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.

Quick Reminder!

Amidst all of the craziness of the presidential election, Paul Krugman had a quick reminder for all of us:

So now that the Unperson/Ryan ticket has lost, Republicans are clearly expecting Paul Ryan to move right back into his previous role as Washington’s favorite Serious, Honest Conservative.
He might get away with it; but I hope not.

The fact is that Ryan is and always was a fraud. His plan never added up; it was never, contrary to what people who should know better asserted, “scored” by the CBO. What he actually offered was a plan to hurt the poor and reward the rich, actually increasing the deficit along the way, plus magic asterisks that supposedly reduced the debt by means unspecified.

His genius, if you can all it that, was in realizing that there was a role — as I said, that of Honest, Serious Conservative — that self-proclaimed centrists desperately wanted to see filled, so that they could demonstrate their bipartisanship by lavishing praise on the holder of that position. So Ryan did his best to impersonate a budget wonk. It wasn’t a very good impersonation — in fact, he’s pretty bad at budget math. But the “centrists” saw what they wanted to see.

Ryan can’t be ignored, since his party does retain blocking power, and he chairs an important committee. But if he must be dealt with, it should be with no illusions. Fool me once …

Why Does Paul Ryan Love Ayn Rand???

And we know he does, but he embraces the old snake oil sales woman because he has to.

The late Rand's entrance into this presidential election, thanks to Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, is more serious than it seems. Sweet reason has a hard time with Rand glorifying selfishness as political doctrine. Now that "selfishness ethic" happens all the time, accompanied by vicious attacks on the federal government and people who work for it, in the Republican-run House. It's not all the author's fault, but Ryan's devotion to Rand is yet another Republican insult and injury to classic American ideas of fairness, squareness, and civic-mindedness. In fact, the Ryan-authored House Republican budget document, which cuts the heart out of our body politic, ripping social services and Medicare to shreds, is a pledge to the Rand coat of arms, standing against people who need a little help from other people. And in turn, Rand gives him a rationale for the intellectual poverty of his ideas.

The self proclaimed Catholic has to follow the teachings of the Atheist Rand because he sure is not following Catholic Doctrine. Just ask the leaders of the Catholic church. The Nations Bishops got together and wrote a letter aimed at the Ryan Budget:

Mr. Ryan’s budget “will hurt hungry children, poor families, vulnerable seniors and workers who cannot find employment,” the bishops wrote in an April letter to the House. “These cuts are unjustified and wrong.”

Then of course, a group of Nuns also got together and delivered the same message to Mr. Ryan:

“As Catholic sisters, we must speak out against the current House Republican budget, authored by Rep. Paul Ryan,” reads a statement on the group’s website. “We do so because it harms people who are already suffering.”

At least Ayn Rand is not alive to add her voice to the ones criticizing Ryan!

Ryan is only Wisconsin House member to vote against freeze in Pentagon spending

An amendment to cut $1.1 billion from the 2013 Pentagon budget, effectively freezing the military budget at this year’s levels, passed the House on a bipartisan 247-167 vote last week.

Remarkably, all but one of the Wisconsin members of the House, Republicans and Democrats, voted for the cuts.  Even arch-conservative Jim Sensenbrenner voted yes.

Who didn't? Self-styled fiscal hawk and budget-cutter Paul Ryan. 


It was a somewhat small but nonetheless important step, and other amendments for more Pentagon cuts and ending the war in Afghanistan unfortunately didn't pass in the Republican-controlled House


 Here's the vote breakdown.

In op ed column, Ryan hides the truth about student loan rate increase

Think Progress reports:

Unless Congress acts, interest rates on federal student loans will double from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent in July. House Republicans have been blocking efforts to prevent the increase, saying they will only agree to do so if Democrats gut a preventive health care fund.

The House Republican budget — authored by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) — called for allowing the increase to occur. The House Republican budget also calls for cutting nearly one million students off of Pell Grants. But in an op-ed Ryan wrote over the weekend for the Wisconsin State Journal, he claimed that Republicans are just attempting to tackle “tuition inflation” with their plan for student loans.

Ryan managed to write the entire op ed column without ever mentioning the coming increase in the interest rate.

Ryan's budget still bedevils GOP Congressional candidates

The budget proposal issued by Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is still a hazard for Republican candidates, more than a year after the proposal’s initial release.

Republican candidates continue to find themselves on the defensive about what the plan will actually do, especially to Medicare, and Democrats continue to make claims about the dire consequences if it were to become law.

The Washington Post's Ed O'Keefe reports from central New York about Ann Marie Buerkle getting questions on her vote for Ryan's budget. The scene he sets at a town hall has her on the defensive, with liberal activists handing out flyers accusing her of cutting funding to entitlements to give tax breaks to the rich.

Read O'Keefe's story here.

