Racist-Enabler Paul Ryan Is Back With More Re-Packaged Ayn Rand Austerity Claptrap

This week, the Wall Street banksters' very own House Financial Services Committee chairman, Jeb Hensarling-- after his meeting with Trump Tuesday morning at Trump Towers-- renewed his push to gut Dodd-Frank consumer protections, something Trump told Paul Ryan he would support. Hensarling and corrupt conservatives from both parties are eager to do away with the Volcker Rule-- which restricts a too-big-to-fail bank’s ability to make risky speculative investments-- destroy the effectiveness of the independent Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and exempt banks with certain capital levels from parts of the law. The overtly corrupt and crooked Hensarling has taken $7,015,460 from the finance sector he supposed to be overseeing ($921,415, this year alone... that's almost as much as the 3 biggest and most corrupted suck-ups to the banksters in Congress-- Paul Ryan- $1,942,309, Kevin McCarthy- $1,549,950, and Wall Street's errand boy himself, Patrick Murphy- $1,403,150)



Ryan is giving Hensarling media cover this week for his pro-bankster jihad, by launching his repackaged Ayn Rand-inspired plan to make America less equitable> Ryan is more concerned with gutting Medicare than dealing with his party's official lurch into the ugly bowels of racism, misogyny and xenophobia. He says he's concerned about Trump's off-the-cliff insanity but claims the only way to get his anti-worker program signed into law is by electing Trump, calling him "a willing partner" on WISN radio this week-- a doubly horrid proposition for normal Americans. Aside from repealing the Affordable Care Act, Ryan’s other plans include voucherizing Medicare in a way that significantly reduces health benefits to seniors, slashing health care for poor people, as well as further slashing what's left of the food stamps program, and, of course, giving large tax cuts to rich people. Greg Sargent no doubt remembers that Ryan's only service to poor people was in 2012 when he helped make sure Mitt Romney would lose the presidential election, did a piece for the Washington Post Tuesday, that pushes back on Ryan's foul plans with a more sensible proposal by the Democrats' middle of the road Center for American Progress. "The report," Sargent wrote, "identifies the core challenges we face: Income has stagnated among most American workers as the top one percent continues to capture an enormous chunk of the income gains in the aftermath of the recession. Making matters worse, the costs of middle class life, such as child care, higher education, and health care, have been rising faster than wages." This keeps poor working class families in a cycle of debt and unable to lift themselves into the middle class. Sargent boils this down to 5 relatively progressive agenda items he thinks Hillary will be able to accept.

• Measures to create jobs and improve opportunity and access to employment that include a national program to subsidize employment, building on state level programs that already have a track record.

• Increased investments in “human capital” that include federal matching funds to states in the quest for universal pre-K education; tax credits for child care; and expanded financial support for higher education (albeit not to the degree Sanders supports).

• Measures designed to help economically strained families, which include a tax credit for children, as well as ideas to “ease tensions between work and family life,” such as expanded family and medical leave and sick days.

• An expansion of the safety net, including expanding Social Security benefits and a push to expand Obamacare to the remaining millions of uninsured.

• Measures designed to boost wages, which include raising the minimum wage to $12 per hour (not $15, which all progressives back), expanding tax breaks for workers--the Earned Income Tax Credit-- to childless adults, expanded overtime protections (such as those recently announced by the Obama administration) and pay equity for women.

Jared Bernstein calls the modest, increment proposals, obviously tailor-made for a moderate like Hillary, "an extremely comprehensive collection of ideas to cut poverty and expand opportunity, all of which fit comfortably into the progressive agenda. If Paul Ryan’s agenda is block-granting Medicaid and food stamps to states-- which is another way of cutting their budgets and effectiveness-- that would be a recipe for higher poverty. Almost everything in the CAP report has a proven track record in terms of reducing poverty and/or expanding opportunity." Barbara Lee feels the CAP report "draws from the best of these proposals and stands in stark contrast to Speaker Ryan’s austerity cuts."

Let's help stop Paul Ryan, his inner circle and the austerity plans they're pushing-- plans that have already failed, with much pain, across Europe-- by electing more progressives to Congress: