A working man runs without big money backers

Randy Bryce, an iron worker who has never held public office except in his union, is running for Congress against Speaker of the House Paul Ryan in 2018.

The odds are against him.  Ryan beat his Democratic opponent by 35 percentage points in 2016.

But Bryce has raised more money – $1.74 million – than any other Democratic congressional candidate at this point, and it’s all or mostly in donations of $22 or less.

Times are changing.   Nowadays you can run for office and have a chance to win, without being a rich person and without being beholden to rich people.

LINKS

When a Political Endorsement Actually Means Something – Bernie Sanders and Randy Bryce on Down With Tyranny!

Can “the Iron Stache” really take down Paul Ryan? by Tim Murphy for Mother Jones.

Speaker Paul Ryan will try to privatize Medicare

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan will try again to privatize Medicare.

President-elect Donald Trump said during the campaign that he will protect Medicare as it is.

Speaker Paul Ryan

But Ryan doesn’t seem to expect a fight with Trump.  Why not?  Does he have reason to believe that Trump didn’t mean what he said?  Reporters need to press Trump to declare where he stands.

Grass-roots advocates should not stand by idly and assume the Democrats in Congress will defend Medicare.  They should be letting their congressional representatives and Senators know that tampering with Medicare is unacceptable.

I give Ryan and the Tea Party Republicans credit.  They never give up pushing for their goals.  They take ideas that seem radical and make them mainstream.

And they strike when the iron is hot!  They never hesitate to use whatever power they have to advance their agenda.

Liberals and progressives can learn from their example.  Instead of just passively trying to preserve Medicare and also Obamacare as they are, they should be demanding a Medicare-for-all system to replace Obamacare.

Weekend reading: Links & comments 10/30/2015

The Midwife to Chaos and Her Perjury by Andrew Napolitano for The Unz Review.

Republican attacks on President Obama and the Clintons generally amount to straining at gnats while swallowing camels.  The House Benghazi Committee’s questioning of Hillary Clinton fits this pattern.

She was questioned for 10 hours, nearly continuously, for her alleged neglect of security leading to the murder of an American diplomat in Benghazi, Libya.  But nobody asked her about why she instigated a war against a country that did not threaten the United States, throwing innocent people leading normal lives into bloody anarchy.

And incidentally providing a new recruiting ground for terrorists..

The 6 Reasons China and Russia Are Catching Up to the U.S. Military on Washington’s Blog.

China Sea Blues: A Thing Not to Do by Fred Reed for Fred on Everything.

Just because the United States has the world’s largest and most expensive military doesn’t mean we have the world’s best military.  We Americans are complacent because of our wealth, and because we have not faced a serious threat to our existence in 70 years.

Our leaders think we can afford to waste money on high-tech weapons that don’t work, and military interventions that aren’t vital to American security.  Other nations, which have less margin of safety and would be fighting near their own borders, may be a match for us.

FBI Accused of Torturing U.S. Citizen Abroad Can’t Be Sued by Christian Farias for The Huffington Post.

Nowadays the Constitution stops where national security and foreign policy begin.

The inner city culture of dependence

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/03/the-secret-lives-of-inner-city-black-males/284454/

http://www.thenation.com/article/178918/what-paul-ryan-and-obama-have-common

Hat tip for the cartoon to http://anticap.wordpress.com/.

Thomas Ferguson on the choice of Paul Ryan

Thomas Ferguson, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Boston, is one of the most astute political observers I know about.  He is going to be a regular on the Real News Network.  I’m just now catching up with his first broadcast, which was last Friday.  Here it is.

Click on Paul Ryan – Insider Trading and Attacks on Medicare for a transcript of the broadcast.

Click on The investment theory of politics for my account of Ferguson’s idea that American political parties represent conflicting business interests rather than the public, and that voters only get a choice on issues that don’t affect corporate profits or on which corporate interests are in conflict.  In the post, I review Ferguson’s 1995 book, Golden Rule: the Investment Theory of Political Parties and the Logic of Money-Driven Politics.

Click on Business, not politics, driving nation rightward for my review of Right Turn: the Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics, which Ferguson co-authored with Joel Rogers in 1986.

Unfortunately both books are out of print and a lot of his current writing is in scholarly publications not available on-line, so the Real News Network is doing a good service to the public by giving Ferguson a public platform.

[8/26/12]  I had hoped to post a follow-up interview with Thomas Ferguson this weekend, but it didn’t happen.

Milestone

Mark Kleiman on The Reality-Based Community blog pointed out an interesting fact.

The nomination of Paul Ryan marks a milestone in American history: for the first time, there is no white Protestant running for President or Vice President on a major-party ticket.

