Flashback and luv to WillPitt - Who's to Ultimately Blame For This Mess? Reagan.

[jackster]

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAreagan.htm

this is worth another read, 4 years later it rings even more true. While it's no longer on Truthout, it is here.

The truth is straightforward: Virtually every significant problem facing the American people today can be traced back to the policies and people that came from the Reagan administration. It is a laundry list of ills, woes and disasters that has all of us, once again, staring apocalypse in the eye.

And don't forget that Jimmie Carter warned us and started us down the road of weaning ourselves from foreign fossil fuels. Ronnie ended it all with a bang. For all those years I wondered why isn't anyone talking about the inevitable? We're going to run out of oil someday. Shouldn't we go back to trying to do something about it? But sadly, and very naively, I thought maybe I was just wrong and because no one was mentioning it, that maybe our leaders really did have a handle on the sitution. Ah, the wide eyed wonder of youth. 30 years later and I know better.

Hope you don't mind Will.

edited to add, you'll need to scroll down to (18)

[mike_c]

1. respectfully, and without having gone back and read the essay...

...I'd like to challenge the notion that Reagan is responsible. Instrumental, certainly, but I think responsibility lies more with a much harder to pin down group of people working in and behind the scenes following WWII. The decisions to keep the U.S. economy on a wartime footing because there were mountains of profit to be made for the capitalist class, conversion of that economic engine into one driven by consumer spending and debt, use of the cold war to maintain a sense of threat throughout the country, and the blossoming of the United States' imperialist foreign policy all began in the years immediately following WWII.

Reagan might be seen as having ushered in the most recent phase, in which the whole house of cards began to get shaky, but he's not responsible really. If it weren't Reagan it would have been someone else-- the whole edifice was never sustainable.

[PATRICK]

2. Reagan empowered

the Nixonian holdovers unnecessarily and merged the new evils of dumb ultra Conservatives to the gulled by hate and charm centrists all in the name of dumb big money. before reagan the GOP was having a hard time reconciling the nut base with the money gods and the traditional stiff necked GOP base. Reagan melded it all into a universally corrupted goo that dragged down anything good, including Democratic centrists and tragically corporate leaning adaptionists.

Those with populist power of a sort make some compromise to get toward the prize then easily give away the entire game once in power when in fact they did not have to, but had lost the will or ability to dare anymore. Bush of course could have acted in such a way as to positively strengthen himself and his party(even toward evil agendas) but was personally totally incapable of doing so. reagan's habit of selling out along the way was equally strong, but he had a possibility of resolving the "true" conservative split from the powermad Bushites.

Fr anyone thinking that bad men can make good presidents or pragmatically acceptable policies the ruins of history are a dismayingly counterargument staggering in its consistency.

[nichomachus]

4. It wasn't so much Nixonian holdovers

After Nixon was taken down, the fascists flooded into the government during the presidency of the dunce Gerald Ford. This was when we got Cheney, Rumsfeld, and a host of others who have been skittering around in the woodwork ever since.

Despite being an charter member of the I Hate Nixon club, I'm slowly coming to think that maybe his impeachment was an inside job to get a chance to move the fascist takeover forward. The aborted coup in 1934 never really went away and resurfaced with the mid-'60s Massacre, in which progressives were murdered. Nixon ended up being too progressive for the fascists -- Clean Air Act, EPA, relations with China, energy independence, affirmative action -- and needed to be done away with. The Democrats were key, but couldn't have done it without a spook, "Deep Throat," feeding information to another spook, Bob Woodward. That smacks on an inside job.

[PATRICK]

5. Correct

It was more Nixon survivors and the young Turks avoiding the fall who learned to be worse than Nixon to survive. They are creating more young serpents in a new generation of Roves in vote cheating schemes, RW schools and assorted areas of corruption and dirt and fanaticism for profit. I wonder what the new generation is learning- if they are allowed to learn anything of course. In all cases, pursuit by the law would be as heady a remedy as it was for Nixon's staff and cabinet.

[nichomachus]

3. It really started with Nixon

By January 1974, oil prices had risen from $3 to $11 per barrel. In response to the embargo, President Richard Nixon did lots of counterproductive things, including imposing oil price controls and lowering highway speed limits. Nixon also launched Project Independence, declaring, "Let this be our national goal: At the end of this decade, in the year 1980, the United States will not be dependent on any other country for the energy we need to provide our jobs, to heat our homes, and to keep our transportation moving." (Automobile aside: Even before the oil embargo, in 1970, Nixon proclaimed in an environmental message to Congress: "I am inaugurating a program to marshal both government and private research with the goal of producing an unconventionally powered virtually pollution free automobile within five years.")

President Gerald Ford moved the date for achieving American energy independence back to 1985. (Auto Aside: Ford signed the 1975 Energy Policy and Conservation Act, which set federal standards for energy efficiency in new cars for the first time.)

President Jimmy Carter made energy policy the centerpiece of his administration. He notoriously declared on April 18, 1977, that achieving energy independence was the "moral equivalent of war." In August of that year, Carter signed the law creating the United States Department of Energy, intended to manage America's energy crisis.

In late 1978, the beginning of the Iranian revolution caused a shortfall in oil exports, and prices doubled over the next couple of years. Carter, wearing a sweater on national television, urged Americans to turn down their thermostats. "Beginning this moment, this nation will never use more foreign oil than we did in 1977—never," Carter declared in his nationally televised speech on July 15, 1979.

He proposed a sweeping $142 billion energy plan which would achieve energy independence by 1990. Part of his plan included the "creation of this nation's first solar bank, which will help us achieve the crucial goal of 20 percent of our energy coming from solar power by the year 2000." Carter imposed an import quota of 8.5 million barrels of oil per day and created the $20 billion Synfuels program, which was supposed to produce 2.5 million barrels of synthetic fuels per day by 1990. To his credit, Carter did begin to dismantle Nixon's crude oil price controls. (Auto aside: In his 1979 speech Carter warned: Citizens who insist on driving large, unnecessarily powerful cars must expect to pay more for that luxury.)

[DCKit]

6. I'll do you all one better....

It was the 1920s, before regulation of business and the stock market. Many of FDR's laws and policies put the kibosh on the complete takeover of the country. Though they continued to make profits, they were no longer allowed to rape and pillage at will.

The relaxation/repeal of the rules and regulations that began under Reagan have continued under every administration since. The corporations and the wealthy who "play" the markets are back on track.

Now that we know that they won't stop until there's nothing left, it's more important than ever to fill the Congress and the WH with non-corporate, independent thinking Democrats, clear out those government agencies that were supposed to protect the interest of the people over the corporations and re-enact/strengthen the laws to prevent the corporations and speculators from ever doing this to us again.