The power that being like to put great actors, communicators and media personalities on the public arena to play the role of fake guru. Ronald Reagan played a tricky role in the “Making American Great” trickle down economics. In the 1980s, as the United States struggled financially, Ronald Reagan was ushered in. From trickle down Reagonomics, cut social spending, upped the military budget, and reduced the taxes on the wealthy, union busting to decimating the middle class, infiltration of Christian fundamentalism into American government and more, Ronald Reagan is responsible for many of the shifts that occurred at the end of the 20th century that caused the major inequalities we see in America today. We’ve basically been living under four decades of Reaganism, under both parties. The way Clinton expanded it doesn’t get talked about nearly enough. Watch How Reagan Ruined Everything.
It is also interesting that Dr. Helen Caldicott met with Reagan briefly and later said that Reagan was “diagnosable,” i.e. he was already suffering from Alzheimer’s disease long before he left office. What was the real impact of Reganomics? Here are some of the quotes from audience to the youtube program Miserable and Broke in the US? Blame Reagan.
- Comment from audience: this should be a multi-part series covering Ronald Reagan’s Legacy, because this is just covering Reaganomics and doesn’t touch the AIDS crisis or other events tied to his administration. In short we need a part 2 and probably a part 3.
- Comment from audience: Don’t forget that Reagan also stopped enforcing the Sherman Anti-Trust Act resulting in almost immediate mergers, acquisitions, leveraged and hostile buy-outs of corporations. Now we have fewer but stronger corporations interfering in our politics, elections and in our lives.
- Comment from audience: I remembered what Reagan did to unions and how it impacted American families even to this day. When I was a kid in the 70s, every mother in my neighborhood was able to stay home and take care of their children. One income could support a family of seven in a blue-collar neighborhood. Today, everyone on my street has to go to work. Families are smaller, and while all of us are highly skilled, we struggle to make ends meet. We have been screwed for so long, most of us don’t even realize that we are being screwed. There should never be such a large wealth gap as there is today.
- Comment from audience: Most companies in the 80s that got tax cuts didn’t respond by giving their workers more money, They responded by taking their jobs and businesses overseas.
- Comment from audience: He said the homeless camped all around D.C. were there because they “preferred” to live outside. NO! They were there because he had axed the budgets of all the mental health hospitals and VA treatment for mentally ill service people. He said that “community-based programs” would care for these folks…only, those programs didn’t exist. And let us never forget that his and Nancy’s answer to the exploding drug addiction problem was “Just Say No.”
- Comment from audience: When Reagan refused to take AIDS seriously because it was the “Gay Virus” almost 90% of severe Hemophiliacs also contracted AIDS, such as my self, during this time due to lax testing protocols. We were essentially given $100,000 and told to fuck off forever. Fast Forward to today, I’m 42 years old, still an AIDS survivor and incapable of working due to my health conditions. My ‘relief fund’ is entirely exhausted as they never expected any of us to survive this long. I was 2 years old when I was infected with HIV, and when I was 5 I also contracted Hepatitis C due to the same lack of real testing protocols. The Reagan administration completely destroyed my life and I’ll never be able to forgive the Republican party for these crimes against humanity.
With a mindset of social darwinism, America has misused its power in its way for dominance. Just the 20th century alone, U.S.A has been through World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Persian Gulf War and the War on Terror (which encompasses the War in Afghanistan and Iraq War). Isbel Hickety (1903-1980) is a New Age Sages. She taught meditation and was Director of Boston School of Astrology. Her guidance, classes, retreats and books lifted countless souls. In her book Astrology: a Cosmic Science , she had discussed the atomic bomb to Japan in 1945, and she said something to the effect that United States will suffer from the karmic retribution for that brutal act. Isabel Hickey had some very famous quotes.
Karmic retribution is a powerful force that can’t be ignored. It’s a reminder that our actions have consequences and that we should always strive to do the right thing. Whether it’s in the form of instant retribution or delayed retribution, it’s important to remember that our actions have consequences. This article gave some very powerful examples. Used metaphor of water, How Does Karmic Retribution Exact Itself? describe the complexity of kamic retribution. And if we do not change our behavior of injustice, we will suffer much more.
