Some people still worship at the shrine of the false saint Ronald

I was sitting at a bus stop in Kent when a man, dressed in a black suit and smoking a cigarette, ambled by and stood about in a bus-waiting posture as well. I got the feeling he wanted to talk to me about something, so I retrieved my netbook and started doing some typing. After a while he spoke up, inquiring how my day was. Thinking that he might be some “missionary” looking for a lost soul, I said “I’m fine” and continued the pretense of being deep in busyness. Unfortunately, once I opened the door, there was no stopping him. I felt obliged to respond to observations about the weather, airports and the Army.

But then things started to become interesting when he wanted to talk about politics, after I mentioned that I was in the service during the Reagan administration, and how he and his handlers seemed to have more sense about armed conflict than George W. Bush and friends. This observation seemed to excite the man in the black suit, who exclaimed that Ronald Reagan was smarter than both Bushes combined—which sort of lit my fuse, because I didn’t believe Reagan was smarter than the second Bush (especially in his second term, when he was already showing signs of Alzheimer’s), let alone both combined. He went on to say that we haven’t had a good president since Reagan (oh no, another Saint Ronny fanatic), and I responded that this was a matter of opinion. The man then asserted that Bill Clinton was the worst president, and was responsible for giving poor people home loans they couldn’t afford; that’s right, blame poor people for the lousy economy instead of banksters and financial gamblers looking for a quick buck.

I’m no “fan” of the Clintons, but suggesting Bill was a worse president that Reagan made me wish I hadn’t just breakfasted at McDonald’s. I responded that Clinton was a good (not great) president whose most critical mistake was allowing the Glass-Steagall regulations to expire—which allowed banks to gamble with depositors’ money in high risk schemes that in the end were more disastrous than anything Ralph Kramden ever dreamed up. I further disturbed the scene when I asserted that I regarded all the troubles that faced the country today could be traced to Reagan. My bus stop companion expressed speechless consternation at this assertion, and I’m sure he was eager to know why I felt this way (by the looks of him, I’m not sure he was even born when Reagan was first elected), but he seemed relieved when the bus finally arrived, and sat as far away from me as possible.

For those who don’t remember or were not born when Reagan was president, it is useful to remember that the “Reagan Revolution” was in many ways as reactionary as the Iranian revolution a few years earlier. In fact, Reagan conspired with the Iranians in the highly improper and probably illegal “October Surprise” which allowed the American hostages to suffer for an additional three months in captivity for tawdry political gain; this wouldn’t be the last time that Reagan and his henchmen engaged in activities that were just this side of treason. Reagan also set the tone for an anti-labor strategy during the air traffic controllers strike. Ironically, the controllers’ union was one of the few that endorsed Reagan, but the union discovered that Reagan had no intention of being sympathetic to their demands for higher pay and better working conditions; when they went on strike, they were promptly fired. The positive public reaction to the move—which would have been expected, because of the air traffic hiccup—was short-sighted, since it merely emboldened the Reagan administration to further erode labor rights.

Although his own vice president, George H.W. Bush, rightly called Reagan’s “supply-side” economic plan “voodoo economics,” the Reagan witch doctors promptly went to work over the first 100 days of the administration—no thanks to the Democrat-controlled Congress. Despite the fact that Reagan won a bare majority of the popular vote, the Democratic majority apparently felt that Reagan had a “mandate” and a “right” to expect his program to be passed; many of these Democrats were Southerners who were party members in name only, and more than a few would switch parties. Reagan’s massive tax cuts that benefitted mainly the wealthy and corporations were supposed to spur economic growth by “trickle down” effect “predicted” by the so-called Laffer Curve. But the Laffer “effect”—that cutting marginal rates on taxes creates higher government revenue because it creates an “incentive” to make more “taxable” income—makes no sense at all, as Warren Buffett has commented on; because of high taxes, businesses and individuals that wanted to make more money actually invest more. Today, instead of investing their extra cash into the economy, many corporations and individuals—like Mitt Romney—“invest” their money in off-shore tax havens instead of creating jobs, which would have in turn created consumers to support those jobs. The only explanation for this is personal greed, apparently something Laffer never took into account. And one wonders if Reagan and his handlers actually believed that his tax policy would actually increase tax revenues—since he was a proponent of “small government.” The disastrous effect of supply-side economics is still being felt today—and it is no “Laffing” matter.

