“I cannot and will not give up my family time.”
Those are the words of Paul Ryan whilst throwing in his bargaining chips to negotiate the forgone conclusion that he’ll replace the corporate owned John Boehner, a joyless creep whose job was to bridge the interests of the CEO’s of Fortune 500 companies with everyone else in America. It’s roughly 50/50 if the voting numbers don’t lie.
That’s where gerrymandering, an activity dominated almost exclusively by Republicans to insure their interests are disproportionately represented compared to the people who happen to live in the slivers of neighborhoods and halves of counties they drew up, and Paul Ryan, the anti-union flip flopping ideologue, come into play. Gerrymandering is a rather slick process where you find out where enough white people live to override everyone else’s vote and draw a chalk outline around it on a map in your office paid for by taxpayers. Ryan in fact was ranked 9th of all members of Congress to benefit from redistricting in a recent study, which is why he doesn’t believe in commissioning such studies.
He is currently the representative of Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District, and was, and is, a major player in that state’s fervent commitment to stripping collective bargaining rights from their public worker’s unions, who are seeking such greedy basic rights as their ability to keep their healthcare benefits and receive overtime pay. Or at least negotiate them.
Such people might not be able to make it to their kid’s high school graduation due to their arthritis flaring up since they can’t afford their medication anymore.
“I cannot and will not give up my family time.”
Ryan is from Janesville Wisconsin. A town which is slightly whiter, and slightly poorer, than the rest of Wisconsin. His family is one of the richest in town.
Hence Ryan is a Tea Party guy, and devout follower of Ayn Rand, a woman who died thirty years ago, whose bourgeois family was ousted from Russia by angry underpaid laborers in the socialist uprising known as the Russian Revolution. She moved to America because back then it would accept almost anybody, even the children of criminals. Rand took her family’s dirty money and wrote some tone deaf elitist books about the free market and the idiocy of organized religion. Ryan ignored that part. Rand is an interesting source for perspective, because when her books were written their were stronger union protections in place in America. At that point in history, American corporations were not outsourcing jobs overseas. This was in part thanks to the unions. Back then, a CEO of a company made about thirty times more money than his average employee. As anti-trust laws and union powers have been stripped away, the number is currently around 300-500. Consequently these CEO’s see their employees as disposable and treat them as such.
In many states such as Wisconsin, public employees banded together to make sure they weren’t treated like Chicago meatpackers and utilized their Freedom of Assembly to allow for them to negotiate with employers.
Hence it is completely inexcusable that Ryan would, as a Congressman – a public employee enjoying a salary paid by the American public – so arrogantly demand certain perks which he has actively helped to strip away from others. Of course, Congress isn’t a union. It just acts like one. Although it’s quite a bit easier for them to negotiate. If they want their salaries raised they just write it up and vote on it themselves.
“Ryan insisted this week that if he is elected speaker, he will not make hundreds of phone calls to the donor base on weekends or travel for events. The frequent three-day weekends afforded to Congress, he said, will be for his family.”
Ryan’s opposition to unions is geared more towards public workers than those employed by companies. Perhaps that’s because he grew up with a cheese filled silver spoon in his mouth due to the fact that his his great-grandfather, Patrick William Ryan, founded a construction company in which is now known as Ryan Incorporated Central. His brothers run the company and Paul Ryan no doubt has stock in it. Consequently he, along with his extended family, have enough money to not worry about being denied health coverage should they contract a terminal illness. This is a privilege Ryan does not believe extends to members of public unions, hence he has supported repealing a Reagan-era reform by which the federal government prohibits states from requiring that a patient’s spouse, as well as the patient, deplete all of his or her assets before Medicaid would cover long term care. This is where you pray Paul Ryan gets cancer and has to pawn his Cadillac before having access to chemotherapy.
There are countless other examples of this hypocrisy. In 2009, for example, he voted against the Federal Employees Paid Paternal Leave Act, which would have allowed federal employees to substitute up to four weeks of available paid leave to take parental leave.
The Speaker of the House earns $223,550 a year. For life. That means after they stop working. That’s called socialism.
“I cannot and will not give up my family time.”
In 2011, Ryan was tasked with keeping a GM plant in his hometown in operation. His solution was to have taxpayers give money to the company. The only public meetings he held in his district required an admission fee of at least $15. In a nutshell that’s what Paul Ryan thinks about the concept of democracy. First he seeks to undermines it, then he bills for it.
His animosity towards public socialism extends only to people who are more easily taken advantage of. If you own a corporation, like his family, you’re in the position to receive various tax breaks. If you build the roads their trucks drive on, you’re out of luck and shouldn’t be paid overtime.
On a macro level his socialism couldn’t be more obvious. He supported the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), a $700 billion bank bailout with the bill being passed on to the American people. This led to measures by which banks are now able to keep their earnings and make public their losses. The disgusting cigarette stained anti-Christian Ayn Rand whom Ryan claims is his beloved spirit animal would have shuttered at that.
Ryan is a man who stands for the opposite of what he claims. Like many Republicans, his reality is severely distorted. He has ideas which aren’t ideas. His own church is on record of opposing his budget cuts on humanitarian grounds. All of this information can be accessed via a quick search of Wikipedia, a website edited by a community, free to the public. That’s democracy.
Paul Ryan is not a man, and fuck his time family too. If you’re going to be a sex gimp for the Koch brothers on my dime I want to see you put in some non-paid overtime. Maybe make the Speaker of the House file a 1099 as an Independent Contractor.
Then you’ll stop getting paid when we say so.