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The Legacy of the Reagan Years |
Current rating: 0 |
by CH
Email: choyle (nospam) insightbb.com (unverified!) |
08 Jun 2004
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The Legacy of the Reagan Years reported in the media in recent days is not how many remember his administration. |
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The legacy of President Reagan's Administration is still with us today.  There are those who feel that the seeds of many of today's problems were planted during his administration.  The recent sentimental reviews of his political accomplishments have not covered the many bad policies and the illegal activity of Iran-Contra; several of members the Reagan Administration were found guilty and spent time in jail.  Below are quotes and links to information from the Reagan years many remember:
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Reagan and Iraq:Â
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A picture is worth a thousand words: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nsa/publications/iraqgate/igpic.html
A sample of our exports to Iraq during his administration:Â http://cns.miis.edu/research/wmdme/flow/iraq/seed.htm
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Reagan and Osama bin Laden:Â
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http://www.nyu.edu/globalbeat/syndicate/feffer022502.html
http://www.public-i.org/dtaweb/report.asp?ReportID=23&L1=10&L2=70&L3=10&L4=0&L5=0
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Reagan and the environment:Â
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http://www.sierraclub.org/planet/199407/takings.asp
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http://multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/issues/1994/09/mm0994_11.html
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10 May 1980 Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan is quoted in the Chicago Tribune as saying:
"Trains are not any more energy efficient than the average automobile, with both getting about 48 passenger miles to the gallon."
10 Sep 1980 Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan is quoted in Sierra magazine as saying:
"Approximately 80% of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation. So let's not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough emissions standards from man-made sources."
9 Oct 1980 Ronald Reagan is quoted in the Los Angeles Times as saying:
"Growing and decaying vegetation in this land are responsible for 93% of the oxides of nitrogen."
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Reagan and public education:
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http://www.issues2000.org/Celeb/Ronald_Reagan_Education.htm
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(Remember when catsup was going to be counted as a vegetable in children's school lunches?)
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Reagan opposed the Voting Rights Act:
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http://www.issues2000.org/Celeb/Ronald_Reagan_Civil_Rights.htm
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21 Sep 1983 Ronald Reagan's Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, describes his staff's racial diversity to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce:
"We have every mixture you can have. I have a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple. And we have talent." Watt is forced to resign 18 days later over these comments.Â
Reagan and the AIDS crisis:
Â
http://www.issues2000.org/Celeb/Ronald_Reagan_Health_Care.htm
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May 1987 According to his authorized biography (published in 2000), Reagan wonders aloud about the AIDS pandemic:
"Maybe the Lord brought down this plague... [because] illicit sex is against the Ten Commandments." [Dutch, p. 458]
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Reagan and the mentally ill:Â
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http://www.sociology.org/content/vol003.004/thomas.html
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Iran-Contra:
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http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsPackageArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=525034
 Reagan gives us record deficits:
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24 Oct 1980 During a nationally-televised campaign speech, Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan declares:
"Mr. Carter is acting as if he hasn't been in charge for the past three and a half years; as if someone else was responsible for the largest deficit in American history."
(Carter's total deficit: $252 billion; Reagan's: $1.4 trillion)
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A quote from his days as Gov. of California:
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15 May 1969 Regarding the ongoing student protests at UC Berkeley, California governor Ronald Reagan is quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle as saying:
"If there has to be a bloodbath, then let's get it over with."
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A favorite quotes from the campaign:
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1979 Ronald Reagan:
"The American Petroleum Institute filed suit against the EPA [and] charged that the agency was suppressing a scientific study for fear it might be misinterpreted... The suppressed study reveals that 80 percent of air pollution comes not from chimneys and auto exhaust pipes, but from plants and trees."
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But there was humor:
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7 Jun 1982 President Ronald Reagan falls asleep during a meeting with Pope John Paul II.
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6 Mar 1984 Former President Jimmy Carter observes:
"President Reagan doesn't always check the facts before he makes statements, and the press accepts this as kind of amusing."
11 Aug 1984 Not realizing that his weekly radio address is already on the air, President Ronald Reagan quips into his live microphone:
"My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes."
21 Mar 1986 In an interview with the New York Times, President Ronald Reagan repeats his long-debunked claim:
"In England, if a criminal carried a gun, even though he didn't use it, he was tried for first-degree murder and hung if he was found guilty."
The legacy lives on.Â
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Related stories on this site:
The Reagan Legacy
Good riddance President Amnesia
Ronald Reagan's Legacy
Rating Reagan: A Bogus Legacy
Our Myopic Beeblebrox: Plausible Selective Memories
Don't Credit Reagan for Ending the Cold War
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This work is in the public domain. |
Comments
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Re: The Legacy of the Reagan Years |
by Ed
frozenthought (nospam) hotmail.com (unverified) |
Current rating: 0
08 Jun 2004
|
President Reagan Changed Me
By Tammy Bruce
FrontPageMagazine.com | June 7, 2004
There are events in life which remind one of what’s truly important. Last week, for example, the subject for this column was going to be the depraved absurdity of O.J. Simpson attempting to explain himself to the media. Again. On this ten-year anniversary of the murders of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman, Simpson was making the interview rounds as the car wreck of the week.
Then President Reagan died. Once again, in a world which seems to be swamped in the ugly and hopeless (think Michael Moore and O.J. Simpson), Reagan emerges as a reminder of the class, style, compassion and brilliance that makes this nation great.
You will read many tributes to the Great Man in the weeks to come. For my part, I present to you an abridgement of the confessional tribute I wrote a year ago about Mr. And Mrs. Reagan in my book, The Death of Right and Wrong.
Ronald Reagan inspired me to become a better person. With his death, perhaps those with whom I used to associate in the gay and feminist establishments will have the courage to look honestly at him and themselves.
***
In 1994 I was in my fourth year as president of the Los Angeles chapter of NOW. I had also served on the National NOW Board of Directors. It was a year I remember, for several reasons. It was the year O.J. Simpson killed Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman, and the year my town was hit by the devastating Northridge earthquake. It was also the year Ronald Reagan announced to the nation that he had Alzheimer’s. …
Ronald Reagan was hated, and still is, in the feminist-establishment circles in which I grew up. That milieu subsists on enemies and hatred. I took my cues from the women around me, women I admired. They were strong and confident, and they knew. They knew who was out to get us. They knew who was determined to throw us back into the Dark Ages. They knew Reagan was evil.
I tell you this not as an excuse for my past actions but as a further illustration of what I’ve been discussing throughout this book – the way malignant narcissism is spread. You see, the seed of my politics, the politics I espouse now, were already manifested in my voting for President Reagan 10 years earlier. I liked him, and I believed he had the best interests of Americans in mind. During my involvement with NOW, however, what took over was my need to be accepted, the romanticization of my “victimhood,” and the power I could achieve by following the models of the women at the top. Those women were happy that Reagan was sick, so I would be, too.
The conditioning of the Left Elite works so well partly because the people attracted to that camp are looking for family, they are looking to belong; consequently people like that – people like me – are easy pickings. My emptiness compelled me to cheer when a decent man who followed his principles was struck down by an unforgiving assailant. Alzheimer’s had done what many feminist leaders fantasized about doing themselves, if only they could get away with it.
Today, I am still pro-choice, and I still support fetal tissue research. But I now realize that those who disagree with me also have good points. I hope they reflect on their position as often as I do on mine, because both camps are on the razor’s edge. I have made my commitment to women and reproductive freedom, while my compatriots on the other side of the fence, mostly because of their religious faith, have made a pact with what they call “the unborn.”
We will have to agree to disagree, but only now do I consider those on that other side decent people – as decent as I, but with a different focus. Ronald Reagan is one of those decent people, but in all the feminist establishment’s mirth about his illness, never did they consider, never would they consider, the humanity of the man. Some may have made sympathetic public comments, but, like Madelyn Toogood, the woman who beat her little girl in a parking lot, they were simply looking around to make sure no one was watching before they returned to privately declaring that Reagan deserved to suffer. …
By now, you may not be surprised to learn that in certain gay and feminist circles, bottles of champagne wait in refrigerators to be opened when Reagan dies. …
I write this on the night Nancy Reagan appeared on “60 Minutes II.” Mike Wallace interviewed her about the former president, their marriage, and their history. Watching the show, I remembered why I liked Reagan so much – old footage of an early interview with Mike Wallace, at the time Reagan announced his first candidacy in 1976 (I was 14), deeply moved me and reminded me what great leadership was to come. ...
During the interview, Mrs. Reagan disclosed that she’s not sure her husband recognizes her anymore. Long ago he had stopped recognizing his children, but he always knew her. Now, it seems, he doesn’t. There was a deep sadness in the woman’s face. It was the “long goodbye,” as she called it.
The Reagans, like so many other people, had probably approached their Golden Years trusting, assuming, that memories would be shared, and laughed and cried about. For Nancy Reagan that doesn’t exist. She hasn’t said goodbye to her husband because “he’s still here,” but the welling of tears in her eyes revealed a wounded, sad woman. I found it heartbreaking to see, as would any decent person of any political persuasion.
Part of my life, however, is still reflective of what I call my “old” life – my years of leadership in the feminist establishment and involvement in the gay-rights movement. This night, those two lives collided. As I cried after the interview because of the sadness of it and my own guilt and shame, I checked my phone messages. There was one from a gay male friend, whom I see infrequently these days but with whom I share some fun and important activist memories.
