Published: April 23, 2008 09:44 am            

WRITE ON: On ‘Inconvenient Truths’

Mike Gregory’s thoughtful and well-written rebuttal in last week’s Record to my column about what I called “The Reagan Recession” deserves a respectful response. His points were very well taken and I am grateful that he would take the time and effort to express them so eloquently.

Like him, I was raised in a conservative Republican family under parents who had a strong work ethic and devout Christian values.

In many ways, I have felt that I didn’t leave the Republican Party so much as that the Republican Party left me. Mr. Gregory is obviously a great fan of Ronald Reagan. I went to the University of California at Berkeley while Reagan was California’s governor. Reagan’s unrelenting antagonism against those who didn’t share his right wing agenda and his undermining of free speech at our college changed my opinion of him.

Whereas before I had always considered Reagan a friendly television and movie actor, I began to see that he was also a very ideologically driven right-winger with an agenda I couldn’t support. He could not handle dissent from others, and his hard stance against those of us who opposed the war in Vietnam and who supported greater academic free-dom was quite dramatic.

He and Richard Nixon did more than anyone to transform me into the proud Liberal I remain to-day.

Mr. Gregory cites the “Stagflation”—that combination of a stagnant economy with high inflation—which characterized the presidency of Jimmy Carter. He’s right. Interest rates soared and gas lines were a real headache. Where I differ with his perspective is that Carter was a victim of the OPEC oil cartel just as we are today. Carter also faced Iran’s Islamic revolution. This began with the overthrow of the cruel Shah of Iran whom the American CIA had installed in a coup d’etat. In our bumbling foreign policy as witness today in Iraq, we caused the rise of the Ayatollah’s and Muslim clerics who rule Iran today.

Carter also faced the capture of our entire embassy in Tehran and its personnel. This “Iranian hostage crisis” cast a cloud over Carter’s presidency. Does anyone besides me find it strangely coincident that these hostages were released on the day Reagan was inaugurated?

What Mr. Gregory doesn’t address is that the first thing Reagan did as President was to bust unions. Ironic when you consider that Reagan himself once led the union called the Screen Actors Guild. But that was back when Ronnie was a Liberal Democrat and before he stabbed many of his friends in the back by supporting Senator Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunt back in the 1940’s and early 1950’s.

Destroying the union movement in America was Reagan’s primary contribution to the destruction of America’s middle class, which we see all around us today. Mr. Gregory may admire Reagan’s “supply side economics,” but that is another name for the discredited “trickle down theory” which assumes that if you give enough to the rich then some of this wealth will “trickle down” to the poor. It doesn’t work. That’s why today you see the gulf between the rich and poor in this country at levels unknown in our history.

Defend Reagan’s policies if you want. He did some good things, most notably bankrupting the Soviet Union. It was expensive but worth it and I praise Reagan for winning the Cold War and breaking up the Soviet Union. But that’s pretty much it from where I see it. The rest of the Reagan Revolution was about rewarding the wealthiest Americans and de-regulating the watchdogs that are supposed to protect us from the greedy zealots of Wall Street and their counterparts-- the Captains of Industry. By firing the regulators, Reagan gave us the Savings and Loan meltdown which cost us over a trillion dollars to fix. He cut taxes on the wealthy while throwing but crumbs to the lower economic classes. He began the trend of outsourcing and so-called “Free Trade” that have smashed America’s manufacturing sector. He opposed the Civil Rights movement and breaking the glass ceiling which keeps women inferior to men in the job market.

When school lunches were found not to have enough vegetables, Reagan’s response was to have ketchup listed as a vegetable. When asked about allowing clear-cutting of trees in our national forests, Reagan said: “Trees cause pollution.” The list of such Reagan nuttiness goes on and on.

The “bill of goods” the Conservative movement has sold us is that government is the enemy and Wall Street and giant corporations are our friends. They are not. That’s why you see the stock market go up every time a corporation lays off thousands of American workers. That’s why you see the Wal-Mart’s of this world smash the mom-and-pop stores run by our neighbors which are closing all over this country. It’s why fifty million of us don’t have any health insurance at all. It’s why one in five American children live below the poverty line. The same zeal for de-regulation is why you see the “mortgage meltdown” which is driving so many of us out of our homes. It is why you’re getting pounded at the gas pump. It is why countries like China-- which hold so much of our debt-- can sell our kids toys covered with lead paint. It is why you pay ten times more for American pharmaceuticals here than you do in Canada.

I could go on but you get the idea.

As to my shot about Reagan actually believing he served in World War Two as a Navy fighter pilot when all he did was make a movie, that is simply a fact. It was Nancy Reagan who had to remind her husband by saying: “No, Ronnie, you were just in Hellcats of the Navy.” I’m afraid that the history of the Reagan Revolution is full of such inconvenient truths, to coin a phrase.

But I am grateful to Mr. Gregory for his thoughtful response to what I wrote and encourage him to continue to speak out for what he believes, just as I do.



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Copyright 2008 Peter Ferrara

        

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