Reagan & Co: Innovation

If the Karl Rove White House took it to new levels, with ever more numerous and creative methods, it was the Reagan administration that pioneered the use of the Executive Branch to destroy federal regulatory agencies from within.

The most publicly visible Republican tactic has been the old fox-guarding-the-henhouse: heading agencies with corporate figures whose previous careers were based on fighting regulation by the very same agencies.

This Birchite innovation kicked off with Reagan's 1981 appointment of James Watt, as Secretary of the Interior.

Watt came from running the Mountain States Legal Foundation, a Coors-financed operation challenging environmental regulations. Watt was also a harbinger of Republican things to come, in being a Christian Dominionist and bigot, publicly vocal about his ideology.

In The Clothes Have No Emperor: A Chronicle of the American '80s, Paul Slansky has lots of quotes—

[1981]
2/5 Testifying before Congress, James Watt is asked if he agrees that natural resources must be preserved for future generations. Yes, he says, but he can't help adding, "I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns."

[1982]
6/17 Interior Secretary James Watt warns the Israeli ambassador that if "liberals of the Jewish community" oppose his plans for offshore drilling, "they will weaken our ability to be a good friend of Israel."

7/21 James Watt announces his five-year plan to open a billion acres of US coastline to oil and gas drilling.

[1983]
1/19 "If you want an example of the failures of socialism, don't go to Russia. Come to America, and see the American Indian reservations."
—James Watt failing to endear himself to native Americans

8/13 Addressing a church group in Anaheim, James Watt compares those who fail to speak out against abortion to "the forces that created the Holocaust" by offering no resistance to Hitler.

Slansky also compiled these undated quotes—

Reagan on Watt:
"I think he's an environmentalist himself, as I think I am."

And from Watt himself:

"We will mine more, drill more, cut more timber."

"I never use the words Democrats and Republicans. It's liberals and Americans."

"Maybe we can get Mrs. Reagan to wear a coyote coat."

"I speak in black-and-white terms without much gray in my life. I see problems without the complexity that is confusing to a lot of people."

"A left-wing cult dedicated to bringing down the type of government I believe in."
—James Watt describing environmentalists

"I think Americans now have the best Secretary of the Interior they've ever had."
—James Watt defending his policies on Nightline

In spending public funds, Watt exhibits a government hater's usual ethical standard:

12/14 [1981] "Mr. Reagan has the White House. I have Arlington." — James Watt justifying his decision to hold two private cocktail parties at Arlington Cemetery's Lee Mansion at the taxpayers' expense

For Reagan, this will be Watt's worst blunder:

4/5 [1983] James Watt bans rock music from the upcoming Fourth of July celebration at the Washington Mall because it attracts "the wrong element." Though the words "Beach" and "Boys" do not pass his lips, the story somehow becomes that Watt has attacked the Beach Boys.

But all is soon forgiven:

4/7In the face of support for the unmaligned Beach Boys from George Bush and Nancy Reagan, James Watt rescinds his rock music ban. As a souvenir of his gaffe, President Reagan presents him with a plaster foot with a bullet hole.

Watt finally resigned Oct. 9, 1983, following negative coverage of his describing an agency panel: "I have a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple."

Before Watt's departure, his damaging legacy was securely in place at Interior. His crowning achievement was to create the Minerals Management Service: administered by Interior—without external scrutiny—to enable disastrous pro-corporate policies like our lack of off-shore drilling oversight.

Watt's tenure is a gift that keeps giving—like those 1980s economic and foreign policies that Robert Parry calls "Ronald Reagan's 30-Year Time Bombs."

Judging from the Wikipedia section on "Later Life," Watt's post-government life has been about what one would expect.

There was a slap on the Republican wrist:

In 1995, Watt was indicted on 25 counts of felony perjury and obstruction of justice by a federal grand jury. The indictments were due to false statements made to a grand jury investigating influence peddling at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which he had lobbied in the mid to late 1980s. On January 2, 1996, as part of a plea bargain, Watt pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count of withholding documents from a federal grand jury. On March 12, 1996 he was sentenced to five years' probation and ordered to pay a $5,000 fine and perform 500 hours of community service.

I haven't found anything further, as to what "community" he "served," but I did find something from a few years back: TBogg on Watt and "those 18 felony counts he dodged." TBogg looks back at, among other things, Robert Scheer's 1996 column on Watt's day in court.

Of the trial—and Watt's mouthing off that God would provide justice—Scheer's column asks (and answers): "Who Needs Divine Intervention? The Watt case shows how bilking the poor can be both lucrative and apparently legal."

Scheer takes the measure of our godly former official—

... once forced out of office ... he did what any good believer in downsizing the federal government would do: he ripped it off. He became a consultant to developers looking to cash in on HUD money. Watt had been in the Reagan Cabinet and was on intimate terms with the hapless Samuel Pierce, who served as secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Watt didn't claim any expertise in urban housing, but he knew how to use a telephone. He got $300,000 for a couple of phone calls to HUD on behalf of a Maryland developer.
...

Watt, in his own testimony before a House subcommittee, conceded that he was in the influence peddling business and that it was quite profitable. Referring to $100,000 he made from a project in Puerto Rico, he said of his developer client, "That's what they offered, and it sounded like a lot of money to me, and we settled on it."

Former independent counsel Arlin M. Adams claimed that the investigation of Watt enabled the federal government to recover $10 million intended for low-income housing in the Virgin Islands that had found its way into rich people's pockets.

In the end, Watt's penchant for erasing computer files may have been his salvation. When questioned if he had a memorandum of talks with Pierce on a housing project, he stated: "I intentionally don't make such memoranda so that lawyers like you won't be able to get them." So much for divine intervention.

As TBogg's post also notes, the judge in the case was this guy. Who more recently has taken care of Republican business in blocking stem cell research.

The talkative and ground-breaking Watt also was ahead of a current trend: well-connected right-wingers openly inciting violence—

During a March 1991 dinner event organized by the Green River Cattlemen's Association in Wyoming, Watt said, "If the troubles from environmentalists cannot be solved in the jury box or at the ballot box, perhaps the cartridge box should be used."

And, as expected, there is Watt's crowing about having been a trailblazer for the Cheney administration:

In a 2001 interview, Watt applauded the Bush administration energy strategy and said its prioritization of oil drilling and coal mining above conservation is just what he recommended in the early 1980s. "Everything Cheney's saying, everything the president's saying - they're saying exactly what we were saying 20 years ago, precisely ... Twenty years later, it sounds like they've just dusted off the old work."

Fiction; Prediction?

Bonus marchers, 1932

By this time last week, I had given up on trying to function.after a physically and mentally punishing week at the office. So I spent most of the weekend immersed in Gary Steyngart's Super Sad True Love Story.

The story is set in a future time that's vague, yet seems to be just around the corner.

Lenny Abramov is heading back to New York after a year in Italy. When his pre-flight screening goes unexpectedly wrong, it's a hint that some things at home may be awry. Lenny is allowed to fly, but it's unclear whether or not he's been flagged for surveillance by the American Restoration Authority—the shadowy entity administering the country on behalf of the ruling Bipartisan Party.

But the incident seems minor to Lenny, who's just fallen in love with the beautiful Eunice Park. A 39-year old booklover, Lenny records his story in an old-fashioned diary; in a parallel narrative, the viewpoint of the much younger Eunice is told through text pulled from her e-mail account.

Lenny returns to a country where technology and consumerism are at bizarre levels, yet not completely unlike our real environment today.

Everyone—except the ultra-wealthy elite of HNWIs (High Net Worth Individuals)—is required to carry a data device called an äppärät, for instant read-out of the bearer's Credit rating.

The äppärät is used to monitor the everyone, yet everyone adores it, with characters using it to stream their every thought and to rate the hotness of everyone in view.

Steyngart's take on consumerism borrows from current "street" marketing to invent even more absurdly crass products. Male characters wear SUK DIK logo clothing; Eunice, her sister and best friend compulsively surf a site called AssLuxury, in an endless quest for deals on the JuicyPussy fashion line.

The price of everything is noted: consumer goods costs are all-important, and they are expressed in "yuan-pegged dollars."

