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Books by Robert Parry
Lost History /
Secrecy & Privilege /
Neck Deep
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Ronald Reagan's
30-Year Time Bombs
By
Robert Parry
The time element of
“30 years” keeps slipping into American official reports
and news stories about the origins of crises – the
latest in “The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report” – but
rarely is the relevance of the three-decade span
explained, and there is a reason.
The failure to
close the circle in saying who started the nation off on
the path toward these disasters is because nearly
everyone shies away from blaming
Ronald Reagan for
almost anything.
The overpowering
consensus in Washington is that its political suicide to
criticize the 40th president of the United States, whose
centennial birthday on Feb. 6 will be celebrated
elaborately.
It’s much safer to
behave like MSNBC’s “Hardball” host
Chris Matthews and
simply accept that Reagan was “one of the all-time
greats.”
But the truth is
that Reagan’s current historical reputation rests more
on the effectiveness of the Republican propaganda
machine—and the timidity of many Democrats and media
personalities—than on his actual record of
accomplishments.
Indeed, many of
today’s worst national and international problems can be
traced to misjudgments and malfeasance from the Reagan
years—from the swelling national debt to out-of-control
banks, from the decline of the U.S. middle class to the
inaction on energy independence, from the rise of
Islamic fundamentalism to Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.
All of these
disasters are part of the Reagan Legacy. Yet, possibly
the most insidious residue from the Reagan Years was the
concept of manipulating information—what some Reagan
officials liked to call “perception management”—as a
means of societal control.
In that endeavor,
Reagan’s team took aim at two key entities—the CIA’s
analytical division and the Washington press corps—with the realization that if the information produced
and disseminated by those two groups could be controlled
then the insider community of Washington and the broader
American public could be managed.
That enabled the
Reagan administration to exaggerate the threat posed by
the Soviet Union (after Reagan’s CIA chief
William Casey
and his deputy
Robert Gates purged many of the CIA
analysts who correctly saw a decaying empire eager for
accommodation with the West).
Similarly,
well-financed right-wing operatives and administration
officials worked to marginalize mainstream journalists
(the “liberal press”) who raised troublesome questions
about Reagan’s domestic and foreign policies.
The impact of these
information strategies had deadly consequences even
years later, such as when
President George W. Bush and
Vice President Dick Cheney essentially dictated the
intelligence “analysis” on Iraq’s WMD to the CIA and
the Washington press corps fell in line behind the march
to war.
Even today,
President Barack Obama complains that his options for
addressing the nation’s growing problems are limited by
what he calls the Reagan “narrative,” demonizing
government. [See “Obama’s Fear of
the Reagan Narrative.”]
A Central
Narrative
The
Reagan Legacy
also lives on as the central narrative of the
now-empowered Republican Party and its Tea Party allies.
The answer to domestic problems is always to cut taxes,
slash government regulations and trust the private
sector, while the cure for international threats is to
talk tough and to take down governments that won’t obey.
For Republicans,
virtually all issues must be shoved into the
straitjacket of Reagan’s orthodoxy, while the Right’s
powerful media continues to build false narratives for
public consumption thus guaranteeing that alternative
approaches are met with unrelenting hostility.
This strategy
works, in part, because progressives lack a sufficient
messaging apparatus to counter the Reagan narrative and
Democratic politicians know that they risk retaliation
if they challenge too directly the pleasant conventional
wisdom about Reagan.
So, instead of a
blunt recognition of Reagan’s responsibility for crises,
the 30-year reference slides in as if something
mysterious about the early 1980s explains how later
catastrophes originated. There is no who-done-it in
these mysteries; Reagan must be kept enshrined as the
genial ex-actor who revived the American spirit after
those trying days of the 1970s.
However, if future
historians are fair (and that is no sure thing), the
reevaluation of Ronald Reagan should start with a
reassessment of the “failed” presidents from the
1970s—Richard Nixon,
Gerald Ford and
Jimmy Carter. All
may deserve more credit than they got for trying to
grapple with problems that now bedevil the country.
