Man! Dude! Session #350
(D)ude: Man! Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal is Republican and the Mayor of New Orleans Mitch Landrieu is a Democrat, but the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina involved President George Walker Bush and his Administration not responding in time. The Department of Defense was not called into New Orleans for 5 miserable days of no relief and no supplies for the afflicted and displaced Americans in Louisiana. Evacuation for poor communities was especially problematic as it involved and only favored those who had means of transportation over those who had none.
(M)ale: Dude! Governor Bobby Jindal was inaugurated on January 14, 2008, and Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s term in office did not commence until May 3, 2010. Actually, the preceding Governor Kathleen Blanco was a Democrat as well as the then-Mayor of New Orleans C. Ray Nagin, when Hurricane Katrina hit.
D: Man! That’s true, but not the point I was trying to manifest! My point being that Face The Nation’s John Dickerson has really been ironed out flat by the far right, just like the so-referred ‘iron lady’ Margaret Thatcher was in the 1980s by then-President Reagan and his Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush. Dickerson was once a capable journalist but has significantly lost his bipartisan sensibility since inflicting harm upon George Walker Bush’s ego in a 2004 press conference where the 43rd President of the United States admitted, quote unquote, ‘I wish you would have given me this written question ahead of time, so I could plan for it.’
M: Dude! Margaret Thatcher ironed out flat by the United States’ far right during the Reagan Administration? How so?
D: Man! The Republican Party in the United States during the Reagan Administration constructed their arguments by borrowing heavily from Margaret Thatcher’s perspectives. It was a lot like school bullies networking with each other in order to consolidate their unfathomable and outrageous abuses of power. President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher shared and built the neocon political and policy constructs that Jeb Bush, Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and the other GOP contenders in the 2016 race for the White House are relying upon in order to define themselves as conservatives.
M: Dude! Jeb Bush, Donald Trump, and Ben Carson are the GOP frontrunners. However, have you noticed how their scriptwriters cannot convince them to engage in independent thought? And then you have Hillary Rodham Clinton, an independent thinker and phenomenal communicator with a team of advisors infiltrating with dense GOP operatives who rely on scripts themselves to convey their presidential candidate’s messaging? Hillary Rodham Clinton deserves far better than Republican operatives tearing apart her campaign from within. The comment she made equivocating the Republican Party with terrorists was too big a miscalculation on her part, but I suspect she is having to fight this campaign alone, without sincere and honestly committed strategists.
D: Man! Speaking of conservatism and neoconservatism, Ronald Reagan built the distinction with his administration’s borrowing heavily from Margaret Thatcher. Case in point takes us back to 1970 when Thatcher held the position of Education and Science Secretary for then-Prime Minister Edward Heath. She cut the free milk program in England for schoolchildren between the ages of 7 and 11, but still allowed those below seven years of age one-third a pint of milk. One-third a pint of milk per schoolchild! Likewise, President Reagan was not the poor or working-class’s president either! Peter Dreier, writing for the nonprofit National Housing Institute’s May/June 2004 online issue of Shelterforce Magazine, puts Ronald Reagan’s presidency into an easy-to-grasp narrative as follows…
Reagan is lauded as “the great communicator,” but he sometimes used his rhetorical skills to stigmatize the poor. During his stump speeches while dutifully promising to roll back welfare, Reagan often told the story of a so-called “welfare queen” in Chicago who drove a Cadillac and had ripped off $150,000 from the government using 80 aliases, 30 addresses, a dozen social security cards and four fictional dead husbands. Journalists searched for this “welfare cheat” in the hopes of interviewing her and discovered that she didn’t exist.
The imagery of “welfare cheats” that persists to this day helped lay the groundwork for the 1996 welfare reform law, pushed by Republicans and signed by President Clinton.
The most dramatic cut in domestic spending during the Reagan years was for low-income housing subsidies. Reagan appointed a housing task force dominated by politically connected developers, landlords, and bankers. In 1982, the task force released a report that called for “free and deregulated” markets as an alternative to government assistance – advice Reagan followed. In his first year in office, Reagan halved the budget for public housing and Section 8 to about $17.5 billion. And for the next few years he sought to eliminate federal housing assistance to the poor altogether.
In the 1980s the proportion of the eligible poor who received federal housing subsidies declined. In 1970, there were 300,000 more low-cost rental units (6.5 million) than low-income renter households (6.2 million). By 1985, the number of low-cost units had fallen to 5.6 million, and the number of low-income renter households had grown to 8.9 million, a disparity of 3.3 million units.
Another of Reagan’s enduring legacies is the steep increase in the number of homeless people, which by the late 1980s had swollen to 600,000 on any given night – and 1.2 million over the course of a year. Many were Vietnam veterans, children, and laid-off workers.
In early 1984 on Good Morning America, Reagan defended himself against charges of callousness toward the poor in a classic blaming-the-victim statement saying that “people who are sleeping on the grates…the homeless…are homeless, you might say, by choice.”
Tenant groups, community development corporations, and community organizations fought to limit the damage done by Reagan’s cutbacks. Some important victories were won when Clinton entered office – the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit and stronger enforcement of the CRA [Community Reinvestment Act]. Funding for low-income housing, legal services, job training and other programs has never been restored to pre-Reagan levels, and the widening disparities between the rich and the rest persist.
