There's more to the madness in North Carolina than voter suppression efforts and bills to allow an official state religion. Gov. Pat McCrory's legislature is steamrolling Democrats and Republicans alike.

The legislature is debating a bill to forcibly transfer the city of Asheville's municipal water system and 22,000-acre mountain watershed to a state-controlled regional authority, leaving a huge hole in the city's budget. The bill's author, state Rep. Tim Moffitt, R-Buncombe, and Rep. Bill Brawley, R-Mecklenburg, have connections with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). House Speaker Thom Tillis, R-Mecklenburg, is on ALEC’s board of directors. They have cities in their sights.

My op-ed appeared in the Asheville, NC Citizen-Times on Friday.

Asheville Water System Burnett Reservoir with Blue Ridge Parkway above. Photo by David Oppenheimer - Performance Impressions

State Senator Tommy Tucker, R-Waxhaw, told a publisher at a recent hearing, “I am the senator. You are the citizen. You need to be quiet.” Some politicians don’t want to govern. They want to rule.

Forcibly regionalizing water systems, for example. Buncombe County Republican Reps. Tim Moffitt and Nathan Ramsey, and Chuck McGrady, R-Henderson, tell constituents their water bill addresses a unique situation in Buncombe County. The words Buncombe and Asheville appear nowhere in it.

In fact, House Bill 488 is not about Asheville, McGrady told colleagues on the House floor. (We’ll come back to that in a minute.)

If Buncombe’s situation is unique, why is the legislature forcing unwanted solutions on cities across North Carolina?

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Maybe, finally, we'll see a sensible resolution to this GOP-fabricated crisis. Wouldn't that be nice? Ha ha, just kidding! The Republican-controlled house is incapable of doing the right thing -- but that doesn't mean we shouldn't push them:

Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) has introduced legislation to try to save the US Postal Service from its incipient bankruptcy, and he is asking for the public to help him pass it.DeFazio’s bill would repeal the needless requirement — one no other business or entity must face — that the Postal Service pre-fund 75 years’ worth of employee health benefits. That requirement has hugely contributed to the USPS defaulting for the first and then second time in its history last year.

Analysis from 2012 estimated that the USPS would have a $1.5 billion surplus without the benefit requirement.

But DeFazio recognizes that facts alone will not influence his colleagues to take up and pass the legislation, so he has also turned to the White House’s petition platform, We The People, to petition President Obama to take a stand against the health benefit requirement. He also points out many of the other flaws in how Congress has managed the postal service:

About 80% of USPS financial losses since 2007 are due to a Congressional mandate to prefund 75 years of future retiree health benefits over 10 years. In 2012 USPS lost a record $15.9 billion, but $11.1 billion of that loss went to prefund healthcare. This must change.

USPS shouldn’t move to 5-day delivery. This would only save 3%, risk further revenue losses, and slow mail delivery.

USPS needs to re-establish overnight delivery standards to ensure the timely delivery of mail and prevent the closure of mail plants.USPS needs to generate more revenue by ending a 2006 ban prohibiting USPS from offering new products and services.Does the Administration support HR 630 and S 316 to make these changes, save American jobs, and allow USPS to remain competitive?

Amidst the fast and furious tweets of often contradictory information regarding the manhunt for the Boston Marathon bomber, this little gem caught my eye: "Nestlé CEO wants to privatize water". Now at first I thought that the headline was merely a grabber to talk about the booming bottled water industry, but then I watched the video and realized, no this guy really thinks that it is a great virtue to be able to privatize water in the future.

Activists accuse Nestlé, the leading seller of bottled water – which accounted for nearly 8% of its total 2011 sales of 83.6bn Swiss francs (£58bn) – of being more interested in lining its own pockets through a back-door privatisation of countries' water supplies, than in saving the planet.

Last year, a documentary film, Bottled Life, accused Nestlé of extracting ground water for its bottled brands at the expense of local communities, often in poor countries. While the company refused to take part in the film, it did post online a rebuttal of the allegations.

