Paul Ryan Goes To Battle For Big Business Again-- This Time Over Immigration

It wasn't a very Tea Party thing for Paul Ryan to do to vote to bail out the Wall Street banksters. In fact, it was even less teabagger-friendly when Ryan joined with Boehner and Cantor between September 29, 2008 and October 3. It was less than a week, but it's the real story of Paul Ryan that Tea Party activists would rather not face.

The long, catastrophic Bush Regime was finally coming to an end and the GOP kleptocrats were winding up their last months in office. They wanted to deliver one more grand giveaway to Wall Street: Henry Paulsen's bankster bailout. One problem: enough Republicans (133 of 'em) joined with Democrats to defeat it 205-228 when it was first brought up for a vote on September 29. Wall Street's best-paid shills, Boehner, Cantor and Ryan, mobilized for battle. At the time Ryan, a relatively junior Member, had already taken $1,704,095 in legalistic bribes from Wall Street (a number that has since then risen to $3,207,247, the most any Wisconsin politicians has ever gotten from Wall Street in history). After the defeat in the House, Wall Street and the banksters went bonkers and pulled all Bush's strings and he and Paulsen easily got the monstrosity passed in the House of Lords and then went back to the House with a no less odious version of the bill that they had rejected a few days before. This time it passed 263-171 with not 65, but 91 Republicans joining in. Among the vote switchers who had had their arms twisted by Boehner, Cantor and Ryan plus the official registered Wall Street lobbyists, not many are still in the House, although all these big bankster bribery recipients are:

• Charlie Dent (R-PA- $1,186,979)
• Jim Gerlach (R-PA- $2,607,380)
• Gary Miller (R-CA- $1,453,324)
• Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL- $1,360,707)
• Lee Terry (R-NE- $1,813,883)
• Patrick Tiberi (R-OH- $4,100,845)

We all, already know that Wall Street rewards its shill handsomely. This post isn't about that. It's about how Paul Ryan never hesitates to sell out the far right base that idolizes him and sticks its collective head in the sand when presented with the evidence that he's nothing-- and has never been anything-- but a shill for Big Business. That's right-- just a garden variety old timey Republican hack, only younger and not as ugly... on the outside. His latest foray on behalf of his Establishment overlords-- to the dismay of the right-wing base-- is how he's embraced immigration reform, which is popular nationally, hated by the Know Nothing and racists who dominate the Tea Party/GOP activist army... and an absolute must for the big money donors who want the cheap labor.

Call it a marriage of convenience. In the battle to win over the majority of the Republican Party on immigration reform an alliance has been formed between two of the GOP's rising stars. Congressman Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) has endeavored to assist Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) in his push to convince the Republican Party to go along with the immigration reform plan proposed by the bipartisan "Gang of Eight" group of senators.

Both Rubio and Ryan are widely seen as potential frontrunners for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. Although helping the other will boost their profile in the minds of voters, the risks of sitting on the sidelines during this debate are too great to not take action.

Rubio was a member of the Gang of Eight and this immigration reform effort is widely seen as his first major legislative opportunity to build up a profile in the minds of voters toward 2016. After the release of the plan, Rubio has essentially went all in on efforts to convince fellow Republicans to support it, appearing in ads that tout the plans conservative values, especially border security and no social assistance to undocumented immigrants who go through the 13 year process to become legal. Rubio has essentially tied up much of his political capital in this bill and a defeat would be catastrophic for any future higher office ambitions.

But Rubio has faced backlash from fellow Republican legislators, conservative media pundit, and activists over the plan that emerged last week. From being attempted to be linked to the false "ObamaPhone" meme with "MarcoPhones" to dealing with members of his own party making statements that hurt his cause, such as Congressman Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) saying that Al Qaeda terrorists, "are now being trained to come in and act like Hispanic," Rubio has quite a bit of work ahead of him in convincing his fellow republicans to follow his lead on immigration reform.

Ryan is providing support on the fiscal front. Ryan has acquired a status among the Republican Party as a budget wonk so his involvement will be crucial for a House version of the Senate immigration reform bill to pass. His position on Capitol Hill allows him to vouch for the price tag and economic effects of the bill, providing much needed cover for nervous Republicans who would like his stamp of approval for the vote for the bill.

Ryan has already started taking heat for his position on immigration. Conservative radio host Mark Levin blasted Ryan on his program, saying, "he's creating a record here for himself that makes it very, very hard, in my view, if he chooses to run for president, to vote for him."

