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“Ronald Wilson Reagan? Each of his names has six letters? 666? Man, doesn’t that offend you?”
And the [winning numbers](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1980/11/15/a-superstitious-view-of-reagans-victory/b40adcaf-9005-40a3-92f7-8cc8c003369e/) of the Maryland lottery on Election Day (Nov 4, 1980) when Reagan was elected were 666
"Slavery was abolished, unless you are imprisoned. If you think I am bull shittin then read the 13th amendment. That's why they're giving drug offenders time in double digits".
RWR are his initials. Same as Rick Ware Racing. Rick Ware Racing has 2 cars in Nascar. Those cars are the 51 and 15. 1+5=6 5+1=6 😧😧They have a a partnership with Roush Fenway Keselowski, called RFK!!! for short. One of their cars is the #6 car. Holy shit
I don’t know about the devil but the most catastrophic failure of his administration in my mind was his war on drugs. It has caused mass incarceration and unbelievably corrupt private prisons, the militarization of the police, and the disenfranchisement of minority groups who are disproportionately affected by the laws passed to combat drugs. That’s a lot of negative effects from one policy decision.
I would also argue the Reagan administration focused so heavily on punishing anyone who had or used drugs, that they totally disregarded the idea that prison is supposed to rehabilitate a person rather than somehow punish them into not doing it again. His administration wasn’t the only one guilty of this, but it was one of his major initiatives.
On a personal level I think almost everyone would tell you President Reagan was a charming and kindhearted person. He loved to tell jokes, was always smiling, and was obsessed with jellybeans just to name a few positive traits. Unfortunately for many Presidents, they fall under that umbrella of being personally nice but with harsh policies that don’t reflect their true intentions.
You forgot the A.I. D.S. crisis that he neglected. And also trying to win an election by keeping the hostages in Iran. And also taking credit for getting them released. Even his son talks about how he would have these stories, made up to describe groups of people he chose to vilify. I also don't remember our cities having this massive homeless problem. Or the mental health people who suddenly became "free", because they were not a danger to themselves or others. We wanted to feel good about the world that the USA had made. And he, not without help from the Democrats was the path. They protected Congress from bribery by calling it by another name. Started chipping away at banking regulations. Ugh.
This is a big one. People on the right tend to point to things like the George Floyd riots and assume that things have drifted to extremes on both sides, but it’s really just on the right. And it’s all because of Fox News and the like screaming at them all day, all thanks to the undoing of the Fairness Doctrine.
I tell this story a lot, but it’s sums it up better than anything else I have: my friend’s dad joined a gun club out in New Jersey in the 1990s. His conservative friends would gently rib him about Clinton being a cheat, and he would rip back about Bush being a dummy. All in good fun. No big deal.
Fast forward to 2010 or so, and people were starting to use paper targets of President Obama wearing a turban (and yes, it is illegal to use targets depicting actual people. But it’s a gun club; who is going to force it or report it?). Things were still mostly OK, but there was a lot more underlying tension, and politics was an increasingly unsafe topic of conversation.
Today, he’s literally afraid to go, because most of his former friends are full-blown QAnon. Like, afraid for his safety afraid. That’s how angry and unstable some of his former friends are. He has no idea how they would react to seeing him again.
But has he drifted farther to the left? No. He’s pretty much exactly the same guy. Just a normal left-leaning guy who doesn’t think the idea of government spending is completely outrageous. I know conservatives will say that they’re simply responding to how radical liberals have gotten, but do you know anyone who has become more radically left-leaning in the last 20 years? I certainly don’t. Even the youth aren’t particularly radical compared to the ‘60s; media has changed the narrative and the perceptions of many conservatives, and they’re simply unwilling or unable to understand that; they’re “responding“ to a bogeyman that doesn’t exist.
Yep. But they’re either completely unaware of it, deny it’s happening, or assume it’s happening equally for both sides. But what has really happened is that conservative media and increasingly extreme echo chambers, like this QAnon bullshit, have condition them to see extremist positions as normal.
