Rep. Paul Ryan's Far-Right Agenda: The Media Can't Take the Truth
By Dean Baker
Monday, 13 August 2012
In principle, the country faces a choice this fall between a moderate conservative, President Obama, and Governor Romney, an extreme conservative who wants to privatize Social Security and Medicare and eliminate most of the services that the public expects from the federal government. The reason why this choice only exists in principle is that the media have worked hard to conceal Rep. Paul Ryan's extreme positions from the public. Now that Governor Romney has implicitly embraced these positions by selecting Representative Ryan as his vice presidential nominee, it remains to be seen whether the media will do it job.
First, in spite of all the name calling about President Obama being a Kenyan socialist, he has pushed an agenda that most Republicans would have been comfortable with twenty years ago...
...By contrast, Representative Ryan has an extreme right-wing agenda that predates both Great Society and the New Deal. He has put forward plans that would cut and privatize both Social Security and Medicare. He has also called for essentially zeroing out most categories of federal spending...
...It is possible to cite many other government interventions along similar lines that never seemed to bother Representative Ryan. In other words, Representative Ryan doesn't have any principled objections to government interferences in the market, even when this interference leads to enormous inefficiency, as is the case with too-big-to-fail banks or patent protection for prescription drugs.
Representative Ryan only seems to object to government programs and policies that benefit lower- and middle-income people. In this sense, he seems to have perfectly captured the philosophy of the modern Republican Party: "a dollar in the pocket of a middle-class person is a dollar that could belong to a rich person."...
For the complete article, go to:
http://truth-out.org/news/item/10860-rep-paul-ryans-far-right-agenda-the-media-cant-take-the-truth
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