Are people people? Or, are there two kinds of people? Men, then women?

Are there women who can’t see that their person, or personhood, is under siege in the 2012 presidential campaign? Any doubt of this was erased by Governor Romney’s choice of Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate. The GOP is gambling that women haven’t all caught on to what’s at stake for them, which is nothing short of their total autonomy and full equality as people.

Is their self-worth not yet complete and universal enough to make their majority in the voter population the sole guarantor of their rights as Americans? Will they find the unity to face down the male dominance of politics and economics, claim full and sole autonomy in their own affairs, and put our history on brand-new path of full equality? Or, will too many remain caught up, by their men, in the evangelical pretensions that men are preordained to rule, at home and in public, because God is a man?   The Man. Don’t they know where all the deadly wars come from?

When candidate Paul Ryan calls Americans to “hard choices,” isn’t that the hard choice he wants from women: to go on accepting the lesser rights that allow men a say — the rights that for most of human history protected their “delicate nature,” as Victorians would say, by keeping them barefoot and pregnant.

So what does Paul Ryan know personally about hard choices? John Nichols has observed in The Nation, “Ryan is a class warrior, and nothing if not the champion of his class. A son of privilege, Ryan was raised in the warm embrace of wealth, and his family’s political connections earned him a ticket to Washington straight out of college.” By 28 he had been elected to the House seat he holds, and 14 years of seniority have made him chairman of the Budget Committee.

Nichols sees him as “a perfect metaphor for the circumstances that would prevail in a Romney-Ryan America.” With the personal wealth built in his House tenure — some $7.8 million — he chose in the middle of the recession to purchase the most desirable mansion in blue-collar Janesville, atop the hill that was once the home of the CEO of Parker Pen, whose plant and jobs are long gone.

As Budget Committee chair, he grabbed the national stage with a budget plan that he calls “Roadmap to America’s Future” that has been largely responsible for putting him on the GOP ticket. Romney has made it a centerpiece of the campaign. Advertised as the “hard choices” that would rein in federal deficits and the soaring national debt, it actually would do neither. It would shred the recession-strained safety nets, do nothing to arrest the spreading unemployment and poverty, yet would further lower taxes paid by the wealthy, and put the cost of hard choices mainly on the backs of the  faltering middle class. The arithmetic would add trillions more to the national debt over the next decade. It’s a prescription for more lost jobs.

The Nation and Nichols have summed up Ryan and his mantra as the coupling of “crony capitalism, social conservative absolutism and cold-war militarism that defines elite modern conservatism.” They find him “dramatically more committed than Reagan ever was to the supply-side lie, to authoritarian assaults on civil liberties and a woman’s right to choose, and to an embrace of militarism over diplomacy.”

They further note that Ryan “would impose outrageous sacrifices on food stamp recipients and students seeking Pell Grants, while preserving an obscenely bloated Pentagon and eliminating even more taxes for billionaires. Ryan’s never been about ‘fiscal responsibility’ [but about] old-school redistribution of wealth . . . upward.” Food stamps largely support women and children.  Pell Grants flow most heavily to women, who have found them vital to their upward mobility.

He counts on the election to be over before it shows that his plan is so brash that it masks the ignorance that drives it. And, to keep women in their place: your eggs belong to God, not to you; should one get fertilized, your personhood is then on hold for the sake of the embryo, regardless of your  circumstances or your mental or physical health.

Women have counted too long and foolishly on men to allow them equality and equal protection under law. Could this be the election where they finally step forth and claim it for themselves? Why do they allow rights to be shaded differently for them than for men? Rights are truly rights only if they are as blind to gender as they are to color and faith. Men didn’t help them win the right to vote; that was a grinding 50-year ordeal.

What may be different now finds the men waiting and watching, not dragging their feet as they did with the right to vote. Women are no longer likely to vote as their husbands tell them to, as they were before World War II brought them so necessarily and dramatically into the general workforce outside the home and sprang them into fuller and irreversible independence. If their church stands in their way, they are free to stop supporting it, or go a new way.

