"THEY REALLY WANT A CORPORATE MONOPOLY STATE"

Thank you, Naomi Klein. And Rachel, you're forgiven for offering the worst euphemism for American Fascism yet: "Big Government Conservatism." Oh Please. Ouch. A corporate monopoly state is the very definition of a fascist state. Or, as Naomi said: "government by fiat"— i.e. fascism.

Her seminal work "The Shock Doctrine — The Rise of Disaster Capitalism" is, in essence, the redefinition of fascism for our time. The premise that crisis (in most cases, but not always, a manufactured one) triggers a shock to the political system, as Ms Klein said, is an old idea. Hitler's final putsch, after years building a strong ideologically extreme and fanatically loyal Nazi movement, was the Reichstag fire. It was used as a pretext to eliminate the remaining roadblocks and opponents to the minority Nazi Party and Hitler's rise to power. The 9/11 terror attacks were a traumatic shock to the American system which led to the subordination of our individual freedoms to the national security state.

Klein's thesis holds that politicians are taking advantage of real and created crises to ram through unpopular privatization schemes to transfer wealth from the people to the corporations. Call it what you will — corporatism, crony capitalism — still it traces its lineage directly to Mussolini and Hitler and the Nazis. They were 20th century. We're 21st. The difference for our times is that charismatic leaders have been replaced by richly rewarded and more manageable right wing bureaucrats, functionaries, and yes men ... like Wisconsin's Scott Walker and Michigan's  Rick Snyder. The similarity is that their coups and crisis-advantage power grabs are as old school democracy-squashing fascism as they have ever been.

Memo to Rachel re: Michael Steele — Standing on high principle by denying those bastards in Steele's party a quorum to ram their criminal bill through the Wisconsin Legislature is the highest form of public service. Abraham Lincoln  jumped out a window in his legislature rather than give the opposing party a quorum. I'll take Abe any day and forever over a partisan hack like Steele.

Rachel, Rachel ... Incidentally, the Koch Brothers are "libertarians" and so is America's Dark Lord of the Sith and most prominent fascist, Dick Cheney of ... WYOMING.