Listen to a radical right-wing nutjob Mark Levin, a virulent racist on whom it's beginning to dawn that Ryan is no friend of the right-wing base:



Ryan works, first and foremost, for Big Business. They invented him. They dragged him out of obscurity (or a gym), cleaned him up, taught him how to speak politically, taught him how to convince dumb DC pundits that he knows something about economics, got Boehner to make him Budget Chair and Romney to give him the VP nomination... and they're still investing in making him a governor or senator or president or something where he can further their agenda.

And there is nothing higher on the Big Business agenda, prioritized more highly than low taxes on the rich and low wages for the poor. Low wages for the poor means lots of immigrants. That's always been the irony of the GOP base opposing immigration and the GOP Establishment always trying to move it along. Bush certainly did and today Boehner, Rubio and Ryan are. Obviously, they want to do as much damage as they can to any bill that advocates anything smacking of humanitarian values-- like keeping families together and access to public services-- but the corporations who finance their cushy careers want cheap labor and they expect this guys to deliver-- regardless of what loudmouthed bigots like Mark Levin have to say.

The End of Paul Ryan, Economic Policy Wonk!

I heard The Nation's John Nichols on Sly's afternoon radio show on 93.7 FM yesterday extolling a new study that completely destroys Paul Ryan's argument that because of our troublesome debt to GDP ratio, the country could fall at any time. Fear mongering much?

Nichols thought it was a shame this important story came out at a time when so many huge stories were breaking, because this essentially reverses and changes the nations economic equation. After contributing $15 to save The Nation, I purged the guilt I would normally feel posting so much of Nichols article. You can always read the whole article with the link above:

Paul Ryan’s numbers are wrong. Really wrong. As in: his most urgent argument on behalf of painful cuts to federal programs and the denial of new funding for job creation, education, healthcare and infrastructure repair is based on a coding error.

The paper the House Budget Committee chairman has used as the intellectual and statistical underpinning for his austerity agenda has been significantly discredited by the revelation that essential data was excluded from the study, leading "to serious errors that inaccurately represent the relationship between public debt and growth."

The Harvard professors who produced the paper—which Ryan cited as recently as last month—haveacknowledged their mathematical error.

Now, the question is whether Ryan and conservative proponents of austerity will acknowledge that they have built their arguments on a false premise. Ryan positioned himself as an economic "Paul Revere," warning that public debt was stalling out the US economy. This notion was always questioned by savvy economists, such as Center for Economic and Policy Research co-director Dean Baker. But Ryan went all in … preaching an economic gospel based on his absolute certainty that when a country’s debt level tops 90 percent of its gross domestic product, it’s economy will decline and crisis will ensue … how the US economy was heading toward a apocalyptic "tipping point." Ryan has argued that any “pain” suffered by working Americans—in the form of restructurings of Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid, post office closures and cuts to state and local aid—was necessary in order to avoid an economic meltdown.

But the 90 percent threshold is a false precipice based on a false premise. In a new paper, "Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff," Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst successfully replicate the results … they reached out to Reinhart and Rogoff … to see how Reinhart and Rogoff's data was constructed … First, Reinhart and Rogoff selectively exclude years of high debt and average growth. Second, they use a debatable method to weight the countries. Third, there also appears to be a coding error that excludes high-debt and average-growth countries.

When they included all the data from all the years and all the countries, the average growth rate of nations with a 90 per cent debt load does not decline by 0.1 percent … Rather, the growth rate is a positive 2.2 per cent. Reinhart acknowledged to the CBC News business reporting team that “Herndon, Ash and Pollin have written a useful paper, finding a significant mistake in one of our figures.”

Ryan must either alter course or confirm the darkest assessments from his critics: that he cribs data from academics not with an eye for accuracy but with a determination to advance his austerity agenda at any cost. 

The Prince Of Pain

I'm retired now. All the work I do is volunteer work. And the sun never rises before I'm up and working. Before I retired I was the president of TimeWarner's Reprise Records, home of Green Day, Eric Clapton, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Depeche Mode, Wilco, Fleetwood Mac, Morrissey, Lou Reed, Frank Sinatra, Barenaked Ladies, Cher, Enya, Josh Groban, Erasure, Rickie Lee Jones, Steely Dan, Chaka Khan, and dozens of other artists. I didn't work any harder then than I do now. And before that I started my own independent record company, 415 Records, which I eventually sold to CBS.

I've written a lot about what I did before my days in the record industry. I have a whole blog devoted to my travels around the world and before I started 415 Records I was tamping around Europe, Asia and Africa for nearly seven years, right out of college. I spent time in Essaouira with Jimi Hendrix, smuggled kif out of the Rif Mountains into Spain so I could finance a trip to India, a trip that brought me to Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and every corner of India. And eventually settled down in Amsterdam to work in a meditation center. I learned more-- and more useful stuff-- on that sojourn than in my 4 years at university. That trip, in fact, eventually, led to me winding up as president of Reprise, a job that paid 7 figures. But when I washed up in San Francisco in the late '70s my net worth was barely seven dollars.