Brabeck, in combative mood, responds that it is important to be less emotional and more analytical about the issues, although he acknowledges that pressure from civil society groups forced Nestlé to recognise that a company cannot create value for its shareholders if it doesn't create value for society in parallel.

"The fact is they [activists] are talking first of all only about the smallest part of the water usage," he says. "I am the first one to say water is a human right. This human right is the five litres of water we need for our daily hydration and the 25 litres we need for minimum hygiene.

"This amount of water is the primary responsibility of every government to make available to every citizen of this world, but this amount of water accounts for 1.5% of the total water which is for all human usage.

"Where I have an issue is that the 98.5% of the water we are using, which is for everything else, is not a human right and because we treat it as one, we are using it in an irresponsible manner, although it is the most precious resource we have. Why? Because we don't want to give any value to this water. And we know very well that if something doesn't have a value, it's human behaviour that we use it in an irresponsible manner.

"If you look back to when I was born, there were 2.7 billion people and we were not even using 40% of the renewable water, but by seven billion we are already over-using it and if we are going to be up to 10 billion [people], we have to change our relationship with this resource."

If the challenge of water scarcity is to be met, Brabeck says all players in society need to become more effective. Businesses that recognise the scale of the problem have to put pressure on others to act and the thousands of active NGOs need to start working together to create change, rather than each pushing their own particular agendas. Brabeck warns businesses not to hide behind a philanthropic agenda but to build water stewardship into the heart of their business strategies.

There's no question that global climate change and the population boom has resulted in vital resources like water being in short supply. But listen to this guy fly his Ayn Rand freak flag and ask yourself, does this sound like he's interested in protecting a resource for impoverished populations or looking to make a buck?

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Next, imagine a disaster strikes in the middle of your run for the White House. Hurricane, earthquake, tornado... again, doesn't matter. Just some generic disaster. With me so far?

Now your competition... the President of the United States... gets to look all presidential and all marshaling the resources of the Federal Government to provide assistance to the states, mobilizing FEMA and declaring his vow to "help the nation through this tragedy" in a timely manner.

Now, being a good Conservative and Wealthy Corporate Executive, you're already on the record as suggesting the possible privatization of FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, impressing upon the American people your solemn belief that Private Industry is far better suited to handle such matters than the bureaucracy of Big Government™. So while the President is out looking all "Presidential", don'tcha think NOW would make for the PERFECT opportunity to put your money where your mouth is and show the country that a Corporate Leader can rally Corporate America to step up and do a better job of disaster relief than the Federal government?

Or do you host a bake sale?

Because what Mitt Romney did yesterday/Tuesday hosting a donation drive in Ohio for the Red Cross, was not much more helpful than that... in fact, an ACTUAL "bake sale" might have been MORE helpful since the Red Cross says what they really need right now is money, not provisions that need to be checked, cleaned and distributed... all of which requires manpower they just can't spare in the midst of a crisis.

No, what Gov. Romney SHOULD have been doing in this crisis is call up his fellow corporate titans and organize corporate-sponsored relief efforts, supplying money, services, food & water, and heavy machinery to the cleanup effort. But he didn't. And you know why. Because they'd laugh in his face.

Corporations don't do anything for free unless they think it will make them more money down the road. If they tried to do everything FEMA does every time there's a disaster, they'd go broke in a month.

Romney also suggested in his 2011 debate response [ibid first link] of possibly "turning disaster relief over to the states". More Libertarian nonsense. The ONLY way the country can afford to pay out tens of Billions in Disaster Relief is BECAUSE the entire nation is paying for it with their tax dollars. Taxes paid in California and Nebraska go to pay for Hurricane relief in Florida & Virginia. And taxes paid in Michigan & Texas aid California following an earthquake. To dump the entire cost off on individual states would plunge them into bankruptcy overnight.

