The Real Legacy of Ronald Reagan Part 2

The man behind the myth sheds a lot of light on why there is a need for a myth in the first place. If you go into the Capitol Rotunda, you will find a statue of this man who broke the laws of the very body where this statue is housed. What kind of person was the man who busted air traffic controller’s unions, enabled the deregulation that caused the Savings and Loan implosion and whom was busted lying to the American people about the Iran Contra affair and why does he deserve to have history rewritten in his favor?

Despite his belief that Biblical End Times prophecy should influence policy, (he once called the Soviet Union “Gog”) he and his wife were devout believers in Astrology. Astrology, is frequently derided by many Fundamentalists as witchcraft, but Ron and Nancy get free passes because they have so enabled the social conservative agenda. Nancy took it so seriously that she ordered dedicated phone lines to be installed in the White House and Camp David so she could never be without the wisdom of the zodiac.

The President of the United States had his wife’s personal astrologer go over his itinerary and change it so that everything was optimized for the best influence of the Zodiac. Chief of Staff Don Regan was ordered to confer with Nancy regarding which days were best for the President’s activities. According to Joan Quigley’s memoirs, this belief in superstition was taken to seriously that the announcement of Anthony Kennedy for the Supreme Court was coordinated by a man with a stopwatch to insure that the man hit the correct moment!

This belief in superstition was echoed in the most powerful commander-in-chief of armed forces in the world believed completely in End Times eschatology. A man with the power to bring about Armageddon was a believer in Astrology and was quoted in the December 1983 issue of People magazine as saying-

"Theologians had been studying the ancient prophecies -- what would portend the coming of Armageddon-- and have said that never, in the time between the prophecies up untiI now, has there ever been a time in which so many of the prophecies are coming together. There have been times in the past when people thought the end of the world was coming, and so forth, but never anything like this."

This attitude was reflected in his Administration as well, His Secretary of the Interior James Watt, a man whose job it was to preserve the environment for future generations once said, “I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns.”

But Reagan was very much a believer in hands off management. His job was not to lead. It was to use his movie star media savvy experience to sell an agenda to the American people while posing in front of a flag, reciting humorous stories, and reading a speech off a teleprompter. And he was given a pass by the press on that for most of his time in the White House.

Understand that Reagan had been shot while in office only 69 days. The press initially went easy on him. The public sympathy towards their leader was similar to what happened to George W. Bush after 9-11. The press took it easy on him when it should not have. The Executive Branch of the U.S is so powerful that it should never be given a free pass from inspection simply because pundits say that now is the time to rally around our leader.

But it makes sense that if a leader is basically hands off to an agenda that increases the deficit that was such a dire concern in the 1980 campaign, deregulates the S&Ls so that his contributors can have high yield no risk investments, increases defense contractor handouts, violates a law regarding funding terrorists in Central America with US taxpayer money, and empowered the Mujahadeen and Osama Bin Laden, elevate a War on Drugs that savagely curtails our legal rights, if you benefit from any of these policies, then the man is a hero who deserves his name on an airport.

That’s the reason behind the retelling of recent history. The powers behind the throne, the think tanks, the real Washington elite had a perfect sock puppet in Ronald Reagan. However horrible the policy, he can look the camera in the eye, justify it in focus group selected words which some speechwriter wrote that he reads convincingly off of a teleprompter.

He could even lie through his teeth to the American public regarding breaking the law and not be held accountable. On November 19, 1986, Ronald Reagan held a press conference regarding selling Tow and Hawk missiles to Iran. He said “…We only sold a few missiles” (more than 2,000 were sold), “We don’t condone shipments to 3rd parties…”, (Israel shipped the missiles), “The missiles were not sold to get back hostages…”(They were sold for that and to fund the Contras) and “We are trying to promote a dialogue with Iranian moderates…” (This was Khomeni’s regime. The moderates were either dead or in jail!)

Two months later, when testifying in front of the Tower Commission on this matter, he specifically acknowledged approving the arms sales. Two weeks after that he tried to reverse that and say his prior statement was erroneous. He was even caught accidentally reading his own notes on evading questions aloud into the record. He said under oath while looking at his notes “If the question comes up at the Tower Board meeting, you might want to say that you were surprised.”

Ronald Reagan could get away with saying that South Africa had stood with us during every war we’ve ever been in. They were actually on the other side during a war Mr. Reagan had fought in himself. He allowed an invasion of Beruit, then ran away while accusing his political opposition of cowardice. He escalated the Nixon era policy of a War on Drugs that serves to imprison people cruelly instead of treating their addiction.

