Date: Wed, 09 Jun 2004 20:21:57 +0100
From: Iain McKay <iain.mckay-AT-zetnet.co.uk>
Subject: Ronald Reagan: Dead at Last!


Ronald Reagan: Dead at Last!

Ronald Reagan has died of Alzheimer's Disease at the age 
of 93. With the deluge of positive commentary about his 
presidency it feels like a lot of America and quite a 
sizeable portion of Britain are also suffering from it. 

Yet facts are awkward things and while often ignored do 
not change. And the facts are Reagan was a disaster not 
only for the world, but also for America. Indeed, if by 
"America" it is meant the majority of the population, 
then Reagan must be considered one of the most anti-
American Presidents of the last century.

For all his rhetoric about freedom, Reagan stood squarely 
with the oppressors at home and abroad. 

In America he implemented a class war which saw widening 
of inequality, tax cuts for the rich and the average 
hourly earnings for most workers falling. The share of 
national income going to capital rose. The benefits of 
economic growth accrued to the elite with most of the 
country's income gains going to the top 1 or 2 percent of 
households. His policies reversed the trend toward 
greater distribution of wealth and have led to the 
greatest concentration of wealth since the days of 
"robber baron" capitalism of the 1890s. Average household 
income was only maintained because more women went out to 
work (so helping to destroy the "family values" Reagan 
said he supported). Unemployment soared. Benefit levels 
for the poor, already low, were frozen and Reagan imposed 
enormous cuts to social welfare programs and the Veterans 
Administration, moves that led to such an enormous rise 
in the homeless population. He also enriched agri-
business at the expense of small farmers, continuing the 
decline of the family farm. He attacked organised labour, 
with the firing of the air traffic controllers showing 
that union busting was back. Not to mention his terrible 
environmental record, of course.

Abroad, he aimed numerous authoritarian regimes. He 
toasted Ferdinand Marcos, supported Argentine fascist 
generals as well as Manuel Noriega. Not to mention 
Saddam, whom Reagan supported and armed, not letting the 
gassing of the Kurds affect the deals being cut -- he 
even supplied Saddam with "dual-use" items, including 
chemicals, to show how important dead Kurds were to the 
Whitehouse. He also took Iraq off the list of states 
declared by the state department as sponsoring terrorism. 

Reagan also supported the apartheid regime in South 
Africa. As the black majority rebelled and the regime 
responded with extra-judicial killings, abductions, 
torture and aggression against neighbouring states, 
Reagan resisted all attempts to impose economic sanctions 
against Botha's regime and vetoed UN resolutions against 
South Africa. If that was not enough, he insisted on 
aiding the deposed Khmer Rouge and so prolonged a civil 
war. He also argued that it should take Cambodia's seat 
at the UN. He also welcomed Angola's Unita to the White 
House and described this murderous group as winning "a 
victory that electrifies the world and brings great 
sympathy and assistance from other nations to those 
struggling for freedom".

Then there was the illegal funnelling of aid to the 
Nicaraguan "contras", terrorists used by the US to 
undermine the radical Sandinista government. Reagan's 
Whitehouse even sold weapons to Iran and used the profits 
of this criminal trade to fund his illegal war against 
Nicaragua. Reagan escaped impeachment during the Iran-
Contra Scandal because he "could not recall" in response 
to more than one hundred questions during the 
Congressional hearings.

The people of El Salvador will have a different 
perspective on Reagan, given that the right wing ARENA, 
armed by Reagan money, weapons, and military training 
from the School of the America's, slaughtered more than 
80,000 of them. In Guatemala, tens of thousands were also 
murdered under the rule of Reagan's ally, General Rios 
Montt. Or those Nicaraguans in the "soft targets" (like 
schools and hospitals) beloved by Reagan's Contra 
terrorists, whom he hailed as the "moral equivalent of 
our founding fathers." These "freedom fighters" murdered, 
tortured and mutilated civilians (including children and 
women) in order to terrorise a people to vote as America 
wanted. So it is doubtful whether the families of the 
hundreds of thousands in Central America murdered by 
death squads armed and funded by Reagan are mourning his 
passing.

