Right on Cue Ryan Goes Toxic

You have probably forgotten – I don’t blame you – that part of the truce signed at the end of the Great Government Close Down War was that a committee of grand folk would assemble to attempt the impossible. They were tasked with negotiating a budget settlement. The US hasn’t had a budget for years. Our toxic politics preclude it. Yet this grand committee was supposed to break through and settle matters, at least for a while.

Well, now the posturing has begun. The great men and women are beginning to organize.

Are we any closer to getting what the media keeps calling a “grand bargain”?

Of course not.

Right on cue Paul Ryan, he of the peculiarly math challenged budget plan, has announced that House Republicans will not contemplate a scintilla of a tax increase. So much for negotiation. This was in his introductory remarks.

So, at the outset, we have a negotiation much like all the rest we have suffered through recently. One sided. Lop sided. Asymmetric. A non-negotaition. The GOP’s position is much as it has been for these past few years: we will negotiate only over which concessions we want to extract from you. You, that is the Democrats and Obama, don’t get to ask for anything. You are just meant to stand and give things up.

This is why I oppose all talk of a grand bargain. There is nothing to bargain over until both sides are putting things up for negotiation. That won’t happen any time soon. So we ought not to expect anything to emerge from this grand committee. Except for a renewed commitment to toxic politics.

What we hear relentlessly from the Ultras like Ryan is that we have an imperative to cut entitlements. They are, apparently, unaffordable. So to save some vestige of social cohesion down the road, we have to surrender to Ryan and his ilk’s individualism and libertarian dystopia. We replace community and collective action for social splintering and persistent division.

He says we ought focus on growth. He doesn’t tell us how that growth will emerge from his worn out policies. He just keeps repeating the debt/deficit canard.

He mimics John Taylor who wants us to ignore the notion that the Republicans are outrageously right wing and focus, instead, on recreating the economic policies that brought us such abundance over the last few decades. What abundance would that be I wonder? That of the 1%? Or that of the rest?

Enough.

Really enough.

The fracturing of our social contract has gone far enough. The privilege accorded capital and the wealthy has gone far enough. The attack on our safety net has gone far enough. The stupidity of allowing corporations free rein has gone far enough. And the extraordinary sense of entitlement felt by our elite has definitely gone far enough. Too far. Way too far.

The time has come to suspend negotiation, not to start it. Until the plutocrats understand they depend us all, that they need us all, and that we are all entitled equally, we need to stop talking. We need, instead to act. And we need not to engage in anything as phony as a pursuit of a grand bargain that is nothing but another sell-out of the majority.

Ryan has done us all a favor by illustrating how far we are from being ready to talk. There’s no one to talk with.