He pardoned W. Mark Felt and Edward Miller for authorizing FBI agents to break into VietNam protesters’ offices without a warrant (small government behavior? I don’t think so!)

When he was running for office he said-
-“All the waste in a year from a nuclear power plant can be stored under a desk."- Burlington Free Press, 15 Feb 1980
-“History shows that when the taxes of a nation approach about 20 percent of the people's income, there begins to be a lack of respect for government... When it reaches 25 percent, there comes an increase in lawlessness.”- Time magazine, 14 Apr 1980
-"Because Vietnam was not a declared war, the veterans are not even eligible for the G.I. Bill of Rights with respect to education or anything."- Newsweek magazine, 21 Apr 1980
-"Trains are not any more energy efficient than the average automobile, with both getting about 48 passenger miles to the gallon."- Chicago Tribune, 10 May 1980
-"Approximately 80% of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation. So let's not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough emissions standards from man-made sources."- Sierra magazine, 10 Sep 1980
-"I have flown twice over Mount St. Helens. I'm not a scientist and I don't know the figures, but I have a suspicion that one little mountain out there, in these last several months, has probably released more sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere than has been released in the last ten years of automobile driving or things of that kind."- Time magazine, 20 Oct 1980

Each of these statements is provably false and he was elected anyway. That might explain why Donald Trump isn’t concerned about being the Birther candidate!

The man obviously existed in a delusional fog completely divorced from reality. But he could read a speech in front of a teleprompter and make the nation feel that gaps in these falsehoods were not important, we’re being protected from the Soviet’s Evil Empire by him and his cronies.

I think that is the reason behind the recent Jan 21st Time Magazine cover stating Obama loves Reagan! Obama admiring this man and contributing to his myth, shows the current Chief Executive’s true colors. He has no problem letting the country be run by interests who did not or will not vote for him. As long as he can read a speech from a teleprompter and make us feel good about the worst ideas Washington elitists come up with, he has every reason to think he can repeat what Reagan did with a sluggish economy and low approval ratings.
But the bias in the news media is not liberal. If it was Reagan and Bush II would never have been given the free passes they were. I can’t see Obama making the deliberately false statements like Reagan did during the coming campaign and getting away with it.

Admire the political ability of Reagan or his handlers if you must. But as a person and a President, he was sorely lacking. How does Reagan, a proven senile, superstitious, delusional old fool, deserve his name on an airport, much less having history rewritten in his favor?

The Real Legacy of Ronald Reagan Part 1

We failed to learn from the Savings and Loan Scandal of the Reagan era and so we repeated the error with the Enron, Tyco, and WorldCom scandals. We failed to learn from those scandals and so we repeated the error with the Housing Bust and the current Great Recession. Even now people are indulging in Revisionist history and working to ensure another financial fiasco while rolling back the meager financial reforms enacted by Congress. For the sake of our country and future generations, let’s set the record straight regarding the Reagan years!

On October 15, 1982, Ronald Reagan signed the Garn St. Germain Depository Institutions Act into law. This act turned small Savings and Loan Lenders known as “thrifts” into something they were never designed to be, private mints for speculators. The resulting scandal and bailout cost the US taxpayer over $1 trillion dollars (hardly fiscal responsibility!). One of the chief lobbyists behind getting it passed was Fred Thompson, current prospective Republican candidate. The language used in selling this abomination to the American people included “…to revitalize the housing industry by strengthening the financial stability of home mortgage lending institutions and ensuring the availability of home mortgage loans." That was what Ronald Wilson Reagan had to say about the bill.

You see, although one man may be held up as a symbol for an era, the sentiment, the work, and the cultural meme always go beyond any one single person (Reagan had nothing to do with the Enron, Tyco, and World Com scandals). Fred Thompson is currently a prospective candidate for the Republican nomination. And should he get in I have no doubt we’ll go through this deregulation looting and bailout cycle all over again. It is what the “Reagan Revolution” has given us!

But if we take a closer look at the Savings and Loan Scandal we can see a pattern of behavior emerging in the activities of the leadership during Reagan’s time and the behavior of the leadership today. I can see at least five similarities between the current Washington culture and the Reagan era people who bought S&Ls, put money into bad investments and got bailed out by the taxpayer. You will find a need in both cases to-

1.Deregulate and allow speculators to steal whatever they can get away with.
2.Lie to investors regarding risks.
3.Bribe Legislators.
4. Keep the public in the dark.
5.Have no one punished even when busted red handed.

