[E-rundbrief] Info 120 - Mokhiber/ Weissman/ Bello: Kritik an Reaganomics aus Nord und S�d

[Matthias Reichl]

E-Rundbrief - Info 120 - Kritik an Reaganomics aus Nord und Süd: Russell 
Mokhiber/ Robert Weissman (USA): Remembering Reagan; Walden Bello 
(Philippinen/ Thailand): Ronald Reagan - A view from the Global South.

Bad Ischl, 13.6.2004

Begegnungszentrum für aktive Gewaltlosigkeit

www.begegnungszentrum.at

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Remembering Reagan
By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

Ronald Reagan was a paradigm shifter.

He was what Charles Derber in his new book, Regime Change Begins at
Home, calls a "regime-changer," moving decisively to end the flagging
New Deal era and launching the modern period of corporate rule.

Reagan changed the framework of expectations. He called into question a
lot of things that had been taken for granted (such as the obligation of
the government of the richest country in history to take care of its
poorest people), and made it possible to consider things which had
previously seemed unthinkable (for example, cutting the knees out from
the powerful U.S. labor movement.)

Reagan was indeed a historic figure, and his death deserves the massive
media attention it is receiving. But the odes to his cheerfulness and
optimism should be replaced with reflections on how his policies
destroyed lives. Pacifica's Amy Goodman has appropriately titled her
retrospective coverage of the Reagan era "Remembering the Dead."

The standard commentaries recall Iran-contra as a blotch on the end of
Reagan's presidency, but the incident was trivial compared to the long
list of administration crimes and misdeeds, among them:

1. Cruelly slashing the social safety net. Reagan cuts in social
spending exacerbated a policy of intentionally raising the unemployment
rate. The result was a huge surge in poverty. With homelessness
skyrocketing, Reagan defended his administration's record: "One problem
that we've had, even in the best of times, and that is the people who
are sleeping on grates, the homeless who are homeless, you might say, by 
choice."

2. Taking the world to the brink of nuclear war. Reagan's supposed
contribution to the downfall of the Soviet Union was a military spending
contest that drove the USSR into economic collapse. Neglected in most
present-day reminiscences is that this military spending spree nearly
started a nuclear war. Development and deployment of a host of nuclear
missiles, initiating Star Wars, acceleration of the arms race -- these
led the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to move its Doomsday Clock in
1984 to three minutes to midnight.

3. A targeted tax cut for the rich. The 1981 tax cut was one of the
largest in U.S. history and heavily targeted toward the rich, with major
declines in tax rates for upper-income groups. The tax break helped
widen income and wealth inequality gaps. As David Stockman admitted, one
of its other intended effects was to starve the government of funds, so
as to justify cuts in government spending (for the poor -- the cash
crunch didn't restrain government spending on corporate welfare).

4. Firing striking air traffic controllers. Reagan's decision to fire
1,800 striking air traffic controller early in his term sent a message
that employers could act against striking or organizing workers with
virtual impunity.

5. Deregulating the Savings & Loan industry, paving the way for an
industry meltdown and subsequent bailout that cost taxpayers hundreds of
billions of dollars.

6. Perpetrating a bloody war in Central America. The Reagan-directed
wars in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua submerged Central America
in a climate of terror and fear, took tens of thousands of lives,
destroyed a democratic experiment in Nicaragua, and entrenched narrow
elites who continue to repress the poor majorities in the region.

7. Embracing South Africa's apartheid regime (Said Reagan in 1981, "Can
we abandon this country [South Africa] that has stood beside us in every
war we've ever fought?" He followed up in 1985 with, "They have
eliminated the segregation that we once had in our own country.") and
dictators worldwide, from Argentina to Korea, Chile to the Philippines.

8.  Undermining health, safety and environmental regulation. Reagan
decreed such rules must be subjected to regulatory impact analysis --
corporate-biased cost-benefit analyses, carried out by the Office of
Management and Budget. The result: countless positive regulations
discarded or revised based on pseudo-scientific conclusions that the
cost to corporations would be greater than the public benefit.