The Book by Professor Michael Hudson The Collapse of Antiquity: Greece and Rome as Civilization’s Oligarchic Turning Point describes how the dynamics of interest-bearing debt led to the rise of rentier oligarchies in classical Greece and Rome, causing economic polarization, widespread austerity, revolts, wars and ultimately the collapse of Rome into serfdom and feudalism. That collapse bequeathed to subsequent Western civilization a pro-creditor legal philosophy that has led to today’s creditor oligarchies. In telling this story, The Collapse of Antiquity reveals the eerie parallels between the collapsing Roman world and today’s debt-burdened Western economies. In the program Origins of debt: Michael Hudson reveals how financial oligarchies in Greece & Rome shaped our world, Professor gave you more detail account of his thoughts.
…and forgive them their debts: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption From Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year (1) (Tyranny of Debt) Paperback – October 30, 2018 was Selected “Best Books of 2018: Economics” by The Financial Times. Here was the book review:
In ...and forgive them their debts, renowned economist Michael Hudson – one of the few who could see the 2008 financial crisis coming – takes us on an epic journey through the economies of ancient civilizations and reveals their relevance for us today. For the past 40 years, in conjunction with Harvard’s Peabody Museum, he and his colleagues have documented how interest-bearing debt was invented in Bronze Age Mesopotamia, and then disseminated to the ancient world. What the Bronze Age rulers understood was that avoiding economic instability required regular royal debt cancellations. Professor Hudson documents dozens of these these royal edicts and traces the archeological record and history of debt, and how societies have dealt with (or failed to deal with) the proliferation of debts that cannot be paid – and their consequences. In the pages of …and forgive them their debts, readers will discover how debt played a central role in shaping ancient societies, and how it continues to shape our world – often destructively.
The Big Question: What happens when debts cannot be paid? Will there be a writedown in favor of debtors (as is routinely done for large corporations), or will creditors be allowed to foreclose (as is done to personal debtors and mortgagees), leading to the creditors’ political takeover of the economy’s assets – and ultimately the government itself? Historically, the remedy of record was the royal Clean Slate proclamation, or biblical Jubilee Year of debt forgiveness.
The Real Message of Jesus: Jesus’s first sermon announced that he had come to proclaim a Clean Slate debt cancellation (the Jubilee Year), as was first described in the Bible (Leviticus 25), and had been used in Babylonia since Hammurabi’s dynasty. This message – more than any other religious claim – is what threatened his enemies, and is why he was put to death. This interpretation has been all but expunged from our contemporary understanding of the phrase, “…and forgive them their debts,” in The Lord’s Prayer. It has been changed to “…and forgive them their trespasses (or sins),” depending on the particular Christian tradition that influenced the translation from the Greek opheilēma/opheiletēs (debts/debtors).
Contrary to the message of Jesus, also found in the Old Testament of the Bible and in other ancient texts, debt repayment has become sanctified and mystified as a way of moralizing claims on borrowers, allowing creditor elites and oligarchs the leverage to take over societies and privatize personal and public assets – especially in hard times. Historically, no monarchy or government has survived takeover by creditor elites and oligarchs (viz: Rome). Perhaps most striking is that – according to a nearly complete consensus of Assyriologists and biblical scholars – the Bible is preoccupied with debt forgiveness more than with sin.
In a time of increasing economic and political polarization, and a global economy deeper in debt than at the height of the 2008 financial crisis, …and forgive them their debts documents what individuals, governments and societies can learn from the ancient past for restoring economic and social stability today.
The Destiny of Civilization: Finance Capitalism, Industrial Capitalism or Socialism Paperback – May 2, 2022, explains why the U.S. and other Western economies have lost their former momentum: A narrow rentier class has gained control and become the new central planner, using its power to drain income from increasingly indebted and high-cost labor and industry. The American disease of de-industrialization has resulted from the costs of industrial production being inflated by the economic rents extracted by this class under the system of financialized monopoly capitalism that now prevails throughout the West.
The book explains why the U.S.-China conflict cannot simply be regarded as market competition between two industrial rivals. It is a broader conflict between different political economic systems – not only between capitalism and socialism as such, but between the logic of an industrial economy and that of a financialized rentier economy increasingly dependent on foreign subsidy and exploitation as its own domestic economy shrivels. Professor Hudson endeavors to revive classical political economy in order to reverse the neoclassical counter-revolution.
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