America Continues To PAY AN ENORMOUS PRICE For The Reagan Revolution

[Segami]

:smoke: :smoke:


" Perhaps it's time for Americans to ask this question: "Are we better off than we were 30 years ago, when Reagan took office?" The answer is a resounding no. And that question is particularly powerful when you consider that two of "The Gipper's" successors--George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush--practiced what might charitably be called "refried Reaganism."


In essence, America has been ruled by Reagan's ideas for 20 of the past 30 years--and even Democrats in the White House during that time have moved way to the right of genuine progressive ideas. Where has it gotten us? On a road to destruction, says veteran journalist Robert Parry, who broke many of the stories about the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s.


Numerous reports have been issued in recent months about negative U.S. trends that started roughly around 1980. That's not an accident, Parry says, because that's the year Reagan took office. Parry makes his case in a recent article at Consortium News titled "Ronald Reagan's 30-Year Time Bombs." Writes Parry:



The time element of “30 years” keeps slipping into American official reports and news stories about the origins of crises--the latest in “The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report”--but rarely is the relevance of the three-decade span explained, and there is a reason.

The failure to close the circle in saying who started the nation off on the path toward these disasters is because nearly everyone shies away from blaming Ronald Reagan for almost anything.


cont'

http://legalschnauzer.blogspot.com/2011/03/america-continues-to-pay-enormous-price.html


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[The Hitman]

1. I agree with the idea but...

Reagan was inaugurated on Jan 20, 1981.

Being sloppy with the facts allows for easy criticism.

[inademv]

3. Did they get the date wrong somewhere in there?

[fishwax]

7. in the third paragraph it says he took office in 1980

"Numerous reports have been issued in recent months about negative U.S. trends that started roughly around 1980. That's not an accident, Parry says, because that's the year Reagan took office ..."

I assume that's what the poster was talking about.

[Rex]

8. '...roughly around 1980.'

Quite a bit different than just 1980.

[fishwax]

9. "because that's the year Reagan took office ..."

So the article says that year (1980) is the year he took office, which is incorrect.

[Segami]

12. Reagan was elected in 1980 and sworn into office in 1981. I believe the author's intention

was to say that 1980 was the year he was elected into office.

[fishwax]

16. I suspect that's what he was thinking as well n/t

[Segami]

4. Thirty years ago would bring us back to March 8th 1981. Reagan was in office.

[Rex]

6. Irony is...

[Jmaxfie1]

2. Are we better off than we were 30 years ago, when Reagan took office? Hell NO!

Reagan convinced people they could have it all, low taxes, the largest military on Earth and a social safety net. Why not, some future generation will pay for it all.

[azurnoir]

5. welcome to the future n/t

[musette_sf]

10. K to the R

and I remember so well moving from the Northeast to the South in 1980, and how completely horrified I was that people would even CONSIDER voting for Reagan.

[cordelia]

19. I remember moving from the South to the West

in 1980, and how completely horrified I was that people would even entertain the idea of voting for Reagan.

[musette_sf]

20. kind of weird

considering that I wasn't even in a very Republican (at the time) part of the South. New Orleans was still pretty Democratic back then. But the people I worked with and some of my friends couldn't understand WHAT I could possibly find wrong about Reagan.

Of course, I was working in the O&G biz at the time, and they were all hot to get RR in there, so maybe it was just the environment I was working in.

But when I moved to Texas 4 years later, by then the Reagan Zombies were in full force over there.

[upi402]

11. MSNBC is the only news outlet telling the truth about the Reagan damage

The others are deifying him 24/7. He took us from the biggest lender nation to the biggest debtor nation. But freepers talk about it as a percentage of the economy...yap yap yap.
:spray:

[Overseas]

13. K&R! //nt

[deutsey]

14. Blasphemer!!!!

[GeorgeGist]

15. The patron saint of ignorance.

[old mark]

17. K&R- The cost in institutionalized ignorance, bigotry and hatred is immense.

And we lost any semblance of real news media as well...We had pretty good reporting and actual journalism at one time, but many people now have never experienced it.

What we have now is absolute shit.

