Last month, Paul Ryan generated a minor media storm for a racially tinged comment lamenting the supposedly weak “culture of work” among “inner city” men. “We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work,” Ryan told conservative radio host Bill Bennett. “There is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.” Ryan later said that he had been “inarticulate” and forswore any racial meaning in his comments. He was, he promised, referring to our entire culture; not “the culture of one community.”
Now, you either buy that or you don’t. If you don’t think there is something racially loaded about decrying the lack of work ethic among inner city men, then I’m probably not going to be able to convince you that there is. (But there probably is.)
Either way, Ryan’s defense could be interpreted as amounting largely to, I was not saying black people are lazy. I was saying poor people are lazy. This is a myth about poverty. It is not true. (Really.)
Enter Elizabeth Warren. “Paul Ryan looks around, sees three unemployed workers for every job opening in America, and blames the people who can’t find a job,” the senior Senator from Massachusetts said in a speech at the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor’s Humphrey-Mondale Dinner on March 29th.
Paul Ryan says don’t blame Wall Street: the guys who made billions of dollars cheating American families. Don’t blame decades of deregulation that took the cops off the beat while the big banks looted the American economy. Don’t blame the Republican Secretary of the Treasury, and the Republican president who set in motion a no-strings-attached bailout for the biggest banks – Nope. Paul Ryan says keep the monies flowing to the powerful corporations, keep their huge tax breaks, keep the special deals for the too-big-to-fail banks and put the blame on hardworking, play-by-the-rules Americans who lost their jobs. That may be Paul Ryan’s vision of how America works, but that is not our vision of this great country.
Warren is an increasingly popular figure and is set to play a large role in the Democratic fight to maintain control of the Senate in November.
Here’s the whole speech:
(via The Huffington Post)