Reagan, Reagan, Reagan. All hail the fascist king.

Every god damned election republicans dig up the dead Reagan. They love immortalizing this dead creep who spent his conscious life attempting to marginalize the concerns of minorities, gays and lesbians, working poor, those afflicted with aids, and everyone else who wasn't part of his filthy rich crowd.

Conservatives and republicans worship Reagan because he gave them free reign to divide and conquer, not in pursuit of something productive or noble, but he gave aid and comfort to those who would spew unvarnished hatred, racism, and patriotic demagougery in their pursuit of some facist ideal of a society where all who didn't fall in line with their ideology were to be denied full benefit of basic amenities like jobs, marriage, investment, and representation in our government.

From his advocation of drug testing as a requirement for obtaining menial jobs and activities, to gerrymandered districts that couldn't elect substantial minotities to Congress, from his indifference to the growing AIDS epidemic, to his refusal to meet with the Congressional Black Congress, from his robbery of our hard earned tax dollars and his elimination of any tariff on money taken out of the country and the creation of tax shelters for his rich friends, to his elimination of numerous government programs that low and middle income individuals and families relied on to survive.

Ronald Reagan's administration, at his direction, limited and sought to eliminate numerous government programs that low and middle income individuals and families relied on to survive. Many Americans, abruptly cut off from a welfare system that barely met basic needs, staggered into a newly created, two-tier wage system that provided less pay for new-hires for the same work performed alongside their more fortunate co-workers, with little or no benefits. Many immediately fell further behind because of the absence of basic health care, child care, and rental assistance, which many of the new positions would not provide. Reagan claimed that the increasing number of welfare recipients were an impediment to economic recovery, although welfare represented less than 1.5% of the budget.

One of the tactics used by Reagan, as he attempted to soften the political blow, was to call on private charities to absorb the burden of the disenfranchised poor without the benefit of federal support. The predictable result was a disintegration of an impoverished community, a disproportionate number black and Hispanic, labeled as greedy and excessive for accepting help which seldom brought them above poverty level.

In response to the nation's burgeoning debt crisis, Reagan and his cronies in Congress made countless Americans ineligible for public assistance with an arbitrary adjustment of the levels of eligibility. Reagan's welfare reform movement gave the back of the hand to federal job training programs.

Reagan saw no need for the federal government to finance low income youngster's college education and sought to reduce the federal role in education altogether in his attempt to eliminate the Dept. of Education.

Funding for low and middle income housing assistance and community redevelopment was all but eliminated, creating a stagnation in the nation's poorest neighborhoods. The nation's poor were systematically locked out from opportunity and legislated into a state of perpetual depression, farmers and migrant workers, union laborers, industrial workers, and everyone else who was scraping by at or below poverty level.

Reagan compounded the alienation of the nation's poor by granting a massive tax break to those individuals and corporations that were already prospering. Although these well-off folk's traditional indifference to the needs of the nation's poor had led to the need for legislation that protected and enhanced equal opportunity, Reagan claimed that they would share their tax-break enhanced wealth. However, newly created tax shelters successfully trapped the wealth that was supposed to "trickle down" to the poor in the form of jobs and opportunity.

Investment schemes were encouraged and developed, such as IRAs and Money Market accounts. Government bonds were offered at low rates with anticipated high returns. This effort by Reagan and his congressional cronies was presented as an effort to encourage savings, which would, in part, justify the huge tax cuts to the upper end of the income scale. Naturally, the ones who benefited the most were those who already had enough money or income to invest the amounts needed.

The median income at the time for Blacks barely rose above $18,000 annually. The majority of lower income Americans put their money into passbook savings, if they had any money to save at all. To invest the amount of money needed to facilitate and maintain high-yield investment accounts, an investor would have to earn more than $22,000 annually. This largely excluded most black wage earners from these investment opportunities. Whites with median incomes over $24,000, not surprisingly, outnumbered black and Hispanic investors by as much as 6 to 1. The gap widened when considering longer term, higher yielding investments that required more capital, such as CDs, interest checking, U.S. government securities, and municipal and corporate bonds. The lack of substantial monetary investment is one reflection of the growing disparity between upper and lower income Americans.

The Reagan administration attacked every federal program that helped those at poverty level gain a foothold in a fast rising economy. Many who were denied access to public assistance slipped further into depression, invisible because of distorted and misleading figures on poverty and unemployment provided by the Reagan Labor dept. The overall projections did not illustrate the proportional plights of individual minority groups.

