The Man Who Sold the World
Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal
of Main Street America
by William Kleinknecht
Nation Books, 2009, paperback
pxi
Ronald Reagan, when the layers of myth are peeled away, was arguably
the least patriotic president in American history.
pxi
He laid the foundation for a new global economic order in which
nationhood would gradually become meaningless. He enacted policies
that helped wipe out the high-paying jobs for the working class
that were the real backbone of the country.
pxi
Ronald Reagan, when the layers of myth are peeled away, was arguably
the least patriotic president in American history. He laid the
foundation for a new global economic order in which nationhood
would gradually become meaningless. He enacted policies that helped
wipe out the high-paying jobs for the working class that were
the real backbone of the country.
... Reagan propelled the transition to
hypercapitalism, an epoch in which the forces of self-interest
and profit seek to make a final rout of traditional human values.
His legacy - mergers, deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy,
privatization, globalization - helped weaken the family and eradicate
small-town life and the sense of community.
pxii
The same government policies that fueled corporate mergers in
other sectors propelled the increasing concentration of the media,
which has resulted in a shallow and homogeneous presentation of
the news that runs no risk of offending advertisers.
pxx
[Ronald] Reagan['s] constant attacks on the inefficiency of government,
a rallying cry taken up by legions of conservative politicians
across the country, became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more
money that was taken away from government programs, the more ineffective
they became, and the more ineffective they became, the more ridiculous
government bureaucrats came to be seen in the public eye. Gradually
government, and the broader realm of public service, has come
to seem disreputable, disdained by the best and brightest college
students planning their careers. And the image of government has
been dragged down even further by the behavior of politicians,
who, imbued with the same exaltation of self-interest that is
the essence of Reaganism, increasingly treat public office as
a vehicle for their own enrichment.
pxx
[Ronald Reagan] disenfranchised the average citizen by inventing
the soft-money machine that made large corporations the real power
in Washington. He weakened the enforcement of labor laws and inspired
union busters across the country by firing the more than eleven
thousand striking air-traffic controllers and breaking their union
in 1981. He empowered corporate executives to abandon the concept
of loyalty to employees, shareholders, and communities and weakened
the bargaining power of labor. He presided over the slow creep
of commercial values into virtually every sphere of American Life.
pxxvii
Our nation was founded on the principles of the Enlightenment,
the idea of a society based on reason and democracy, not the perquisites
of monarchs and aristocrats. The Progressive era and the New Deal
rested on those principles. They brought intellect to bear on
the most serious problems of society. Reaganism replaced Enlightenment
thinking with a corrupted Romanticism that portrays freemarket
purism as an article of religious faith that is the real meaning
of America. The answer to any of the economic challenges of the
twenty-first century is to do nothing. Cut taxes, eviscerate all
regulation of private enterprise, and trust the market to guide
our fates.
With Reaganism has come an abandonment
of all faith in reason and progress, and it has accrued manifestly
to the detriment of the average America.
pxxvii
Our nation was founded on the principles of the Enlightenment,
the idea of a society based on reason and democracy, not the perquisites
of monarchs and aristocrats. The Progressive era and the New Deal
rested on those principles. They brought intellect to bear on
the most serious problems of society. Reaganism replaced Enlightenment
thinking with a corrupted Romanticism that portrays freemarket
purism as an article of religious faith that is the real meaning
of America. The answer to any of the economic challenges of the
twenty-first century is to do nothing. Cut taxes, eviscerate all
regulation of private enterprise, and trust the market to guide
our fates.
pxxvii
Reaganism replaced Enlightenment thinking with a corrupted Romanticism
that portrays freemarket purism as an article of religious faith
that is the real meaning of America. The answer to any of the
economic challenges of the twenty-first century is to do nothing.
Cut taxes, eviscerate all regulation of private enterprise, and
trust the market to guide our fates.