He had been watching the same interview, but he was cheering. “Woo hoo! It looks like we might be opening up that champagne sooner than later! I hope you were watching the Dragon Lady on “60 Minutes” tonight. I suppose with Alzheimer’s, he’s not suffering anymore, but it sure looks like she is! There is a God after all.”
I had never thought of my friend as an indecent person, just as I never thought of myself as one. But he really hates those two people and wishes them awful things. He believes he’s in the right and they’re wrong. He also believes that the questions that divide them are moral issues about life and death. The difference, however, is that I think it’s safe to say neither Nancy nor Ronald Reagan ever had a bottle of champagne in the fridge waiting for a gay man or a feminist to die. The Reagans, I’ll bet, don’t hoot and holler at someone else’s pain.
Mrs. Reagan’s humanity illustrated by counterpoint the soullessness of the Left. We, the Feminist and Gay Elites, inflicted on society narcissists’ biggest crime of all: We couldn’t see beyond our own interests and desires. We became indecent in defending our principles. …
While I don’t hold out any hope for the damaged Left Elite I’ve exposed for you in this book, I know that we as individuals can overcome and reject what the Left demands of us – the abandonment of right and wrong, the banishment of decency and integrity, the rejection of what the Reagans, both of them, represent.
We can instead do our best to live honest lives, replete with the discomfort of shame, the difficulties of personal responsibility, and the joy, the genuine happiness, that only right and good can bring. We will have the reward of being better people.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tammy Bruce is a Fox News Channel Contributor and author of The Death of Right and Wrong. |
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The Great Prevaricator |
by Geov Parrish
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
08 Jun 2004
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The Reaction from Those of Us Who Came of Age During the Reagan Presidency -- and Found It Inexplicably Horrific
Excuse me while I barf.
I'm in no mood to join the joyful eulogies upon the passing of Ronald Reagan -- remembrances that prove, once again, the staggering size of our country's memory hole.
I missed the '60s. I grew up in Middle America, with Watergate, barely, and the benign buffoonery of Ford and Carter. When Ronald Reagan was elected president, it was an inexplicable, savage turn for a country that I'd never realized was capable of such things.
It's not just that George W. Bush would have been impossible without Reagan. The presidency of Ronald Reagan himself was so bad, on so many levels, that as young adults a sizeable number of us could only sputter in impotent rage, a rage summed up nicely by the Crucif***s song "Hinckley Had A Vision." It simply made no sense that an entire country could be run by sinister thugs, all because its spokesperson was a washed up actor with the professional training to deliver the most ridiculous, venal lies with a calming, "Great Communicator" demeanor.
Great Communicator, my ass. Tens of thousands of us died of AIDS on his watch, and he never even once mentioned the word. He also refused to adequately fund AIDS research -- a critical delay that, we now know, could have saved countless lives. We seem to have forgotten that.
We've also forgotten the corruption -- not just the constitution-shredding outrage of Iran-Contra, but an administration that set a modern record for the number of indicted officials.
It was the Great Communicator whose era gave us the term, and scourge, of homelessness. It was Reagan who launched an illegal war on Nicaragua, Reagan who unleashed and praised Guatemala's genocide and El Salvador's death squads. Reagan whose tax cuts and funding choices launched class war at home, a class war still being successfully waged, by many of the same officials, 20 years later.
And excuse me, but Ronald Reagan did not end communism. Hundreds of thousands of courageous people, in Moscow and Gdansk and Prague and across the communist bloc, deserve the credit for risking their lives to bring down tyrannical governments, often with nothing more than the willingness to sacrifice their own bodies. They risked everything. Reagan risked nothing but an inadvertent record deficit it took a decade and a Democratic president to heal.
To honor Reagan as the triumphant Cold Warrior, without even mentioning the courage of all those ordinary people, just after the 15th anniversary of that lone man in Tiananmen Square, is an insult of staggering proportions. Ronald Reagan had a historic meltdown happen on his watch; he was no more responsible for it than George W. Bush was responsible for another, less positive cataclysm in 2001. Less, even. At least the CIA knew something like 9-11 was in the works. They had no idea the Iron Curtain would collapse.
There's no doubt the reign of Ronald "Bedtime for Bonzo" Reagan had truly profound implications for our country and the world. Whether that's a good thing or not is a matter of debate.
Last week in this space, I mourned the passing of David Dellinger, a contemporary of Reagan's who exemplified, far better than Ronnie ever could, courage and integrity and compassion. Dellinger spent his adult life speaking truth to power; Reagan spent it making things up for an audience. One was an apostle of selfless love; the other presided over the Me Decade.
Not all of us spent that decade obsessing over our investments and stepping over the homeless. For much of my twenties, I helped organize protests of hundreds of thousands of people on the Mall and at the Pentagon and elsewhere in Washington. Most of us are still around. Most of us still remember the profound sense of shock as we watched our country become a place we didn't recognize, led by a genial, seemingly clueless man with an agenda that was on many levels simply evil.
Sound familiar? Forget the obituaries; I can hardly wait to unseat Ronald Reagan's heir in November.
© 2004 Working Assets
http://www.workingforchange.com |
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Re: The Legacy of the Reagan Years |
by CH
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
08 Jun 2004
|
For those who would like to review the list of charges and findings from the Congressional investigation into the Iran-Contra Affair the report's summary is at:
http://www.webcom.com/pinknoiz/covert/icsummary.html
A portion of the summary statement is pasted below:
The Iran operations were carried out with the knowledge of, among others, President Ronald Reagan, Vice President George Bush, Secretary of State George P. Shultz, Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger, Director of Central Intelligence William J. Casey, and national security advisers Robert C. McFarlane and John M. Poindexter; of these officials, only Weinberger and Shultz dissented from the policy decision, and Weinberger eventually acquiesced by ordering the Department of Defense to provide the necessary arms; and
large volumes of highly relevant, contemporaneously created documents were systematically and willfully withheld from investigators by several Reagan Administration officials.
Following the revelation of these operations in October and November 1986, Reagan Administration officials deliberately deceived the Congress and the public about the level and extent of official knowledge of and support for these operations.
In addition, Independent Counsel concluded that the off-the-books nature of the Iran and contra operations gave line-level personnel the opportunity to commit money crimes. |
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Re: The Legacy of the Reagan Years |
by pm
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
09 Jun 2004
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This is a good outline for an article, but I don't think many people will visit all the links. Perhaps someone could use CH's outline to write an article for the upcoming issue of the Public I. |
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Re: The Legacy of the Reagan Years |
by butterfly
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
09 Jun 2004
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I don't understand my own country!!!!
Reagan is dead. He was old and had alzenheimer's - wasn't he going to die eventually?
There is huge hoopla over his death and homage to his life -
WHAT FOR?!?!
He is responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands in Nicaragua, in El Salvador and right here in this country. His trickle down theory created more poverty for those who were lower income and began the death of the middle class. His refusal to address the AIDS virus resulted in the death of many many citizens. There are countries today that offer medication for free to anyone with HIV or AIDS. The United States is not one of them.
I can not bring myself to accept that what turns people on ion this country is an image of old man patriarch - a cowboy with a deep voice and marbles for brains.
When will we (if ever?) join the ranks of Europe and many countries in South America that vote with their minds?!? Will quality of life, true equality, jobs, health care, affordable housing and free education ever be valued in the U.S.? Or are we forever doomed to being Walmart nation? |
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Re: The Legacy of the Reagan Years |
by pm
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
10 Jun 2004
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If BFD's family were murdered by mercenaries trained at the School of the Americas, would he be celebrating Reagan's legacy?
If BFD were tortured in a Chilean stadium by Reagan's friend, Augusto Pinochet, would he decry those who remembered Reagan's crimes?
BFD must think that depriving workers of their right to strike and implementing tax policies designed to reward the rich at the expense of the poor--to the extent that the average American family has a lower standard of living today than in 1980--are GOOD things.
If BFD cared one bit about truth, he'd be enraged that "the liberal media" is brainwashing an entire generation into believing Reagan was "One of the Greatest Presidents of All Time."
Doesn't it alarm him to remember Reagan's support for Saddam Hussein? Or is that simply 'collateral damage'?
His multiple standards again shed light on the disgusting morality of the vindictive, nasty Right. |
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Can I respond? |
by bfd
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
10 Jun 2004
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I don't represent the nasty, vindictive right (or the nice, forgiving right for that matter). However, I'm mused to see that like EVERYBODY who disagrees with you, I'm "brainwashed" - a method to which you are somehow magically impervious.
I'll direct your questions about the SoA to the people of Central America (and for that matter, Mexico and Texas) now free from threat by Soviet satellite death squads. I'm not sure how GOV. Reagan was responsible for the 1973 Chilean coup, but far be it from me to ruin a perfectly good conspiracy theory. And as for Hussein, as you and your ilk seem to forget, in the 1980s we were locked in a cold war that threatened to end humankind. Now that the threat has ended, it's time to right wrongs and deal with lesser threats - to which you bay and protest in the streets about, "blood for oil" and other inane, childish rants.
Go ahead and delete me now. Just know this - everything that you believe in, everything that you pour your pure little heart and soul and effort into - the OPPOSITE is 100% certain to happen. You are cursed to absolute failure.
And you know it. |
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another view |
by gehrig
zemblan (nospam) earthlink.net (verified) |
Current rating: 0
10 Jun 2004
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Click on image for a larger version
 |
#file_1#
@%< |
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Re: The Legacy of the Reagan Years |
by Jack Ryan
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
11 Jun 2004
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There are two absolute truths that have made themselves evident this past week.
The American People and indeed the world, loved, President Reagan. The throngs of people who came to pay there last respects was completely unexpected.
Secondly, the class of the left demonstrates for all to see that at least in their own block, they have achieved their goal of a "truely classless society".
Again Goodbye Gipper and thanks for a grateful country and your policies which freed Eastern Europe from the evils of Socialism/Communism.
Jack |
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He Lied and Cheated in the Name of Anti-communism |
by Jonathan Steele
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
11 Jun 2004
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From Iraq, Reagan didn't look so Freedom-loving
It will be odd for Iraqis to watch TV tonight (power cuts permitting) and hear the eulogies to freedom-loving Ronald Reagan at his state funeral. The motives behind US policy towards their country have always been a mystery, and if Iraqis sometimes explain to westerners that Saddam Hussein was a CIA agent whose appointed task was to provoke an American invasion of Iraq, it is largely thanks to Reagan's legacy.
Although Saddam was still a junior figure, it is a matter of record that the CIA station in Baghdad aided the coup which first brought the Ba'athists to power in 1963. But it was Reagan who, two decades later, turned US-Iraqi relations into a decisive wartime alliance. He sent a personal letter to Saddam Hussein in December 1983 offering help against Iran. The letter was hand-carried to Baghdad by Reagan's special envoy, Donald Rumsfeld.
Reagan liked several things about Saddam. A firm anti-communist, he had banned the party and executed or imprisoned thousands of its members. The Iraqi leader was also a bulwark against the mullahs in Tehran and a promising point of pressure against Syria and its Hizbullah clients in Lebanon who had just destroyed the US Marine compound in Beirut, killing over 200 Americans.
It is not surprising that the current international maneuvering over Iraq is treated with suspicion grounded in that history. Iraqis regard their newly appointed government with skepticism. They see the difficulty France had at the United Nations in trying to persuade the Americans to allow Iraqis a veto over US offensives in places like Falluja. They note that Prime Minister Ayad Allawi did not even ask for a major Iraqi role until the French made it an issue. Iraqis remember that Allawi and his exile organization, the Iraqi National Accord, were paid by the CIA.
Not just in Iraq but around the world, the hallmark of Reagan's presidency was anti-communist cynicism, masked by phony rhetoric about freedom. In his first press conference as president he used quasi-biblical language to claim that Soviet leaders "reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat". It was one of the most extraordinary cases of the pot calling the kettle black. What could Saddam, let alone other Iraqis, have thought when it became known two years after Rumsfeld's first visit to Baghdad that Washington had secretly sold arms to the mullahs Iraq was fighting. Who had been lying and cheating?
In the name of anti-communism everything was possible. Reagan invaded Grenada on the false premise that US students who had been there safely for months were suddenly in danger. Reagan armed thugs to overthrow the government of Nicaragua, even after it won internationally certified free elections in 1984. He made the US an outlaw by rejecting the world court judgments against its blockade of Nicaragua's coast.
Reagan armed and trained Osama bin Laden and his followers in their Afghan jihad, and authorized the CIA to help to pay for the construction of the very tunnels in Tora Bora in which his one-time ally later successfully hid from US planes. On the grounds that Nelson Mandela's African National Congress was pro-communist, Reagan vetoed US congress bills putting sanctions on the apartheid regime the ANC was fighting.
His policies towards the Soviet Union were hysterical and counter-productive. He put detente into deep freeze for several years with his insulting label "the evil empire". It led to overblown outrage over the downing by Soviet aircraft of a South Korean airliner that intruded into Russian air space. Moscow's action was inept, but if Reagan had not put the superpowers in collision, the Kremlin might have treated the wayward plane more calmly.
Moscow's policies in the developing world were no less cynical than Reagan's. In Iran and Iraq they played both sides, tilting towards Saddam Hussein, in spite of his execution of communists. They feared Iran's Islamic fundamentalism as much as Washington did. But the cold war was not mainly about ideology, and certainly not freedom. It was a contest for power. By the time Reagan took office, some independent analysts and reporters with experience in the Soviet Union were arguing Moscow's power had peaked.
The CIA was exaggerating the strength of the Soviet economy and the amount being spent on defense (shades of the recent fiasco over Iraq's WMD). The issue was hotly debated, and it was hard to reach the truth of events in a closed society. Those like myself who detected Soviet weakness had to struggle against the Kremlinological establishment, where traditional views were in a majority.
But the record of Soviet behavior suggested that, behind Brezhnev's rhetoric, Moscow had become disillusioned with its international achievements. Its Warsaw Pact allies were unreliable and had to be periodically invaded or threatened.
In the Middle East, Moscow had few allies in spite of decades of trying to win friends through the supply of arms. Egypt had moved west, Syria saw that Russia had no clout on the central issue of Israel and Palestine, the Gulf states were suspicious, and only Yemen and Iraq seemed to offer a little hope.
The Kremlin was losing heart, but its elderly leaders were too ill to draw the consequences. It took a younger leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, to start the process of international withdrawal. High oil prices after 1973 had given Moscow a decade of easy money to finance its part in the US-Soviet arms race while also developing its industrial infrastructure.
By the early 1980s the weakness of the consumer goods sector, the failure to reform agriculture, and the pressure for liberalization coming from a policy elite which had traveled abroad as diplomats, engineers and journalists was about to break the surface.
Reagan's Star Wars project did not bankrupt the Soviet Union into reform, as his admirers claim. In repeated statements as well as his budget allocations Gorbachev made it clear Moscow would not bother to match a dubious weapons system which could not give Washington "first-strike capability" for at least another 15 years, if ever.
The Soviet Union imploded for internal reasons, not least the erratic way Gorbachev reacted to the contradictory processes set in motion by his own reforms. Reagan was merely an uncomprehending bystander. His acceptance in his second term of detente was a u-turn which millions of peace activists in Europe had been demanding.
It was detente that made the end of the cold war possible, and without Reagan's blind anti-communism it could have come at least four years earlier.
· Jonathan Steele' s book 'The Limits of Soviet Power' was published in 1984
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk |
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Re: The Legacy of the Reagan Years |
by Good Riddance Gipper
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
11 Jun 2004
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Reagan's death is really a shame--a shame that it didn't occur earlier. It's too bad that that bitter, Brylcreemed, empty-headed, big-mouthed, reactionary, fear-mongering waste didn't die before he pitched into the effort of truly ruining this nation and what was left of its ideals. It's too bad that he didn't die when he was a B-movie hack and before he became a rat in Hollywood against fellow union members. It's too bad that he didn't die before he started shilling for union-busting polluting corporations such as GE. It's too bad that he didn't die before he started spewing his unvarnished nonsense about "welfare queens" allegedly spending taxpayers' dollars on Cadillacs in the 1960s. It's too bad that he didn't die before he unleashed the National Guard, with its tear gas and bullets, on peaceful antiwar protesters and community activists in Berkeley in the 1960s as governor of California. It's too bad that he didn't die before he gleefully stuffed grapes into his ignorant arrogant face at a lunch with California's wealthy union-busting Napa Valley plutocrats while impoverished largely Latino field hands, legally excluded from the protections of the NLRA, fought for years for better-than-sub-poverty wages, sanitary living conditions in company farm towns, and rampant and deadly pesticide use. It's too bad that Reagan didn't die before his worthless bag of fearmongering bones was elected to infect the White House. It's too bad that he didn't die before he started his quest to quadruple the annual deficit. It's too bad that he didn't die before he inspired the union-busting that characterized the 1980s and after, with PATCO being the harbinger for Hormel and many lesser-known examples of union-busting and pressure for workers' concessions to greedy socially irresponsible corporations. It's too bad that he didn't die before he drastically ramped up the funding to murderous thugs in El Salvador and Nicaragua who murdered many, too many innocent civilians (El Mozote in December 1981 in El Salvador being only one example), while claiming not only that the supposedly dangerous communists that they hunted down were "only a 48-hour drive from Texas" (as if they had their eyes trained on Brownsville...), but also that these massacres by American-trained and taxpayer-funded "freedon fighters" didn't exist, and that even if they did, their "dedication to human rights" was "improving." It's too bad that he didn't die before nominating such scumbags as James Watt, Elliot Abrams, Donald Rumsfeld, Casper Weinberger, and a host of other human germs to important positions from which to senselessly plan to murder people and the environment alike. It's too bad that he didn't die before initiating a policy of "constructive engagement" with South Africa (the world's largest source of diamonds), whose bantustan-style system of extremely racist segregation was only one step above the slavery that the Civil War ended. It's too bad that he didn't die before either cringing at the thought of letting the acronym "AIDS" exit his worthless face, or failing to fund the medical research and assistance necessary to stanch the AIDS epidemic. It's too bad that he didn't die before letting out thousands of mentally ill patients who needed care and help from a right-wing government that didn't give a frog's fat ass about them. It's too bad that he didn't die before his administration enacted an illegal guns-for-hostages, guns-for-drugs approach to both Iran and Latin America that was morally bereft, intellectually bankrupt, thoroughly illegal, and successful in circumventing Congressional law to continue to fund Latin American slaughter at US taxpayer expense while infesting America's ghettoes with cheap, addictive and highly dangerous drugs. It's too bad that Reagan didn't die before gutting our already fragile network of social systems and our already frail infrastructure to heighten Cold War tensions against a Soviet Union, that sober commentators knew to be teetering and hollow, by needlessly building many more nuclear and "conventional" weapons, thus scaring the crap out of the very people who needed the programs he cut in order to endanger them with a Cold War that he truly, not falsely, could have ended. It's too bad he didn't die before he was obviously enfeebled and felt the need to lie about his administration's Iran-Contra scandal.
