Is Trump our Hugo Chávez? If so, what can we do about it (him)?

Andrés Miguel Rondón references this tweet when he writes: "Label ["the bad guys"]: the minorities, the politicians, the businessmen. Caricature them. As vermin, evil masterminds, haters and losers, you name it. Then paint yourself as the savior."

"The recipe for populism is universal. Find a wound common to many, find someone to blame for it, and make up a good story to tell. Mix it all together. Tell the wounded you know how they feel. That you found the bad guys. Label them. . . . Caricature them. . . . Then paint yourself as the savior. . . . [E]nrapture them with a tale. One that starts with anger and ends in vengeance. A vengeance they can participate in.

"That’s how it becomes a movement."

-- Andrés Miguel Rondón, in his Washington Post op-ed piece

by Ken

It's not a question that would ever have occurred to me: Do Venezuelans who botched their dealings with Hugo Chávez have anything to teach us about how to deal with Trump? Not, that is, without prompting from Andrés Miguel Rondón, whose biographical note, accompanying a Washington Post op-ed, reads:

Andrés Miguel Rondón is an economist living in Madrid. He is a Venezuelan citizen who was born and raised there.

The WaPo piece (of which we're told, "A version of this article originally appeared on Caracas Chronicles") is titled, pretty graphically: "In Venezuela, we couldn’t stop Chávez. Don’t make the same mistakes we did." And it's blurbed: "How to let a populist beat you, over and over again."

The Caracas Chronicles version of the piece was timed for Inauguration Day, when Rondón began:

The whole world’s eyes are on Washington today, and not in a good way. As Venezuelans, we’re looking North with more trepidation than most today, even though — in fairness — the panic over Trump-as-northern-Chávez is premature. A politician is to be judged by what it does in office, not by what he says before he gets there. Beating Chávez historic economic demolition of the richest oil country in the world, during the biggest oil bonanza ever, leaving behind an inflation-ridden, bullet-stricken, hungry, ailing country — is quite an ask. But let’s see what happens.

Because in one way, Trump and Chávez are identical: they are masters of Populism.

The recipe is universal. . . .

Rondón begins the WaPo version:

Andrés Miguel Rondón

Donald Trump is an avowed capitalist; Hugo Chávez was a socialist with communist dreams. One builds skyscrapers, the other expropriated them. But politics is only one-half policy: The other, darker half is rhetoric. Sometimes the rhetoric takes over. Such has been our lot in Venezuela for the past two decades — and such is yours now, Americans. Because in one regard, Trump and Chávez are identical. They are both masters of populism.

The recipe for populism is universal. Find a wound common to many, find someone to blame for it, and make up a good story to tell. Mix it all together. Tell the wounded you know how they feel. That you found the bad guys. Label them: the minorities, the politicians, the businessmen. Caricature them. As vermin, evil masterminds, haters and losers, you name it. Then paint yourself as the savior. Capture the people’s imagination. Forget about policies and plans, just enrapture them with a tale. One that starts with anger and ends in vengeance. A vengeance they can participate in.

That’s how it becomes a movement. There’s something soothing in all that anger. Populism is built on the irresistible allure of simplicity. The narcotic of the simple answer to an intractable question. The problem is now made simple.

The problem is you.

"You," of course, meaning us. Rondón goes on to ask, sensibly: "How do I know?" And he answers:

Because I grew up as the “you” Trump is about to turn you into. In Venezuela, the urban middle class I come from was cast as the enemy in the political struggle that followed Chávez’s arrival in 1998. For years, I watched in frustration as the opposition failed to do anything about the catastrophe overtaking our nation. Only later did I realize that this failure was self-inflicted. So now, to my American friends, here is some advice on how to avoid Venezuela’s mistakes.

This notion of us as "the enemy" is crucial to Rondón. He makes it his first piece of advice to us:

• Don’t forget who the enemy is.

Populism can survive only amid polarization. It works through the unending vilification of a cartoonish enemy. Never forget that you’re that enemy. Trump needs you to be the enemy, just like all religions need a demon. A scapegoat. “But facts!” you’ll say, missing the point entirely.

What makes you the enemy? It’s very simple to a populist: If you’re not a victim, you’re a culprit.

The Venezuelan version of this lesson?