Taking these gifts from the Reagan Administration one by one-

1. Deregulate and let speculators to steal whatever they can get away with.

This bill allowed Charles Keating, a hardcore social conservative, to buy Lincoln Savings and Loan and make it part of his Land Development Firm, American Continental Corporation. He could then put the assets of the S&L towards high risk investments that were insured with taxpayer money. The deal was one of virtually no risk (thanks to Reagan’s government intervention) and potentially high yield.

During the last housing boom, banks were allowed to sell portions of the loans called CDOs to themselves in order to keep prices up. During 2006 and 2007, CDOs of one bank frequently purchased slices of other CDOs of the same bank. AIG Insurance Corporation required an $85 billion dollar bailout in 2008 because they were the ones insuring these CDOs.

And that’s not even touching on the deregulation poster child- Jeff Skilling’s Enron!

We learned nothing from history after the S&L crash and Enron so of course we were doomed to repeat them recently.

2.Lie to investors regarding risk.

Part of what Charles Keating did is he masked his massive financial losses with financial schemes like speculative grade or “junk” bonds. Keating sold $250 million of Lincoln Junk Notes mostly to seniors. His salesmen told them that these speculative bonds (that had rows an rows of dilapidated condos in Texas that were going to make good on them) were federally insured! That was a lie. Some of these pensioners paid for trusting Charles Keating in one of the worst possible ways, elderly poverty after they had saved all of their lives.

In the years of the Housing Bubble, seniors were also targeted for reverse mortgages. Predatory lenders, aggressive marketing, and fraud perpetrators were finding seniors and inflicting elderly poverty on them. The sub prime mortgage market was targeting seniors with reverse mortgage scams and a lot of people wound up losing their homes. It worked like this, you are a senior who is cash poor but equity rich. Along comes a subprime lender, with a flashy sales pitch, willing to loan you more than your house is worth. Sounds like a good deal, huh? The thing is there is evil hidden in the contract and when your house equity drops in value, the loan changes into something you cannot afford to pay.

The Senate has just reported that Goldman Sachs “systematically misled clients, sold them financial instruments it knew to be junk, bet against them and profited off of their losses…”They have had 21 Billion dollars in a strategy which inflated earnings for them as housing assets were inflated and then shorted them in order not lose, all the while selling the CDO backed assets like “Timberwolf 1” to investors.

We did not tighten the regulations enough regarding deceptive advertising and full financial disclosure (have you read that credit card agreement lately) after the S&L fiasco. So we, of course, repeat history. And elderly poverty is such an ugly mark of a failed civilization, that it’s appropriate to stop and say, “Thank You, Ronald Reagan!” when we see examples of this failure.

3.Bribe Legislators

Banking regulator Ed Gray was mailed an anonymous video of S&Ls bad investments that were costing the taxpayer hundreds of millions. In response, Grey did his job and started cracking down on these fast buck schemes. Keating reacted by having legislators whom he was backing heavily, known as the Keating 5, to put pressure on Ed Gray to not do his job and leave Charles Keating alone! Alan Cranston, John Glenn, Donald Riegle, Dennis DeConcini and John McCain each received anywhere from $34K to $112K from Keating and Company. Later, when questioned whether or not his contributions influenced the Senators, Keating said, “I certainly hope so!”

One of the few examples of something good coming out of the current mess we are in is the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Elizabeth Warren was and still is making enemies from in and out of Congress in both parties while trying to do the sane responsible thing. Insuring what went on merely a few years ago regarding sub-prime lenders and banks playing fast and loose with the rules and crashing the economy is a worthwhile and noble goal.

Is it really plausible, that given the history of the Keating 5 and the way things work in Washington, that Rep. Spencer Bachus can receive $1,069,313 from commercial banks, $108,000 of that from JP Morgan Chase, and $83,000 of it from Bank of America, and still be an entirely neutral and objective commentator when he says, “You have a lot of discretion and a lot of power, but I see very little accountability,” regarding Elizabeth Warren and the new CFPB? He has no problem with huge amounts of discretion, a lot of power and little accountability when it comes to JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America!

The same thing is going on now that went on before in the 80’s under Reagan and make no mistake. Corrupt Legislators intend to undo or underfund the minor changes the CFPB will implement so that the people paying them can continue to their looting and ultimately have the taxpayer bail them out for even more money. We have not learned from history.

