Excerpt: "Mitt Romney is a robot who will say and do whatever he's programmed to do. Ryan is the robot's brain. The robot has no heart. It's your job to enable America to see this."
Portrait, Robert Reich, 08/16/09. (photo: Perian Flaherty)
Memo to Joe, Re: Debate
11 October 12
eware: Paul Ryan will appear affable. He's less polished and aggressive than Romney, even soft-spoken. And he acts as if he's saying reasonable things.
But under the surface he's a rightwing zealot. And nothing he says or believes is reasonable - neither logical nor reflecting the values of the great majority of Americans.
Your job is to smoke Ryan out, exposing his fanaticism. The best way to do this is to force him to take responsibility for the regressive budget he created as chairman of the House Budget Committee.
Ryan won't be able to pull a Romney - pretending he's a moderate - because the Ryan budget is out there, with specific numbers.
It's an astounding document that Romney fully supports. And it fills in the details Romney has left out of his proposals. Mitt Romney is a robot who will say and do whatever he's programmed to do. Ryan is the robot's brain. The robot has no heart. It's your job to enable America to see this.
I suggest you hold up a copy of the Ryan budget in front of the cameras. You might even read selected passages.
Emphasize these points: Ryan's budget turns Medicare into vouchers. It includes the same $716 billion of savings Romney last week accused the President of cutting out of Medicare - but instead of getting it from providers he gets it from the elderly.
It turns Medicaid over to cash-starved states, with even less federal contribution. This will hurt the poor as well as middle-class elderly in nursing homes.
Over 60 percent of its savings come out of programs for lower-income Americans - like Pell grants and food stamps.
Yet it gives huge tax cuts to the top 1 percent - some $4.7 trillion over the next decade. (This is the same top 1 percent, you might add, who have reaped 93 percent of the gains from the recovery, whose stock portfolios have regained everything they lost and more, and who are now taking home a larger share of total income than at any time in the last eighty years and paying the lowest taxes than at any time since before World War II.)
As a result it doesn't reduce the federal debt at all. In fact, it worsens it.
On top of all this, Ryan is on record - as is Romney - for wanting to repeal both ObamaCare (taking coverage away from 30 million Americans) and the Dodd-Frank law (thereby giving cover to Wall Street).
Your challenge will be get this across firmly and clearly, with an appropriate degree of indignation - on a medium that rewards style over substance, glibness over detail, and optimistic happy talk over grim reality.
My suggestion: Be cheerfully aggressive. Take Ryan on directly and sharply but do so with a smile. Force him to take responsibility for the regressiveness of his budget and the radicalism of his ideology.
Prepare your closing carefully (unlike the President seemed to have done last week), and tell America the unvarnished truth: Romney and Ryan plan to do a reverse Robin Hood at a time in our nation's history when the rich have never had it so good while the rest haven't been as economically insecure since the Great Depression.
Their agenda is all the more remarkable in that we have a growing budget deficit to deal with, along soaring healthcare costs and aging boomers without enough to retire on because their net worth went down the drain with their homes.
The fundamental question is whether we're still all in it together - whether as American citizens we continue to have obligations to one another to assure equal opportunity and help for those who need it - or we're on our own, without a common bond or a common good. Romney and Ryan represent the latter view, a view utterly at odds with what we have accomplished as a nation.
Robert B. Reich, Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written thirteen books, including the best sellers "Aftershock" and "The Work of Nations." His latest is an e-book, "Beyond Outrage." He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine and chairman of Common Cause.
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Comments
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Finally, someone wonders out loud if President Obama had been threatened. It's a can of worms no one really wants to think about...but I believe he was acting as a man who was concerned about his and perhaps his family's safety. There, I said it.
Actually I looked at the video of the debate again and Obama really didn't do as bad as fredboy here and some others are suggesting !
He came out confident and he made his points but there was a moment where he had fear in his eyes and appeared shaken .
So there very well could have been something going on that we are not privy to !
Fredboy I think you are way to hard on the President when you have no clue why he suddenly went off track in the debate. You actually could have been right to think his life or his families was threatened ! Being in CO where gun laws are lax it could have been his own life that was threatened !
Something distracted him you could tell by the change on his face and his body language .Before that he was in command of that debate !
1)When empty chairs are lynched, it isn't an empty threat;
2)I don't think Obama was prepared for the fog of mendacity that Romney spewed;
3)Just back from fivethirtyeight .com...this is more than recoverable;
4)Biden will blister Ryan if he takes Reich's advice;
5)Reich is right again.
