John Breaux Sees Democrats Embracing Paul Ryan's Plan To 'End Medicare'

Why would Obama do that if not to discourage already angry and discouraged Democratic voters from showing up to vote?

Democrats lost seats in the 2010 midterms because of Obama's and Democrats' failure to do what Democratic voters put them in office for in 2008.  It was BlueDogs who lost seats in huge numbers, and lost Democrats control over the House and lowered the total in the Senate -- Progressives only lost 3 seats.  

Since the midterm elections, Obama's tried to spin this as some mandate for more Republican-like legislation.  

Do you honestly believe that the message of the midterms was to cut spending when the vast majority of Americans want no cuts to Medicare or SocialSecurity and want the wars to end now, BushObama tax cuts to be repealed and taxes raised on corporations and the rich?  Yet that's exactly what Obama and Republicans and the Democrats in the House and Senate who voted for this 'Super Congress' (including NancyPelosi) are trying to sell.  Just this past week, Pelosi said she could sign on to Simpson-Bowles.
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John Breaux Sees Democrats Embracing Paul Ryan's Plan To 'End Medicare'

I'm praying the Democrats win an overwhelming majority and we go to a one payer system, like the civilized world has.

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What do you think you're voting for when you put Obama back into the WhiteHouse?  

And if your answer is "populist policies", what makes you think that's what Obama supports?

Before the 2010 midterms, Obama broadcast that he would be doing more of the same, more caving,, to Republicans, more Republican-like legislation, even if Democrats remained the majority and in control of both Houses of Congress:

Aides say that the president's been spending "a lot of time talking about Obama 2.0," brainstorming with administration officials about the best way to revamp the strategies & goals of the White House.

And despite the predictions that Democrats may relinquish a large degree of legislating power, including perhaps control of the House & even Senate, Obama isn't thinking of the next two years as a period that'll be marked with the same obstructive nature from the GOP.

"It may be that regardless of what happens after this election, [Republicans] feel more responsible, either because they didn't do as well as they anticipated, & so the strategy of just saying no to everything & sitting on the sidelines & throwing bombs didn't work for them," Obama says. "Or they did reasonably well, in which case the American people are going to be looking to them to offer serious proposals & work with me in a serious way."

DickDurbin says Obama's post-election agenda "will have to be limited & focused on the things that are achievable and high priorities for the American people." TomDaschle says Obama has to reach out more: "The keyword is inclusion. He's got to find ways to be inclusive."

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SIGAR Report Finds Afghanistan Reconstruction Compromised By Security, Corruption

MADDOW: America, it‘s your tax dollars at work. This is the war economy as translated to land-locked Central Asia. We dump a ton of money thinking that we are paying for our military effort. Everything that goes along with our military effort ends up letting - or in this case, directing like a squirt gun, instead of flooding - 

ENGEL: The streets become rivers of mud. 

MADDOW: But the money doesn‘t go to the country and trickle down its economy. It just goes to the elites and power brokers who can keep it for themselves. 

ENGEL: A war lord system. There is a lot of money in war - contracting, supplying, shipping. And if you have been in power, you keep those contracts for yourself and you build neighborhoods like this. And maybe, you don‘t even live here. You live somewhere else, in a foreign country. 

MADDOW: This is what it is like in Kabul. This is the exact same dynamic that we saw in Kandahar where you‘re talking with these counterinsurgency doctors and soaked military officers who are incredibly smart and have far reaching thinking about this sort of thing and they can because of that, they can see the basic contradiction at work that we‘re trying to do. 

If the whole effort, all the money and everything, is to establish governance and - if the whole effort is to establish governance, all of our money, all of our spending here is only supporting the elite, the warlordism -

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SIGAR Report Finds Afghanistan Reconstruction Compromised By Security, Corruption

ENGEL: Exactly. And the reason the streets are still unpaved is that these government officials refuse to pay any taxes to the government. They are in a fight so the government won‘t come and pave the roads or connect it to any kind of sanitation system at all because the same government ministers won‘t pay to register the neighborhood. 

MADDOW: So they won‘t throw their weight around to get their neighborhood taken care of, because they don‘t live here anyway. 

ENGEL: They don‘t live here anyway. So you have these large homes, and some of these homes - you see this building right behind you? 

MADDOW: That looks like a hotel. 

ENGEL: No. No. No. They are all private homes. 

MADDOW: This is a private home? 

ENGEL: It‘s a private home. It probably has 25 bedrooms in it and garish, colonnades and unusual architectural features. And then, they‘ll rent that out to some western client and they‘ll charge either by the bedroom or by the floor or for the whole thing. And if you were to build this one - it‘s obviously under construction - that is a $1 million plus house in Kabul with no paved streets. 