For instance,
Nixon,
Ford and
Carter won scant praise for addressing
the systemic challenges from America’s oil dependence,
environmental degradation, the arms race, and nuclear
proliferation—all issues that Reagan essentially ignored
and that now threaten the future of America and the
planet.
These presidents
also followed a generally moderate course on economic
policies, finding bipartisan approaches to challenges
like inflation and budget deficits, which were a tiny
fraction of today’s numbers.
Nixon—despite his
ugly paranoia and noxious bigotry—helped create the
Environmental Protection Agency; he imposed
energy-conservation measures; he opened the diplomatic
door to communist China. Nixon’s administration also
detected the growing weakness in the
Soviet Union and
advocated a
policy of détente (a plan for bringing the
Cold War to an end or at least curbing its most
dangerous excesses).
After Nixon’s
resignation in the
Watergate scandal, Ford continued
many of Nixon’s policies, particularly trying to wind
down the Cold War with Moscow. However, confronting a
rebellion from Reagan’s Republican Right in 1976, Ford
abandoned “détente.”
Ford also let
hard-line Cold Warriors (and a first wave of young
intellectuals who became known as neoconservatives)
pressure the CIA’s analytical division (the so-called
“Team-B Experiment”), and he brought in a new generation
of hard-liners, including
Dick
Cheney and
Donald
Rumsfeld.
After defeating
Ford in 1976, Carter injected more respect for human
rights into U.S. foreign policy, a move some scholars
believe put an important nail in the coffin of the
Soviet Union, leaving it hard-pressed to justify the
repressive internal practices of the East Bloc.
Carter also
emphasized the need to contain the spread of nuclear
weapons, especially in unstable countries like Pakistan.
Domestically,
Carter pushed a comprehensive energy policy and warned
Americans that their growing dependence on foreign oil
represented a national security threat, what he famously
called “the moral equivalent of war.”
However, powerful
vested interests—both domestic and foreign—managed to
exploit the shortcomings of these three presidents to
sabotage any sustained progress. By 1980, Reagan had
emerged as the Pied Piper luring the American people
away from the tough choices that Nixon, Ford and Carter
had defined. [See Robert Parry’s
Secrecy & Privilege.]
Sunny
Disposition
With his
superficially sunny disposition—and a ruthless political
strategy of exploiting white-male resentments—Reagan
convinced millions of Americans that the threats they
faced were: African-American
welfare queens, Central
American leftists, a rapidly expanding
Evil Empire based
in Moscow, and the do-good federal government.
In his First
Inaugural Address in 1981, Reagan declared that
“government is not the solution to our problem;
government is the problem.”
When it came to
cutting back on America’s energy use, Reagan’s message
could be boiled down to the old reggae lyric, “Don’t
worry, be happy.” Rather than pressing Detroit to build
smaller, fuel-efficient cars, Reagan made clear that the
auto industry could manufacture gas-guzzlers without
much nagging from Washington.
The same with the
environment. Reagan intentionally staffed the
Environmental Protection Agency and the
Interior
Department with officials who were hostile toward
regulation aimed at protecting the environment.
Reagan pushed for
deregulation of industries, including banking; he
slashed income taxes for the wealthiest Americans in an
experiment known as “supply side” economics, which held
falsely that cutting rates for the rich would increase
revenues and eliminate the federal deficit.
Over the years,
“supply side” would evolve into a secular religion for
many on the Right, but Reagan’s budget director
David
Stockman once blurted out the truth, that it would lead
to red ink “as far as the eye could see.”
While conceding
that some of Reagan’s economic plans did not work out as
intended, his defenders—including many mainstream
journalists—still argue that Reagan should be hailed as
a great President because he “won the Cold War,” a
short-hand phrase that they like to attach to his
historical biography.
