Failures of Reagan- From the Right

This essay, The Myths of Reaganomics, comes from the Mises Institute, a fundamentalist pro-capitalism organization.

It highlights the lies of Reaganism, which even honest conservatives recognized, and the distance between rhetoric and reality:

In 1986, the last recorded year of the Reagan administration, the federal government spent $990 billion, an increase of 68%. Whatever this is, it is emphatically not reducing government expenditures.
...We get federal spending as percent of GNP in 1980 as 21.6%, and after six years of Reagan, 24.3%.

The next, and admittedly the most embarrassing, failure of Reaganomic goals is the deficit...One of the most curious, and least edifying, sights in the Reagan era was to see the Reaganites completely change their tune of a lifetime.

[T]he fa­mous "tax cut" of 1981 did not cut taxes at all. It's true that tax rates for higher-income brackets were cut; but for the average person, taxes rose, rather than declined. The reason is that, on the whole, the cut in income tax rates was more than offset by two forms of tax increase. One was "bracket creep," a term for inflation quietly but effectively raising one into higher tax brackets, so that you pay more and proportionately higher taxes even though the tax rate schedule has officially remained the same. The second source of higher taxes was Social Security taxation, which kept increasing, and which helped taxes go up overall.

So here is the bottom-line consensus on Reaganism:
* Increases in spending, with shifts in spending from the needs of the poor to the military-industrial complex
* Massive increases in the deficit
* Tax increases for working people, where only the very wealthy benefited

What is there to honor in this record?

Posted by Nathan at 09:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Track (0)

If We Do This to Our Guys...

How much more evidence do we need of torture and brutality against prisoners? Check this out:

Reversing itself, the Army said Tuesday that a G.I. was discharged partly because of a head injury he suffered while posing as an uncooperative detainee during a training exercise at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba...

Mr. Baker, 37, a former member of the 438th Military Police Company, said he played the role of an uncooperative prisoner and was beaten so badly by four American soldiers that he suffered a traumatic brain injury and seizures. He said the soldiers only stopped beating him when they realized he might be American.

What could more dramatically illustrate that the beating and torture revealed had little to do with real investigations? With 25 deaths in military custody since the Afghanistan war, the top leadership of this country should be indicted for war crimes.

Posted by Nathan at 07:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Track (0)

Reagan- Irresponsible Debt

As Lloyd Bentsen once said of the Reagan economy, ""You know, if you let me write $200 billion worth of hot checks every year, I could give you the illusion of prosperity too."

And lest anyone say, Reagan was just doing what other Presidents had done, he wasn't. In the post-WW II period-- after the debt incurred to pay for that war -- the US national debt stayed essentially flat at just under a trillion dollars in real dollars for almost thirty years.

Then Reagan came in and the debt skyrocketed:

Reagan and Bush Senior more than doubled the national debt, permanently hobbling future generations with debt payments.

And what did they accomplish with that debt that is so much better than Presidents who conducted their economic policy without stealing money from their grandchildren?

Any "boom" under Reagan (and the economy wasn't that great overall) was theft from future generations, nothing more. Al Capone had a pretty good economy for himself too, but we didn't give him a state funeral.

It is truly pathetic that conservatives, who once believed in pay-as-you-go accounting, can worship an economic policy that was nothing more than credit card spending sprees.

Posted by Nathan at 09:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | Track (0)

Reagan: Enemy of Working People

I just got back from Canada, where the differences between the two major parties seems to amount to whether a $2 copay on prescription drugs in their state-run health care system is too outrageously expensive.

So I missed most of the initial gnashing of teeth over Reagan's death. I didn't weep when Nixon died and I sure as hell am not in any tears over the death of a man who ordered the murder of innocents across Central America and whose trade policies led to deaths of the poor throughout the world.

Kerry and the "responsible" Dems can play the bipartisan game that Reagan was not an evil monster, but I won't. This is a man who supported Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein when it suited his Cold War purposes, then we are expected to forget that thousands died in New York City because this man thought playing "enemy of my enemy is my friend" games wouldn't lead to consequences. The pit at Ground Zero is Ronald Reagan's legacy.

But let's not forget his trade policies. Through the IMF, Reagan promoted structural adjustment programs that demanded that poor nations stop growing food and start growing cash crops to pay off debt to Northern banks. Poverty and malnutrition soared throughout Africa and Latin America. And tied to trade were new requirements that those nations enforce intellectual property laws, especially on prescription drugs, so that if those poor people got sick, they could no longer afford drugs needed to keep them alive.

