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Mitt Romney has chosen Paul Ryan to be his vice presidential candidate. Mr. Ryan is new to the national scene, with out-of-step views from a bygone era.

He’s known as the author of the extreme GOP budget; one that many say hurts the middle class, turns Medicare into a voucher system and cuts Pell Grants for college students by 170 billion—and cut off a million students over the next decade.

Even as it makes these dramatic cuts—it cuts taxes for the nation’s millionaires and billionaires.

What perhaps is the most important for the American public to understand are Paul Ryan’s views towards women. Paul Ryan voted at least four times to defund Planned Parenthood and helped sponsor anti-abortion legislation that used the term “forcible rape.”

Stephanie Cutter breaks down how the Romney-Ryan plan will end Medicare as we know it, turning it into a voucher system and making seniors pay up to $6,400 more. She also shares how President Obama is already strengthening Medicare and helping seniors save money.

Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan plan to end Medicare as we know it. Now, as voters react, Romney responds by lying about the President’s record on Medicare.

Romney-Ryan: using bogus attacks to hide their plan to end Medicare.

Poor Paul Ryan – he successfully rammed a budget bill through the U.S. House that gutted Medicare, thus earning him the undying adulation of the far-right Republican fringe, whose unrestrained enthusiasm for him compelled Mitt Romney to name the Wisconsin Republican as his VP nominee.

So far, so good – but, WHAM! – the Romney-Ryan ticket had barely debuted before Mitt started dumping on his newly-anointed running mate’s budget. Curiously, that’s the exact same budget that Romney had gushed about during the Republican primary this spring, calling it a “bold and exciting effort” that is “very much needed.”

But that was when Mitt was trolling for votes in the shallow waters of the fringe. Now, however, Ryan’s budget, the very bauble that got him to the GOP’s number two political slot, turns out to be so widely and wildly unpopular with voters in the deeper waters of the general election that it’s already been trashed by the GOP’s number one. “I have my own budget plan,” Romney backpedaled the day after he knighted Sir Ryan,” and that’s the budget plan we’re going to run on.” (more…)

Mitt Romney hasn’t provided details so we should be grateful he’s selected as vice president a man with a detailed plan Romney says is “marvelous,” “bold and exciting,” “excellent,” “much needed,” and “consistent with” what he’s put out.

So let’s look at the five basic features of this “marvelous” Ryan plan.

FIRST: It would boost unemployment because it slashes public spending next year and the year after, when the economy is still likely to need a boost, not a fiscal drag. It would be the same austerity trap now throwing Europe into recession. According to the Economic Policy Institute, Ryan’s plan would mean 1.3 million fewer jobs next year than otherwise, and 2.8 million fewer the year after.

SECOND: Ryan would take from lower-income Americans and give to the rich — who already have the biggest share of America’s total income and wealth in almost a century. His plan would raise taxes on families earning between 30 and 40 thousand dollars by almost $500 a year, and slash programs like Medicare, food stamps, and children’s health What would Ryan do with these savings? Reduce taxes on millionaires by an average of over $500,000 a year. (more…)

Paul Ryan’s looks are often compared to an actor’s, and that’s no accident: He’s being groomed for the role of a lifetime. When Mitt Romney accidentally introduced Ryan as “the next President” he may have been displaying the same predilection for accidental honesty — for truth-telling as political gaffe — that he showed when he praised Israel’s socialized health system.

And Romney may be right. The most likeable and electable extremist in the country just became the GOP’s 2016 front-runner. That’s no accident either.

All the signs suggest that the economy will struggle for years unless progressive steps are taken. Worse, another steep decline into recession or depression could occur at any time. If Obama’s re-elected and we’re still suffering in 2016, as now seems likely, our “electable extremist” will be in the perfect position to become the next President.

Heads we win, says Corporate America, and tails you lose.

The Long Game

Even that doesn’t tell the whole story. The Ryan choice reflects something much bigger than an election or two. Corporate America and those who serve it have been playing a Long Game for political power, displaying formidable qualities yet to be seen in its electoral opponents: a clearly-articulated vision, concrete goals, and the ability to plan and execute long-range strategies.

Under their ideal of Corporate Statism, the President is no longer “the Decider.” He or she increasingly serves as Corporate America’s employee, a hireling who serves as its sales rep, its celebrity spokesperson, as a flesh-and-blood avatar for faceless financial power.

Who’s better suited for that job than Paul Ryan?

The game plan was laid out in the infamous Lewis Powell memo of 1970, which encouraged corporations to take control of all major US institutions. And their game was already well underway when Powell sketched his strategy on the chalkboard.

Far from being a blunder, the Ryan nomination can be seen as the next step in a decades-long plan to capture this country’s political institutions for the ideology of radical corporate statism. The left would be wise to stop celebrating it and start coming up with a Long Game of its own.

