Ik begon vorige week zo'n beetje misselijk te worden bij alle wierook die verspreid werd n.a.v. het overlijden van Ronny Reagan... 'Van de doden niets dan goeds' is één zaak, de levenden die met de lijken blijven zitten een andere...
Gelukkig kreeg ik net op het juiste moment van een vriendin een mail met onderstaand artikel...
Remembering Reagan
By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
Ronald Reagan was a paradigm shifter.
He was what Charles Derber in his new book, Regime Change Begins at
Home, calls a "regime-changer," moving decisively to end the flagging
New Deal era and launching the modern period of corporate rule.
Reagan changed the framework of expectations. He called into question a
lot of things that had been taken for granted (such as the obligation of
the government of the richest country in history to take care of its
poorest people), and made it possible to consider things which had
previously seemed unthinkable (for example, cutting the knees out from
the powerful U.S. labor movement.)
Reagan was indeed a historic figure, and his death deserves the massive
media attention it is receiving. But the odes to his cheerfulness and
optimism should be replaced with reflections on how his policies
destroyed lives. Pacifica's Amy Goodman has appropriately titled her
retrospective coverage of the Reagan era "Remembering the Dead."
The standard commentaries recall Iran-contra as a blotch on the end of
Reagan's presidency, but the incident was trivial compared to the long
list of administration crimes and misdeeds, among them:
1. Cruelly slashing the social safety net. Reagan cuts in social
spending exacerbated a policy of intentionally raising the unemployment
rate. The result was a huge surge in poverty. With homelessness
skyrocketing, Reagan defended his administration's record: "One problem
that we've had, even in the best of times, and that is the people who
are sleeping on grates, the homeless who are homeless, you might say, by
choice."
2. Taking the world to the brink of nuclear war. Reagan's supposed
contribution to the downfall of the Soviet Union was a military spending
contest that drove the USSR into economic collapse. Neglected in most
present-day reminiscences is that this military spending spree nearly
started a nuclear war. Development and deployment of a host of nuclear
missiles, initiating Star Wars, acceleration of the arms race -- these
led the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to move its Doomsday Clock in
1984 to three minutes to midnight.
3. A targeted tax cut for the rich. The 1981 tax cut was one of the
largest in U.S. history and heavily targeted toward the rich, with major
declines in tax rates for upper-income groups. The tax break helped
widen income and wealth inequality gaps. As David Stockman admitted, one
of its other intended effects was to starve the government of funds, so
as to justify cuts in government spending (for the poor -- the cash
crunch didn't restrain government spending on corporate welfare).
4. Firing striking air traffic controllers. Reagan's decision to fire
1,800 striking air traffic controller early in his term sent a message
that employers could act against striking or organizing workers with
virtual impunity.
5. Perpetrating a bloody war in Central America. The Reagan-directed
wars in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua submerged Central America
in a climate of terror and fear, took tens of thousands of lives,
destroyed a democratic experiment in Nicaragua, and entrenched narrow
elites who continue to repress the poor majorities in the region.
6. Embracing South Africa's apartheid regime (Said Reagan in 1981, "Can
we abandon this country [South Africa] that has stood beside us in every
war we've ever fought?" He followed up in 1985 with, "They have
eliminated the segregation that we once had in our own country.") and
dictators worldwide, from Argentina to Korea, Chile to the Philippines.
7. Undermining health, safety and environmental regulation. Reagan
decreed such rules must be subjected to regulatory impact analysis --
corporate-biased cost-benefit analyses, carried out by the Office of
Management and Budget. The result: countless positive regulations
discarded or revised based on pseudo-scientific conclusions that the
cost to corporations would be greater than the public benefit.
8. Slashing the Environmental Protection Agency budget in half, and
installing Anne Gorsuch Burford to oversee the dismantling of the agency
and ensure weak enforcement of environmental rules.
9. Kick-starting the era of structural adjustment. It was under Reagan
administration influence that the International Monetary Fund and World
Bank began widely imposing the policy package known as structural
adjustment -- featuring deregulation, privatization, emphasis on
exports, cuts in social spending -- that has plunged country after
country in the developing world into economic destitution. The IMF chief
at the time was honest about what was to come, saying in 1981 that, for
low-income countries, "adjustment is particularly costly in human terms."
10. Silence on the AIDS epidemic. Reagan didn't mention AIDS publicly
until 1987, by which point AIDS had killed 19,000 in the United States.
While the public health service advocated aggressive education on
prevention, Reagan moralists like Secretary of Education Bill Bennett
insisted on confining prevention messages to abstinence.
It's important to remember Reagan all right, but let's remember him for
what he did, not for his ability to deliver a scripted line. Ronald
Wilson Reagan played up and exacerbated economic and racial divisions,
and he left the country, and the world, meaner and more dangerous.
Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime
Reporter,
http://www.corporatecrimereporter.com. Robert Weissman is
editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor,
http://www.multinationalmonitor.org. They are co-authors of Corporate
Predators: The Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy (Monroe,
Maine: Common Courage Press;
http://www.corporatepredators.org).
(c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
Date: Thu, 10 Jun 2004 18:09:58 -0400