We know about Citizens United’s effect on ad buys this election cycle. There is a recent story floating out there from August alleging that the Koch Brothers may have “bought” Paul Ryan’s place on the GOP ticket for a cool $100 million donation to the 2012 GOP effort. The allegation appears in the second link. Then there’s Karl Rove, who infused every empty ad space in America with his half billion in reality creation. You’ll recall that Rove famously said he creates reality. (Reality is what he says it is.) And then there is Pete Peterson, bizarrely hailed as a serious patriot. The schtick is that he loves America so much he is spending 1 billion dollars to steer America away from being a nation which cares about its people and toward a draconian future. Patriot? Not hardly. The man is a hard-line zealot, who uses the meme of bipatisanship to reel in suckered Dems along with right-wing Republicans to destroy the middle class. If the middle class has anything, he wants it gone, and in the hands of the elites. And 1 billion is a small price to pay to divest you and me of our pensions, our savings, our health care, simply everything. It’s all about greed and contempt for the rest of Americans.
When it comes to the Tea Party and the infusion of Ayn Rand “philosophy” into today’s politics, Peterson and Koch are names joined at the hip and in their contempt for the Middle Class. And Paul Ryan is their candidate. It also makes one think. You have to be really spiteful to dedicate thirty years of your life to ruin old people all the while you are unbelievably wealthy. Who does that? But Pete Peterson has corrupted the process even more. Spending “his” money to destroy Medicare, Social Security. He hates public schools, poverty programs, food stamps, health care and the middle class, but Peterson has particularly ramped up his effort to destroy Social Security and Medicare using the phony “fiscal cliff” manipulation the GOP tried a year ago.
Last week their boy, Paul Ryan, looked Americans in the eye and lied through his teeth about protecting Medicare and Social Security. He lied when he said the president cut it by nearly a Trillion. He did not but rather pumped the savings from overpayments to insurers and hospitals back into the system. Money saved from enhanced fraud detection goes back into the system too. But Ryan’s voucher plan (and it is a voucher since you get a set amount as a discount when you buy full priced health insurance in the open market) goes into the hands of private insurers. So too will his identical 700 billion cut to Medicare. He does not put it back into the system to extend the life of the program as Obama does. Ryan/Romney’s voucher plan will strangle the budgets of those on it and traditional Medicare too, by siphoning off the money used from traditional Medicare so that program won’t be there for older Americans. You cannot take money out of the program for younger retireds, who would cost the system less, were they still in it, and expect to break even). Ryan is covering up his effort to kill the program. He also lied to the American people about his expressed intent to destroy Social Security, the very program that he admits allowed him to go to college. Ryan’s double talk is just that, doubletalk. He doesn’t talk about it in 2012 because he doesn’t want you to know that as recently as 2010 he was still supporting privatizing Social Security.
Ryan, obviously, has been a major backer of private accounts in the past. His “Road Map for America’s Future” in 2010 contained a Social Security privatization proposal, though his most recent 2012 budget didn’t include the idea.
Notice also in the WAPO article, Romney’s No Apology also included talk of favoring Social Security Privatization.
This past year Paul Ryan led the Republicans effort tried to bring about default, which means that the government would not pay its debts. That would leave mostly seniors holding the bag because the government has borrowed from the Social Security trust fund. The Republican plan is to give more tax cuts to the rich and not pay back the Social Security trust fund. They don’t want folks to know that their futures are on the line. This time sequestration will kick in and even affect defense, which the Republicans cannot countenance, even while a peace dividend could easily make such defense cuts realistic. But the real reason Paul Ryan hates sequestration is that he knows it takes Social Security off the table. Paul Ryan seeks to privatize it and has already tried to do that legislatively.
[We know how we would have fared during the 2007-8 fiscal collapse had Social Security been privatized. Millions of seniors would have lost everything. Those reaching 67 in the past five years would have been out of luck and on the street. But there was Paul Ryan saying he will protect it. It is a damnable lie]
The wailing about sequestration defense cuts is wailing at a straw man. If Paul Ryan cared about defense, he would stop throwing money at the Pentagon that The Pentagon doesn’t even want. Waste undermines programs rather than helps them. Were he to care about defense, he would also want the troops home instead of concocting ways to leave them in Iraq and Afghanistan, among new countries he wants to conquer.
Proposing more and more wars doesn’t make us safer, but less so. Most of all, they jeopardize the financial security of middle class Americans, indeed the entire country. And that is a security issue. Too bad the uber rich fraction of a percent who really run this country don’t give a fig what happens when they pull the rug out from under us. Don’t let it happen!
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