However, a strong
case can be made that the
Cold War was won well before
Reagan arrived in the White House. Indeed, in the 1970s,
it was a common perception in the U.S. intelligence
community that the Cold War between the United States
and the Soviet Union was winding down, largely because
the Soviet economic model had lost the technological
race with the West.
That was the view
of many
Kremlinologists in the CIA’s analytical
division. Also, I was told by a senior CIA’s operations
official that some of the CIA’s best spies inside the
Soviet hierarchy supported the view that the Soviet
Union was headed toward collapse, not surging toward
world supremacy, as Reagan and his foreign policy team
insisted in the early 1980s.
The
CIA analysis
was the basis for the détente that was launched by Nixon
and Ford, essentially seeking a negotiated solution to
the most dangerous remaining aspects of the Cold War.
In that view,
Soviet military operations, including sending troops
into Afghanistan in 1979, were mostly defensive in
nature. In Afghanistan, the Soviets hoped to prop up a
secular pro-communist government that was seeking to
modernize the country but was beset by opposition from
Islamic fundamentalists who were getting covert support
from the U.S. government.
Though the Afghan
covert operation originated with
Cold Warriors in the
Carter administration, especially national security
adviser
Zbigniew Brzezinski, the war was dramatically
ramped up under Reagan.
Reagan and CIA
Director
Casey also were willing to trade U.S.
acquiescence toward Pakistan’s nuclear arms program for
its help in shipping weaponry to the Afghan jihadists
(including a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden). [See “Reagan’s Bargain/Charlie Wilson’s
War.”]
Making Matters
Worse
While Reagan’s
acolytes cite the
Soviet defeat in Afghanistan as
decisive in “winning the Cold War,” the counter-argument
is that Moscow was already in disarray—and while failure
in Afghanistan may have sped the Soviet Union’s final
collapse—it also created twin dangers for the future of
the world: the rise of
al-Qaeda terrorism and the
nuclear bomb in the hands of
Pakistan’s unstable Islamic
Republic.
In other words,
Reagan’s over-reaction to the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan created even worse long-term threats to U.S.
national security. And, instead of crediting Reagan with
“winning the Cold War,” it could be argued that he
extended it unnecessarily—at great cost in lives and
money.
Reagan’s actions
elsewhere in the world also damaged long-term U.S.
interests. In
Latin America, for instance, Reagan’s
brutal strategy of arming right-wing militaries to crush
peasant, student and labor uprisings created a legacy of
anti-Americanism that has resurfaced in the emergence of
populist leftist governments.
In
Nicaragua,
Sandinista leader
Daniel Ortega (whom Reagan once
denounced as a “dictator in designer glasses”) returned
to power. In
El Salvador, the leftist FMLN won the last
presidential election. Indeed, across the region,
hostility to Washington is now the rule, creating
openings for
China,
Iran,
Cuba,
Venezuela and other
American rivals.
In the early 1980s,
Reagan also credentialed a young generation of
neocon
intellectuals, who pioneered a concept called
“perception management,” the shaping of how Americans
saw, understood and were frightened by threats from
abroad.
To marginalize
dissent, Reagan and his subordinates stoked anger toward
anyone who challenged the era’s feel-good optimism.
Skeptics were not just honorable critics, they were
un-American defeatists or—in
Jeane Kirkpatrick’s
memorable attack line—they would “blame America first.”
Under Reagan, a
right-wing infrastructure took shape, linking media
outlets (magazines, newspapers, books, etc.) with
well-financed think tanks that churned out endless op-eds
and research papers. Plus, there were attack groups that
went after mainstream journalists who dared disclose
information that poked holes in Reagan’s propaganda
themes.
In effect, Reagan’s
team created a faux reality for the American public.
Civil wars in Central America between impoverished
peasants and wealthy oligarchs became East-West
showdowns. U.S.-backed insurgents in
Nicaragua,
Angola
and
Afghanistan were transformed from corrupt, brutal
(often drug-tainted) thugs into noble
“freedom-fighters.”