Ryan's budget is 'albatross' for GOP candidates, pollster says

Democratic pollster Mark Mellman (pictured) predicts that Paul Ryan's budget will be "an albatross around the necks of Republicans across the country."

"In almost every poll we do, in almost every state, in almost every congressional district where we poll, people's support for the Ryan plan is one of the most compelling reasons to vote against them," Mellman said.

Mellman added that the proposed changes to Medicare would be the most problematic for Republicans.

Mellman, a prominent national pollster, spoke at a WisPolitics.com luncheon in Madison.

Read more here.

TV spot asks: 'Does Ryan think we were born yesterday?'

Americans United for Change and AFSCME are launching TV spots this week to attack four Midwestern Republican congressmen who voted for Ryan's budget, including Ryan himself. The ads will run against Ryan in the Milwaukee market, as well as targeting Wisconsin Rep. Sean Duffy in the Wausau market.

From the script: "Duffy just voted again to replace Medicare's guaranteed benefits with private vouchers that won't even cover the cost of care. Can you imagine! He voted to cut Medicare benefits to give millionaires and big oil companies another tax break!"

Budget punishes those in poverty, exposes Paul Ryan's phony focus on dignity

Greg Kaufmann of the Nation:

 “Promoting the natural rights and the inherent dignity of the individual must be the central focus of all government.”

That’s what Congressman Paul Ryan wrote earlier this month in an exclusive commentary for Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity. This week, he revealed exactly where his laser-like focus on dignity would lead this nation... 

Mr. Ryan’s focus on dignity… means a cut in food stamps of $133 billion over ten years, even though 76 percent of participating households include a child, senior or disabled person, nearly half of all recipients are children and 40 percent of single mothers use food stamps to help feed their families.   

Mr. Ryan’s focus on dignity… means the repeal of the Affordable Care Act and attacking Medicaid with his block-granting light saber. The repeal results in at least 33 million people losing their healthcare... 

Mr. Ryan’s focus on dignity… means not only extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy but handing them an additional $3 trillion in tax cuts to boot. If he just extended the Bush tax cuts, but nixed the Don’t Worry Rich People, Ryan Loves You additional tax cuts—that alone would pay for the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, the Medicaid cuts, the SNAP cuts and domestic discretionary spending cuts.

All told, Ryan hands out about $4.4 trillion in tax cuts that primarily benefit the very best off, and pays for it with $4.15 trillion in spending cuts to programs that primarily benefit the poor and middle class.

There's lots more. Read it and weep.

Penny-pinching Ryan spends your tax money on self-promotional budget video

 
Penny-pinching Paul Ryan is so worried about government spending that he's spent some of your hard-earned money on this political video to push the Republican agenda and attack President Obama and the Democrats.

Ed O'Keefe of the Washington Post calls it, "heavy on theatrics, light on specifics."

When they come, we won't like the specifics, which are tailored to please the most conservative members of the House GOP caucus, and which will renege on budget agreements Ryan and the GOP made last year, slashing spending by as much as $19-billion.

Thursday night, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee blasted Ryan for reportedly planning once again to propose changes to Medicare and for using “a taxpayer funded self-promotional video” to criticize Democrats for the nation’s fiscal woes.

“Ryan and House Republicans are responsible for getting our country into this debt crisis and now want seniors to be the first to sacrifice to get us out,” DCCC spokesman Jesse Ferguson said in a statement Thursday night.

'Zombie-eyed granny starver' Ryan doesn't want to discuss social issues

Charles Pierce of The Politics Blog:

Pity poor zombie-eyed granny-starver Paul Ryan. There he was, being a serious man of ideas and being all policy intellectualish, and dying to lay out a precise plan for two decades of granny-starving, and suddenly, all anybody wanted to talk about [on CBS This Morning] was lady parts and what should be done about them...

But, in respect to Paul Ryan, let's talk again about his budget, the one that the CBO laughed at, the one that will burn Medicare down to the ground and paint "Medicare" on the urn holding its ashes, the one that was partly responsible for at least one lost GOP House seat, the one that had his fellow Republicans running for cover back home, and the one that dropped his approval rating back home like a stone dropped into a well. Personally, I think they might rather talk about birth control.

Good news for Dems: Ryan, GOP sticking with unpopular Medicare plan

Democrats should be happy to hear that House Republicans, led by Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan, are committed to trying to end Medicare as we know it again in their 2012 budget.  ABC News:

House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin says Republicans have no plans to shy away from controversial efforts to reform entitlements when the House GOP drafts its budget this year, including transforming Medicare into a premium-support system.

“We’re not backing off on the kinds of reforms that we’ve advocated, but we have to write it,” Paul said during a break at the GOP’s issues conference in Baltimore today. “We’ve done more to normalize the idea of premium support than anything at all. We’re confident that these are the right policies. There’s an emerging bipartisan consensus that’s occurring on doing premium support reform to Medicare is the best way to save Medicare.”

There is, of course, no such emerging consensus. Ryan got one Democrat to fall for his latest version of the plan and co-sponsor it with him. But Democrats would be nuts to support Ryan's plan, which is political poison.

More from Reuters:

Ryan said he wanted his budget plan to offer voters an alternative vision to the "cradle-to-grave welfare state" that he says Democratic President Barack Obama is promoting.

The House Republican budget resolution will contain reforms to Medicare, the healthcare program for Americans 62 and over, such as providing subsidies to help recipients pay for private insurance, based on their wealth and medical needs.

 "We haven't written it yet, but we're not backing off on the kinds of reforms we've advocated," Ryan told reporters at a retreat for House Republicans in Baltimore.

The Obama White House must be celebrating.

Another award for Ryan: Most discredited budget plan of the year

Paul Ryan continues to rack up the awards for worst of 2011. On the heels of Scam Artist of the Year,  the latest, from credit.com on the most discredited ideas of the year:


Most disCredited Budget Reform Plan

Paul Ryan’s budget takes the cake in this category, and eats it too. “We need to get rid of all these accounting tricks, all these budget gimmicks, and we’ve got to attack the drivers of our debt,” said Ryan very earnestly, reminiscent of Our Gang’s Alfalfa without the cowlick. However, upon a not very close examination it became completely obvious that Ryan’s budget was itself filled with accounting tricks and budget gimmicks, some supplied by the conservative Heritage Foundation and others resulting from blatant mischaracterization of Congressional Budget Office assessments.

Worse, instead of attacking the drivers of the debt, it seemed to mostly attack drivers of postal trucks, by more or less eliminating Social Security and Medicare, as they have been understood for generations, for people who are today under 55 years of age. Ryan’s budget became laughable, like the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact (which purported to outlaw war as an instrument of national policy), only faster. Even Newt Gingrich, in a rare burst of candor, referred to it as “right-wing social engineering.” In any case by the end of the year, the Ryan being talked about most was an NFL quarterback, not a congressman from Wisconsin.

More here.

Paul Ryan wins well-deserved award: Scam Artist of the Year

Madison's Capital Times does the honors:

Paul Ryan is a hustler. The Republican congressman from Janesville has gotten very good at fooling political and media elites into thinking that his schemes to steer federal money into the accounts of Wall Street speculators (by taking steps to privatize Social Security) and for-profit insurance companies (by turning Medicare and Medicaid into voucher programs) would balance budgets or in some other way improve the circumstances of working families.

But Ryan’s having a harder time fooling Americans who take fiscal matters and the future of the republic seriously.

...The fact is that millions of Americans are actively protesting against the political corruption that floods corporate cash into the campaign accounts of pliable congressmen like Paul Ryan. The American people are furious with the pay-to-play politics that has tipped the balance in Washington away from the best interests of people in communities such as Janesville and toward the special interests on Wall Street.

Paul Ryan embodies this corruption of America’s promise. He may still be able to fool the editors at Time. He may still be able to scam a headline out of the PolitiFact folks. But he is having a harder time fooling the American people. That is some of the best news to come out of 2011. But the even better news could come in 2012 — if Ryan is finally rejected by voters who have tired of being “represented” by a political scam artist who serves Wall Street rather than Main Street.

Read more here.

Romney Endorses Radical Ryan Budget

Ari Berman in The Nation:

When Paul Ryan introduced his radical budget plan this year—which would turn Medicare into a voucher system, privatize Social Security and massively redistribute income upward by drastically cutting taxes for the wealthiest one percent while severely slashing programs for low-income Americans—Mitt Romney heartily applauded.

“I applaud Rep. Paul Ryan for recognizing the looming financial crisis that faces our nation and for the creative and bold thinking that he brings to the debate,” Romney said in April 2011. “He is setting the right tone for finally getting spending and entitlements under control. Anyone who has read my book knows that we are on the same page.”

Now Romney has gone a step further, actively incorporating Ryan’s ideas into his own plan to reduce the social safety net, which he outlined at the Koch Brothers–funded Americans for Prosperity convention on Friday. Romney would raise the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare, cut $100 billion from Medicaid and allow seniors to pay for health coverage through vouchers for private insurance (a shrewd way to undermine the immensely popular government-run Medicare program).

After the speech, Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin wrote that Romney “has found his inner Paul Ryan.” Ryan, in turn, told Rubin that Romney’s plan was “a great development…. This tracks perfectly with the House budget.” The Wisconsin congressman gushed to National Review: “It shows we’re all singing from the same hymnal.”

Given the unpopularity of the Ryan budget, Romney may come to regret this endorsement. It may help him win the votes of Tea Party conservatives in the GOP primary, but it will almost certainly become a liability in a general election campaign against President Obama.

