March 1981: Popularity

This month, thirty years ago: year one of the Reagan presidency...

Paul Slansky reports in The Clothes Have No Emperor: A Chronicle of the American '80s—

3/18 THE GALLUP POLL REAGAN APPROVAL TRAILING EARLIER PRESIDENTS'
— The Washington Post


3/30 Following a speech at the Washington Hilton, President Reagan is shot in the chest by John W. Hinckley, Jr.—though he doesn't notice for a while. Three others are also injured, including press secretary James Brady, who survives a bullet to the brain after being reported dead on all three networks.

When the President sees Nancy at the hospital, he reportedly says, "Honey, I forgot to duck," a line originally spoken by Jack Dempsey to his wife after being beaten by Gene Tunney in 1926. As he enters the operating room, the President reportedly asks the surgeons, "Please tell me you're Republicans." A bullet is removed from his left lung.

When he comes out of anesthesia, he reportedly begins scribbling humorous notes to the nurses: "All in all, I'd rather be in Philadelphia." "Send me to L.A., where I can see the air I'm breathing." "Does Nancy know about us?"

During the operation, [Secretary of State] Al Haig rushes to the White House briefing room where, trembling and with his voice cracking, he seeks to reassure our allies that the government continues to function: "As of now, I am in control here, in the White House, pending return of the Vice President."

Afterward, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger confronts Haig and suggests he has misstated the line of succession. "Look," says Haig, "you better go home and read your Constitution, buddy. That's the way it is."

In Hollywood, the Academy Awards presentation is postponed for 24 hours.

3/31 An ABC News/Washington Post poll shows that President Reagan's popularity rating went up 11 points after he was shot.

PBS Timeline, April 1:
Nancy seeks out advice of astrologer Joan Quigley at the recommendation of friend Merv Griffin. From then on Quigley will influence the President's schedule by pointing out "good and bad days." Temple of Palmistry, 1909 Alaska-Yukon Exposition, Seattle
University of Washington

"At Long Last... No Decency?"

Photographer: Harold Gauer, 1954
Milwaukee Public Library

A pictorial bit of Wisconsin history.

Then, as now, it's history with plenty of impact beyond the state.

From the library record for this photo:

Exterminator Ed Batzner and volunteer worker Thelma Windrow at Bat[z]ner's place of business... The photographer explains: 'A campaign to recall US Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin involved the circulation of recall peititions by volunteers organized under the slogan 'Joe Must Go!' One of the groups supporting this activity called itself the 'Mothers March on McCarthy.' Leroy Gore, a small town (Sauk City, Wis.) Republican newspaper editor, started the movement and headed the state-wide activity, but much of the work centered in Milwaukee. During this 'McCarthy Era' the recall generated much heat, vituperation, even fear. It was considered courageous to circulate in strange neighborhoods and at night with this highly controversial proposition. The photo was arranged as evidence that the representatives of both points of view could meet face to face, the shop-keeper with his pro-Joe signs and the lady with her clipboard of petitions.'

Trying to keep up with the current Wisconsin story—and related power grabs around the country—I was looking for material on the ultra-Right think tanks behind legislation Republican governors are inflicting on their states.

That was a week ago, and I came upon this.

Professor Cronon asserts his political independence, his non-membership in a union, and his interest in seeing legislation improved by input from different sides. His concern was about legislation being written by interests outside the state—and outside public scrutiny.

And he was concerned about rubber-stamping:

If it has seemed to you while watching recent debates in the legislature that many Republican members of the Senate and Assembly have already made up their minds about the bills on which they're voting, and don't have much interest in listening to arguments being made by anyone else in the room, it's probably because they did in fact make up their minds about these bills long before they entered the Capitol chambers. You can decide for yourself whether that's a good expression of the "sifting and winnowing" for which this state long ago became famous.

He ends with this—

One conclusion seems clear: what we've witnessed in Wisconsin during the opening months of 2011 did not originate in this state, even though we've been at the center of the political storm in terms of how it's being implemented. This is a well-planned and well-coordinated national campaign, and it would be helpful to know a lot more about it.

Let's get to work, fellow citizens.

Dr. Cronon's next public exercise of citizenship: a March 22
op-ed, "Wisconsin's Radical Break."

The actions of Scott Walker and the GOP have been openly radical—so much so, writes Dr. Cronon, that

Mr. Walker's conduct has provoked a level of divisiveness and bitter partisan hostility the likes of which have not been seen in this state since at least the Vietnam War. Many citizens are furious at their governor and his party, not only because of profound policy differences, but because these particular Republicans have exercised power in abusively nontransparent ways that represent such a radical break from the state's tradition of open government.