Maybe I would have found food some other way-- scavenging? a life of crime?-- but without food stamps I would never have been able to start 415 Records and launch my career in the music business. That I know for sure. I've literally paid well over a million dollars in federal income taxes since then. A pretty good investment for the federal government.

Thursday, just after it passed the House by a surprisingly narrow margin, we looked at why the American Catholic Bishops have decried Paul Ryan's heartless budget as anathema to the teachings of Jesus Christ. It's a budget premised on the kind of pain conservatives feel compelled to inflict on poor people "for their own good." In Paul Ryan's world-- a world of grubby inheritance and corporate indulgence and sell-out-- pain will forge "them" into better citizens. In Ryan's world "the social safety net represents a moral threat to Americans’ character, as well as a fiscal threat to their country’s budget."

He’s incessantly warned of luring “able-bodied people into lives of dependency and complacency” and depriving them “of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives.” In his latest budget, he introduced his cuts to Medicaid, nutrition assistance, and other support programs for low-income Americans with a warning that the safety net “can create a powerful disincentive to get ahead.”

Included in those cuts is a massive reduction in spending on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). But the Center On Budget and Policy Priorities took a look at the employment situation of Americans who rely on the program, and the reality belies Ryan’s rhetoric:

Among households with children that include an adult who isn’t elderly or disabled, 87 percent of the households receiving SNAP in a given month include an individual who worked in the prior year or will work in the following year.

Ryan actually has an ongoing problem when it comes to honestly representing the SNAP program. Last year, he claimed it was “growing at unsustainable rates”-- a notion that fails to account for the effects of the recession, that fails to differentiate spending in raw dollars from spending as a share of the economy, and which utterly ignores the program’s projected path over the next decade.

Ryan’s budget would cut SNAP spending by $135 billion between now and 2023-- requiring either 12 to 13 million of the 44.7 million people currently on the program to be kicked off, or a reduction in benefits of $190 a month for the poorest of American families by 2019. Nor did the 1996 welfare reform law-- on which Ryan models his current budget proposals-- turn out to be the success he presents it as. In the aftermath of the Great Recession, welfare’s case load grew only 16 percent, even as the numbers of the unemployed increased by 88 percent; an utter failure to keep up with the needs of impoverished Americans.

As for the safety net as a whole, CBPP cites research from the National Bureau of Economic Research that one of every seven Americans would be poor without the safety net, but are above the poverty line because of it-- a total of over 40 million people.

But Ryan and the Republican Party do not believe in investing in the American people. They believing in protecting the gains of the wealthy few-- even though Ryan himself-- like his idol, Ayn Rand-- personally subsisted on government aid for many years when they needed it to scrape by.

Paul Ryan Launches New Budget/Austerity Plan-- Rob Zerban Launches Exploratory Committee

Yesterday, Jerry Nadler (D-NY) was one of several Democrats on the House floor raging against Ryan's extremely ideological Law of the Jungle budget-- what he referred to as "merely a repackaging of the same extreme agenda that the American people rejected last fall."

“The House Republicans’ budget would again try to end Medicare as we know it by replacing the guarantee of health coverage with a private voucher program that would reduce benefits. This throws seniors back onto the mercy of the private insurance market, while every year giving them less and less of the health benefits they have earned through a lifetime of hard work.

"The Republican budget would not only make permanent the arbitrary, across-the-board budget cuts known as ‘sequestration,’ it would go further-- making even more savage cuts to domestic programs. Critical social services like food stamps, college assistance for low-income families, Section 8 housing, home heating assistance, and Medicaid-- all would face drastic cuts. Under the Republican proposal, our transportation investments would be cut by 20% over the next 10 years, exacerbating the challenges posed by our outdated roads, bridges, and airports. The bill also completely eliminates support for PBS, NPR, AmeriCorps, and the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities.

"The Republican budget makes all of these cuts while refusing to cut a dime of military spending. What’s worse, the Republican plan actually reverses planned reductions to military spending by increasing cuts to vital social programs-- a callously unfair proposal that will have terrible consequences for millions of American families.

"To add insult to injury, the bill before us today would make sweeping, regressive changes to the tax code which would raise taxes on middle class families by up to $3,000. Millionaires, however, would actually see a tax cut that averages $245,000 a year. This is just wrong. Working families should never have to pay more just so the rich can pay less, which is just one more reason why we must defeat this bill.

