Ronald Reagan
In this, the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth, we have already been deluged, in a single day (his birthday was February 6, 1911), to more detestable hyperbole of his life, governorship and presidency, than any human should be asked to endure, even if such distortions were spread out over a duration lasting several millenia. We can’t deny that Ronald Reagan was a brilliant politician, who was recruited and brain-washed for service into the Republican Army by General Electric, as he carried out their bidding and served as possibly the worst president in American history. In the past, I have given that award to GW Bush, but as I explain below, the policies Reagan put in place have finally settled in and become more pervasively economic than those of GW, whose main contribution was to give us a “Security State.” Reagan’s mentor at GE was Lemuel Boulware, who helped convert him from an FDR Democrat (Reagan voted for FDR all four times he ran), to a conservative Republican willing to do the bidding of General Electric and serve other corporatist interests. Perhaps he was grateful to someone who paid him at a time when his acting career had come to an end (he worked for GE from 1954 to 1962, when he became governor of California). For the Republicans, he was a good figurehead president that could be counted on to promote their program and be true to the corporate plan; I still wonder today if Reagan really understood the degree to which he was intellectually abused by the Republican mantra and the corporatist interests he faithfully served. His famous quip “government is not the solution, it’s the problem” caught the attention of many Americans, including the former governor of Minnesota, Tim Pawlenty, who hopes to replace Reagan as the banner carrier for outrageously destructive, right-wing policies. Pawlenty’s main contribution to Minnesota was to turn Minnesota into Mississippi and I think he got the state about half way down the river. Reagan’s presidency was not as viciously destructive as that of GW Bush’s, but it had a far more devastating, long-term impact on our lives, our system of government and our national economy. Reagan served to convert our nation from a country that once had decent equality of wages, with a vibrant middle class, to the current form of our socioeconomic order that includes a marginalized middle class and hoards of homeless people living in abject poverty. I did not know about homeless people in America until Reagan came into office. Then I began to see them in every city I visited. Reagan hand delivered our once vibrant economy into the destructive hands of a plutocracy made up of a few ruling elites, who have no interest in stabilizing our economy or our future: these ruling elites, who hide behind the masks of corporate behavior, wouldn’t even know what a healthy, equitable society looked like, let alone know how to generate one. But, they all pray at the alter of Ronald Reagan, a convenient resting place for the mindless. Individually, the people that make up these corporations may seem like very nice people, though they are extraordinarily naive about things like the environment and the costs their corporations shift to public spending. But since a corporation is not a person and has no innate sense of ethics, under the banner of the corporation, immensely destructive behavior is perpetrated on the public and tramples on our values. The development of the multinational corporation has moved
Lemuel Boulware
them away from the boundaries of effective control by a single government.
Before Reagan took office and drastically cut the income taxes to produce huge Federal deficits and more wealth for the wealthy, the United States was the biggest creditor nation in the world. When Reagan was finished, we had become the biggest debtor nation in the world and we continue to borrow to finance our wars and tax cuts for the wealthy–he showed us how to do that too. How is it possible, given Reagan’s impact on our economy, to even think about electing Republicans? Shouldn’t we have a constitutional amendment banning the Republican party and Reaganomics as one which endangers our future and places doubt on the survival of our species?
Ronald Reagan’s objective as president, was to destroy the New Deal of FDR. He commenced his presidency by waging war on labor unions and putting the country on a trajectory where today, the lowest number of Americans are represented by a union contract, compared to any time since the 1930s. Unions are historically vital to our economic equality because they serve to even out the score between increases in productivity, due to worker efficiencies, and a just increase in worker wages, which have now fallen far behind the long-term gains in productivity. When union representation retreated, corporate heads were increasingly concerned about a golden parachute for themselves as they abandoned the concept of the gold watch for their employees. Downsizing the corporation is now so commonplace that people in their fifties expect to lose their job and are guaranteed of not finding a suitable replacement. If we had more and stronger labor unions, the income gap that exists today, would never have developed. And yes, stronger unions would have helped create an environment where companies cannot move at the drop of a hat to China or some other low wage country. That decision, like it is in Europe today, would be more broadly distributed through unions, government and weaker corporations.