9. Slashing the Environmental Protection Agency budget in half, and
installing Anne Gorsuch Burford to oversee the dismantling of the agency
and ensure weak enforcement of environmental rules.

10. Kick-starting the era of structural adjustment. It was under Reagan
administration influence that the International Monetary Fund and World
Bank began widely imposing the policy package known as structural
adjustment -- featuring deregulation, privatization, emphasis on
exports, cuts in social spending -- that has plunged country after
country in the developing world into economic destitution. The IMF chief
at the time was honest about what was to come, saying in 1981 that, for
low-income countries, "adjustment is particularly costly in human terms."

11. Silence on the AIDS epidemic. Reagan didn't mention AIDS publicly
until 1987, by which point AIDS had killed 19,000 in the United States.
While the public health service advocated aggressive education on
prevention, Reagan moralists like Secretary of Education Bill Bennett
insisted on confining prevention messages to abstinence.

12. Enabling a corporate merger frenzy. The administration effectively
re-wrote antitrust laws and oversaw what at the time was an
unprecedented merger trend. "There is nothing written in the sky that
says the world would not be a perfectly satisfactory place if there were
only 100 companies, provided that each had 1 percent of every product
and service market," said Reagan's antitrust enforcement chief William Baxter.

The Reagan administration didn't succeed at imposing all of his agenda.
But even Reagan's failures had paradigm-shifting impacts. Among policies
he sought but failed to impose were: eliminating the Consumer Product
Safety Commission, consummating an unprecedented giveaway of coal mining
rights on federal land, and stripping benefits from thousands of
recipients of Social Security disability (a move ultimately counteracted
by the courts).

It's important to remember Reagan all right, but let's remember him for
what he did, not for his ability to deliver a scripted line. Ronald
Wilson Reagan played up and exacerbated economic and racial divisions,
and he left the country, and the world, meaner and more dangerous.


Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime
Reporter, http://www.corporatecrimereporter.com. Robert Weissman is
editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor,
http://www.multinationalmonitor.org. They are co-authors of Corporate
Predators: The Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy (Monroe,
Maine: Common Courage Press; http://www.corporatepredators.org).

(c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

This article is posted at: 
<http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/corp-focus/2004/000180.html>

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RONALD REAGAN: A VIEW FROM THE GLOBAL SOUTH
By Walden Bello*

One thing you can say about Ronald Reagan: he knew when to cut
and run.  When a suicide bomber took the lives of 241 US marines
in Lebanon in 1983, he withdrew the US intervention force without
batting an eyelash, keen to avoid what he and his advisers feared
was a morass that could compromise the US strategically.  His
stubborn ideological successor at the White House could take a
few lessons from him on when to retreat.

The Lebanon withdrawal, however, is the one positive element that
this writer sees in the Reagan record.

His strategic policy was scary: to get Washington to achieve
decisive nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union and prepare it for
the possibility of a "limited nuclear war" with the Soviets.  D?tente
was abandoned and the number of potential targets in the Soviet
Union was raised from 25,000 to an astounding 50,000 sites by his
nuclear war planners.

It was actually in the Third World, however, that Reagan waged
war, and he did it with the gusto of a playground bully where and
when he could get away with it.  Early on, he invaded minuscule
Grenada and ousted its left- leaning government, with his diplomats
manufacturing a "request" for intervention from the little known
Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS).  Also brazen in
its violation of international law was his mining of Nicaragua's
harbors and his financing and arming of mercenaries-the "contras"-
to try to bring down the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.  Then
there was the 1986 bombing of Tripoli and Benghazi-an effort to
murder Muam mar Khaddafy via the use of "surgical" airpower that,
instead, ended up killing, the Libyan strongman's daughter and
scores of innocent Libyan civilians.