Well... maybe not "overnight", Individual states might be able to hang on for at least a few months before going belly up... unlike Corporate America

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During the 2010 campaign, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell falsely charged that with the Affordable Care Act President Obama was "sticking it to seniors." McConnell's GOP was rewarded for that fiction, as a 21 point margin among voters 65 and older propelled the Republicans to an overwhelmingly victory in the midterms.

Now just two years later, it is Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney who will really be sticking it to seniors. His Obamacare pledge to "kill it dead" will erase hard-won health protections today's elderly have gained under the ACA. Romney's proposal to slash Medicaid spending by more than a third over the next decade and give what remains as block grants to the states could jeopardize nursing home care for millions of Americans. And as the Congressional Budget Office and a new Kaiser Family Foundation study confirmed, the Romney-Ryan plan to "voucherize and privatize" Medicare will invariably lead to much higher costs for future recipients.

That's the word from the Kaiser analysis, which examined the impact if a Romney-Ryan style voucher plan was implemented today. (Note that Romney's premium support proposal only applies to future Medicare beneficiaries, those now 55 or younger.) As Sarah Kliff of the Washington Post explained:

What Kaiser did was pretty simple. Its researchers modeled what would happen if seniors received a set amount from the government to pay for their Medicare benefits. That check would be equal to second-lowest bid from a private, Medicare Advantage plan. That's the same benchmark used in the Ryan Budget, Romney-Ryan proposal and the Domenici-Rivlin proposal.

That was step one. Step two was looking at whether that check would cover the cost of providing Medicare benefits under the traditional or private plans, in a given area. For 59 percent of seniors, it wouldn't: 25 million seniors would pay more for their current benefits if the government enacted this premium support model right now.

But that figure understates how the pain of Romney's Medicare gambit would be felt geographically. While nationwide 27 percent of seniors would face monthly premium increases of $100 or more, in high-cost states like Connecticut, Florida, Massachusetts and New Jersey the figure tops 90 percent (see map above).

If the Kaiser study helped answer how many American seniors would pay more for health insurance under President Romney and Vice President Ryan, the Congressional Budget Office explained how much.

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Success on Main St depends on success in the classroom. Take a stand for #edreform. #breakthemonopoly bit.ly/SchMg5

— U.S. Chamber's ICW (@USChamberICW) September 28, 2012

"Won't Back Down" is a huge flop at the box office. No surprise there, given that it's an insubstantial view of what the issues in education reform are really about. But it seems that the film probably wasn't made for general viewing anyway, given how it's currently being used.

The US Chamber of Commerce has launched a nationwide tour they call "Breaking the Monopoly of Mediocrity" in education. They should have just called it "Break Teachers and Bash the Unions," because that's really what the purpose is. From their recently-launched website:

The 'Breaking the Monopoly of Mediocrity' tour will include:

• An interactive forum of local business leaders, educators, and community leaders facilitated by education reform policy experts and practitioners. Participants will have an opportunity to strategize with other leaders in the community on the best ways to implement change.
• A screening of the film with Won’t Back Down—a story of a single mother’s struggle to create meaningful change in her daughter’s chronically failing school.
• Key resources, including a customized fact sheet detailing relevant education and workforce data of the community.

I'm sure it's not a coincidence that the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post came out yesterday with an editorial saying that Won't Back Down should be nominated for an Academy Award. Rupert has no shame in promoting his own prospects for big profits in privatized education through his own publications and non-profits like Michelle Rhee's StudentsFirst outfit, but this editorial is particularly shameless:

‘Won’t Back Down” for Best Picture?

Why not? The school-based drama, which opened last weekend, boasts a sterling cast, including Academy Award nominees Viola Davis and Maggie Gyllenhaal.

More important, it sends a valuable message about US schools — and unions.

Indeed, that it’s drawn the acid-laced enmity of American Federation of Teachers boss Randi Weingarten tells you all you need to know: Give this flick an Oscar now.

