Fraudulent Gipper Era Began Our Current Bus Plunge

Reagan’s Secret Legacy

"On this, the one-hundredth birthday of Ronald Reagan, the Reagan worshippers are coming out of the woodwork. It seems that the self-appointed leaders of the “Tempest in the Teapot” party (or whatever they call themselves), even Obama himself, are trying to ride Reagan’s fame to new political heights. That’s good, because Reagan had a serious weakness, his notoriety associated with his extremist beliefs, which we should all take time to remember today.

Ronald Reagan did something very bad to this country; he planted a poisonous seed that has now put forth fully ripened fruit, in our own era, fruit which makes the heart cold and intoxicates the minds, filling them with visions of untold wealth and power. Reagan imbibed deeply on his own poison, giving substance to his own hallucinatory visions, which he shared with his followers. It his delusional military and economic theories that are directly responsible for the dual crises that threaten the civilized world today. His nonsensical faith-based “supply-side economics” theory (which George Bush described as “voodoo economics”) set loose the dangerous speculative economics that have plagued us, giving credence to the “borrow our way to prosperity” theories that have imperiled the world economy.

His was a “faith-based” policy, in that it required a leap of blind faith in Reagan’s promises, that the investor class would reinvest the enormous profits Reagan was sending their way, back into the American economy. Instead, they pocketed the cash, sending much of it to offshore bank accounts, or into building new factories in “Third World” countries, instead of modernizing American production lines. In short, Reagan promised that if we basically trusted his plan his rich friends would turn the American economy around, after he basically handed them the keys to the national treasury.

Deregulation took the lid off. In effect, financial institutions were urged to adapt the same policies used by the CIA over the years to raise cash for covert operations. Risky investments were encouraged, any investments, so long as there was some form of cash flowing or other capital to be used as new collateral for new loans, to increase investment pools for new ventures. Reagan unleashed a massive pyramid scheme, to use as a weapon to economically bludgeon Russia and its allies. In the end, all of us have come to feel the hard end of the economic weapon.

His crazy ideas of hiring militants to fight our enemies for us (so that the American military and the CIA might disavow the contracts) have lived on, eventually coming back to bite us all on the ass, in today’s “war on terrorism.” The war in Afghanistan, then Iraq, soon in Pakistan as well, are all clean-up operations, trying to eliminate some of the same militant groups which we have created to fight for us in the past.

The “Reagan revolutionaries,” who came to be known as the “neocons,” were masters in the science of propaganda, having spent their academic years studying European fascism (under the pretense of finding preventive measures with which to defend against new fascism). The key to effective propaganda is the ability to say one thing publicly and mean the exact opposite of that thing, revealing the truth only to a select group of insiders. The “neoconservatives” successfully took over the “conservative movement by using this technique. Both groups used the same words and phrases, but the neocons group lied about their definitions, using those words instead, as code words, understandable only to the elite, who knew that when Reagan spoke of reining-in the multinational corporations, he really intended to empower them. When he spoke of deregulation and privatization as being keys to unlocking the American economy, the insiders knew that only the wealthy few would be deregulated and that privatization would not improve anyone’s lives, other than the American oligarchs who would be handed vast segments of federal programs to cannibalize for their own profits, just like Russia’s oligarchs.

Which of Reagan’s many delusional values should Americans really want to “reconnect with”?

I despised that "morning in america" business and knew full well those years would come back to haunt us. Dr. Helen Caldicott said back in the 80sthat this country was never going to recover from what the Reagan mob was doing, and now we know we won't. Militarism went on a meth binge; they spent over three trillion dollars. They destabilized all of Latin America. They ramped up the "war on drugs" at the same time they hauled tons of coke in to begin the crack epidemic. They deregulated and privatized the shit out of everything, essentially going to war on the commonwealth of the citizens of this country to enrich the few. Even the 1980 election was sort of an early Bush mob scam - with the Reagan criminals exploiting the Iran hostage crisis to get him in office. Very few times you can point to a certain date in history and declare This Is When It Started. Our present collapse began January 20, 1981.