That Reagan led an assault on labor unions is a given. The PATCO strike and the crushing of the air controllers union was a defining moment of Reagan's Presidency. The assault on wage levels and health care by employers under Reagan went non-stop and the number of unionized workers plummetted.

While Reagan railed against the Soviet Union, his administration leaders were masters of the double-standard, downplaying the evils of Apartheid, giving a pass to murder under Pinochet or death squads in Central America.

Oh, but hey, Ronald Reagan ended the Cold War. What crap. The head of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, was a reformer who was independently leading change in the country. He had zero plans to attack the United States, yet Reagan wasted trillions of dollars on military weapons that were unneeded-- probably the single biggest waste of money in the history of the world.

His economic policies were based on idiotic supply side theory-- claims that tax cuts would lead to increased revenue instead meant we saw massive deficits by the end of his Presidency. And he wasn't even that great a tax cutter, although the wealthy saw massive tax cuts. But the working people saw massive tax increases in the form of increased payroll and excise taxes.

Reagan was the worst President of the 20th century with Bush Junior leading the charge to fulfill that role in the 21st.

Posted by Nathan at 09:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (12) | Track (2)

Rating the Catholic Politicians

Senator Dick Durbin has released a survey of Catholic Senators (pdf) that rates them in three categories: Pro-Life, Domestic Policy and Foreign Policy.

Unsurprisingly, Democratic Senators do poorly on the pro-life rating, but the news is in the Domestic and Foreign Policy ratings. Using the stated legislative priorities of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), Durbin has ranked the Senators on Catholic positions from the minimum wage to the right to unionize on the domestic front to the Iraq War Resolution and Global AIDS funding on the international side.

And some Catholic Republicans are way off the Church's legislative priorities. Senator Sununu and Santorum received the lowest domestic ratings (23%) with Bunning and Santorum tied with the lowest ratings in foreign policy (6%). Other Catholic GOPers with notably low ratings were Senator Domenici (27% Domestic, 12% International) and Murkowski (33% Domestic, 7% International).

BTW Kerry had the highest domestic rating of any Catholic Senator (95%). Of course, conservatives will say only the abortion issue counts. Now, many Catholic leaders may say it counts more-- and Durbin gives it its own rating, but it should raise questions in some quarters-- hint to the media-- that additional stories on who is a "good Catholic" could be done.

Posted by Nathan at 08:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | Track (4)

The Chalabi Spy Scandal

Chalabi was the source of lies about WMDs, the source of lies to the New York Times stoking war fever, took the US government for tens of millions of dollars with nothing to show for it, and now it appears he was a spy for Iran!!!

But Bush was never close to him:

Bush maintains he was never close to Chalabi.

"My meetings with him were very brief," Bush said. "I mean, I think I met with him at the State of the Union and just kind of working through the rope line, and he might have come up with a group of leaders. But I haven't had any extensive conversations with him."

Bush said he doesn't recall any of his advisers saying that Chalabi was providing vital information.

Liar.

Caption: Before his fall from favor, Ahmed Chalabi, seen standing behind Laura Bush, was a "special guest" at January's State of the Union address.

Liar. Liar. Liar. Liar. Liar. Liar.

And if he didn't think Chalabi was giving us vital information, why the hell was Bush authorizing tens of millions of dollars to him?

Idiot. Idiot. Idiot. Idiot. Idiot.

Take your choice.

Posted by Nathan at 06:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Track (0)

$2/gal- Just a Taste of Coming Oil Crash

Read this article and be afraid-- and then get angry at the lies being told to the public.

The bottom line of the article is that global energy use is skyrocketing while little new oil is being discovered:

new sources of oil are becoming increasingly difficult to find and more expensive to develop. Global discovery peaked in 1964 and has declined ever since. In 2000, there were 16 discoveries of oil "mega-fields." In 2001, we found eight, and in 2002 only three such discoveries were made. Today, we consume about six barrels of oil for every one new barrel discovered.

And the numbers you hear out there on available oil are probably lies. The Saudis are lying to us about how much oil they have. The Big Oil companies are lying. And the government is lying.

Take the Saudis:

A second major problem is the fact that the Saudis will not allow any independent third-party observer to examine their reserves, operations and books. It's off-limits and "totally opaque"... Analysts can't even know for sure exactly how much oil the Saudis produce each day.

During the 80s, estimates of OPEC's total reserves magically jumped from 353 to 643 billion barrels, despite the lack of new oil fields or significant improvements in drilling technologies. The Saudis themselves jacked up their stated reserves from 170 to 257 billion barrels.

Matt Simmons has personally pored over 40 years' worth of Saudi petroleum reservoir engineering reports. "I do data analysis," Simmons says. "And the data analysis is getting increasingly scary. We have clearly grossly overstated proved reserves."