4. Keep the public in the dark

Brother to one President and son of another, Neil Bush, took an unpaid but prestigious position on the Silverado S&L Board of Directors. He voted to approve loans and credit to William Walter and Kenneth Good, (his partners in other ventures). The two wound up stiffing Silverado for $130 million dollars. Good gave Neil Bush a $100,000 loan with no requirement to pay it back. As all of this was becoming public, there was a lot of pressure to not close it down coming from the Reagan Administration (which had George H.W. Bush-Neil’s father as Vice President). In fact the regulator was specifically told not to close down Silverado until after the 1988 election. If a prospective President’s son is in a venture that costs taxpayers millions and he gives orders to slow down an investigation and closure of a lending institution, that would seem to be something the public should be aware of and hopefully act upon.

In 2008, when a former member of the Keating 5 running as the Republican candidate for president announced that the economy is still fundamentally strong on the day when the stock market took its worst hit in history, there was no keeping financial mismanagement out of the election news. What was unsettling was that both candidates announced their support for a proposed $700 Billion dollar bailout with no conditions on how the money was to be spent. There was no choice between the two candidates that were going to win. We couldn’t even get a clear answer as far as how the money would be spent. Your choice was between Candidate A, who backed the $700 Billion dollar blank check and Candidate B who was going to whine about having write a $700 Billion dollar blank check but was still voting for it.

Oh, the guy behind the $700 Billion dollar figure was Henry Paulson, former Goldman Sachs CEO! That’s the same Goldman Sachs just busted by the Senate for preying on unwitting investors.

We did nothing to fix the problem of lack of transparency in these transactions after the S&L crash, and so of course, history repeated itself. Even now, with their hand caught in the cookie jar, they continue to spend millions on think tanks and PACs to insure nothing changes. This is all a gift of the “Reagan Revolution”!

5.Have no one punished even when caught red handed.

Neil Bush was eventually ordered to pay millions to the government and wound up only paying a mere $50K. That would still leave him $50K in the black from that “loan” from Kenneth Good, if Republican supporters did not pay his fine. Silverado’s collapse cost the taxpayer $1.3 billion.

Charles Keating was convicted and sent to jail, but in 1996 his convictions were overturned on a technicality.

As of this date, there have been neither prosecutions nor convictions in the collapse of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Citibank, Merrill Lynch, UBS, or Goldman Sachs.

The only person imprisoned as a result of the Reagan era Iran Contra Scandal was Bill Breeden, who stole a street sign in Odon, Indiana, which was named after Admiral John Poindexter. He held it hostage for a “Ransom” of $30 Million, the amount of money that had been transferred to the terrorist army the Contras.

We need to stop this hero worship of Ronald Reagan right now. I’m all for renaming that airport and putting a statue of a pregnant woman being shot in the back by a Contra in front of Reagan’s statue in the Capitol Rotunda. Ignoring the record of what happened during the Reagan Administration and embracing a false history of those years only insures that history will repeat itself. And Reagan, although dead, is continuing a long tradition of deregulating and allowing speculators to steal whatever they can get away with, allowing white collar criminals to lie to investors regarding risks, enable systemic bribing of Legislators keeping the public in the dark, and having no one punished even when busted red handed from beyond the grave.

In Defense of Nellie Oleson

Bullying has been making headlines in recent months and as loathsome as practice as it is, we should not forget that the worst bully of all is the system itself. Both the education system and the industrial capitalist system which it is preparing worker drones for is more fearsome by far than anything a single individual can do. To illustrate my point, I’d like to reference an iconic bully from literature and TV, Nellie Oleson.

When Laura Ingalls Wilder, mother to Libertarian icon Rose Wilder Lane, wrote her series of books based on her experiences growing up in Walnut Grove, she used a composite character Nellie Oleson to represent 3 girls with whom she had rivalries as a child. Nellie Owens, who was the daughter of the local merchant, Genevieve Masters who was tall blonde and spoiled with beautifully tailored clothes, and Stella Gilbert who was Laura’s rival for Almanzo Wilder’s affections were combined to form Nellie Oleson-the bully of Walnut Grove and nemesis of young Laura Ingalls.

