Friday, Aug. 17, 2012
Who Is Paul Ryan?
Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan admires Ayn Rand, and if you believe Republican Party mythology, Ryan is a messianic John Galt who will save America from a secret socialist conspiracy. Thus, in Rand fashion, it's worth asking: Who Is Paul Ryan?
The answer is simple: the GOP's presumptive vice presidential nominee is the 21st century's flesh-and-blood embodiment of political deception and media obfuscation.
Purporting to be a small-government budget hawk, Ryan publicly decries corporate welfare and says he wants "to get Washington out of the business of picking winners and losers." This has generated press coverage promoting Ryan as a great fiscal conservative. Yet, written out of the story is the fact that Ryan is a Huge Government Republican who voted for—and in some cases, still defends—the biggest examples of corporate welfare in American history.
Ryan, you see, was the Huge Government Republican who backed this era's massive corporate bailouts—the one who picked politically connected companies as winners and taxpayers as losers. He was the Huge Government Republican who regularly voted for profligate war spending bills—the ones that blew a gaping hole in the federal budget. And he is the Huge Government Republican now using his committee chairmanship to oppose serious cuts to the deficit-exploding corporate welfare still embedded in the bloated Pentagon budget.
Similarly, Ryan claims to be, and is billed in the press as, a libertarian-inspired acolyte of Rand—a man who supposedly values freedom and limited government. But as a Huge Government Republican, he has consistently voted to expand the surveillance state, endorse warrantless wiretapping and permit indefinite detention. Oh, and in contradiction to Rand's writings, he has also pushed to use the power of Huge Government to end a woman's right to choose an abortion.
Like so many Republicans, Ryan genuflects to the private sector and insinuates that the government is not a job creator. It's funny coming from a guy who has spent most of his adult life as a federal employee and whose family's construction company brags of building its fortune off government highway contracts.
Ryan labels himself an opponent of "crony capitalism" and is often promoted by reporters as someone who can help Mitt Romney thwart the Washington insiders who corrupt our politics. Somehow, we are expected to ignore the fact that Ryan has spent the vast majority of his adult life in Washington; that his wife served as a top pharmaceutical and oil lobbyist in Washington; and that, as Newsweek reported in 2011, he tried to insert special provisions into federal law that would boost his personal oil investment portfolio.
Then there are Ryan's budget proposals, whose central premises are that Medicare must be gutted and Social Security must be turned over to Wall Street because we allegedly don't have enough revenue to fund them. In response, the press often credits Ryan's blueprint for being courageous and honest. Yet, in the very same plans, Ryan proposes to severely deplete public revenues by eliminating all taxes on capital gains, interest and dividends, meaning that, according to The Atlantic magazine, Mitt Romney would pay a 0.82% tax rate on his $21 million annual earnings.
Republican powerbrokers, of course, hope you never learn any of this. They hope you and an obsequious press don't bother to review Ryan's congressional votes or his legislative history. They are hoping, in other words, that when you see Ryan's boyish Midwestern visage, you won't see the real Ryan—and you won't see what his ascent to vice president might mean for the future of America.
David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now." He co-hosts "The Rundown" on AM630 KHOW in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com.
The answer is simple: the GOP's presumptive vice presidential nominee is the 21st century's flesh-and-blood embodiment of political deception and media obfuscation.
Purporting to be a small-government budget hawk, Ryan publicly decries corporate welfare and says he wants "to get Washington out of the business of picking winners and losers." This has generated press coverage promoting Ryan as a great fiscal conservative. Yet, written out of the story is the fact that Ryan is a Huge Government Republican who voted for—and in some cases, still defends—the biggest examples of corporate welfare in American history.
Ryan, you see, was the Huge Government Republican who backed this era's massive corporate bailouts—the one who picked politically connected companies as winners and taxpayers as losers. He was the Huge Government Republican who regularly voted for profligate war spending bills—the ones that blew a gaping hole in the federal budget. And he is the Huge Government Republican now using his committee chairmanship to oppose serious cuts to the deficit-exploding corporate welfare still embedded in the bloated Pentagon budget.
Similarly, Ryan claims to be, and is billed in the press as, a libertarian-inspired acolyte of Rand—a man who supposedly values freedom and limited government. But as a Huge Government Republican, he has consistently voted to expand the surveillance state, endorse warrantless wiretapping and permit indefinite detention. Oh, and in contradiction to Rand's writings, he has also pushed to use the power of Huge Government to end a woman's right to choose an abortion.
Like so many Republicans, Ryan genuflects to the private sector and insinuates that the government is not a job creator. It's funny coming from a guy who has spent most of his adult life as a federal employee and whose family's construction company brags of building its fortune off government highway contracts.
