#Reagan
Yeah, let's talk about it

#Reagan

#Libertarianism doesn't work
#Individualism doesn't work.
more on the demise of sears from Beverly Dir
"Ayn Rand's - Sears Demise began much earlier.
Sears followed #Reagan's Union Busting and Lifetime Firing of 11,364 Experienced Professional Air Traffic Controllers who went on strike due to under staffing and wide spread fatigue which caused unsafe working conditions in the air traffic control system for in- flight plane accidents. There have been 22 near misses this year. Reagan's undermining of unions was also the Demise of the Middle Class.
1) In the late 1970s Sacramento, Sears "laid off" their BEST large appliance repairman & retained or hired young inexperienced cheaper repairmen.
2) In the 1990s, Raley's Supermarket, now with 129 Supermarkets worth $1.4 Billion did the same thing. Raley's grocery store CEO Mike Raley Teel is the wealthiest man in Sacramento according to Forbes, worth $ 940 Million. Despite the Corporate and Individual wealth, Teel with 92% ownership, cut the hours of all Senior staff with 10 years or more working for Raley's, from 40 hours weekly to 24 hours weekly, so that Raley's did NOT have to contribute as much to the employees retirement fund.
3) Our son worked for Raley's Bel Air Supermarkets for 26 years as the graveyard warehouse receiving and stocking crew manager, and he was also assigned to various stores to "clean up & reorganize" departments like the biggest money making liquor departments.
4) Raley's not only cut Workers' weekly hours and income, but workers consequently lost family medical benefits.
5) Our son had three kids to support, some older staff had kids in college who were forced to drop out, and some employees lost their homes through no fault of their own.
6) Our son and our grandkids were on the brink of homelessness were forced to move out of expensive California to a cheaper, but lower wage State on the East Coast.
7) Mike Teel's raw unrestrained capitalist greed ruined some workers and their family's' lives, contributed to the decline of the community and homelessness!
8.) Employers must have to hire employees for a full 40 hour work week before they can hire part time, underpaid, and under compensated workers who must work 3 jobs to barely pay for living expenses."

The Daddy of Fake News

#reagan #fakenews

#Nato in Osteuropa: Eine Osterweiterung des Denkens

#Brandt statt #Reagan , #Abrüstung statt Aufrüstung: So wuchs unser Autor auf. Auf seinen Reisen durch #Osteuropa lernte er einen Perspektivwechsel

#taz #rada #russland #putin #ukraine

https://taz.de/Nato-in-Osteuropa/!5839905

Diese „Nachbarschaft“ machte mehr als 150 Millionen Men­schen zu so etwas wie Spielmaterial einer russlandfreundlichen deutschen Außenpolitik, die sich auf die Ostpolitik Willy Brandts berief und auf russische „Sicherheitsinteressen“, hinter denen sich Putins Hegemonialstreben verbarg.

The Media Lens Book Of Obituaries – Deleting Tutu’s Criticism Of Israel

Media Lens

(...) Following his death in 2004, we described how Ronald Reagan’s eight years as US President (1981-89) had resulted in a vast bloodbath as Washington poured money and weapons into client dictatorships and right-wing death squads across Central America. The death toll: more than 70,000 political killings in El Salvador, more than 100,000 in Guatemala, and 30,000 killed in the US Contra war waged against Nicaragua. Journalist Allan Nairn described the latter as ‘One of the most intensive campaigns of mass murder in recent history.’ (Democracy Now, 8 June 2004)

On the BBC’s flagship Newsnight programme, Gavin Esler said of Reagan:

‘Many people believe that he restored faith in American military action after Vietnam through his willingness to use force, if necessary, in defence of American interests.’ (Newsnight, 9 June 2004) (...)

The basic rule: Official Friends of State are greeted by ostensibly independent corporate media with a wry, knowing, ultimately approving smile. Official Enemies of State are greeted with a sneer or a snarl.

In the immediate aftermath of Margaret Thatcher’s death on 8 April 2013, we found 461 UK national newspaper articles mentioning the word ‘Thatcher’. Of these, 29 articles mentioned ‘Thatcher’ and ‘Saddam’. None mentioned that Thatcher had armed and financed the Iraqi dictator. Links to torture and mass murder that would have been front and centre in reviewing the life of any Official Enemy were airbrushed from history. (...)

Also in 2013, following the death of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez (...)

The corporate media version of events was nutshelled by an editorial in the Independent titled:

‘Hugo Chávez – an era of grand political illusion comes to an end’

This of a leader who had reduced poverty by half, having sparked a regional move towards greater independence from the ruthless superpower to the North. The editorial continued:

‘Mr Chávez was no run-of-the-mill dictator. His offences were far from the excesses of a Colonel Gaddafi, say. What he was, more than anything, was an illusionist – a showman who used his prodigious powers of persuasion to present a corrupt autocracy fuelled by petrodollars as a socialist utopia in the making. The show now over, he leaves a hollowed-out country crippled by poverty, violence and crime. So much for the revolution.’

For the oligarch-owned Independent, then, Chávez – who had won 15 democratic elections, including four presidential elections – was a ‘dictator’. (...)

A further example of five-scythe filtering was provided by recent media coverage following the death of Desmond Tutu, the former Archbishop of Cape Town and chairman of South Africa’s truth and reconciliation commission. Tutu was one of the great leaders of the anti-apartheid movement, but he protested many other forms of oppression. In 2002, the Guardian published an opinion piece in which Tutu commented:

‘I’ve been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa. I have seen the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about.’ (...)