Perhaps that is why — as a centrist and a lifelong independent — I have found myself returning over the past few weeks to the question posed by the lawyer Joseph N. Welch during the hearings that finally helped bring down another Wisconsin Republican, Joe McCarthy, in 1954: "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

This runs in the NYT; next thing you know, the Wisconsin GOP submits a state records request —demanding the contents of the professor's University e-mail account, on the pretext that they are entitled to review the e-mails of a "government official."

Dr. Cronon had used a private account for private exercise of citizenship. His initial response to the GOP is included in this report, along with a later observation—

I worried for a while that my New York Times op-ed on "Wisconsin's Radical Break" might have gone too far in drawing a carefully limited parallel between the current tactics of the Republican Party in Wisconsin and those of Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s...but since the Republican Party seems intent on offering evidence to support that comparison, I guess I should just let their words and actions speak for themselves.

While the Wisconsin GOP was going after a history professor, its members elected to offices of public trust got busy defying a court order.

In his NYT piece, Dr. Cronon observed that, while Walker and McCarthy are not equivalent in politics and historical periods in office, there is a similar arrogance in responding to disagreement by attacking opponents.

And the professor noted this piece of political history—

McCarthy helped create the modern Democratic Party in Wisconsin by infuriating progressive Republicans, imagining that he could build a national platform by cultivating an image as a sternly uncompromising leader willing to attack anyone who stood in his way. Mr. Walker appears to be provoking some of the same ire from adversaries and from advocates of good government by acting with a similar contempt for those who disagree with him.

The turmoil in Wisconsin is not only about bargaining rights or the pension payments of public employees. It is about transparency and openness. It is about neighborliness, decency and mutual respect. Joe McCarthy forgot these lessons of good government, and so, I fear, has Mr. Walker. Wisconsin's citizens have not.

McCarthy was all about intimidating enemies, until he finally overreached enough to be deprived of his national platform. Even so, two involved Milwaukee citizens were willing in 1954 to show it was desirable to have different sides talking calmly.

And when McCarthy first ran for Senate in 1946, he did so in a social and economic landscape where his campaign literature was union-printedWisconsin Historical Society
Campaign mailer: A brief news and editorial history of Judge Joe McCarthy, regular Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate

One Hundred Years Ago Today

Greene Street and Washington Place... Men and women, escaping the fire in the only way they thought possible, jumped from the windows to their deaths while people in the street below pleaded with them to wait for help.
Photographer: unknown, March 25, 1911; Kheel Center

It happened on an afternoon in Manhattan, as a shocked crowd watched.

It spurred safety and labor reforms in New York, and later, nationally.

In our time of renewed attacks on labor, the history is a reminder that the fight never ends—and how we again live in a gilded age of wealth and power unaccountable for its crimes.

Sam Seder's Kevin Baker interview has a good summary of the historical context in 1911, a time of "continuous class warfare in the workplace"—

• From 1885-1905, there were 37,000 strikes nationally, which were usually ended brutally, by hired goons, militia, and/or local police.
• By 1911 unsafe workplaces around the country caused an estimated one hundred deaths a day.
• Joining across ethnic lines, 20,000 sweatshop workers had held a strike a year earlier. They were attacked by police, along with the pimps and prostitutes they controlled. The International Ladies Garment Union grew from the strike, and won some improvements.

The Triangle factory was one place where the strike had made no difference, although the factory had been considered a modern improvement over sweatshops. The building itself was fireproofed, but the cloth inventory was highly flammable—the owners had run a good sideline insuring inventory and collecting settlements after "mysterious fires."

This time, the fire wasn't intentional. But as on all work days, women were locked in the shop—so their pocketbooks could be inspected for pilfered scraps before they were allowed to go home.

The factory owners had worked their way up to owning a factory and exploiting workers, like they had once been. They were chauffeured to and from their homes on Park Avenue, while their employees lived miserably, in crowded tenements. Post-fire, the owners paid token restitution to victims' families—and profited on the insurance settlement. Then, they started over: opening a new factory, where the same fire violations found a few months later.

When the fire broke out that March afternoon, passersby first thought those were burning bundles of cloth inventory being thrown out windows—as young women plunged to horrible deaths.

Reformer Frances Perkins, who witnessed the fire, became a key figure behind progressive legislation passed in New York, and was later FDR's Secretary of Labor and a major force in the New Deal.

The Kheel Center archives include heartbreaking photos. The Wiki entry is a good summary, and this week I've seen some pieces—like this and this—which make the point about how embattled labor is, a century later. Driftglass adds this, on modern anti-regulation ideologues.

This 1979 TV movie may have been a badly fictionalized version of events, but once upon a time, something relating to labor history was broadcast on network TV.

