Just over a year ago, I wrote a post about The Powell Memo. This memo has been referred to by others like Henry Giroux and Richard Wolff. This memo, by Lewis F. Powell and dated August 23, 1971, was a plan Powell developed and delivered to his friend Eugene Sydnor, Jr., the Director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. It outlined how “to win an ideological war against liberal intellectuals, who argued for holding government and corporate power accountable as a precondition for extending and expanding the promise of an inclusive democracy.”
Now that we have the “Koch brothers’ dream ticket,” Ryan’s economic extension of the Powell Memo, his budget plan, has serious implications for “the promise of an inclusive democracy.”
Below are three summaries of how the Romney/Ryan/Koch future would look after implementing Ryan’s extension of the Powell plan. The first is short. The second includes a video, and the third is a summary of everything that the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has written about Ryan’s plans for a Koch Brothers’ America. I conclude this post with my own summary.
Twelve Things You Should Know About Vice Presidential Candidate Paul Ryan – “Mitt Romney has picked as his running mate 42 year-old Republican Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI), the architect of the GOP budget, which the New York Times has described as ‘the most extreme budget plan passed by a house of Congress in modern times.'”
Romney and Ryan want to take us back to the failed, top-down economic ideas of Ronald Reagan and GW Bush – “This extreme plan would turn Medicare into a voucher program, increasing seniors’ costs by up to $6,350 per year. It would also slash education and clean energy funding, along with other middle-class investments critical to economic growth—while raising taxes on millions of middle-class families to pay for tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires.”
Ryan Roundup: Everything You Need to Know About Chairman Ryan’s Budget – Here “is a compilation of the CBPP analyses and blog posts on the budget that House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan proposed, and the House of Representatives passed, in March. At the bottom of the compilation, we also list the Center’s analysis of the Ryan ‘Roadmap’ budget plan.”
Here’s my summary of this possible Koch Brothers’ future if their dream team is elected: All public that remains will continue to be privatized – government accountable to voters will become corporate governance accountable only to boards of directors and institutional shareholders; expanding, delusional, rugged individualism will stamp out our ability to empathize; critical thinking will be replaced by blind beliefs; higher education will exist only for the ONE%; our democracy will migrate to a plutocracy through casino capitalism as any attempts to cancel Citizen United are squashed; our prison population will increase at rates similar to our past doubling of technology speeds; the middle class will disappear as their wages continue their 40 year stagnation, will stop using credit, and their kids won’t be able to find work and have to move back in; becoming seriously ill will once again result in bankruptcy and/or premature death; most americans will have to work until they die as they can’t afford to save for retirement and social security will be privatized and left to the rampages of unregulated casino capitalism; etc.
America’s future will be determined by our actions over the next 87 days.
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I have worked as hard as I could, for as long as I could. Now, I'm offered a disability payment that is half of what it would take to barely exist in todays world. My mortgage payment was higher than my disability. After 4 decades of working for slave wages, this is not what I paid for. Even with almost free medical care, I cannot afford to eat and pay rent. They have us right where they want us. And they blame us. The people that worked all their lives to make them rich.