During the 2007 student-led protests against the government’s closure of RCTV , then the second-biggest TV channel in Venezuela, Chávez continually went on air to frame us students as “pups of the American Empire,” “supporters of the enemy of the country” — spoiled, unpatriotic babies who only wanted to watch soap operas. Using our socioeconomic background as his main accusation, he sought to frame us as the direct inheritors of the mostly imagined “oligarchs” of our fathers’ generation. The students who supported Chavismo were “children of the homeland,” “sons of the people,” “the future of the country.” Not for one moment did the government’s analysis go beyond such cartoons.

The problem is not the message but the messenger, and if you don’t realize this, you will be wasting your time.

From here the lessons get harder, and from Rondón's standpoint we are probably wildly mishandling Trump, just as he and his fellow Venezuelans so badly mishandled Chávez.

Don’t feed polarization, disarm it. This means leaving the theater of injured decency behind.
That includes rebukes such as the one the “Hamilton” cast gave Vice President-elect Mike Pence shortly after the election. While sincere, it only antagonized Trump; it surely did not convince a single Trump supporter to change his or her mind. Shaming has never been an effective method of persuasion.

The Venezuelan opposition struggled for years to get this. We wouldn’t stop pontificating about how stupid Chavismo was, not only to international friends but also to Chávez’s electoral base. “Really, this guy? Are you nuts? You must be nuts,” we’d say.

The subtext was clear: Look, idiots — he will destroy the country. He’s blatantly siding with the bad guys: Fidel Castro, Vladi­mir Putin, the white supremacists or the guerrillas. He’s not that smart. He’s threatening to destroy the economy. He has no respect for democracy or for the experts who work hard and know how to do business.

Which leads Rondón to a point that will be familiar to those who have been reading Ian Welsh on Trump, in which a central theme has been that, however abhorrent the man may be, far from being stupid he's extremely competent. As Rondón puts it:

[M]y political awakening was set off by the tectonic realization that Chávez, however evil, was not actually stupid.

Neither is Trump: Getting to the highest office in the world requires not only sheer force of will but also great, calculated rhetorical precision. The kind only a few political geniuses are born with and one he flamboyantly brandishes.

Case in point:

 “We are in a rigged system, and a big part of the rigging are these dishonest people in the media,” Trump said late in the campaign, when he was sounding the most like Chávez. “Isn’t it amazing? They don’t even want to look at you folks.” The natural conclusion is all too clear: Turn off the TV, just listen to me. The constant boos at his rallies only confirmed as much. By looking down on Trump’s supporters, you’ve lost the first battle. Instead of fighting polarization, you’ve played into it.

The worst you can do is bundle moderates and extremists together and think that America is divided between racists and liberals. That’s the textbook definition of polarization. We thought our country was split between treacherous oligarchs and Chávez’s uneducated, gullible base. The only one who benefited was Chávez.

THE NEXT LESSON: "DON'T TRY TO FORCE HIM OUT"

Venezuelans, uUnderstandably desperate, tried everything, Rondón says.

Coup d’etat? Check. Ruinous oil strike? Check. Boycotting elections in hopes that international observers would intervene? You guessed it.

"But," he says, "a hissy fit is not a strategy."

The people on the other side — and crucially, independents — will rebel against you if you look like you’re losing your mind. You will have proved yourself to be the very thing you’re claiming to be fighting against: an enemy of democracy. And all the while you’re giving the populist and his followers enough rhetorical fuel to rightly call you a saboteur, an unpatriotic schemer, for years to come. . . .

Attempting to force Trump out, rather than digging in to fight his agenda, would just distract the public from whatever failed policies the administration is making. In Venezuela, the opposition focused on trying to reject the dictator by any means possible — when we should have just kept pointing out how badly Chávez’s rule was hurting the very people he claimed to be serving.

THE LAST LESSON: "FIND A COUNTERARGUMENT.
(NO, NOT THE ONE YOU THINK.)"

"Don’t waste your time trying to prove that this grand idea is better than that one."

Ditch all the big words. The problem, remember, is not the message but the messenger. It’s not that Trump supporters are too stupid to see right from wrong, it’s that you’re more valuable to them as an enemy than as a compatriot. Your challenge is to prove that you belong in the same tribe as them — that you are American in exactly the same way they are.

The Chávez opposition, Rondón says, "fell into this trap in a bad way."