Lenny works in "the creative economy." Reporting back to his nightmarishly hip workplace, he sees that employee names and ratings are now displayed on an old-fashioned Italian railway board

... the black-and-white flaps were turning madly, the letters and numbers mutating—a droning ticka-ticka-ticka-ticka—to form new words and figures, as one unfortunate Aiden M. was lowered from "overcoming loss of a loved one" to "letting personal life interfere with job" to "doesn't play well with others." Disturbingly enough, several of my former colleagues... were marked by the dreaded legend TRAIN CANCELED.

I found the novel hard to put down: the first half or so is just that funny, although the comic inventions also seem believable enough to have a painful edge.

And the really dark notes are plentiful, early on:

People in the streets are being stopped by the New York National Guard—whose troops have oddly Southern accents. And the security checkpoints are marked by signs denying their existence; persons stopped are instructed that—

BY READING THIS SIGN YOU HAVE DENIED EXISTENCE OF THE OBJECT AND IMPLIED CONSENT.

Credit Poles read the Credit ratings of pedestrians, as the authorities monitor LNWIs (Low Net Worth Individuals). Immigrants are watched, to be deported if they break the rules: Chinese must spend; Latinos, save.

Without good looks or wealth, Lenny still is able to establish a relationship with Eunice. She has to overlook other bad traits: Lenny reads books (the young say they smell bad), and he is too "brain-smart."

Whether the relationship can survive or not, the world around the two becomes darker as the novel progresses.

As the country's economic/political underpinning is threatened with investor "decoupling," New York prepares for the visit of the Chinese central banker, "unofficially the world's most powerful man."

Whole neighborhoods are cleared; the newly homeless camp in Central Park, in an echo of another century's Hoovervilles.

Veterans of the recent war with Venezuela are angry about not receiving their promised bonus. Events parallel the 1932 Bonus Army, as vets and other LNWIs camp in Tompkins Square and refuse to leave.

The National Guard are gradually supplanted by the security arm of Staatling-Wapachung, the sinister corporation that also employs Lenny.

Well before the novel's end, Lenny's Russian Jewish immigrant parents are afraid to go outside because of the Credit Poles; Eunice's Korean immigrant mother wonders if she and Eunice's father did the right thing in leaving a poor, war-torn country that unexpectedly became rich and peaceful while their adopted country declined.

Despite the comic exaggeration, Steyngart's vision of the future is entirely too believable—a very worthwhile novel, if not something that improved my mood at the time of reading.

The week that followed brought daily news stories resonant of the novel's atmosphere of life in a dying empire.

New York Stock Exchange bought by Germans.

Borders' bankruptcy suggests books are not mass market. Some places still support independent stores, but in my little town, Borders has been the last remaining place to peruse new books, even if the stock was increasingly showing the Kmart ownership.

It's certainly no news that there are separate standards for HNWI and LNWI, but as in Steyngart's tale, the gap grows ever more stunning.

Roy Edroso mused yesterday on severity of punishment for the ordinary person caught in the criminal justice system; the absence of consequences (other than greater wealth) for those who have destroyed the economy; the right-wing's ramping up the war on teachers' unions; and more—

One of the saddest things about the decline of this country is that we've relearned a pre-democratic contempt for the suffering of the less fortunate and a solicitous interest in the problems of the very fortunate. Poor saps who never had a chance are presumed to never have deserved one, while the rich are treated with kid gloves lest they take offense and go Galt on us. Once Americans cheered the underdog. Now I see there's a book out called Underdogma: How America's Enemies Use Our Love for the Underdog to Trash American Power which tells that this generosity of spirit is actually a dangerous delusion...

I don't know if Roy was thinking of Steyngart, or simply observing our "culture"—

We hear a lot of talk about "hippie punching" these days, but make no mistake: Under a certain, very high net worth [my emphasis], everybody's getting punched.

Back To The Republican Future

Guarding approach to mills, Lawrence, Mass.
January 12, 1912 ("Bread and Roses" strike)
Library of Congress

Someone is aiming for a quick ascension to Reagan-hood, and has wasted not a moment between his inauguration last month and his threat to call in the National Guard against uppity workers.

