Ronald Reagan's legacy has been whitewashed for the benefit of those of us who have no memory.
"For decades, we have piled deficit upon deficit, mortgaging our future and our children's future for the temporary convenience of the present. To continue this long trend is to guarantee tremendous social, cultural, political, and economic upheavals."

"You and I, as individuals, can, by borrowing, live beyond our means, but for only a limited period of time. Why, then, should we think that collectively, as a nation, we are not bound by that same limitation?"

This is an excerpt from Ronald Reagan's first inaugural address. During Reagan's terms in office, spending rose 6.8% largely due to a huge defense build up. This increase in spending combined with his tax cut policy added $1.34 trillion to the national deficit.



Great Communicator, my ass. Tens of thousands of us died of AIDS on his watch, and he never even once mentioned the word. He also refused to adequately fund AIDS research -- a critical delay that, we now know, could have saved countless lives. We seem to have forgotten that.

We've also forgotten the corruption -- not just the constitution-shredding outrage of Iran-Contra, but an administration that set a modern record for the number of indicted officials.

It was the Great Communicator whose era gave us the term, and scourge, of homelessness. It was Reagan who launched an illegal war on Nicaragua, Reagan who unleashed and praised Guatemala's genocide and El Salvador's death squads. Reagan whose tax cuts and funding choices launched class war at home, a class war still being successfully waged, by many of the same officials, 20 years later.

And excuse me, but Ronald Reagan did not end communism. Hundreds of thousands of courageous people, in Moscow and Gdansk and Prague and across the communist bloc, deserve the credit for risking their lives to bring down tyrannical governments, often with nothing more than the willingness to sacrifice their own bodies. They risked everything. Reagan risked nothing but an inadvertent record deficit it took a decade and a Democratic president to heal.
Source: "The Great Prevaricator -- The reaction from those of us who came of age during the Reagan presidency -- and found it inexplicably horrific" by Geov Parrish - WorkingForChange.com - 06.07.04



Giving Reagan credit for ending communism is like giving a crowing rooster credit for the sunrise.
(And shouldn't at least a little of the credit go to Mikhail Gorbachev, the Solidarity movement in Poland, and other internal players?)

High oil prices in the 1970s suckered the Kremlin into propping up inefficient industries, overextending subsidies, postponing real economic reforms and invading Afghanistan. When oil prices collapsed to $15 a barrel in the late 1980s, the overextended, petrified Soviet Empire went bust.

In a 2006 speech entitled “The Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia,” Yegor Gaidar, a deputy prime minister of Russia in the early 1990s, noted that “the timeline of the collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced to Sept. 13, 1985. On this date, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the minister of oil of Saudi Arabia, declared that the monarchy had decided to alter its oil policy radically. The Saudis stopped protecting oil prices, and Saudi Arabia quickly regained its share in the world market.

“During the next six months,” added Gaidar, “oil production in Saudi Arabia increased fourfold, while oil prices collapsed by approximately the same amount in real terms. As a result, the Soviet Union lost approximately $20 billion per year, money without which the country simply could not survive.”
Source: "The Green Revolution(s)" By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN - NY Times - June 23, 2009



…[H]is ability to mingle truth with fantasy was frightening. At different times, Reagan -- who infamously said that "facts are stupid things" -- falsely claimed to have ended poverty in Los Angeles; implied he was personally involved in the liberation of Europe's concentration camps; argued that trees cause most pollution; said that the Hollywood blacklist, to which he contributed names, never existed; described as "freedom fighters" the Contra thugs and the religious fundamentalists in Afghanistan who would later become Al Qaeda; and claimed that fighting a "limited" nuclear war was not an insane idea.

In the White House, he ran up more debt than any earlier president -- primarily to serve the requests of what Republican President Eisenhower had, with alarm, termed the "military-industrial complex." (George W. Bush has broken that record.)
Source: "A nice guy's nasty policies - Separating Reagan's political legacy from his personality" by Robert Scheer - Creators Syndicate - 06.08.04



[A]ccording to Congressional Budget Office estimates, the after-tax income of a typical family, adjusted for inflation, rose more than twice as much from 1992 to 2000 as it did from 1980 to 1988.
Source: "The Great Taxer" -- New York Times -- By PAUL KRUGMAN -- June 8, 2004



In the Reagan era…deregulation led to the savings-and-laon debacle, costing American taxpayers $200 billion…The S&L crisis was an important contributing factor in the 1991 recession.
Source: "Globalization and its Discontents" by Joseph Stiglitz - "The East Asia Crisis" - pp 114-115



"We did not--repeat, did not--trade weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we," Reagan proclaimed in November 1986. Four months later, on March 4, 1987, Reagan admitted in a televised national address, "A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not."