We wrote again and again about principles, about separation of powers, civil liberties, the role of the military in politics, corruption and economic policy. But it took opposition leaders 10 years to figure out that they needed to actually go to the slums and the countryside. Not for a speech or a rally, but for a game of dominoes or to dance salsa — to show they were Venezuelans, too, that they weren’t just dour scolds and could hit a baseball, could tell a joke that landed. That they could break the tribal divide, come down off the billboards and show that they were real. This is not populism by other means. It is the only way of establishing your standing. It’s deciding not to live in an echo chamber. To press pause on the siren song of polarization.

Because if the music keeps going, yes — you will see neighbors deported and friends of different creeds and sexual orientations living in fear and anxiety, your country’s economic inequality deepening along the way. But something worse could happen. In Venezuela, whole generations were split in two. A sense of shared culture was wiped out. Rhetoric took over our history books, our future, our own sense of self. We lost the freedom to be anything larger than cartoons.

This does not have to be your fate. You can be different. Recognize that you’re the enemy Trump requires. Show concern, not contempt, for the wounds of those who brought him to power. By all means, be patient with democracy and struggle relentlessly to free yourself from the shackles of the caricature the populists have drawn of you.

And his final words:

It’s a tall order. But the alternative is worse. Trust me.

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If you've seen Caracas's "Tower of David" in "Homeland," here's some more you may want to know about it

A photo of the real Tower of David taken by the Spanish photographer Sebastian Liste, one of 14 posted on newyorker.com in January

"One day, I asked the real El Niño Daza about the community that he had created in the Tower [of David]. He spoke in the style of a new sheriff of Dodge who had cleaned out the riffraff. 'We live well here. We don't hear gunfights all the time here. Here there're no thugs with pistols in their hands. What there is here is work. What there is here is good people, hardworking people.' I asked Daza how he had become the Tower's jefe. 'In the beginning, everyone wanted to be the boss. But God got rid of those he wanted to get rid of and left those he wanted to leave.' "

-- Jon Lee Anderson, in a newyorker.com blog follow-up
to his January report on present-day Venezuela

by Ken

Since I still have a blogpost to write tonight, I haven't watched the new episode of Homeland yet, but I was delighted to see that The New Yorker's Jon Lee Anderson watched last week's, because the fugitive congressman-terrorist Brody's turning up in Caracas's skeletal skyscraper known as the Tower of David had me dredging my memory for the powerful piece JLA wrote in the not-too-distant past, an evaluation of the legacy of Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez, then still clinging to life ("Slumlord: What has Hugo Chávez wrought in Venezuela?"). The real Tower of David, which Anderson described as "one of South America's most apocalyptic urban fastnesses," and which was figuratively at the center of the piece, seemed fairly well depicted in the Homeland episode. So in addition to hoping to refresh my pitiable memory, I was extremely curious what Anderson has to say about the depiction in the new post, "The Real 'Tower of David.'"

The Tower, Anderson writes,

is a half-finished forty-five-story skyscraper-cum-ghetto that rises from the heart of downtown Caracas. Home to over three thousand people who have built brick shacks inside its concrete carapace -- right up to the twenty-eighth floor -- the Tower is controlled by a group of malandros led by the born-again ex-convict Alexander (El Niño) Daza. In "Homeland," Brody is made a guest and a prisoner of El Niño (The Boy), who finds a doctor to heal his wounds and assigns a girl to watch over him. In real life, as in "Homeland," the Tower is a symbol of contemporary Venezuela's broken dreams and, more pointedly, of the failure of the late Hugo Chávez's experiment in socialism, which he called his "Bolivarian revolution."

The building and its occupants were the subject of a story I wrote earlier this year, titled "Slumlord." At the time, the bombastic Chávez, who was fifty-eight years-old and had recently won reëlection to Venezuela's Presidency after nearly fourteen years in office, was still alive but concealed from public view, as he succumbed to cancer. He eventually died on March 5th, and was succeeded in office by his Vice-President, Nicolás Maduro.

The Tower, originally conceived of as the centerpiece of Venezuelan's answer to Wall Street in the once economically dynamic, oil-rich nation, began construction in 1990. It was the brainchild of David Brillembourg, an investor who died in 1993, before the Tower was finished. Shortly afterward, there was a devastating Venezuelan financial crisis, and construction never resumed. The Tower of David, sixty-per-cent complete, became a derelict edifice. In 2007, El Niño Daza, together with several other armed gangsters and several hundred civilian followers, invaded the building and took it over. Daza has lived there ever since, ruling it like a private fiefdom. His authority, in a sense, is a by-product of the Chávez revolution; indeed, Daza was one of Chávez's ardent supporters.

