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THE OFFICIAL WEB SITE OF THE MADISON TIMES WEEKLY NEWSPAPER |
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OPINION |
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Vantage Point / Ron Daniels Reagan was no friend of Blacks, workers, and the poor While the “nation” mourns the death of Ronald Reagan, 40th president of the United States, I dare say that few tears have been shed for him in Black America. His administration was one of the most antagonistic towards Blacks, workers, and poor people in the 20th century. Reagan, the “great communicator” as he came to be known for his “performances” as an actor-turned-politician, once claimed that he had never seen racism in his entire life. Nonetheless, he was quite willing and adept at exploiting racial stereotypes and fears to advance his pro-rich, anti-poor, anti-worker, and anti-Black vision of America. No one exploited Richard Nixon’s concept of a “southern strategy” to attract Whites away from the Democratic Party more than Reagan. In fact, he unapologetically went to Pulaski, Tenn., the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan, to launch one of his presidential campaigns. Conservatives of his persuasion increasingly labeled the Democratic Party the political vehicle of Blacks. Not so subtlety it was suggested that Democrats were embracing the causes and concerns of Blacks to the detriment of Whites. In general, race became the critical subtext of much of Reagan’s domestic policy agenda. While Richard Nixon may have failed to vigorously enforce civil-rights laws as a way of responding to the “White backlash” fueled by political demagogues like George Wallace, Reagan termed civil-rights advances “reverse racism” and actively used the Department of Justice to undue civil-rights laws he argued were unfair to White people. White people were told that they were “victims” of “Black racism.” Moreover, Blacks were viewed as a “burden” on the backs of hardworking, decent White taxpayers because the size of the federal government had swollen dramatically because of social programs designed to cater to the whims of Blacks. It was Reagan who popularized the idea of “welfare queens” and “food stamp cheats.” It did not matter that there were more Whites receiving welfare benefits and foods stamps than Blacks; in the minds of much of White America, social programs were synonymous with “Blacks.” These false perceptions allowed Reagan to shrink the size of government by drastically cutting social programs and reducing aid to the cities. Quoted in a column by Clyde Haberman in The New York Times, former Gov. Mario Cuomo said that the result of this deliberate effort to diminish aid to the cities was “less for health, less for welfare, less for job training, and less for all the things that cities depended on the federal government for.” Offering data to back up Cuomo’s claim, Haberman notes that on “Mr. Reagan’s watch, federal spending for subsidized housing programs was sliced by about 75 percent, to $8 billion in 1988 from $33 billion in 1983 ... From 1981 to 1983, federal aid to New York City fell by $560 million, or 21 percent. More than 1.1 million New Yorkers had food stamps benefits reduced or eliminated.” Reagan may have been an affable and jovial individual but these personal traits did not translate into a sensitive or compassionate disposition towards the poor. As Douglass Lasdon, executive director of the New York-based Urban Justice Center wrote in a letter to the editor of The New York Times, “President Reagan made it OK—even a source of pride—to abandon and demonize poor people.” In concurring with this view, Cuomo declared: “Regrettably, President Reagan made the denial of compassion for the people who needed it the most sound like a virtue.” Reagan’s assault on poor and working people did not end with the decimation of social programs. His agenda envisioned nothing less than crippling or destroying organized labor as a force to check the avaricious ambitions of the rich and the super-rich. His “supply-side” economic policies, “Reaganomics,” unabashedly advocated tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy to assist them to amass even more wealth. And Reagan had no intention of allowing unions to be an impediment to this scheme. Accordingly, he fired the air-traffic controllers union workers and ultimately broke the union to send a clear message to organized labor and workers in general that to challenge the hegemony of corporate power in the U.S. was to risk losing your livelihood. In his desire to rehabilitate the national “ego” of the U.S. after the debacle in Vietnam, and to defeat the “evil empire” (the Soviet Union) to make the world “safe” for “free market” capitalism and “democracy,” Reagan pushed through huge increases in military spending. This was also disastrous because he was robbing the poor by reducing expenditures for social programs and aid to the cities in order to finance a greatly beefed up armed forces and a bellicose foreign policy. It is not surprising that under Reagan, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. What is surprising is that he is mourned as a great president by large numbers of White poor and working people. It is surprising that he is being compared with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, when his domestic agenda aimed to destroy virtually everything that FDR stood for and accomplished for poor and working people with the New Deal. As I have said so many times in speeches about the Reagan era, he never won an Academy Award as an actor, but he deserves the Academy Award of the century for his performance as president of the United States. He fooled a lot of poor and working people into believing that he was acting in their interest. And, I submit to you that he was able to get away with this extraordinary act because racism was/is alive in American society. Reagan was able to persuade people, who should have been allied with Blacks in the pursuit of social, economic, and racial justice, that we were their enemies. The proverbial “divide and conquer” strategy was used to the hilt to advance the interests of the rich and the super-rich at the expense of Blacks and the poor. Ronald Reagan was no friend of Blacks, workers, and the poor!
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