Today I learned that Mitt Romney, the candidate who believes being very rich is a good enough reason to be elected, chose hyper-capitalist Paul Ryan as his running mate.
This is very sad news. It means that, even if Romney loses in November (and I suspect he will) the Republican party wants to consciously move even further to the corporate right. And as the past thirty years of history have shown, every time Republicans move right, the Democrats do too. And since they have conspired to keep other political parties out of the electoral process, the entire political discourse continues to move to the right.
Paul Ryan is Austerity, Inc. He wants to plunge the United States into the sort of impoverished austerity that has been imposed by the bankers in Spain and Greece. Even as our economic system falls apart, Ryan has the audacity to talk about how Ayn Rand taught him “the morality of capitalism.”
I believe the American public can be smart enough to see through Ryan’s facade.
This year, I hope the Occupy movement will bring the fight to the politicians. We owe it to ourselves to stage demonstrations protesting Austerity and to say we will not be ruled by the corporations.
It is unfortunate that every time the right moves right, the democrats do as well. This movement says something about the whole ethical and political milieu in the United States. Which says something about the value of individualism over Christianity in our lives.