Mission Accomplished: The Reagan Occupation and the Destruction of the American Middle Class

[kpete]

Mission Accomplished: The Reagan Occupation and the Destruction of the American Middle Class

Submitted by BuzzFlash on Fri, 06/25/2010 - 8:32am.

* Guest Commentary

DAVID MICHAEL GREEN FOR BUZZFLASH

Eighty years ago, something occurred in America that was never supposed to happen. An aristocrat came to the presidency and engineered a policy revolution that created a broad and prosperous middle class where it had not existed as such before.

................

Since Reagan, regressive puppet politicians have been spouting anti-state rhetoric and sarcastic venom with increasing intensity. Saint Ron of Hypocrisy told us that government was the problem, not the solution, seemingly without noticing the irony of his massive military build-up or the government-enforced restrictions the right favors on everything from abortion to gay marriage to euthanasia. Now, as gutted and corrupted regulatory institutions have permitted massively harmful meltdowns ranging from Wall Street to coal mines to oil wells, we are forced to listen to sermons from those on the right about the incompetence of government. Well, yeah. If in fact you staff government regulatory bodies with industry shills who are explicitly ordered not to actually, er, regulate, and if you legislate away their power to effectively do so anyhow, and if you pulverize conscientious whistleblowers to within an inch of their lives, then guess what? That little bit of government will in fact be incompetent. In fact, it will be nearly as bad at the competence thing as, say, all the big banks on Wall Street (which had to be rescued by the, uh, government), or all the big auto companies in Detroit (ditto), or British Petroleum, or Enron, or the savings-and-loan industry, or...

And so, despite the astonishing illogic of it all, the American people now clamor for more harm to be brought upon themselves and more of their money to be looted for the further enrichment of the wealthiest one-tenth of one percent of the population. It certainly doesn’t help that the supposed “party of the people” is every bit as much a part of the problem as anyone else, and arguably far more so given the extra measure of disingenuousness involved. From NAFTA to WTO to welfare ‘reform’ to the Telecommunications Bill, Wall Street never had better friend in the White House than Bill Clinton. That is, until Barack Obama simply outright changed the address of Goldman Sachs’ headquarters to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. As we speak, the president and his party in Congress are busy gutting meaningful ‘reform’ of the shamelessly gluttonous finance industry, just as their masters have ordered them to do. And if you think Obama’s bad now, wait until after November. Like Clinton in 1994, he will take the trouncing he’s about to receive in the election as a signal to move even further to the right.

And thus the Reagan Occupation inches closer yet to a full-blown “mission accomplished”. The middle class is on its knees and shrinking fast. Unions have been broken into irrelevance. Government, supposedly an agent of the public interest, has become a complete tool of those it is meant to monitor. Both political parties are fully owned by the oligarchy. The public has been brainwashed into seeing its allies as enemies and its enemies as allies. We have been drained of hope that any actor on the horizon can come to our rescue.

Bad policy choices by self-serving politicians? Would that ‘twere only thus.

We are occupied.

http://blog.buzzflash.com/contributors/3310

[katmondoo]

1. I also credit him for opening the door to the Religious Right

Starting with the anti abortion rhetoric

[izquierdista]

2. Actor on the horizon?

Kevin Costner for President

If his oil/water separators can clean up the Gulf, then why not? It's better than anyone else has done.

[Greyhound]

3. Yeah, but he's an idiot. George Cloony is both better looking and brighter. n/t

[izquierdista]

4. I'll settle for that.

Compared to Bush and Palin, he's in the genius category.

[Cresent City Kid]

5. It sounds simplistic, but I think it's only about enriching the rich

The complexity is in the details. The top 1/10% never reach a point of satiation, they think of other people's money as potentially theirs. You can still get rich under what we would call normal or fair conditions, but you would run into limits like taxes or having your corporation follow worker safety regulations, etc. Leaving money unaquired in order to be a halfway decent member of society is an unacceptable option. Any resistance is steamrolled. If there's a regulation in the way, break the law, if breaking the law costs too much, buy the government and change the law.

The social conservative element of the republican party is all about getting asses into the voting booth voting for republicans. One of the few problems they encounter with this strategy is on immigration. The ones at the controls want the cheap labor, but their voting rank and file are nationalist/racist xenophobes. For the most part the republican voters simply echo the talking points and catch phrases fed to them.

I question my own conclusion that it boils down to something as simple as the rich trying to get richer. I go over it again and again, but it seems to point this way.

[alterfurz]

6. "Just...follow the money." -- Deep Throat ("All the President's Men," 1976)

Money confers the power to command the labor of others. Love of money is love of power. And love of power is the root of evil. -- Edward Abbey

[Cresent City Kid]

7. It's easy to follow

It's all going in the same direction. I don't know if these guys all get together and meet, but if they did, a small conference room would suffice.

[Vinnie From Indy]

8. Now we have a MASSIVE, pervasive right wing propaganda structure

Rush Limbaugh and others launch thousands of hours of propaganda each week.