I didn't see it, but remember that the next morning, a receptionist at work told me how she was still feeling shaken by the movie.

At the time, I took it as another example of how Americans are receptive to their history if someone ever bothers letting them know about it—which is usually when some simulacrum gets on TV. (Roots in 1977 was probably the first big example of this).

1979 was still before Reagan—and would soon be followed by thirty years of history rewrites and voter willingness to vote against their interests, over and over and over.

Now it seems that in more than one state, voters are finding the shine is off their new governors, in record time.

Frances Perkins was born into a family from Maine—one of those states with a new Republican governor. Since taking office, his priorities have included undoing child labor laws, and spending money to remove labor history murals from an obscure conference room.

LePage's cleansing of the same building includes having "...eight conference rooms named after labor leaders — including Cesar Chavez — be renamed 'after mountains, counties or something.'"

Among the disappeared will be Frances Perkins, as well as "William Looney, a 19th-century lawmaker who sponsored a 10-hour workday law."

States of Emergency

The natural disasters grow more devastating.

We don't know to what degree human activity contributes to magnitudes beyond what Japan ever expected and prepared for, as much as the country knows to expect earthquakes, and coined the word tsunami.

The misery unleashed by the tsunami would have been staggering enough, but proximity to the nuclear reactors has cut off some survivors from aid.

The potential consequences of the man-made catastrophe are only beginning.

As of today, Japanese reporting of radiation in foodstuffs has started.

Yesterday, detection of "not harmful" radiation reaching the U.S. began.

Even if further meltdowns and leakage are averted, opponents of nuclear power have always been right. At Fukushima, corrupt corporate management was in charge of reactors long known to be unsafe: deadly waste ("spent fuel") stored above the reactors; waste controlled only when cooled by water pumped by the electricity that the plant could no longer produce (the disaster destroyed emergency generators)... Six of these, crammed onto an earthquake fault in such a densely populated country... And whether the plutonium reactor is contained is not at all certain.

Images here suggest just how vulnerable these reactors were.

As elsewhere, the record in Japan is one of corporations and government colluding over a technology that will never be safe.

Today: another March 19, another anniversary (Year Eight) of our glorious Iraq adventure.

And a future anniversary in the making? Today, we began a third war— where the emergency just may have to do with interests other than humanitarian ones.

Elsewhere in the region, nothing is stopping minority elites from declaring their own emergencies and violently cracking down on their masses, presumably with weapons we've sold them.

In the midst of it all, our Republican House discovered a dire emergency at home.

The GOP governors have been busy finding emergencies in their states, to be solved by handouts to corporations and the rich, paid by higher taxes for the lower classes, as well as by radical legislation written for them by ultra-Right think tanks.

On Monday's Thom Hartmann show, John Nichols described the Madison rally on the previous Saturday (March 14).

With a turnout of 100,000 or more, it took the fourteen returning Democratic state senators an hour to reach the stage. They got the heroes' welcome they so deserved, for shining light on legislation Walker had expected to pass before the public knew what had happened.

When they addressed the rally, said Nichols, "even the most conservative Democrats spoke the language of solidarity," over the assault on democracy and working people.

As much as we seem to be hurtling into an age as dark as some wish for us, the creativity of Wisconsinites is inspiring.

In homage to Faux News, they brought their own palm trees— And simply stood up for a way of life. By this Friday, a judge in Madison had issued a restraining order against implementing the anti-collective bargaining law, as both sides continue legal action.

And as Wisconsin Republicans flew to DC to pick up the lobbyist cash, activists got into this palace—where the palms are not inflatable plastic— The start of a slideshow—and a good view of those palms—is here.

While the Right is a many-bellied beast, some demonstrators were briefly inside one of the biggest—when a group that had marched to the White House spontaneously decided to cross the street and visit the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The Ronald Reagan Memorial Employment Plan

Entrance to Amalgamated Sugar Company factory at opening of second beet season. Nyssa, Oregon; 1939
Photographer: Dorothea Lange
Library of Congress FSA/OWI archive

No surprise that the jobs program is a closed door, for most of us.

But it's a great deal for all the former speechwriters and surviving members of his administration, what with their book deals and wingnut foundation gigs.

This Friday, Morning Edition gave nearly eight minutes to this, on the upcoming anniversary of Reagan's March 30, 1981 popularity surge.

Here, it's not a former Reagan staffer cashing in, but a WaPo writer (who happens to be married to an NPR correspondent). Wilber has detoured from his federal court system beat to devote 320 pages to "the day the shots were fired, and how Reagan managed to keep his sense of humor throughout the traumatic events."