So how true-to-life is the Homeland version of the Tower of David?

"There are some inevitable discrepancies as well as uncanny parallels," Anderson writes, beginning with the depiction of El Niño himself.

In the "Homeland" episode, El Niño is a strutting, grinning archetypal bad guy, with a big spider tattooed on his neck. The real El Niño Daza is clean-cut, and if he has tattoos they are hidden; he carries a Bible and frequently quotes from it. But early on in his control of the Tower there were murders of rivals, and a number of those killed were cut up and thrown off of high stories, just as men are ritually executed in Venezuela's prisons, where he spent much of his life. In "Homeland," Brody is shown who is boss when El Niño's goons grab a man accused of stealing Brody's passport and hurl him to his death from an upper floor. In both "Homeland" and real life, the Tower's open floors look out across a city of smaller towers, overshadowed by mountains. There are goons everywhere and people watching. When Brody tries to make a run for it, he is stopped by armed men on the ground floor. There is no escape from the Tower of David in "Homeland." In real life, there are sentinels on duty and an electric gated entrance, guarded by El Niño Daza's people.

Anderson goes back over the history of Venezuela's oil boom, as Chávez's frequently good intentions on behalf of Venezuela's underprivileged were translated into policies and execution thereof that were grossly inept as well as corrupt.

Though Chávez's initiatives were well-intended, and ultimately brought up the basic standard of living of poor Venezuelans, many of them were inefficient, dogged by inept planning and administration, and by corruption. The government's housing program, in particular, was abysmal, and by the mid-aughts numerous invasions of unoccupied buildings as well as vacant lots were taking place around Caracas -- in some cases, by organized groups of squatters led by criminals, who then took over the properties and charged the other occupants rent and protection money. The government, for the most part, looked the other way.

"Invaded" buildings are epidemic in Caracas: some 155 in the downtown area, Anderson says, "including an entire shopping mall."

It was a situation that the government had shown little willpower to do anything about. The poverty, chronic housing shortage, and government compliance with many of the invasiones, combined with a dramatic breakdown in law enforcement and security, had created a dystopian atmosphere in Caracas -- with the Tower of David as the most visible symbol of Venezuela's mess. In 2011, the murder rate in the Capital District of Caracas was a hundred and twenty-two per hundred thousand inhabitants, one of the highest in Latin America. Meanwhile, most of the country's overflowing prisons are controlled by the criminals who are imprisoned in them, and who guard their way of life -- and the criminal rackets they run from their sanctuaries -- with armed men. It is much the same in the Tower, though the weapons are discretely concealed.

At this point Anderson presents the quote from "the real El Niño Daza about the community that he had created in the Tower" which I've put at the top of this post. Then he concludes:

Brody, presumably, will ultimately escape from the Tower of David. But for those who actually live there, the Tower is not an entertainment but both a prison and a refuge, an armed sanctuary in a country without many rules.

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For a "Sunday Classics" fix anytime, visit the stand-alone "Sunday Classics with Ken."

Fake Republican Outrage Is Getting Kind Of Predictable... And Ignorable-- But Obama Is Still Likely To Shake Hands With Hacks Like John Ensign

Despite relentless right-wing propaganda, Venezuela is not our enemy

Republican Party hacks are all up in arms and puffed up with their fake sense of outrage over Obama shaking hands with Hugo Chavez. Obama doesn't laugh at his hopeless opponents; he's polite. Yesterday he politely told GOP sore losers and troublemakers to shove it. I think any Americans who don't get their world view from Limbaugh, O'Reilly and Coulter don't need to be told that extending diplomatic courtesy is a plus, not-- as in the dark old Bush days-- a sign of weakness. At a news conference at the end of the three-day summit Obama patiently explained to Republican dunces that "the U.S. must engage other countries through humanitarian gestures, not simply military intervention."

Obama said it would be a mistake to measure the Summit of the Americas by specific agreements reached. But by listening to his counterparts and eschewing heavy-handed diplomacy, he said, he was creating an atmosphere in which, "at the margins," foreign leaders are "more likely to want to cooperate than not cooperate."