Despite the increasingly intense push by evangelicals and rabid antifeminists to reverse Roe v. Wade and to keep women enslaved to their eggs, women have never had a plainer opportunity than in this election, and its renewed politicization of their persons, to assert their autonomy, to lock it in, and to leave no doubt that the Bill of Rights belongs as surely to them as to men.

It’s such a simple choice: a vote for still greater upward mobility, or another bow to the male ego and Ryan’s conspicuous chauvinism. Women should remember in the voting booth that they now are earning three out of every five college degrees, and closing in on equal pay. The meek recovery from the recession is putting them into jobs faster than men. Their majority in the voter population will ensure that these trends continue, if they unite.

In the process they must distance themselves from the men who are making football and NASCAR racing the national religions. Forget the cheap thrills. These exalted pursuits leave America with a dead hand in global economic competition.

If women unite, the America they build could do new and bigger things for the world. They could start by blunting the male appetite for wars, and scaling back the insane paranoia of the never-ending arms race and “the obscenely bloated Pentagon.” The mothers could demand that the savings be spent on the quality schools that would put us back in the global competition in math and science, and then push the homework that would make that investment work.

Frank Mensel — September 2012

Since Mitt Romney emerged as the frontrunner, the Republicans have been marching toward an election likely to be decided more by ideology than by the hard economic issues facing We the People.  They have now locked on that course by the choice of Rep. Paul Ryan to complete their ticket.

It is now the ticket of the Two Empty Suits.

Mitt was always the perfect fit for it, in light of his wholesale reversal of ideals he stood for as governor of Massachusetts. Missing now from one pant leg is his lost stand for full freedom for women, i.e., pro choice. Gone from the other pant leg is his support of health care for all, the plan he got enacted in Massachusetts.

One empty sleeve is his abandonment of equal rights for gays. The other empty sleeve is his mostly missing tax returns, which could tell us whether there were years in which his income ran eight or more figures but he did or didn’t he pay any income tax. His promise that he’ll release one more tax return by October 15, barely two weeks before the election, is an empty bow to conservatives who believe the voters are entitled to see all his returns, from his fattest years with Bain Equity, in which he cashed out struggling companies and cut jobs by the thousands, to net his millions.

His suit coat makes a handy hiding place for all those missing returns. The picture is completed by a flip-flop pinned to the bottom of each flapping pant leg.

Congressman Ryan is an empty suit of a different weave. His career is void of real-world experience.  From his college days, he only game has been politics. He was a cofounder of the GOP Young Guns, and by 28 he had been elected to the Congressional seat he has held for 14 years.

Since the only life he has known is the life of privilege, it seems natural that as Chair of the House Budget Committee he would fashion a highly partisan federal budget that shreds the safety nets for the under-privileged, while it lines the pockets of the One Percent, yet fails to shrink either the chronic deficits or the national debt. It deepens the drift toward oligarchy that started with President Reagan’s promise of “trickle down” prosperity. Democracy works in the long run only from “trickle up,” the will of a majority who understand that freedom isn’t handed down, but must be earned by honest labor.

What has been growing steadily, and unabated, from trickle-down is the Vulture Culture, in which human rights are seen less and less as natural rights but as limits increasingly defined by the corporate power at play in globalized markets. Multinational corporations are no longer bound by national bodies of law, or by our Constitution. They live increasingly by rules of their own making, because they have the wealth to hire as much legal counsel as they need to paralyze any court and to live by their own rules. In his devotion to privilege, Ryan stands with the Vulture Culture.

Ryan typifies the ideologues who expect the world to live by their principles, however inconsistent they are with the Constitution and its bent upon justice. Without equal protection, under the rule of law, neither justice nor the rule of law can be perfected. He paints with the same paint and the same brush as his constant soul mate, Rep. Todd Akin of Missouri. This pair leaves the non-zealots of the Republican Party red-faced over women’s rights. Neither the mental nor physical health of an impregnated women counts for as much as the pretended personhood of the fertilized egg.

