentage of the economy:
– Under the Ryan plan, core defense spending (the defense budget other than war costs and some relatively small items such as military family housing),[11] would total about $5.7 trillion over the ten-year period 2013-2022. The Romney plan would increase core defense spending to $7.9 trillion. The Ryan plan increases core defense funding modestly relative to the existing BCA caps, but core defense would nevertheless decline to 2.6 percent of GDP by 2022. In contrast, Governor Romney would increase core defense to 4 percent of GDP.
– The Ryan plan would cut entitlement and discretionary programs (outside of core defense and net interest) by $5.2 trillion over ten years.[12] The Romney proposal would cut this spending by between $7.0 trillion and $9.6 trillion, depending upon whether the budget is balanced. Thus, Governor Romney’s ten-year cuts would range from one-third deeper than those in the Ryan budget to almost twice as deep as the Ryan cuts.
These cuts would have severe consequences for individual programs, including potentially throwing 13 million people off of the food stamp program.
As Bloomberg News noted, Ryan’s tax plan involves giving slightly more away to the wealthy than does Romney’s, but Romney more than makes up for it with his budget’s gutting of programs that aid the middle-class and low-income Americans. And he does it in order to preserve a level of defense spending that has nothing to do with defense priorities, but is simply a number that Romney decreed is necessary.
By: Pat Garofalo, Think Progress, August 13, 2012
“Mitt Romney Is Still Mitt Romney”: Mitt Romney’s Problem Isn’t Obama—It’s Mitt Romney
Mitt Romney has a problem. And it isn’t his campaign strategy or strategists. It isn’t President Obama’s campaign strategy or strategists. Mitt Romney’s problem is Mitt Romney.
The current rash of polls clearly show that with more exposure, more time on the campaign trail, more time traveling abroad to “highlight” his foreign policy credentials, and the more he hides his tax returns, the worse Romney does with voters.
While President Barack Obama’s blackboard is pretty much completely written on, Romney’s blackboard is getting filled with information about the former Massachusetts governor that is hurting him, especially among independents. Sure, some of it is due to Obama ads and the national dialogue, but most of it is due to Romney himself.
This is all about who Mitt Romney really is; this is about his background, his judgment.
Both the new CNN and Fox polls show the public is beginning to get Romney’s number. Over the summer, his favorable rating dropped six points to 48 percent; his negative has risen five points. It is worse with independents, with favorable ratings dropping eight points. These numbers are according to Fox, which has Obama leading Romney by 49-40 percent.
CNN has Obama leading by 52-45 percent, with similar drops in Romney’s favorable and increases in his unfavorable ratings. With the crucial swing voters who identify themselves as independents, Romney has seen his unfavorable go from 40 percent to 52 percent.
The key question asked by CNN was whether or not Romney favors the rich over the middle class. Basically, two thirds of all Americans see Romney as a creature of the super wealthy who fights for the super wealthy. Now, 64 percent of all Americans believe Romney favors the rich over the middle class and 68 percent of independents have that belief. Even 67 percent of independents say he should release more tax returns.
Bottom line: Voters are not comfortable with who Mitt Romney is. They weren’t comfortable during the primaries and they aren’t comfortable now. The more they learn about Mitt Romney, the less they like him.
Do they believe he changes his positions on key issues on a dime to get elected? Sure. Do they believe he has a tin ear and can’t seem to get it right, as with his foreign travels or liking to “fire people?” Sure. Do they feel nervous about his time at Bain Capital, his foreign bank accounts, and shell corporations? Absolutely.
Fundamentally, this is personal. They know that Romney has worked the system to his advantage, paid little or no taxes, hidden his operations behind a phalanx of accountants and lawyers. He might even get away with being a “master of the universe” if he supported policies that helped the middle class. He might be able to convince voters that he cared about them if he denounced loopholes like Swiss bank accounts, Bermuda dummy corporations, even something as fundamental to his wealth as the carried interest deduction. “Yes, I took advantage of things that were legal, but I am going to close these loopholes when I am president.”
But Mitt Romney stays with his fundamental belief system—stays with policies that give even more tax breaks to the super wealthy and leave the middle class paying the bill. This may be his Bain background, it may be what he really believes, but it is not what the American people believe or need right now when they are hurting. This is back to the future economics and it shows a lack of sensitivity to middle class families.
After all the ads, after all the polls, after all the back and forth, Mitt Romney is still Mitt Romney. And that dog won’t hunt.
By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, August 10, 2012
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 