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SIGAR Report Finds Afghanistan Reconstruction Compromised By Security, Corruption

ENGEL: Because this was originally just empty land. You can see there is no real pavement or anything like that. When the Americans came in with the northern alliance (the northern alliance, which was the allies against the Taliban) took this land and then gave it away to all their cronies. They created a new war wealth neighborhood out of nothing. 

MADDOW: And so we‘ve still got open sewers and we‘ve still got no pavement, but we have rococo castles. Nouveau riche castles. 

ENGEL: That lease for $10,000 to $25,000 a month, because it‘s a safe area. But here‘s the irony. Most of the government officials - and these are almost all owned by government officials - don‘t live in them. They rent them out to foreign companies, contractors. And they live in Dubai or have their families in Islamabad. So they are purely investment properties. 

MADDOW: There‘s a sign right there in that one. It says, “house for rent.” 

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John Breaux Sees Democrats Embracing Paul Ryan's Plan To 'End Medicare'

When politician­s say that "Social Security is the third rail of politics", they mean it with a hostility that should be reserved for their Corporate Masters.  You don't see politician­s putting campaign finance and election reform on their agenda from year to year as you do their continuing assaults on social safety net programs for the People.

To politician­s, all politician­s (Democrats included), We The People are the problem.  If only they didn't have to deal with making us happy to get our votes that keep them employed.  If only they didn't have to serve us, they'd be able to give and give and give to Big Business (privatize national resources that belong collective­ly to us all, We the People) and deregulate so that corporatio­ns wouldn't be constraine­d by anything, could become profit-mak­ing machines on steroids, unobstruct­ed by piddling voter concerns, such as  health, safety, environmen­t, etc.  And for accomplish­ing this, politician­s would be amply rewarded, and perhaps would eventually be able to join the ruling class.

You can choose to believe what you will about Democratic politician­s, but the fact is that the DLC controls the Democratic Party (the DLC is referred to as the Republican wing of the Democratic Party, the pro-corpor­ate branch), and that Democrats in Congress and in the White House have signed on to privatize public resources and utilities and deregulate (Democrats in Congress, despite all their campaign promises, have refused to regulate or perform their Constituti­onally-req­uired role of oversight, both in the Bush and Obama administra­tions  -- What little regulating they've put in legislatio­n the last 2 years is ineffectiv­e for a whole array of very sneaky moves).  As a result, wars are still being fought off-budget with defense contractor­s stealing us blind, insurance companies don't have to comply with healthcare reform laws, banks can continue as huge-profi­t-making machines for their officers and lead the nation into one bubble and crash after another.

You can choose to think of Obama and his intentions in whatever way makes you happy.  What you can't do is explain how any of what Obama's done these past two years has been in the People's and not the Corporatio­ns' interests.

What's gotten lost in the news cycle the past few months are Obama's new NAFTA-like treaties (S. Korea and Colombia) which mean more Americans' jobs will be outsourced overseas.  And then there's Paul Ryan, Simpson-Bowles, the 'Super Congress', all with plans for gutting Social Security and Medicare, along with the Dream Act (which means a flood of immigrants working for slave wages) creeping forward.  

We The People are being transforme­d, from sheep to sacrificia­l lambs.
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SIGAR Report Finds Afghanistan Reconstruction Compromised By Security, Corruption

What's the objective, how is the military going about achieving it, and where are our tax dollars going?

Not long ago, Rachel Maddow walked the dusty, garbage-strewn streets of Afghanistan with RIchard Engel to see what exporting US-style democracy means, and what US nation-building actually builds. Watch this to see where are our tax dollars going, and learn how we are not "nation-building", not making us safer, and not helping the Afghans or building their nation at all (or a democracy). Learn how this has all been just a huge rip-off of the American people:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eR5BHnN__5M


Here's the transcript:

RACHEL MADDOW: There are very few countries in the world poorer than Afghanistan where abject poverty is almost everywhere. The keyword there is almost. There are super rich folks here. We visited their neighborhood in Kabul. They‘re garish, bizarre. What it looks like to be rich in poor, war-torn, land-locked Central Asian neighborhood. 

MADDOW: So we are in a neighborhood now. Kabul. Talking about the distribution of wealth, in Kabul and the effect of - 

RICHARD ENGEL: There is a distribution of wealth. This is where it is distributed. This is where it ends up. All of the money from contracts and association with the government and association with the U.S. military has ended up here. 

MADDOW: Why? 

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