[THS] The Reagan Occupation and the Destruction of the American Middle Class

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25823.htm

Mission Accomplished:
The Reagan Occupation and the Destruction of the American Middle Class

By David Michael Green

June 25, 2010 "Information Clearing House" --  Eighty years ago, something occurred
in America that was never supposed to happen. An aristocrat came to the presidency
and engineered a policy revolution that created a broad and prosperous middle class
where it had not existed as such before.

To do this, Franklin Roosevelt and his party had to rewrite the existing rules of wealth
redistribution in the United States such that the traditionally fantastically wealthy
overclass (which had grown even fatter as the industrialism of the prior century
concentrated wealth yet further) would become merely tremendously wealthy from
that point forward, in order to leave enough for others to live a decent life.

Needless to say, this rankled the country club set, but, remarkably, they more or less
made peace with this development during the early decades of the post-war era, and
largely cooperated with the new economic order. So did their political
representatives. The Eisenhower administration was the first chance after twenty
years of the New Deal to dismantle the newly created American welfare state, and
Ike not only refused to take that opportunity, but famously labeled those in his party
who wanted to as “stupid”.

If Eisenhower, in his gray suit, black-and-white photos and de rigueur businessman’s
hat from the era seems quaint today, so does his political restraint. By the 1980s that
was ancient history, and remains so to this day, including through (and via) two
Democratic presidencies now.

If Americans understood the real ambitions of Ronald Reagan and his puppeteers,
and if they knew the degree to which the supposed patriotism of those folks
extended beyond falsity and into the far darker waters of being an irritating
irrelevance put on purely for show, then they would not only stop seeing Reagan as
some sort of national hero, but would also understand that he instead launched a
process far more equivalent to an invasion and occupation of this country.

The goal of the right – which cares about America about as much as it does about
Burkina Faso – has been to restore the economic order last seen under Herbert
Hoover, in which a tiny minority possess vast sums of wealth and there is (therefore)
essentially no remaining middle class. It is nothing short of a breathtaking display of a
world class greed, worthy of the ages.

It has also been a work of strategic genius (in much the same way one might
appreciate the Germans’ engineering prowess in figuring out the logistics of how to
mass murder ten or twelve million civilians in a year or two), one which has drawn
upon deep psychological insights, absolutely sociopathic amoralism, and clever tactics
that have all simultaneously pushed in the same direction. In plain English, they hired
some politicians of hit-man level moral integrity, who then marshaled fear, insecurity,
hate and deceit into a witch’s brew of self-destruction that would prove highly
attractive to a large segment of the population already sinking from the effects of a
global economic order rebalancing after decades of post-war American dominance.

Of course, you couldn’t just come right out and say, “Vote for me and I’ll give your
money to people so rich they can’t even imagine what they’ll do with it (but they still
demand to have it anyhow)”, so slightly more subtle tactics had to be employed. It is
telling that the most honest thing Barack Obama ever said was when he thought
there were no microphones in the room. But he was right when, at a presidential
fundraiser in San Francisco he told the wine and cheese set that the right uses guns,
god and gays (I would add Gaddafis) to scare people out of their money. I’ll believe
that Republicans are serious about protecting heterosexual marriage on the day that
you can’t find half of them prowling the gay bars of DC every night (and you don’t
even want to know what the other half are into).

This bait-and-switch tactic worked perfectly well whenever it was applied. It didn’t
hurt that the regressive Billy-Bobs who vote for these folks are as dumb as a tree.
With bags of hammers for leaves. But stupid is really only the facilitating quality, and
often one that is neither present nor required. What really drives this stuff is fear. If
you can turn that into a loathing of fur’ners, fags, bitches, blackies and brownies, you
got their vote. Then you can do what you really set out to accomplish in the first
place. George W. Bush’s 2004 campaign was the paradigmatic example. All year he
talked about jamming through a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Big
priority. Urgent national issue. The religitarded across America just about peed
themselves, they were so excited. Then he gets elected and is brazen enough to
announce that there’ll be no such effort, after all, and that his signature legislative
initiative will be an attempt to hand over the fat Social Security pot of money to
Goldman Sachs. The redneck dolts with their Bush/Cheney ‘04 bumper-stickers didn’t
know what to think. So, of course, they just didn’t.

Meanwhile, to say that this kleptocratic revolution worked really well is only untrue by
means of the verb tense employed. It is still working really well. And the final leg of
Reagan’s March to the Sea is now upon us. Chunks of middle class body parts have
been hacked off, bit by bit, over the decades, ‘til there’s little remaining anymore.
Remember how they told us that ‘free trade’ wouldn’t decimate our jobs, our unions
and our bargaining power? Is that why little old ladies serve Happy Meals at
McDonald’s all across the country, assuming they’re lucky enough to get that job?
Remember how they said that massive tax cuts for the wealthy would be ‘revenue
neutral’ and would jump-start the economy? Which is confusing since the national
debt doubled under George W. Bush, and then he proceeded to hand us the worst
economy since the Great Depression. Remember how they told us that we needed to
slash wasteful government spending on benefits? Now that we’ve become the ones
who need those, they’re gone. Remember when they said that government is our
enemy and corporations should be free to do whatever they want? You know, like
spill oil or trade derivatives?

There’s another little trick that is about to become especially prominent in the coming
years. When Reagan came to office and began his “voodoo economics” project of
nearly quadrupling the national debt, after having promised to cut it instead, many
people were puzzled by this. Personally, I figured that they just did the math and
realized that in the real world (where governments sometimes live but campaigns
rarely do) something simply had to give. If you slash tax revenues and massively
increase military spending, guess what’s gonna happen to your budget? Others,
however, saw a more nefarious game being played, and perhaps they were right.
This is the idea that they intentionally ran up deficits so large that the national
government would be forced to do what it otherwise would not, which is to slash
spending on popular entitlements and other social programs.