With Reaganism has come an abandonment
of all faith in reason and progress, and it has accrued manifestly
to the detriment of the average America.
p42
[Ronald] Reagan ... became an FBI informant... Reagan was so busy
an informant in the next few years that the bureau gave him a
code name, T- 10.
p42
As head of the Screen Actors Guild, [Ronald Reagan] began to promote
the agenda of Hollywood executives as much as the rank and file
of his union, beginning with his efforts to keep communists from
gaining influence in the motion picture industry. In November
1947, at the SAG meeting that elected him to his first full term
as president, he supported a resolution requiring that no one
hold office in the union without signing an affidavit denying
membership in the Communist Party. He also joined forces with
Louis B. Mayer and other studio executives to stave off government
meddling in the motion picture industry by making sure Hollywood
cleaned its own house of communist influence. Reagan's partner
in is effort was Roy Brewer, a powerful Hollywood labor leader
and rabid anticommunist who had succeeded John Wayne as president
of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American
Ideals, formed in 1944 to oppose not only communism but the New
Deal, labor unions, and civil rights groups.
p43
[Ronald] Reagan has denied that he ever named names before Congress
or participated in blacklisting. He was always insistent that
no blacklisting ever occurred (which might explain how, in 1984,
he could justify appointing Brewer, whom a Los Angeles Times reporter
once called the "darkest figure of a dark age," to a
key labor post in his administration). But the release of [Ronald
Reagan's] FBI file in the 1980s and other documentation ... suggests
that he played a major role in driving "subversives"
from the [movie] industry. With Brewer, Reagan served on a committee
within the Motion Picture Industrial Council responsible for "clearing"
those accused of communist ties, which of course meant laying
the ground for the banishment of those who could not be cleared.
His FBI file notes approvingly that Reagan told an agent that
"he has been made a member of a committee headed by L. B.
Mayer, the purpose of which allegedly is to 'purge' the motion
picture industry of Communist Party members." Reagan appeared
as a "friendly witness" before the House Committee on
Un-American Activities ... and parroted the official statement
of the producers that the government could make Hollywood's job
easier by declaring the Communist Party an agent of a foreign
power and banning its members from all occupations in this country.
p51
[Ronald Reagan] shifted his core beliefs depending on what he
became convinced was in his own self-interest at the moment. He
was a leftist until he felt duped by Hollywood communists and
became an FBI informant. He was a committed labor leader until
his own interests required self-serving deals with management.
He was a New Dealer while the philosophy was benefiting him personally,
but switched to Republicanism when the social welfare tab was
coming out of his taxes. Since his mind disdained nuance and complexity,
he could believe passionately in whatever one-dimensional viewpoint
he held at any given time, and his boyish enthusiasm and disarming
manners had a way of winning over doubters. The man who saw big
business as an unalloyed evil and government as the savior of
the people could believe the complete opposite a few years later
without ever entertaining the possibility that the truth might
lie somewhere in the middle.
p51
[Ronald] Reagan on the campaign trail in 1980 was indeed a true
believer in a set of political ideas that vindicated his enmity
toward government, accrued to his own personal wealth, and won
him the admiration and financial backing of the Southern California
country club set. The close-knit group of Sun Belt tycoons who
bankrolled Reagan's rise in politics... They had little interest
in social issues like abortion, affirmative action, or school
prayer. Most were not even particularly passionate in their anticommunism.
They viewed Reagan quite simply as a potential liberator for the
entrepreneurial class... The rising class of entrepreneurs in
the service sector, who wanted deep cuts in their taxes and government
regulators out of the way.
p70
Everything that was ostensibly part of Reagan's domestic agenda
- ending handouts to the welfare queens, outlawing abortion, promoting
school prayer, controlling crime, nurturing family values - became
secondary issues whose value was mainly to divide the nation and
distract attention from the coup d'etat that the rich were staging
in Washington. While some of the traditional goals of the conservative
movement would be achieved over the next two decades, they were
not the central focus of the Reagan White House. The real business
of the [Reagan] administration ... was business. And the way to
carry out that business was to implement a plan for the disembowelment
of the public sector.
p70
The real business of the [Reagan] administration ... was business.