And yet the myth of Reagan as a strong leader willing to 
fight for freedom is still peddled. As Reagan said, 
"facts are stupid." Clearly, the removal of the Marxist 
government from the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada must 
be considered as a turning point in world history. Not 
that the collapse of the USSR can be laid at his door. 
Without his strong man rhetoric, the reforms that brought 
about the collapse of Stalinism would have been 
implemented sooner. It was not Reagan who ended Stalinist 
tyranny but rather the hundreds of thousands of people 
across Eastern Europe who risked their lives taking to 
the streets who did so. The kind of people power Reagan 
spent so much energy crushing at home and in Central 
America.

All this is unsurprising as, for the right, freedom is 
equated to capitalism. Yet even here reality was at odds 
with the legend. While he slashed taxes for the richest, 
he raised taxes on the poor. He deregulated the Savings 
and Loan industry, enriching the few, and subsequently 
bailed it out at taxpayer expense when it the dynamics of 
the market took its toll. He presided over such a corrupt 
and over-inflated stock market that it saw the largest 
one-day crash in its history, greater than in 1929. He 
talked about free-trade but backed the protectionist 
measures. He embraced Monetarism, causing the worse slump 
since the Great Depression. On the plus side, this was 
ideal for breaking the back of working class resistance 
(as intended). He then used military Keynesianism to 
bolster the economy, with defence-spending and deficits 
rising to astronomical heights -- aided by enormous and 
outrageous military contracts for which taxpayers paid 
hundreds of dollars for nuts, bolts, and toilet seats 
(all the while AIDS research was under funded). And yet 
the 1980s had the slowest growth of any decade in the 
post-World War II era.  

After his two terms spending by the federal government 
was (in real terms) 25% higher, the federal civilian 
workforce had increased from 2.8 million to 3 million and 
federal spending was basically unchanged at over 20% of 
GDP. That the Ronald Reagan Building is the largest 
government building in Washington says more about his 
legacy than the eulogies we have had to suffer recently. 
So Reagan as "anti-government crusader" is a myth. He got 
the government off the bosses' back, sure, but not off 
the workers'. The capitalist dream of the state as little 
more than a defender of property, as a rod for the 
workers' back, was revived. 

What of his other legacies? His "war on drugs" was a 
costly (and authoritarian) failure while his "war in 
terror" saw a C.I.A.-sponsored car-bombing in Lebanon 
(with more than eighty civilians killed) along with 
extensive support for state terrorism by client regimes. 
He "cut and run" from Lebanon after a suicide bomber 
killed more than 200 American soldiers. His Whitehouse 
also armed the Mojahedin to resist the Soviet invasion of 
Afghanistan, one of whose groups evolved into the Taliban 
and another (with CIA approval) into al-Qaida. Combined 
with US support for Saddam, would the current (equally 
bogus) "war on terror" be necessary if it had not been 
for Reagan? 

If an accurate account of his time in the Whitehouse was 
presented the obvious conclusion to draw would be that 
Reagan was a miserable failure -- unless you were rich. 
If the rich get richer, you can preside over the worse 
recession since the 1930s and subsequent historically 
poor economic recovery and see it praised as an economic 
miracle. If the rich get richer, you can kill as many 
foreigners as you like and be praised as a man of peace. 
If the rich get richer you can concentrate wealth to 
extreme levels and still be called a man of the people. 
This explains the advanced symptoms of Alzheimer's 
Disease the media and some parts of the public have 
exhibited of late.

Yet we should not forget that Reagan, like Thatcher, only 
applied the policies their erstwhile opponents had 
already started to implement. Perhaps they took them to a 
higher level, but the writing was on the wall. Nor should 
we forget that the Spanish Socialist Party and Labour 
Party in New Zealand applied the same Thatcherite 
policies when in power. Clinton and Blair have continued 
the neo-liberal policies. After all, they were all 
subject to the same pressures from the state bureaucracy 
and big business. Which suggests that putting your faith 
in the ballot-box is illusionary. Only an extra-
parliamentary movement can curb the excesses of state and 
capitalist power, for regardless of who gets elected the 
needs of capital are always placed first.

But now Reagan is gone -- only Pinochet, Thatcher and 
Milton Friedman to go.