For more on how a politician should react to BS, see the following.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/10/10/give-me-more-politicians-with-this-kind-of-passion/
For some reason content doesnt matter. Mitt went up there last week and lied about everything...ho w do you eve respond to that? It doesnt matter what he said, he was aggressive...re ally? This is who we become, the presidential debates are reduced to reality TV mentality?
I chose to listen to the words, in my view, Obama won last week. If lying, rudeness, and creepy sneers are the criteria then Mitt won.
Thats their strategy to try to appear moderate, which they arentm and back peddle on all their original stances. I hope Joe hits it out of the park, and nails Eddie Munster to the wall.
God help us, He will be the only one who will be able to, if Romney/Ryan get elected.
geesh.
If Congress hadn't blocked it, he would have shut down Guantanamo and put in a jobs program that would have unemployment down another 0.5 to 1.0%.
Please add a link to those in your bio for Prof. Reich. They're even more instructive than his writing because his whiteboard illustrations are concise and memorable. Some are from 2011 but they hold up. Here's an example:
http://front.moveon.org/scribbling-sharpie-illustrates-the-truth-about-our-economy/
Prove that typical poisonous reactionary statement, mindlessly demonizing somebody just for the hell of it, with no point, reason or backup.
C'mon, lets hear something in support of no brain, no heart. You must be talking about Twit or Dimwits.
I have never been a democrat and thus am not a "follower" of either Biden or Obama but to even suggest (whether one agrees with his conclusions or not and I for one more often disagree than agree with his) that Biden has neither a brain nor a heart shows that you in fact no nothing about this man.
As, i said while i more often then not disagree with his conclusions, Biden has always been one of the most thoughtful members of congress regarding US foreign policy (e.g., his take on Iraq early on was that Iraq has never truly been one country but rather three, held together in recent decades only due to the brutality of Saddam's regime and thus to talk about putting Iraq back together as a single country was foolish and would only lead to ongoing internal sectarian conflict; instead, we should have been talking to the Iraqis about creating more of a federation of semi-autonomous regions but with shared oil revenues). As for Biden having no heart; well, if you consider a guy with blue collar roots that has never forgotten where he came from and who his real consituency is and should be then i suppose your idea of "heart" are those like Romney and Ryan who believe that the total destruction of the gains made by workers in the post world war II era while claiming to be looking out for "little guy" in the process.
Ryan has been on the road stating lots of numbers but then the next day he fashions the statement to what Romney said the day before when called out.
I do not believe he is a brilliant Economics Person because he has not proven it. Anyone can sit down on a computer, put some graphs, charts and spreadsheet together....It is what is between all those lines and columns that the Sheeple do not read.
Good Luck Joe....facts nothing but the facts!
Why can't you see a political talking head vs someone who is willing to say
S*(& at the dinner table. When will politics start saying it is what it is? People who can't see us selling our souls to china and other overseas bond investors, without a single chance of payoff?
All you just said is projection, that is what is actually true about Mitt R.
You are brainwashed and the sad thing is you probably dont even know it. Just say it about the other guy first, when its your guy its true about...we arent kids here, we can see your a Fox news sheeple.
In the remake of the Wizard of Oz they tried to get Joe as the Scarecrow but he kept telly Dorothy what a big F'ing deal everything was!
Isn't that the "children's story" that really isn't that at all but rather a parable about the powers of the bankers (i.e., the yellow brick road was gold) and the men "behind the curtain" pulling the strings vs. the workers (the tin man), the farmers (the scare crow), the populists (the cowardly lion who was really william jennings bryant) and those advocating for a silver backed currency (in the book, as opposed to the movie, dorothy's slippers are silver) to break the powers of the gold-backers (the banksters)?
See Ellen Brown's important book Web of Debt for a great explanation of our financial system and the money supply (and how we can't "go broke" in a "fiat" money system) and the need for publicly owned financial institutions in this country. You will also never look at the Wizard of Oz in the same way ever again.
Do you really take voters for such idiots that they're guided by a few minutes in a SHOW? If that were true, any fairground barker could be president.
Romney and family look like Hollywood actors hamming it up as President & First Family - pity Goya's not around to paint them! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Francisco_de_Goya_y_Lucientes_054.jpg) But is that enough to win an election?
If it is, Heaven help us - our survival instincts have gone AWOL.