While Reagan’s military hardware build-up—actually with programs initiated during previous administrations—helped end the Cold War by convincing the Soviet Union that it could not keep-up with the U.S. militarily, hastening the break-up of the Warsaw Pact. But having served in West Germany for four years, I can tell you that while U.S. soldiers were generally supportive of Reagan, Germans viewed him with deep suspicion, as some kind of dangerous cowboy; his “Star Wars” initiative was regarded as a unrealistic exercise that unnecessarily exacerbated tensions right on the country’s doorstep. I remember a cover of a German magazine that portrayed a clownish Reagan sticking his head above a foxhole, wearing a steel pot with an M-16 in hand. Of course, like many armchair warriors Reagan never actually served in the military.

With massive tax cuts and $1.5 trillion in military spending, sending the federal budget deficit to levels that were higher than even today’s in comparison to revenue intake in real terms, and unemployment that remained above or near double-digits most of his first term, how much was Reagan’s “revolution” going to cost the country—or rather, who was going to pay? Tea Partiers forget that Saint Ronald was not completely opposed to tax hikes, so long as they were disguised as something else. Still, someone had to “pay”—and it wouldn’t be the rich who continued to get richer: It turns out that Reagan intended that the poorest and most vulnerable Americans would do the paying—by slashing every social program in sight, including school lunches for poor children (remember the “ketchup is a vegetable” controversy?), low-income housing subsidies, food stamps, AFDC and Medicaid.

Another disastrous result of Reagan’s election was environmental policy. Interior Secretary James Watt may have been an idiot who talked himself out of his job barely after he started, but his underlings—like Rita Lavelle and Anne Gorsuch—were even more corrupt tools of business. Politics also played a part in environmental “policy”: Gorsuch ordered a delay in granting Super Fund money for the clean-up of the Stringfellow toxic waste dump in California, because she feared that Gov. Jerry Brown might “benefit” from the clean-up in his expected run for the Seante. Before the two were forced to resign after criminal charges of selling their services to corporate American, severe damage to environmental protection had already done.

The refusal to enforce, and the reduction of, regulations naturally effected the financial sector—the most publicized failure being the Savings and Loan crash, from which obviously nothing was learned from; the total tax payer money used to bail out those institutions far exceeded that of the 2008 bail outs in real terms. Civil rights enforcement was no less infected by hostility and indifference; that current Supreme Justice Clarence Thomas was in charge of it is the only thing we really need to know.

I have to give credit to Reagan for making the smart move by evacuating the Marines from Beirut after the barracks bombing that killed more than 200 U.S. Marines; however, he had an opportunity to flex American military might by invading the tiny island of Grenada, which Reagan claimed was about to become another Cuba after leftist “radicals” overthrew the government there. But it was Reagan’s support of right-wing murder regimes in Central America that was responsible for the infamous Iran-Contra Affair. Originally, the secret sale of weapons to arch-enemy Iran was supposedly in cooperation for aiding in the release of American hostages in Lebanon (or was it a promise made to the Iranians for their cooperation in the “October Surprise”?). This in itself was highly irregular, but it was compounded when rogue operators like Oliver North used some of the money from the sale of those weapons to arm Contra militias in Nicaragua fighting the leftist Sandinista government, which violated the Boland Amendment, which prohibited military aid to the Contras, who were too closely tied to the brutal Somoza regime which led to the Sandinista movement in the first place. While North and a few henchmen were eventually convicted of crimes in the affair, all would soon have their convictions overturned or later receive pardons. While Reagan accepted “responsibility” without acknowledging any personal hand in the “transaction,” the actions conducted in his name—like the “October Surprise”—came dangerously near the line of treasonable activity.

The “legacy” of the Reagan years was one of irresponsible government—especially concerning the environment and financial regulation—that often came close to being criminal in its neglect. It was during the Reagan years that the erosion of labor rights went on the fast track, and it was under Reagan that the income gap between rich and poor began its seemingly unstoppable acceleration, based on an economic premise that was never anything more than an unproven theory popular with right-wing economists. It was under Reagan that the poorest Americans were seen not as having problems, but being a “problem.” It was under Reagan that immoral, unethical and even criminal behavior in support of political ideology would find increasing acceptability, especially in extremist right circles. And perhaps worst of all, the “cult” of Reagan, that it was “sunshine in America” during his administration when it was nothing of the kind, has some Americans believing that the country needs to go back to the policies of that time. What they do not understand is that, as I wanted to explain to that man in the black suit, what is wrong with the country today is in many respects a direct result of Reagan’s policies.