And the way to carry out that business was to implement a plan
for the disembowelment of the public sector.
p71
Ronald Reagan ... tried to take America on a journey back to a
Shangri-la that never existed. The Millionaire Backers, who knew
that his presidency was just a money grab by the upper class,
may have chuckled to themselves at how gullibly he bought into
the lines he was reading. But Reagan was a true believer. His
idea that America's greatness would be restored only if freed
from the shackles of government unleashed one of the great philosophical
misadventures of modern history... it brought seismic changes
to American society, undermining our democracy, cheapening our
culture, and reversing a seventy-year trend toward social progress.
p71
With his simple pledge to "get government off the backs of
the American people," Ronald Reagan set in motion a tidal
wave of deregulation and privatization that has transformed the
nation.
p73
Reaganism, to the degree that it was anything but a coup by the
rich, was perpetrated not in the name of facts and analysis but
in the name of ideology, an ideology that our most revered national
leaders - Lincoln, Wilson, the Roosevelts, Truman, and Kennedy
- had long ago regarded as obsolete and downright disastrous when
allowed to guide national policy.
p120
[Bill Clinton] had pledged in his campaign to put people first,
and end the Reagan-Bush neglect of the public sector. But he ended
up buying into the Reagan mantra of deregulation... He quickly
developed a rapport with [Reagan-appointed Alan] Greenspan, giving
the free-market guru even more influence over White House policy
than he had enjoyed in the Reagan-Bush years. And he made his
chief economic adviser Robert Rubin, the former cochairman of
Goldman Sachs and Company, a man who saw the world through the
prism of Wall Street. Rubin, who was head of the White House National
Economic Council in Clinton's first term and treasury secretary
in his second, became fast friends with Greenspan, the latter
once joking that the longtime Democrat was the best Republican
treasury secretary ever. Together, the two men ensured that Clinton
stayed the course of Reaganism on economic matters.
p122
In
the fall of 1999, with the Clinton administration's backing and
the enthusiastic support of Senator Phil Gramm, chairman of the
Banking Committee, Congress approved the Financial Services Modernization
Act, commonly known as the Gramm-Leach-Biley Act, which repealed
Glass-Steagall. On the day his negotiators and Republican leaders
reached an accord on the law, Clinton issued a statement predicting
that consumers would be among the winners. "When this potentially
historic agreement is finalized," he said, "it will
strengthen the economy and help consumers, communities and businesses
across America."
... The repeal of Glass-Steagall, the
culmination of an effort that the Reagan administration had begun
in its first months in office, did not turn out to be a boon for
consumers or the economy, as Regan, Greenspan, Rubin, and Clinton
had predicted. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prizewinning economist
who had chaired Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers, wrote
in 2003 that his was a lonely voice in the administration opposing
the repeal of Glass-Steagall, and his concerns proved to be on
the money.
... Within two years after the repeal
of Glass-Steagall, companies were inflating their earnings by
billions of dollars. Brokers were happy to manipulate their analyses
of these companies and lure in unsuspecting investors because
millions of dollars in fees were flowing to their firms' investment-banking
divisions.
... [At] the dawn of the George W. Bush
era ... the ethos of Reaganism was once again enshrined as holy
writ, so the stock market implosion of the millennium would not
give rise to new banking regulation. Instead, the financial press
continued to deify Greenspan, Rubin, and Reagan, and the country
plunged headlong into the subprime mortgage scandal. Without the
repeal of Glass-Steagall and other aspects of financial deregulation
in the post-Reagan era, the financial supermarkets like Citicorp
and Merrill Lynch would never have been allowed to engage in the
kind of reckless mortgage lending that set off such a historic
economic crisis.
The antecedents of the subprime mortgage
crisis clearly lay within the Reagan administration.
p127
The ideology that Adam Smith originated, Milton Friedman rejuvenated,
Ronald Reagan made the new American consensus, and Alan Greenspan
carried into the twenty-first century: the belief that the "invisible
hand" of the market is never wrong.
p132
In industry after industry in the post-Reagan era: Consumers are
bought off with pennies - or led to believe they have saved money
- while mergers cost thousands of people their jobs, wages plummet,
service declines, and navigating American commerce becomes a daily
affront to human dignity.
p132
Any survey of the damage resulting from the deregulation of America
is remiss without a word about the Reagan administration's moves
toward removing all government controls over broadcasting, cable
television, and telecommunications. Here we find the beginning
of a movement that would pick the pockets of American consumers,
penalize rural communities, and reduce radio and television to
commercial drivel. The Telecommunications Act of 1996, a grand
hoodwinking of the public that promised more competition and diversity
in the media but instead wiped out whatever diversity was left,
was the culmination of a process the Reagan administration set
in motion in 1981.
