|
FOCUS: You Might Be Paul Ryan If... |
 |
|
Monday, 13 August 2012 12:00 |
|
Cole writes: "If you would raise taxes on the middle classes; but your budget would allow your wealthy running mate Mitt Romney to pay almost nothing in taxes, you might be Paul Ryan."
Paul Ryan speaks during a campaign rally in Wisconsin, 08/12/12.
You Might Be Paul Ryan If...
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment
13 August 12
 f you admitted that you got into politics because of the impact on you of the philosopher of personal greed and egotism, Ayn Rand, but later had to deny it because it was bad publicity, you might be Paul Ryan.
If you want to destroy social security for others, but after your father died when you were 16, you used your father's social security survivor benefits to help pay for your education at Miami University of Ohio ... you might be Paul Ryan.
If you say your budget plan was inspired by Roman Catholic teachings, but nearly 60 prominent Catholic thinkers and leaders condemned it as heartless, cruel and un-Christian ... you might be Paul Ryan.
If you claim to be a free marketeer but want to keep $40 billion in tax breaks for Big Oil in the budget, you might be Paul Ryan. When it comes to green energy, the Right says it has to be profitable on its own, but won't give it a level playing field.
If you would raise taxes on the middle classes; but your budget would allow your wealthy running mate Mitt Romney to pay almost nothing in taxes, you might be Paul Ryan.
If you are against deficits in an economic downturn and during a Democratic administration, but voted for all the measures that ran up the deficit under Bush and erased Clinton's budget surplus, you might be Paul Ryan.
If you say you are pro-life, but supported to the hilt an illegal and unjustified US invasion and occupation of Iraq, which killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, you might be Paul Ryan.
If you accused climate scientists of conspiring to "intentionally mislead the public on the issue of climate change," but are yourself a Koch brother-backed conspirator for the 1%, you might be Paul Ryan.
If your proof that climate change is an illusion is that it still snows in the winter, you might be Paul Ryan.
 |
|
Lunatic Ayn Rand, Paul Ryan's Biggest Influence |
|
|
Monday, 13 August 2012 09:45 |
|
Intro: "Here's a treasure trove of background info on the woman who inspired Romney's VP pick to go into public office."
Paul Ryan's budget is filled with endless cuts. (photo: WSJ)
Lunatic Ayn Rand, Paul Ryan's Biggest Influence
By Jan Frel, AlterNet
13 August 12
Here's a treasure trove of background info on the woman who inspired Romney's VP pick to go into public office.
  he reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand." That's freshly minted GOP vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan talking - statements he would eventually recant - at a party celebrating what would have been the prolific author's 100th birthday,
Rand's books are a big driver in the long-term right-wing campaign to delude millions of people into believing that there's no such thing as society - that everyone must look out only for themselves. Lately, Rand's work has enjoyed a major revival of interest. Besides Ryan, she's inspired yoga-wear company Lululemon to publish her quotations on its products, and she's even made inroads into the North American semi-socialist enclave of Canada.
AlterNet has kept the pace with Rand's resurgence, doing our best to educate people about what a nutcase she was and how harmful her ideas are. These 10 articles, previously published on AlterNet, shed light on why Rand's influence on Ryan is so dangerous.
1. How Ayn Rand Seduced Generations of Young Men and Helped Make the U.S. Into a Selfish, Greedy Nation
"When I was a kid," AlterNet contribuer Bruce Levine writes, "my reading included comic books and Rand's The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. There wasn't much difference between the comic books and Rand's novels in terms of the simplicity of the heroes. What was different was that unlike Superman or Batman, Rand made selfishness heroic, and she made caring about others weakness."
Bruce Levine's explanation of how Rand has captured the minds of so many is a must-read. "While Harriet Beecher Stowe shamed Americans about the United State's dehumanization of African Americans and slavery, Ayn Rand removed Americans' guilt for being selfish and uncaring about anyone except themselves. Not only did Rand make it 'moral' for the wealthy not to pay their fair share of taxes, she 'liberated' millions of other Americans from caring about the suffering of others, even the suffering of their own children."
2. Rand's Philosophy in a Nutshell
The bloggers at ThinkProgress explain that the philosophy Ayn Rand laid out in her novels and essays was, "a frightful concoction of hyper-egotism, power-worship and anarcho-capitalism. She opposed all forms of welfare, unemployment insurance, support for the poor and middle-class, regulation of industry and government provision for roads or other infrastructure. She also insisted that law enforcement, defense and the courts were the only appropriate arenas for government, and that all taxation should be purely voluntary. Her view of economics starkly divided the world into a contest between 'moochers' and 'producers,' with the small group making up the latter generally composed of the spectacularly wealthy, the successful, and the titans of industry."
3. Ayn Rand Railed Against Government Benefits, But Grabbed Social Security and Medicare When She Needed Them
AlterNet's Joshua Holland has the goods: "Her books provided wide-ranging parables of 'parasites,' 'looters' and 'moochers' using the levers of government to steal the fruits of her heroes' labor. In the real world, however, Rand herself received Social Security payments and Medicare benefits under the name of Ann O'Connor (her husband was Frank O'Connor).
4. Rand Worked on a Movie Script Glorifying the Atomic Bomb
According to author Greg Mitchell, Rand called the nuclear weapon capable of incinerating entire cities "an eloquent example of, argument for and tribute to free enterprise."
5. Billionaires and Corporations Use Rand's Writings To Brainwash College Students
Pam Martens reported that Charles Koch, who pushes "millions of dollars through his foundation into economic programs at public universities and mandating approval of faculty and curriculum in some instances," partnered with the "southern banking giant BB&T ... mandating that Ayn Rand's book Atlas Shrugged is taught and distributed to students."
6. How Rand Became the Libertarians' Favorite Philosopher
Author Gary Weiss explains how the "Rand movement, which was little more than a cult when the Atlas Shrugged author died 30 years ago, has effectively merged with the vastly larger libertarian movement. While many differences are likely to remain ... this means that Objectivism, Rand's quasi-religious philosophy, is going to permeate the political process more than ever before."
7. Ayn Rand in Real Life
Author Hal Crowther writes, "For an eyewitness portrait of Ayn Rand in the flesh, in the prime of her celebrity, you can't improve on the 'Ubermensch' chapter in Tobias Wolff's autobiographical novel Old School. Invited to meet with the faculty and student writers at the narrator's boarding school, Rand arrives with an entourage of chain-smoking idolaters in black and behaves so repellently that her audience of innocents gets a life lesson in what kind of adult to avoid, and to avoid becoming. Rude, dismissive, vain and self-infatuated to the point of obtuseness - she names Atlas Shrugged as the only great American novel - Rand and her hissing chorus in black manage to alienate the entire school, even the rich board member who had admired and invited her. What strikes Wolff's narrator most forcefully is her utter lack of charity or empathy, her transparent disgust with everything she views as disfiguring or disabling..."
8. Red-State 'Parasites,' Blue-State Providers
Ayn Rand loved to throw around the word "parasite." If you aren't a psychopath billionaire, in Rand's eyes you're a parasite. It's a psychology totally in keeping with the myths of blue-state/red-state America, as AlterNet's Sara Robinson explains.
9. Ayn Rand Was a Big Admirer of a Serial Killer
No exaggerating here. Mark Ames writes, "Back in the late 1920s, as Ayn Rand was working out her philosophy, she became enthralled by a real-life American serial killer, William Edward Hickman, whose gruesome, sadistic dismemberment of a 12-year-old girl named Marion Parker in 1927 shocked the nation. Rand filled her early notebooks with worshipful praise of Hickman. According to biographer Jennifer Burns, author of Goddess of the Market, Rand was so smitten with Hickman that she modeled her first literary creation ... on him."
10. We've Already Had a Randian in High Office (Alan Greenspan), and It Was Devastating to the Middle Class
"The most devoted member of [Rand's] inner circle," George Monbiot writes, "was Alan Greenspan, former head of the US Federal Reserve. Among the essays he wrote for Rand were those published in a book he co-edited with her called Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. Here, starkly explained, you'll find the philosophy he brought into government. There is no need for the regulation of business – even builders or Big Pharma – he argued, as 'the "greed" of the businessman or, more appropriately, his profit-seeking … is the unexcelled protector of the consumer.' As for bankers, their need to win the trust of their clients guarantees that they will act with honour and integrity. Unregulated capitalism, he maintains, is a 'superlatively moral system.'"
|
|
|
The Ryan Choice |
|
|
Sunday, 12 August 2012 16:00 |
|
Reich writes: "Paul Ryan is the reverse of Sarah Palin. She was all right-wing flash without much substance. He's all right-wing substance without much flash."