Or perhaps, after a lifetime in acting, he never broke character.

We'll never have so much airtime devoted to Reagan's record, so we'll have to settle for this dewey-eyed piece, as it rehashes the operating room anecdotes of he who was dubbed by Gore Vidal, the Acting President.

The segment did have one revealing bit, in an interview with the Secret Service agent who got Reagan to the hospital—

"Since he did live and do what he did for those eight years, you can see the results of saving his life. And that's what our job is, saving lives... Before that event, even though there had been attacks on John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King [Jr.], a whole bevy of problems for the Secret Service, we still took a defensive posture. With this event we realized that wouldn't work anymore, and we did it in a flash. That's what came out of it..."

Threats to Kennedys and King: ehhh...
To Reagan: wake-up call!

On other job fronts, if Wisconsinites could fire Scott Walker today, they likely would.

His moves since day one in the Governor's office couldn't have been more obviously patterned on Reagan's career.

There was the attack on unions [see: President Reagan]. His earliest tactic was to threaten teachers and nurses with the National Guard, and his "budget repair" is, among many things, an assault on the University of Wisconsin [see: Governor Reagan, on both counts].

Walker may be unpopular at home—and subject to recall next year—but he'll never be out of work. He's got the media spotlight and big money behind him; a made man with a lifetime ticket to the right-wing gravy train.

All around the country, everyone else needing a job can expect the aid and compassion the great man himself always displayed.

Some quotes from Paul Slansky, The Clothes Have No Emperor: A Chronicle of the American '80s— [1982]

1/19 At his seventh press conference, President Reagan:

• Claims there are "a million people more working than there were in 1980," though statistics show that 100,000 fewer are employed
...
• Responds to a question about the 17% black unemployment rate by pointing out that "in this time of great unemployment," Sunday's papers had "24 full pages of ... employers looking for employees," though most of the jobs available…require special training, for which his administration has cut funds by over 30%.

3/16 "Is it news if some fellow out in South Succotash someplace has just been laid off, that he should be interviewed nationwide?"
—President Reagan—whose Presidency is based on the premise that people believe what they see on TV—complaining about coverage of the nation's economic suffering

4/15 "The statisticians in Washington have funny ways of counting."
—President Reagan explaining to Illinois high school students why, although the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a rise in unemployment, he believes the jobless rate has in fact declined

9/4 "South Succotash, with its population of 11 million, must be a considerable place."
—AFL-CIO president Lane Kirkland on the unemployment figures

10/4 President Reagan suggests—and not, by any means, for the first time—that since he sees big help-wanted sections in the Sunday papers, unemployment must be caused by a lot of lazy people who'd just rather not work.

10/18 "Now we are trying to get unemployment to go up, and I think we are going to succeed."
—President Reagan getting confused during a GOP fundraising speech

12/23 President Reagan suggests that the key to solving the unemployment problem could very well be something as simple as hiring unnecessary workers. "If a lot of businesses ... could hire just one person ... it would be interesting to see how much we can reduce these unemployment rolls."

[1983]

1/18 "The President and Cap sit around and talk about how workfare got surfers off the beach in California. They have no concept of what is going on."
—Unnamed aide on President Reagan's failure to comprehend the seriousness of the recession

And some undated quotes:

THE REAGAN ADMINISTRATION TALKS ABOUT THE ECONOMY

"The number of people remaining in poverty is very small and it grows smaller every day."
—Domestic adviser Martin Anderson

"An increase in the number of people seeking work who did not find it."
—Larry Speakes on the cause of unemployment

"Just remember, for every person who is out of work, there are nine of us with jobs."
—President Reagan on the unemployment rate

Laboratory of Plutocracy

Just a portion of a much larger Center for American Progress chart illustrating the House's proposed budget: tax breaks for the elite, stolen from essential services for the poor and struggling.

While Kochs and the like have seen to getting their money's worth from the Congress they've purchased, they also have made sure that the staff at state levels are very busy, indeed.

Union-busting in Wisconsin and other states with Republican governors and legislatures is only one front in their class warfare.

The groundwork has been laid the groundwork by thirty years of propaganda joining the government-bad theme to CEO worship, to push the idea that government should be run like a corporation. No matter how the pretense works in reality—from the two terms of Decider Bush, to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's likely one-year tenure followed by recall—the necessity and unquestionable desirability of CEO government is the owners' message, long made into conventional wisdom by their political and media servants.

In real corporations, democracy is not the environment in which CEOs work their special magic. So Republican-controlled state legislatures are at work on any conceivable means of reigning in that pesky democracy, through the cherished GOP tactic of making sure the wrong people do not vote.