'Jobs Not Cuts' Rally Set For Paul Ryan's Janesville Office on Aug. 10

From Rock NetRoots:

Make it a full day in J'ville! Rally at noon then potluck picnic 4-9 (6pm food, 7pm speakers) at Riverside Park, North Pavillion).

While Congress embarks on another August recess, many in Paul Ryan's district have been looking for work since the LAST August recess; or longer. We need good paying jobs, jobs where the weekly take home pay exceeds the price of a bottle of Paul Ryan's favorite wine. On August 10th we'll go to his Janesville office and ask, "Where are the Jobs?"

"Jobs Not Cuts" Rally

Congressman Ryan's District Office, 20 S. Main St. (Map)

Janesville, WI 53545

Wednesday, August 10th, Noon

Sign up here for event.

From Chuck Ogg, Rock County Progressives

Ryan attacks Obama, but GOP doesn’t have a ‘credible’ debt plan of its own

Stephen Stromberg, of the Washington Post, finds Paul Ryan has more than a small credibility gap when discussing Obama's budget position:

Paul Ryan, the GOP’s budget chief, tried to twist the knife in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, issuing a wide-ranging condemnation of President Obama in the midst of the Republicans’ debt-limit victory.

Here’s a key sentence: The president, he writes, “still hasn't put forward a credible plan to tackle the threat of ever-rising spending and debt, and his evasiveness is emblematic of the party he leads.”

Nearly every word of that applies to Ryan and his party, only arguably more so. The budget Ryan wrote and the GOP House passed would add $6 trillion to the debt over the next decade, despite its truly punitive cuts to domestic spending. Why? Because while Ryan would reform entitlement programs, one essential element in budget reform, he would also cut taxes steeply, exactly the opposite of what the budget math requires. The result is a plan that doesn’t balance the budget until 2030s, which Ryan euphemistically calls “[putting] the federal budget on the path to balance.”

Read it here.

Ryan voted for $3.4-trillion in debt GOP blames on Obama

Paul Ryan and the other Republicans talk a good game now about the need for fiscal responsibility and reining in spending.  But they have been a big part of the problem, Lisa Lerer writes on Bloomberg:

... [Speaker John Boehner], House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell all voted for major drivers of the nation’s debt during the past decade: Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts and Medicare prescription drug benefits. They also voted for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, that rescued financial institutions and the auto industry.

Together, according to data compiled by Bloomberg News, these initiatives added $3.4 trillion to the nation’s accumulated debt and to its current annual budget deficit of $1.5 trillion.

Since 2001, the debt has grown from $5.8 trillion to $14.3-trillion. Republicans controlled the White House eight of the last 10 years and had control of the entire government for four of those years.

More here.

Paul Ryan exposes himself

Made you look! Made you look!

That headline is from The New Republic,where Jonathan Chait writes:

One little-noticed effect of the debt ceiling impasse is that Paul Ryan, that Paul Revere of fiscal calamity, darling of the anti-deficit lobby, has been exposed as a fraud. Technically, I guess he hasn't been exposed if nobody pays attention to it, in the same sense that a person walking naked down a deserted street might as well be at home in the bedroom. But if you care to pay close attention, Ryan's fraudulence is perfectly clear.

Ryan's opposition to the so-called Gang of Six proposal, which does what he claims to want, proves, Chait says, that:

Ryan doesn't really care if nominal tax rates are lower and that all the savings come from closing tax expenditures. He just wants rich people to pay less money to the government, and whether that lower tax bill comes in the form of lower rates or bigger loopholes is the secondary consideration.

More here.

Ryan's tweets on budget show him up as a twit

To hear Paul Ryan tell it, it is a terrible thing that the Democratic-controlled US Senate hasn't "passed a budget" since Fido was a pup.

Ryan's a regular tweeter about just how long it is since the Dems passed a budget. For example:

RepPaulRyan Paul Ryan
7/8/11: Unemployment hits 9.2% on 800th day since Senate Dems last thought govt needed a budget. Public Debt: $9.75T. http://ow.ly/5Ijkk
19 Jul

Shocking! Scandalous! Those Democrats just don't care if we ever have a budget!  (It is a biennial budget, so you'd only pass it every 730 days or so anyway, of course.)

But here's the little secret Ryan's not telling anyone: It doesn't make one whit of difference.

Jonathan Bernstein in the Washington Post:

Remember, the budget resolution — that’s the thing that Senate Dems haven’t done yet, and may not do — isn’t a law. It doesn’t actually do anything, except to give instructions from Congress to Congress. Passing a budget doesn’t have any relation to whether Congress passes spending bills, which it must do in the end.

So who cares how many days it has been?  Paul Ryan pretends he does.  But he clearly knows better.