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."