Of all the radical moves in all the laboratories around the country, Florida lends a particularly weird note.

Yes: it is Florida... Still, this guy?

An executive mansion, not jail, for someone who presided over the largest Medicare fraud case in history—and cannot even manage to pose for a photo without looking like the psychopath he clearly is.

But what we see is what Florida gets: an equivalent of Scott's previous career of doing "for hospitals ... what McDonald's has done for the food business"—

During Scott's tenure at Columbia/HCA, his cost cutting methods threatened patient care and safety:

- Susan Marks, a technician at one of Scott's hospitals, was forced to monitor 72 heart monitors by herself. Marks explained, "I have to. I've been told you either do it, or there's the door."...

- Scott downsized nursing staffs, created conditions where "babies were attended as infrequently as every three hours. Once, the only nurse caring for seven ill infants was so busy she failed to hear an alarm when a baby stopped breathing. A parent dashed to the baby and stimulated breathing, the state report said."...

...

In 2001, Scott would return to health care and the 'McDonalds model,' with a chain of urgent care clinics all over Florida. And as Tristam Korten explained in this two part series for Salon, it quickly replicated many of Columbia/HCA's favorite business practices.

This NYT story , Florida Republicans Are at Odds With Their Leader, at least has some amusing quotes—

"The governor doesn't understand there is a State Constitution and that we have three branches of government," said State Senator Mike Fasano, a Republican from New Port Richey who upset Mr. Scott with rough handling of his staff during a testy committee hearing. "They are talking about the attitude that he is still the C.E.O. of his former health care corporation, and that is not going to work in this state, in Tallahassee, in my district. The people believe in three branches of government."

...

"I think there have been some understandable growing pains because government doesn't function like a corporation," said Speaker Dean Cannon, a Republican from central Florida, taking a more measured tone than Mr. Fasano.

"I like Governor Scott a lot as a person and a leader," Mr. Cannon said. "I think he's going through the understandable adjustment of the transition from campaigning to governance."

"Transition"? To this guy, it means a fabulously golden parachute, as he moves on to plunder elsewhere.

Look out, Minnie! He's eyeing more booty than just your pocketbook!

Photo: Orlando Sentinal

Revolution, Televised Or Not

AP Photo/Wisconsin State Journal, Steve Apps

Among all things wrong with our "news" media, the rush to fit complex events into predetermined narratives—before moving on to the latest piece of trivia—means ignoring the most gripping of stories.

The usual suspects may believe the Wisconsin story is over—that the manly Republicans won, and it's old news.

But the story has just begun.

The March 9 coup happened when I was offline for a few hours, but trying to digest a stack of printed material from the previous few days.

A very big development had been Michael Moore's speech at the Saturday (March 5) rally.

Last week Thom Hartmann started running daily reports from John Nichols in Madison, and those segments have been riveting.

This Monday, Nichols told the story of how Moore was writing something for his blog on Friday, when he decided that he had to go to Madison. A middle of the night decision led him to the airport; a few hours later, fire fighters escorted him to the rally—where what had been planned as a blog post became a speech before a crowd of at least 30,000 (or 10-20,000 more).

"America is NOT broke" was Moore's theme; some good excerpts are here:

... America is awash in wealth... It's just that it's not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the uber-rich.

...

...The smug rich have overplayed their hand. They couldn't have just been content with the money they raided from the treasury... They had to shut us up so that we could not even sit at a table with them to bargain about simple things like classroom size and bulletproof vests for everyone on the police force.

Moore may not have had media coverage, but the "uber-rich" took notice, undoubtedly finding the masses had expressed themselves quite long enough. The politicians they own soon dropped all pretense that the union-busting was about "budget repair," and staged an illegal vote in hopes of ending the scenes from the Capitol.

From Illinois, where he was with the other State Senate Democrats, Minority Leader Mark Miller issued a March 9 statement:

"In thirty minutes, 18 State Senators undid fifty years of civil rights in Wisconsin.

"Their disrespect for the people of Wisconsin and their rights is an outrage that will never be forgotten.

"Tonight, 18 Senate Republicans conspired to take government away from the people.

"Tomorrow we will join the people of Wisconsin in taking back their government."

Also from Moore's March 5 speech:

... Corporate America's fatal mistake. By trying to destroy us they have given birth to a movement – a movement that is becoming a massive, nonviolent revolt across the country...

America ain't broke! The only thing that's broken is the moral compass of the rulers.

After thirty years of class war, the undisguised power grab is there for all to see; this has the potential to be a real turning point, as people around the country observe Wisconsin's reaction.

It seems the other team picked kind of a bad place to pull this.