Better yet, no one seems to mind. Perhaps the arc of history does bend in the right direction after all.

via The Reality-Based Community.

And, as somebody pointed out in the discussion thread, this is the first time since before World War Two that none of the major-party candidates for President or Vice President has done any military service.

The trouble with Paul Ryan

Rep. Paul Ryan

Mitt Romney’s selection of Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin as his running mate is a bad thing.  Ryan, the chair of the House Budget Committee, is a radical right-winger who has proposed privatizing Social Security and wants to replace Medicare with an inadequate voucher program.  His budget proposals would entail not only eliminating most of the social safety net, but most governmental services.  He proposes drastic tax reductions for rich people, while increasing taxes for working people.

It would be a disaster for the country if Mitt Romney were to be elected, and then die in office, making Ryan President.  Or if Romney were to follow Ryan’s lead in domestic policy, as President George W. Bush followed Vice President Richard Cheney’s lead in national security affairs during his first six years in office.

But even if Romney loses, the Ryan choice changes the terms of debate.  President Barack Obama has offered to cut Social Security and Medicare, protected Wall Street from business failure and criminal prosecution, and done little or nothing to help labor.  But with Romney and Ryan as his opponents, he can define these as progressive positions.

Click on U.S. Congressman Paul Ryan for Ryan’s home page.

Click on The Legendary Paul Ryan for a profile of Paul Ryan by Jonathan Chait in New York magazine.

Click on How Paul Ryan Captured the G.O.P. for a profile of Paul Ryan by Ryan Lizza in The New Yorker.

Click on Six Things to Know About Ryan (and Romney) for analysis of Ryan’s record by Jonathan Cohn in the New Republic.

Click on Mitt Romney Would Pay 0.82 Percent in Taxes Under Paul Ryan’s Plan for a report by Matthew O’Brien in The Atlantic Monthly.

[Update 8/19/12]

Kevin Drum of Mother Jones pointed out that Paul Ryan has a new Medicare plan which (arguably) is not as bad as last year’s plan.  The new plan would call for private insurers and Medicare to submit competitive bids, and for the government to issue vouchers equivalent to the second-lowest bid.   People would be covered for the two lowest bids and could pay extra if they wanted premium coverage.

The problem with this, as Drum pointed out, is that this won’t necessarily hold down Medicare costs, since premiums for private insurance have gone up faster than Medicare—even though private employers (presumably) get competitive bids for their employee health insurance plans.  What happens if the bids come in higher than what Ryan wants to budget for vouchers?  Who pays the difference?  The government? Seniors?

Why the Senate rejected Ryan’s plan

Click on After Senate’s Medicare Vote, Ryan Remains Unbowed for a National Public Radio interview with Rep. Paul Ryan, the Republican chair of the House Budget Committee.

Click on Ryan Budget Would Increase Health Care Spending for Medicare Beneficiaries for analysis by Paul N. Van de Water of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Click on Sharing Costs is No Way to Fix Medicare for analysis by Peter Orzag for Bloomberg News.

What I would do about the deficit

I would put taxes back to where they were 10 years ago.

I would put military spending back to where it was 10 years ago.

If that didn’t do the trick, I would resurrect the idea of a single-payer federal health insurance plan.

Rep. Paul Ryan

I most certainly would not have the gall to proposed further reductions of the tax burden on the upper 1 percent of the population, as Rep. Paul Ryan and other Republicans do, and call this a deficit reduction plan.

Click on Tax myths and tall tales for an excellent article on taxes by David Cay Johnson in Rochester’s City newspaper.

Click on The Do-Nothing Plan for Annie Lowrey’s article on Slate explaining why doing nothing at all is more fiscally sound than adopting the Republican budget plan.  The do-nothing plan would allow the Bush tax cuts to expire and the Medicare savings under the Affordable Care Act to take effect.  These two things, she wrote, would bring the budget into balance within 10 years.

Click on Medicare Isn’t the Problem, It’s the Solution for Robert Reich’s ideas on how to cut health insurance costs.

Click on Ryan’s Five-Point Plan for a summary by Nobel economist Paul Krugman in the New York Times.

Click on The Budget Speech for Krugman’s views on President Obama’s budget plan.  My reaction is the same as Krugman’s.  I liked President Obama’s rhetoric, as I usually do.  My question is whether he will fight for his plan, which is a flawed compromise to begin with, or treat the points in his plan as bargaining chips to be negotiated away.

Click on Obama, Ryan and the Shape of the Planet for Paul Krugman’s comment on how the Obama and Ryan plans compare.