Rethug Gilded Age Economics and Dismantling a Century of Progress

We have two articles appearing in the Kaplan Daily today on the dangerously extreme economic philosophy of the current Rethuglican/ New Confederate Party. [Note: to read both articles in their entirety, once you go to the page link, click on the underlined introduction in each.] One, by Greg Ip, reviews the retrograde "voodoo economics" of leading party lights (as in "light-weights"). Alexander Keyssar traces the campaign to unravel nearly a century of social and economic progress by right-wing yahoos and plutocrats who want to turn back the clock to the 1880's (see Perry, "Hair", below):

"...To a historian, the agenda of today's conservatives looks like a bizarre effort to return to the Gilded Age, an era with little regulation of business, no social insurance and no legal protections for workers. This agenda, moreover, calls for the destruction or weakening of institutions without acknowledging (or perhaps understanding) why they came into being."

The only thing missing in the equation is a muscular, dynamic progressive counterweight to the momentum on the far right (paging Barack Obama...).