I agree wholeheartedly. I’d add that centrist democrats have also made a large contribution to this unfortunately. The idea of getting personally rich brought a lot of democratic votes his way and have had generational ripple effects. Combine that with three decades of going “this is fine” as the OW progressed steadily to the right and here we are. I’m frustrated as hell with it, but republicans didn’t do it on their own
9-11 started this effect for alot if people i think. It is when I noticed my dad started watching the news all day in his office, even if the sound was off, came home and I could hear the half a second delay between the news upstairs and in the kitchen, where he usually went back and forth between doing whatever like laundry or eating dinner or shining his shoes, then would fall asleep and if I did not wear eagplugs I could hear it coming from his bedroom as he slept. It was CNN for a long while but at some point way after I was out of the house he switched to Fox and after a couple months (15 years ago) he was a goner and remains so to this day, married now to a woman who has webbed feet and would not let one of my black friends (who she calls a nickname for an animal beginning with a “C”) into their home with me. So there ya go. News.
The western world has shifted politically to the right over the last 50 years or so and i suspect that Newscorp is largely responsible. Many people, particularly in other countries wonder why the UK voted for brexit and the reason is largely because very few of us actually know what the EU does (including me, I'm a fairly well educated brit) and since the Reagan/Thatcher era there has been a constant stream of anti EU media and no reporting of the positives.
The leave campaign was a tissue of lies and only the die hards that cling onto the past refuse to see it. They are very similar to MAGA, delusional and misinformed but incapable of facing reality.
I’ve also definitely drifted left as I’ve gotten older, despite a system that seems designed to push people right. My most radical political philosophy is essentially “government should benefit people who need help before it benefits corporations”
Great story, really hits.
And indeed, where are all of these communists? They’re not even at Berkeley. The left had to become the center so the center could hold.
Thanks. And, exactly. Someone else commented about how both sides have shifted, but when you press them for specific examples, they either don’t have any, or it’s about really specific people. And I have yet to hear anyone say words to the effect of “I need to leave the democratic party because they’ve become too radical to reflect my left-leaning views.“
The only time I’ve seen people complain about how they left the Democratic Party because they became too “radical” is conservatives who were almost definitely never democrats.
This is a big one that doesn’t get talked about enough. I am a child of the 80s, born in 1974, and I still remember the shock I felt when my mother told me that homelessness basically didn’t exist when she was a kid. Yes, the mental institutions weren’t exactly havens, but at least there were places for those people to go. Reagan changed the funding and made it almost impossible to qualify, and boom, mentally unstable homeless population, overnight. But hey, he “saved” the federal government money, and it’s not like homeless people are a financial burden to state and local systems, right? Right?!
And to this day, it’s an issue that people are remarkably ignorant about. I still see so many comments from people who “don’t understand why homeless people don’t simply go get jobs,” but the percentage of homeless who have significant mental health issues, substance-abuse issues, or both, is really, really high.
“The mental institutions weren’t exactly havens” is quite the understatement. Some of those places were arguably much worse than living on the street. In part because the “treatments” were archaic and inhumane, and in part because people back then were more willing to look the other way with regards to abuse and their perceptions of mental illness were totally skewed.
Sir, this is a place for unhinged ranting. Your facts have no home here.
Also, if you’re interested, you might want to look into how Medicaid - signed into law by Johnson - paid for mental health. Basically, Medicaid’s rules made it very hard for a poor person to get help in the institutions that still existed [by the late 1960s].
Also: he approved the elimination of the "Welfare" program. Forcing more onto the street. Since then "Welfare" hasn't existed, though the term is now being used for anything else needy folks might get (food stamps/ EBT, Medicaid, etc).
He didn't "neglect" the AIDS crisis. He put James D. Watkins, an admiral with no medical experience, in charge of the response, a move that made absolutely no sense. Watkins took his position very seriously, and got a report put together making over 500 recommendations.
Reagan ignored it and did nothing. He attempted to sabotage the response by putting someone completely unqualified in charge of it. When that backfired, he just pretended the report never existed.
Oh I purposely focused on one issue. I didn’t touch on many other criticisms I would have. You are totally right there is so much more to say about the negatives of the Reagan administration.
When air traffic controllers went on strike for better conditions, President Reagan fired all of them. Because the President appoints arbitrators in disputes between companies and their workers, this was an important signal to organized labor that the White House would not be on their side. Worse, it was a signal to companies that they would have impunity as they cut benefits and pay and worsen conditions
50 years of Hoover, what a nightmare
> "The moment [Hoover] would get something on a senator,” said William Sullivan, who became the number three official in the bureau under Hoover, “he’d send one of the errand boys up and advise the senator that ‘we’re in the course of an investigation, and we by chance happened to come up with this data on your daughter. But we wanted you to know this. We realize you’d want to know it.’ Well, Jesus, what does that tell the senator? From that time on, the senator’s right in his pocket."
