November 12, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

BUT REAGAN WAS "LIKABLE," WASN'T HE?

Ronald Reagan has become like a god to right-wingers. Things were so much better when Saint Reagan was president, we're told. He single-handedly took on the Soviet Union and showed those Communists who was boss. He lifted the economy from its malaise and created millions of jobs (never mind those deficits). He was a "great" president. Never mind the facts. This item comes from Paul Krugman showing a history of Reagan's race baiting. But race baiting is a good thing in right-wing world, I guess. This is linked at www.nytimes.com:

So there’s a campaign on to exonerate Ronald Reagan from the charge that he deliberately made use of Nixon’s Southern strategy. When he went to Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1980, the town where the civil rights workers had been murdered, and declared that “I believe in states’ rights,” he didn’t mean to signal support for white racists. It was all just an innocent mistake.

Indeed, you do really have to feel sorry for Reagan. He just kept making those innocent mistakes.

When he went on about the welfare queen driving her Cadillac, and kept repeating the story years after it had been debunked, some people thought he was engaging in race-baiting. But it was all just an innocent mistake.

When, in 1976, he talked about working people angry about the “strapping young buck” using food stamps to buy T-bone steaks at the grocery store, he didn’t mean to play into racial hostility. True, as the New York Times reported,

The ex-Governor has used the grocery-line illustration before, but in states like New Hampshire where there is scant black population, he has never used the expression “young buck,” which, to whites in the South, generally denotes a large black man.

THE DEREGULATION DISASTER

It's an old saying now that if we refuse to learn from history we're doomed to repeat the same mistakes. That is certainly true in management of the economy. We should have learned big lessons from the Great Depression and what led up to the Depression. But the advocates of deregulation and free markets must have thought the Depression was just an anomaly. It wasn't. Deregulation has consistently led to disaster. We're seeing it now in the subprime mortgage crisis. This commentary by Robert Kuttner is at www.latimes.com:

The deepening calamity now spreading from financial markets to the broader economy results from the failed fantasy that markets can regulate themselves.

We supposedly learned this lesson once, after the crash of 1929. In the aftermath, we built a dynamic system of managed capitalism so that a financial collapse would never again create a Great Depression.

But beginning in the 1970s, free-market economists and financial elites convinced Congress and presidents of both parties that a deregulated economy would be a more dynamic one; that something new about technology or trade or ideology meant that markets were at last truly self-governing.

New, exotic forms of financial engineering proliferated. These were praised as improving efficiency.

We have just had a full field test of free-market ideology, and once again it failed.