Mark Fowler, Reagan's first chairman of
the Federal Communications Commission, was the spiritual father
of broadcast deregulation. He came into office with a profound
disdain for the notion that television and radio airwaves were
owned by the public, a concept that had been the cornerstone of
communications law since 1934. He felt the airwaves should be
the province of corporations, whose competition in the free market
would be enough to serve the public interest. "It's time
to move away from thinking of broadcasters as trustees and time
to treat them the way that everyone else in this society does,
that is, as a business," he said. "Television is just
another appliance. It's a toaster with pictures. Fowler said he
took it as an "article of faith that any successful businessman
is meeting a public need." He was fond of cloaking himself
in the mantle of Ronald Reagan, once boasting that he was "not
the captive of any industry or industry in general. "I am
a captive of a philosophy of government we call Reaganism."
These were not just idle words. In Fowler's
six-year tenure as chairman, the FCC reviewed or abolished 89
percent of the regulations governing broadcasting. By 1987, the
commission had done away with the fairness doctrine, which required
broadcast outlets to cover both sides of public issues; the provision
that required broadcasters to allow public figures equal time
to respond to attacks; the requirement that politicians be given
airtime around elections; and the rule that stations keep a file
of all their complaints from the public. Fowler also dropped the
FCC's enforcement of misconduct on the part of broadcasting license
holders.
But Fowler's most important contribution
to the homogenization of news and entertainment was his success
in liberalizing the multipleownership rule. Since 1953, the holdings
of any one broadcaster had been limited to seven television stations,
seven FM radio stations, and seven AM stations. Fowler managed
to raise that number to twelve and did away with the rule that
stations be held for three years before being sold. This reform
was enough to set off a round of mergers in the broadcasting industry,
including Capital Cities' acquisition of the American Broadcasting
Corporation, the first sale of a major television network. Radio
and television stations were soon being traded like any other
commodity, making a mockery of their status as trustees of the
nation's airwaves.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996, a
sweeping deregulation of the communications, cable television,
and telephone industries, was passed after furious lobbying and
a blizzard of contributions to key members of Congress. According
to the Center for Responsive Politics, the communications and
electronic industries gave $23.7 million to congressional candidates
in 1995-1996. The result was that a bill profoundly skewed toward
powerful interests was passed with hardly any public debate. "I
have never seen anything like the Telecommunications bill,"
one career lobbyist told journalist Robert McChesney. "The
silence of public debate is deafening. A bill with such astonishing
impact on all of us is not even being discussed."
Sponsors of the law estimated that deregulation
of the cable and telephone industries would save consumers $550
billion over a decade-$333 billion in lower long-distance rates,
$32 billion in lower local phone rates, and $78 billion in lower
cable bills. Instead, cable rates went up by about 50 percent
and local phone rates by more than 20 percent, according to a
2005 study by Common Cause.
Even more devastating for our culture
and national discourse was the further evisceration of limits
on multiple ownership of broadcast stations. Companies had been
limited to owning forty radio stations; the law removed any limits,
enabling a company like Clear Channel Communications to own twelve
hundred stations around the country. The Common Cause study found
that $700 million worth of buying and selling of radio stations
occurred the first week after the act became law.
The act also did away with the limit of
twelve television stations per company and boosted the national
share of audience for one company from 25 to 35 percent. In the
wake of this provision, the nation saw a frenzy of mergers in
the broadcasting industry that left five companies: Viacom, Disney,
News Corp, NBC, and AOL-Time Warner-in control of 75 percent of
prime-time viewing.
Higher telephone and cable TV rates, vastly
increased concentration of the media, the death of local radio,
the homogenization and dumbing down of programming, less broadcast
coverage of news-all these emerged from the movement begun by
Ronald Reagan, the man they called the Great Communicator.
p144
With the gutting of antitrust enforcement, the slashing of corporate
taxes, and the new permissiveness at the SEC, all the pieces were
in place for an unprecedented consolidation of big business.
... Between 1982 and 1988, more than ten
thousand mergers and acquisitions took place in the United States,
affecting enterprises that together had in excess of $1 trillion
in capital. The mergers swept America's best-known companies into
a complex web of ownership that was well beyond the ability of
the average consumer to comprehend. Most of the deals were financed
with junk bonds and other borrowed funds. The "leveraged
buyout," in which the acquirer buys the company almost entirely
with borrowed funds and then repays the loan out of the acquired
company's assets, became the cornerstone of the hostile takeover
movement in the 1980s.
p147
Corporate raiders and arbitrageurs, like Ivan Boesky, T. Boone
Pickens, and Carl Icahn, became the new robber barons, preying
on companies whose stock had been devalued by the straitened economy
and scrappy overseas competition, so that they were ripe for takeovers.
These predators would snatch up controlling interests in the companies
and use them as gambling chips, flipping them for quick profits
or even selling them off piece by piece like buying a car and
selling it for parts... The predators of Wall Street walked away
with huge fortunes acquired through pain to employees and
and communities as plants closed and many of the less successful
buyouts ended in corporate bankruptcy.
Reagan's abandonment of antitrust enforcement,
his corporate tax cuts, and his neutering of securities regulation
only helped accelerate big business's growing reluctance to invest
in America... Rather than sink capital into new factories and
products that could compete with overseas industrialists, American
business leaders preferred "paper entrepreneurism,"
the illusion of profitability through accounting, tax avoidance,
financial management, mergers and acquisitions, and litigation.
p148
Proponents of Reagan policies argued that mergers and acquisitions
displaced inefficient management and created wealth by enhancing
shareholder value in the acquired companies. But all this deal
making was largely benefiting a small group of players on Wall
Street, institutional investors, and savvy corporate executives...
But small shareholders, small employers, and communities - that
is to say, the part of America that Reagan often professed to
care about - were the losers.
p153
The predatory actions of the corporate raiders that the Reagan
administration encouraged in the 1980s had made earnings and market
share the central concern of nervous corporate executives... Company
executives in the 1990s resorted to a quick and easy way to maintain
market share: by acquiring other companies. Each of the acquisitions
enabled the acquirer to create the illusion of increased earnings,
which inflated market share and yielded new capital for the next
acquisition.
But after the stock market bubble burst,
these towers of speculation and accounting chicanery came tumbling
down. The falling stock market revealed the inherent instability
of huge companies hastily put together by mergers.
The merger of AOL and Time Warner was
spectacular failure. On the day the merger was announced, the
combined market capitalization of the two companies soared from
$222 billion to $318 billion. Unfortunately, the succeeding two
years brought nothing but plummeting income and shares. By the
end of January 2003, the media giant's market capitalization stood
at $62 billion, and it was paralyzed by huge losses and $26 billion
in debt.
p155
Ronald Reagan completed the mission that his Millionaire Backers
laid out for him ... the infusion of commercial values into virtually
every sphere of American life. Big corporations now have a sway
over our culture that would have appalled Adam Smith or Calvin
Coolidge, perhaps even Ronald Reagan himself.
p158
Reagan acted as if the 1980 election, in which he gained only
50.7 percent of the ballots cast, in the lowest voter turnout
in thirty-two years, gave him a mandate to grant big business
an unprecedented entrée into the lives of Americans. It
was not just the tax cuts and deregulation that gave corporations
new power. The administration adopted a series of policies that
received little attention at the time but served the express purpose
of giving corporate America a much larger sway over our culture.
p161
Americans now work more hours on average than our counterparts
in any other developed nation, for reasons closely linked to the
Reagan Revolution: the stagnation of middle-class wages and the
insecurity of corporate employment.
p161
In Reagan's speeches, the plan for corporate hegemony was always
hidden behind paeans to the good old-fashioned inventiveness and
entrepreneurial instincts of Americans, as if we were still a
nation of artisans and small-scale capitalists, not the epicenter
of a global oligopoly where corporations have no real allegiance
to any single country.
p161
Cyrill Siewert, the chief financial officer at the Colgate-Palmolive
Company
The United States does not have an automatic
call on our resources. There is no mindset that puts this country
first.
p180
From his days as the governor of California, Reagan had been harping
on the idea that sustaining the poor and healing the sick should
be the responsibility of private interests, not the government.
... Nonprofit institutions, many of which
were on the brink of insolvency because of the [Reagan] federal
budget cuts ... lined up to press corporate America for handouts.
.. Increasingly, nonprofit institutions,
particularly those acting as the custodians of our culture, began
to see corporations as partners, and corporate values bled into
their activities. Commercialism and corporate advertising became
a standard accoutrement of cultural events.