Problem is... we've not yet seen any real debate. And I don't know if we shall - they don't do that any more.
Do you really take voters for such idiots that they're guided by a few minutes in a SHOW? If that were true, any fairground barker could be president.
Hey, that's how ronny got elected.
Love the People hate their Politicians
In essence, these individuals were paying this money into the federal government in the form of taxes, but are now paying it in the form of loans.
What we have is a distribution problem. Wealth is being transferred rapidly from the pockets of those who work for wages into the coffers of the wealthy.
Saying "We are broke" is mere propaganda deployed to accelerate this really bad distribution strategy.
Why in hell you (and many like you who repeat this "we are broke" baloney) want to make the rich richer and leave the rest of us to starve in insufficient wage slavery is the great mystery of American politics.
and the FED has "lent" more than $16 trillion to the banks (at virtually 0% interest rate...which they should never have done but that is another story) on top of the official bail out funds which proves clearly that we are not broke and that it this is in fact impossible for a sovereign country that controls its own currency...and, so your point is?
Want to fix something .... take up Yoga, learn to breathe. Learn to work with others than against yourself.
Stop pretending that for some reason there seems to be a problem of excess spending when we are talking about shifting costs away from shared expenses such as health care, education, transportation, medical research, safe energy, and ecological disaster prevention. The costs for those items under the Ryan plan would not go away, they are taken up by individuals; many of whom their lives and the lives of everyone, filthy rich included will be diminished. Thats reality.
taking responsibilty for your own action(S) is the core issue
As many just said, the government is not redistributing to the deadbeats, it is redistributing to RICH deadbeats.
And how are they doing it? By cutting Soc Sec, Medicare, Medicaid, ObamaCare etc. and "cutting taxes".
And you are helping.
Thanks a lot!
http://www.urban.org/publications/900288.html
As for getting rid of "government assistance" i notice that you somehow forget to include in your list all of the "corporate welfare" that goes to some of the largest and most profitable corporations in the country that currently pay no income taxes or those earning above the current SS cap which means that for some huge portions of their income are not "taxed" at all.
So, in fact, you don't want to do away with all "government assistance" but only that part that goes to those at the bottom of the income/wealth ladder but keep in place all of the corporate welfare going to those at the top. Hardly even a credible, let alone a defensible, position.
How many people are the true deadbeats? The ones that got approved for a mortgage they couldn't afford because the bank lied to Fannie and Freddie about the loan? How about those folks that lost their jobs to people in another country that not only work for pennies a day, but the company gets to write off their foreign "investment" making it close to free labor.
What about the people that take the money in my 401K use it to finance a buyout of a company my 401K is invested in, then suck out all the company's asset's and only pay 15% tax? For a no risk paper shuffle. Those people are true deadbeats.
Remember also that all the cuts you want o make does not eliminate the costs.
I for one would prefer to prop up a few deadbeats via my taxes than risk screwing the rest of the country.
If you are Christian, that is the path I think Jesus would follow. I think so, because as a Jew I know its the path to heal the world. In fact, nearly all religions likely follow the same morality.
As long as you got yours, screw everyone else...typical republican mantra.
GOP = Greedy One Percent
And blah, blah, blah you go once more with some cliches that are becoming a bore.
I believe in Spay and Neutering Programs...
The 20-to-24-year-o lds (7 percent) can finally return society's investment in them as their new paychecks begin whittling away at their mountain of tuition debt.
The 15-19 group (7.1 percent) bag groceries, stock shelves, deliver papers, and ask, "Fries with that?"
The 10-14 group (6.8 percent) baby-sit and mow lawns to produce parental escape nights and manicured mansions. Tax 'em.
The 5-to-9-year-old s (6.6 percent) produce discarded incisors; tooth fairies will file IRS donor reports.
Newborns through age 4? (6.9 percent) About the only thing babies produce is a lot of... well... how do we tax that?
Mitt's onto something. There's definitely revenue potential here.
Or is it the hundreds of corporations that pay a percentage of taxes in the 1-5% range and get billions of dollars from the government in the form of contracts for defense or other matters?
Or could it be the 7,000 millionaires who paid no federal taxes in 2011 because Congress has given them special loopholes and other paths around taxation?
