MADISON, Wis. — Somewhere in a Wisconsin basketball media guide or highlight DVD is a photo that made coach Bo Ryan especially proud this past week. Ryan remembers it well. He’s there with then-assistants Rob Jeter, Tony Bennett and Saul Phillips celebrating a big Badgers victory. Now they’re all in the NCAA tournament together as head coaches. “Everybody that’s in that huddle is in the NCAA tournament,” Ryan said. “It’s always nice to be dancing.”

Second-seeded Wisconsin opens the tournament Thursday against 15th-seeded American in Milwaukee. Ho-hum, just a 16th straight year in the NCAAs for the Badgers. Bennett, a Wisconsin assistant for Ryan’s Badgers debut season in 2001, has Virginia one better as the top seed in the East region after winning the ACC. The Cavaliers face Coastal Carolina on Friday in Raleigh, N.C.

Phillips, an assistant under Ryan at Wisconsin-Milwaukee before following Ryan to the Badgers for a few years, is now head coach of Summit League champion North Dakota State. His team plays Oklahoma on Thursday in Spokane, Wash.

Jeter, the current coach at Milwaukee, had the toughest road after leading a team picked last in the Horizon League preseason poll to the conference tournament title and an automatic NCAA bid. Milwaukee is a No. 15 seed in the East and plays Villanova on Thursday in Buffalo, N.Y.

Ryan’s comments are especially demeaning to the overwhelmingly white First District he represents in southeastern Wisconsin. Much of the district is composed of factory towns whose economic hearts have been ripped out by deindustrialization and globalization, fed by the “free trade” agreements which Ryan has championed. These once-bustling industrial centers include Racine, Kenosha, and Ryan’s hometown of Janesville. The city of Beloit, just outside Janesville and formerly in Ryan’s district, has also been languishing.

Janesville became famous, briefly, after Ryan’s false claim in 2012 that President Obama promised to keep open a General Motors plant which closed just before Christmas in 2008. That city, more than any other, has borne the brunt of Ryan's contempt for workers and the poor in his own district. Ryan’s Janesville, a community of about 62,000, has barely stayed afloat after losing an estimated 11,000 jobs directly and indirectly wiped out by the GM closing (meanwhile GM has kept channeling hundreds of millions into a plant it built in Silao Mexico to duplicate Janesville’s production lines).

After the GM plant closed, Janesville experienced a surge in human misery of all kinds--women seeking shelter from abuse, as well as suicide, food shortages, unmet health needs, and homelessness. Everyone Cooperating to Help Others Inc., a local faith-based organization, experienced nearly a 15-fold increase in demand for food from 2003 to 2009. Another indicator of the city’s plight is the percentage of children who qualify for those free and reduced-cost lunches that Ryan disparaged. The percentage of children eligible for these lunches soared from 34% in 2007 to 52.8% by the fall 2012.

Paul Ryan is Janesville's own Marie Antoinette. The Congressman has repeatedly and consistently opposed extending unemployment benefits (again during the recent budget negotiations with Sen. Patty Murray) and funding for food stamps and foreclosure assistance (although desperately needed in his birthplace, where the county saw foreclosures nearly quadruple 2000-2009).

6.) Elimination of four year old kindergarten-- even though Wisconsin is one of only two states that has a constitution that specifically calls for educating children in a public school at age four.

5.) Calls for having elementary school teachers to carry loaded firearms with them at school. Kindergartners and loaded handguns-- what could go wrong?

4.) Calls for completely eliminating taxes on corporate dividends-- the main money-maker for Wisconsin's wealthiest citizens.

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2.) That all birth control pills are really abortificients and should be banned. And it goes without saying that the Wisconsin GOP has written into their platform that their are no exceptions where a woman gets a choice of whether or not to have an abortion-- including when she's been the victim of rape and incest.

6.) Elimination of four year old kindergarten-- even though Wisconsin is one of only two states that has a constitution that specifically calls for educating children in a public school at age four.

5.) Calls for having elementary school teachers to carry loaded firearms with them at school. Kindergartners and loaded handguns-- what could go wrong?

4.) Calls for completely eliminating taxes on corporate dividends-- the main money-maker for Wisconsin's wealthiest citizens.

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2.) That all birth control pills are really abortificients and should be banned. And it goes without saying that the Wisconsin GOP has written into their platform that their are no exceptions where a woman gets a choice of whether or not to have an abortion-- including when she's been the victim of rape and incest.

