I am hardly the first to opine on the Baby Reaganites who have matriculated into the media and who now smirk and shrug their ways before the cameras. I was reminded of the matter this morning while drinking coffee and watching Baby Reaganites Par Excellence on the morning news. The B.R. squad is working hard to convey the view that the Democrats are the makers of our nation’s disastrous deficits and that by turns, any effort to help the poor and the dying middle classes represents a flagrant and irresponsible extension of our national debt.
Yesterday while riding a bus in Iowa City I overheard a graduate student explain to a fellow rider that the Obama administration will, by the time it finishes its first term have created the largest increase in our national debt in history. I couldn’t stand it. I turned around and told him that this was absolutely untrue and added that the greatest increase in our nation’s national debt has occurred under Ronald Reagan’s watch, with W. Bush in second place.
OF course facts are stupid things. What’s the point? The point of course is that real working class people are starving right now. And our social services network has collapsed. People with serious disabilities are facing the very real prospect of being thrown into the streets. The heartlessness of the GOP is unparalleled in modern history. But you wouldn’t know this by watching the Baby Reaganites on TV. Their rotor-beanie are powered by Quinnnipiac Polls and whoever paid for their lunches.
We at POTB are fans of Will Bunch’s book Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future
Here’s a little video segment of Mr. Bunch:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/mpd/permalink/m21XM8ZOMICNOS
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I was a graduate student in Iowa during Reagan’s first term. I remember his heartlessness toward the family farmers who were going “under” during the early 80’s recession. Reagan observed that inefficiency had to be weeded out, etc. etc. The Gipper was nothing more than a corporate shill for General Electric. Even the Tin Man had a kinder heart than Reagan. He wasn’t my grandfather I can tell you that.
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Yet the veneration of the old phoney grows in our media. As Huck Finn would say, its enough to give me the fantods.
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Nearly 14% of children in the state of Iowa are living below the poverty level. How’s that legacy Mr. Reagan?
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It is estimated that 51% of Americans will live in poverty at some point before the age of 65.
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Take a look at Derrick Braziel’s piece on Rand Paul’s insensitivity to the poor entitled: Rand Paul to the Poor: Cheer Up, It’s Not So Bad!
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From Nader.org:
Here is the briefest of lists to illustrate — under Reagan there was a record near-tripling of the national debt to $2.7 trillion, record annual budget deficits, record trade deficits, record transforming of America into a debtor nation, record giveaway of public land resources, record decline in low income public housing starts, record homelessness, record Pentagon waste, fraud and abuse, record corporate crimes, record corporate mergers and acquisitions, record skyrocketing corporate executive salaries along with stagnant or declining real wages for workers, record salary hikes for top government officials, record-long freezing of the federal minimum wage, record export of jobs overseas, record selling of America cheaply to foreign investors.
Continuing … record complexity in federal tax and pension laws and in the forms people have to fill out, record cuts in food stamps, medicaid and the ‘social safety net, record ten year poverty rates, record deregulation of banks, record government bailouts for crooked or speculative banks, record number of bank failures, fifty year record number of farm foreclosures and bankruptcies, record amounts of hard drugs imported, record brazenness in pushing through Congress the abolition of the $ 1 20 per month minimum social security for 3 million Americans (later repealed under a wave of elderly protest), record denials of Social Security disability payments and record number of federal judges condemning these denials.
Continuing … record low in issuing of OSHA lob safety standards, record low in issuing NHTSA auto safety and fuel efficiency standards, record debacle in mismanaging the nation’s nuclear weapons’ plants and radioactive contamination, record denigration of federal solar and energy conservation programs since they got underway in early Seventies, record share of the taxpayer’s dollar going lust to pay interest on the national debt, record reliance of a debt-burdened government on foreign financiers, record resignations of shady, high government appointees (the sleaze phenomenon), record number of government civilian employees, record reduction planned for continual meat and poultry inspections, record low in significant antitrust law enforcement, record number of attempts by Reagan to destroy the legal services for the poor program, record tax bonanzas for six years given to major corporations.
Continuing record government secrecy, record insensitivity to civil liberties and enforcement of the civil rights laws, record prices for government publications and information thereby undermining public’s right to know, record hypocrisy between what a President says regarding the rights of government whistleblowers and ethics in government, compared to his vetoes and ‘look the other way’ behavior.
Continuing… record postwar high in the number of children living in poverty, record declining rate of student loan availability, record funding of chemical and biological warfare programs (since Nixon stopped them 28 years ago) and… oh, yes, a record number of speeches and statements against federal deficit spending.
Reagan has told us how he brought down inflation. But the record shows that the world oil glut, The Federal Reserve’s high interest rate policy and the worst postwar recession (1981- early 1983) produced that result, not Reagan.
Reagan says that his administration was responsible for creating over 1 7 million jobs. That is a strange thing for a supposed free enterpriser like Reagan to claim. Maybe he is referring to his massive
prime-the-pump red-ink spending. In any event, there was a record number of lower-paying jobs created in industry and commerce thereby requiring more members of the family to look for paying work.
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More members of the family who can live in poverty…
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Whatever happened to the funny version of Stephen Kuusisto? There are conflicting reports about his sense of humor. Some say they’ve seen it while camping in Maine. Others think they saw it on the subway in Manhattan. Wherever his humor has gone, we might reflect on his favorite graffito of all time. It was from the Nixon years. It was written on the wall of a bathroom stall. It said: “If you voted for Nixon in ’68 you cant’ shit here. Your asshole’s in Washington.”
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 