With the
Iran-Contra schemes of 1984-86, Reagan also revived
Richard Nixon’s
theory of an imperial presidency that
could ignore the nation’s laws and evade accountability
through criminal cover-ups. That behavior would rear its
head again in the war crimes of George W. Bush. [For
details on Reagan’s abuses, see Robert Parry’s
Lost History and
Secrecy & Privilege.]
Wall Street Greed
The
American Dream also dimmed
during Reagan’s tenure.
While he played the
role of the nation’s kindly grandfather, his operatives
divided the American people, using “wedge issues” to
deepen grievances especially of white men who were
encouraged to see themselves as victims of “reverse
discrimination” and “political correctness.”
Yet even as
working-class white men were rallying to the Republican
banner (as so-called “Reagan Democrats”), their economic
interests were being savaged.
Unions were broken and
marginalized; “free trade” policies
shipped
manufacturing jobs abroad; old neighborhoods were
decaying; drug use among the young was soaring.
Meanwhile,
unprecedented greed was unleashed on
Wall Street,
fraying old-fashioned bonds between company owners and
employees.
Before Reagan,
corporate CEOs earned less than 50 times the salary of
an average worker. By the end of the Reagan-Bush-I
administrations in 1993, the average CEO salary was more
than 100 times that of a typical worker. (At the end of
the Bush-II administration, that CEO-salary figure was
more than 250 times that of an average worker.)
Many other trends
set during the Reagan era continued to corrode the U.S.
political process in the years after Reagan left office.
After 9/11, for instance, the
neocons reemerged as a
dominant force, reprising their “perception management”
tactics, depicting the “war on terror”—like the last
days of the Cold War—as a terrifying conflict between
good and evil.
The hyping of the
Islamic threat mirrored the
neocons’ exaggerated
depiction of the Soviet menace in the 1980s—and again
the propaganda strategy worked. Many Americans let their
emotions run wild, from the hunger for revenge after
9/11 to the war fever over invading Iraq.
Arguably, the
descent into this dark fantasyland—that Ronald Reagan
began in the early 1980s—reached its nadir in the
flag-waving early days of the
Iraq War. Only gradually
did reality begin to reassert itself as the death toll
mounted in Iraq and the
Katrina disaster reminded
Americans why they needed an effective government.
Still, the
disasters—set in motion by Ronald Reagan—continued to
roll in. George W. Bush’s Reagan-esque tax cuts for the
rich blew another huge hole in the federal budget and
the Reagan-esque anti-regulatory fervor contributed to a
massive financial meltdown that threw the nation into
economic chaos.
The majority report
of the
Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission blamed the
banking crisis, in part, on “30 years of deregulation
and reliance on self-regulation.” (Not surprisingly, the
four Republicans on the commission refused to sign on,
seeking to lay greater blame on government policies for
encouraging home ownership.)
GOP Icon
Republicans
continue to enforce the notion that Reagan is an
untouchable icon, that his memory and his policies must
be revered. After the GOP gained control of Congress in
1994, the party rushed to name as many public sites
after Reagan as possible, seeking to elevate their hero
to the stature of martyred leaders like
John F. Kennedy
and
Martin Luther King Jr.
In that endeavor,
the Republicans often had the help of Democrats who saw
honoring Reagan as an easy gesture of political
bipartisanship, apparently unaware of—or unwilling to
contest—the larger GOP strategy of solidifying the
status of
Reaganism as much as Reagan.
For instance, early
in
Campaign 2008, when Barack Obama was positioning
himself as a bipartisan political figure who could
appeal to Republicans, he bowed to the Reagan mystique,
hailing the GOP icon as a leader who “changed the
trajectory of America.”
Though Obama’s
chief point was that Reagan in 1980 “put us on a
fundamentally different path”—a point which may be
historically undeniable—Obama went further, justifying
Reagan’s course correction because of “all the excesses
of the 1960s and 1970s, and government had grown and
grown, but there wasn’t much sense of accountability.”