As for the big oil companies, when Royal Dutch Shell admitted four months ago that it had been lying to shareholders about how much oil they owned, it was treated as a financial scandal.

But the Shell lies about having more oil than they actually do could just be the tip of the iceberg:

"Most of us can't believe Shell is the only one," says [one analyst]. "Traditionally, they've been very good and conservative in their accounting practices. A bunch of us suspect they are probably just the first to come clean."

What this means is that remaining oil will become increasingly valuable. But it also means the politics of cheap oil will inevitably end. The military costs of protecting oil production, as terrorists increasingly target remaining sites, will just increase the real costs.

We are unlikely to get a real debate on the need to increase energy efficiency across the economy, expand mass transit, and begin reshaping our communities to decrease energy use over the coming decades.

But we desperately need it.

Posted by Nathan at 05:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (12) | Track (1)

Let America Be America Again

This is a brilliant slogan for the Kerry campaign.

What this Langston Hughes poem evokes is leftwing patriotism, a concise statement that leaders who betray the ideals of the country are not patriots but subverters of the nation.

It summarizes the idea that the Bush Presidency is a radical departure from Americanism, while implicit in its text is the idea that there is no ideal to return to, just an ideal we are ever striving to achieve. The end lines are the harshest demands for change possible:

America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!

But that's all subtext. It's a bit like Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA"; some will mistake it for chauvinism, but others will understand the depth of subtle assault on Bush's greedy destruction of this country.

Posted by Nathan at 08:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (10) | Track (4)

Cheney Fixed Halliburton Deal

Pretty close to a smoking gun.

Time Magazine found this memo showing that the VP coordinated Halliburton getting the multi-billion dollar contract for Iraq:

The e-mail -- dated March 5, 2003 -- says Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, approved the arrangement to award the contract to the oil-services company, the administration official said.

According to an e-mail excerpt in Time, the contract was "contingent on informing WH [White House] tomorrow. We anticipate no issues since action has been coordinated w[ith] VP's office."

The Corps of Engineers gave Halliburton the contract three days later without seeking other bids, Time reports.

Now, the Cheney folks say that the "coordinated" action was just a heads up of potential controversy, but think about it.

Why was the VP's office informed of potential PR problems before the White House itself? Why is the Army Corps of Engineers even dealing directly with PR issues on the taxpayer dime in that case?

If the White House was officially informed of the potential contract, and someone in the political office then called the VP office to worry about PR issues, that would be normal politics.

But this looks like the VP was involved directly in coordinating the politics -- and probably the substance -- of the Halliburton deal.

It's disgusting even in the most favorable light.

Posted by Nathan at 02:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | Track (0)

Go See "Control Room"

I saw Control Room, the documentary about the Arab news network Al Jazeera, this weekend. It was stunning.

The anchors and writers for the television network are clearly biased against the US invasion, and they make few bones about this fact. But then, they ask, aren't all the US networks supportive of the US? What's the difference? Isn't "objectivity" a crock?

But that doesn't mean there are no standards. When asked what is the purpose of Al Jazeera, an executive producers says it's showing the truth. Turth is of course biased, but there is at least one clear injunction in that for journalists.

Don't withhold information you know happened.

Al Jazeera passed that test. The US networks failed.

It was Al Jazeera that showed the results of US bombing-- the dead and crippled-- and the deaths of Americans themselves once they invaded. And they showed US soldiers threatening families as they went door to door.

They also showed the other side, the US military side, where they were willing to broadcast statements by the US government as to why everything was happening. As one top US official admits in the documentary, Al Jazeera was willing to broadcase almost any statement they gave them.

Yet Al Jazeera was accused of being deceptive.

Because it didn't censor images unflattering to the US.

Images that the US media, as if they were state-controlled media, dutifully refused to run as part of the war effort.

Who served truth?

Al Jazeera, whatever their bias, at least ran information from both sides of the argument.

The roots of torture at Abu Ghraib can be seen in this documentary, as US reporters refused to ask tough questions and instead became stenographers for Donald Rumsfeld.

At one point, Donald Rumsfeld attacks Al Jazeera, saying of them, once someone starts lying, how can you ever take them seriously.

The crowd in my New York theater, a few blocks from Ground Zero, began laughing derisively.

Yes, Don, how can we take you seriously?

Posted by Nathan at 09:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | Track (1)

Lies and No Child Left Behind

One way to lie is to mischaracterize statements by opponents or answer a question not asked.

Take No Child Left Behind.