With Ryan and Akin, the caveman lives on, borne on the belief  held since the stone age that when a woman says no she really means yes. Thus, rape is never rape, because it comes down to the word of a woman. Women simply cannot be trusted where there is any question of pregnancy. Men must have the last word, because that’s the way the world has always worked. So where’s it gotten us: a world that knows less real security and more crime and corruption that it has ever had before.  With natural rights meaning less and less every day. With the enslavement and exploitation of women, the flesh trade is still growing globally.

And, nature itself threatened more and more by overpopulation and commercial exploitation. The Environmental Protection Agency is consistently frustrated in its mission and mandate by federal courts dominated by the right-wing jurists elevated to federal benches by Presidents Reagan and Bush I and Bush II, jurists who confuse corporations with people. Corporations exist by law solely for money.  Money is not people.

At a time when the USA is struggling grimly to meet the increasingly competitive world in the three Rs, which are more than ever the key to economic and technological security, the GOP gives us a ticket of the two Rs. Is this a bad joke? Depends on what the ticket of Two Empty Suits can prove it November.

If the Empty Suits should win, the Vulture Culture is certain to keep growing, and the middle class will be shrinking more. In such flourishing oligarchy, the rule of law and the promise of equal protection will mean less and less.

– Frank Mensel, September 2012

A century ago, in the incomparable 1912 campaign for the White House – former President Roosevelt, sitting President Taft, and President-to-be Wilson in pitched battle – they made a contribution to history that falls heavily on the 21^st century. They got the economic message RIGHT.

The message was as plain as the earth itself: Wealth is like manure. Keep it in piles, and its value is lost. Spread it, and it grows many good things.

It can be traced to the inspiration of steel-magnate-philanthropist Andrew Carnegie and his timeless essay, “The Gospel of Wealth.” The responsibility and power of capitalism to regenerate itself, to nurture the consumer economics and middle classes on which it feeds, was never captured more insightfully, nor in fewer worlds, than when he said, “The man who dies rich, dies disgraced.”

So where are these messages in the campaign of 2012? Surely they are lost on the One Percent, with a few exceptions. They want no part of the wealth sharing of fairer taxes. Shamelessly,  they are bent upon killing all estates taxes, to enable their offspring to live in the careless opulence they’re accustomed to, denuding the earth as they go.

And, how about today’s economists, will the profession ever outgrow its fame as “the dismal science?”  Or put to rest President Truman’s wish for “a one-armed economist?” When will the left hand and the right hand grasp reality together, thus finding a firm stand?

American economics and politics have become so interlaced today by corporate power that the ideals of Carnegie and trust-busting Teddy are easily ignored. They’ve been replaced by class warfare, in which the well-heeled media too easily pretend the rich are not at fault. Class warfare is always rooted in wealth, because it’s a blame game that only money can win. It’s a smokescreen for the huge carbon footprints that wealth and the corporate world are making.

No less ironic has been the inability of the Obama White House to grow hay in such fertile ground. Is this White House too much staffed in Ivy League elitists and their meandering economists?

The President could seize the high ground on reelection simply by steadily reminding the One Percent that capitalism only grows when it spreads wealth more than it concentrates it. Our enormous national debt is our reward for living the game the other way around in the three decades since the Reagan White House raised the false hope that all ships would rise with the “trickle down” from  accelerated spending bound to come from greater concentration of wealth. It didn’t, and won’t. Trickle down is so fundamentally unAmerican. Democracy lives from the bottom up, not the top down.

On class warfare, the One Percent “protesteth too much,” yet they cannot escape responsibility for it. Sadly, the media have taken it too lightly, but the president can’t afford to. With job markets and the middle class stalled, and hope shrinking, “trickle down” could not be deader. It’s the President’s job to finish burying it. It’s the message the Ninety-nine Percent have been pining for. They’d not only grasp it, they’d run with it, and run hard.

– Frank Mensel, September 2012