Joel Klein, former chancellor of New York Department of Education, loves Won't Back Down, too. Gosh, I wonder if that has anything to do with his gig running Murdoch's corporate education division? Klein's recent interview with Techcrunch echoes all of the US Chamber's talking points:

Our own Gregory Ferenstein asked Klein about why he thought that the education space isn’t being disrupted by the Internet as quickly as other markets. In Klein’s view, it’s the fact that education is still, for the most part, a “state-run monopoly” that resists change as much as possible.

Despite this assessment, Klein still said that he is more enthusiastic about online education than ever before. In his view, now is the time for those who are developing education apps to engage. “Nothing comes easy in K-12,” though, he noted. There is, after all, very little incentive for the incumbents in this space to change.

[...]

Analytics and assessment, is seems, is really what Klein is focusing on. The biggest mistake we’ve made so far, he thinks, is that we have focused so much on technology but not enough on assessment. Different kids, after all, learn in different ways and at different speeds. But with enough analytics, we should be able to better personalize the education experience.

Oh, look! It's more Bill Gates argle-bargle! Yes, there's certainly space in K-12 education for the Internet and technology, but this notion that assessments can be microtargeted down to the differences between the kid with ADHD and the kid with a reading disability is just nonsense. Yes! That's what we need, more testing.

Those "assessments" obviously bring a very large revenue stream into corporate balance sheets, which is why they're relentlessly pimped at every opportunity. What they do not do is give provable data as to how children learn or why they are not meeting arbitrary standards that are not necessarily accurate reflections of what a child knows or does not know.

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Almost from the moment it was announced, the Republicans' Romney-Ryan ticket began already drawing fire for both men's plans for the "voucherization of Medicare." As it turns out, there's another reason Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan should worry America's seniors and the millions more soon to join them. Both supported President Bush's aborted scheme to privatize Social Security, only to run away from their past positions after its staggering unpopularity and the 2008 meltdown of the U.S. financial system revealed that Republican path to be political suicide.

As Ryan Grim and others highlighted, Rep. Ryan was at the forefront of George W. Bush's 2005 effort to divert contributions from the Social Security trust fund into private accounts. (He would later agree with Texas Governor Rick Perry that Social Security is "a Ponzi scheme.") To enable their Republican colleagues sell the concept to their skeptical constituents, Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) and Rep. Deborah Pryce (R-OH) authored a presentation full of helpful talking points, such as:

"Your audience doesn't know how trillions and billions differ. They know these numbers are large, but not how large nor how many billions make a trillion. Boil numbers down to 'your family's share.' Also avoid percentages; your audience will try to calculate them in their head--no easy task while listening to a speech--and many will do it incorrectly."

As it turned out, of course, it was the Republicans who were doing the math wrong. As Matthew Yglesias summed it up last year:

What privatizers want to say is that current retirees will keep getting benefits and future retirees will be okay despite our lack of benefits because we'll have private accounts. But current retirees can't get benefits if my money is in a private account. And my account can't be funded if I'm paying benefits for current retirees.

Vice President Al Gore made the same point during his presidential debates against then Governor George W. Bush in 2000, noting that "the trillion dollars that has been promised to young people has also been promised to older people," adding, "And you cannot keep both promises." By 2005, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated President Bush's plan to let younger workers divert a quarter of their payroll taxes into private accounts would add $17.7 trillion to the national debt by 2050.

But as Jonathan Chait recounted in April, Paul Ryan made George W. Bush's "fuzzy math" seem brilliant in comparison:

In 2005, when Bush campaigned to introduce private accounts into Social Security, Ryan fervently crusaded for the concept. He was the sponsor in the House of a bill to create new private accounts funded entirely by borrowing, with no benefit cuts. Ryan's plan was so staggeringly profligate, entailing more than $2 trillion in new debt over the first decade alone, that even the Bush administration opposed it as "irresponsible."