Wisconsin resident John Nichols, interviewed by Amy Goodman—

... Governor Walker took office in January, after a campaign in which he really ran as a feel-good Republican. He did not talk about gutting public employee contracts. He didn't talk about getting rid of collective bargaining. He didn't talk about perhaps imposing a sweeping right-to-work law that took away not just collective bargaining rights for public employees but for employees in the private sector. None of this came up. But in January, after taking office, he began to move very quietly behind the scenes to implement this plan. What's fascinating is that while it does, as you note, attempt to take away collective bargaining rights for teachers, also for state, county and municipal employees, there is a special protection written in for police unions and firefighter unions that happened to support him in the last election.

At least some members of the latter unions refused to fall for the divide and conquer move.

I managed to catch a good bit of Thom Hartmann during the week: Nichols was on at least twice, and there were other reports from Madison. Sam Seder interviewed a Madison blogger on February 17. A big point that local observers have been making: Walker arranged to have contract renewals halted until after he took office.

From a report last December:

Union members already have agreed to concessions, and Walker's bluster only aims to pit Wisconsin citizens against their public employees, said Bryan Kennedy, the union's president.

"We are willing to do our part, but make no mistake: Walker is angling to make state employees the political whipping boy for the state of Wisconsin's economy," Kennedy said in a statement.

Walker, a Republican, has asked that no union contracts be approved before he takes office because they could tie his hands in dealing with an estimated $3.3 billion shortfall in the next two-year budget.

Talking Points Memo is running extensive coverage of events, including how Walker set this all in motion by faking the whole budget crisis.

John Nichols noted the ruse, and Walker's real motivation:

The fact is, Wisconsin is not broke. The Fiscal Bureau of Wisconsin just said in January that it will end this year with a $123 million surplus. So the fact of the matter is that this is not being done because of a lack of money. This is being done because political forces, conservative political forces, would like to disempower public employee unions and remove that voice for a strong public sector. That's what austerity really translates as. And I do hope people keep an eye on what's happening in Wisconsin with a similar eye to what they watch protests around the world with. This is a place where we really are going to see a critical test of whether workers have the right and also the power to demand fair play.
...

And there's no doubt in my mind that this is part of a wide Republican and conservative strategy to take down public employee unions, which have done two things: one, they have challenged Republicans at election time—the truth of the matter is, public employee unions are a very important political force in this country; but two, and I think more importantly, they have been the primary advocates in the United States, for the better part of 30 years, for public sector spending and for public education. If you weaken these unions, you really do weaken the public sphere. And frankly, that's something that a lot of right-wing think tanks in Washington would like to see happen.

The national media's coverage of protest in Egypt and beyond was not lost on demonstrators and their messages:

"Hosni" Walker
"ONE DICTATOR TO GO"
And this.

As those demonstrations in Cairo showed, workers' rights are tied to political rights. Bag News Notes posted photojournalist David Degner's observations of what developed there—

The police protest we see in these two photos took place... at the Ministry of Interior ... the location an odd thing in itself. Taking pictures the night of the 29th [of January] was one of the most significant moments of the protests for me. There were kids just one block up trying to get to the Ministry running directly into police gunfire. And now, just a few weeks later, the policemen, in the same spot, are protesting for better housing, health care and wages — and want the people to also know that they are no longer under their former leader, Adly, who was removed as Minister of the Interior.

The cycle continues with a new Bag News post: "Cairo, Wisconsin."

The Wisconsin protest gained more participants over the week, and TPM has this slide show.

Some players on a certain publicly owned team weighed in. But their celebrity is so two weeks ago...

Though national coverage can be expected to increase this weekend, as the billionaires send in the Real American shock troops.

Perhaps they can borrow an idea and ride in this way.

R.I.P., Comic Genius

Briefly saying "screw it" to an unreasonable workload by trying to catch up a bit with the outside world, I learned of the death of Kenneth Mars, at 75.

No matter how many times I watch this, it's an unfailing source of belly laughs, as well as awe at Mars' brilliant performance.

Roy Edroso marked the news here.

Just a couple weeks ago, I was reading Roy's piece on wingnut observance of Reagan's birthday, and laughing at gems like the tag lines:

The Reagan you loved! The Reagan you knew! The Reagan with a song in his heart!