We Don’t Do Windows

The Corporate Right’s leadership may have already concluded that this year’s Presidential election is likely unwinnable. Ryan then becomes the perfect choice for VP: With one move, the nation’s most genuinely radical national politician became the leading contender for the 2016 nomination. Ryan will turn out the GOP base and give it a lift in down-ticket races. And most importantly, a far-right radical has been given four months to preach an extreme vision of America on a national platform.

And let’s not forget: If the unexpected happens and the GOP ticket wins, this radical will also be a heartbeat away from the Presidency.

If Uriah Heep were the leading man on a daytime soap opera, he’d be Paul Ryan. Ryan’s half-suave, half-goofy style puts an avuncular smiley-face on the corporatists’ brutal ideology. He’ll move the “Overton window” of political acceptability even further to the Right every time he appears on television. And he’ll appear on television a lot. Let’s face it, liberals: The camera loves those eyes.

Until this weekend, nobody in the Presidential race was articulating a clear political vision. But Paul Ryan will.

Ryan’s is an extreme Randian vision of the economic landscape as painted by Hieronymus Bosch, where corporate colossuses strive above a ragged population struggling to survive in their shadows. Why is this ideology frightening, if it’s so unpopular and dystopic? To paraphrase John Goodman in The Big Lebowski: Say what you like about the tenets of corporate statism, Dude, but at least it’s an ethos.

The Corporate State

The phrase “corporate statism” describe the GOP’s new ideology far better than “conservatism” does. The corporate statists don’t share traditional conservatism’s abhorrence of fiscal deficits, for example, despite all their rhetoric to the contrary.

In fact, the Ryan budget would actually increase the deficit from its current $10 trillion to $22 trillion over a ten-year period, so that by 2022 the nation would be paying more in interest payments than it would in Medicare payments. That’s much higher than the deficits projected under President Obama’s plan, which leads to reduced indebtedness over time.

The only genuine conservative in this year’s race, at least where government deficits are concerned, is Barack Obama.

The Rand/Ryan/Romney ideology is “corporate statist” because it places the institutions of government at the disposal of, and in the service of, a few dozen mega-corporations. We saw the corporate-statist agenda in action when Rep. Spencer Bachus, in another “truth as gaffe” moment, told Wall Street executives that “Washington exists to serve the banks.” (more…)

In case you’re having trouble remembering just how bad for working families the budget plan written by vice presidential contender Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) would be, here’s a handy excerpt from a Top 10 list by the Center for American Progress.

1. It caters to the 1%.

Ryan’s proposed tax cuts for the rich are larger than the windfall they received from former President George W. Bush.

2. It ends Medicare as we know it.

The budget would move toward a privatization of Medicare…and anyone new to the Medicare program could see costs rise by nearly $6,000 by 2050.

3. It eliminates the health care safety net.

The budget would cost 47 million people their health insurance benefits over the next decade.

4. It increases unemployment.

The House budget seeks to balance the deficit on the backs of unemployed Americans, whose ranks would increase under the plan.

5. It threatens our economic competitiveness.

The plan slashes $871 billion from government investments in education, job training, scientific research and transportation infrastructure over the next decade.

6. It showers money on Big Oil.

The budget would continue to shower oil companies with $40 billion in tax breaks over 10 years. (more…)

The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza provides a profile of Rep. Paul Ryan, with a rich discussion of his vision for limited government.

It’s a good read, but it left me thinking about what it is that troubles me most about Rep. Ryan, an earnest guy who’s come a long way and influenced a lot of people at a relatively young age. The problem is his numbers don’t add up. And that’s a particularly big problem for a celebrated budget wonk.

It’s actually not hard to write down plans that purport to quantify Ayn Randian visions. You cut deeply here and there — always from 30,000 feet up so you don’t have to get into fights about specifics — you turn big programs over to the states (e.g., you “block grant” foods stamps and Medicaid), you privatize social insurance, you voucherize Medicare with vouchers whose costs lag prices.

Then, in the spirit of another Ryan hero, Jack Kemp, you write down a bunch of supply-side tax cuts.

But the problem with all that is obvious, and here Ryan is guilty of that which he accuses his adversaries: intellectual laziness. Ayn Rand was a philosopher, a novelist. She never worried about public infrastructure, retirement security, budget deficits. Kemp’s trickle down ideas, still promoted today by the likes of Art Laffer and Larry Kudlow, not to mention Gov. Romney, have never come anywhere close to working. They’ve led not to balanced budgets and broadly shared growth, but to larger deficits and greater income concentration.

It’s thus no more plausible nor responsible to tout such an unrealistic vision from the right than it would be for an American politician to proclaim his allegiance to the ideas of Karl Marx and write down plans for confiscating wealth and socializing the means of production.

Moreover, and this is really pretty inevitable, when you learn a bit more about the politicians who write down and support plans like Ryan’s, it turns out that the federal government has played and continues to play an important role in their district and state, as has very much been the case with Ryan in Wisconsin.