And even more irresponsible after the implosion of Wall Street in the fall of 2008. As ThinkProgress reported at the time, studies estimated that private accounts would lose money a third of the time. That fall, the Center for American Progress calculated that "that if a worker had retired on October 1, 2008 after 35 years of contributions to private retirement accounts, that retiree would have lost nearly $30,000 in retirement funds because of the downturn in the stock market over the last two years." And while retirees would face the risks inherent in the market, according to a 1997 analysis their Wall Street money managers would reap an estimated "$240 billion in fees during the first 12 years of a privatization scheme- this number is undoubtedly much higher now." And all the while, the Social Security Trust Fund which currently helps offset the yawning federal budget deficits would be depleted by trillions over the next several decades.

Nevertheless, even after the near-collapse of the American financial system, Paul Ryan stuck with his Social Security privatization gambit.

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There's an old saying that politicians campaign in poetry and govern in prose. But when it comes to Paul Ryan and his radical GOP budget, Republicans would prefer to campaign in silence and then govern with an axe. While the Grand Old Party would love to enact Ryan's massive tax cut windfall for the wealthy, shredding of the social safety net, gutting of Medicaid and privatization of Medicare, Republicans hate having to talk about policies that are about as popular as the ebola virus. And as the history of Paul Ryan's "Roadmap for America's Future" shows, that Republican discomfort increases as Election Day approaches.

Mitt Romney's own unease has been on display since the moment he first announced the House Budget Chairman from Wisconsin as his running mate. Romney has been quick to claim that he is running on his own budget, only to acknowledge "I'm sure there are places that my budget is different than his, but we're on the same page."

But as Politico and The Hill each reported Tuesday, among Republican strategists and GOP members of Congress that heartburn is approaching panic. "Away from the cameras," Politico noted, "there is an unmistakable consensus among Republican operatives in Washington: Romney has taken a risk with Ryan that has only a modest chance of going right -- and a huge chance of going horribly wrong." As The Hill explained:

Republicans strategists are worried that Rep. Paul Ryan's (R-Wis.) addition to the presidential ticket will cost their party House and Senate seats this fall.

Their concern: Democrats will successfully demonize Ryan's budget plan, which contains controversial spending cuts and changes to Medicare...Many Republicans in tough races this year, especially in the House, voted for Ryan's proposal, which makes it hard for them to distance themselves from it.

Hard, indeed. After all, 235 House Republicans and 40 GOP Senators--98 percent of all GOP member of Congress--voted for Ryan's budget in 2011. (In 2012, the numbers were 228 and 41, respectively.)

But that near-unanimous Republican support for Paul Ryan's extremist blueprint after the GOP takeover of the House was a far cry the Party's relative silence before the 2010 midterms were won. Put another way, for three years the GOP's backing of the Ryan Roadmap has been directly proportional to the distance to the next Election Day.

2009: Republicans Love Paul Ryan

In April 2009, twenty four months before all but four House Republicans voted for Ryan's plan to ration Medicare, the smaller GOP minority said yea on essentially the same plan. As Steve Benen detailed in the Washington Monthly in the fall of 2009:

In April, 137 Republicans voted in support of a GOP alternative budget. It didn't generate a lot of attention, but the plan, drafted by the House Budget Committee's Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) called for "replacing the traditional Medicare program with subsidies to help retirees enroll in private health care plans."

The AP noted at the time that Republican leaders were "clearly nervous that votes in favor of the GOP alternative have exposed their members to political danger."

2010: They Love Him Not

But in February 2010, Rep. Ryan unveiled his "Roadmap for America's Future" and its "slash and privatize" agenda for Social Security and Medicare. Because the value of Ryan's vouchers fails to keep up with the out-of-control rise in premiums in the private health insurance market, America's elderly would be forced to pay more out of pocket or accept less coverage. The Washington Post's Ezra Klein described the inexorable Republican rationing of Medicare which would then ensue:

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It appears that the NRCC is in a panic over Paul Ryan's elevation to the national ticket. They've sent a flurry of memos since Saturday, and the latest is over messaging on Medicare and Social Security. Despite the fact that the actual memo came from the NRCC, the instructions are straight out of the Luntz playbook, as outlined in 2009 and 2010.