Upon news of Reagan's election, the right wing in El Salvador
celebrated with firecrackers.  They were not to be disappointed.
Neither was Ferdinand Marcos, to whom Reagan's emissary
George H.W. Bush offered the followin g toast in Manila in a 1981
visit:  "We love you, sir...We love your adherence to democratic
rights and processes."  It took tremendous pressure on the part of
State Department pragmatists like then Undersecretary Michael
Armacost to get Reagan to abandon Marcos during the People's
Power Uprising in 1986.  But while giving in to political realities,
Reagan made sure to ensconce his good friend Ferdinand
comfortably in exile in Hawaii.

Reagan and his ideological partner Margaret Thatcher initiated the
neoliberal free-market revolution that ended the post-war
compromise between management and labor in the North and
swept away development-oriented policie s in the global South.

It is said that Reagan did not believe in income redistribution.  He
did, so long as it was in favor of the rich.  In the North, anti-union
policies, indiscriminate layoffs, tight budgets, and social security
cuts gutted the income of the working masses.  The statistics are
telling:  Between 1979 and 1989 in the US, the hourly wages of 80
per cent of the work force declined, with the wage of the typical (or
median) worker falling by nearl y 5 per cent in real terms.  By the
end of the Republican era in 1992, the bottom 60 per cent of the
population had the lowest share, and the top 20 per cent the
highest share, of total income ever recorded.  And indeed, among
the top 20 per cent, wealth gains were concentrated among the top
one per cent, which captured 53 per cent of the total income
growth among all families.

Reagan's Treasury Department took advantage of third world
countries' massive indebtedness to US commercial banks to push
them to adopt radical programs of trade liberalization, deregulation,
and privatization that were a dministered by the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank under the rubric of
"structural adjustment."  For most of the developing world, the
1980's came to be known as the "Lost Decade."

In Latin America, owing to structural adjustment, the number of
people living in poverty rose from 130 million in 1980 to 180 million
by the beginning of the 1990s.  In most countries, the burden of
adjustment policies fe ll disproportionately on low-income and
middle-income groups while the top five per cent of the population
in most countries retained or increased its income share.  By the
beginning of the nineties, the top 20 per cent o f the continent's
population was earning 20 times that earned by the poorest 20 per
cent.

In Africa, structural adjustment was one of the key factors that led
to an astonishing drop in per capita income by over two per cent
per year in the 1980s, so that at the end of the decade, per capita
income had plunged to its level at the time of independence in the
1960s and some 200 of the region's 690 million people were
classified as poor by the World Bank.  Surveying the devastated
landscape created by free-market programs, the Wor ld Bank's
chief economist for Africa admitted:  "We did not think that the
human costs of these programs could be so great, and the
economic gains so slow in coming."

Even key US allies in the Cold War felt the Reagan sting.
Demanding more liberal terms for the entry of US goods and
investments into the "Newly Industrializing Countries" (NICs) of
East Asia, a Reagan subordinate warned : "Although the NICs may
be regarded as tigers because they are strong, ferocious traders,
the analogy has a darker side.  Tigers live in the jungle and by the
law of the jungle.  They are a shrinking population."  Trade warfare
was waged against South Korea, so that in the space of four years,
the US' massive trade deficit with that country was turned into a
trade surplus.  Washington also forced Tokyo to drastically raise
the value of t he yen relative to the dollar, to reduce imports from
Japan and increase exports there; this was one of the factors that
eventually led to that country's long recession in the 1990s.

If I were asked what epitaph I would write for Ronald Reagan, it
would be "Here lies a man who was good for the upper 20 per cent
of his fellow Americans and his rich and powerful buddies
elsewhere, but bad for the rest o f us."

Oh yes, Reagan gave this left-wing exile political asylum in the US
in 1985, but that, I have been assured, was the result of a
bureaucratic foul-up.  But, thank you anyway, Mr. Reagan, and do
rest in peace.

* Walden Bello is executive director of the Bangkok-based Focus
on the Global South and professor of sociology and public
administration at the University of the Philippines.

Focus on the Global South (FOCUS)
c/o CUSRI, Chulalongkorn University
Bangkok 10330
THAILAND
Tel: 662 218 7363/7364/7365/7383
e-mail: N.Bullard at focusweb.org
http://www.focusweb.org

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Matthias Reichl
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