Memo to Joe, Re: Debate 10OKT12

THIS is what we expect from VP Joe Biden, good advise from Robert Reich. Godspeed Joe!

TO: VPOTUS
FROM: Robert Reich
RE: Debate
Beware: Paul Ryan will appear affable. He's less polished and aggressive than Romney, even soft-spoken. And he acts as if he's saying reasonable things.
But under the surface he's a right-wing zealot. And nothing he says or believes is reasonable -- neither logical nor reflecting the values of the great majority of Americans.
Your job is to smoke Ryan out, exposing his fanaticism. The best way to do this is to force him to take responsibility for the regressive budget he created as chairman of the House Budget Committee.
Ryan won't be able to pull a Romney -- pretending he's a moderate -- because the Ryan budget is out there, with specific numbers.
It's an astounding document that Romney fully supports. And it fills in the details Romney has left out of his proposals. Mitt Romney is a robot who will say and do whatever he's programmed to do. Ryan is the robot's brain. The robot has no heart. It's your job to enable America to see this.
I suggest you hold up a copy of the Ryan budget in front of the cameras. You might even read selected passages.
Emphasize these points: Ryan's budget turns Medicare into vouchers. It includes the same $716 billion of savings Romney last week accused the President of cutting out of Medicare -- but instead of getting it from providers he gets it from the elderly.
It turns Medicaid over to cash-starved states, with even less federal contribution. This will hurt the poor as well as middle-class elderly in nursing homes.
Over 60 percent of its savings come out of programs for lower-income Americans -- like Pell grants and food stamps.
Yet it gives huge tax cuts to the top 1 percent -- some $4.7 trillion over the next decade. (This is the same top 1 percent, you might add, who have reaped 93 percent of the gains from the recovery, whose stock portfolios have regained everything they lost and more, and who are now taking home a larger share of total income than at any time in the last eighty years and paying the lowest taxes than at any time since before World War II.)
As a result it doesn't reduce the federal debt at all. In fact, it worsens it.
On top of all this, Ryan is on record -- as is Romney -- for wanting to repeal both ObamaCare (taking coverage away from 30 million Americans) and the Dodd-Frank law (thereby giving cover to Wall Street).
Your challenge will be get this across firmly and clearly, with an appropriate degree of indignation -- on a medium that rewards style over substance, glibness over detail, and optimistic happy talk over grim reality.
My suggestion: Be cheerfully aggressive. Take Ryan on directly and sharply but do so with a smile. Force him to take responsibility for the regressiveness of his budget and the radicalism of his ideology.
Prepare your closing carefully (unlike the President seemed to have done last week), and tell America the unvarnished truth: Romney and Ryan plan to do a reverse Robin Hood at a time in our nation's history when the rich have never had it so good while the rest haven't been as economically insecure since the Great Depression.
Their agenda is all the more remarkable in that we have a growing budget deficit to deal with, along soaring healthcare costs and aging boomers without enough to retire on because their net worth went down the drain with their homes.
The fundamental question is whether we're still all in it together -- whether as American citizens we continue to have obligations to one another to assure equal opportunity and help for those who need it -- or we're on our own, without a common bond or a common good. Romney and Ryan represent the latter view, a view utterly at odds with what we have accomplished as a nation.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-reich/biden-ryan-vp-debate_b_1955964.html?utm_source=Alert-blogger&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Email%2BNotifications

CHART: As Services For Main Street Are Gutted, Richest Pay Lowest Taxes In A Generation 9APR11