While Obama later
clarified his point to say he didn’t mean to endorse
Reagan’s conservative policies, Obama seemed to suggest
that Reagan’s 1980 election administered a needed dose
of accountability to the United States when Reagan
actually did the opposite. Reagan’s presidency
represented a dangerous escape from accountability – and
reality. [See “Obama’s Dubious
Praise for Reagan.”]
Obama and
congressional Democrats have continued to pander to the
Reagan myth. In 2009, President Obama hailed Ronald
Reagan while welcoming
Nancy Reagan to the White House
and signing a law creating a panel to honor Reagan’s
100th birthday on Feb. 6, 2011.
“President Reagan
helped as much as any President to restore a sense of
optimism in our country, a spirit that transcended
politics—that transcended even the most heated arguments
of the day,” Obama said.
It may take many
more years before a mainstream politician or a
journalist who cares about future employment dares speak
truthfully about Reagan and the grievous harm that his
presidency inflicted on the American Republic and the
people of the Earth.
28 January 2011
Source:
ConsortiumNews
Robert Parry
is an
American investigative journalist. He was awarded
the
George Polk Award for National Reporting in 1984 for
his work with the
Associated Press on the
Iran-Contra story and uncovered
Oliver North's involvement in it as a
Washington-based correspondent for
Newsweek. In 1995, he established Consortium News as
an online
ezine dedicated to
investigative journalism. From 2000 to 2004, he
worked for the financial wire service
Bloomberg.
Major subjects of
Parry's articles and reports on Consortium News include
the presidency of
George W. Bush, the career of Army general and Bush
Secretary of State
Colin Powell (with
Norman Solomon), the
October Surprise controversy of the 1980 election,
the Nicaraguan contra-cocaine investigation, the efforts
to impeach President
Clinton, right-wing terrorism in Latin America, the
political influence of
Sun Myung Moon, mainstream American media imbalance,
United States Secretary of Defense
Robert Gates, the presidency of
Barack Obama, the influence of
Sarah Palin, as well as international stories.
Parry has written
several books, including
Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press &
"Project Truth" (1999) and
Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from
Watergate to Iraq (2004), and
Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush
—Wikipedia
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Bill Moyers
and Bruce Bartlett on Where the Right Went Wrong—14
February 2012—Bill Moyers talks with
conservative economist Bruce Bartlett, who wrote
"the bible" for the Reagan Revolution, worked on
domestic policy for the Reagan White House, and
served as a top treasury official under the first
President Bush. Now he's a heretic in the
conservative circles where he once was a star.
Bartlett argues that right-wing tax policies --
pushed in part by Grover Norquist and Tea Party
activists -- are destroying the country's economic
foundation.
Bill Moyers:
Heather McGhee speaks of how the neoliberal economic
experience of the last 30 years—including cutting taxes
on the rich and waiting for the wealth and prosperity to
trickle down—has left her generation of Millennials
standing under a spigot someone forgot to turn on. After
a few drips and drops, it went dry. So did the very
notion of equal opportunity for all. And today we’re
living in a country deeply divided between winners and
losers. Nowhere is that more evident than in our tax
system—so distorted by loopholes, exemptions, credits,
and deductions favoring the already rich and powerful
that it no longer can raise the money needed to pay the
government’s bills.
Among the people
who saw this crisis coming was the conservative
economist Bruce Bartlett, the supply-side champion who
wrote the manifesto for the Reagan Revolution. Bartlett
became a senior policy analyst in the Reagan White House
and a top official at the Treasury Department under the
first George Bush. Yet for all those credentials, he is
today an outcast from the very conservative ranks where
he was once so influential.
That’s because
Bruce Bartlett dared to write a book criticizing the
second George Bush as a pretend conservative who slashed
taxes but still spent with wild abandon. The subtitle
says it all:
How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the
Reagan Legacy.
