When "Good" Men Do Very Bad Things
Imagine for a moment that I am a Conservative Republican Ideologue. My creed is a simple one: de-fund, de-institutionalise, de-unionise, de-regulate, and then, with utter insouciance, deny the responsibility for the consequences. It's November 1980. Heartland America is going mad for a political candidate who "talks their language", the language of small government, lower taxes, big business, and, of course, farm subsidies - the one form of government funding that the Heartland approves. Add in the charisma of the gun-toting Hollywood cowboy with a passion for Zane Grey novels that can be read in one sitting and you have the perfect candidate: Ronald Wilson Reagan.
Reagan swept into office on a wave of hysteria that promised to roll-back the so-called "welfare state" and usher in the New American Era of self-reliance, lower taxes and smaller government. In addition to his landslide victory at the polls, Reagan entered the White House with a gift from the outgoing Democratic President: a balanced budget. But wait, that wasn't all. Reagan also inherited a Budget SURPLUS! From a "tax and spend Democrat", no less! Jimmy Carter had done what no Republican President in the 20th century could do. Carter disproved our favourite accusation against Democrats, that they over-spend to fund big government. Almost no one noticed the Surplus that Reagan inherited because a publicity stunt the day after the election stole the world's attention. The Iranians suddenly released the American hostages held in Tehran since the fall of the Shah in 1979. What a co-incidence! What a stroke of luck! Except that it wasn't. The deal had been negotiated by the Carter administration for the release earlier in 1980 but Reagan's strategists intervened and negotiated the continued imprisonment of the hostages until the day after the election instead of the planned release in October 1980. Read that again. Reagan negotiated to KEEP the American hostages imprisoned in Iran until the day after his election! It is an act of Treason to undermine a sitting President's international agreements for any reason but for a Public Relations stunt? Was Reagan charged with Treason? Of course, not. He claimed the credit for the release and there began the Myth of the "great communicator" who could't read words of more than three syllables without a teleprompter.
Conservatism Triumphs
Fast forward eight years to George Herbert Walker Bush's election. Reagan's presidency ended very differently from President Carter's. The Reagan legacy was the largest DEFICIT in American history. In eight tumultuous years Republican President Ronald Reagan had drastically cut domestic spending by the federal government yet he had raised taxes eleven times! A Democrat who did that would be pilloried! When his popularity showed signs of waning, Reagan did what all good Conservatives do: he created the perception of threats to American interests in foreign lands, as in the 1983 "rescue" of medical students from the "strategic threat" posed by the island of Grenada, population uh...about 91, 000 proving that no threat was too small to escape America's notice! 7,600 American troops were involved in the invasion of the island and 5,000 were awarded medals afterward. Reagan basked in the increase of his "approval ratings" and racked up another triumph for his up-coming re-election campaign in 1984.
Safety Comes...At A Price
To make sure Congress and the world got the message that America's military might meant business Reagan, tripled the national debt in eight short years through DEFICIT spending by massively increasing military and black ops spending whilst convincing everyone he was serious about reducing the size of government. How? He de-funded essential government services resulting in mass lay-offs and the introduction of "out-sourcing" of government functions. Brilliant! Private companies whose workers were paid by the hour and worked without benefits sought contracts from the Federal Government to supply the missing services. Of course, because of the necessity for private companies to make a profit the out-sourcing cost more than the original government services did but no one noticed because under Reagan, the government - at least those departments dedicated to human services - were shrinking in size. Of course, the military budget was expanding exponentially but national security was more important than national health. Everyone understood that.
Voodoo Economics On Wall Street
Reagan moved early in this presidency to de-regulate the banking system. Removing such un-necessary and excessive government interference in free markets, Reagan cut things like Federal Deposit Insurance for small banks which resulted in thousands of bank failures in the mid-eighties and the impoverishment of a generation of elderly Americans and middle class savers.
Despite his public claims to admire and even identify with President Franklin Roosevelt (1932-1945) whose administration pulled America through a Depression (occasioned in part by another Republican President's refusal to regulate Wall Street), Reagan led the dismantling of Roosevelt's "New Deal" and replaced it with a system of what George Herbert Bush (the Twig's father) termed "voodoo economics". The Enron debacle, the Halliburton scandal, the collapse of Merill-Lynch, Goldman-Sachs, Lehman Brothers, etc., directly resulted from the extreme de-regulation of banking and investment firms. Part of "voodoo economics" was the practice of paying bonuses to Executives based not on their actual performance but on projections of potential earnings for the company in ten years' time! In other words imaginary expansion ten years later resulted in immediate payment of multi-million dollar bonuses for the senior Execs. Bush 1 may have called in voodoo but the Executives and Partners in Wall Street firms laughed all the way to the bank. Until the bottom fell out. In 2008 under Reagan's spiritual protege, the Twig: Dubya himself.
LEGACY OF AN "AMERICAN HERO"
When President Reagan rode off into the California sunset in 1989, America was in debt up its ears, fighting a losing war in Afghanistan that is still going on today, had the largest homeless population in the world, permitted the arming of both mentally ill people and criminals by weakening gun control laws, had the world's highest rates of murder and suicide in its domestic population, and left record numbers of unemployed people following the de-regulation of industries that moved their operations to other countries in search of cheap labour. All in all, not a bad showing for a Conservative Republican.
How did Reagan manage to do so much damage to the country that he supposedly loved and was prepared to die for - well, at least, on celluloid... Remember, I am a Conservative Republican Ideologue. I don't care what disasters Reagan was responsible for whilst he was claiming the moral high ground for my America. Who could forget proud moments like the one in Berlin that made my eyes run with tears of joy: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" Those are the kinds of shlocky moments Americans craved and Reagan gave them to us.
Five years later that wall did come down. Ronald Reagan could and did take credit for it. But he also brought down a lot of other walls: the walls of small American Savings and Loan Banks that had been the trusted stronghold of the American middle-class since the Depression Era; the walls of factories all over America leaving the workers job-less and penniless; the walls of mental hospitals which resulted in the occupants living on the streets, in stockyards, under bridges, and in abandoned tunnels in America's cities. How did he do all this and leave office as popular as ever? He did it indirectly through de-regulation and de-funding. The loss of half-century old safe-guards did the rest. Reagan did all this with the aplomb of the Snake Oil Salesman who just sells the product - he's not responsible for its effects on real people.
Reference:
http://www.salon.com/2013/09/29/ronald_reagans_shameful_legacy_violence_the_homeless_mental_illness/
American Psychosis: How the Federal Government Destroyed the Mental Illness Treatment System by E. Fuller Torrey
E. Fuller Torrey is Executive Director of the Stanley Medical Research Institute in Chevy Chase, MD, founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center, and Professor of Psychiatry at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. Available from Amazon for Kindle $2.61.
© Delia O' Riordan 2014
www.psychic-delia.com
