The racist John Birch Society's neofascist idealizations appeared near-extinguished with the death of Joe McCarthy, the rise of the Eisenhower-Kennedy-Johnson consensus on social insurance and public investments in infrastructure, jobs and public education, amid the victories of the American Civil Rights Movement for jobs and justice.
Like Lazarus, fascism is back, brought to life by five Republicans on the US Supreme Court, and the realization among a handful of rightwing political strategists that Americans remain sufficiently disengaged and despondent about their ability to secure the blessings of liberty for their families (United States Constitution) that rightist Republicans can create legal, non-biological entities and endow them with rights and power exceeding the American people with a 50/50 shot of people not knowing what happened.
In a typically insightful column this week, Nobel-Prize-winning economist, Paul Krugman, notes other derangements of the GOP-Koch mob in Congress and the GOP presidential clown car: A clueless and out-of-touch attitude that translates neatly into policy, (supplied by the corporate-funded, rightwing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)). (Center for Media and Democracy)
Krugman, commenting on the Federal Reserve's new study of the financial well-being of American households, (Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, May 27, 2015 Press Release and Study), writes, "I am not, or not only, talking about right-wing contempt for the poor, although the dominance of compassionless conservatism is a sight to behold. ... But leave self-declared conservatives and their contempt for the poor on one side. What’s really striking is the disconnect between centrist conventional wisdom and the reality of life — and death — for much of the nation."
The Koch brothers-Ayn Rand strain of modern-day Birchism that Krugman references as tolerated and abetted in Washington is embodied in Wisconsin by Republicans led by Scott Walker, Paul Ryan and Ron Johnson.
Scott Walker is defined more completely by his malice, as his sociopathic contempt masks a ignorance combined with corruption, and an anti-intellectual bent that makes for a dangerous public officeholder who never faces presidential-level turnouts at the ballot box.
Though Krugman does not mention Wisconsin's trio of modern-day John Birchers in his latest column this weekend, Krugman has eviscerated Paul Ryan numerous times and repeated what is obvious: Ryan is a liar, and the GOP effort to attack Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is cowardly and dishonestly presented.
What the Fed study makes clear is that about one half of American families are living on the edge.
This is obvious to most Americans, remote to centrist conventional wisdom in D.C. , and a good thing to Scott Walker and Koch brothers holding malice the likes of which Wisconsin has never seen, or even contemplated.
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