Sarah Palin wasn't that far off when she talked about death panels-- except she failed to grasp that they already exist: They're called health insurance companies. Every day, people who have spent decades paying into a health insurance policy, find themselves severely injured or sick and then have to deal with an insurance company that is failing to follow through on their end of the bargain: Paying for the necessary medical care.

One example is oral chemotherapy for cancer patients. In many cases, it's more effective than other forms of chemotherapy in fighting cancer, but because it's more expensive, many insurance companies don't define it as a form of chemotherapy and, therefore, don't cover it. What the Cancer Treatment Fairness Act would simply do is require health insurance companies that already cover chemotherapy, to include "oral chemotherapy."

This bill was supported by a majority of Wisconsin's state senators-- including six Republican state senators. However, because a majority of Republican senators don't support it, Senate Majority Scott Fitzerald refused to even allow it to go up for a vote.

As State Senator Jon Erpenbach pointed out, "the reality is many advocates of this bill will die between now and the next session" because the Wisconsin legislature failed to hold health insurance companies accountable.

A great debate raged in London: Would it be wrong to feed the starving Irish with free food, thereby setting up a “culture of dependency”? Certainly England’s man in charge of easing the famine, Sir Charles Trevelyan, thought so. “Dependence on charity,” he declared, “is not to be made an agreeable mode of life.”

And there I ran into Paul Ryan. His great-great-grandfather had fled to America. But the Republican congressman was very much in evidence, wagging his finger at the famished. His oft-stated “culture of dependency” is a safety net that becomes a lazy-day hammock. But it was also England’s excuse for lethal negligence.
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Ryan boasts of the Gaelic half of his ancestry, on his father’s side. “I come from Irish peasants who came over during the potato famine,” he said last year during a forum on immigration.

BUT with a head still stuffed with college-boy mush from Ayn Rand, he apparently never did any reading about the times that prompted his ancestors to sail away from the suffering sod. Centuries of British rule that attempted to strip the Irish of their language, their religion and their land had produced a wretched peasant class, subsisting on potatoes. When blight wiped out the potatoes, at least a million Irish died — one in eight people.

Dear Organic Consumer,

How do we know we're winning the war against Monsanto and Big Food?

Dozens of supermarket chains and natural health stores have declared that they won’t sell GMO salmon in their stores, even if the FDA approves it.

Grocery stores, including major retail chains, are starting to voluntarily label GMO-foods, and in some cases, get rid of them altogether. Meanwhile sales of non-GMO and organic products are steadily increasing.

The Grocery Manufacturers Association, desperate to prevent state GMO labeling laws, is peddling a bill in Congress that would preempt state laws—but no member of Congress has been willing to sponsor it.

We’re winning, one battle at a time. But until we bring down Monsanto’s evil empire once and for all, we still have work to do. If you help us raise $200,000 by midnight, March 31, two donors—Mercola.com and Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps—will pitch in to match our $200,000 by donating $100,000 each. We’ll use that $400,000 to fight for state GMO labeling laws, and county bans on GMO crops. Can you make a donation today?

Since January 1, 2014, our Organic Consumers’ network has donated $165,000 to the Vermont state GMO labeling campaign, and $15,000 to the Maryland state GMO labeling campaign.

We’ve also donated a total of $80,000 to campaigns to ban the growing of GMO crops in several Oregon counties.

Next week, we’ll send the first $100,000 of our $500,000 pledge to support the November 4 state ballot initiative in Oregon, an initiative that will require mandatory labeling of foods containing GMO ingredients.

Many of you helped us raise millions of dollars for state ballot initiatives in California and Washington State, only to be disappointed when Monsanto and Big Food squeaked by with narrow wins. I was disappointed, too.

But you can’t put a price on exposing Monsanto's lies and driving genetically engineered foods off the market. What you helped us accomplish in California and Washington State has cracked the foundation of Monsanto’s evil empire.

Now we need to finish the job.

Like you, I look forward to the day when we no longer have to raise money to fight for the basic right to know what’s in our food—and the right to ban the growing of crops, and the manufacture of foods, that are poisoning our soil, air and water, and ruining our health.

Until then, we’re all in this together.

Every donation made by midnight, March 31, no matter how large or small, will bring us closer to our goal of $200,000—and that much closer to matching funds from Mercola.com and Dr. Bronner’s.

Thank you!

Ronnie Cummins
National Director, Organic Consumers Association and Organic Consumers Fund

P.S. Funds donated directly to campaigns must be raised through the Organic Consumers Fund, our allied 501(c)4 lobbying arm. If you need to make a tax-deductible donation, please donate to our 501(c)3 nonprofit. Your donation will indirectly support our GMO bans and labeling laws by funding our ongoing education and media work.