Officials across the country, including Republicans in states struggling to implement the reforms required, have complained that the administration has shortchanged them, cutting the education funds originally promised and dumping the additional costs on the states.

So how does the Bush administration respond?

With this breathless press release/campaign propaganda about a report paid for with tax money:

The General Accounting Office (GAO) released a new report Unfunded Mandates: Analysis of Reform Act Coverage that found that the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is in fact not an "unfunded mandate," as critics of the law have claimed.

No Child Left Behind costs states money and the federal government hasn't provided them with the funds promised, but the Bushies decide to narrow the question to a technical definition:

According to the report, NCLB '[d]id not meet the UMRA's [Unfunded Mandates Reform Act of 1995] definition of a mandate because the requirements were a condition of federal financial assistance' and 'any costs incurred by state, local or tribal governments would result from complying' with conditions for receiving the funds.

Get that-- since states can give up all the federal money conditioned on following the program, they technically aren't "mandated" to spend extra money.

All true, and a complete distracting lie in the context of the actual criticisms of the program. But that's how these people work.

Posted by Nathan at 09:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | Track (0)

Civil Liberties Protect Govt Officials

Why are civil liberties needed?

One answer is that we fear that the worst impulses of humanity will get out of control without the restraining hand of human rights standards.

That is one clear story told by looking at the pictures and reports emerging from Abu Ghraib.

But there is another reason for civil liberties, where we fear an all-too-normal impulse, namely covering your ass, will lead to violations of rights.

Apparently, on top of the indignity of torture at Abu Ghraib, it turns out almost none of the prisoners were linked to the insurgency. And almost no useful intelligence was gained from those prisoners.

So why were these prisoners held so long in such terrible conditions:

In general, said a senior Army officer who served in Iraq, many of the prisoners held in the isolation wing at Abu Ghraib were kept there long beyond any period of usefulness because "no one wanted to be responsible for releasing the next Osama bin Laden."

This is the best argument against giving officials discretion over our rights.

It's not that they will violate them out of viciousness-- although they may -- but because sacrificing those rights may just be seen as a way to protect their career to avoid blame.

Which is why civil liberties are so useful.

As long as the standards are tough and inflexible, officials cannot be blamed if they follow such standards and release people when they have no proof of their guilt.

Discretion creates a chance to blame such officials, so therefore endangers innocent people deeply, since officials then have to fear for their careers if they, by their own discretion, release a person who later turns out to be guilty, even if there was no real evidence at the time to hold them.

Civil liberties, the "Miranda Rule"-- all get vilified when something goes wrong and a released prisoner commits a crime. Good. Better the abstract principle get blamed then the officials who released them, or otherwise those officials would never release anyone, innocent or guilty.

Posted by Nathan at 06:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Track (0)

Bush Fought Al Qaeda

...and Al Qaeda Won...

Al Qaeda has more than 18,000 militants ready to strike and the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq has accelerated recruitment to the ranks of Osama bin Laden's network, a leading London think-tank says.

Al Qaeda's finances were in good order, its "middle managers" provided expertise to Islamic militants around the globe and bin Laden's drawing power was as strong as ever, the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) said on Tuesday.

Remember this antiwar cartoon produced by TomPaine.com before the war? Couldn't have been more accurate:

Posted by Nathan at 09:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (8) | Track (2)

Job Security for SBC Workers

After a short four-day walkout by its workers, SBC has agreed to a contract guaranteeing its employees job security, including transferring employees from declining telephone divisions to new high tech divisions:

The agreement also includes new access to jobs in the growth areas, protects health security for both active employees and retirees, and improves pensions.

The settlement guarantees no layoffs of employees currently on the payroll for the life of the agreement and calls for rehiring of several hundred workers who had been laid off at SBC Southwest and SBC Midwest.

Officials of the nation's No. 2 phone provider said negotiators agreed to provide current CWA-represented employees with a guaranteed job offer should their existing job be no longer needed.

And to make sure that a merger or any kind of sale will not endanger jobs, the contract requires that any successor company must assume these obligations as well.

SBC has always been the most union-friendly of the Baby Bells, so the conflict over this contract had been a bit surprising, but it's nice that the result was still an industry standard.

Posted by Nathan at 06:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | Track (0)

One Win for Sanity

A judge threw out the Justice Department's vendetta against Greenpeace, ruling charges of "sailor mongering" from a 19th century law could not be used against the organization. It was somewhat of a technical victory for civil liberties, but we'll take them where we can these days.

Posted by Nathan at 07:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Track (0)

Which Conservative Ideology?

Matt Y agrees that GOP power has actually been quite successful in helping the wealthy but this isn't part of conservativism the ideology-- which he equates with "traditional morality and small government."