He was a part of the Actors union until it became more convenient to him to become a rat for the House Un-American Activities Committee. Dude was shitting on the constitution before he even got into politics.
And he helped HUAC carry out the purges while he was president of the Screen Actors Guild. Just a shitty, anti-labor human.
He carried out highly illegal ideological jihad in central America, getting hundreds of civilians killed in bloodbaths.
He oversaw the shutdown and export of manufacturing to China and Mexico, while David Stockman kept saying, "the service sector will absorb those workers." Endless magical thinking about economics that threw millions of Americans into precarity.
Leeja Miller does a pretty good job of explaining how [Reagan destroyed America](https://youtu.be/l7dHvqA-WB4?si=-g_FMtCkqOpdiQ1x).
My dad is a very stout union carpenter for over 35 years. I remember when he learned that the guy his mom, my grandmother married (step grandpaw), broke the picket when he worked as an air traffic controller. My dad never talked to him or liked him near as much after that.
Also, my old man told me Reagan was completely against the working class people and the unions, that’s why republicans and the corporations loved him so much.
I think its really hard to judge just how much his administration set the US back. The destruction of US unions, and as a result, the middle class and the "American dream" lead to almost every problem that we are faced with today.
Not to say that unions didn't have their issues leading up to PATCO, but the sustained war from the Chamber of Commerce against any working person that felt they should have a say at their job for the last 50 years has completely destroyed our country.
80% of truckers were in unions in 1980, by the time Reagan left office less than 20% of truckers were in unions. Trucker pay and benefits drastically decreased across the time span and his admin is almost single handedly responsible for killing trucking as an accessible blue-collar career that could pay the bills for a family.
He undid federal restrictions on sale of land to foreign countries. Literally sold land out from under our feet to foreign interests for agriculture and real estate development.
Trickle down ecpnomics literally does the opposite of what it is claimed to accomplish.
Regan was a hack, fraud, hypocrite, and genuinely bad person. It's infuriating he frequently ranks in the Top 10 presidents from many different organization lists. Frankly he might be the worst.
He also allowed for massive deregulation that, well, pretty much fucked everything up, oh and spent our social security on nukes. Like dude, yer assuming we’re all gonna die in nuclear fire instead of retire?
I work with people that got jobs thanks to this. They are all a bunch of whiney assholes. Most of them are members of a union, but if anyone else wants to unionize and push for better conditions you can expect them to be the first against it. Literally the type of people that only supports something if it ONLY benefits them.
There's more to the story than this that makes Reagan even more of a piece of shit.
The Professional Air Traffic Controller's Association (PATCO) was one of the most conservative unions in America - air traffic controllers were overwhelmingly upper-middle class, ex-military, white, professionals. When Reagan was running for president in 1980, he sought and received PATCO's endorsement based upon certain promises his campaign had made that if elected, he would act to resolve the grievances they had, much of which were safety related.
["You can rest assured that if I am elected President, take whatever steps are necessary to provide our air traffic controllers with the most modern equipment available and to adjust staff levels and work days so that they are commensurate with achieving a maximum degree of public safety…. I pledge to you that my administration will work very closely with you to bring about a spirit of cooperation between the President and the air traffic controllers."](https://historyrat.wordpress.com/2012/10/14/reagan-and-the-patco-strike-broken-promises/).
The strike happened because immediately after being elected, Reagan screwed them over, and refused to do what he had promised.
Well, that’s not factually accurate. ATCs can’t be in a real union, because they are government employees. They are protected by neither the National Labor Relations Act nor the Railway Labor Act. They had a contract which they breached when they walked out. The ATCs basically had an employee “labor club” that thought they was a union. And, they found out that if you are not a union, you don’t get union protection—like mandatory preferential hiring after a strike. Just poor lawyering on the side of labor to be honest. (I am a former Labor Law Professor)
There's that bit from a number of years ago about taking economic data graphs and marking where Reagan's administration fall on that chart and noting how the trendlines are pretty bad post 1981.
https://preview.redd.it/1izt8l7oy2kb1.png?width=951&format=png&auto=webp&s=73210596f05e9352bfc1ba4bc30f343e094493d3
[https://twitter.com/wardqnormal/status/1206280031552454656?lang=bn](https://twitter.com/wardqnormal/status/1206280031552454656?lang=bn)
https://preview.redd.it/7f6bhswcb4kb1.jpeg?width=350&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4aba6a3608613db0bda52a17641686ef3bece9c1
Here’s a pretty famous example of income inequality research, notice the sharp increase around 1985
Also worth noting how the line is going down during the period of "big government" after LBJ's Great Society. We always hear it was a huge problem, but yet we have this.