Sure, it's ironic that this year marks the 100th anniversary of the legislative session that made Wisconsin a national model.

Those legislative accomplishments of 1911 later inspired parts of the New Deal.

In turn, inspiring the hatred of those in the elite who refuse to be part of society, instead believing they deserves to control everything.

But in opposing those forces, Wisconsinites have the lessons of history, which many of them seem to remember.

Not that rulers give anything up without a fight.

In this country they have all the money and media to try making it go away.

A Ghaddafi is content to order a bloodbath.

And this week in Egypt, the army violently broke up peaceful protests—to stop evidence of torture and election-rigging from coming to light.

But events in Wisconsin are tremendously inspiring.

Citizens are in motion, with recalls and other actions being undertaken.

Tomorrow: a likely-to-be huge rally.

And—the farmers' tractorcade is on the way.

Let Them Eat Ketchup

Somehow, I suspect funeral director campaign contributions behind this great move by Wisconsin's recently elected governor—Walker's Budget Slashes Medicaid, While Increasing Funeral Assistance For Destitute Who Die.

Scott Walker has been in quite the rush to become the new Reagan. The original model had eight years to defund social programs while projecting "sunny optimism."

Walker does not care about the human cost of his program; Reagan may or may not have been less heartless, but he simply refused to believe anyone in America went hungry.

Quotes from Paul Slansky, The Clothes Have No Emperor: A Chronicle of the American '80s—

[1981]

9/4 The Agriculture Department proposes cutting the size of school lunches... In addition, condiments such as ketchup and pickle relish would be reclassified as vegetables.

9/25 President Reagan—untroubled by the drop in stock prices "because I don't have any"—announces that he has withdrawn the proposal to cut school lunches. He suggests that a dissident faction in the Agriculture Department might have come up with the idea as a form of "bureaucratic sabotage."

Just to set the record straight, aide James Johnson explains, "It would be a mistake to say that ketchup per se was classified as a vegetable. Ketchup in combination with other things was classified as a vegetable." And what things would ketchup have to combine with to be considered a full-blown vegetable? "French fries or hamburgers."

[1982]

3/24 Agriculture official Mary C. Jarratt tells Congress her department has been unable to document President Reagan's horror stories of food stamp abuse, pointing out that the change from a food stamp purchase is limited to 99 cents. "It's not possible to buy a bottle of vodka with 99 cents," she says. Deputy White House press secretary Peter Roussel says Reagan wouldn't tell these stories "unless he thought they were accurate."

4/4 "If Mr. Reagan thinks he has to cut social spending to help right the economy, others might disagree, but he has earned the right to try. What he is not entitled to do is to cut spending for the poor and then claim that he is increasing it."
— New York Times editorial

4/22 The Reagan administration complains that the CBS documentary People Like Us—a Bill Moyers report on four people who have slipped through the President's "alleged safety net"—constituted a "below-the belt" attack on its economic policies. The network rejects a government request for a prime time half hour "to present our side."

[1983]

8/2 Claiming to be "perplexed" by continuing accounts of Americans going hungry, President Reagan establishes a Task Force on Food Assistance to explain it to him.

8/3 POVERTY RATE ROSE TO 15% IN '82, HlGHEST LEVEL SINCE MID-1960'S
— The New York Times

[1986]

5/21 President Reagan tells a group of students, "I don't believe that there is anyone that is going hungry in America simply by reason of denial or lack of ability to feed them. It is by people not knowing where or how to get this help." Asked what this observation is based on, Larry Speakes says, "That is his view." Critics note that the Reagan administration eliminated the program that informed needy people of available benefits.

6/11 President Reagan distinguishes himself at his 37th press conference by claiming that the government is providing 93 million meals a day to hungry Americans.

Bonus undated quote, from domestic adviser Martin Anderson—

The number of people remaining in poverty is very small and it grows smaller every day.

Reagan & Co: CEO Governance

In his 2004 Bottom Line: The true costs of Reagan and extreme capitalism, Sam Smith ranges over a world of hurt.

To show how expectations have been shifted since the '60s, Smith cites Lyndon Johnson:

"The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning. The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents... It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community."

That was in 1964: the same year Reagan said—

"We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry every night. Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet."

By the '80s, the stage was set—

Reagan was still just a brash voice for the wealthy, the greedy, and the lucky, a Bill O'Reilly with charm. But by the time he ran for president, the crudity and the covert cruelty had been transformed into a faith, a philosophy, and a political platform, in part due to a small group of rightwing economists and other academics, but mostly thanks to the new prime minister of England, Margaret Thatcher...

...