Just an FYI to let you know who the government is really serving......as the song goes (sort of) 'It aint us babe, no no no it aint us babe, it aint us they're lookin (out) for babe'.....HEY YOU TEA-BAGGERS, YOU GETTIN YOURS YET???? From Think Progress........
Last night President Obama and congressional negotiators cut a deal to keep the government running, cutting “$38.5 billion under current funding levels, per Republican demands,” and $78 billion below what Obama called for in his initial 2011 budget.
Yet as Republicans and Democrats continue to battle over the deficit within a political framing that includes taking aim at Pell Grants for low-income students — which Obama preemptively proposed to cut, calling summer grants “too expensive,” while Republicans want far deeper cuts than that — Head Start funding, and other programs from Main Street Americans, there is one group of Americans that seems to be getting away without having any sacrifices demanded of them: the very richest.
As this chart from from Wealth for the Common Good shows, the top 400 taxpayers — who have more wealth than half of all Americans combined — are paying lower taxes than they have in a generation, as their tax responsibilities have slowly collapsed since the New Deal era as working families have been asked to pay more and more:

There have been a handful of proposals by congressional progressives to once again put requiring more sacrifice from the luckiest among us back on the table. The Congressional Progressive Caucus recently unveiled a “People’s Budget” that would boost taxes on the wealthiest Americans, returning them to levels closer to where they were under Ronald Reagan’s first term — hardly socialism.
Yet these proposals have yet to gain steam, and the budget debate in Washington appears to revolve completely around cutting spending for Main Street Americans who’ve already been asked to pay too much during the recession. That’s why there’s a Main Street Movement demanding fair sacrifice and standing up for the great American middle class. Whether it succeeds may determine the fate of most hard-working Americans for a generation to come.

Rep. Graves Calls GOP’s Billions In Oil Subsidies ‘Market Manipulation;’ Forgets That He Voted To Extend Them 2APR11

WHY weren't the tea-bagger protestors who showed up in D.C. this week protesting against the gop / tea-bagger vote for subsidies to the big oil companies? Probably because through the manipulation and propaganda of the tea-bagger caucus in the House they were not aware of it....after all to admit supporting these subsidies they would show whose interest they are actually representing, those of the corporations who paid for them in the last election. This from ThinkProgress....
In February and again in March, Republicans in the House of Representatives, on a largely party-line roll call, voted to extend tens of billions in taxpayer subsidies to big oil companies. At the sparsely attended “Continuing Revolution” Tea Party rally on Thursday calling for more budget cuts, we talked to a number of attendees about their thoughts on Republicans giving so much taxpayer money away to already ultra-profitable oil companies. Rep. Sam Graves (R-MO) was among the many lawmakers to vote twice to extend over $50 billion in taxpayer subsidies to the oil companies:

– House Vote 153 on H.J.Res.44: Graves voted to extend billions in oil subsidies.
– House Vote 109 on H.R.1: Graves voted to extend billions in oil subsidies.

However, when we caught up with Graves yesterday, he said he had no idea that the vote had taken place. He didn’t seem to remember voting for them. In fact, after pressing the congressman, Graves called the idea of giving oil companies taxpayer subsidies “a manipulation of the market place”:

FANG: Four billion dollars in oil subsidies that the Congress just passed to extend for the next ten years maybe forty billion for the next ten years to oil companies. Do you agree with that type of subsidy given the state our budget and deficit?
GRAVES: Uh, when was that passed? I’m not aware of what you’re speaking.
FANG: It was in the continuing resolution debate. I think the Democrats raised a point of order to vote on it and it passed.
GRAVES: Hm. Yeah as far as subsidies, I mean I believe in the free market system all together, the capitalism system one hundred percent. Let the markets determine who is going to succeed throughout the market place.
KEYES: Do you think those subsidies are an aberration of the free market?
GRAVES: I mean they definitely influence the market place. Its somewhat of a manipulation of the market place if products aren’t willing, aren’t able to succeed on their own because of consumer demand and likeness of that product then why should government get in there and manipulate it?

Watch it:


Republicans have convinced the media and the Tea Party movement that they are concerned about the deficit. Even as the GOP has voted in lockstep to balloon the deficit with billions in tax giveaways to millionaires and billionaires, they have used concerns about the deficit to justify cutting food stamps, Pell grants, the Weather Service, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and other consumer and middle class protections. The billions in oil subsidies Graves voted to protect — then forgot about — is part of the same ideology of soaking the poor to help the rich.