Reagan's True Legacy...

[MrScorpio]

[secondvariety]

1. Add another statistic

to the pile. Reagan's economic policy ruined many, many lives.

[icarusxat]

14. or took them

may the self absorbed freak rot in heaven or hell for the rest of eternity...
then again,
maybe we all will learn to forgive
and he will be too...

[KansDem]

2. It all began when Reagan moved jobs and money offshore...

How Corporatist-Conservative Policy Destroyed The American Economy

From FireDogLake--

By allowing large corporations reduced taxes and higher profit margins, the corporate philosophy of America changed. It morphed from a partnership between management and labor to a partnership between management and stockholders. Instead of quality products for a fair price, the old American way of doing business, enterprise became predicated upon profit alone. Demand for greater return on investment drove management to look for new ways to cut labor costs and reduce expenses. What resulted was an increasing call for free trade agreements that allowed corporations to transfer large blocks of their manufacturing overseas where labor was infinitely cheaper, and where regulations were not imposed to protect that cheap labor. President George H.W. Bush started this landslide by ramming NAFTA through, President Clinton continued it, and the most recent President George W. Bush extended it and in all likelihood, drove the final nails into the coffin.

Also occurring simultaneously was the increased demand for executive talent that could manage multi-national companies. Along with that demand came vastly increased pay for executives, while manual labor pools in America shrunk and lost wage leverage. That lost leverage has never been recovered, and has infiltrated even into the white collar world of lower management. Where once there was a large enough pool of opportunity for American workers, there grew in its place an increasing number of unemployed or underemployed laborers, which exacerbated the lost leverage problem. A worker today only has leverage if he has an opportunity to move from his current employer to a different one offering higher wages. That possibility has all but evaporated with trickle down economics. As more and more jobs left American shores, the opportunity for leverage disappeared. All of the leverage belongs with corporations today; exactly what conservatives, or should I say, corporatists, wanted.

By allowing corporations to manage based on profit alone, and enabling their greed for profit by removing traditional protectionist regulations on international trade, conservatives ushered in this new era of lost jobs, wages, and hope. The jobs can’t return until American companies can compete without hiring labor overseas.

--much more--
http://my.firedoglake.com/politicalpartypooper/tag/president-reagan/

Good read! Puts it all in a nutshell so folks like me can understand the real damage done by Reagan and his "trickle on"...er, "trickle down" economics...

[Fumesucker]

3. Shows you where the money goes, amazing how alike these two charts appear

[byeya]

4. Up through the Carter administration, workers were compensated for their increased productivity.

After this period, capital kept virtually all the workers' increases in productivity.

[reformist2]

5. Looks more like Clinton's legacy to me...

[tblue]

8. Main Street did well under Clinton

But Reagan made selfish cool and community unpopular. Clinton didn't do that.

[Thinkingabout]

6. Reagan trickledown economics has not happpened to the working class of Americans, even with 30 years

of waiting. Salaries are not rising for the labors but executives are outrageous. He started the bust of unions in which working class has depended on to negotiate salaries and benefits.

[mountain grammy]

7. That's because half of Americans are under educated,

under informed, and under the influence of the great propaganda of "USA, USA, we're number one" and "might makes right" that began with "morning in America" and the greatest 2 bit actor we've ever elected. What a scam. I was horrified when RR got the nomination and then was elected in a landslide, and yes, it was a landslide. It was truly the beginning of the end for the American economy.

[Zorra]

9. the spread of HIV is another part of his legacy. nt

[Bluenorthwest]

10. Reagan was a monster, the worst President ever.

Obama says he was transfromative which I guess means he transformed the population by allowing unchecked public health crisis to kill many of the minority groups the right does not like, gay people, black people, transformative as hell. Like a steamroller transforms asphalt.

[Peace Patriot]

11. Reagan's crimes are enormous...

Not just the destruction of the "New Deal" and its equitable society model--the smashing of the middle class and upward mobility hopes for the poor--but also...

--deregulation of the Savings & Loans institutions and utter looting of small savers' accounts;

--re-write of the tax code for the rich--smashing of the progressive tax;

--elimination of the "Fairness Doctrine" in the regulation of our public airwaves;

--treason--negotiating with the Iranian hostage takers to keep hold of American hostages until after the 1980 Carter vs. Reagan election;

--conducting a secret war on Nicaragua that was explicitly forbidden by Congress--filthy dirty operation out of the Reagan White House.