Despite the fact that many former welfare recipients eventually returned to work, 31% of adult blacks remained at poverty level compared to only 11% of adult whites. In the aftermath of the Reagan administration, black children made up 43% of the nation's poor. Reagan's insensitivity to the nation's poor was pointed up by his refusal to meet and work with members and leaders of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Instead of supporting badly needed legislation that would increase the minimum wage, he lobbied instead for a sub-minimum wage that he claimed would create new jobs for the nation's youth. Reagan ignored the fact that millions of Americans were working to support families with a wage that had become sub-minimum with no increase since '81.

Reagan sought to abolish the Small Business Administration which mostly assisted minority owned businesses, while at the same time, calling small business the "backbone of the American economy." Reagan appointed a pro-business Labor Relations Board to deflect the grievances of the nation's displaced workforce.

Reagan strongly supported legislation that would have outlawed federal-funding for abortions, a move that would mostly affect those who couldn't afford an abortion, leaving the affluent as the only group of females with the ultimate choice in their own pregnancy, and doom most low income women into poverty by forcing them to have a child they could not afford.

Reagan sought to limit the federal role in education by reducing the amount of money in the federal education budget. He appointed a controversial education secretary whose outspokenness on non-educational issues prevented a focus on school problems. Secretary Bennett then suggested, and it was subsequently disproved, that federal student aid was responsible for high tuition costs.

Reagan described congressional initiatives to lift the nation's poor out of poverty as misguided compassion. He admonished Americans to "Stand tall", but he repeatedly pulled the rug from under those who found themselves at the lower end of the economic spectrum. Many Americans could not see their way across the abyss that Reagan created between the nation's rich and poor.

I would not hesitate to repudiate those who would claim that Reagan's presidency should be canonized or emulated. Hopefully, historians will not elevate the myth that Reagan actually achieved economic equity and competitiveness, and instead, record the reality of his efforts in systematically targeting and weakening the programs that were in place to shorten the gap between the rich and poor.

"Trickle down", was his legacy. All of the excesses of his wealthy crowd have been trickling down on the rest of us as his rich juniors who make up less than 2% of our population have adopted his arrogant indifference to the plights of ordinary Americans in their desperate attempt to inflate their booty with the product of our hard earned sacrifices, and in their attempt to marginalize the concerns of the rest of us.

Trickle down. All hail the fascist king who taught us how to hate and conquer in the name of America. We will likely never outlive the damage he has done to our great society. It is our obligation to unmask and unkennel the truth about this dead demogougic gadfly. These self-serving, revisonistic homilies from those who seek to lord over us demand elucidation of the facts and motives behind the reign of this pecuniary king.


http://journals.democraticunderground.com/bigtree

:eyes:

it's going too crazy in the your land.

The only one for me who makes sense is Edwards.

And he is certainly none of these. I think he is an empty suit, but then again so was Reagan.

lying to the people, lying to the Congress....

let us not forget Reagans' propagating radical islamics funding them in the billions to wage war on civilian targets. He firmly believed the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Osama bin Laden was called a freedom fighter by Reagan.

I'm sure it was really quite a liberating experience for them.

was a vegetable :grr:.

you have a typo in your header- should be fascist.

thanks

trying to be snarky here. I make typos too. And I know you know how to spell.

thanks a bunch

"Surely you don't think he got Alzheimer's the day after he left office."

from Democracy Now: http://www.democracynow.org/2004/6/7/helen_caldicott_on_the_nuclear_race


AMY GOODMAN: It’s very good to have you with us. Dr. Caldicott has founded a new organization called the Nuclear Policy Research Institute. Can you talk about your meeting with President Reagan, and about those years of the Reagan Presidency, as it relates to nuclear weapons?


