Wednesday, August 15, 2012
Taking the radical right to the furthest extreme
Posted by Steve Hammer on Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 8:30 AM
In an acknowledgment that he was losing the presidential race, Republican candidate Mitt Romney doubled down last week on the angry, white people constituency and named the most radical, whitest, angriest political figure imaginable as his running mate.
With almost nobody left in the undecided column, Romney has given up on capturing the middle and is going all out to make the presidential campaign a referendum on the concept that the richest people in the country aren't rich enough.
In doing so, he's picked Wisconsin representative Paul Ryan, a vice presidential candidate with the brilliant intellect of Dan Quayle, the charisma and charm of Al Gore and the compassion of Dick Cheney. The Romney-Ryan ticket is a suicide pact almost guaranteed to lose the election and to burn down America if it doesn't.
The unemployed, underprivileged and disadvantaged people are using up too much money and need to sacrifice even more so that Romney and Ryan can build bigger yachts, send more money to offshore bank accounts and pay even fewer taxes than they do now.
Previous tickets have at least given lip service to the concept of a rising tide that lifts all boats, of creating more economic opportunity and to helping the middle and lower classes. The Romney-Ryan ticket is a middle finger directed at the 99 percent of the population that doesn't own multiple Cadillacs or belong to multiple country clubs.
If you're anything but a rich, white Republican, you have no place in Romney's America. The choice of Ryan made that crystal clear.
If you'll ever need Medicare, public education or any kind of governmental assistance for your children, Romney-Ryan isn't for you. The money spent on keeping seniors healthy, improving our classrooms or even helping poor children eat healthy lunches at school is money better spent redistributed to the rich.
Instead of Medicare, Ryan would like to hand people a voucher that may or may not be good enough to get private health insurance. The budget he authored was a declaration of war against the poor.
According to a recent analysis in Esquire: Ryan's budget would have dropped 300,000 children from the subsidized school lunch program, eliminated health care for almost as many, and slashed $83 billion in benefits for federal retirees, people who devoted their careers to serving their country.
He did this not to save money, but because he carries a heartfelt belief that government shouldn't be doing things like helping people attend college, making sure veterans are cared for and making sure we have clean air and water.
The trillions of dollars he desires to cut from the budget comes from things such as that. But millionaires can expect a big bonus from the enhanced tax cuts he wants to give them.
It would be unbelievable except that it's true. Want a choice on reproductive rights? Sorry. Want any rights at all except to remain in the working poor? Not with Romney-Ryan. You have the right to pay higher taxes if you're poor and lower taxes if you're rich.
Meanwhile, Romney would like to take a wrecking ball to 50 years of foreign relations by restarting the Cold War with Russia. His provocative statements aimed at Moscow can only be designed to start a new arms race and remilitarization against the imaginary threat of the former Soviet Union.
Remember that, despite what they say, neither Romney nor Ryan is for smaller government. They want a much bigger military and a new bureaucracy to dole out entitlements to the rich. They only want a government that provides fewer benefits for the vast majority of people. They're not against corporate welfare, just the welfare that helps poor people survive when hard times hit.
As the late historian Howard Zinn wrote, "Dependency on government has never been bad for the rich. The pretense of the laissez-faire people is that only the poor are dependent on government, while the rich take care of themselves. This argument manages to ignore all of modern history, which shows a consistent record of laissez-faire for the poor, but enormous government intervention for the rich."
The Republicans will do their best over the next few months to portray President Barack Obama as a radical president when, in reality, the addition of Ryan means Romney ticket is the most radical and extreme in history.
So the election, more so than before, is a good old-fashioned class and race war. The rich versus the poor.The plutocrats versus the workers.The bosses against the workers. White America versus non-white America.
Don't get caught up in the noise coming from the news media or from corporately controlled conservative talk radio. This is a choice between economic opportunity and a permanent underclass, between diplomacy and the Bush Doctrine of perpetual war and between the CEO class and the rest of us.
Which side are you on?
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