Reagan and Thatcher can not be blamed for everything that followed... for example, both Clinton and Blair were more effective in destroying their own party's traditions of social democracy than Reagan had been... Still it was Thatcher and Reagan that got things rolling. Every president and prime minister, regardless of party, who followed took their country further to the right.

What Reagan was up to was easily apparent to the modestly observant.

In 1985 Haynes Johnson noted in the Washington Post:

"His appeal has been to private instead of public interests, the self instead of selfless interests. Absent is any call for public service, for common effort, for shared sacrifice, for actions that extend beyond the gratification of the individual, for a wise perspective on the experience of the past and a clear definition of the unmet challenges of the future. The result of this sort of thinking leads to greater celebration of selfishness. It means a greater green light for a new wave of greed so evident in these mid-1980's."

Smith's 2004 piece includes material he wrote in 1985:

... I don't think even the president's critics are taking the Reagan phenomenon seriously enough. This is not just another bad president we're facing, but an administration that is attempting a massive revolution in economics, social and moral values, foreign policy, class and racial relationships, and civil liberties...

...We face a massive deficit and what does our president want to do to correct it? Increase still further military spending even at the cost of destroying programs that have been an integral part of American life for decades. Forget about the issue of priorities and think what this says about who holds power in this country. When people starve to feed the military machine, democracy is in deep trouble. In truth, the Reagan administration is an attempt to turn the military-industrial combination from a complex to a full autocracy.

Part of the problem stems from the cultural background of the Reagan elite; they are used to being bosses, they now have the key to executive washroom of the world, America, and damned if anyone else is going to get in. This executive suite mentality helps perhaps to explain why the Reagan people are so abysmal at the ordinary politics of compromise and negotiation. They're best at telling people what to do, only now instead of it being a branch manager it's a senator, an interest group or another once sovereign nation. Listen to them talking about why they won't help this or that segment of the population; their rhetoric is that of a CEO announcing the closing of a plant to improve the profitability of the company...

The CEO mentality at the highest levels of government was not new, as we know from the record of a former CEO who joined JFK's "best and brightest."

But Reagan's appointments and policies took things to an unprecedented level of transition to government by the corporations, for the corporations.

Besides the tangible evidence of toll caused by rising levels of unemployment and poverty in the last thirty years, it's important to note how cultural degradation has advanced the Right's agenda.

In a long list of the depressing statistics and other markers of where we are, post 2000, Smith writes that

- There has been a massive shift towards the language of capitalism in all aspects of our conversation and speech, making our words more clichéd, less meaningful, less enjoyable, and less human. To an extraordinary degree we now speak to each as salesmen rather than as fellow citizens. This makes for a pretty seedy culture, full of insincerity and deceit while short on cooperation, individual creativity and shared goals.

...

- Advertising has invaded every aspect of our life making existence increasingly one large commercial.

Broad brush, perhaps, yet uncomfortably familiar.

The environment created since the '80s has led to what Thomas Frank wrote about so brilliantly here: our living in a country where magical PR dust has turned capitalists into populists and union members into an elite. All while the employed have been subject to ever-increasing job insecurity along with ever-increasing demands for "productivity," as employers sought to indoctrinate workers to worship "change" and "flexibility." Demands that were made into an accepted cultural narrative, spread by a media that has hardly reported on labor for decades—except to denigrate unions as an archaic and declassé holdover.

Whether or not workers really fell for this stuff, there have been more than enough of them willing to vote against their interests, over and over.

It's a direct line from Reagan to Bush, and on to the current reality.

Republican-held state houses serving as laboratories for union busting and corporate enrichment, as in Ohio and Wisconsin.

While at the U.S. Capitol—

Republican leaders are using the deficits – which largely derive from the Republican policies that supported unfunded wars, unfunded subsidies for the richest Americans, and an economic disaster driven by the deregulation of Wall Street – to wage a war on working Americans. Far from helping hard-working, middle class Americans who have borne the brunt of the Great Recession, the House Republican budget targets those very same Americans.
The extremist House budget will kill jobs and slash funding for education, job training programs, student loans, and health care services for women and their families, among many other things. According to Mark Zandi, who advised John McCain's presidential campaign and who now works at the non-partisan Moody's Analytics, the GOP's proposed budget cuts will destroy 700,000 American jobs.

But as St. Ronald said, "We are trying to get unemployment to go up, and I think we're going to succeed."

Constituent Service

Leading up to, then following the March 1 budget speech, Scott Walker's team had police limiting access to the Wisconsin Capitol Building.

The move contravened the state's Constitution, which requires the building to be open to the public.

And it was a move to reign in the reasonableness of the law enforcement agencies that have maintained the public's right to be in the building over the last weeks.

