Jabberwocky On The Potomac - 1988 - The Reagan Years
(Even hair was perplexed)
For all the spin, analysis and hand-wringing going on over our economy of late, we often forget it got a start somewhere. Fingers often point in the direction of the 80's where conflicting stories abound, but it's a good bet that the "supply side" theory of the economy had something to do with it.
As this episode of Face The Nation from May 29, 1988 illustrates, Treasury Secretary James Baker just couldn't break himself away from his rose colored glasses, even for a minute.
James Baker: “I noticed the intro to your program, the “yes, but . .” – but if I may say so, people have been out there saying “yes, but” since the spring of 1983. They’ve been telling us that “yes, things are okay now, but the wheels are gonna fall off, the economy’s gonna go in the tank, and it hasn’t. And it is not going to.”
Leslie Stahl: “How long is it not going to?”
James Baker: “Well . . .well into the foreseeable future. Well into the foreseeable future”
Yes, well into the foreseeable future - hopefully the future where nobody will notice what happened in the 80's. Hopefully by that future, some miracle will magically occur and all our economic woes will vanish. Or all those practitioners of Voodoo Economics will be dead, senile or too in-disposed to care.
Welcome to the future.
tripling the debt in order to cover up the fraud. Might that help?
1988. We'd won the Euro cup. The good old days. Bad fashion, crappy music. Complete shite, flying cars predicted for the future. BBS was the hype. Apple II was da shite. C64 sid was the music chip.
The good old days. :)
Bite my shiny metal ass.
http://www.startalkradio.net/
... by then the Amiga was raping Apple IIs.
As a kid somehow things made sense in the 80s. However looking back as a young adult now it is like WTF?
CTHULHU 2012 "Why vote for a lesser evil?"
of this from 1985...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrUB0g8Vjgg
"Did the earth move for you Nancy?"
http://www.cracked.com/funny-2360-the-1980s/
Hopefully humanity will one day learn to be humane.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_z5jU5nrlAo&fe...
Lestat?
Diabolus est Deus Inversus
growing up in the 80s, in a middle class household, everything seemed great. No complaints. It's sad to look back and see all of the things that were screwed up.
Nothing will be the same after eight years of Bush / Cheney and the Repugs , what they did to this country and are doing ... I often wonder and worry what is in store for us. The eighties were great ... compared to today , the radical Reich have been doing their damnedest to destroy this country and turn it upside down , they are not done yet . People like Grover Norquist must be happy campers now .
"The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all."
That's only because the common riff-raff can't afford the campground fees anymore.
Diabolus est Deus Inversus
Dan Quayle more than Darth Bush.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SY7CtVA8LkY
While Regan and his "new" congress were certainly the BFFs of supply-side economics, the idiocy really got its start under the Carter administration with the Airline Deregulation Act. An act he "proudly" signed. Along with the Railroad Revitalization and Regulatory Reform Act of 1976 and the Motor Carrier Act of 1980 these constituted the backbone of the early stagger towards the fantasy of "supply-side" economics.
Continuing to concentrate on the cartoon villains we see in the "other tribe" and not looking at the real source of the problem (the disease and fantasy of right-wing economic philosophy) is why we continue to get results like the coming destruction of Social Security by a "liberal" president and congress. No matter which of the "2 parties" actually holds power right-wing economic philosophy/fantasy reigns supreme.
Thanks. It's good to see a bit of truth over tribalism now and again. :)
Hopefully humanity will one day learn to be humane.
. . . that the Reagan White House believed it could "forsee" the future, what with all the astrology nonsense, but Baker sounds like he thinks he's Miss Cleo or some other charlatan like Sylvia Brown. Heh.
News flash: The future is NOT forseeable. You can make educated guesses about it but it is never set in stone, especially when it comes to the economy.