A running theme of the summit was Obama's cordial dealings with Chavez, who once called former President George W. Bush the "devil" and who just last month dismissed Obama as an "ignoramus." The two were photographed smiling and clasping hands.

At one meeting attended by South American leaders, Chavez made a show of walking around the table as the cameras rolled and handing Obama a copy of "Open Veins of Latin America," a 1971 book by Eduardo Galeano chronicling U.S. and European imperialism in the region.

Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) told CNN today that it was "irresponsible" for Obama to be seen "laughing and joking" with the Venezuelan president.

Obama dismissed such concerns. He said the 2008 presidential campaign proved that American voters want the president to engage his counterparts, whether or not they are avowed friends of the U.S.

Obama said it "was a nice gesture to give me a book. I'm a reader." He added that the election was a referendum of sorts on the argument that U.S. solicitude toward foreign leaders could be seen as "weakness."

"The American people didn't buy it," the president said. "And there's a good reason the American people didn't buy it, because it doesn't make sense."

The U.S. has nothing to fear from Venezuela, a large supplier of crude oil to the U.S., Obama said.

"Its defense budget is probably 1/600th of the U.S.," he said. "They own [the oil company] Citgo. It's unlikely that as a consequence of me shaking hands or having a polite conversation with Mr. Chavez that we are endangering the strategic interests of the United States."

This morning when I woke up I heard a sterile talking head on CNN describe Hugo Chavez or Venezuela as "America's arch-nemesis." A much more accurate thing to say is that House obstructionist leader John Boehner or North Carolina racist Richard Burr or secessionist Rick Perry is America's arch-nemesis. Or how about Kenneth Lewis or the other corrupt banksters who have systematically looted the country and dragged us into a Depression? A rightist created myth has imbeciles who couldn't identify Venezuela on a map if their lives depended on it repeating a Limbaughist demonization formula about a country with which we have no legitimate gripes. That Chavez spoke out forcefully against George Bush-- who tried to topple his government and nearly succeeded in having him assassinated-- is something Americans should be appreciative of. Unfortunately, I doubt that's why Obama shook hands with him. Instead he's busy putting the U.S. back on an even foreign policy keel after 8 years of the worst and most dangerous foreign policy in the history of the country.

It's likely that the U.S. and Venezuela will resume full diplomatic relations which had badly soured under the Bush Regime. And although Obama has made it clear he's not going to go as fast as most people think he should towards fully normalizing relations with Cuba, the days when obscenely wealthy right-wing Cuban gangsters, their sons, and their corrupt bought-off shills in Congress could dictate U.S. policy is coming to an end.

And much to the dismay of many progressives it's likely that Obama will shake hands not just with Hugo Chavez but with real enemies of our country's basic values-- rightist kooks and corporate patsies like Ensign, McConnell, Kyl, Cornyn, even dangerous loons who I hope get frisked first like Coburn, Burr and Bachmann. While White House advisors were admonishing the obstructionists to come up with constructive proposals to the problems Bush left behind-- and constructive doesn't mean slogans like "4 more years" from partisan nitwits like Paul Ryan (R-WI), Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) and Eric Cantor (R-VA)-- all we heard from them were nonsensical talking points and GOP Minority Leader John Boehner's bovine fart jokes. This is a no-brainer for Obama because, afterall, polling shows that Americans have a more favorable attitude towards Venezuela than towards the Republican Party. (42% of Americans look on Venzuela favorable but only 39% see the GOP in that light.) And now that Cheney came out of his crypt and went on Fox to smear the President over "the handshake," I expect the Republican approval rating to fall some more.

Obama Wows 'Em In Latin America-- Republican Hypocrites Snipe At The President Here At Home

You may have read here at DWT that we were disappointed with the very modest baby steps the Obama Administration announced towards Cuba last week. The ritualistic screaming and denunciations from the extreme right left-behinds and revanchistas of the Cuban-American community in Florida and a few bribed shills from districts where Cuba isn't an issue, was largely ignored. That may have encouraged Obama to go a little further during his summit with the leaders of the rest of the countries of the Western Hemisphere, all of whom enjoy satisfactory relations with Cuba. America-- if not the Cuban-American would-be aristocracy who still nurture the dream of overthrowing the Revolution and reasserting themselves as the feudal lords of Cuba-- is ready for change in regard to the dysfunctional and shameful relationship we have with one of our closest neighbors.