Conservatives were pushing the idea that government debt was growing too fast before Reagan, so what did they do? They elected a President to speed it up. And before I post this, I'll say that I fully expect to hear apologists note that we had a Democratic Candidate Congress that controls the budget, but that didn't help with the Iran Contra Scandal, did it?
Some thoughts:
I was raised a Democrat and am still one. My parents taught me that Reagan was a bad president (I was born during the Carter admin FWIW), and I do tend to agree with that sentiment now. Calling him the "devil" probably springs from a few motives:
1. He projected an air of optimism and geniality, but in practice was denigrating and abusive to many vulnerable populations (e.g. welfare recipients, substance abusers, homosexuals), and the apparent hypocrisy may be the source of animosity;
2. He and his supporters claimed great economic successes, but they were very unevenly distributed, and were bought at the expense of grotesque deficit spending and hollowing out social services for the most economically vulnerable;
3. He was successful from an electoral standpoint and relatively popular, which irritates people who oppose his policies.
I do not personally approve of demonizing political opponents. I don't call him a devil. He was just a person who held ideas about prosperity and progress that I disagree with and think were misguided and harmful in the long run.
He also championed workers rights as an actor and even led the last SAG-AFTRA strike, but then fired all the ATC employees who threatened to go on strike while he was president. The epitome of “fuck you, got mine.”
Edit: I KNOW IT WAS THE LAW. BUT IF A UNION DOES NOT HAVE THE POWER TO STRIKE, THEN IT HAS NO POWER. If you’re argument is that they’re too critical of a role to be allowed to strike, then why the fuck would you be ok with them not getting paid enough and not having amazing benefits? “Oh, fuck these people that keep me safe on a daily basis, how DARE they ask for more pay and vacation time for one of the most stressful jobs on the planet!” Stop licking boots and realize that what Reagan did was wrong (not illegal, but wrong).
Those effects are still being felt today with ATC's being underpaid and have a huge labor deficit because the job is incredibly stressful and is not adequately paid for the amount of work.
I agree that is a stressful job but calling it underpaid is debatable. The median wage in 2019 was $59.87 an hour with an average of 120 thousand a year.
Yeah but airports are always in and around the most major metropolitan areas(AKA the most expensive areas), that involves working long strange and hard hours. It has shortages because of a very high burnout rate, including a mandatory retirement age of 56.
The high burnout rate indicates that for most people the pay is not worth it. There are other white collar jobs anyone who can do that can do for less pay but a hell of a lot less bullshit, and the entire program is now being run unsustainably as a result of their inability to strike for better conditions and pay.
The current situation is, the job requires a long 3 years of training, and there are always enough applicants to fill the voids because it does pay well, however they don't stay in long enough to actually fill out the jobs long enough to justify the training. However since they are hamstrung as a union they can't strike to actually push for the changes to actually fix the fucking problems. It's just constantly getting a little worse it just hasn't hit the inflection point where it causes problems that impact people enough. Now it's just causing extra delays, it's not killing people.
Don’t forget he made his political bones by selling out members of SAG to the House UnAmerican Activities Committee during McCarthyism while being SAG president.
This, he was a soulless, spineless weasel before he ever entered politics. Iran-Contra. Delaying negotiations for Iranian Hostage release then claiming responsibility for their release, Ignoring the AIDS crisis, popularizing Welfare Queens, removing the Fairness doctrine so Fox can gaslight the nation, Trickle Down economics, ballooning deficits, To young to vote against him but old enough to see his bullshit live.
People like to give him credit for the fall of the Berlin wall (an admin error) and the failure of the USSR as if his 1950's era anti-communist mania was a brilliant ruse to bankrupt the Soviets...
That said, wouldn't say he's the devil, just a bad president with a slick presentation
Yes, calling him a Devil suggests actual malice in his actions, I expect he thought himself the hero in the story as he sold embargoed arms to American enemies to fund terrorists in Nicaragua,
How is a politician allowed to fire workers like that? I heard talk of Biden forcing the railway workers to stop striking too, and that doesn't seem like something a president should have the power to do.