--complicity in the genocide against Mayan villagers in Guatemala--TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND Mayan villagers murdered in horrible ways by the fully Reagan-supported fascist regime.


Reagan should have been impeached and driven from office many times over.

The Reagan regime also brought two of the most destructive trends in U.S. political history: What amounts to a corporate media coup d'etat (corporate complicity in the Iran hostage treason, and Reagan worship thereafter), and Democratic Party leadership complicity with several of these crimes, including the economic crimes. The Reagan regime marked the end of the Democratic Party as the party of the workers and the poor (the majority) leaving most Americans without representation.

Then, Clinton happened. Clinton also served the 1%, and most infamously eliminated Glass-Steagal--the "New Deal" law regulating banks and financial institutions that was designed to prevent 1%-er induced Depressions such as the one we're in now. But Clinton was a "mixed bag," with some progressive impulses, and wealth did, indeed, "trickle down" during his tenure to some extent. The Clinton sex scandal--run by an extremely oppressive and sex-obsessed prosecutor, AND by the corporate media--in the teeth of strong indications that the American people didn't give a crap about it--was designed to hobble the enormously popular Clinton, should his progressive impulses arise in his second term, and it consumed his White House in the end.

All of this occurred before ES&S/Diebold took over our vote counting system.

The Democrats became the SECOND party of the wealthy, leaving most Americans without representation, and our party leaders also clearly started providing "cover" for Puke crimes (Iran-Contra, for instance). And the Corporate Media became the propaganda trumpet for the wealthy, losing all credibility as the "Fourth Estate" (honest journalists). It is no wonder that the next thing that happened was the Supreme Court appointing Bush Jr. for the final looting and use of the U.S. war machine directly for corporate gain (oil in Iraq).

Into this crippled democracy came something else--electronic voting, run on 'TRADE SECRET' code--code that the public is forbidden to review--with virtually no auditing, that was spread like a plague to every state, during the 2002 to 2004 period, and is now monopolized (75%) by ONE, PRIVATE, FAR RIGHTWING-CONNECTED corporation--ES&S, which bought out Diebold.

This is the final blockade against reform.

People ask me, when I raise this all-consuming fact--virtually unaudited, private, corporate vote counting, in every state: wasn't Obama elected?

My first answer is that, if he was, he can't prove it and doesn't seem to care that he can't. And, secondly, yes, I think he was elected, and by a greater margin than we know (5% to 10% greater--a mandate), but also, he was PERMITTED to be elected, and that is the problem.

People were so battered by the Bush Junta that Obama's message of "hope" sounded good, and what alternative did voters have? He seemed new, fresh, untainted by Clintonism (party of the rich and the corporate), opposed the Iraq War, opposed "free trade for the rich" with Colombia, got a lot of progressive votes for being black (compelling desire to see the true end of slavery), so people voted for hope, however vague--and didn't see the other things coming: anonymous drone assassinations without benefit of trial (substitute for war); vast domestic spying; reversal on "free trade for the rich"; insurance corporation-run health care; lame, lame, LAME responses to the 1%er assault on Social Security and other institutions of our "Commons" such as the U.S. Postal Service, complete coverup of Bush Junta crimes, and on and on.

He WAS elected, in my opinion (and I've studied the matter as well as possible, given the 'TRADE SECRET' voting coup d'etat), but what might have been a progressive, anti-war mandate was significantly shaved, and he has turned out to be a president who "gives the CIA whatever it wants" (recent New Yorker article), wholly in the clutches of the "military-industrial complex," the "prison-industrial complex," and "billionaire/Wall Street complex."

'TRADE SECRET' vote counting, although it may be only the FINAL blockade to reform, is nevertheless where we need to START, in order to undo the enormous damage to our democracy and our country that began with the Reagan regime. The things that went way wrong with the Reagan regime cannot even begin to be corrected without honest, transparent vote counting--vote counting in the PUBLIC venue--the most fundamental element of democracy.

[byeya]

12. Yes, Reagan was when crimes went unpunished and then, through legislation, ceased to be crimes.

I remember one of the first things Raygun tried to do, unseccussfully thank goodness, was to repeal the foreign corrupt practices act which forbade US companies from engaging in bribery abroad.

[truebluegreen]

13. I disagree a little:

Crimes really started to go unpunished in the public sphere when Ford pardoned Nixon, even though he hadn't yet been convicted of anything. Now such pardons and work-arounds are common practice.