For his heresy
Bartlett was sacked by the conservative think tank where
he worked. Undaunted, this card-carrying advocate of
free markets and small government has been a prolific
writer for popular and academic journals and has just
published a new book:
The Benefit and the Burden: Tax Reform—Why We Need It
and What It Will Take. It’s a layman’s guide
through the jungle of a tax system that, thanks to
rented politicians and anti-tax ideologues like Grover
Norquist, enable the one percent to make off like
bandits while our national debt soars sky-high. I talked
to Bruce Bartlett soon after he had finished his new
book.
Bill Moyers:
You've made the point that America's top earning one
percent had an effective 33.1 percent federal income tax
rate in 1986, and an effective rate of only 23.3 percent
in 2008. And you say if the top one percent had kept
paying at the 1986 effective rate, quote, "the federal
debt today would be $1.7 trillion lower." That's a lot
of money.
Bruce Bartlett:
Well, that's right. And when I say effective rate that
means the taxes that they paid divided by their income.
So that tells you what the revenue is that the
government gets from taxing them. And clearly, they were
doing okay at the beginning of that period. And that was
Ronald Reagan's administration. Up until 1986, the top
marginal rate, the top statutory rate was 50 percent.
Now it's 35 percent. And all the pressure is on to lower
that even further. And this just doesn't make a great
deal of sense to me. When people say, 'Oh, we can't
raise taxes on the rich. They'll go on strike, they'll
move to another country.' But within recent memory, it
hasn't been that long ago that we had rates that were
substantially higher. And these people did just fine.— OccupyAmerica
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Scorpions
The Battles and Triumphs of FDR's Great
Supreme Court Justices
By
Noah Feldman
As a
conservative Supreme Court flexes its
muscles against a Democratic president for
the first time since the New Deal, a series
of recent books has explored the
constitutional battles of the Roosevelt era
and their contemporary relevance. Harvard
law professor Feldman's
Scorpions
focuses more on the battles of the 1940s and
1950s, and it is distinguished by its thesis
that the "distinctive constitutional
theories" of Roosevelt's four greatest
justices, all of whom began as New Deal
liberals—Hugo
Black,
William O. Douglas,
Felix Frankfurter, and
Robert Jackson—have continued to "cover
the whole field of constitutional thought"
up to the present day. |
Feldman argues that
Black,
the liberal originalist;
Douglas, the activist libertarian;
Frankfurter, the advocate of strenuous
judicial deference; and
Jackson, the pragmatist; achieved greatness
by developing four unique constitutional approaches,
which reflected their own personalities and worldviews,
although they were able to converge on common ground in
Brown v. Board of Education, which Feldman calls
the last and greatest act of the
Roosevelt Court. The pleasure of this book comes
from Feldman's skill as a narrator of intellectual
history.
With confidence and
an eye for telling details, he relates the story of the
backstage deliberations that contributed to the landmark
decisions of the
Roosevelt Court, including not only Brown but
also cases involving the internment of
Japanese-Americans, the trial of the German saboteurs,
and President Truman's
seizure of the steel mills to avoid a strike.
Combining the critical judgments of a legal scholar with
political and narrative insight, Feldman is especially
good in describing how the clashing personalities and
philosophies of his four protagonists were reflected in
their negotiations and final opinions; his concise
accounts of Brown and the steel seizure case, for
example, are memorable.
And he describes
how the rivalries and personality clashes among the four
liberal allies eventually drove them apart:
Hugo
Black's determination to take revenge on
those who offended his Southern sense of honor led him
to retaliate not only against Jackson and Chief
Justice Harlan Fiske Stone but also against the
racist Southerners who had disclosed his former
Ku
Klux Klan membership to the press.