Ryan labels himself an opponent of "crony capitalism" and is often promoted by reporters as someone who can help Mitt Romney thwart the Washington insiders who corrupt our politics. Somehow, we are expected to ignore the fact that Ryan has spent the vast majority of his adult life in Washington; that his wife served as a top pharmaceutical and oil lobbyist in Washington; and that, as Newsweek reported in 2011, he tried to insert special provisions into federal law that would boost his personal oil investment portfolio.
Then there are Ryan's budget proposals, whose central premises are that Medicare must be gutted and Social Security must be turned over to Wall Street because we allegedly don't have enough revenue to fund them. In response, the press often credits Ryan's blueprint for being courageous and honest. Yet, in the very same plans, Ryan proposes to severely deplete public revenues by eliminating all taxes on capital gains, interest and dividends, meaning that, according to The Atlantic magazine, Mitt Romney would pay a 0.82% tax rate on his $21 million annual earnings.
Republican powerbrokers, of course, hope you never learn any of this. They hope you and an obsequious press don't bother to review Ryan's congressional votes or his legislative history. They are hoping, in other words, that when you see Ryan's boyish Midwestern visage, you won't see the real Ryan—and you won't see what his ascent to vice president might mean for the future of America.
David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now." He co-hosts "The Rundown" on AM630 KHOW in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com.
© 2012 CREATORS.COM
It is all true and you check it out on his voting record. He voted for all the bailouts, the two wars, the drug payment for the elder that was never in the Bush budget or ever paid for, and the evil stimulas that he even wrote three letters to the goverment to get money from and did get some grants totally upwards of 50 million dollars that saved or created over 7000 jobs, that statment is even in the letters he wrote.
According to Wikipedia, with lots of footnoted sources about his early life, it shows his conservative bent. Born and raised in Janesville, went to catholic grade school, student government, voted prom king, yada yada.
I lived and worked in Janesville for about 10 years let me tell you my impression of this ultra-conservative, blue collar, working class values place isolated in the center of Rock County.
When I moved there, my grandfather from historic racist western Wisconsin said "Oh, that's such a nice 'white' town", I could tell where my father's divisive, conservative, intolerant attitudes came from.
Janesville is (was for many decades) a GM town. The people there grew up with the attitude "I'm going to work at the plant like my daddy did, why should I study hard in school and go to college?" It did not take much to be considered a "brain" or "wonk" in that town. Paul Ryan was probably considered smarter than he really was. Being a Union workforce, the attitude was "they owe me, I owe nothing". Talking to Boy Scout leaders, these residents would drop their kids off at the troop meetings, pick them up later. When I was in Boy Scouts in Madison, parents stayed there and participated. Not in Janesville. Other youth organizations reported the same parenting attitudes.
Janesville was also a residence of a KKK leader, he lived in the slums. I'll bet his attitude made him unemployable, and Janesville was so lily-white that it may have contained the only all-white slum in the midwest!
Paul Ryan elected Prom King, elected to student government? He had to have "Janesville" values that agreed with the rest of the students or he would not have won the popular vote.
Janesville also had a reputation of "people grow up here, then move away. They do not move here". An artist-type I knew at Lab Safety Supply said "Do you know how much they had to pay me to get me to move here?" Going out to bars and restaurants, pretty much all country and western, beer bars, and steak joints, not much ethnic food variety at all. Most ethnic was national chain pizza and Taco Bell. I do not remember there being any art galleries.
When I moved there to one of the few apartments it had (rentals were mostly corner duplexes with all that GM money), the resident manager made it clear to me during the application interview how the wind blew. "There was this guy here, he spoiled it all by dating a black woman, the neighbors did not like that, he did not last long here." Janesville in the 80's was pure white, Beloit was where you lived if you were black. And no housing developments were being built in between those two cities, got to preserve that buffer space.
About Paul Ryan being "Huge Government" from the Republican side.
There are those who believe government is the stabilizing and equalizing force between the haves and the have-nots, making sure to preserve our founding fathers constitutional protections. Keeping the playign field level, encouraging competition and fair play, equal opportunity, providing public law enforcement of society-stabilizing laws, laws designed to stop wasteful and costly "Hatfields and McCoys" efforts.
Then there are those who believe that government is an "accelerating tool" for your wealth-concentrating business to use to set up a more profitable environment, blocking new upstarts from entering into your business, enacting public works infrastructure spending to get electricity and raw materials to the worksite (factory or farm field), get finished product to the customer and retail stores.
-- This is what Obama meant when he said "You did not build your business, somebody else did".
Oh, you must have been raised by the nuns and priest of Catholic school, back before the Vatican Council of the 60's!