Reagan apologists often attack Jimmy Carter because, like the predators they are, they smell weakness. It is a mistake. Carter, is in fact among the best Presidents in job creation and he is the only US President to have brokered a Middle East peace --the Camp David Accords. In the wake of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Carter acted quickly. He replaced Kissinger's incremental, shuttle diplomacy with a comprehensive, multilateral approach that included reconvening the 1973 Geneva Conference to include a Palestinian delegation. The GOP feared to duplicate that approach because it might have succeeded.
Reagan’s election in November 1980 also was welcomed in other quarters. His victory set off celebrations in the well-to-do communities of Central America. After four years of Jimmy Carter's human rights nagging, the region's anti-communist hard-liners were thrilled that they had someone in the White House who understood their problems.
The oligarchs and the generals had good reason for optimism. For years, Reagan had been a staunch defender of right-wing regimes engaged in bloody counterinsurgency campaigns against leftist enemies.
In the late 1970s, when Carter's human rights coordinator, Pat Derian, criticized the Argentine military for its "dirty war" -- tens of thousands of "disappearances," tortures and murders -- then-political commentator Reagan joshed that she should "walk a mile in the moccasins” of the Argentine generals before criticizing them. [Martin Edwin Andersen's Dossier Secreto.]
Despite his aw shucks style, Reagan found virtually every anti-communist action justified, no matter how brutal.
From his eight years in the White House, there is no historical indication that he was troubled by the bloodbath and even genocide that occurred in Central America during his presidency, while he was shipping hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to the implicated forces.
The death toll was staggering -- an estimated 70,000 or more political killings in El Salvador, possibly 20,000 slain from the contra war in Nicaragua, about 200 political "disappearances" in Honduras and some 100,000 people eliminated during a resurgence of political violence in Guatemala.
The one consistent element in these slaughters was the over-arching Cold War rationalization, emanating from Ronald Reagan's White House.
--Robert Parry, Obama's Dubious Praise for Reagan
Hoping to deflect attention from the new Äugustus, Reagan worshipers claim that Carter was responsible for "horrible inflation" and 20% interest rates. So what? Interest rates would be expected to decline under Reagan's depression as interest rates, in fact, decline in every recession or depression. During Reagan's depression, the GDP declined at a rate of 2.2 percent, quite possibly the biggest such decline since the Great Depression, most certainly it was the biggest decline in the more than twenty years between 1973 to the assumption of the White House by Bush. Millions lost jobs and homes. In any case, it was the Federal Reserve Board that slashed interest rates and expanded the money supply, thus reducing prices. Ronald Reagan had nothing whatsoever to do with it! It was the Fed --not Reagan --who was responsible for the following but short-lived recovery.
Under Carter, people were at work and productive. They were buying homes --not leaving them under the threat of imminent foreclosure as many, perhaps, millions are doing now. That was not the case under Reagan who destroyed the trade unions, exported jobs and technology, and plunged the nation into a depression of two years ---the very worst since Herbert Hoover's Great Depression!
Ronald Reagan justified disastrous economic policies with ideological nonsense called 'supply-side economics or, derisively, 'Trickle Down' theory might have worked in a completely "closed economy". But the US imports goods from abroad. 'Tax cuts' to non-productive, American elites who outsource [read: export] jobs abroad will only squirrel away a 'tax cuts' in a safe haven beyond the reach of the tax man. It is money that will never trickle down. It is monies lost forever to investment inside the United States. It is the mechanism by which the GOP has made of America a third world nation. It is the mechanism by which the axis of Reagan/Bush destroyed a once great nation!
The US, a net debtor nation, imports most of its automobiles, appliances, and electronic goods from abroad. No wealth trickles down. Items that had been the staple of the US economic engine had, at one time, provided jobs at home. That has not been the case since Ronald Reagan and the GOP feasted upon the rotting carcass that had been the source of US industrial might. Compounding the tragedy, Ronald Reagan slashed taxes for millionaires and billionaires and everyone else got poor.