In 1983, Doug Coe and General John W. Vessey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, informed the civilian ambassadors of the Central American nations that the Prayer Breakfast would be used to arrange “private sessions” for their generals with "responsible leaders" in the United States; the invitations would be sent from Republican senators Richard Lugar and Mark Hatfield, and Dixiecrat John Stennis, the Mississippi segregationist after whom an aircraft carrier is now named.
The Family went on to build friendships between the Reagan administration and the Salvadoran general Carlos Eugenios Vides Casanova, found liable in 2002 by a Florida jury for the torture of thousands, and the Honduran general Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, who before his assassination was linked to both the CIA and death squads. El Salvador became one of the bloodiest battlegrounds of the Cold War; U.S. military aid to Honduras jumped from $4 million per year to $79 million.**
In Africa, the Family greased the switch of U.S. patronage from one client state, Ethiopia, to another that they felt was more promising: Somalia. “We work with power where we can,” Doug Coe explains, “build new power where we can't.” Former secretary of state James Baker, a longtime participant in a prayer cell facilitated by Coe, recalls that when he visited Albania after the collapse of Eastern European communism, the Balkan nation's foreign minister met him on the tarmac with the words, “I greet you in the name of Doug Coe.”--Jeff Sharlet
Study the symptoms not the virus...
** "U.S. military aid to Honduras jumped from $4 million per year to $79 million."...
**Doug Coe and General Vessey: Minutes of a luncheon held at the Cedars, the Family's Arlington, Virginia headquarters, October 19, 1983, collection 459, BGCA; no box number. The luncheon was organized by Aquilino E. Boyd, the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega's ambassador to the United States.
Also in attendance was an inner-circle member of the Family named Herb Ellingwood, a longtime Reagan aide who had been responsible for "psychological warfare" against student protestors in California.
In 1970, Ellingwood was one of the small circle of men who laid hands on Reagan and heard a voice, allegedly God's, promising Reagan the White House. Paul Kengor, God and Ronald Reagan: A Spiritual Life (Regan Books, 2004), pp. 135-36. When Reagan ascended to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, he took Ellingwood with him as a deputy counsel.
Ellingwood's advice? "Economic salvation and spiritual salvation go side by side." John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America (Penguin Press, 2004), pp. 331-32. Lugar et al.: Telegram to General Manual Antonio Noriega, January 25, 1984, collection 459, BGCA. Casanova and Martinez: Getter, "Showing Faith in Discretion." Military aid to Honduras: Elaine Sciolino, "U.S. Said to Link Latin Aid to Support for Contras," New York Times, May 18, 1987.
Study the symptoms not the virus...
Ah, I remember the 80s. I was a conservative Republican through much of it. If you'd asked me, I would have carved Reagan's face on Mount Rushmore with the others. I was as sure of his voodoo economics as a Christian is of Heaven.
I look back on this and wonder what the hell I was thinking.
I will say this much for my former-self: I never used the word "socialist" unless someone adopted the label themselves. I took the word to mean that you advocated the government takeover of ALL business (not just the temporary takeover of failing businesses critical to the economy) and paying everyone equally (not just higher taxes for the rich).
I also never accused liberals of disloyalty to the country. The concept of "loyal opposition" wasn't lost on me like it is to Republicans today.
My former-self, even with Reagan-worship intact, would be aghast at what's happened over the last decade.
If you look closer at those pieces of legislation, certainly the Airline bill, they were the result of actions going back as far as 1970. A lot of what Carter got were holdovers from the Nixon and later Ford administrations, including appointees. Certainly Carter could have vetoed them (I have to check and see who had the Majority Senate and House during those years), but a lot of the problems I see, especially now, are ones that have been inherited from previous administrations. A lot of that gets forgotten in the course of the argument. With the intense amount of media noise and distraction it's difficult to see that many of the problems we're facing right now are the direct result of actions taken as far back as 1970. Legislation that's been in place for 40 years makes it something of an institution to a lot of people. Don't forget, we all talk about Dick Cheney sometimes not realizing he's a direct result of the Nixon Administration - those roots go deep. Thanks for the response. You've prompted me to dig in the archive further.
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