What Reagan Taught Bush:
Top Ten Lessons for Counterrevolutionaries
by David Lytel
ReDefeatBush.com, 6/04
Anyone old enough to remember the Reagan
presidency is in shock. The right because their hero has died
and the left because the eulogizing about him is so gloriously
twisted and exaggerated it can't help but remind you of Reagan
himself, who never let the facts get in the way of a good story.
If you missed the Reagan administration and need a crash course,
here are the lessons that the Republicans learned from the Reagan
presidency and have passed on to George W. Bush and America's
current rulers.
10. Even if tax cuts build a weaker America
they build a stronger Republican party:
As economist Lester Thurow has written,
"the epitaph of the Reagan presidency will be: When Ronald
Reagan became President, the United States was the largest creditor
nation. When he left the presidency, we were the world's largest
debtor nation." Under cover of his "supply side"
theory, he massively expanded the federal budget deficit and our
trade deficit, both of which were harmful in the long run but
allowed the Republicans to juice the economy with debt-financed
stimulus and win re-election for Reagan. History shows the story
that Reagan returned America to economic strength after the failure
of the Carter Administration is not borne out by fact. Reagan
continued the regulatory reform policies of the Carter administration
and only in the final year of his presidency (1988) did employment
return to the level it had been at the end of the Carter presidency
(1979). It wasn't until the Clinton Administration that the federal
budget once again produced surplus, an achievement squandered
by Bush and his reduction of federal tax revenues by massive tax
cuts. There is no evidence that the Reagan's "tax cuts"
had any significant economic impact since they were not really
cuts but a shift in the tax burden from the wealthy to the middle
class. The long term effect of the Republican drive to reduce
the tax burden on the wealthy is profound. If the U.S. taxes were
equivalent to those of our European allies, the Social Security
Trust Fund would be solvent and sufficient funds would exist in
the public treasury to virtually eliminate poverty and provide
significant investment in public education, so when you see substandard
housing and shamefully underfunded public schools, think of Ronald
Reagan.
9. A President must take full responsibility
for everything except the mistakes and illegal activities:
As has become known since his death, Reagan's
campaign manager William Casey negotiated the sale of weapons
to Iran to secure the release of America's hostages held there,
a direct violation of U.S. law and policy. Once in office as Reagan's
CIA director, he illegally oversaw the transfer of funds to right
wing counterrevolutionaries in Nicaragua. The story made up to
cover the torture of Iraqi prisoners is eerily similar to the
story created to cover the Reagan Administration's lying and coverup
of the Iran/Contra scandal, that it was the work of a few rogue
employees who were operating unsupervised at the highest levels
of the U.S. government. In the case of the Reagan administration,
the cover story was that Lt. Colonel (Oliver North) in the White
House's National Security Council independently devised and executed
a plan to sell 1 weapons illegally to America's enemies and used
the money to finance -- despite specific laws passed to prohibit
it -- right wing paramilitary groups in Nicaragua and El Salvador.
Of course, nothing like this was possible without the knowledge
and cooperation of the CIA, NSA and the rest of the military establishment,
but the thin veneer of plausibility enabled the Administration
to deflect blame from the leaders, who escaped prosecution for
their crimes. In addition to Reagan, whose knowledge of the activities
of his own government was sketchy at best, George Bush, Sr. also
claimed to have been "out of the loop" despite the preponderance
of evidence to the contrary. But the debate often glides right
past the question of what we were doing training and equipping
forces widely cited by international human rights organizations
as being barbaric and inhumane. Because they called themselves
anti-Communist the Reagan Administration welcomed them as allies
and refused to permit their crimes to be investigated and brought
to light, as today we accept profoundly anti-democratic regimes
in Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia to name but a few since they
are willing to help us plunder Afghanistan, Iraq and the countries
that will be invaded should Bush remain president in 2005.
8. While overt racism is unseemly, a Republican
leader should signal to white power proponents that he agrees
with them:
Reagan pioneered insulting the poor and
powerless and proved how popular this is with white men, particularly
in the south and west. Reagan launched his candidacy for the presidency
in the deep south in the place where white civil rights workers
had been murdered, using the language of "states rights"
that substituted for the discredited claims of Caucasian racial
supremacy. Reagan's repeated characterization of poor black women
on public assistance as "welfare queens" enabled white
people to openly loathe them again, which during the height of
the civil rights movement had been considered rude and boorish
behavior. Had Reagan genuinely cared about misappropriation of
public funds he would not have been indifferent to corporate crimes
that looted more money from both public and private coffers than
all of the black women in American history (including Oprah Winfrey)
have ever seen. The blindness of Reagan's Department of Justice
during the 1980s permitted new forms of corporate fraud to be
pioneered such as junk bonds that stole billions from investors
and the misuse of savings and loan charters, a scandal that drained
billions from the public treasury and private investors. Neither
of these massive huge rip offs attracted Reagan's attention because
their perpetrators and the beneficiaries of these crimes were
almost entirely male Caucasians.
7. Nations that assist the U.S. in its
foreign policy goals can murder, torture and imprison anyone necessary
to maintain stability:
Reagan's ambassador to El Salvador John
Negroponte, now in charge of the reconstruction of Iraq, gave
American moral and financial support to Robert d'Aubusson and
his ARENA Party in El Salvador, a barely veiled political arm
of the death squads that terrorized the country in the name of
democracy and freedom. Reagan also remained silent on the great
crusade against Apartheid in South Africa, which he considered
a matter for the South African military to manage by itself with
assistance from American arms dealers.