He was a little dithery. I shook his hand and said, how do you do, Mr. President. He didn’t know there was a table at the back of the room and I said, you sit there and I’ll sit there. Patti was present but said nothing. I introduced myself by saying you probably don’t know who I am. He said, yes, I do, you are an Australian. You were on the beach when you were a young girl and your scared of nuclear war. I said yes, that’s right. He said, well, I, too, am scared of nuclear war, but I want to prevent it by building more nuclear bombs, so we were off to a great start. I just finished my book, “Missile Envy,” so I was stock full of facts and figures. He would make a statement, which was wrong, and everything he said was incorrect and inaccurate, so I would stop him when he said what he said and correct him and you remember he used to get flustered his cheeks would flush, we would call that in medicine Mylar Flush, and I would hold his hand to reassure him and he we would go on to the next topic. I reported this in my autobiography, “A Desperate Passion.” We met for an hour and a quarter. I was I spent half the time actually holding his hand. We really established a doctor-patient relationship, with me being his doctor. Halfway through the interview, he said, look, I took some notes before I came down. He pulled some handwritten notes out of his top pocket and read to me that the people who worked for the nuclear weapons freeze (which at that time was 80% of the U.S. population supported the freeze) were either K.G.B. duped or Soviet Agents. I said, that’s from last month’s “Reader’s Digest.” John Barron’s piece and he said, no that’s from my Intelligence files. Patty reassured me later that that was virtually one and the same thing. He virtually never read a book or very few although he stopped to read the “Reader’s Digest” every month, all his life. At one point, she said that I know that what Dr. Caldicott is saying is correct, because I have a 1989 Pentagon document to prove it, and without looking at it, he said that’s a forgery. I think it was one of the most shocking experiences of my life. I decided if there was no point—if I was not going to meet with him again and I could have no influence, but I would talk to the press, who were hungry to hear exactly what this man was about. I spent more time with him alone than any other person during his eight years of office. And during the interview he leaned over to me and said look, I’m not going to talk to anyone about this. I said, fortuitously, I wouldn’t, either. Then eventually, a journalist said to me, look, I just want some background and I naively gave the background and the piece was printed. I wrote and apologized to him and he wrote me a nice letter back saying that I’m used to it. He said they are not gentlemen and they don’t follow the rules and obligations of journalists, which was very sweet. I thought he was a sweet old man. He was not appropriate at all to be the president of the United States. I guess that clinically I estimated his IQ as one does with a patient to make sure that they take their medicines on time and the like. I don’t think my clinical assessment was that he did not have Alzheimer’s at the time nor was it impending clinically. I spoke to a lot of people who knew him in Hollywood and said he was the most boring man they ever knew, but he was always like that, so, I don’t think it was anything different. So, I used to call him the Pied Piper of Armageddon because people followed him wherever he went. He would tell people he would take them down the path. So, he was a sort of father figure who engendered confidence and much affection within the American populist to their detriment and to the detriment of the world. However, I thought I had no influence at all, but through the retrospective work, I now think that maybe I did, because when he met with Gorbachev, they were momentous meets that two men in this human race has ever had, they almost agreed to eliminate nuclear weapons between Russia and America. Gorbachev and Reagan got hung up on star wars. After that, he and Gorbachev worked together and Shevardnadze and Schultz turned into great statesmen and I think together they helped to bring about the end of the cold war, which was a magnificent achievement and I credit both of them for that. And since the cold war ended, nothing has changed. America and Russia still target with each other with 3,500 hydrogen bombs. Nothing has changed except the animosity has disappeared, and the two countries are friends, but they still hold the world as nuclear hostage ready to blow us up at any second of any day.

understatement

There was a story in the Boston Globe right after Reagan admitted he was mentally unfit. They interviewed a doctor who is an Alzheimer's researcher. He told about watching Reagan on TV during his first term. He said he turned to his wife and said, "Oh my God. Reagan has Alzheimer's." Apparently, he was exhibiting all the signs that people show in the early stages of the disease.

the military didn't even recognize it for treatment purposes until the late '90's

As a poverty level, liberal, 40 something white male who never really got too successful in the construction trades, small lumber mills in the northwest, and landscaping and other semi-skilled occupations, it was very depressing trying to keep afloat during the Reagan years while trying to raise a family. Though I had personal problems with mental illness (depression and such) and drug and alcohol addictions that kept me from perservering beyond my assumed limitations, the heavy, heartless hand of the Reagan administration only helped to compound my problems. And now that I am at last over the depression and addictions (finally), I still haven't gotten myself beyond poverty, and I am afraid for what me and my youngest child, and millions of Americans in similar shoes are facing. We must be extremely careful, and really do some research into our choices for POTUS, because if we make the wrong choices, and allow the corporate-elite to continue to run the show, I truly fear for us.

:kick:

Guess not.