Harsh, yes. So was Reagan and his administration. Good riddance to "the Gipper." |
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Re: The Legacy of the Reagan Years |
by pm
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
11 Jun 2004
|
What we see from this past week is hardly that 'the american people loved reagan' but that the LIBERAL PRESS!!!! loved Reagan. Tourists who happened to be in Washington lined up to watch the spectacle of a state funeral. Big deal.
How much of what we saw this past week was eulogy, and how much was political opportunism? The Democrats are too scared to point it out (Blagojevich even admitted that he voted -- twice -- for him), but imagine if Liberals had used a week to grandstand for a deceased Democrat. I can hear the shrieks now. The type of critical commentary now isolated to fringe media would be blaring from the networks.
The Right knows no shame and no boundaries, which is why criticism of people like Reagan, who forsake the values of freedom and justice, is not allowed. This week has made it harder for the US to learn from its mistakes. |
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Re: The Legacy of the Reagan Years |
by Good Riddance Gipper
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
11 Jun 2004
|
Tax Cuts for the Rich, Deregulation, Death Squads, Apartheid, Deficits, Busted Unions and Busted S&Ls
Remembering Reagan
By RUSSELL MOKHIBER
and ROBERT WEISSMAN
Ronald Reagan was a paradigm shifter.
He was what Charles Derber in his new book, Regime Change Begins at Home, calls a "regime-changer," moving decisively to end the flagging New Deal era and launching the modern period of corporate rule.
Reagan changed the framework of expectations. He called into question a lot of things that had been taken for granted (such as the obligation of the government of the richest country in history to take care of its poorest people), and made it possible to consider things which had previously seemed unthinkable (for example, cutting the knees out from the powerful U.S. labor movement.)
Reagan was indeed a historic figure, and his death deserves the massive media attention it is receiving. But the odes to his cheerfulness and optimism should be replaced with reflections on how his policies destroyed lives. Pacifica's Amy Goodman has appropriately titled her retrospective coverage of the Reagan era "Remembering the Dead."
The standard commentaries recall Iran-contra as a blotch on the end of Reagan's presidency, but the incident was trivial compared to the long list of administration crimes and misdeeds, among them:
1. Cruelly slashing the social safety net. Reagan cuts in social spending exacerbated a policy of intentionally raising the unemployment rate. The result was a huge surge in poverty. With homelessness skyrocketing, Reagan defended his administration's record: "One problem that we've had, even in the best of times, and that is the people who are sleeping on grates, the homeless who are homeless, you might say, by choice."
2. Taking the world to the brink of nuclear war. Reagan's supposed contribution to the downfall of the Soviet Union was a military spending contest that drove the USSR into economic collapse. Neglected in most present-day reminiscences is that this military spending spree nearly started a nuclear war. Development and deployment of a host of nuclear missiles, initiating Star Wars, acceleration of the arms race -- these led the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to move its Doomsday Clock in 1984 to three minutes to midnight.
3. A targeted tax cut for the rich. The 1981 tax cut was one of the largest in U.S. history and heavily targeted toward the rich, with major declines in tax rates for upper-income groups. The tax break helped widen income and wealth inequality gaps. As David Stockman admitted, one of its other intended effects was to starve the government of funds, so as to justify cuts in government spending (for the poor -- the cash crunch didn't restrain government spending on corporate welfare).
4. Firing striking air traffic controllers. Reagan's decision to fire 1,800 striking air traffic controller early in his term sent a message that employers could act against striking or organizing workers with virtual impunity.
5. Deregulating the Savings & Loan industry, paving the way for an industry meltdown and subsequent bailout that cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.
6. Perpetrating a bloody war in Central America. The Reagan-directed wars in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua submerged Central America in a climate of terror and fear, took tens of thousands of lives, destroyed a democratic experiment in Nicaragua, and entrenched narrow elites who continue to repress the poor majorities in the region.
7. Embracing South Africa's apartheid regime (Said Reagan in 1981, "Can we abandon this country [South Africa] that has stood beside us in every war we've ever fought?" He followed up in 1985 with, "They have eliminated the segregation that we once had in our own country.") and dictators worldwide, from Argentina to Korea, Chile to the Philippines.
8. Undermining health, safety and environmental regulation. Reagan decreed such rules must be subjected to regulatory impact analysis -- corporate-biased cost-benefit analyses, carried out by the Office of Management and Budget. The result: countless positive regulations discarded or revised based on pseudo-scientific conclusions that the cost to corporations would be greater than the public benefit.
9. Slashing the Environmental Protection Agency budget in half, and installing Anne Gorsuch Burford to oversee the dismantling of the agency and ensure weak enforcement of environmental rules.
10. Kick-starting the era of structural adjustment. It was under Reagan administration influence that the International Monetary Fund and World Bank began widely imposing the policy package known as structural adjustment -- featuring deregulation, privatization, emphasis on exports, cuts in social spending -- that has plunged country after country in the developing world into economic destitution. The IMF chief at the time was honest about what was to come, saying in 1981 that, for low-income countries, "adjustment is particularly costly in human terms."
11. Silence on the AIDS epidemic. Reagan didn't mention AIDS publicly until 1987, by which point AIDS had killed 19,000 in the United States. While the public health service advocated aggressive education on prevention, Reagan moralists like Secretary of Education Bill Bennett insisted on confining prevention messages to abstinence.
12. Enabling a corporate merger frenzy. The administration effectively re-wrote antitrust laws and oversaw what at the time was an unprecedented merger trend. "There is nothing written in the sky that says the world would not be a perfectly satisfactory place if there were only 100 companies, provided that each had 1 percent of every product and service market," said Reagan's antitrust enforcement chief William Baxter.
The Reagan administration didn't succeed at imposing all of his agenda. But even Reagan's failures had paradigm-shifting impacts. Among policies he sought but failed to impose were: eliminating the Consumer Product Safety Commission, consummating an unprecedented giveaway of coal mining rights on federal land, and stripping benefits from thousands of recipients of Social Security disability (a move ultimately counteracted by the courts).
It's important to remember Reagan all right, but let's remember him for what he did, not for his ability to deliver a scripted line. Ronald Wilson Reagan played up and exacerbated economic and racial divisions, and he left the country, and the world, meaner and more dangerous.
Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime Reporter.
Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor, and co-director of Essential Action, a corporate accountability group. They are co-authors of Corporate Predators: The Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press; http://www.corporatepredators.org).
(c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman |
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Re: The Legacy of the Reagan Years |
by ijustkrushalot
uiuc.edu (unverified) |
Current rating: 0
12 Jun 2004
|
I thought that tonight, rather than talking on the subjects you are discussing, or trying to find something new to say, it might be appropriate to reflect a bit on our heritage.
You can call it mysticism if you want to, but I have always believed that there was some divine plan that placed this great continent between two oceans to be sought out by those who were possessed of an abiding love of freedom and a special kind of courage.
This was true of those who pioneered the great wilderness in the beginning of this country, as it is also true of those later immigrants who were willing to leave the land of their birth and come to a land where even the language was unknown to them. Call it chauvinistic, but our heritage does set us apart. Some years ago a writer, who happened to be an avid student of history, told me a story about that day in the little hall in Philadelphia where honorable men, hard-pressed by a King who was flouting the very law they were willing to obey, debated whether they should take the fateful step of declaring their independence from that king. I was told by this man that the story could be found in the writings of Jefferson. I confess, I never researched or made an effort to verify it. Perhaps it is only legend. But story, or legend, he described the atmosphere, the strain, the debate, and that as men for the first time faced the consequences of such an irretrievable act, the walls resounded with the dread word of treason and its price -- the gallows and the headman's axe. As the day wore on the issue hung in the balance, and then, according to the story, a man rose in the small gallery. He was not a young man and was obviously calling on all the energy he could muster. Citing the grievances that had brought them to this moment, he said, "Sign that parchment. They may turn every tree into a gallows, every home into a grave and yet the words of that parchment can never die. For the mechanic in his workshop, they will be words of hope, to the slave in the mines -- freedom." And he added, "If my hands were freezing in death, I would sign that parchment with my last ounce of strength. Sign, sign if the next moment the noose is around your neck, sign even if the hall is ringing with the sound of headman’s axe, for that parchment will be the textbook of freedom, the bible of the rights of man forever." And then it is said he fell back exhausted. But 56 delegates, swept by his eloquence, signed the Declaration of Independence, a document destined to be as immortal as any work of man can be. And according to the story, when they turned to thank him for his timely oratory, he could not be found nor were there any who knew who he was or how he had come in or gone out through the locked and guarded doors.
Well, as I say, whether story or legend, the signing of the document that day in Independence Hall was miracle enough. Fifty-six men, a little band so unique -- we have never seen their like since -- pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor. Sixteen gave their lives, most gave their fortunes and all of them preserved their sacred honor. What manner of men were they? Certainly they were not an unwashed, revolutionary rabble, nor were they adventurers in a heroic mood. Twenty-four were lawyers and jurists, 11 were merchants and tradesmen, nine were farmers. They were men who would achieve security but valued freedom more.
