|
Gary
Webb: Dark Alliance | Rehnquist
|
Ronald Reagan
Greg Palast says it for many of us:
Killer, Coward, Conman
- Good Riddance, Ronnie Reagan: More proof only the good die
young
Sunday, June 6, 2004 by
Greg Palast
You're not going to like this.
You shouldn't speak ill of the dead. But in this case, someone's
got to.
Ronald Reagan was a conman.
Reagan was a coward. Reagan was a killer.
In 1987, I found myself stuck
in a crappy little town in Nicaragua named Chaguitillo. The people
were kind enough, though hungry, except for one surly young man.
His wife had just died of tuberculosis.
People don't die of TB if they
get some antibiotics. But Ronald Reagan, big hearted guy that
he was, had put a lock-down embargo on medicine to Nicaragua
because he didn't like the government that the people there had
elected.
Ronnie grinned and cracked
jokes while the young woman's lungs filled up and she stopped
breathing. Reagan flashed that B-movie grin while they buried
the mother of three.
And when Hezbollah terrorists
struck and murdered hundreds of American marines in their sleep
in Lebanon, the TV warrior ran away like a whipped dog ... then
turned around and invaded Grenada. That little Club Med war was
a murderous PR stunt so Ronnie could hold parades for gunning
down Cubans building an airport.
I remember Nancy, a skull and
crossbones prancing around in designer dresses, some of the "gifts"
that flowed to the Reagans -- from hats to million-dollar homes
-- from cronies well compensated with government loot. It used
to be called bribery.
And all the while, Grandpa
grinned, the grandfather who bleated on about "family values"
but didn't bother to see his own grandchildren.
The New York Times today, in
its canned obit, wrote that Reagan projected, "faith in
small town America" and "old-time values." "Values"
my ass. It was union busting and a declaration of war on the
poor and anyone who couldn't buy designer dresses. It was the
New Meanness, bringing starvation back to America so that every
millionaire could get another million.
"Small town" values?
From the movie star of the Pacific Palisades, the Malibu mogul?
I want to throw up.
And all the while, in the White
House basement, as his brain boiled away, his last conscious
act was to condone a coup d'etat against our elected Congress.
Reagan's Defense Secretary Casper the Ghost Weinberger with the
crazed Colonel, Ollie North, plotted to give guns to the Monster
of the Mideast, Ayatolla Khomeini.
Reagan's boys called Jimmy
Carter a weanie and a wuss although Carter wouldn't give an inch
to the Ayatolla. Reagan, with that film-fantasy tough-guy con
in front of cameras, went begging like a coward cockroach to
Khomeini pleading on bended knee for the release of our hostages.
Ollie North flew into Iran
with a birthday cake for the maniac mullah -- no kidding --in
the shape of a key. The key to Ronnie's heart.
Then the Reagan roaches mixed
their cowardice with crime: taking cash from the hostage-takers
to buy guns for the "contras" - the drug-runners of
Nicaragua posing as freedom fighters.
I remember as a student in
Berkeley the words screeching out of the bullhorn, "The
Governor of the State of California, Ronald Reagan, hereby orders
this demonstration to disburse" ... and then came the teargas
and the truncheons. And all the while, that fang-hiding grin
from the Gipper.
In Chaguitillo, all night long,
the farmers stayed awake to guard their kids from attack from
Reagan's Contra terrorists. The farmers weren't even Sandinistas,
those 'Commies' that our cracked-brained President told us were
'only a 48-hour drive from Texas.' What the hell would they want
with Texas, anyway?
Nevertheless, the farmers,
and their families, were Ronnie's targets.
In the deserted darkness of
Chaguitillo, a TV blared. Weirdly, it was that third-rate gangster
movie, "Brother Rat." Starring Ronald Reagan.
Well, my friends, you can rest
easier tonight: the Rat is dead.
Killer, coward, conman. Ronald
Reagan, good-bye and good riddance.
Ronald Reagan's Legacy
Ronald Reagan was a man who
fought for what he believed in, and he changed the world more
than probably any American in the twentieth century. He changed
not only the conservative movement, the Republican party, his
country and the world -- but also his opponents, known as liberals.
As a result of his achievements, the typical liberal Member of
Congress today sits to the right of Richard Nixon on a number
of economic issues, including tax policy.
The Great Communicator, as
he was called, was capable of charming millions of Americans
with his soothing, grandfatherly demeanor. In 1984 there were
polls indicating that most of those who voted to re-elect him
disagreed with him on the issues. In short, the "Reagan
revolution" would probably never have happened without his
unrivalled leadership skills.
His death has unleashed a torrent
of commentary on the significance of this revolution, and so
it is important to set the record straight. His economic policies
were mostly a failure. Partly this was because he had promised
something arithmetically impossible: to increase military spending,
cut taxes, and balance the budget. He kept the first two promises,
delivering the largest peacetime military build-up in American
history, and cutting taxes massively, mostly for upper-income
households.
But budget deficits soared
to record heights. The national debt doubled, as a percentage
of the economy, before Mr. Reagan's successors were able to bring
it under control. This "military Keynesianism" did
pull the economy out of the 1982 recession, but the 1980s still
chalked up the slowest growth of any decade in the post-World
War II era. And income was redistributed to the wealthy as never
before: during the 1980s, most of the country's income gains
went to the top 1 or 2 percent of households.
Mr. Reagan also helped redistribute
American income and wealth with a bold assault on American labor.
In 1981 he summarily fired 12,000 air traffic controllers who
went on strike for better working conditions. This ushered in
a new and dark era of labor relations, with employers now free
to "permanently replace" striking workers. The median
real wage failed to grow during the decade of the 1980s.
The Reagan revolution caused
even more economic damage internationally, for example by changing
policy at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Thus
began the era of "structural adjustment" -- a set of
economic policies that has become so discredited worldwide that
the IMF and World Bank no longer use the term. The 1980s became
"the lost decade" for Latin America, the region most
affected by Washington's foreign economic policy. Income per
person actually shrank for the decade, a rare historical event,
and the region has yet to come close to its pre-1980s growth
rates.
Mr. Reagan is often credited
with having caused the collapse of the Soviet Union, but this
is doubtful. He did use the Cold War as a pretext for other interventions,
including funding and support for horrific violence against the
civilian population of Central America. In 1999 the United Nations
determined that the massacres of tens of thousands of Guatemalans,
mostly indigenous people, constituted "genocide." These
massacres -- often involving grotesque torture -- reached their
peak under the rule of Mr. Reagan's ally, the Guatemalan General
Rios Montt. Tens of thousands of Salvadorans were also murdered
during Mr. Reagan's presidency by death squads affiliated with
the U.S.-funded Salvadoran military.
But it was Mr. Reagan's efforts
to overthrow the government -- democratically elected in 1984
-- of poor, underdeveloped Nicaragua that almost brought down
his presidency. Congress cut off aid to Mr. Reagan's proxy army,
the Contras, as a result of pressure from Americans -- led by
religious groups -- who were disgusted by the Contras' tactics
of murdering unarmed teachers and health care workers.
The Reagan administration continued
to run the war from the basement of the White House, and paid
for part of it with the proceeds of illegal arms sales to Iran.
Hence the Iran-Contra scandal, in which Mr. Reagan escaped prosecution
because his subordinates claimed that he had no knowledge of
their crimes.
The Reagan revolution continues
today: the "war on terror" has replaced the Cold War
as pretext for intervention abroad, including the disastrous
war in Iraq. Tax cuts for the rich and huge increases in military
spending have revived the era of giant budget deficits. As the
Great Communicator used to say, "There they go again."
|
Truth can never be
told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd. William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell