Meet the New GOP Prototype for Enriching Local Elites While Ramming Christian Right Dogma into Law

[doxydad]

Kansas under Gov. Sam Brownback is in fiscal ruin, but the wealthy still stay wealthy.

It is said that states are political laboratories for political ideologies. On that score, there are few states that better exemplify how the working class has been used as an unwitting pawn for the elites than Kansas. Today, Kansas is dealing with its worst fiscal crisis in living memory. How did it get here?

Geographically, Kansas sits smack in the middle of the continent, which is appropriate given that for much of its history, the state has literally been all over the map. It was the hotbed for left-wing and socialist populism in the late 19th century. Pragmatic centrism was the rigor du jour in the 1980s. In the 1990s, Christian fundamentalism became the political ideology of the state’s most agitated citizens, especially after the high-profile ant-abortion protests of 1992.

In the midterm elections of 1994, the Christian Right took all three leadership positions in the state’s legislature, and introduced what they called a “Contract with Kansas,” which amounted to little more than a solemn pledge to execute more prisoners and save more fetuses. It was also the year Sam Brownback, the son of one of the wealthiest families in the state, was elected to the House of Representatives.

In 2012, Gov. Brownback implemented what has been proven an abject failure wherever it has been tried: trickledown economics. He signed into law massive tax cuts for the state’s wealthiest citizens, which eliminated income taxes for businesses, and cut the highest income tax rates by 25 percent. The working-class foot soldiers of the Christian Right were placated with a bill that declared “life begins at fertilization.”

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/meet-new-gop-prototype-enriching-local-elites-while-ramming-christian-right-dogma

Sorry, Kansas, you're the next Mississippi....