And what price did they pay? John Hart was driven from the side of his desperately ill wife. After more than a year of living almost as an animal in the forest and in caves, he returned to find his wife had died and his children had vanished. He never saw them again, his property was destroyed and he died of a broken heart -- but with no regret, only pride in the part he had played that day in Independence Hall. Carter Braxton of Virginia lost all his ships -- they were sold to pay his debts. He died in rags. So it was with Ellery, Clymer, Hall, Walton, Gwinnett, Rutledge, Morris, Livingston, and Middleton. Nelson, learning that Cornwallis was using his home for a headquarters, personally begged Washington to fire on him and destroy his home--he died bankrupt. It has never been reported that any of these men ever expressed bitterness or renounced their action as not worth the price. Fifty-six rank-and-file, ordinary citizens had founded a nation that grew from sea to shining sea, five million farms, quiet villages, cities that never sleep -- all done without an area re-development plan, urban renewal or a rural legal assistance program.
Now we are a nation of 211 million people with a pedigree that includes blood lines from every corner of the world. We have shed that American-melting-pot blood in every corner of the world, usually in defense of someone's freedom. Those who remained of that remarkable band we call our Founding Fathers tied up some of the loose ends about a dozen years after the Revolution. It had been the first revolution in all man’s history that did not just exchange one set of rulers for another. This had been a philosophical revolution. The culmination of men's dreams for 6,000 years were formalized with the Constitution, probably the most unique document ever drawn in the long history of man's relation to man. I know there have been other constitutions, new ones are being drawn today by newly emerging nations. Most of them, even the one of the Soviet Union, contain many of the same guarantees as our own Constitution, and still there is a difference. The difference is so subtle that we often overlook it, but it is so great that it tells the whole story. Those other constitutions say, "Government grants you these rights," and ours says, "You are born with these rights, they are yours by the grace of God, and no government on earth can take them from you.".............................
..................................I did not tell that story out of any desire to be narrowly chauvinistic or to glorify aggressive militarism, but it is an example of government meeting its highest responsibility.
In recent years we have been treated to a rash of noble-sounding phrases. Some of them sound good, but they don't hold up under close analysis. Take for instance the slogan so frequently uttered by the young senator from Massachusetts, "The greatest good for the greatest number." Certainly under that slogan, no modern day Captain Ingraham would risk even the smallest craft and crew for a single citizen. Every dictator who ever lived has justified the enslavement of his people on the theory of what was good for the majority.
We are not a warlike people. Nor is our history filled with tales of aggressive adventures and imperialism, which might come as a shock to some of the placard painters in our modern demonstrations. The lesson of Vietnam, I think, should be that never again will young Americans be asked to fight and possibly die for a cause unless that cause is so meaningful that we, as a nation, pledge our full resources to achieve victory as quickly as possible.
I realize that such a pronouncement, of course, would possibly be laying one open to the charge of warmongering -- but that would also be ridiculous. My generation has paid a higher price and has fought harder for freedom than any generation that had ever lived. We have known four wars in a single lifetime. All were horrible, all could have been avoided if at a particular moment in time we had made it plain that we subscribed to the words of John Stuart Mill when he said that "war is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things."
The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing is worth a war is worse. The man who has nothing which he cares about more than his personal safety is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
The widespread disaffection with things military is only a part of the philosophical division in our land today. I must say to you who have recently, or presently are still receiving an education, I am awed by your powers of resistance. I have some knowledge of the attempts that have been made in many classrooms and lecture halls to persuade you that there is little to admire in America. For the second time in this century, capitalism and the free enterprise are under assault. Privately owned business is blamed for spoiling the environment, exploiting the worker and seducing, if not outright raping, the customer. Those who make the charge have the solution, of course -- government regulation and control. We may never get around to explaining how citizens who are so gullible that they can be suckered into buying cereal or soap that they don't need and would not be good for them, can at the same time be astute enough to choose representatives in government to which they would entrust the running of their lives.
Not too long ago, a poll was taken on 2,500 college campuses in this country. Thousands and thousands of responses were obtained. Overwhelmingly, 65, 70, and 75 percent of the students found business responsible, as I have said before, for the things that were wrong in this country. That same number said that government was the solution and should take over the management and the control of private business. Eighty percent of the respondents said they wanted government to keep its paws out of their private lives.
We are told every day that the assembly-line worker is becoming a dull-witted robot and that mass production results in standardization. Well, there isn't a socialist country in the world that would not give its copy of Karl Marx for our standardization.
Standardization means production for the masses and the assembly line means more leisure for the worker -- freedom from backbreaking and mind-dulling drudgery that man had known for centuries past. Karl Marx did not abolish child labor or free the women from working in the coal mines in England – the steam engine and modern machinery did that.......................................
..................................Standing on the tiny deck of the Arabella in 1630 off the Massachusetts coast, John Winthrop said, "We will be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword throughout the world." Well, we have not dealt falsely with our God, even if He is temporarily suspended from the classroom.
When I was born my life expectancy was 10 years less than I have already lived – that’s a cause of regret for some people in California, I know. Ninety percent of Americans at that time lived beneath what is considered the poverty line today, three-quarters lived in what is considered substandard housing. Today each of those figures is less than 10 percent. We have increased our life expectancy by wiping out, almost totally, diseases that still ravage mankind in other parts of the world. I doubt if the young people here tonight know the names of some of the diseases that were commonplace when we were growing up. We have more doctors per thousand people than any nation in the world. We have more hospitals than any nation in the world.
When I was your age, believe it or not, none of us knew that we even had a racial problem. When I graduated from college and became a radio sport announcer, broadcasting major league baseball, I didn’t have a Hank Aaron or a Willie Mays to talk about. The Spaulding Guide said baseball was a game for Caucasian gentlemen. Some of us then began editorializing and campaigning against this. Gradually we campaigned against all those other areas where the constitutional rights of a large segment of our citizenry were being denied. We have not finished the job. We still have a long way to go, but we have made more progress in a few years than we have made in more than a century.
One-third of all the students in the world who are pursuing higher education are doing so in the United States. The percentage of our young Negro community that is going to college is greater than the percentage of whites in any other country in the world.
One-half of all the economic activity in the entire history of man has taken place in this republic. We have distributed our wealth more widely among our people than any society known to man. Americans work less hours for a higher standard of living than any other people. Ninety-five percent of all our families have an adequate daily intake of nutrients -- and a part of the five percent that don't are trying to lose weight! Ninety-nine percent have gas or electric refrigeration, 92 percent have televisions, and an equal number have telephones. There are 120 million cars on our streets and highways -- and all of them are on the street at once when you are trying to get home at night. But isn't this just proof of our materialism -- the very thing that we are charged with? Well, we also have more churches, more libraries, we support voluntarily more symphony orchestras, and opera companies, non-profit theaters, and publish more books than all the other nations of the world put together.
Somehow America has bred a kindliness into our people unmatched anywhere, as has been pointed out in that best-selling record by a Canadian journalist. We are not a sick society. A sick society could not produce the men that set foot on the moon, or who are now circling the earth above us in the Skylab. A sick society bereft of morality and courage did not produce the men who went through those years of torture and captivity in Vietnam. Where did we find such men? They are typical of this land as the Founding Fathers were typical. We found them in our streets, in the offices, the shops and the working places of our country and on the farms.
We cannot escape our destiny, nor should we try to do so. The leadership of the free world was thrust upon us two centuries ago in that little hall of Philadelphia. In the days following World War II, when the economic strength and power of America was all that stood between the world and the return to the dark ages, Pope Pius XII said, "The American people have a great genius for splendid and unselfish actions. Into the hands of America God has placed the destinies of an afflicted mankind."
We are indeed, and we are today, the last best hope of man on earth.
--------------------------
Ronald Reagon,
January 25, 1974
First Conservative Political Action Conference |
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Reagan's Destructive Revolution |
by Walter Williams
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
12 Jun 2004
|
Amid the mountains of praise and the occasional criticism of Ronald Reagan, what may be his most lasting legacy remains hidden. He led a political revolution that radically altered the American system of government and its key institutions.
The revolution began in 1981 under the banner of Reaganism — Ronald Reagan's anti-government, market-fundamentalist philosophy that now dominates American political thought.
Yet, it is best labeled the "Stealth Revolution" because pundits and the public, after nearly a quarter century, still appear to be unaware of its existence, much less the damage already done. The deleterious changes have stayed under the radar.
Be that as it may, a revolution is in full swing. President Reagan's two terms put it on course; Reaganism sustained it for the next 12 years; George W. Bush, Reagan's disciple, re-energized it with a vengeance.
Following the tenets of Reaganism, Bush has led the most undemocratic American government in the post-World War II era. It well may be the least democratic government since 1789.
The result is that the national institutions created by the Constitution to support representative democracy have been disfigured. America has become an entrenched plutocracy where the wealthiest individuals and major corporations unduly influence government decisions to reap benefits at the expense of ordinary citizens.
A modern-day Rip Van Winkle — falling asleep just before Reagan's inauguration and awakening today — would be amazed to find that the political revolution has eaten away much of the foundation of the American republic during his hibernation. The Stealth Revolution has succeeded to an extent unimaginable a quarter century ago.
In "The Great Unraveling," Princeton University economist and New York Times op-ed columnist Paul Krugman, drawing on Henry Kissinger's 1957 book, "A World Restored," pointed out that what the latter labeled a "revolutionary power" intends to crush the existing structure of governance that it views as illegitimate.
Krugman argued: "One should regard America's right-wing movement — which now in effect controls the administration, both houses of Congress, much of the judiciary, and a good slice of the media — as a revolutionary power in Kissinger's sense. That is, it is a movement whose leaders do not accept the legitimacy of our current political system."
At the same time, it needs underscoring that the full implications of the political change can be perceived only when cast in a broader historical context going back to the start of the Reagan administration. The first shots were fired in 1981, not 2001; the Reagan revolution began over two decades ago.