"According to the Economic Policy Institute, the net effect of all of these policies would decrease GDP by 1.7%, resulting in 2 million jobs lost in 2014 alone. If budgets are truly a reflection of our values, then what does it say about the priorities of House Republicans when their budget increases health care costs for seniors, cuts 2 million jobs, and hits middle class families with a tax increase in order to subsidize another tax cut for the rich?"

And just as Ryan was introducing his toxic Austerity Agenda, Cyprus' new right-wing government was verging on the brink of social collapse for adopting their own version of the Ryan Roadmap and... better news... Ryan's 2012 opponent, Rob Zerban announced the formation of an exploratory committee. (In other words... he's running against Ryan again, hopefully, this time with the support of the DCCC, which stood in implacable opposition to anyone taking on Ryan in 2012.) Last year, even with DCCC hostility, Zerban gave Ryan the closest challenge of his Congressional career-- and shaved nearly 20 points off Ryan's average victory margin, even while Ryan was on the national news almost everyday as part of the Romney presidential ticket. It was the closest 2012 Congressional election in Wisconsin and caused Paul Ryan to lose his home ward, his home town, and his home county. Rob:

"Since the election, I have been inundated with phone calls and emails from people all over the First District urging me to come forward again to give the people of Southeast Wisconsin a viable alternative to Paul Ryan. I've been listening to people from Janesville to Racine talk about their need for jobs and economic security, good schools and fair pay, and a strong social safety net for the hardships life sometimes throws our way. The formation of this exploratory committee is simply a formalizing of that process of listening to my friends and neighbors.

"My hope is that, over the next few months, we will begin to have a conversation about what the people of the Wisconsin's First District really want: a secure future, not federal austerity."

A poll released Monday by the very pro-Republican Rasmussen bunch shows Ryan's approval rating sinking like a stone. What a difference a day makes! Last August fully half the voters had a favorable impression of Ryan and less than a third was through him. Now only 35% of likely voters said they had a favorable impression of him, while 54% said they viewed him negatively. Even Republicans-- who once thought Ryan could do no wrong and backed him with a stunning 83% approval-- are not nearly as sold on the bill of good he's peddling. Only a slim majority (52%) of Republican voters approve.

Ryan's toxic budget passed this morning 221-207. Even more interesting than every single Democrat voting NO-- even the worst right-wing shills in the party (like Kirkpatrick, Matheson, Barrow, Negrete McLeod, Schrader and McIntyre)-- is that 10 Republicans voted against it. The Republicans were a mixture of Libertarians, mainstream conservatives and insane neo-fascists who found Ryan "too moderate" (like the 2 crackpot psychopaths competing for the open Georgia Senate seat, Broun and Gingrey). Raúl Grijalva and Keith Ellison, co-chairs of the Progressive Caucus, obviously both voted against it. They issued a joint statement: "Budgets are about choices, and the Back to Work Budget chooses investing in America’s working families. The Republican Ryan budget ignores the results of the 2012 elections and protects the world’s biggest corporations at working families’ expense. The country needs jobs right now, not a budget that takes away health care and gives massive tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires."

Although Ryan's detractors include many on the lunatic fringe-- like the aforementioned lunatics from Georgia-- the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops was horrified by Ryan's jihad against the poor. Although Ryan makes a show of trying to portray himself as a good Catholic, he long ago tossed Jesus' message aside for the admittedly anti-Christian greed-and-selfishness preachings of his favorite childhood story teller, Ayn Rand. Watch:

In twin letters sent to the House and Senate, the bishops said they “support the goal of reducing future unsustainable deficits, but insist that this worthy goal be pursued in ways that protect poor and vulnerable people at home and abroad.”

The bishops blasted the Ryan budget as failing to meet certain “moral criteria” by disproportionately cutting programs like food stamps that “serve poor and vulnerable people.”

...The bishops said the revamped plan would “drastically cut” spending by $800 billion over 10 years.

“This figure is very concerning, since 70 percent of the spending in this budget category goes for programs to help poor and vulnerable people,” they wrote.

The bishops warned the Ryan budget would likely slash safety net programs likes Pell Grants, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, school lunches and the Earned Income Tax Credit, among others.

Ryan first drew the ire of the bishops last year when he said his Catholic faith helped shape his budget plan.

He said that by accelerating the debt crisis, President Obama’s policies will be more damaging to the poor. Ryan also said the USCCB doesn’t represent the views of all Catholic bishops.

The USCCB shot back, saying the officials who penned the congressional letters were elected to represent the bishops on policy matters at the national level.

After you watch Rand trying to whitewash the Robber Barons during her 1959 interview with Mike Wallace, take a look at the clip below from the History Channel:

Did Paul Ryan Sleep Thorugh The 2012 Election?

Why does he think repealing Obamacare is a winning issue?

Just asking the question and spreading the word.