In noting Mars' passing, Roy linked to Roger Ebert on "The Producers." Mars will always be remembered for his contribution to that amazing movie, and his death inevitably brings back memories of repeat viewings.

Ebert notes that

... David Ehrenstein traces the first use of the phrase "creative accounting" to "The Producers," and Bialystock and Bloom make it into a fine art. "Hello, boys!" says Max, plopping down next to his safe and patting the piles of money.

This led me to look for the Ehrenstein review:

When a film can boast of inventing terms like "creative accounting" and that all-time catch-phrase "When you’ve got it, flaunt it!" it’s more than a mere success. The Producers is a modern comedy classic.

Besides the sadness of losing a great talent, it's sobering to realize how the 1968 movie is from another, very distant world. I clearly remember its crooks—loveable as they may have been—landing in jail for their misdeeds.

Edroso again: this post today on connections to be made among some other news stories—

As conservatives denounce schoolteachers who seek to preserve their collective bargaining rights, it's good to be reminded by Matt Taibbi that the banksters who wrecked the economy have been let off scott free and then some by the government.

Sleight of Hand

In his 1988 On Bended Knee: The Press and The Reagan Presidency, Mark Hertsgaard reports this event, as described to him by an anonymous witness:

In the very first weeks of his presidency... an ABC News camera crew visited Reagan in the Oval Office for a routine interview. Three-by-five index cards in hand, the President eloquently delivered the statements his staff had prepared, and in short order the interview was over. But no sooner had Reagan finished speaking than he strode over to his desk, reached into a drawer and happily pulled on a small green finger monster. Grinning and providing his own sound effects, he waggled his fierce little friend at the camera crew three times, winked broadly and left the room, chuckling. The ABC producer in charge of the event remembered that a White House "elbow grabber" approached him and nervously asked, "You weren't rolling on that, were you?" ... the producer assured the aide, falsely, that no, they had not been. Later... the videotape in question was buried in the ABC archives, never to be broadcast.

This is on pages 108-9, part of a chapter ("'Jelly Bean Journalism'") on the relationship the White House established with the media as soon as Reagan came to power.

Hertsgaard outlines what was to become the pattern for media treatment of Republicans in the Oval Office. A few key factors in the 1980s cheerleading:

A post-Watergate press corps was eager to prove its "loyalty."

Establishment journalists jumped on the patriotic bandwagon when Iran released U.S. hostages at the moment of Reagan's inauguration.

Media outlets were happy to run whatever pretty pictures a slick Hollywood operation staged for them.

This chapter's title comes from one of Hertsgaard's interviewees: a CBS Evening News associated producer during Reagan's first term, Richard Cohen. [A different guy than the WaPo hack of that name.]

During Reagan's time in office, TV coverage in particular was what Cohen dubbed "jelly bean journalism"—

In Cohen's view, when Reagan came to power, network news operations were so tickled by the ability of the new White House media apparatus to provide visually appealing images of the President that they seemed to lose their journalistic bearings. Either not seeing or not minding the manipulation inherent in the process, they eagerly broadcast pictures carefully staged by Michael Deaver to project an endearingly positive image of Reagan as a man who wished no harm to anyone... control over television's portrayal... was so pervasive early in the administration, Cohen felt, that "Deaver should have been listed as the executive producer on all the political stories we broadcast.

"Much more than newspapers, it was the institution of the evening news that would make it or break it for Reagan, Cohen added. "I think it was obvious to the Reagan people that if they gave us pictures of Ron kissing Nancy or giving a wink to the camera, it would get on the air. We were slow to realize we were being suckered, and when we did we just didn't care much about it. It may just be too much to ask an executive producer to pass up a great picture."

As Cohen also told Hertsgaard, he later came to realize that the first year's coverage set the tone for Reagan's two terms.

From the start, as that unidentified ABC interviewee's revelation suggests, the media were happy to pretend they hadn't seen White House Finger Monster Theater, and more.

The stage is set.

For his next trick: the budget will be announced February 18, 1981 (PBS timeline).