Reagan also significantly reduced Federal support for programs that provided things like healthcare for poor people and he began the cultural wars of pitting the middle class against one another on issues like creationism, abortion and gay rights. The reductions he imposed on Federal programs led, among other things, to a significant rise in infant mortality, especially in the inner cities, an outcome created when pregnant women could no longer access prenatal care. Today, the United States ranks 33rd among all nations in the infant mortality rate. Isn’t that a sobering number for the wealthiest country in the world? It is especially grievous because it is very easy to significantly reduce this number, through proper prenatal care.
I have written before on the Presidency of Ronald Reagan and Reaganomics in more than one posting and I will surely write about him again. There are many other sides to Ronald Reagan’s policies besides the domestic ones and each of them is an equally sad indictment of his presidency. Once Reagan was elected, the great civic and public works projects, like the Interstate Highway system under Eisenhower, the Apollo project under Kennedy and the Civil Rights legislation and War on Poverty under Johnson–those kinds of projects ceased and Reagan instead chose his militaristic “Star Wars” missile defense program to highlight his administration, which did little for the country’s future and did virtually nothing for bringing down the Soviet Union (the Soviets actually spent less on defense after Reagan announced his star wars initiative which you can read about in one of Chalmers Johnson’s books). Military spending may add something to consumption and does produce jobs, but these are not the kinds of jobs or the kind of industry that generates a multiplicative economic growth, leading to a broader, more innovative economy (just what kind of spinoff do you get when you design a cluster bomb? Improved fire works?). Today, thanks to Reagan, we are a far more militaristic country than we were under previous presidencies. Missile defense is still alive as a program which no one wants to identify by its proper terms: missile defense is in reality an offensive weapons system. Duh!
Reagan also created a disastrous foreign policy in other spheres, not just those related to his unneeded acceleration of the Cold War and his ruinous policies on our domestic tranquility. He also went to war against a small South American country–Nicaragua, because he didn’t like the leftist government that the Sandinistas had legitimately established after overthrowing the brutal dictator Somoza. I would invite you to read about Greg Palast’s experience in witnessing the effects of Reagan’s war and economic embargo on Nicaragua when Palast was in the country. The Iran-Contra scandal under Reagan was an example gross of violation of Federal law. For his assault on our constitutional form of government and his knowledge and perhaps direction for the Iran-Contra scandal, Reagan should have been impeached and thrown out of office for violating laws passed by Congress. An investigation into the Iran-Contra scandal led to charges against many of Reagan’s appointees were charged violating Federal statutes and/or perjury; fourteen members of his administration were charged, including the infamous Oliver North and Casper Weinberger, Secretary of Defense. North was convicted, but his conviction was overturned on appeal. Casper Weinberger was pardoned by Bush I. Reagan has also stacked the Federal courts with judges who are steadfast supporters of deregulation; we are still living with many of his judicial appointments.
Reagan sewed the seeds of destruction of a more equitable American economy and helped to establish the imbalance that now imperils our future growth and stability as a democratic society. The giant corporate wealth and power he helped to set in motion now robs us of free choice and the political capacity to shape our future and improve the lives of our children. I was deeply disturbed by his Presidency when it began: if he made some people feel good at one time, they should all be feeling pretty terrible right now, since we can, if we are willing to look at history objectively, fully appreciate how much of the economic crisis of today actually got started when Reagan first assumed the presidency and set his policies in motion. Reaganomics gave us a terrible recession soon after Reagan took office (the supply side economic theory, the idea that taxation policy entirely controls our economic growth, served as the basis of Reagan’s drastic reduction in income taxes, which in turn ignited the severe recession of the early 1980s–because the supply side theory didn’t work–cutting taxes cut Federal revenues dramatically and the interest rates skyrocketed). In fact, the unemployment level during the Reagan recession (which the Republicans tried to blame on Jimmy Carter) was higher than what we are experiencing today (10.8 percent). His policies of deregulation led directly to the Savings and Loan scandal, which soaked ordinary tax payers for bailout money (~ $130 billion). Until Reagan began to dismantle the New Deal, our recessions were minimalized by the New Deal policies and the regulatory functions of government installed under FDR. But, since Reagan took office, we have seen the economic crises not only increase in frequency, but increase in severity, until today, we find ourselves in a crisis rivaling that of the Great Depression. Never before in any recession have I personally known individuals who lost their jobs or were foreclosed on their homes. Now I know many such people. What the news doesn’t adequately report is the fact that this recession we are in has reached deeply into the middle class, leaving many of them broke and without income. In reality, we have been in a recession since the dot com recession of 2001. Yet, despite the overwhelming connection of this cause and effect, we are confronted with a group of citizens, such as those in the Tea Party of today, who eulogize Ronald and Nancy Reagan in a way that seems like serious case of denial pathology. Apparently making Americans feel good is better than formulating policies that provide good paying jobs and give balance to wealth distribution in a society. I understand that Mercedes Benz factory workers in Alabama are paid half the rate that German workers get for the same work. Isn’t this a true reversal of fortune? That is the essence of capitalism–especially the form that Reagan helped to develop–the toxic capitalism that destroys unions, marginalizes wages of workers and then moves on to another country where labor is even cheaper.