Portrait, Robert Reich, 08/16/09. (photo: Perian Flaherty)
The Ryan Choice
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
12 August 12
 aul Ryan is the reverse of Sarah Palin. She was all right-wing flash without much substance. He's all right-wing substance without much flash.
Ryan is not a firebrand. He's not smarmy. He doesn't ooze contempt for opponents or ridicule those who disagree with him. In style and tone, he doesn't even sound like an ideologue - until you listen to what he has to say.
It's here - in Ryan's views and policy judgments - we find the true ideologue. More than any other politician today, Paul Ryan exemplifies the social Darwinism at the core of today's Republican Party: Reward the rich, penalize the poor, let everyone else fend for themselves. Dog eat dog.
Ryan's views are crystallized in the budget he produced for House Republicans last March as chairman of the House Budget committee. That budget would cut $3.3 trillion from low-income programs over the next decade. The biggest cuts would be in Medicaid, which provides healthcare for the nation's poor - forcing states to drop coverage for an estimated 14 million to 28 million low-income people, according to the non-partisan Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.
Ryan's budget would also reduce food stamps for poor families by 17 percent ($135 billion) over the decade, leading to a significant increase in hunger - particularly among children. It would also reduce housing assistance, job training, and Pell grants for college tuition.
In all, 62 percent of the budget cuts proposed by Ryan would come from low-income programs.
The Ryan plan would also turn Medicare into vouchers whose value won't possibly keep up with rising health-care costs - thereby shifting those costs on to seniors.
At the same time, Ryan would provide a substantial tax cut to the very rich - who are already taking home an almost unprecedented share of the nation's total income. Today's 400 richest Americans have more wealth than the bottom 150 million of us put together.
Ryan's views are pure social Darwinism. As William Graham Sumner, the progenitor of social Darwinism in America, put it in the 1880s: "Civilization has a simple choice." It's either "liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest" or "not-liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest. The former carries society forward and favors all its best members; the latter carries society downwards and favors all its worst members."
Is this Mitt Romney's view as well?
Some believe Romney chose Ryan solely in order to drum up enthusiasm on the right. Since most Americans have already made up their minds about whom they'll vote for, and the polls show Americans highly polarized - with an almost equal number supporting Romney as Obama - the winner will be determined by how many on either side take the trouble to vote. So in picking Ryan, Romney is motivating his rightwing base to get to the polls, and pull everyone else they can along with them.
But there's reason to believe Romney also agrees with Ryan's social Darwinism. Romney accuses President Obama of creating an "entitlement society" and thinks government shouldn't help distressed homeowners but instead let the market "hit the bottom." And although Romney has carefully avoided specifics in his own economic plan, he has said he's "very supportive" of Ryan's budget plan. "It's a bold and exciting effort, an excellent piece of work, very much needed … very consistent with what I put out earlier."
Romney hasn't put out much but the budget he's proposed would, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, throw ten million low-income people off the benefits rolls for food stamps or cut benefits by thousands of dollars a year, or both.
At the same time, Romney wants to permanently extend the Bush tax cuts to the wealthy, reduce corporate income taxes, and eliminate the estate tax. These tax reductions would increase the incomes of people earning more than $1 million a year by an average of $295,874 annually, according to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center.
Oh, did I say that Romney and Ryan also want to repeal President Obama's healthcare law, thereby leaving fifty million Americans without health insurance?
Social Darwinism offered a moral justification for the wild inequities and social cruelties of the late nineteenth century. It allowed John D. Rockefeller, for example, to claim the fortune he accumulated through his giant Standard Oil Trust was "merely a survival of the fittest… the working out of a law of nature and of God."
The social Darwinism of that era also undermined all efforts to build a more broadly based prosperity and rescue our democracy from the tight grip of a very few at the top. It was used by the privileged and powerful to convince everyone else that government shouldn't do much of anything.