... The values of the Reagan administration
made it socially acceptable for corporate executives and board
members of cultural institutions, even those not losing federal
funding, to see their destinies as intertwined.
p181
an analyst of corporate philanthropy told the New York Times
Higher education and the arts are visible,
uncontroversial and closely lined with the class interests of
those giving out the money. But what can a homeless hungry person
do for a corporation? He doesn't work at the company, he doesn't
buy its products and his good will won't do the corporation much
good. That's the real reason why most corporate money doesn't
go to poor people.
p183
Reagan bore direct responsibility for the corruption of the nonprofit
sector now intertwined with for-profit affiliates and suffused
with commercial values that its mission of serving the poor, providing
health care, or upholding our culture is often hopelessly compromise
Many spheres of American life that by tradition had been painstakingly
shielded from commercial manipulation would increasingly be subject
to the caprice of the marketplace desperate for funding in the
wake of Reagan's deep budget cuts, major nonprofit institutions
across the country answered the siren call of the corporation.
in the Darwinian struggle for survival that followed the Reagan
administration's budget cuts, a huge number of nonprofits closed
their doors, and too many of those that remained inevitably absorbed
the private-sector values of their new sponsors often at the expense
of their core mission.
Large nonprofits are now often indistinguishable
from for-profit corporations with huge executive salaries, sprawling
office complexes, and high-priced lobbyists. Many of their operations
are wedded to for-profit affiliates, and yet they are still exempt
from taxes.
p183
An exhaustive study by the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1993 found
the nation's nonprofit hospitals devoted only 6 percent of their
expenditures to caring for the poor, while diverting hundreds
of million of dollars into commercial affiliates like hotels,
restaurants, health spas, laundries, marinas, and parking garages.
p183
Charity care in hospitals has declined dramatically even as beds
go unfilled, and medical equipment and personnel sit idle. A 2001
study found that 350,000 hospital beds, or one-third of the nation's
total, are empty on an average day, while millions of people are
denied charity care.
p192
It took Ronald Reagan only a few short years to reverse decades
of efforts by reformers to bring honesty and accountability to
the federal government... The right-wing ideologues and former
corporate executives who larded the top layers of government in
the Reagan years made a mockery of his promises to reduce government
waste while preserving programs for the "truly needy."
They were not wired to think in terms of democracy and the common
well-being of Americans. Like their patron, they worshipped at
the altar of self-interest. They had grown used to rationalizing
their greed as the sacred ground of free-market economics. In
their view, men like themselves had built this country with their
relentless acquisitiveness, and they saw no reason to change their
ways once they were appointed to public office. They would simply
use government as an extension of their business interests.
Their mind-numbing disregard for the people
of this country is well documented, although it seems to have
disappeared from the public discourse and it is inexplicably never
mentioned as part of Reagan's legacy.
p193
By the end of Reagan's two terms, 138 members of his administration
had been convicted, indicted, or investigated for criminal activity,
a record of graft that far surpassed even the Nixon, Harding,
and Grant administrations, Reagan's closest competitors in the
sweepstakes for the most corrupt presidency.
p195
Behind the scandals that enveloped the federal government in the
1980s was a new breed of public servant that [Ronald] Reagan ushered
into public life, one whose interests lay in serving not the public
but the coterie of Republican contributors and wealthy businessmen
who really mattered to the Reagan Revolution.
p203
The ethos that Reagan transported to Washington was the contempt
for government and exaltation of self-interest.
p204
Reaganism [was] the movement that decried government waste while
allowing dishonest public officials and their corporate allies
to squander billions of dollars of the public money.
p205
[The Reagan] administration may have been the most scandal-ridden
ever, his policies may have offended JudeoChristian values by
blatantly favoring the rich over the poor, his aides may have
lied to Congress, circumvented the Constitution, and regularly
uttered phrases brimming with bigotry and contempt for democracy.
And yet Reagan continued to be regarded by a large portion of
the public as a man of pristine values.
p213
By the very words that he repeated throughout his first campaign
- "Are you better off than you were four years ago?' [Ronald
Reagan] exhorted Americans to think of themselves, not their
country. He also transmitted that ethos to the people who made
up the Washington establishment: the elected officials, bureaucrats,
lobbyists, and reporters. And ultimately the ethos bled into society
at large. It is no accident that what is known as the Decade of
Greed coincided with the Reagan presidency.
p214
[The] disdain for ethics is a huge part of [Ronald] Reagan's legacy...