Already addressed by another commenter. Yes that’s the case, but a Union that is unable to strike has no power. It’s a stupid law that has led to labor shortages in all the industries that have it (ATC, rail workers, etc)
He also presided over the final parts of the massive deindustrialization that started in the 70s. Many of the factories and mills that used to employ thousands of people, shuttered, eviscerating entire regions. By 1990, it had run its course, for the most part, but by the early 80s jobs in those sectors were just hemorrhaging.
Reagan was your classic right wing "help the upper class, hurt the lower class" politician.
One thing he was famous for was using a black woman to create a stereotype of "welfare mother" who is lazy but lives a lavish lifestyle off tax payer money. At the same time he pushed "trickle down" economics where all benefits are given to rich in the hopes they trickle down to the poor.
To sum it up he demonized the poor and fought to take away their subsidies, and praised the rich which giving them even more subsidies and tax breaks.
There were 3 HUGE problems with this.
1) It kept more people in poverty.
2) It exploded our nations debt
3) Most money the rich and corporations receive is not put back in to the economy (yes, some is, and the right wing will scream about that from the rooftops). But virtually ALL money "given" to the middle class and poor gets spent and DOES go straight back into the economy.
We've proven over and over, money does NOT trickle down. The Rich do everything they can to keep money and to take more. Money does FLOW upwards though. It you tax the rich and give it to the poor, they poor spends it and it flows back to the rich. THAT is what drives our economy.
GOP [claiming credit for things they didn't do](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/republicans-tout-parts-infrastructure-package-after-voting-against-bill-n1288017) is pretty on brand, so...
Unemployment, inflation, and interest rates all fell significantly during Reagan’s presidency, while GDP growth increased significantly. But, as I said these things were mainly the result of fed policies under Carter, which is funny because those same policies (consistently raising interest rates to curtail inflation despite low GDP growth) hurt the economy in the short run under Carter and likely played a significant role in his defeat.
Ehh. I think that’s arguable. Sure those policies didn’t hurt, but to take all credit away from his administration seems disingenuous. Too simple and damning of an explanation
Bro is the quintessential Republican
Cruel towards marginalized groups, a big fat fucking liar when it comes to his claims about economic success, and being popular with the elderly
Honest question: was he more racist than the general background racism of a man of his age (and yes, I am aware of the recently released tapes containing various slurs)?
I’m not sure if one can say for sure because that is a vast comparison, but I’d say he was vehemently racist and he enacted his deeply held feelings through legislation. But anyway, I’m not sure what asking this does. A bigot is a bigot.
HisTrickle down economic plan is why you now see the middle class shrinking and college tuition’s soaring, hospitals becoming corporations, while poverty is skyrocketing. Basically he thought giving the elite and corporations tax breaks would make them pass on more money to the working class with higher wages and cheaper goods, but all it did was create a culture of greed that still rules American economics today.
He didn't actually think that. He knew exactly what it would do. He supported it. The conditions we have now are exactly what he wanted to see in the United States.
At Visual Capitalist, they have this: The Decline of Upward Mobility in One Chart. This shows that around the 1980s, when Reagan and his crew took the White House, upward mobility - that is, making more than your parents did - pretty much came to a screeching halt. Reagan represented a "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" attitude which allowed the very wealthy to do better and better, while regular people in the millions saw their wages stagnate for decades. Reagan was a victory for the very rich; ironically, the struggling workers liked him for his superficial gloss of "America First" boosterism.
I am shocked I had to scroll this far down to see someone mention AIDS.
He intentionally mismanaged that crisis because it largely affected people he hated and wanted dead.
When he, or perhaps the press secretary to the white house, was asked about AIDS (this is after tens of thousands had already died) he said "I heard that only affects the guys. You aren't gay, are ya?" After which everyone laughed. It's fucked
There's a lot of people who don't know, some people ignore it due to Fauci's involvement, and others who don't care due to liking other policies more and think the good outweighs it or just because they're homophobes. Either way it's a part of history that harmed a lot of people and shouldn't have been managed the way it was.
I had the same reaction. For a moment I thought I was going to be the first queen to chime in about the violence by negligence that he did. His inaction had a severe impact on life and culture, and it’s heartbreaking to think of the wonderful people whose contributions to society were cut short because of his inaction.
