Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988 - Jane Mayer, Doyle McManus Audiobook

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• 
  bfmghm
  February 11th, 2023
  

  Reagan 2024!

  Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988 - Jane Mayer, Doyle McManus
• 
  johndunbar
  February 11th, 2023
  

  

  Thanks for sharing

  Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988 - Jane Mayer, Doyle McManus
• 
  AudioBookBay12311
  February 13th, 2023
  

  This book doesn’t cover the most important aspect of Reagan: the neoliberal legacy.

  For example, Reagan’s reforms allowed corporations in the US to export middle class jobs abroad so that they could pay 30 cents per hour of work (resulting in massive private profits). He coupled this with attacks on labor unions (PATCO is a famous case of this - the labor union endorsed Reagan, and Reagan then destroyed that labor union) to further increase profits. Low wage retail/service jobs followed as a replacement. To upkeep a middle class life, the up-to-your-neck-in-debt era came into being (people had to and have to undertake tons of debt so that consumption, education and etc could be upkept), which of course has greatly accelerated from the 1980s to what it is now.

  Reagan decreased social services (such as education and healthcare https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/04/upshot/reagan-deregulation-and-americas-exceptional-rise-in-health-care-costs.html - and etc) for the middle class and increased poverty for the lower class with austerity, combined with tax cuts for the 10%. A massive 45% tax cut followed for the upper classes - you have never seen anything like that. The total tax revenue (the government budget) shifted from getting 3/4ths of it by taxing corporations and top income earners, to the working class. So now 3/4ths of the government budget are funded by the working class - so when they say “we owe 31 trillion dollars in debt”, now you know what they really are saying. Imagine if the amount of tax that you paid reduced by half, while those with ungodly amounts of money had to cover the difference (as it was before), and what that would do for your standard of living. So the functioning of the state has been shifted onto the working class, while the benefactors of that functioning of the state have shifted onto the upper classes. A complete reversal. This also has a double whammy effect, as mentioned above with the debt era, the taxes that the financial elite do not have to pay, also allows them to use that capital to make massive returns by financing that debt. They get to add on top of their gigantic piles because of low taxes (that they have a thousand ways to get out of), and make even more because of that. The inequality, social/political and economic problems that this has produced are gigantic. It’s a repetition of the 1930s era - the financial elite (all over the world) fund xenophobic narratives to shift the blame onto minority groups causing a rise of supremacist groups. In Greece, they recently had a literal Nazi party gain 1/3rd of the seats in parliament (who only lost support because the other parties absorbed their narratives and policies to retain votes - you can guess what Nazi policies are).

  He systematized continual wealth transfers to the top with voodoo economics/trickle down economics (which really is a weak attempt at misdirecting the ultimate goal of these policies - the concentration of wealth and power to the .1%). Of course the decoupling of productivity to wages followed (meaning all of the growth that the US (and the western world) has experienced in the last 4 decades, has went to the so called financial “elite” rather than the base of the people who produce that growth. Which hasn’t been the case prior the 1980s - back then when your country did well, you did too).

  He repealed so many regulations that he was named the Great Deregulator (he repealed about half of them). The most significant of which, was beginning the repeal of the Glass Steagall Act (finished by Clinton) that by now has caused several massive crashes (one was prevented in the first Bush era by regulators - the book “The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One” by William K. Black has a section on this). The most recent crash caused by the repeal of Glass Steagall, is the gigantic 2008 - 2009 housing crash that caused a transfer of trillions of dollars of wealth from the working class to the .1%. 10 million Americans “lost” their homes because speculative investment was merged with banking, which allowed literal criminal behavior by the bankers because they now knew that they must be bailed out upon a crash (that they cause), or the system will disintegrate. Of course, this crash affected more countries than the US. It also caused tens of millions of people to lose their homes abroad. The total number of people affected is in the billions (the majority of whom are also experiencing wage “stagnation” - shifting profits to the top). Did the government (and the corporations that run it), who run on working class money now use working class money to help out/restructure the debt of the working class so that houses would be kept by that class in the end? Of course not. They bailed out Wall Street, took those houses and gave it to the banks (as did other governments their bankers across the world). And on top of that, in the US, did not criminally charge any of them (apart from a single guy - a low hanging fruit who was not involved in creating these toxic financial products. Why? you’d ask. Because they claimed that would harm confidence in the banking system (and the Justice Department agreed) - by the way, guess what sort of prison that guy, and the financial elite go to? The type where their standard of living are equivalent to yours). Meaning, they are literally above the law. And even if every once in a while a token one is paraded around, they get to go on a nice vacation for a while. There is a lot more to cover in this section, e.g. he also repealed the fairness doctrine. Where mainstream (corporate) media had to cover a variety of viewpoints. Which essentially turned most news networks into nothing but propaganda machines.

  And lastly, (even though there’s a lot more), Reagan also greatly advanced the police state and private prison system via the war on drugs. He also used the CIA to pump black communities with drugs to do several things, one, to fill prisons with black people (and privatize a lot of public money by funding the private prison system), and two, to raise funds for the fascist forces in Nicaragua (whom congress outlawed the funding of), with the purpose of defeating the overwhelmingly supported leftist reforms - I have no idea how freedom, liberty, nor democracy can be claimed when fascist military dictatorships are funded and enforced abroad.

  To prevent such abuses in the future, in my opinion, direct democracies are a great solution. Where you actually get to vote on policies rather than only on so called representatives: https://youtu.be/ZeP9LdbJj8M and https://youtu.be/wWBIkko8Yaw

  Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988 - Jane Mayer, Doyle McManus
• 
  Fruity1
  November 22nd, 2023
  

  

  Thanks.

  Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988 - Jane Mayer, Doyle McManus

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