BRAVE NEW WORLD

It is official.  Paul Ryan is the Republican choice for vice-president; we are fully engaged in the "brave new world."  Of course double-speak has been a part of politics for both parties for all time.  But now we are totally engaged in double-speak.  The Republicans have always insisted that if the wealthy are given tax breaks, the money will trickle down to the poor, and jobs will be created.  For the past twenty years the money has been trickling up.  The poor are making less money than ever, the middle class has been making less money than ever, and the wealthy have been making more money.  The jobs are not being created; jobs have been disappearing. 

There are many people who are unemployed as a result of the "great recession" and there are many more who are underemployed.  People are not earning living wages; they are not earning enough money to support their families.  Forty million people are not paying taxes.  The Republicans are furious about this.  They insist that these people must pay their "fair" share.  They keep stating that the wealthy pay more money in taxes than anyone else.  The wealthy probably do pay more in absolute dollars, but they often pay a much lower percentage; and sometimes they pay nothing at all due to their tax loopholes.  Forty million pay nothing because they have nothing to pay.  They cannot even afford to feed their children.  Every citizen should be able to earn enough money to feed his or her children, and provide clothing and shelter. 

Ironically, during bad economic times, people tend to vote the president out of office and elect someone else.  The "someone else" alternative to the president is Mitt Romney who has now chosen Paul Ryan as his vice-presidential candidate.  They urge the poor and the middle class to vote for them; they will increase the taxes for the middle and insist that the forty million poor pay money that they don't have.  This will give the wealthy a huge tax break.  They will do away with medicare and social security.  Ironically, Republicans started a lie in 2010 that the Democrats would create "death panels" to let the people on Medicare die.  In reality the Republicans are the party that will eliminate medicare and medicaid and allow both the elderly and the poor to die.  They give us their promise that they will eliminate Obamacare which will also increase the number of deaths.  Romney said that he doesn't worry about the poor, because there are safety nets for them.  The Paul Ryan Budget will do away with the safety nets, eliminate food stamps, take more money from education, and drive the poor and the middle class to economic devastation.  There will be no education to lift the youth out of poverty as it did in the past.  The Environmental Protection Agency will be eliminated and deaths will increase due to polluted air and water.  Paul Ryan has been trying to eliminate the clean air and clean water acts for the past several years.  Planned Parenthood Clinics will be eliminated and contraception will be forbidden.  More women will bring more children into poverty, more women will die, and more children will die.  This is a very dismal future for America.

The Republicans are not trying to improve American society; they are trying to obtain all wealth and power for the elite few.  They want a society like Russia before the Russian revolution in 1917, or a society like North Korea today.  They don't want a democracy; they want an oligarchy.  I personally have never seen such extremism in America, and I never dreamed that I would see something like this.

The Republicans want a small government and a large, large, super-large army.  America has the largest military on earth; it is even larger than all the other nation's militaries combined.  And it is not big enough.  A small government, a large army, and a starving populace will put us on a par with North Korea.  I never dreamed we could fall so low.