As Walker's actions have become more extreme, the County Sheriff has gone on record saying the State police had to take over, because "I refused to put my deputy sheriffs in a position to be palace guards."

Frustrated at constituents not being admitted to the building, Democrats moved desks outdoors, and hung a banner: "Assembly Democrats Are Open for Business."

John Nichols, on what drove them to it:

A judge has ordered the governor and his aides to open the Capitol.

... the governor and his aides have failed to comply with the order. Instead, they have restricted access so severely that, in the words of former Wisconsin Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager, they make a mockery of the state's tradition of open and accessible government.

"Opening the Capitol to the public does not mean letting one person in every three hours, as then restricting the movements of that one person once she is inside," explains Lautenschlager. "The governor and his aides are not respecting the judge's order; they are in contempt of it."

While this was happening, Walker's team was admitting their constituents.

That's going by what Nichols said on the Thom Hartmann show yesterday: the public was being admitted no more than one per hour, but the building was "swarming with lobbyists."

Perhaps they were from the bunch described here: ringers sneaked into the building to applaud the Tuesday night budget speech—

Nearly without exception, the west gallery was all men in black suits and, when the governor said something meaningful, they all rose and applauded, and they did it with verve and volume. I'm not saying these guys were not from Wisconsin, but if you know Wisconsin, you know for a fact that even for most businessmen, black suits are not part of the wardrobe. In general, the only time one will see a large gathering of Wisconsin men in black suits is at a funeral, or, apparently at a Governor Walker budget address.

There are so many fascinating aspects to the story.It's clear that Wisconsin expects open government, and that many citizens have re-thought voting for Walker, now that they've seen his Banana Republicanism in action.

Wisconsin elected officials can be subject to recall after one year in office. That gives Walker about ten months, but the campaign to start recalling his allies has begun.

And of the big picture—the real struggle ahead and the real hope—a wonderful piece by John Nichols: The Spirit of Wisconsin.

In Ohio, the course of events and possible remedies are very different, but a state referendum is likely to be the next move unions and Democrats make against the class warfare being waged by their governor and Republican majority legislature.

"The Spirit Of Democracy Is Abroad In The Land"

Photographer Christopher Guess:

"the people's house" feels as much like a university student union as the government's legislative home.

Guess posts about the key organizing role played by the UW-Madison Teachers Assistant Association:

In Wisconsin, teacher assistants carry the same labor rights as state employees. The TAA has played a critical role in the organization of the protests running bus shuttles, doing food distribution, coordinating with police to prevent removal of signs and posters, organizing petitions, etc. Although they just lost their 24/7 access to this conference room where members where working and sleeping, they remain the "central brain" of the protest activity.

More Guess photos, in another post here.

That sculpture above commemorates the man; it's easy to imagine how palpably the spirit of "Fighting Bob" La Follette is felt at the Capitol these days.

Seventh-generation Wisconsin John Nichols observes—

This has happened before, of course. More than a century ago, Robert M. La Follette battled for the governorship in election after election until, finally, he beat the corrupt Republican machine and ushered in an era of progressive reform that redefined our politics for generations.

Just as La Follette had to fight the robber barons and their political stooges, so today's progressives are battling out-of-state corporate interests (including Koch Industries) and their local appendage, Scott Walker.

The fight will not end immediately, or easily. The "money power" -- as La Follette referred to it -- is arrayed to advance Walker’s legislative and political agenda. But the people power is on the march, as was seen last Saturday when a crowd that numbered well in excess of 100,000 protested in Madison, and tens of thousands of additional Wisconsinites went to their city, village and town squares to demand that the governor and the Legislature serve the people of Wisconsin as opposed to billionaire campaign contributors like David Koch.

As the progressives defeated the Scott Walkers and Paul Ryans of their day, La Follette declared that "the spirit of democracy is abroad in the land." But the great governor and senator warned against thinking that one election victory or one policy battle success would be transformational. "We are slow to realize that democracy is a life; and involves continual struggle," explained La Follette. "It is only as those of every generation who love democracy resist with all their might the encroachments of its enemies that the ideals of representative government can even be nearly approximated."

Meanwhile, in another part of the world Nicole Tung takes portraits of people standing up to a dictator.

Bloodshed is not over; yet, there's this—

Benghazi, Saturday, February 26: I was walking out of the main square where Friday prayers and protests take place — it's in front of the courthouse in Benghazi where the revolution effectively started. This guy couldn't have been older than 22 and he was leaning out of the sunroof of a car in this costume yelling and shaking his fists, imitating Qaddafi. Everyone who walked past laughed out loud. It was pretty extraordinary that this kind of mocking could take place so openly, and everyone could feel the lighter spirit and a weight being lifted.