The scandals of his administration were almost entirely ignored
in the reminiscences of his presidency that appeared after his
death. The question all the commentators should have been asking
was quite simple: Could Reagan really have been a good man, deserving
of the reverence he has been given by so many Americans, if his
administration was steeped in such a miasma of corruption?
p215
Washington was once a cordial place where politicians from rival
parties respected each other's views and socialized at the end
of the workday. But the Reaganites brought a new breed into the
capital, whose credo was to mock the enemy and win at all costs.
p 215
The election of Ronald Reagan opened an era of mediocrity in the
Congress. Dozens of candidates whom all of Washington recognized
as unfit for the job were elected as senators and representatives
on Reagan's coattails. And a handful of incumbents well known
for their political extremism or slippery ethics, like Tom DeLay,
Newt Gingrich, and Jesse Helms, suddenly had enormous influence,
key committee chairmanships, or both. The new crop of lawmakers
were so slavish in their devotion to Reagan's policies that they
were dubbed the "Reagan Robots.
p219
Anyone looking for the antecedents of the Red State-Blue State
divide in America need look only to the style of governance Reagan
introduced in his first term. To convince rural and blue-collar
whites to support his elitist agenda, Reagan relied on a politics
of paranoia and distraction, establishing what would become known
as wedge issues as a cornerstone of conservative rule. In his
stump speeches Reagan never mentioned his real plans for the country:
the selling of national parks, tax cuts skewed toward the rich,
the deregulation of the financial industry, the gutting of environmental
enforcement, or the promotion of mergers between companies. Instead,
he spoke broadly of attacking big government and, more than any
president before him, distracted attention from his real agenda
by focusing on controversial issues that his handlers knew would
drive a wedge between traditional Democratic constituencies.
p220
Progressive commentators have often marveled at how gullible Americans
are in not seeing through [the] blatant manipulation of their
prejudices.. But they underestimate the power of the propaganda
that the Reagan administration unleashed on the country. The first
plank of this strategy was an effort to sharply curtail the people's
right to know. The Reagan administration moved on a wide number
of fronts to reduce the amount of information that the public
receives from the federal government.
p220
While reducing the level of information available to the public,
the [Reagan] administration went further than any previous administration
in its efforts to deceive and manipulate the press... Reagan's
loathsome treatment of the press, his blatant scripting of events,
his endless falsehoods, and his constant distortion of reality
were out in the open and forever changed the way press relations
would be handled in the capital.
Reagan's presidency was the first to fully
adopt the corporate model of public relations in its communications
with the public... no administration before Reagan's extended
these techniques beyond the campaign and into the realm of governance,
packaging its message and selling its programs in precisely the
same fashion that a corporation might push cars or toasters.
p222
Leslie Janka, a deputy White House press secretary under Ronald
Reagan
The whole thing was PR. [The Reagan Administration]
was a PR outfit that became president and took over the country.
And to the degree that the Constitution forced them to do things
like make a budget, run foreign policy and all that, they sort
of did it. But their first, last and overarching activity was
public relations.
p223
In the Reagan White House, the engineering of consent was accomplished
in part by manipulation of the press. Michael Deaver, David Gergan
and other media strategists made it their goal every morning to
control that day's story. They would develop a "line of the
day" and push it at the press corps, usually scheduling a
highly visual event that would please the television networks.
The effort was extremely successful in setting the agenda for
the media, which spent little time analyzing the implications
of Reagan's sweeping transformation of federal policies.
p223
Michael Deaver in his memoirs
Ronald Reagan enjoyed the most generous
treatment by the press of any president in the postwar era. He
knew it, and liked the distinction.
p223
The last thing [the Reagan Administration] wanted the public to
find out was that Reagan, by the time he was elected president,
could articulate few political ideas beyond his disdain for communism,
taxes, and big government. But it was the very simplicity of those
beliefs that made him the perfect pitchman. Thus we have Ronald
Reagan in his speeches speaking in simple platitudes that often
cloaked the real intentions of the administration, intentions
that he never completely understood. He would not tell the American
people that his administration planned to gut environmental protections
or drastically reduce business taxes or set off a rash of corporate
mergers.