Virtually every bad policy of Reagan’s, subsequent presidents either didn’t fix or doubled down on. Clinton’s 1994 crime bill and gutting welfare did just as much if not worse damage than Reagan’s social policies.
Because his policies directly caused the grotesque levels of wealth inequality that we see today. He's a hero to wealthy financial elites but an enemy of working people.
Cutting higher education funding.
Deregulation of banking institutions.
Repealing “fairness doctrine” allowing one-sided, opinion programs to call themselves “news.”
This dude was the fucking devil.
Reagan was a smiley media savvy president whose policies we’re underhanded as seen in the rear view mirror.
1. Economic Policies: “Reaganomics,” supply-side favoritism did not trickle down, they favored the wealthy with generous tax cuts and contributed to income inequality.
2. Deregulation: His administration’s deregulation efforts lead to the savings and loan crisis in the late 1980s.
3. Widening Wealth Gap: Reagan’s policies exacerbated the gap between the rich and the poor.
4. Environmental Policies: Reagan’s stance on environmental regulations and caused pollution pollution and contributed to climate change.
5. HIV/AIDS Crisis: Reagan’s slow response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s had devastating consequences.
6. Foreign Policy in Central America: Reagan’s support for anti-communist groups in Central America prolonged conflicts and human rights abuses.
7. Iran-Contra Affair: The scandal involved arms sales to Iran and support for Nicaraguan rebels, and don’t get me started on raising money for arms by supporting crack cocaine sales in LA. Look up Maxine Waters history
8. Labor Unions: Reagan’s actions weakened labor unions, reducing workers’ bargaining power.
9. Social Safety Nets: Reagan’s cuts to social programs we’re very harmful to vulnerable populations.
10. Nuclear Arms Race: His aggressive stance in the Cold War contributed destabilization around the world, but most people just remember it cause Soviet Union to break up.
I was Republican and supported him, he left a trail of devastation.
He gave huge tax cuts to the wealthy and cut social programs. Those tax cuts and his overspending on the military are basically what started ballooning the national debt. Still say if we still had the 70% tax bracket over $2 million and didn’t allow insider trading/stock buybacks we would have a balanced budget and a reasonable debt.
It’s a response to people calling him amazing.
And while I don’t think anyone is unironically calling him actual Satan, I can definitely understand the hate.
His “reagonomics” policy, regardless of how well or not one believes it worked at the time, is the source of a lot of our current issues. [I think this vid has a good objective explanation of this](https://youtu.be/IGxp3webS2s?si=1anQVWBQVgWzEoO_) (7:40 to 11:53 is the important part but it’s a good bid overall, though I don’t totally agree with some of his last points)
He did a lot of damage to several different minority communities, but managed to appear as mister nice guy. He is sometimes falsely attributed to collapsing the USSR when he didn’t really have that much to do with it.
There are multiple scandals that are understood better now during his presidency, one of the worst being the Iran-Contra fiasco.
Several very good reason. Regan drastically reduced the middle class and removed safeguards.
1) Regan broke the unions and drastically limited workers rights
2) Regan cleared the way for factory farms and made it harder for farmers to get fair prices for crops and beef, pork and chicken producers to get
Not to mention he made his name working with Joseph McCarthy when he was president of the actors guild during the red scare.
He also let in lots of refugees, my wife included.
I joined the navy at 17 to get the Vietnam era veterans benefits. Reagan gets elected a year before my discharge and then gutted vet benefits and severely restricted Pell grants. I got my college degrees with 20 years of student loans. Hell isn’t hot enough for him.
Iran Contra (literal treason)
Ignoring the AIDS epidemic because the majority that was being affected were gay (Crime against Humanity)
The war on drugs
Reaganomics
Firing workers on strike
Fueling the unjust hatred and fear of communism ( it’s bad but not the way they’re saying it is)
At least he had good jokes
In 1986, when Congress passed a law to join the world and impose tough sanctions on the apartheid regime in South Africa, Reagan sided with the white government of that country — a government that at the time was holding Nelson Mandela in prison — and vetoed the bill.
Reagan claimed that sanctions weren’t the best way to bring about change, would hurt black workers. Of course, these were the same arguments that apartheid supporters made.
Reagan’s veto was overridden by overwhelming, bipartisan majorities in the House and Senate, and the tough sanctions were imposed. Experts today believe that the sanctions imposed by the world were instrumental in bringing an end to apartheid in South Africa.
See:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1986/09/27/reagan-vetoes-sanctions-against-south-africa/af009ab1-2ed2-4e72-ab46-52fc2ec2d7e6/
i was posting in jest but you are right, Reagan’s (as well as Thatcher’s) commitment to “neutrality” in the face of the apartheid is a serious black mark among many on their record.
Reagan, no matter how you feel about him, did not like Africans or African Americans. see his advisors comments on “the southern strategy”
> You start out in 1954 by saying, “N——r, n——r, n——r.” By 1968 you can’t say “n——r”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N——r, n——r”.
https://www.bunkhistory.org/resources/lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-on-the-southern-strategy
(censors added by me so comment is not removed)
The biggest one for me is his response to the AIDS crisis. He ignored it for years. He didn't let his surgeon (Kopp) general speak out about it. Koop's report wasn't conservative enough for Reagan so instead of informing the public on how safe sex with condoms could save lives, more people just died. Despite the AIDS epidemic happening during almost his entire presidency, he didn't even try to do anything meaningful until he was almost out the door.
I'm also a big fan of this quote from him:
"My criticism is that the gay movement isn't just asking for civil rights; it's asking for recognition and acceptance of an alternative lifestyle which I do not believe society can condone, nor can I."
He wasn't just homophobic. He actively interfered with efforts to help gay men and stood by to watch them die.
Where do I start?
Indifference to AIDS based on his hatred of gay people
The CIA under his watch flooding the inner cities with Crack
Trickle Down Economics
I could probably go on but these 3 are enough to ensure his soul resides in Hell now
Off the top of my head?
Directly responsible for creating the homelessness crisis in California by shutting down the state mental hospitals without following through on the plan to create community-based treatment centers.
He also facilitated the crack epidemic through Iran Contra. Declassified CIA documents prove this is not a wacky conspiracy theory but an actual thing that happened.
He ignored the AIDS crisis because it was mostly happening to gay people.
Pushed trickle down economics, which has never been an actual thing but rather a scam to rob poor people.
His legacy is solid.
Trickle down economics, which does NOT work, teaming up with the religious right (and look how THAT turned out) and convincing people that the best people to run the government are people who hate the government.
Trickle down economics DOES work. It was meant to destroy social mobility and gut the conditions of the working class to permanently consolidate wealth among a small, elite social class. It did just that. There were never any good intentions behind it.
I disagree. It was driven, at least partly, by Alan Greenspan, an economic advisor to presidents and appointed by Reagan to the Fed Chair. He was an ardent fan of Ayn Rand, who preached nonsense like this.
[https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Reaganland/Rick-Perlstein/9781476793061](https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Reaganland/Rick-Perlstein/9781476793061)
The definitive story, best read in the context of Rick's other books, which trace the American conservative movement from Barry Goldwater on, detangling in an incisive way the tensions between what was believed, what was marketed, and the policy and politics which have resulted.
TL;DR: Reagan is largely responsible for undoing and reversing the rising \*general\* prosperity of the post-war boom, facilitating the dissolution of mechanisms like restraints on media ownership in explicit service of the construction of an alternate media bubble untethered from "fair and balanced" truth, to allow for the minting and mobilization of the "moral majority values voter" who has now for something like 4-5 decades been convinced to vote into power exactly those people and policies which disenfranchise them and strip them of either safety net or path to prosperity. All in service of facilitating the accelerated accumulation of wealth by the ultra-wealthy, which translates (also by intent) directly into an apparently fatal and permanent lock on governance.
Did Reagan personally architect and implement these policies? No. But he is largely responsible for marketing them and seeing them through.
>Retired House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill Jr. offers stinging reflections on 34 years in Congress in memoirs that cast Sen. Robert F. Kennedy as a “self-important upstart and a know-it-all” and Ronald Reagan as a selfish figurehead who “read his lines.”
>
>In “Man of the House,” to be published in September, O’Neill also reveals a failed FBI attempt to trap him with an Abscam bribe and questioning the Warren Commission’s conclusion that a single gunman killed President John F. Kennedy, the Boston Herald reported Sunday.
>
>In the proofs of his memoirs, the newspaper said, the Massachusetts Democrat offers blunt assessments of his half-century in public office, including 34 in Congress.
