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THE OFFICIAL WEB SITE OF THE MADISON TIMES WEEKLY NEWSPAPER |
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OPINION |
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On the wrong side of history By Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, Sr. Last week, we paid respect to Ronald Reagan, saluting his optimism, his ability to communicate, and his grandfatherly affability. But Reagan was a conviction politician. He championed ideas that helped forge a conservative era. But the right-wing chorus that would put his head on Mount Rushmore has it wrong. Reagan was largely on the wrong side of history and his era is exhausted. His ideas are part of our problem, not part of our solution. Consider this. If Reagan was right, Dr. Martin Luther King was wrong. Reagan called King a communist. He wanted to gut the Voting Rights Act and the civil rights laws. He pushed to give tax breaks to colleges that practiced racial discrimination. He praised apartheid South Africa as a bastion of democracy and thought Nelson Mandela should stay in prison. Behind that smile, Reagan practiced a vicious brand of race-bait politics. He opened his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, calling for a revival of states rights. Now, he had to work to get to Philadelphia. It isn’t an airplane hub. And it is known for only one thing: It is the town where three civil-rights workers were brutally murdered during Mississippi Summer in the 1960s. Reagan went there to send a message to Whites (and to Blacks) across the South. Then he slurred the invented “welfare queen,” suggesting that poor African American women were living high on the dole. He turned the war on poverty into the war on the poor, slashing housing subsidies by 80 percent and creating a dramatic rise of homelessness in this country. But Reagan was wrong. Dr. King had it right. This country’s diversity is its strength. The Congress spurned Reagan’s efforts to overturn the civil-rights laws. Over Reagan’s veto, the Congress imposed sanctions on South Africa. Mandela remains Africa’s leading statesman. Reagan’s race-bait politics did help Republicans consolidate their position in the South as the party of White sanctuary. But now they are beginning to realize that a White’s only politics is a failing proposition in America. Bush has sustained Reagan’s war on the poor, but the result is an inequality that shackles opportunity in this country. Reagan championed tax cuts for the rich, corporate free trade, and deregulation and privatization. But tax cuts led to deficits as far as the eye could see, and even Reagan began the process of raising taxes to pay for them. But he raised taxes on working and middle-income people, forcing them to pay for the party that he threw for the rich. Corporate trade provided incentives for companies to move jobs abroad, and put American workers in direct competition with slave labor abroad. The result was the beginning of record trade deficits, and turning the U.S. from the world’s largest creditor to its largest debtor. Increasingly, our children will have to pay off creditors in China, Japan, and elsewhere, taxing their own income. Reagan’s deregulation led directly to the largest corporate crime waves since the 1920s, and to the chasm that opened between the salaries of CEOs and that of workers — that soared from 40 percent to 400 percent in a matter of a few years. He left us more indebted, more unequal, and more crime-ridden than before. And now the trade deficits can’t be sustained, the corporate scandals have started to erode trust in U.S. markets, and the investments not made in schools, in infrastructure, and in new energy impose a growing tax on our economy. And, of course, Reagan was the champion of “Big Stick” foreign policy and scorn for international institutions. Under Reagan, pre-emptive covert wars led directly to the debacle in Central America and the scandals at home known as Iran-Contra, where Reagan unable to win support for the covert war in the court of public opinion decided to trash the law and the Constitution to pursue his wars. Reagan doubled the military budget in peacetime, wasting literally hundreds of billions on weapons systems that we did not need and never used. He — and the CIA — got it wrong. They thought the Soviet Union was strong and on the march, when, in fact, it was rotting from within. Unlike the neo-conservatives that now dominate the Bush administration, Reagan at least realized that Gorbachev was for real and negotiated with him, spurning the advice of those who wanted to ratchet up the pressure on him. And now, Bush’s “Big Stick” foreign policy and scorn for international institutions have left America more isolated, more mistrusted, and less influential across the world than ever. Those policies — and worse the arrogance of the attitudes — are making America less secure and more vulnerable. They will cost us thousands of casualties and over $200 billion in the deserts of Iraq. We can admire Reagan’s mastery of his performance and remember his sense of good humor. But we should not ignore the failure of the ideas that he championed. And we should celebrate the passing of the era that he helped to create.
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