If you would just do some research you might find that the likes of Mitt Romney pay less in taxes than does a house-cleaning single mother who just barely scrapes by. That's because her payroll taxes have been producing surpluses from 1983, when Reagan raised that tax, until George W. Bush trashed the economy. That surplus went to subsidize the likes of Romney to cover for the taxes he doesn't pay and the other 1%ers who rely on government for their income, protection, lower tax rates, etc., etc.
It seems you are proposing a return to the society that produced the likes of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Good luck with that.
I say let the Republicans, corporations, the wealthy and Wall street, all of whom who created the dysfunctional and financial mess, let them pay down the deficit.
Joe does fun.
Conservatives have deluded themselves that Biden is a fool and that their boy is the only smart one on the stage. Just like they thought that their view--anyone but Obama--was widely shared.
Somehow the GOP through its Rove/Koch/TeaPa ry owners believe manipulating citizens' ability to vote, hostility toward women and anti-contracept ion, racial animus, scaring the elderly, cheap shots at education and teachers, preventing higher education for modest income students, more tax cuts for plutocrats and anti-Golden Rule postures are a winning combination. You can't be against everything human and be elected. They need to step out of the Ayn Rand bubble.
what is it? 3 to 4 billion a day in interest??? what if it spikes to 14 percent rates like Carter had?
We are toast.
Let's Fix It you want to fix what? You are negative, have no facts, repeat yesterdays news by bad columnists or Rush.
Want to fix something...try fixing your attitude. None of us are perfect but most people here have the ability to review, think, research and Think for Ourselves....Tr y it sometime could be a whole new adventure
And who got us "Broke"?
It's like you are falling for the "We screwed once so let us in and we'll do it even more this time".
Or as in the old King and I, "Give us a kick if you would, your majesty -give us a kick if you PLEASE, your majesty!"
Are you familiar with the expression "Fink"?
It is simply impossible for a sovereign nation that controls its own currency to be "broke." To believe otherwise is simply to not understand at all the nature of a "fiat" monetary system. If we are "broke" then how could the federal gov't "lend" more than $16 trillion dollars to the banks (which they should not have done but that is another story) on top of the official bailout funds?
For some enlightenment about how this "fiat" money system really works i recommend to all:
http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Money-Theory-Macroeconomics-Sovereign/dp/0230368891/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1349976846&sr=8-1&keywords=modern+money+theory
Even if there were enough money to be found through cutting loopholes that affect mainly the rich, the claim that Congress will close these loopholes is a fantasy. I call this Romney's "I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today" proposal. Republicans will vote for the tax cut but when Tuesday comes, they won't close the loopholes--they 've already pledged this to Grover Norquist. If this weren't true, surely Romney or his allies Boehner & McConnell could suggest at least a couple of significant loopholes Congress would act to close, but they're more silent than crickets.
Reagan started the trickle-down approach, GHW Bush tried it again, and GW Bush tried it yet again. We ended up with massive debt & landed in a near depression. Now Romney wants to try it a fourth time. That's what I call an "unfortunate reality"!
It's time to return to the Keynesian approach Professor Reich advocates & stop this ridiculous, failed experiment with supply-side, trickle-down, voodoo economics. Then we will begin to see the debt come down.
When did we start being broke? It was when Ronald Reagan got elected in 1980. The US national debt was flat between 1950 and 1980. It's hypocritical for Republicans to claim to be guardians of fiscal responsibility. If you want proof of this, see this article by David Stockman, who was Reagan's financial director from 1981 to '85: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/opinion/01stockman.html
Could it possibly be that the breaking began with Ronald Reagan who slashed taxes for the rich, let corporations run wild, raised taxes (payroll tax) on the working middle class, created a runaway deficit, piled debt on top of debt and did nothing to better the lives of most Americans while shoveling hundreds of billions of dollars to his friends in the defense industry to delivery arms we do not need? Could it have been that he increased government spending by about 70% but tax collects by only 60%?
Could it be Daddy Bush who increased government spending by 28% in his four years but tax receipts by only 16.5%?
Could it be Baby Bush who increased government spending by 89% but tax collection by only 5%? Or maybe it was Bush leaving Obama a deficit in the fiscal year 2009 budget of $1.55 trillion, which has been steadily lowered by Obama to be only $1.1 trillion now, a reduction in deficit spending of $400 billion.
Or maybe it was Baby Bush who lost more than 8 million jobs in the last year of his ruinous reign, but which the GOP now blames Obama for, in spite of him halting a descent into a second Great Depression.
Perhaps you could tell us how Mitt Romney is going to address that "Breaking" by reintroducing the very policies that broke us in the first place.