Reagan's unshakable conviction that the federal government was the nation's biggest domestic problem, and his efforts to constrain it, severely reduced that government's capacity to serve the American people and undermined representative democracy.
His commitment to an unfettered free market, deep reductions in the top income-tax rates, and massive deregulation for businesses greatly increased the political power of the wealthiest citizens and corporate America. A straight road to plutocracy lay open.
With Reaganism dominating public thinking during the 20 years before the Bush presidency, the Republicans had in place a solid base to launch the blitzkrieg that firmly entrenched the plutocratic regime. What have they done?
To start with, there is iron political control from the top ensuring far greater White House domination over the federal agencies than at any time in the past. Secrecy and deception permeate the Bush presidency, keeping needed decision-making information from the public and Congress and distorting what is disseminated.
The Republican majority exercises the same autocratic control in the House of Representatives by severely restricting debate and excluding Democrats from conference committees.
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, has transformed the conference committees, which in the past were restricted to reconciling disagreements between House and Senate bills, into a key means of inserting major changes, not appearing in either bill, during the conference.
Sheer power has been substituted for the deliberations leading to reasoned compromises that James Madison, the father of the Constitution, believed to be central to a flourishing democracy.
Congress no longer placed its constituents' interests over those of special interests — in this case, the wealthiest, most powerful citizens and corporations. America has ceased to be the world's greatest representative democracy.
Ronald Reagan is dead, but Reaganism, and the Stealth Revolution it engendered, lives on with all its destructive force. And I fear it may be Reagan's most lasting legacy unless the nation wakes up and sees what the Reagan revolution has wrought. Cassandras are not always wrong.
Walter Williams, professor emeritus at the University of Washington's Evans School of Public Affairs, is the author of the recently published "Reaganism and the Death of Representative Democracy."
Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com |
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Re: The Legacy of the Reagan Years |
by Larry K
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
12 Jun 2004
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The image I'll always remember from the teflon president is him sitting at an inquiry, smugly saying over and over "I don't recall." Well,the liar eventually got his wish. |
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OH, THAT EXPLAINS IT |
by George W. Bush via TPR
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
12 Jun 2004
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'I learned more from Ronald Reagan than from anyone ...'
http://prorev.com/indexa.htm |
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Re: The Legacy of the Reagan Years |
by Jack Ryan
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
12 Jun 2004
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I continue to see alot of pent up anger, jealousy and absolute frustration from the revolutionary left regarding Reagan. I suspect that it is because he totally and utterly defeated communism almost everywhere except in the dark regions of the Indy Media and the aptly named democratic underground.
With the exception of China, Cuba, North Korea, and few others, Reagan freed most of the planet from the tyranny that is communism. Hey, if I were bitter communist, I would be upset too. Fortunately, I am a patriot committed to the ideas of Freedom, Liberty and Prosperity for anyone willing to grab it.
The fact that your philosophy that the revolutionary left is committed too can only be sustained by walls that imprison it's subjects should give you some reason to reconsider your beliefs. Or better still, ask nearly everyone in the now free Eastern Europe a question: Are you better off now than you were prior to the utter defeat of the Soviet Style system? Kinda Reaganesqe is it not?
ML, TEAR DOWN THIS WALL!!!
Jack |
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Bush-boy Bids Goodbye |
by Lalo Alcaraz
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
12 Jun 2004
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A commentary on the pomp and circumstance of Reagan's passing by Lalo Alcaraz (if you like this, you should check out Alcaraz's regular strip "la cucaracha" ). |
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Re: The Legacy of the Reagan Years |
by gehrig
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
14 Jun 2004
|
From www.tikkun.org:
By the end of his term, 138 Reagan administration officials had been convicted, had been indicted, or had been the subject of official investigations for official misconduct and/or criminal violations. In terms of number of officials involved, the record of his administration was the worst ever.
* Lyn Nofziger—Convicted on charges of illegal lobbying of White House in Wedtech scandal.
* Michael Deaver received three years' probation and was fined one hundred thousand dollars after being convicted for lying to a congressional subcommittee and a federal grand jury about his lobbying activities after leaving the White House...
* E. Bob Wallach, close friend and law classmate of Atty General Edwin Meese, was sentenced to six years in prison and fined $250,000 in connection with the Wedtech influence-peddling scandal.
Then there was:
* James Watt, Reagan's Secretary of the Interior was indicted on 41 felony counts for using connections at the Department of Housing and Urban Development to help his private clients seek federal funds for housing projects in Maryland, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Watt conceded that he had received $500,000 from clients who were granted very favorable housing contracts after he had intervened on their behalf. In testifying before a House committee Watt said: "That's what they offered and it sounded like a lot of money to me, and we settled on it." Watt was eventually sentenced to five years in prison and 500 hours of community service.
* The Iran-Contra scandal. In June, 1984, at a National Security Council meeting, CIA Director Casey urged President Reagan to seek third-party aid for the Nicaraguan contras. Secretary of State Schultz warned that it would be an "impeachable offense" if the U.S. government acted as conduit for such secret funding. But that didn't stop them. That same day, Oliver North was seeking third-party aid for the contras. But Reagan, the "teflon President" avoided serious charges or impeachment...
* Oliver North—Convicted of falsifying and destroying documents, accepting an illegal gratuity, and aiding and abetting the obstruction of Congress. Conviction overturned on appeal due to legal technicalities...
* John Poindexter, Reagan's national security advisor, guilty of five criminal counts involving conspiracy to mislead Congress, obstructing congressional inquiries, lying to lawmakers, used "high national security" to mask deceit and wrong-doing...
* Richard Secord pleaded guilty to a felony charge of lying to Congress over Iran-Contra...
* Casper Weinberger was Secretary of Defense during Iran-Contra. In June 1992 he was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of concealing from congressional investigators and prosecutors thousands of pages of his handwritten notes. The personal memoirs taken during high level meetings, detailed events in 1985 and 1986 involving the Iran-Contra affair. Weinberger claimed he was being unfairly prosecuted because he would not provide information incriminating Ronald Reagan. Weinberger was scheduled to go on trial January 5, 1993, where the contents of his notes would have come to light and may have implicated other, unindicted conspirators. While Weinberger was never directly linked to the covert operations phase of the Iran-Contra affair, he is believed to have been involved in the cover-up of the ensuing scandal. According to Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, Weinberger's notes contain evidence of a conspiracy among the highest ranking Reagan Administration officials to lie to congress and the American public. S ome of the notes are believed to have evidence against then Vice-President George Bush who pardoned Weinberger to keep him from going to trial...
* Elliott Abrams was appointed by President Reagan in 1985 to head the State Department's Latin American Bureau. He was closely linked with ex-White House aide Lt. Col. Oliver North's covert movement to aid the Contras. Working for North, Abrams coordinated inter-agency support for the contras and helped solicit illegal funding from foreign powers as well as domestic contributors. Abrams agreed to cooperate with Iran-Contra investigators and pled guilty to two charges reduced to misdemeanors. He was sentenced in 1991 to two years probation and 100 hours of community service but was pardoned by President George Bush...
* Robert C. McFarlane was appointed Ronald Reagan's National Security Advisor in October 1983 and become well-known as a champion of the MX missile program in his role as White House liaison to congress. In 1984, McFarlane initiated the review of U.S. policy towards Iran that led directly to the arms for hostages deal. He also supervised early National Security Council efforts to support the Contras. Shortly after the Iran-Contra scandal was revealed in early 1987, McFarlane took an overdose of the tranquilizer Valium in an attempt to end his life. In his own words: "What really drove me to despair was a sense of having failed the country." McFarlane pled guilty to four misdemeanors and was sentenced to two years probation and 200 hours of community service. He was also fined $20,000. He received a blanket pardon from President George Bush...
* Alan D. Fiers was the Chief of the Central Intelligence Agency's Central American Task Force. Fiers pled guilty in 1991 to two counts of withholding information from congress about Oliver North's activities and the diversion of Iran arms sale money to aid the Contras. He was sentenced to one year of probation and 100 hours of community service. Fiers agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in exchange for having his felonies reduced to misdemeanors and his testimony gave a boost to the long standing criminal investigation of Lawrence Walsh, Special Prosecutor. Fiers testified that he and three CIA colleagues knew by mid-1986 that profits from the TOW and HAWK missile sales to Iran were being diverted to the Contras months before it became public knowledge. Alan Fiers received a blanket pardon for his crimes from President Bush...
* Clair George was Chief of the CIA's Division of Covert Operations under President Reagan. In August 1992 a hung jury led U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth to declare a mistrial in the case of Clair George who was accused of concealing from Congress his knowledge of the Iran-Contra affair. George had been named by Alan Fiers when Fiers turned state's evidence for Lawrence Walsh's investigation. In a second trial on charges of perjury, false statements and obstruction of justice, George was convicted of lying to two congressional committees in 1986. George faced a maximum five year federal prison sentence and a $20,000 fine for each of the two convictions. Jurors cleared George of five other charges including two counts of lying to a federal grand jury. Those charges would have carried a mandatory 10 months in prison upon conviction. Clair George received a blanket pardon for his crimes from President George Bush...
* Duane R. (Dewey) Clarridge was head of the CIA's Western European Division under President Reagan. He was indicted on November 29, 1991 for lying to congress and to the Tower Commission that investigated Iran- Contra. Clarridge was charged with five counts of perjury and two counts of making false statements for covering up his knowledge of a November 25, 1985 shipment of HAWK missiles to Iran. Clarridge was also suspected of diverting to the Contras weapons that were originally intended for the Afghan mujahaddeen guerrillas. Clarridge received a blanket pardon for his crimes on Christmas Eve 1992 from President George Bush...