In 1986, when asked whether he had participated in White House discussions about the Iran-Contra arms program as vice president, [George H.W.] Bush claimed to have been "out of the loop." He specifically denied attending a January 1986 meeting at which Secretary of State George Schultz and Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger opposed the arms-for-hostages deal. But White House logs, made public by independent counsel Kenneth Walsh in 1992, revealed that Bush had attended that meeting, and several others. In response, Bush claimed not to have heard Schultz's and Weinberger's objections, though Weinberger's journal entry for the meeting noted of the deal "VP favored."
Source: "The Mendacity Index - Which president told the biggest whoppers?" -- Washington Monthly -- September 2003



Ronald Reagan's reign led to the most convictions of administration members of any presidency (an impressive 138 convictions or indictments of associates)

Equally buried in the saccharine casket of rose-tinted sunset memories will be the horror of the Iran-Contra scandal in which the American constitution was shredded with as much cynicism as Nixon's Watergate-riddled presidency. The inconvenience of America's democratically-elected representatives forbidding the administration to deal with the Iranians or fund Nicaraguan terrorists was simply subverted by wholesale lying on a scale that made Clinton's fibs seem even more inconsequential than they were.
Source: "Mourning becomes electoral -- Bush eyes Reagan's Teflon" by Martin Lewis -The Rip Post - 06.10.04



After Democrats and Republicans in Congress passed sanctions against the apartheid government of South Africa, Reagan vetoed the measure. His Administration cuddled up with the fascistic and anti-Semitic junta of Argentina and backed militaries in El Salvador and Guatemala that massacred civilians. It moved to normalize relations with Augusto Pinochet, the tyrant of Chile. Reagan sent George Bush the First to the Philippines, where the Vice President toasted dictator Ferdinand Marcos for fostering "democracy." Pursuing a quasi-secret war against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, the Reagan Administration violated international law and circumvented Congress to support contra rebels engaged in human rights abuses and, according to the CIA's own Inspector General, worked with suspected drug traffickers. Reagan covertly sent arms to the mullahs of Iran and courted Saddam Hussein, even after his use of chemical weapons. He appointed officials who claimed nuclear war was winnable, thus raising the chances that miscalculations by the Soviet Union or the United States would plunge the world into chaos.

On the home front Reagan was almost as divisive and disingenuous as the second Bush. His deficit-causing supply-side tax cuts (derided by the elder Bush as "voodoo economics") were sold with phony numbers and sleight-of-hand accounting. These "trickle-down" tax cuts--coupled with a tremendous boost in military spending--were designed to bankrupt the government, pressuring it to reduce government spending and thereby justifying draconian cuts in social programs. (Remember ketchup as a vegetable?)

He presided over an S&L scandal that stuck taxpayers with a bill approaching a trillion dollars. He appointed Antonin Scalia to the Supreme Court. He tried to gut the Civil Rights Commission, and his Administration waged a relentless series of attacks on affirmative action while trying to grant tax-exempt status to private schools that engaged in racial discrimination.
Source: "The Reagan Legacy" from The Nation website - June 10, 2004



Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars") [was] his plan to protect the United States and even the world from nuclear attack by intercepting incoming rockets. SDI was a delusion. Twenty years and some $80 billion later, nothing remotely resembling it is even on the drawing board.
Source: "Cold War to Star Wars" by Jonathan Schell - from The Nation website - June 10, 2004



Reagan launched his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi. He was invited to do so by then-US Representative (later Senator and majority leader) Trent Lott. In Philadelphia Reagan endorsed states' rights and in turn was endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan, which was present on that occasion. In 1964 Philadelphia was the site where civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney were murdered in the name of states' rights as they attempted to register blacks to vote in Mississippi. In 1980 Reagan was sending a states' rights signal to all conservatives, South and North, that their states would be given freedom even if it was at the expense of justice.

[H]e ignored AIDS for most of his time in office; supported the apartheid regime in South Africa (Congress overrode his veto of economic sanctions against the regime), seeing Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress as communists; defunded enforcement of civil rights and tried to weaken the 1965 Voting Rights Act; opposed the Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday (though he finally caved in and signed it); fought against affirmative action; demonized a fictitious pink-Cadillac-driving "welfare queen"; cut Medicaid, Medicare, school breakfast and lunch programs while declaring ketchup a vegetable; tried to undermine Social Security; wanted to deny women choice; tolerated an illegal Iran/contra effort in Nicaragua; diverted attention from the 241 servicemen killed in Lebanon by invading tiny Grenada under the guise that it posed a communist threat to the United States; in the name of anti-communism supported and funded right-wing murder squads in Guatemala and El Salvador.
Source: "Reagan: A Legacy of States' Rights" by Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. - from The Nation website - June 16, 2004



And let's not forget this is the guy who claimed that ketchup is a vegetable in order to reduce the size of school lunches for children to fund yet more tax cuts for the rich.

He's also the guy that built up the mujahadeen in Afghanistan that later became the Taliban.

Not to mention he's the guy that encouraged Saddam Hussein to invade Iraq and provided him with the chemical weapons that were used against his own people (the Kurds in northern Iraq) with full knowledge of how they would be used.

But perhaps the greatest tragedy of the Reagan legacy is his simplistic framing of the small regional conflicts that dotted the globe. These conflicts were framed as extensions of the larger East vs. West, USA vs. USSR conflict. This perspective was driven by the typical advantage granted to capital over labor, free market profits over worker rights, etc. Because of this prejudice that reinforced his cold war mentality, he often chose to back the wrong side or interfere in some other inappropriate way in these regional conflicts. Now that the larger conflict is essentially resolved, the residual effects of these smaller regional conflicts in places like Nicaragua and Afghanistan continue to boil and fester into issues that must be dealt with on a much larger scale.

No matter what you think of Reagan or his policies, we will always be in his debt.


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Comments Contributor Date Submitted
Reagan's speeches often reminded me of "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." He spoke well, and said squat. I can't think of a thing he did that I liked. Many died because of his domestic and foreign policies. And I never really liked Nancy, either. But she obviously loved him. I watched as little of his funeral as I could, but seeing how small and frail Nancy looked made me somewhat sad. It was easy, for me at least, to understand her grief over losing someone so dear to her, whether I ever liked him or not. Linda
Denton
9/14/2004

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