6. Bust unions whenever you can because
those people are a danger to the continued concentration of wealth
and power in the hands of trust fund Republicans.
Among Reagan's first acts in office was
the crushing of the air traffic controllers union, which brought
to light the inadequate safeguards on public air travel. Reagan
refused to negotiate with PATCO and ordered the hiring of more
compliant workers. When Libyan agents brought down an American
passenger plane over Lockerbee Scotland he diverted attention
from the lack of security in the international airline system,
instead unsuccessfully dispatching warplanes to kill Libyan leader
Momar Quadaffi.
5. The most effective way to please corporate
contributors is to name someone to head regulatory agencies who
will undermine the agency from within:
In naming James Watt and Anne Gorsuch
to the top positions at EPA Reagan pioneered a method not even
Nixon dared use to undermine environmental regulation -- having
people resolutely opposed to the success of their agency in the
top leadership roles, resulting in the near collapse of a generation
of consensus on government support for clean air and water, the
proper handling of solid waste, recycling, the clean up of hazardous
wastes, etc.
4. If defense policies serve only to tie
corporate interests more closely to the Republican party without
making the nation more secure that is good enough.
Reagan's Department of Defense spent billions
of dollars on a "star wars" missile defense system that
did not work, still does not work, and even if it did work would
be preparation for a threat that no longer exists. In conjunction
with the privatization of military functions, Reagan helped create
a class of enterprise that could be trusted to give generously
to Republican causes and was almost entirely dependent upon the
maintenance of a high level of international hostility. These
companies, such as Haliburton, Bechtel and others are the core
constituency of the Republican party, responsible for ensuring
that it has a sufficient financial advantage over the opposition
party so that it may remain in power despite its narrow popular
base.
3. No global problem is too big to be
ignored unless its solution can promote the interests of the Republican
party.
In the Reagan Administration no urgent
social and medical problem was more resolutely ignored than the
worldwide spread of AIDS. Reagan's indifference to the plight
of gay men who were among the first to be struck by the AIDS virus
led to thousands of needless deaths. His demonization of homosexuals
and characterization of AIDS as a plague from God raised homophobia
to a new level of acceptability, from which it has only recently
recovered. In the Bush administration, the preponderance of the
evidence of global warming and the international consensus that
it be addressed collectively have been ignored with equal vigor
because there is no constituency for environmental protection
within the Republican party.
2. If you are affable the commercial news
media will judge you on your intentions rather than your actual
results.
Reagan proved that image is everything,
and that as long as he was charming reporters who asked difficult
questions would be shunned by their peers as acting rude toward
a nice old man. Bush has held even fewer public news conferences
than Reagan and his management of the news media has produced
little backlash, despite his lies about Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction, a link between Hussein and Al Qaeda, the effect of
massive tax cuts, banishment of images of coffins containing Americans
killed in foreign adventures, etc. Like Reagan, Bush has succeeded
in getting the news media to judge him on the wellness of his
intentions rather than on the wisdom of his judgment.
1. Boldly claim credit for major historic
events and make it seem that you caused them:
After 60 years Communism in Russia and
the rest of Eastern Europe was falling under the weight of its
inability to perform economically and its massive worldwide military
commitments. Its legitimacy was under significant attack from
within and was further undermined by the loss of the Soviet Army
to insurgents in Afghanistan. Communist Party leader Mikhail Gorbachev's
economic and political liberalization to improve openness and
productivity raised expectations that rapidly ran ahead of actual
results, leading to a breakdown of public authority. This was
exploited by Boris Yeltsin and other reformers who seized power.
It is liberalization that could not be controlled that ended totalitarianism
in the former Soviet Union, not the expansion of American military
spending. That Reagan and the Republican Party do not understand
nor deserve credit for the fall of Communism in Russia can be
more or less proven by two observations. First, the Soviet Union
had already maxed out its military capacity long before Reagan's
military build-up began. Second, the Republicans are unwilling
to use a warming of relations to bring down the government of
Cuba but maintain a hard line policy that has no chance of working.
Instead of confronting the Castro regime with expanded trade and
cultural exchanges that cause them to seek political and economic
liberalization, Castro can count on continued hard line opposition
from the U.S. and the continuation of a useless economic embargo
against his country. This enables Castro to argue that further
tight economic and political controls are necessary and to shield
Cuban citizens from interaction with Americans, and it permits
the Republicans to please the Cuban-American community, without
which its tenuous hold on power in Florida might be lost. Despite
this, the Republicans will claim credit for bringing down Castro
when he finally dies of old age.
The history of the Reagan Administration
as presented in the Reagan obituaries is the scrubbed and sanitized
version, in which Ronald Reagan is the brave hero whose bold thinking
saved America from economic collapse and whose goodness enabled
a godloving people to triumph over evil. Only a few stories you
will ever hear will be further from the truth. In reality, Reagan
was the first figurehead president, incapable of answering questions
about the policies of his administration which he understood in
only the most summary way, and responsible only as the public
spokesperson for decisions made by others. Reagan pioneered the
deliberate confusion of the public interest with corporate interests.
He enhanced the role of the Republican Party as the primary vehicle
for the sale of influence to corporate decision-makers eager to
undermine the national government, the only institution powerful
enough to confront global commercial interests seeking to evade
environmental, labor and other standards of conduct. By evicerating
public authority, bankrupting the public treasury and projecting
a sunny personality to deflect the critical evaluation of his
actual job performance Bush continues the tradition Reagan began.
David Lytel served in the White House
Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Clinton Administration.
He holds a PhD in government from Cornell and is a former Democratic
elected official. He runs ReDefeatBush.com.
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