* Environmental Protection Agency's favoritism toward polluters. Assistant administrator unduly influenced by chemical industry lobbyists. Another administrator resigned after pressuring employees to tone down a critical report on a chemical company accused of illegal pollution in Michigan. The deputy chief of federal activities was accused of compiling an interagency "hit" or "enemies" list, like those kept in the Nixon Watergate period, singling out career employees to be hired, fired or promoted according to political beliefs...
* Anne Gorscuh Burford resigned amid accusations she politically manipulated the Superfund money...
* Rita Lavelle was fired after accusing a senior EPA official of "systematically alienating the business community." She was later indicted, tried and convicted of lying to Congress and served three months of a six-month prison sentence. After an extensive investigation, in August 1984, a House of Representatives subcommittee concluded that top-level EPA appointees by Reagan for three years "violated their public trust by disregarding the public health and the environment, manipulating the Superfund program for political purposes, engaging in unethical conduct and participating in other abuses.".
* Neglected nuclear safety. A critical situation involving nuclear safety had been allowed to develop during the Reagan era. Immense sums, estimated at 200 billion or more, would be required in the 1990s to replace and make safe America's neglected, aging, deteriorating, and dangerous nuclear facilities...
* Savings & Loan Bail-out. Hundreds of billions of dollars were needed to bail out savings and loan institutions that either had failed during the deregulation frenzy of the eighties or were in danger of bankruptcy...
* Reckless airline deregulation. Deregulation of airline industry took too broad a sweep, endangering public safety.
Additionally:
* Richard Allen, National Security adviser resigned amid controversy over an honorarium he received for arranging an interview with Nancy Reagan...
* Richard Beggs, chief administrator at NASA was indicted for defrauding the government while an executive at General Dynamics...
* Guy Flake, Deputy Secretary of Commerce, resigned after allegations of a conflict of interest in contract negotiations...
* Louis Glutfrida, Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency resigned amid allegations of misuses of government property...
* Edwin Gray, Chairman of the Federal Home Loan Bank was charged with illegally repaying himself and his wife $26,000 in travel costs...
* Max Hugel, CIA chief of covert operations who resigned after allegations of fraudulent financial dealings...
* Carlos Campbell, Assistant Secretary of Commerce resigned over charges of awarding federal grants to his personal friends' firms...
* Raymond Donovan, Secretary of Labor indicted for defrauding the New York City Transit Authority of $7.4. million. (Republicans will point out that Donovan was acquitted. And that really matters in Donovan's case, because he was a Republican. But it didn't matter for Clinton or any of his cabinet, most all of whom were acquitted, because THEY were Democrats!)
* John Fedders, chief of enforcement for the Securities and Exchange Commission resigned over charges of beating his wife...
* Arthur Hayes, Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration resigned over illegal travel reimbursements...
* J. Lynn Helms, chief of the Federal Aviation Administration resigned over a grand jury investigation of illegal business activities...
* Marjory Mecklenburg, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Resources resigned over irregularities on her travel vouchers...
* Robert Nimmo, head of the Veterans Administration resigned when a report criticized him for improper use of government funds...
* J. William Petro, U.S. Attorney fired and fined for tipping off an acquaintance about a forthcoming Grand Jury investigation...
* Thomas C. Reed, White House counselor and National Security Council adviser resigned and paid a $427,000 fine for stock market insider trading...
* Emanuel Savas, Assistant Secretary of HUD resigned over assigning staff members to work on government time on a book that guilty to expense account fraud and accepting kickbacks on government contracts...
* Charles Wick, Director of the U.S. Information Agency investigated for taping conversations with public officials without their approval.
Two types of problems typified the ethical misconduct cases of the Reagan years, and both had heavy consequences to citizens everywhere. One stemmed from ideology and deregulatory impulses run amok; the other, from classic corruption on a grand scale.
* The Pentagon procurement scandal, which resulted from the Republicans' enormous infusion of money too quickly into the Defense Department after the lean Carter years ...
* Massive fraud and mismanagement in the Department of Housing and Urban Development throughout Reagan's eight years. These were finally documented in congressional hearings in spring 1989, after Reagan left office. Cost the taxpayers billions of dollars in losses. What made this scandal most shameful was that Reagan's' friends and fixers profited at the expense of the poor, the very people HUD and the federal government were pledged to assist through low-income housing... Despite their many public lies about the matter, it was eventually proven that the Sales of weapons to Iran, followed by illegal financial support of the Central American Contras were carried out with the knowledge of, among others, President Ronald Reagan, Vice President George Bush, Secretary of State George P. Shultz, Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger, Director of Central Intelligence William J. Casey, and national security advisers Robert C. McFarlane and John M. Poindexter. Of these officials, only Weinberger and Shultz dissented from the policy decision. Weinberger eventually acquiesced and ordered the Department of Defense to provide the necessary arms. Large volumes of highly relevant, contemporaneously created documents were systematically and willfully withheld from investigators by several Reagan Administration officials in an attempt to cover up the administration's extensive corruption.
@%< |
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Reagan: Media Myth and Reality |
by FAIR
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
14 Jun 2004
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NEW YORK - June 9 - As the media spend the week memorializing Ronald Reagan, journalists are redefining the former president's life and accomplishments with a stream of hagiographies that frequently skew the facts and gloss over scandal and criticism.
*Reagan's Popularity
"Ronald Reagan was the most popular president ever to leave office," explained ABC anchor Elizabeth Vargas (6/6/04). "His approval ratings were higher than any other at the end of his second term." Though the claim was repeated by many news outlets, it is not true; Bill Clinton's approval ratings when he left office were actually higher than Reagan's, at 66 percent versus Reagan's 63 percent (Gallup, 1/10-14/01). Franklin Delano Roosevelt also topped Reagan with a 66 percent approval rating at the time of his death in office after three and a half terms.
In general, Reagan's popularity during his two terms tends to be overstated. The Washington Post's lead article on June 6 began by declaring him "one of the most popular presidents of the 20th Century," while ABC's Sam Donaldson announced, "Through travesty, triumph and tragedy, the president enjoyed unprecedented popularity." The Chicago Tribune (6/6/04) wrote that "his popularity with the electorate was deep and personal... rarely did his popularity dip below 50 percent; it often exceeded 70 percent, an extraordinarily high mark."
But a look at Gallup polling data brings a different perspective. Through most of his presidency, Reagan did not rate much higher than other post-World War II presidents. And during his first two years, Reagan's approval ratings were quite low. His 52 percent average approval rating for his presidency places him sixth out of the past ten presidents, behind Kennedy (70 percent), Eisenhower (66 percent), George H.W. Bush (61 percent), Clinton (55 percent), and Johnson (55 percent). His popularity frequently dipped below 50 percent during his first term, plummeted to 46 percent during the Iran-Contra scandal, and never exceeded 68 percent. (By contrast, Clinton's maximum approval rating hit 71 percent.)
Some in the media similarly emphasized Reagan's likeability. CBS anchor Bob Schieffer asserted, "You could hate his policies, but it was hard not to like Ronald Reagan (6/6/04). But Reagan's "likeability" numbers did not score much higher than other modern presidents, including Jimmy Carter. (For more on Reagan polling myths, see: http://www.fair.org/extra/8903/reagan-popularity.html)
*No Time for Critical Voices
Mainstream media have relied heavily on Republicans and former Reagan officials to tell the story of Reagan and his accomplishments, which results in a decidedly one-sided version of events. A June 7 article in the New York Times on Reagan's impact claimed that Reagan "was almost always popular and, many now say, usually right." The article stated that "Reagan lived long enough to enable many of his old lieutenants, and some more dispassionate chroniclers as well, to argue that he had also been right on some of the bigger questions of his time."
Six of the eight sources the article quoted were former Reagan staffers or Republicans, one was longtime Reagan devotee Margaret Thatcher, and one was University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein, who gave no argument that Reagan was "right" about anything. No other "dispassionate chroniclers" were quoted. Should readers be surprised that Reagan's friends and former colleagues still think he was right?
Television news has displayed an even more pronounced reliance on Reagan's Republican admirers. The Sunday morning shows (6/6/04) almost exclusively featured Republicans; former Reagan chief of staff James Baker appeared on all three networks, as well as Fox and CNN. Fox News Sunday (6/6/04) featured, in addition to Baker, current national security advisor Condoleezza Rice, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and Sheila Tate, former press secretary for Nancy Reagan. MSNBC's June 6 Hardball program featured Republican Sen. Elizabeth Dole, Republican representatives David Dreier and Chris Cox, and Reagan strategist Richard Wirthlin.
Interviewing Reagan's admirers may have provided an intimate view of the former president, but it yielded virtually no acknowledgment of his flaws. Former Secretary of State Alexander Haig, when questioned by CNN's Anderson Cooper (6/6/04) to name Reagan's greatest weakness or failing, responded, "I'm not going to criticize the President. And even if I wanted to, I would never do it on an occasion such as this. We should be grateful that the world was a better place because of Ronald Reagan's presidency."
Even when potentially critical voices were included, the tendency was to soften any disagreements over Reagan's policy. On NPR's Morning Edition (6/7/04), Susan Stamberg interviewed Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher along with Democratic strategist Paul Begala. Clearly, though, this was no time for disagreement, as evidenced by one of Stamberg's questions to Begala: "You once famously said that politics is show business for ugly people. Ronald Reagan makes a liar out of you. He was an extremely handsome, attractive man." Begala's response: "Boy, was he."