The schoolhouse of Walnut Grove is very different from the windowless halls of education we call our schools today. For starters, Laura learned and taught in an area that preceded “The Education Trust”, a group of people who took it upon themselves to organize most educational administrative jobs in the U.S. around 1917. With representatives from Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and the National Education Association, their chief end, according to British evolutionist Benjamin Kidd, “was to impose on the young the ideal of subordination.”

So you see, as reprehensible as Nellie Oleson’s actions were, they were just small potatoes. The Education Trust was looking to impose a subordination on generations youngsters far in excess of anything that Nellie Oleson or her 3 real life counterparts could ever dream of in their most sadistic fantasies. And as we look into the large scale bullying of a system that has it’s stated purpose of preventing the “problem of overproduction” we see that this group wanted to create the next generation of workers competing for favor of management. This could only be accomplished with the systemic mass psychological campaign that billed itself as mass schooling.

The Behavioral Science Teacher Education Project was a top down bureaucratic effort to reform schooling after 1967. Consider that this is the world a great many of today’s adults (your humble author included) were born into, and consider that this document was anti-democratic monstrosity, which would focus on undermining anything productive that students would do with their school time (pointless busywork from your least favorite teacher had it’s origin here) while simultaneously changing the system of discipline to one where the teacher was virtually powerless to maintain order.

So, of course, when a heartbreaking video of a young girl showing cards stating how miserable she is when going in for her daily torment at the place where she goes for education goes viral we feel a need to do something. And therein lies a dilemma. What has been done so far as top-down bureaucratic solutions to educational problems does not have a good record!
If the current system is able to create bullies by keeping schoolwork irrelevant and preventing classroom discipline, it can reverse it’s own actions and policies if it truly wishes to do something about bullies!

And it is very important to keep in mind that bullying is not limited to schoolyards. You can be bullyed as an adult. I recently read an article in randi.org (the James Randi Educational Foundation’s website) that accurately labeled the characteristics which makes a bully as a combination of narcissism and entitlement. I’ve had quite a few skirmishes as an adult with people who are best described as entitled narcissists.

Wonderful things happen when adults stand up to entitled narcissists!

What better description of Hosni Mubarek or any tyrant other than a very entitled narcissist. The people of Egypt stood up for themselves at no small cost of life and limb and deserve our support as do the people of Tunisia, Libya, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Afghanistan!

The brave people of Wisconsin just had a bout with an entitled narcissist who found his way to the Governor’s mansion. To their credit, the people stood up and Scott Walker recently had to admit to Congress that his plan was to give away public resources to cronies while using a balanced budget as an excuse to break the backs of unions.

If you have not stood up to a bully as a child, you will find doing it as an adult very difficult. Would Laura Ingalls have written what she did if she did not go through the crucible of confronting Nellie Olson as a child?

Do not forget that today’s bully is tomorrow’s victim and vice versa. I know of a case where a young relative’s acquaintance, a drug dealer, star athlete and all around bully, had overturned his car while intoxicated and was now a quadriplegic. That was five years ago. She (my young relative) was hard hearted towards him at the time. She felt that he deserved that fate and was relieved that he was no longer a malevolent force at her school.

Over time, the kid has probably developed some humility. Over the course of his life, he will probably run into a nurse or caregiver that has a feeling of narcissism and entitlement. Then it will be his turn to be on the receiving end of bullying. None of his victims from year before will be around to witness it, but they will have moved on to a point where yesterday’s bullies are of no consequence.

And rest assured, it does feel like crap to be bullied. But in the process to do something about bullying, let us keep in mind that we don’t want to empower the biggest bully of them all. It is a system that has nothing but contempt for the individual. And it has stated in its origins that they “…shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science.” In Arthur Calhoun’s 1919 “Social History of the Family”, he anticipated a point where the child passes from its family and into a “community of experts”. He also voiced hope that in time we’d see public education designed “to check the mating of the unfit”.

Is high school’s structure making more sense to you now? Is the lack of success when it comes to increasing our educational standards a surprise? The Educational system itself was put forward and advanced by entitled narcissists who were way more malevolent than Nellie Oleson or her 3 real life counterparts. In the process of protecting small children from bullies, there is a danger that we cave into the worst bully of them all.

Any sabre rattling about the state “doing something” about bullying should go be met with extreme skepticism! As much as I feel for the children on the receiving end, they are often twice victimized. Victimized by bullies whom the teachers can’t control because the teachers hands have been tied and by the underfunded understaffed system itself. After all, when it comes to subjugating children, breaking their will and making their lives miserable, I’m sure the people whose policy it is to do just that hate competition!