Whether or not the conspiracy was real, it is the case that the federal government is
running humongous deficits every year, which pile up further on the massive national
debt. And it is also the case that we are now hearing a rising chorus on the right –
especially from the tea party know-nothings – about slashing government spending
as the top priority for Washington. Even though, according to the principles of
Keynesian economics, this is the last thing we should be doing during a recession.

And, of course, something tells me that as the pinch is increasingly felt, the call for
cuts won’t be in the domain of military spending, even though our allocation there is
obscenely out of proportion to any imaginable threat in the world, and is roughly
equal to what almost the entire rest of the world spends on defense – that’s one
country equal to almost two hundred others, combined. I’m also guessing that we
won’t be raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans either, even though they pay far
less than they did in the pre-Reagan era, when the country was generally very
prosperous, and even though they often pay a lower percentage in taxes than the
secretaries and janitors who work for them. No, we can’t touch those folks.

Instead, the intense pressure now will be to finish the job of eviscerating the middle
class and transferring every last nickel of their wealth to the oligarchs who fancy
themselves masters of the universe. Unemployment insurance, for example. Never
mind that we have ten percent official unemployment and closer to twenty percent in
reality, or that whole cities like Detroit are being wiped out. The Republican minority
in the Senate, along with the Democratic “moderates” there, are now refusing to
extend expiring unemployment benefits (which are already a pittance when they
exist). Nine hundred thousand laid-off workers have thus lost their meager sub-
subsistence benefits, and that number will grow to more than a million-and-a-half in
a few days now. Guess why. Because regressive senators – including John Kerry and
Maria Cantwell – are holding unemployment insurance extensions hostage to
protecting a loophole that allows wealthy fund managers to be taxed on their profits
at an obscenely low percentage rate. How’s that for national priorities? How’s that for
compassionate conservatism?

Next, inevitably, will come entitlements. Indeed, most of the states in the union are
already heading that way, cutting pensions for employees. Not to mention certain low
priority areas like education, which is getting slashed from California to New York.
How long can it be before Medicare and Social Security are put on the chopping
block? And why? Because we have our priorities good and straight, pal: a morbidly
bloated military and pathetically low tax rates for the wealthiest among us comes first.
Then, if we could somehow do it for free I suppose we could allow decent education,
or health care, or retirement with dignity for our elders. But, of course, since that
can’t be done without cost, those things must go.

The other strategic initiative now reaching fruition during the right’s three decade-
long campaign to massively redistribute wealth in this country – literally, the crime of
the century – is the evisceration of the state. This must be done (or, more accurately,
it must be done in some respects but absolutely not in others) because the state is
the only force capable of standing up to the power of concentrated wealth, and
because the state sets the very rules by which such wealth either is or isn’t
concentrated. It also must be done because the state nominally speaks for the public
and the public interest, as against the private interest.

Since Reagan, regressive puppet politicians have been spouting anti-state rhetoric
and sarcastic venom with increasing intensity. Saint Ron of Hypocrisy told us that
government was the problem, not the solution, seemingly without noticing the irony
of his massive military build-up or the government-enforced restrictions the right
favors on everything from abortion to gay marriage to euthanasia. Now, as gutted
and corrupted regulatory institutions have permitted massively harmful meltdowns
ranging from Wall Street to coal mines to oil wells, we are forced to listen to sermons
from those on the right about the incompetence of government. Well, yeah. If in fact
you staff government regulatory bodies with industry shills who are explicitly ordered
not to actually, er, regulate, and if you legislate away their power to effectively do so
anyhow, and if you pulverize conscientious whistleblowers to within an inch of their
lives, then guess what? That little bit of government will in fact be incompetent. In
fact, it will be nearly as bad at the competence thing as, say, all the big banks on
Wall Street (which had to be rescued by the, uh, government), or all the big auto
companies in Detroit (ditto), or British Petroleum, or Enron, or the savings-and-loan
industry, or...

And so, despite the astonishing illogic of it all, the American people now clamor for
more harm to be brought upon themselves and more of their money to be looted for
the further enrichment of the wealthiest one-tenth of one percent of the population.
It certainly doesn’t help that the supposed “party of the people” is every bit as much
a part of the problem as anyone else, and arguably far more so given the extra
measure of disingenuousness involved. From NAFTA to WTO to welfare ‘reform’ to
the Telecommunications Bill, Wall Street never had better friend in the White House
than Bill Clinton. That is, until Barack Obama simply outright changed the address of
Goldman Sachs’ headquarters to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. As we speak, the
president and his party in Congress are busy gutting meaningful ‘reform’ of the
shamelessly gluttonous finance industry, just as their masters have ordered them to
do. And if you think Obama’s bad now, wait until after November. Like Clinton in
1994, he will take the trouncing he’s about to receive in the election as a signal to
move even further to the right.

And thus the Reagan Occupation inches closer yet to a full-blown “mission
accomplished”. The middle class is on its knees and shrinking fast. Unions have been
broken into irrelevance. Government, supposedly an agent of the public interest, has
become a complete tool of those it is meant to monitor. Both political parties are fully
owned by the oligarchy. The public has been brainwashed into seeing its allies as
enemies and its enemies as allies. We have been drained of hope that any actor on
the horizon can come to our rescue.

Bad policy choices by self-serving politicians? Would that ‘twere only thus.

We are occupied.

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New
York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles
(dmg at regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow
him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website,
www.regressiveantidote.net .