No wonder the GOPers worship that man. He is STILL all they have.


mark

[EstimatedProphet]

18. The biggest price we pay is an abundance of Reagan masturbators.

The "gift" that keeps on giving.

[highplainsdem]

21. Reagan did a lot of damage, but it started before his administration.

It started in the '70s, with the beginning of what has sometimes been called the vast rightwing conspiracy, basically a coalition of rightwing billionaires and politicians.

Read up on the history of the Cato Institute and the American Legislative Exchange Council, among other organizations set up by rightwingers starting in the '70s.

I've posted a few topics on ALEC since yesterday, after finally discovering just how much influence it has. ALEC usually tries to stay under the radar, since it doesn't look good to have corporations who pay to participate writing "model legislation" for the thousands of conservative legislators who are also members.

It's behind the anti-union bills and much of the rest of this rightwing legislative blitz.

Reagan was an effect figurehead, but he isn't to blame for everything that's going on now. This was planned before he was elected, and it's been carried out methodically since he left office.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x591230

[Segami]

24. Thanks for the informative links highplainsdem. Its imperative to continue revealing or exposing

these stealth mechanisms, political double-dealing and manipulation from organizations such as ' ALEC ' and those within its infrastructure.

[Starry Messenger]

25. Good background, thank you. n/t

[HughBeaumont]

34. Yep. The "Seeding".

The Great Stagnation, The Big Takeover and The Great Risk Shift began low-key rooting in the early to mid-70s.

Lower the people's expectations, get them to concede to less and less of a share of the pie each year.
Label, Label, LABEL the opposition until your eyes fall out.
Keep it simple; so simple that a junior-high-school dropout gets it.
Repeat the lies over and over and over again.
Be kingmakers. People love fatherly puppets that can sell bullshit as chateaubriand.
Sell them the rope to hang themselves with.
Start assimilating into the media, heavily. He who controls the message controls the vote.

[RainDog]

22. kick n/t

[Hannah Bell]

23. kr

[hfojvt]

26. too bad that Obama keeps pushing Reaganomics then

and Clinton too

but I sorta think Mondale caused that by getting shellacked so bad

McGovern, Mondale and Dukakis sorta collectively discredited the left with three consecutive electoral bloodbaths

Now everybody feels like tax increases are another 3rd rail in politics. Even tax increases on the rich.

[kenny blankenship]

27. We had our last best chance to escape in 2008. And we completely blew it.

Reaganism, free market fundamentalism, Rule by the Rich -call it what you like- was utterly discredited by the financial collapse. The hollowness & criminality of our political economy was exposed for all to see, and we finally had a chance to escape the ideological traps that enslaved us to corruption. But the truth was not told, as "our" side proved complicit, the guilty were allowed to escape, and we blew that chance. Or rather, the Congressional Democrats and a Reagan admirer named Barack Obama blew it for us.

[Segami]

28. We blew our chances & continue to do so because our elected Democratic reps (including Obama ) have

decided to fight back against a barrage of republican ' bare knuckle ' punches by implementing ' compromising fair play ground rules ' while their heads were being slammed between a car door. Why are Democratic voters ALWAYS electing or represented by the weakest of the weak who in the end, showcase themselves as fearful of ' pushing back ' against manipulative, lying loud-mouth republican sniveling shits? Are these the best representatives we can elect to fight for our progressive issues? Collectively, they don't add up to one tenth of a Senator Bernie Sanders.

[fittosurvive]

29. ...before my time (politically), but I have always been told that many Democrats supported Reagan.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reagan_Democrat

[Poiuyt]

30. I'm so sick of everyone being afraid of saying anything bad about Reagan

Politicians, both right and left, fall over themselves saying what a god he was. It's time that his REAL legacy gets revealed.

[upi402]

32. We need the real journalists to get on the air first

and on main stream media. Thom Hartmann is all over it. I can't get Free Speech TV and have to watch Democracy Now! on public access 2nd generation crap TV -yet I'm still grateful for Pacifica!

[glinda]

31. And Obama loves Raygun. Yup. I see it now....

[mdmc]

33. ..