Today's NY Times is reporting that the Latin American leaders were impressed with Obama's willingness to move beyond the archaic Cold War era boycott of Cuba long dictated by a few wealthy fascist families from pre-Revolutionary Cuba (plus the American Mafia). Obama said the U.S. "seeks a new beginning with Cuba" and is willing to sit down with the Cuban government and work on better relations.

Mr. Obama’s remarks, during the opening ceremony at the Summit of the Americas, are the clearest signal in decades that the United States is willing to change direction in its dealings with Cuba. They capped a dizzying series of developments this week, including surprisingly warm words between Raúl Castro, Cuba’s leader, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton
.
Other leaders here said that in watching Mr. Obama extend his hand to Cuba, they felt they were witnessing a historic shift. And in another twist, Cuba’s strongest ally at the summit, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, no fan of the United States, was photographed at the meeting giving Mr. Obama a hearty handclasp and a broad smile.

...“I know there is a longer journey that must be traveled in overcoming decades of mistrust, but there are critical steps we can take toward a new day,” Mr. Obama said, adding that he was “prepared to have my administration engage with the Cuban government on a wide range of issues-- from human rights, free speech, and democratic reform to drugs, migration, and economic issues.”

Fascist elements in the U.S. were stunned and upset that another Fox-created boogie-man, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, was treated as a head of state instead of like a pariah or a terrorist. Obama knew his agenda for change wouldn't be achieved without lots of sniping and hysteria from the far right, but he's moving steadily forward on multiple fronts and, so far, neither their tea parties nor the hissing of obstructionist pip-squeaks like Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Paul Ryan (R-WI) have managed to do anything but mark the opposition as out-of-step reactionaries with no ideas beyond going back to more hopelessly failed and disastrous Bush policies.

Instead of embracing exponents of change, the teabaggers invited asked a number of Republican members of Congress who have supported bank bailouts and other no-strings-attached giveaways to Wall Street speculators, free trade policies that empower contemporary variations on the British East India Company and schemes to gamble Social Security on the stock market.

Among speakers scheduled to titillate teabagger rallies are Florida Congressman Ander Crenshaw (appearing in Jacksonville), Arizona Congressman John Shadegg (appearing in Phoenix), North Carolina Congresswoman Susan Myrick (appearing in Charlotte) and Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan (appearing in Madison).

All cast the Tory vote for the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, which gave hundreds of billions of dollars to banks and speculators.

No doubt, Ryan's the worst hypocrite in the bunch.

The ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee has emerged as the GOPs pointman on "fiscal responsibility" issues. Yet, this Tory legislator played a key role in passing the Wall Street bailout last fall, rallying Republican votes for the measure when sincere conservatives wanted to vote "no" to the $800-billion giveaway with Vermont Independent Bernie Sanders, who said, "rescuing the economy does not mean we have to just give away $700 billion of taxpayer money to the banks," and Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold, who said, "Taxpayers deserve a plan that puts their concerns ahead of those who got us into this mess."

Technically, Ryan represents Janesville, Wisconsin, but his real designation ought to be: Paul Ryan, R-Wall Street.

Janesville is, or at least was, a manufacturing town. Yet, Ryan has since his election to the House in 1998 consistently voted for free-trade pacts-- including the extension of most-favored nation trading status to China-- that have been devastating to the community and others in his southeastern Wisconsin district. How devastating, last winter, the sprawling General Motor plant that had been the community's top employer for nine decades, was shuttered.

What was Ryan doing in the months before the plant closed? Campaigning for a scheme to gamble Social Security funds on the stock market and gut Medicare and Medicaid. Had Ryan gotten his way, tens of millions of Americans who lost most of their retirement savings when the stock market crashed in the fall would also have lost much of their Social Security safety net. And they would have had an even harder time getting access to medical care.

Fiscally responsible? Not Paul Ryan.

His whole career has been about redistributing wealth upward, rewriting trade rules to favor multinational corporations, robbing the federal treasury to enrich his banking industry benefactors and running up debts to bail out Wall Street.

If Sam Adams had encountered this Tory, they would have tossed him in Boston Harbor with those crates of tea.

You can help stop Paul Ryan-- before it's too late.