Tutu even drew attention to the power of the pro-Israel lobby in smearing criticism of Israel as ‘anti-semitism’:

‘to criticise it is to be immediately dubbed anti-semitic, as if the Palestinians were not semitic. I am not even anti-white, despite the madness of that group. And how did it come about that Israel was collaborating with the apartheid government on security measures?’ (...)

Elsewhere, Tutu wrote:

‘The withdrawal of trade with South Africa… was ultimately one of the key levers that brought the apartheid state – bloodlessly – to its knees… Those who continue to do business with Israel, who contribute to a sense of “normalcy” in Israeli society, are doing the people of Israel and Palestine a disservice.’

In December 2020, Tutu added:

‘Apartheid was horrible in South Africa and it’s horrible when Israel practises its own form of apartheid against the Palestinians, with checkpoints and a system of oppressive policies. Indeed another US statute, the Leahy law, prohibits US military aid to governments that systematically violate human rights.’

In a stirring example of just how low the Guardian has sunk under the editorship of Katharine Viner, the same newspaper that published Tutu’s comments made no mention whatever of Palestinians or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in its obituary on 6 December 2021.

In response, a Change.org petition, signed by more than 3,250 people, sent a searing open letter to Viner:

‘Tutu’s repeated criticism of Israeli apartheid policies, and his commitment to the cause of the Palestinian people, are all simply omitted.’ (...)

The BBC made no mention of the issue here, here and here. (...)

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer responded to the death of Tutu:

‘Desmond Tutu was a tower of a man, and a leader of moral activism. He dedicated his life to tackling injustice and standing up for the oppressed. His impact on the world crosses borders and echoes through generations. May he rest in peace.’

As the website Skwawkbox noted accurately in response:

‘But if Tutu had been a Labour member, Starmer would probably have expelled him, at least if he had the spine to do it, for comments in support of Palestinians and of boycotts and sanctions against Israel…’

Clearly, our media guardians of power were keen to say as little as possible about Tutu’s criticism of Israel without exposing themselves as outright totalitarians by blanking the issue 100% – 99% is a much better look, especially when reviewing the life of a courageous anti-fascist. (...)

Complete article

Tags: #obituary #desmond_tutu #tutu #reagan #ronald_reagan #central_america #el_salvador #guatemala #nicaragua #contra #thatcher #margareth_thatcher #media #journalism #journalist #news #interational_politics #fireign_relations #power #bbc #the_guardian #inependent #newspapers #news_media #venezuela #chaves #hugo_chaves #israel #anti-semitism #apartheid #pro-israel_lobby #labour #keir_starmer

Why Nelson #Mandela Was Viewed as a 'Terrorist' by the U.S. Until 2008

source: https://www.biography.com/news/nelson-mandela-terrorist-reagan-thatcher

“The South African #government is under no obligation to negotiate the future of the country with any organization that proclaims a goal of creating a communist state, and uses terrorist tactics and #violence to achieve it,” #Reagan said in a 1986 speech.

...

Succeeding leaders in the U.S. and U.K. had more favorable views of Mandela, who became South Africa’s president in 1994. Even so, the U.S. continued to classify Mandela and his party as terrorists until 2008. That July, President George W. #Bush signed a bill removing them from all terrorist lists.

#USA #politics #terrorList #terror #terrorism #history #problem

Remember me? I'm the idiot who started saluting my inferiors

#Reagan

Ronnie Raygun Doctrine

#reagan #fcc #murdoch #brainwash

The precipice. (We went over it earlier than most USAians probably think.)

The Last Honest Speech by a U.S. President

I was sixteen when President Jimmy Carter gave his so-called Malaise speech in 1979. Focusing on America’s wasteful energy consumption, Carter vowed to cut America’s dependence on oil imports while pushing alternative energies such as solar. In crafting his speech, he listened to regular Americans and diagnosed a national peril far worse than America’s wanton consumption of energy.

And for his honesty, Carter got voted out of office in 1980. The sunny optimism of Ronald Reagan arrived, though the “sunny” part didn’t include the solar panels that Carter had added to the White House. (Under Reagan, these were quickly removed.) For Carter’s expertise in science (he was formerly a naval nuclear engineer under Admiral Hyman Rickover) came Reagan’s fossil-fuel-friendly policies and Nancy Reagan’s penchant for astrology. It was morning again in America in the sense that profit once again took priority over policy and people – and fantasy took precedence over reality.

[Carter's speech was prophetic.]

... _ Carter told Americans in 1979 that: “We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I’ve warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.”_

[And that is the path we chose. We have not ventured from it since.]

The second, much to be preferred, path was: “the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our Nation and ourselves.”

Does anyone have any doubt about which path America chose under Reagan and his successors?

The “certain route to failure.” A route where tens of millions of Americans lose their health care during a pandemic; a route where the government bails out the richest corporations first and the poorest Americans last, if at all; a route where division and fragmentation are the order of the day, embraced by a president who revels in chaos and his own self-interest. And a route where that same man is likely to be reelected as president in November, despite his colossal mismanagement of a health crisis that he can’t even bring himself to understand, let alone attempt to control.

... Is it any surprise that real wages for workers in America have basically been flat since the time of Carter? Reagan instituted Robin Hood in reverse, facilitating an economy where the rich got far richer, mainly by trampling on the backs of the middle class and poor.

So, we collectively bought a cancerous fantasy in 1980, one which has now metastasized with a malignant and sociopathic exploiter, Donald Trump, at the helm.

[The whole article is a must-read.]

#Carter #USA #Honesty #Reagan #SnakeOil #AmericanIdiocy

https://www.laprogressive.com/last-honest-speech/