We're broke? I think a certain $10 trillion dollar debt really made a contribution. And Obama wasn't president at the time. Can you guess especially who laid the groundwork for this? And how it's not going to be poofed away with a magic wand, especially in only four years? Nothing like borrow and spend to "help" reduce the debt.
However their are enough coffers to make sure that all politicians, brass, their agencies and people who got jobs from their relatives and buddies doin favors...all have salaries, vacations, benefits coming from the National Treasury.
We are owned by debts owed....but push comes to shove, Politicians know the USA will go for a good price. Thanks to the Republicans of Now.
I would prefer to be an independent, libertarian, green, democrat than a NAZI
I believe you watch to much Fox News to have an opinion based in reality.
He had a quiet,reflectiv e demeanor, didnot show tell and let the Opponent sound and look like a Meth freak.
Moderator stank
Glad you chose your words, would have been negligible if you said I do think OB...
Stay in school, try to learn to think for yourself. Perhaps learn to research. I find that the deeper you dig to bury the opponent, the bigger/deeper the hole to bury yourself. Watch for the loose dirt....oops
Could you please direct us to a credible source that shows this, preferably a video not made by FOX, for a bit of confirmation.
"Arrogance" and it's close collectively-im plied neighbor "Hubris" has been owned by the right lock, stock and barrel for as long as I can remember.
So give us a wee bittie authentication for this -shall we say over the top- statement, would ya? -Purty please.
They Poll according to who pays. They know the times poor are home, rich are home, working class come home from work.
they know the R and D sides of town...please I worked for them. It is a scam and they make a lot of money.
Moderator was horrendous as expected.
Romnified was methafied
OB was Dignified...I chose him as he acted like a President, a person of Office.
What they got was a president who took the entire defense department bureaucracy of a previously discredited administration into his administration inclusive of the Generals, Secretary of Defense and all the rest ( this has never happened before); then gave us more phony war. While president Obama was receiving the “Nobel Peace prize” he respiratory simultaneously and successfully defended the architect of torture in a San Francisco federal court. In addition, he sidetracked attempts of the ACLU to remove the illegal overseas prisons and never gave even a feeble attempt to close the infamous Guantanamo prison. He has never tried to return our revered habeas corpus or remove the immoral, illegal, Patriot Act. As this is written he has placed ill advised military intimidation and economic sanctions over innocent Iranian people and continues to fund the illegal Zionist settlers three generations removed from WWII, (many from New York) in the Middle East. Recently Obama signed a law (National Defense Authorization Act) making the “Patriot Act” permanent and the USA is now officially a military/police state with the habeas corpus long gone.
You reveal you think you are not part of this.
They were too busy to continue working for change.
You were all asleep the next year look at who you allowed into State, and Federal Positions.
You all want to blame someone....Look in the Mirror. You and the Democrats fell asleep at the wheel...still OB continued to move forward.
What have you done this year? I see nothing in Pa
My astonishment is that none of the pundits or journalists respond that Romney and Ryan are saying the hell with those younger people who are the children and grandchildren of those currently on Medicare.
Do they not think that the current beneficiaries care about their progeny?
What I find puzzling is what do they plan to do with all the money these people have paid in? Are they going to give it back to those who have probably worked for 30 years or more?
Arguing 'which is worse?', is a total distraction from the fact of current Financial Ruin, and the reality of being 'Chief World Terrorist', while blaming others......
and lies upon lLies
We are in Denial and Ignorance (yes, They 'Own the News')
-- President Obama, too, for his next debate.
Obama is way smarter then Romney could ever dream of being.
When you go up against Ryan in your debate, DO NOT use the "art of compromise" in the form of nonresponses. It would be like a bad rerun, as has happened not just with Obama, but other Democrats in the past.
He passed Romney care and has disavowed it, and now just about convinced Republicans that he means it, what if he doesn't? What if he really is lying equally to both sides and is more or less of a moderate like Obama turned out to be when he got elected?
I'm just posing the question on the off chance that Romney may not be what he seems ... Obama certainly was not?
So, if we use vouchers to buy our health insurance we can assume that 20% of the voucher will go to the insurance company to pay for administration, advertising, etc. Medicare administration is 3%.
That means that 17% of the voucher pays administrative costs instead of medical needs. Isn't it stupid to suggest vouchers? Or, does Ryan have stock in the insurance companies?
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