Note this quote toward the end of the New Yorker article, where Ryan asserts:

“Of course we believe in government. We think government should do what it does really well, but that it has limits, and obviously within those limits are things like infrastructure, interstate highways, and airports.”

I guarantee you that Rep. Ryan would place programs to serve vets within that circle along with food and water safety, law enforcement, border patrols, and countless other measures. But his budget disallows their existence. (more…)

The defense industry and its Republican allies in Congress are up in arms — metaphorically speaking, of course — over the possibility that an agreement which the GOP signed might actually take effect as agreed.

They hate when then happens. So they’re cooking something up that could create big problems for your wallet … not to mention your digestive tract.

Republicans routinely express contempt at the thought of using government funds to save jobs. But when it comes to defense spending, they want us to know that government funds should be used to save jobs. For their part, defense contractors just want our money. So, in what appears to be a coordinated plan, Lockheed Martin threatened to send out fraudulent “layoff notices” to over one hundred thousand employees, while its minions in Congress simultaneously demand that the Pentagon do the same.

We’ll need to send out a few hundred million more notices if they succeed — including a warning about the E. Coli outbreaks their plans likely to create. Drop those hamburgers, kids! Lockheed Martin wants a few more billion from your Mommies and Daddies.

Lockheed’s Lie

Nobody knows if the sequestration process will be triggered, or where and how the mandated cuts would be applied to if it were. Nevertheless, Lockheed Martin CEO Robert “Bob” Stevens told Congress that “a very rough ‘seat of the pants’ estimate is that we might be required to lay off about 10,000 employees.”

But since Mr. Stevens has absolutely no information on the nature of those cuts, that figure must have been pulled out of something inside those pants.

Stevens goes on to claim that sequestration’s “reductions… are likely to trigger the law (called) the WARN Act — requiring 60 days or more advanced notification in certain locations before workers can be laid off. But since we don’t know exactly who will be affected,” says Stevens, “our best judgment is that we may have to notify a substantially higher number of our employees … that they may not have a job if sequestration takes place.”

Stevens says that the law forces Lockheed Martin to send layoff notices to most of its 123,000 workers, many of whom just happen to live in battleground electoral states — even though most of them won’t be laid off, according to Lockheed’s own beneath-the-seat-of-the-pants scenario. And the media’s taking the bait. “Virginia Voters Ask Whom to Blame for Defense Cut Risk,” said Bloomberg BusinessWeek in a typical headline.

There’s only one problem: Lockheed Martin CEO Bob Stevens may be lying. And unless he’s an incompetent executive with an equally incompetent legal team, he knows he’s probably lying.

Who’s the Boss?

Here’s what the WARN Act actually says: “An employer may order a plant closing or mass layoff before the conclusion of the 60-day period if the closing or mass layoff is caused by business circumstances that were not reasonably foreseeable as of the time that notice would have been required.” (Emphasis ours.)

Since the outcome of the sequestration process isn’t “reasonably foreseeable,” Lockheed and other defense contractors aren’t obliged to send notices to anybody. And since Lockheed made it clear that more than 90 percent of the employees receiving those notices would not be laid off, even under its own hypothetical and hyper-hysterical scenario, the unlucky 1 in 10 won’t even know who they are — which means nobody would be receiving a genuine layoff notice. They’d just be frightened and intimidated, right in time for Election Day. That’s why the Labor Department has stated that it would be “inappropriate” to send out layoff notices under these circumstances.

Word to a company whose motto is “We never forget who we’re working for”: I think you forgot something.

High Anxiety

The Lockheed Martin lie was part of a broader offensive which is based on what seems to be a new tactic: terrorizing working people, in a time of high unemployment, purely for political and financial gain.

While Bob Martin was pulling his little scam House Republicans were pressing a Defense Department official to acknowledge that, if the Pentagon were to lay off civilian employees, it would also have to send out layoff notices before the election. They then scolded the official, however, when he explained that no layoffs were currently being planned.

“The anxiety is building on a daily basis,” said Virginian Republican Rep. Rob Wittman, a member of the House Armed Services Committee. But Wittman’s not on record as expressing any “anxiety” over the loss of jobs, children’s health services, or other important services from sequestration’s non-defense cuts. In fact, he seems to have faced these possibilities with considerable equanimity.

Worst. Jobs. Plan. Ever.

Sequestration was always a dumb idea, and Democrats should’ve known from past experience that Republicans would welsh on the deal anyway.Now the GOP wants to increase defense spending well above previously agreed-upon levels, while slashing all other government spending to well below the original deal’s already dangerously-low limits. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) shows us what they have in mind:

For all their caterwauling about lost defense jobs, far more jobs will already be lost in other areas under the current plan — and their proposed changes would make those losses rise even further. A studyby Sen. Tom Harkin notes that sequestration’s $2.7 billion in lost federal education grants would force “46,349 employees to either lose their jobs or rely on cash-strapped States and localities to pick up their salaries instead.” (more…)