Not all readers
will be convinced by Feldman's thesis that the judicial
philosophies of the Roosevelt justices continue to
define the Court's terms of debate today: on the left
and the right, there are, for example, no advocates of
Frankfurter's near-complete judicial
abstinence or of
Douglas's romantic libertarian activism. And
in the political arena, the constitutional debates of
the 1940s and '50s seem less relevant today than those
of the Progressive era, when liberals first attacked the
conservative Court as pro-business, and conservatives
insisted that only the Court could defend liberty in the
face of an out-of-control regulatory state.
But Feldman does not try to make
too much of the contemporary relevance of the battles he
describes: this is a first-rate work of narrative
history that succeeds in bringing the intellectual and
political battles of the post-Roosevelt Court vividly to
life.—Jeffrey Rosen, a
law professor at George Washington University, is the
author of
The Supreme Court: The Personalities and Rivalries That
Defined America, Publishers Weekly
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A Tale of Two Moralities
One side of American
politics considers the modern welfare state—a
private-enterprise economy, but one in which society’s
winners are taxed to pay for a social safety net—morally
superior to the capitalism red in tooth and claw we had
before the New Deal. It’s only right, this side
believes, for the affluent to help the less fortunate.
The other side believes
that people have a right to keep what they earn, and
that taxing them to support others, no matter how needy,
amounts to theft. That’s what lies behind the modern
right’s fondness for violent rhetoric: many activists on
the right really do see taxes and regulation as
tyrannical impositions on their liberty.— NYTimes
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Reagan's Real
Legacy—By Peter Dreier—4 February 2011—During his
two terms in the White House (1981–89), Reagan presided
over a widening gap between the rich and everyone else,
declining wages and living standards for working
families, an assault on labor unions as a vehicle to
lift Americans into the middle class, a dramatic
increase in poverty and homelessness, and the
consolidation and deregulation of the financial industry
that led to the current mortgage meltdown, foreclosure
epidemic and lingering recession. These trends were not
caused by inevitable social and economic forces. They
resulted from Reagan’s policy and political choices
based on an underlying “you’re on your own” ideology. .
. .
Reagan’s fans give
him credit for restoring the nation’s prosperity. But
whatever economic growth occurred during the Reagan
years mostly benefitted those already well off. The
income gap between the rich and everyone else in America
widened. Wages for the average worker declined and the
nation’s homeownership rate fell. During Reagan’s two
terms in the White House, the minimum wage was frozen at
$3.35 an hour, while prices rose, thus eroding the
standard of living of millions of low-wage workers. The
number of people living beneath the federal poverty line
rose from 26.1 million in 1979 to 32.7 million in 1988.
Meanwhile, the rich got much richer. By the end of the
decade, the richest 1 percent of Americans had 39
percent of the nation’s wealth. . . .
Reagan’s fans give
him credit for restoring the nation’s prosperity. But
whatever economic growth occurred during the Reagan
years mostly benefitted those already well off. The
income gap between the rich and everyone else in America
widened. Wages for the average worker declined and the
nation’s homeownership rate fell. During Reagan’s two
terms in the White House, the minimum wage was frozen at
$3.35 an hour, while prices rose, thus eroding the
standard of living of millions of low-wage workers. The
number of people living beneath the federal poverty line
rose from 26.1 million in 1979 to 32.7 million in 1988.
Meanwhile, the rich got much richer. By the end of the
decade, the richest 1 percent of Americans had 39
percent of the nation’s wealth. . . .
The declining
fiscal fortunes of America’s cities began during the
Reagan years. By the end of his second term, federal
assistance to local governments had been slashed by 60
percent. Reagan eliminated general revenue sharing to
cities, cut funding for public service jobs and job
training, almost dismantled federally funded legal
services for the poor, cut the antipoverty Community
Development Block Grant program and reduced funds for
public transit.
These cutbacks had a disastrous
effect on cities with high levels of poverty and limited
property tax bases, many of which depended on federal
aid to provide basic services. In 1980 federal dollars
accounted for 22 percent of big city budgets. By the end
of Reagan’s second term, federal aid was only 6 percent.