Many historians who debate the similarity between the Roman Empire of the ancient world and the American Empire of today, coalesce behind the idea that one feature in particular was shared by both empires, included the perception that their only concern was the country or city in which they lived, coupled with complete ignorance about the world outside, but it was the world that they wanted to dominate. Don’t you find it odd that a country intent on dominating the world is so ignorant about the nature of what it is they want to dominate? Well, they are not the same people are they? That is, the would be “dominators” are different than the dodo citizens who can’t locate the Atlantic ocean on a map. And who was it that decided on this “option” for dominance by America. Only now, with events like the massive demonstrations in Egypt, are we beginning to wake up to a world that has changed without us really knowing anything about what it was like before the changes began. Surely we have reached the low point in our ignorance. But I’m sure the Tea Party can show us a lower bar for stupidity and the inability to face reality.
Americans have a way of assimilating bad presidents and absorbing their errors in judgment and their bad policies. But Ronald Reagan was a president whose errors cannot be absorbed, as he gave us an irreversible demarcation point in our history, one which has forced us backwards as a society, slowly unraveling the layers we had generated which favored social and economic justice on a much broader scale than what we have today. In the 19th and 20th Centuries, we were steadily marching towards improved social and economic conditions and better opportunities for education and improvements in our lives. Before the current recession, the policies of the Bush administration, based on the ideas of Reaganomics (Bush’s plan was to exactly reproduce Reagan’s presidency, as he began with significant tax cuts, especially for the wealthy and huge deficits as part of “kill the beast” approach to government) had pushed us many steps further but in the same direction as what Reagan had induced. Through Bush, we generated a new Gilded Age of the 21st Century, that led directly to our current economic crisis. The element that confronts us today is perhaps the biggest challenge we have ever faced as a society–that of dealing with giant, multinational corporations, the entities that Ronald Reagan favored and to which he gave such a boost, just as if he was still employed by General Electric. Our courts have ruled that corporations are essentially people and entitled to the privileges of the 14th Amendment of our constitution and now they can contribute unlimited funds to campaigns. Armed with new options for contributing to political campaigns, corporate power will be flexing its substantial wealth in the election of 2012, while the mythology of Ronald Reagan continues to propagate itself until we say enough is enough and begin to look more objectively at his achievements. Not only is the Reagan cupboard bare, but there are a lot of things missing.
A bad President is one whose implemented policies places the country into a more perilous future. That is what Ronald Reagan, Reaganism and Reaganomics have done to America and, as we see the fresh bloom of new corporate greed spill out into actions like the privatization of the world’s water supply, we can appreciate the threat that these changes have imposed on our future. But, they can all be gone in a minute. If each state simply nullified their corporate contract, they would be without license to operate in the states that rejected their rights to operate . That would get the CEO fired and force his/her replacement to renegotiate the license. Just a few such examples like that would bring the ruling corporate elite back to the real world and help restore society to a pathway of sanity.
RFM
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