"Globalization" amid Ronald Reagan's orgy of union-busting, offshore tax havens and outsourcing, must be blamed for the decline of US exports, the collapse of major US industries, the fact that the US is now a third world nation behind a mask of Hollywood and glitz. The US now pulls up the rear, behind China, Japan, Europe and much of the world. Everything from jeans to binoculars now come from China, IT is outsourced to India, and I see few Americans driving anything but Japanese cars.
Given this hole dug over more than twenty years, I am as outraged as I am unimpressed with the crumbs now thrown the rest of us by this profligate administration, this profligate, arrogant party.
Meanwhile, the nation’s official poverty rate declined for the first time this decade, from 12.6 percent in 2005 to 12.3 percent in 2006. There were 36.5 million people in poverty in 2006, not statistically different from 2005. The number of people without health insurance coverage rose from 44.8 million (15.3 percent) in 2005 to 47 million (15.8 percent) in 2006.
--US Census Bureau Release, AUG. 28, 2007
Capital "trickling up" to Bush's base is money lost to productive investment, lost to small business, lost to consumers who might have spent it in ways that would have created jobs here in the US.
Before Reagan, America had a steel industry. After Reagan, it didn't. Before Reagan, America had a viable automotive industry. After Reagan, the US was buying its cars from Japan. Before Reagan, small retailers still existed. After Reagan, small stores had all but disappeared, giving way to huge corporate chains, and, in time, WalMart --the economic Kudzu that ate America.
Typically, Reagan would take credit for reforms begun under Carter. It was Carter who gave the rich a capital gains tax cut, even as he deregulated key industries like trucking and airlines. Carter also increased defense spending. I happen to think Carter ought not have done that! But, to his credit, he didn't muck it up nearly as much as did Reagan who sold his soul for the elite GOP base of robber barons, war lords and buyers of crooked GOP politicians!
The era was largely characterized by the undue influence of corporate PACs which forced Congress to pass pro-business/anti-individual, anti-family legislation. Supply-siders believed it would trickle down. Like Bush's war on Iraq, it didn't work out as planned. The nation was plunged into the worst and longest (two years) depression since WWII.
The GOP would love to fight another cold war. The "commies" were shooting back like the misnamed "insurgents", "terrorists" or whatever they are called this week.
Much is made of the demoralized military under Carter. What had they to be demoralized about? They were no longer slogging through the swamps in Viet Nam and they had to yet been sent to Lebanon by Ronald Reagan. The Pentagon brass should have just gotten over it! These guys are not 'war heroes'. They don't put their lives on the front lines. They don't get shot it! They are glorified pencil pushers and bureaucrats. If they were disgruntled, it is no fault of the electorate. Screw 'em. If they don't like their jobs, let them try to get into another line of work while a gopper is President. Lotsa luck, general!
All in all, the enlisted person, under Carter, had it a helluva lot better than do soldiers under either Ronald Reagan who dispatched them to Lebanon to be blown up in a Marine Barracks or under Bush who has them mired and dehumanized in Iraq. Has anyone bothered to check out the suicide rates of returning servicemen?
(CBS) Some of America's 25 million veterans face their biggest fight when they return home from the battlefield -- when they take on mental illness.
And, a CBS News analysis reveals they lose that battle, and take their own lives, at a clip described by various experts as "stunning" and "alarming," according to Chief Investigative Correspondent Armen Keteyian. One called it a "hidden epidemic."
He says no one had ever counted just how many suicides there are nationwide among those who had served in the military -- until now.
The five-month CBS News probe, based upon a detailed analysis of data obtained from death records from 2004 and 2005, found that veterans were more than twice as likely to commit suicide in 2005 as non-vets.
A recent Veteran Affairs Department estimate says some 5,000 ex-servicemen and women will commit suicide this year, largely as a result of mental health issues, and Keteyian says, "Our numbers are much higher than that, overall."
--CBS News: Vets' Suicide Rate "Stunning"
Goppers have been known to opine: ...cleaning up after Carter's utter incompetence was messy. In fact, there was nothing to clean up. There was, in fact, nothing for Reagan to do but screw up and screw up he did! The nation would have been better off if Reagan has done absolutely nothing! See my article: Reagan was no hero but he played one in a movie.
That's because, under Reagan, the GOP became not merely a crime syndicate, it became a kooky cult.
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