Via Politico:

“Do not say: ‘entitlement reform,’ ‘privatization,’ ‘every option is on the table,’” the National Republican Congressional Committee said in an email memo. “Do say: ‘strengthen,’ ‘secure,’ ‘save,’ ‘preserve, ‘protect.’”

The email read like a warning shot, alerting Republicans that they would soon face a barrage of Medicare-themed attacks and telling them they needed to be ready for the scrutiny that was to come. The internal email, obtained by POLITICO, was a clear and immediate sign that Republicans knew Ryan could create trouble down ballot for GOP candidates in tight congressional races.

“Predictably,” the NRCC wrote, Democrats are “already blasting Mitt Romney’s selection of Congressman Paul Ryan as his vice presidential running mate. Expect your boss to get questions from reporters on how this selection of a fellow House member impacts your race.”

These directives are being taken to heart, not only by candidates including Romney himself, but also the cable networks cheering Ryan on. No questions are being asked that should be asked, like why it is that if the Ryan plan is so wonderful for people under age 55, people over age 55 can't participate. That one seems fairly obvious, and yet no one asks. That ridiculous softball interview with Bob Schieffer is a terrific example.

The Romney campaign is banking on ignorance to slide Ryan's whole profitization plan right by. Go out and talk to your neighbors, who aren't really paying attention and don't start until sometime in October. They likely won't know who Paul Ryan is or why he's such a threat to their financial future. With messaging schemes like the Luntz terms above, they never will unless people start telling them.

Here it is, plain and simple. Paul Ryan is a fervent believer in killing social insurance by privatizing it for profit. To that end, his budget proposal ends Medicare. It ends it. Period. There is no "choice." involved. It ends Medicare and shifts the burden for medical costs onto senior citizens. Similarly, his scheme for Social Security ends it. Period. It takes our retirement funds and gives them to Wall Street, where all the risk then shifts over to the retiree and all the profit heads into Wall Street's pocket.

Wall Street and health insurers benefit from Paul Ryan's plan, but people don't. They can paint that pig with all kinds of different shades of lipstick but everyone needs to know that Paul Ryan aims to destroy the social safety nets by shifting all costs and risks from the government to individuals, terminating the agreement that has worked so well for so many years, and handing our retirement to profit-driven enterprise.

Spread the word.

Even as Mitt Romney was introducing Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate, his campaign was preparing a defense of the House Budget Chairman's draconian Medicare proposals. With good reason. After all, in April 2011 the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office forecast that Ryan's scheme to convert today's guaranteed Medicare insurance program into an underfunded voucher system would dramatically shift the health care costs onto America's seniors. And in February 2010, Ryan acknowledged his privatization plan for millions of future elderly constituted rationing.

But it's not just Team Romney that should be concerned about being caught red-handed with the proverbial gun pointed at the wildly popular program. Last year, 235 House Republicans and 40 GOP Senators--98 percent of all Republicans in Congress--voted for Paul Ryan's budget and its blueprint to rationing Medicare.

To be sure, the Ryan budget blessed by Republicans on Capitol Hill means de facto rationing for the system that today serves 46 million American seniors. As the CBO documented last year, Ryan's plan to replace public insurance provided by the government with vouchers for the elderly to buy their own coverage in the private market means getting less care for more money. The CBO analysis concluded that "a typical beneficiary would spend more for health care under the proposal." Make that, as Director Douglas Elmendorf explained, a lot more.

Under the proposal, most elderly people who would be entitled to premium support payments would pay more for their health care than they would pay under the current Medicare system. For a typical 65-year-old with average health spending enrolled in a plan with benefits similar to those currently provided by Medicare, CBO estimated the beneficiary's spending on premiums and out-of-pocket expenditures as a share of a benchmark amount: what total health care spending would be if a private insurer covered the beneficiary. By 2030, the beneficiary's share would be 68 percent of that benchmark under the proposal, 25 percent under the extended-baseline scenario, and 30 percent under the alternative fiscal scenario.

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