*Reagan's Legacy
Reagan's influence over world politics and the direction of the Republican Party were important aspects of the media's Reagan tributes. But more often than not, the more controversial aspects of Reagan's legacy were either downplayed or recast as footnotes.
Time magazine (6/14/04) cheered that "the Reagan years were another of those hinges upon which history sometimes turns. On one side, a wounded but still vigorous liberalism with its faith in government as the answer to almost every question. On the other, a free market so triumphant-- even after the tech bubble burst-- that we look first to 'growth,' not government, to solve most problems." As NBC's John Hockenberry put it (6/5/04), "The Reagan revolution imagined the unimaginable. When poverty and welfare were at crisis levels in the 1980s, Reagan declared war on government and turned his back on the welfare state." The long-term impact of cuts in social spending, gutted environmental protections and other casualties of Reagan's "war on government" were relegated to passing mentions.
Reagan's fervent support for right-wing governments in Central America was one of the defining foreign policies of his administration, and the fact that death squads associated with those governments murdered tens of thousands of civilians surely must be included in any reckoning of Reagan's successes and failures.
But a search of major U.S. newspapers in the Nexis news database turns up the phrase "death squad" only five times in connection with Reagan in the days following his death--twice in commentaries (Philadelphia Inquirer, 6/6/04; Chicago Tribune, 6/8/04) and twice in letters to the editor (San Francisco Chronicle, 6/8/04; L.A. Times, 6/8/04). Only one news article found in the search (L.A. Times, 6/6/04) considered the death squads an important enough part of Reagan's legacy to be worth mentioning. The three broadcast networks, CNN and Fox didn't mention death squads at all, according to Nexis. Nor were any references found in the transcripts of the broadcast networks to the fact that Reagan's policy of supporting Islamicist insurgents against the Soviet-backed government of Afghanistan led to the rise of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.
The Reagan administration's friendly policy towards Saddam Hussein was also a neglected media topic. During the Reagan years, the U.S. offered significant support to Iraq, including weapons components, military intelligence, and even some of the ingredients for manufacturing biological weapons like anthrax (Newsweek, 9/23/02).
The rare opportunities for critical reflection about Reagan's policies were turned into additional evidence of his strength, as when Time magazine (6/14/04) suggested, "Even when his views were most intransigent-- when he wondered out loud whether Martin Luther King Jr. was a communist or failed for nearly all of his presidency to speak the word AIDS even once-- Reagan gave Reaganism a human face." Time followed that strange assessment with a comment from Bush adviser Karl Rove: "He made us sunny optimists... His was a conservatism of laughter and openness and community."
Journalists seemed determined to show that any criticisms of Reagan could be turned upside down. As Dan Rather explained on CBS's 60 Minutes (6/6/04), "The literal-minded were forever troubled by his tendency to sometimes confuse life with the movies. But he understood, like very few leaders before or since, the power of myth and storytelling. In his films and his political life, Ronald Reagan stood at the intersection where dreams and reality meet, and with a wink and a one-liner, always held out hope for a happy ending."
Even Reagan's contradictions were somehow construed as strong points. As Time put it (6/14/04), "So great was Reagan's victory in making his preoccupations into enduring themes of the national conversation that it may not matter that his record didn't always match his rhetoric. He insisted, for instance, that a balanced budget was one of his priorities. But by the time Reagan left office, a combination of lower tax revenues and sharply higher spending for defense had sent the deficit through the roof."
The Iran-Contra scandal, which loomed too large to ignore, was often written off by journalists. "As we look back today, it's like just a speck in the eight years of his presidency," explained CNN's Judy Woodruff (6/7/04). Meet the Press host Tim Russert (6/6/04) showed a clip of Reagan's famous response to the scandal, in which he stated, "A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true. But the facts and the evidence tell me it is not." Russert described this tortured evasion of culpability as "very believable."
Whatever reporters made of Iran-Contra, though, Reagan's triumph over such problems was more important than the incidents themselves. CBS reporter Anthony Mason (6/6/04) explained: "The deficit doubled during the Reagan years. His second term was scarred by the Iran Contra scandal, but he never lost that common touch.... Ronald Reagan had an uncanny ability to make Americans feel good about themselves." That bond with American citizens remained front-and-center throughout the media. As CBS anchor Dan Rather put it (6/5/04), Reagan "was the great communicator, yes. But he was also a master at communicating greatness. He understood that, as he once put it, 'History is a ribbon always unfurling,' and managed to convey his vision in terms both simple and poetic. And so he was able to act as a conduit to connect us to who we had been and who we could be."
*Reagan and the Media
The overwhelmingly positive coverage of Reagan struck some as a significant change. As Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz noted(6/7/04): "The uplifting tone with which journalists are eulogizing Ronald Reagan is obscuring a central fact of his presidency: He had a very contentious relationship with the press." Others would certainly disagree with Kurtz's assessment-- Mark Heertsgaard's 1991 book, "On Bended Knee: The Press & the Reagan Presidency," for example, characterizes the press corps as being basically uncritical during the Reagan years.
In any event, it would be hard to argue that current coverage of Reagan carries any lingering traces of that formerly "contentious" relationship. If anything, some reporters now seem to think that the main lesson learned from the Reagan years was not to be critical. As ABC's Sam Donaldson put it (6/4/04), "Reporters over the years made the mistake of saying, 'Well, he made this mistake, he made this mistake. He got that fact wrong.' The American public got it right. It didn't matter."
Finally, Tom Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism (USA Today, 6/7/04) gave an interesting take on what he acknowledged were "almost completely uncritical" media reports on Reagan: "For networks that are accused of being liberal, this is a way for them to show that they are fair." One would hope that such an overwhelmingly uncritical assessment of important political and historical matters would not meet anyone's definition of "fair" journalism.
http://www.fair.org/ |
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Seen on the Internet |
by someone
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
14 Jun 2004
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Jesus Christ only got a 3 day mourning period. |
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Re: The Legacy of the Reagan Years |
by Jack Ryan
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
14 Jun 2004
|
Dear Someone,
You said: Jesus Christ only got a 3 day mourning period.
Well like most liberals, you forgot to read the rest of the story.
Christ rose from the dead on the third day. You should read the book, it's a great story. After you do, go out and spread the Good News.
Jack |
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Re: The Legacy of the Reagan Years |
by Anna Epelbaum
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
15 Jun 2004
|
Dear Jack Ryan, It WAS NOT REAGAN because of whom former Eastern communist world colapsed. Though he did something for it. There were a lot of other reasons, internal reasons of that former empire, two centuries of historical clashes with Poland and Polish Pope, etc., etc., etc..
I saw it by my own eyes, as I immigrated from former Soviet Union at the very end of 1989. The history of my husband whose way Reagan , as governor of California, crossed a very substancial while ago when he(Reagan) annuled a lot of research grants in Berkeley and Stanford, and pretty brutally crashed students' movements in Berkeley, demonstrating certainly not good features of his governing policies and own personality, is showing how technology and science are supported and promoted by goverment. I am not pro-communism, sure, not. However, you conversation about so named "freedom" sound like even worse propaganda than the one I used to hear during my teenage years! |
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Re: The Legacy of the Reagan Years |
by Joe Futrelle
futrelle (nospam) shout.net (verified) |
Current rating: 0
15 Jun 2004
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I remember Reagan for a couple of things.
1. Iran-contra. Like Nixon, the Reagan administration operated outside of the law, a fundamentally unamerican position. The NSC contravened congress, our elected representatives, and then tried to cover it up. We're supposed to ... what? forget that? Sorry, I remember. Any serious rehabilitation of Reagan's legacy has got to deal seriously with Iran-contra. If you accept the dubious idea that Reagan was completely out of the loop, then you must at least concede that he was doing a poor job of leading his own administration.
2. SDI. Many scientists were appalled by the proposition, because it wasn't feasible, as is being borne out by our current attempts at an MD system that has failed test after test. But worse were the strategic implications; SDI was an escalation of the arms race, not a climbdown. I was personally appalled that Reagan was taking advice from Edward Teller, the inventor of the H-bomb, and proposing H-bomb based weapons like the X-ray laser. The legacy of SDI lives on in Rumsfeld and co.'s plan to build an array of terrifying space-based weapons. Now, I don't have to be reminded that the iron curtain collapsed on Reagan's watch; but SDI lives on, in the absence of a comparable threat. 9/11 demonstrated that our enemies do not need missiles to harm us.
The jingoistic week-long tribute to Reagan appalled me, not because I wish ill on this man or his family, who are all after all human beings like everyone else, but because it was largely irresponsible reporting that literally prevented people from hearing about the important things that are going on in the world. People who do no more than scan the headlines spent a week listening to commentators fawn over Reagan and were left relatively uninformed.
History will vindicate realistic assessments of Reagan, who after all left a complicated legacy that can't be summed up by me or any commentator who only focuses on what they want to focus on. In the meantime there are critical decisions facing everyone in this democracy, and blanket 24-hour coverage of largely irrelevant topics for weeks at a time is dangerous, because uninformed decisions could literally result in innocent people being killed. |
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urgent assistance |
by from forota utanga
forotautanga2 (nospam) jumpy.it (unverified) |
Current rating: 0
11 Sep 2004
|
dear sir.
my name is forota utanga i need your assistance.
thanks |
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Re: The Legacy of the Reagan Years |
by Ron Cigic
lcigron (nospam) ptd.net (unverified) |
Current rating: 0
01 Dec 2004
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How many people were convicted of felonies
during the Reagan anministration. |
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