President George W. Bush, who often claims Reagan’s mantle, recently proposed cutting one-third of the Section 8 housing vouchers – a lifeline against homelessness for two million poor families.
M: Dude! Speaking of misleading with deliberate misdirection, the Republican TEA GOP is so desperate to win the White House in 2016 that they are seriously considering keeping Donald Trump in the race as the presidential contender and Jeb Bush as vice president. “Whatever it takes” is the campaign slogan for the Republican TEA GOP this time around. If the Republican TEA GOP doesn’t win the Executive Branch next year, they will have essentially disintegrated their brand of elitist muckraking.
D: Man! Elitist muckrakers is what the Republican brand is these days. Margaret Thatcher always insisted that someone else was responsible for the stands she took, including placing the blame for sanctioning milk for schoolchildren on a colleague and then blaming Ronald Reagan for the foreign policy decisions she and then-President Reagan had collaboratively designed.
M: Dude! Why lie like that?
D: Man! For the sake of Thatcher and Reagan winning their reelection campaigns! You see, after the Iran hostage crisis, the United States of America experienced a surge in patriotic sentiment amongst its citizenry and, coincidentally, Reagan and Herbert Walker Bush enjoyed that surge of patriotic pride upon entering the White House. But nobody knew that, in Thatcher’s England, the Reagan and Bush ticket had crafted another predicament to coincide with the Iran hostage crisis, known as the Iranian Embassy [located in London] siege, which lasted six days, April 30 to May 5, 1980. Coincidentally, Thatcher had been Prime Minister of England since May 4, 1979, and her approval rating would plummet steadily to just 23% by December 1980. Hence, she and the English Conservative Party needed a push too from deliberated distractions in foreign policy affairs. The eventual Falklands War of 1982 helped her get reelected, for which she had sought out the Reagan Republicans. But at a costly price to England, and subsequently US, of course!
M: Dude! How so? What’s the evidence like?
D: Man! Margaret Thatcher was just as concerned in the 1980s about lowering inflation as David Koch had expressed in his December 14, 2014, television interview with Barbara Walters for her annual roundup of the Ten Most Fascinating People. We may not know what exactly David Koch has in mind right now, but we do know exactly what Prime Minister Thatcher had in mind back then. Thatcher raised interest rates, which led to the fall of consumer spending and investments. This was the moment of demise for Thatcherism and Reaganomics, both stubbornly insisting upon supply-side, trickle-down economics.
M: Dude! How did Thatcher reconcile the obvious disadvantages of supply-side economics?
D: Man! Thatcher placed limits on public spending that led to such debilitating cuts in social services such as education and housing that at some point the University of Oxford refused to award her, an alumna, an honorary doctorate. In 1989 she even instituted a poll tax for Scotland that was launched in England a year later. This poll tax was like the flat tax championed presently by Republican presidential contender Ben Carson and others within his political party. And, by the way, the heavy tax placed upon North Sea oil extraction produced revenue for England that was then used to offset the heavy cost of those entitlement reforms made by Thatcher. Also, like Republican governors Scott Walker and Chris Christie today, Prime Minister Thatcher abhorred trade unions primarily because of the power they convened through protests and strikes. By March 1984, she was unafraid to take on the [English] National Coal Board, having labeled the [English] National Union of Mineworkers as an “enemy” and its actions unlawful a year earlier.
M: Dude! How did Reagan win re-election in 1984?
D: Man! By leading a 1983 invasion of the Caribbean island Grenada, located north of Venezuela. Again, the Reagan Republicans managed to secure American pride and enthusiasm for the venture. But internally, Operation Urgent Fury was doomed and brought a lot of contempt upon the United States government by the USSR and the UN Security Council to the point that United States Congressional Democrats sought to impeach President Reagan for violating international treaties in the process but, of course, were unsuccessful in their pursuit for justice. Reagan’s State Department had misled and misinformed the general public in the same strain of falsehoods as George Walker Bush and Dick Cheney would years later insist upon a second war with Iraq, promising the move would be swift and not as costly as it actually proved to be in reality. And, get this, our soldiers were subjected to utilizing tourist maps marked with handwritten grids and tactical specifics in their combat operation on the ground in Grenada!
M: Dude! Tourist maps!?!? Speaking of falsehoods, Donald Trump and Jeb Bush and the American Press Corps have devised a plan to another Bush presidency. Have you heard?
D: Man! No?
M: Dude! Donald Trump is scheduled to win the primaries and become the candidate for the Republican Party if he continues performing the way he is doing currently with the Republican National Committee scriptwriters and scheduled pre-scripted debates. Jeb Bush, on the other hand, will be assigned as Trump’s vice president and take over the Executive Branch and the White House by ousting Donald Trump from the United States presidency for some technicality involving Trump’s history of domestic abuse and illicit underground affiliations.
D: Man! So Trump is a Republican TEA GOP candidate because of his ability to command an audience and bring hyped news coverage to the RNC debates that would otherwise be bland and blah-blah-blah?
M: Dude! Of course! Yeah!
D: Man! Have the other Republican TEA GOP candidates been assigned cabinet positions inside the Donald Trump and/or Jeb Bush White House?
M: Dude! Of course! Yeah!
D: Man! Ora pro nobis!
