Don't let that puppy-dog face fool you. It's about time that more Wisconsin voters in Kenosha and Racine counties, most of Walworth County and portions of Rock, Waukesha, and Milwaukee County make a ballot choice that doesn't go against their own economic interests. They need to throw out Rep. Paul Ryan and elect Rob Zerban, a Kenosha County supervisor and small-business owner, who proudly notes near the top of his biography that he pays his employees family-sustaining wages with benefits including quality health care.
The mainstream news media says almost nothing about this, but Ryan's a two-timer, big time. He talks soothingly of repairing the social safety net and helping the needy, but that's only because his polling suggests that's a smart thing to say. He doesn't really believe it, though, and we don't need to read his mind to figure that out. No, we just have to look at his biggest boosters: The ultra-conservative, business-centric, uber-wealthy, out-of-state Koch brothers.
Salon.com has a new story on the tea party and what's next for it, the Republican Party establishment and the entire country, especially if the GOP re-captures the US Senate. The piece is a Q&A interview with Harvard University professor Theda Skocpol, sociologist and political scientist who in 2011 released “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism.” Salon bills that book as "perhaps the definitive analysis of the movement."
For Wisconsin voters in the 1st Congressional District, the professor offers brief but illuminating comment on Ryan, who as House Budget Committee chair is in charge of that body's fiscal policy madhouse. In his current campaign to retain his seat against Democratic Party challenger Zerban, Ryan has, like other conservative Republicans, suddenly tracked leftward, though only in terms of his rhetoric. Skocpol nails him on that one when discussing the many different factions and interests making up the "tea party" construct, focusing on the notorious, industrialist Koch brothers.
.. [T]he Koch brothers network, instantiated most clearly at this point in [one of their main political instruments] Americans for Prosperity, they don’t care what kind of people they exploit. And they’re actually in favor of a version of immigration reform that might even include a kind of infinitely winding, very delayed route to some legalizations. Their guy is Paul Ryan (Paul Ryan always follows the Koch brothers’ line on everything) and he’s made favorable noises.
This isn't the first time Ryan's been fingered as a Koch brothers tool. Politico.com wrote that,
"Ryan has developed deep ties to Koch World,” shorthand for the huge network of Koch-funded, Koch-controlled political operations.
About a year ago, John Nichols, columnist at The Nation magazine and associate editor at Madison's Capital Times newspaper, wrote a piece pointing out the Ryan connection to the Kochs. The piece was headlined, "Paul Ryan's Choice: Constituents or Koch Brothers?" Excerpt:
When the City of Kenosha, Wisconsin, was preparing to formally petition Congress to take the necessary actions to get corporate money out of politics and to restore grassroots democracy, the congressman who represents the community was meeting secretly with the Koch brothers to plot election strategies and policy agendas... .
Ryan has been among the prime beneficiaries of the money-in-politics moment ushered in by the High Court. As the House Budget Committee chairman, he has collected millions of dollars from individuals and groups that stand to benefit from initiatives such as Social Security privatization and the development of voucher schemes to “reform” Medicaid and Medicare. The congressman has become a favorite of many of the biggest donors in the country, including billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch.
The Koch brothers, prime funders of conservative causes and Republican politicians, were enthusiastic backers of placing Ryan on the 2012 Republican ticket. That move entered in a fiasco that saw Ryan fail to deliver Wisconsin for the ticket led by Mitt Romney. Ryan not only lost his hometown of Janesville but many of the other communities in his district, including Kenosha... .
As Kenosha was petitioning for the redress of money-in-politics grievances, the congressman was at a posh resort near Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he had flown as soon as Congress went on recess. The Koch brothers had rented the entire Hyatt Regency Tamaya Resort and set up a private security perimeter so that no media—and certainly no citizens—could get near the elite retreat. And they invited Paul Ryan to spend several days with them as their guest of honor.
One assumes Ryan might also hold a special seat of honor at the Kochs' secluded compound in Kansas, but even Kansans seem now to have figured out that tea party politics of the sort pushed by the Kochs amount to destructive social Darwinism -- bad for average working folks, good for the fat cats. Now it's time for 1st District voters to tell Ryan he's no longer welcome to sit at figurative kitchen tables back here in Wisconsin.
Check out Zerban: He's smart, he's sensible and he could out-debate Ryan while drinking a glass of water. Then go vote your self-interest for a change. Help your neighbors overcome the millions of dollars Ryan has accepted from the likes of the Kochs and other wealthy grumps who insist on having more, at your expense.