Without a watchdog media during the early months, the administration had free rein, in Hertsgaard's words, for "skillful manipulation of the public dialog" that "elevated Reagan to near god-like status in official Washington and nurtured the already gathering climate of timidity and reactionary conformity."

In interviews David Gergen and Michael Deaver called the media's coverage of Reagan's first six months "fair and balanced" [Hertsgaard's 1988 phrase]. The former White House staffers noted there was more criticism by August of 1981.

And by that point, the successful media campaign and political maneuvers ("with lots of Democratic help") had already achieved passage of what Hertsgaard calls the White House's "astonishing economic package," which "set in motion one of the greatest government-engineered transfers of wealth in modern U.S. history."

There He Goes Again

Image: tiki_kiliki

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

[1981] 2/6 "It's just the 31st anniversary of my 39th birthday."
—President Reagan on turning 70

[1983] 2/4 During a difficult point in her husband's press conference, Nancy Reagan barges on stage carrying a birthday cake, instantly turning a news event into entertainment. Observes the President erroneously of his upcoming 72nd: "It's just the 31st anniversary of my 39th birthday."

[1984] 2/6 President Reagan celebrates his 73rd birthday—"the 34th anniversary of my 39th birthday"—in his hometown of Dixon, Illinois. "It's great to be back home," he says. "And, you know, if our old house on Hennepin Avenue looked as good in 1924 as it does now, I might never have left." Everyone laughs.

[1985] 2/5 "Birthday? Oh, you mean the 35th anniversary of my 39th birthday?"
—President Reagan on his upcoming 74th

[1986] 2/6 President Reagan turns 75, prompting not just the familiar joke about the "36th anniversary of my 39th birthday" but the additional insight that 75 is "only 24 Celsius."

[1987] 2/6 Walking into a roomful of aides assembled for a surprise 76th birthday party, President Reagan seems startled until his wife whispers to him, "It's your staff."

"Of all the 38th anniversaries of my 39th birthday," says the President incorrectly, "this is about the nicest."

[1988] 2/5 At a surprise party for the President's upcoming 77th birthday... Reagan observes that the event is "the 38th anniversary of my 39th birthday."

Now that the big year has arrived, Roy Edroso reports (hilariously) on the "hilarious birthday tributes" by wingnut bloggers

... who see a second Reagan in Sarah Palin. (Reagan's actual son? They hate him plus he's gay!)

Many rightblogger Reagan reminiscences were free-associative, perhaps in formal tribute to the Oval Office's most famous Alzheimer's sufferer.

Ongoing Events

CNN

It's always amazing to see a population suddenly take to the streets. And noteworthy to once more see the contrast between the U.S. and cultures with a sense of the public square.

Whether Egypt will be able to move in a liberalizing direction is unknown.

Plenty of reporting suggests the importance of the generational factor, and of protest being sparked by an educated class without adequate work.

Bag News has been running work by photojournalists in Cairo, including this post, about local ingenuity in maintaining the protest.

One photo is described:

Here we see an outdoor medical clinic. Before the uprising, there was one clinic in a mosque near the square. One week later, there are now five. I first visited there last Saturday night. At that time, they were taking donations for medicine and food. When I went back yesterday, the original clinic had turned into a warehouse for donated medicine running a distribution system to the five satellite clinics.

In the mosque clinic, things run like a well-oiled machine. There is one guy on a podium, calling out orders for shipments, directing traffic, dispatching ambulances. There is one section just for treating eyes. The main type of wounds now are rock injuries. The first few days, however, it was wounds from rubber bullets fired by the police.

This outdoor version is smaller than the mosque clinic but it works the same way. The mats are set up and doctors wait for the next injured person to come in. If the injury is serious, the patient is transported to the mosque or taken away by ambulance.

The U.S. background to events is familiar, with tanks and other hardware courtesy of years of "aid", and the Chamber of Commerce's role in pro-Mubarak stealth political lobbying.

There's the familiar story of dictator taking an "après moi" line.

And the anti-protest forces tell a story that usually ends one way, as it's generally not hard to keep a larger majority suppressed by putting just enough thugs on the payroll.

Even U.S. media are paying attention: not only are events dramatic, but there are those brutal attacks on and arrests of fellow journalists.