Happy Birthday Ronald Reagan (Thanks for Ruining America)

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.alternet.org/workplace/125575/happy_birthday_ronald_reagan_(thanks_for_ruining_america)/

By William Kleinknecht, AlterNet. Posted February 6, 2009.

Reagan rolled back a century of progressive advances. And now we're seeing the results of his terrible policies more clearly than ever.

Ronald Reagan's 98th birthday is being celebrated today at a time that should be a cause for soul searching among his admirers. The conservative revolution that Reagan unleashed upon the nation and much of the world lay in ashes, and Washington is embarking on a new epoch of government intervention to eradicate the excesses of free-market purism. One would expect liberals to be out in the streets looking for statues of the Gipper to topple from their pedestals.

But nothing of the kind is happening. While George W. Bush is now the bane even of many conservatives, a Marine Corps contingent will lay a wreath at Reagan's gravesite safe in the knowledge that much of the nation holds his memory in a warm embrace.

Historians may one day view this as an odd historical conundrum, since Reagan's legacy is so clearly imprinted on the myriad of forces that have vitiated the American dream for millions of working people and brought wreckage to the world economy.

The continuing fallout from Reagan's policies – the meltdown of the financial sector, widening income inequality, the emergence of lockdown America, the obscene inflation of CEO compensation, the end of locally owned media, market crashes, blackouts, drug-company scandals, rampant greed and materialism -- is all around us. As D.H. Lawrence once wrote in another context, "The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins."

The subprime mortgage crisis, the root of the chaos in the financial sector, is a case in point. Its antecedents clearly lay within the Reagan administration, beginning with an appearance by Donald T. Reagan, Reagan's first treasury secretary, before the Senate banking committee in early 1981, when he laid out a detailed vision for near-complete deregulation of the financial industry.

On Regan's behalf, Richard Pratt, Reagan's first chairman of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, drafted the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act of 1982, which included a provision, Title VIII, that enabled lenders for the first time to issue adjustable-rate mortgages and other exotic loans, such as those requiring interest-only payments. The provision was aimed at helping rescue the savings and loan industry by allowing thrifts to respond to the volatility in interest rates that prevailed in the early 1980s, but it would be precisely these types of loans that brought about foreclosures on hundreds of thousands of home mortgages in 2007 and 2008.

FULL 2 page story at link.

[lonestarnot]

1. Piss on you Raygun.

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

2. He should have died in jail. (nt)

[Fovea]

3. Thanks Ronnie

for treating America like you did Jane Wyman.

[Jamastiene]

4. There isn't a level of Hell hot enough for that motherfucker.

His bullshit started the destruction of this country that Bush finished. The only consolation prize I could ever foresee would be to hear his screams all the way from Hell.

[tanyev]

5. K & R