But the triumph of pro-corporate market fundamentalism is a core part of at least a wing of conservatism, from Milton Friedman to supply side economics to the Federalist Society. These folks always were always more concerned about government protecting property interests than limiting government per se. Look at intellectual property rights-- the economic right has been demanding that China -- China for gods sake-- increase its government repression to get rid of software and entertainment piracy.

That Matt sees this stuff as tangential to "true" conservatism is exactly the point-- like a lot of liberals he's more obsessed with the culture war, while thinking the economic war can be managed once a few good technocrats are put into office under a nice liberal President.

While I'll defend Clinton relative to Reagan and the Bushes and want Kerry to win, Robert Rubin or the equivalent that Kerry will appoint is not going to confront head-on the economic warfare that working people are facing, at both the government level and by private sector corporate organizing. And the fact that liberals don't take the economic component of conservatism seriously enough is exactly why the rightwing can get away with it given the often deadening media silence.

Posted by Nathan at 07:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (8) | Track (0)

Comment Problems

My anti-spam software has been acting up and blocking most comments. So I disabled it.

So if you had problems, repost your comments. And excuse the occasional spam advertisement for porn and drugs until I find a replacement solution.

Posted by Nathan at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Track (0)

Wages Lag, Bush Approval Drops

To the chagrin of some Bush boosters, recent GDP and job numbers aren't boosting approval of Bush's handling of the economy. In fact, it's been dropping with a recent poll showing 60% of the population disapproving of his economic management.

Which might be explained by the fact that anemic job growth is matched by stagnant wages for everyone else. Check the wage analysis factoids:

Adjusted for inflation, average hourly wages for non-farm workers, excluding managers and executives, rose 25 cents, to $15.35, between 2001 and 2003. That equates to an annual increase of less than 2 percent, or below the rate of inflation.

Labor's share of the increase in national income since November 2001, the end of the last recession, is the lowest for any recovery since the end of World War II.

The kicker of all this is that corporate America is doing phenomenally well:

From the start of 2002 to the end of 2003, national income grew about $804 billion, or 8.7 percent. For the first time, corporate profits received a larger share of the growth than labor did.

Corporate profits, however, were able to experience explosive growth as a consequence of the very large gap between the growth rates of labor productivity and worker earnings.

The median cash compensation for chief executives was up over 7 percent, and that's not including stock options and other long-term incentives, according to Mercer Human Resource Consulting.

So note this, not only were the rich getting their taxes cut, but the total income they were earning was expanding rapidly.

But the GOP still thinks the wealthy need new tax cuts.

Maybe they shouldn't be surprised that the rest of the population thinks they deserve a raise as well-- and see Bush as not delivering the goods for anyone other than his rich buddies.

Posted by Nathan at 08:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | Track (4)

Rightwing on Me and WWP

WorldNetDaily, the popular rightwing online news site, has a full-fledged story on the attacks on critics of the WWP-ANSWER within the left, with a lot on my history within the National Lawyers Guild. They seemed to have combed every email list and web site to piece together the story. Although they didn't bother to even contact me for comment, a pretty shabby failure.

It's not too slanted, since it emphasizes how isolated ideologically the WWP is on the Left and distinguishes the vast numbers who opposed the war versus the tiny clique around WWP-ANSWER who were pro-Saddam.

The article even points out why the media pays more attention to fringe rightwing groups than to Stalinist groups like the WWP-- the rightwing groups are actively murdering people in the US. Quoting one source:

"The far right becomes relevant when it's shooting abortion doctors or blowing up courthouses," he said, "There aren't a lot of leftists blowing things up."

Which of course highlights why the rightwing is kind of silly to itself spend too much time talking breathlessly about fringe groups, when it tolerates Klan allies and abortion doctors in its midst. I wonder how many exposes WND has done on those?

Posted by Nathan at 07:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (14) | Track (5)

Leave No Rich Child Behind

A great title for a Washington Post editorial:

The House of Representatives plans to take up a bill this week that would provide new tax breaks to families earning as much as $309,000, while doing next to nothing for those at the low end of the income scale...

Currently, married families with incomes of up to $110,000 receive the full credit; the bill would more than double the income ceiling, to $250,000...

For families earning less than $10,750, however, the House bill would do nothing. Thus, a family with a parent working full-time at the minimum wage ($10,300) would get no benefit from the bill.

This proposal is part of an overall bill that would add an additional $500 billion to the national debt over the next ten years.

These folks are just evil-- handing out trillions to the wealthy, while doing nothing for minimum wage workers and their families.

Posted by Nathan at 07:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | Track (0)