p224
Every president who followed [Ronald] Reagan would be squired
by image consultants and pollsters; the Washington press corps
would not be informed of the government's real activities but
distracted and manipulated; speeches would be filled with meaningless
drivel; and the public would come to regard politicians as no
more worthy of trust than used-car salesmen.
p229
The last two decades have seen a rollback of civil liberties and
a dramatic empowerment of police in the name of lighting criminal
threats that seem to shift with every political season. Reagan
pledged to take government off the backs of the people, but for
many Americans, that government is more intrusive than ever.
p230
With right-wing politicians and their media allies regularly stoking
the public's paranoia over drugs or carjacking or kidnapped children
or abusive day-care centers or terrorism ... citizens are frightened
into giving up liberties jealously guarded by previous generations
of Americans.
p230
The entire landscape of criminal justice in America was shaped
by Ronald Reagan. The prison-building boom, the exponential increase
in the number of Americans behind bars, the billions poured down
the drain in the so-called war on drugs, the racial-profiling
scandal on the nation's highways, the attacks on habeas corpus
and the exclusionary rule, the exaggerated hero worship of the
police officer - all of these can be laid at Reagan's doorstep.
The law-and-order debate in America has always been a spawning
ground for demagoguery, but the forces of reason and dispassion
had the upper hand for much of the middle decades of the last
century. Reagan helped make sure that criminal justice questions
would close out the century steeped in hysteria. Since he established
crime as a potent wedge issue, politicians across the country
have been falling over one another to press for tougher criminal
statutes, whether they make sense or not.
p231
[George HW Bush] escalated Reagan's war on drugs, hiring thousands
of new federal agents and, for the first time, creating a federal
death penalty for crimes having nothing to do with national security.
Bill Clinton also recognized a political winner when he saw it
and adopted the Reagan-Bush approach as his own.
p259
John Adams
Commerce, luxury, and avarice destroyed
every republican government.
p259
The discrediting government as a legitimate and) meaningful presence
in the lives of Americans, Reagan repudiated the very concept
of national leadership. By exhorting Americans to place self-interest
above all, he undermined the spirit of sacrifice and the possibility
of a common effort to solve our most pressing national problems.
p261
The proportion of American families living in poverty in the United
States dropped from 17.9 percent in 1963 to 10.9 percent in 1970,
the period encompassed by Johnson's Great Society programs. In
the early 1960s, few among the poor and elderly had health insurance,
but Medicaid and Medicare have brought medical care to hundreds
of millions of Americans. Johnson steered federal aid to local
school districts for the first time and made higher education
possible for millions of poor and working-class students with
the help of federal grants and loans. Public broadcasting, funding
for the arts, environmental enforcement, Head Start and child
nutrition programs, millions of acres of national parks, and the
National Institutes of Health are all part of the Great Society
legacy.
p262
Franklin Roosevelt
If [a government program] fails, admit
it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.
p262
[Ronald] Reagan was unsuccessful in gutting all of the New Deal
and Great Society programs - he criticized almost every one of
them at one time or another in his career - but he ensured the
failure of any proposals in Washington over the next two and a
half decades to improve the lives of the poor.
p265
[Ronald] Reagan's broad swipes at the federal budget created a
momentum that would last long after he left office. He virtually
took Washington out of the business of promoting the welfare of
its citizens. No subsequent administration has proposed any serious
programs to rebuild the cities, house and educate the poor, or
shore up the nation's infrastructure, let alone adopt an industrial
policy.
p267
The Age of Reagan will not be erased by empty promises of change
followed by business as usual. It will have passed only when our
leaders regain a sense of national purpose and contemplate real
public investment in science, infrastructure, education, and job
training-investment in the people of America.
... It seems vaguely utopian to speak
in such terms, but that only shows how far Reagan pushed the country
to the right. Not long ago these were the enunciated policies
of the federal government, fully accepted by centrist politicians,
not just those on the left. Reagan's demagoguery was so skillful
that these policies were virtually banished from public life.
p269
Something went horribly wrong on election day in 1980, the day
our country was turned over to mean-spirited religious zealots,
thinly veiled racists, law-and-order extremists, warmongers, and
a class of people shamefully willing to act as handmaidens of
the wealthy at the expense of the ordinary citizen.
Ronald
Reagan page
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