Not until the twentieth century did America reject social Darwinism. We created a large middle class that became the engine of our economy and our democracy. We built safety nets to catch Americans who fell downward, often through no fault of their own.
We designed regulations to protect against the inevitable excesses of free-market greed. We taxed the rich and invested in public goods - public schools, public universities, public transportation, public parks, public health - that made us all better off.
In short, we rejected the notion that each of us is on our own in a competitive contest for survival.
But choosing Ryan, Romney has raised for the nation the starkest of choices: Do we want to return to that earlier time, or are we willing and able to move forward - toward a democracy and an economy that works for us all?
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.
|
|
The Barack Obama Election-Year Decathlon |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=18199"><span class="small">Will Durst, Humor Times</span></a>
|
|
Sunday, 12 August 2012 15:43 |
|
Durst writes: "We're used to seeing him body surfing and on the basketball court, but the Complying Hawaiian has been showing off some pretty impressive election-year moves as well."
Political satirist Will Durst. (photo: WillDurst.com)
The Barack Obama Election-Year Decathlon
By Will Durst, Humor Times
12 August 12
With the Free World Leader Gold Medal at stake, the incumbent has been showing off some pretty impressive election-year moves.
lanetary props to the City of London for a monumentally memorable 30th Olympiad, viewed in this country against the backdrop of election-year coverage.
It was obvious from the opening ceremonies that these would be games nobody would soon forget. From the queen jumping out of a helicopter to Charles Dickens wearing a top hat at Stonehenge contracting black-lung disease during the Industrial Revolution or whatever was going on there. Beautiful, is what it was. And odd.
Then for two weeks, the world's greatest athletes captivated global attention by setting records and shedding tears and pulling hamstrings in familiar events and sports we didn't even know existed. Men's rhythmic marathon gymnastic BMX diving?
It continues to amaze how every four years, humans continue to incrementally evolve to be faster and stronger and higher and longer and as far as synchronized swimming is concerned, creepier.
The weather was oh-so-British; mercurial, unpredictable and tipsy by dark. And added kudos must be laid at the feet of England's capital city for keeping the contests pretty much controversy-free. Except, of course, the momentary ugliness that was the women's semifinal field hockey match between Great Britain and Argentina. AKA: The Falklands War II. This time it's personal! Utilizing less-lethal sticks.
One can never entirely keep politics out of games or games out of politics. The two have too much in common. For instance, we cheer for our team no matter what opponents they line up against. And if a player switches sides, that's fine too. As long as they wear our uniform. So essentially, what we root for is laundry.
Score is kept and grudges held for generations. Contestants blindly resort to any strategy within the law to win, often finding themselves on the wrong side of strictly legal. And invariably one over-caffeinated idiot will try to psych out the other side with smack talk about somebody's mama.
Every once in a while some underused substitute will buzz a high, tight one under the chin of an opposing superstar and both benches will clear. And then… not much of anything happens. Participants talk of sportsmanship being the paramount goal but it's plain to see everything is all about the gold.
Even our notoriously composed to the point of semi-somnambulant president occasionally is forced to engage in various sporty contortions. We're used to seeing him body surfing and on the basketball court, but the Complying Hawaiian has been showing off some pretty impressive election-year moves as well. As a little something we like to call the Barack Obama Election-Year Decathlon will elucidate.
- The Individual Medley Multiple Issue-Straddle.
- The Debt Ceiling Crisis Crunch Clean and Jerk. With an emphasis on the jerks.
- Global Goodwill High Nuclear Hurdle Tour.
- Extreme Middle of the Road Straightline Walk-Run.
- Single Weekend 10 State Promise Them Anything Fundraising Marathon.
- Last Minute Digging Up a Democrat with a Backbone Desperation Relay.
- The Incredible Disappearing Successful Solar Energy Photo-Op Sprint.
- The 800 Pound Gorilla that is the Economy Greco-Roman Wrestle.
- Biting His Tongue While in the Presence of John Boehner Freestyle.
And the final event:
- The Joe Biden Advanced Obstacle Course. Now with Landmines!
The New York Times says Emmy-nominated comedian and writer Will Durst "is quite possibly the best political satirist working in the country today." Check out the website: Redroom.com to buy his book or find out more about upcoming stand-up performances. Or willdurst.com.
|
|