The consequences were devastating to urban schools and
libraries, municipal hospitals and clinics, and
sanitation, police and fire departments—many of which
had to shut their doors. Many cities still haven’t
recovered from the downward spiral started during the
Gipper’s presidency.— TheNation
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Jeremiah Wright with Bill Moyers
Interview with Jeremiah Wright
Ronald
Reagan Worst President Ever?— By Robert Parry—20
February 2012—Before Reagan, corporate CEOs earned
less than 50 times the salary of an average worker.
By the end of the Reagan-Bush-I administrations in
1993, the average CEO salary was more than 100 times
that of a typical worker. (At the end of the Bush-II
administration, that CEO-salary figure was more than
250 times that of an average worker.)
Many other
trends set during the Reagan era continued to
corrode the U.S. political process in the years
after Reagan left office. After 9/11, for instance,
the neocons reemerged as a dominant force, reprising
their “perception management” tactics, depicting the
“war on terror”—like the last days of the Cold
War—as a terrifying conflict between good and evil.
The hyping of
the Islamic threat mirrored the neocons’ exaggerated
depiction of the Soviet menace in the 1980s—and
again the propaganda strategy worked. Many Americans
let their emotions run wild, from the hunger for
revenge after 9/11 to the war fever over invading
Iraq.
Arguably, the
descent into this dark fantasyland—that Ronald
Reagan began in the early 1980s – reached its nadir
in the flag-waving early days of the Iraq War. Only
gradually did reality begin to reassert itself as
the death toll mounted in Iraq and the Katrina
disaster reminded Americans why they needed an
effective government.
Still, the
disasters—set in motion by Ronald Reagan—continued
to roll in. Bush’s Reagan-esque tax cuts for the
rich blew another huge hole in the federal budget
and the Reagan-esque anti-regulatory fervor led to a
massive financial meltdown that threw the nation
into economic chaos.—ConsortiumNews
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My Father at 100
By
Ron Reagan
February 6, 2011, is the one hundredth
anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth. To
mark the occasion, Ron Reagan has written My
Father at 100, an intimate look at the life
of his father-one of the most popular
presidents in American history-told from the
perspective of someone who knew Ronald
Reagan better than any adviser, friend, or
colleague. As he grew up under his father's
watchful gaze, he observed the very
qualities that made the future president a
powerful leader. Yet for all of their shared
experiences of horseback rides and touch
football games, there was much that Ron
never knew about his father's past, and in
My Father at 100, he sets out to understand
this beloved, if often enigmatic, figure who
turned his early tribulations into a
stunning political career. |
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The Last Holiday: A Memoir
By Gil Scott Heron
Shortly after we republished The Vulture and The Nigger Factory, Gil started to tell me about The Last Holiday, an account he was writing of a multi-city tour that he ended up doing with Stevie Wonder in late 1980 and early 1981. Originally Bob Marley was meant to be playing the tour that Stevie Wonder had conceived as a way of trying to force legislation to make Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday. At the time, Marley was dying of cancer, so Gil was asked to do the first six dates. He ended up doing all 41. And Dr King's birthday ended up becoming a national holiday ("The Last Holiday because America can't afford to have another national holiday"), but Gil always felt that Stevie never got the recognition he deserved and that his story needed to be told. The first chapters of this book were given to me in New York when Gil was living in the Chelsea Hotel. Among the pages was a chapter called Deadline that recounts the night they played Oakland, California, 8 December; it was also the night that John Lennon was murdered. Gil uses Lennon's violent end as a brilliant parallel to Dr King's assassination and as a biting commentary on the constraints that sometimes lead to newspapers getting things wrong. —Jamie Byng, Guardian / Gil_reads_"Deadline" (audio) / Gil Scott-Heron
& His Music Gil Scott
Heron Blue Collar
Remember Gil Scott- Heron |
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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ChickenBones Store
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posted 31 January 2011
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