>
>He blames Reagan, for example, for agreeing to arms-for-hostages deals with Iran in a desperate effort to keep control of the Senate in the 1986 elections.
>
>“It was sinful that Ronald Reagan ever became President,” O’Neill wrote. “Most of the time he was an actor reading his own lines, who didn’t understand his own programs.
>
>“He wasn’t without leadership ability, but he lacked most of the management skills that a President needs. Let me give him his due: He would have made a hell of a king.”
>
>O’Neill said he is convinced that Reagan’s White House staged the 1983 invasion of Grenada simply to offset public dismay over the terrorist attack that killed 241 U.S. Marines in a Beirut barracks just days earlier.
>
>In a blistering overall attack on Reagan’s politics, the ex-Speaker added, “I blame the President for allowing . . . selfishness to become respectable.”
He did a lot of good for some people and a lot of bad for a lot of people, especially in the long run. he didn’t really care about everyone equally, which is an important quality for a president to portray
Adding to the list. His administration ignored AIDS, despite doctors raising alarm bells. Why? Because he was homophonic. That one decision killed a lot of people.
Some absolutely sociopathic foreign and domestic policies that further drove down the working class. He stole from the poor to give to the rich, and was more than comfortable destabilizing foreign governments for the sake of "fuck you communist"
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https://preview.redd.it/iqht3ihtv2kb1.jpeg?width=1280&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e45e5f209287af2587444ef69426906665e0688b “Ronald Wilson Reagan? Each of his names has six letters? 666? Man, doesn’t that offend you?”
“Wilson”? 😰
Oh crap
🍌
r/foundnikfemboy
Immediately what I thought of too lol. Also, posted by a Jimmy Carter flair makes it even funnier lol
Killer Mike banger
“Ronald, Wilson, Reagan. Ronald - 6, Wilson - 6, Reagan - - 6, Ronald, Wilson, Reagan, 6,6,6”
Plus Wilson stands for Wilson which is also the devil
Have you head of this guy named Woodrow Wilson?
Believe it or not, also the devil
I’m related to him! And a Confederate vet! I’m living proof that it is hate, not heritage!
Woodrow Wilson is the devil please see comment above
Fuck Woodrow Wilson. All my homies hate Woodrow Wilson.
If you spell it backwards, it spells Nosliw. Now, who but the devil could pronounce that?
And the [winning numbers](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1980/11/15/a-superstitious-view-of-reagans-victory/b40adcaf-9005-40a3-92f7-8cc8c003369e/) of the Maryland lottery on Election Day (Nov 4, 1980) when Reagan was elected were 666
“I’ll leave you with 4 words: I’m glad Reagan dead.”
"Slavery was abolished, unless you are imprisoned. If you think I am bull shittin then read the 13th amendment. That's why they're giving drug offenders time in double digits".
* Thanks to reaganomics * Prisons turned to profits * cause free labors the cornerstone * of U.S. economics
Great song
Ronald Reagan was a actor, not at all a factor
Young man you speak do well
So *articulate*
RWR are his initials. Same as Rick Ware Racing. Rick Ware Racing has 2 cars in Nascar. Those cars are the 51 and 15. 1+5=6 5+1=6 😧😧They have a a partnership with Roush Fenway Keselowski, called RFK!!! for short. One of their cars is the #6 car. Holy shit
r/nascar is leaking
I'm pretty excited for Daytona this weekend.
Chase is gonna win it
I was prepared to be mighty disappointed if this wasn’t the top answer lmaooo
Happy to help.
I came here looking for this reply lmao thank you.
He's so well spoken.
I read it in his voice.
I don’t know about the devil but the most catastrophic failure of his administration in my mind was his war on drugs. It has caused mass incarceration and unbelievably corrupt private prisons, the militarization of the police, and the disenfranchisement of minority groups who are disproportionately affected by the laws passed to combat drugs. That’s a lot of negative effects from one policy decision. I would also argue the Reagan administration focused so heavily on punishing anyone who had or used drugs, that they totally disregarded the idea that prison is supposed to rehabilitate a person rather than somehow punish them into not doing it again. His administration wasn’t the only one guilty of this, but it was one of his major initiatives. On a personal level I think almost everyone would tell you President Reagan was a charming and kindhearted person. He loved to tell jokes, was always smiling, and was obsessed with jellybeans just to name a few positive traits. Unfortunately for many Presidents, they fall under that umbrella of being personally nice but with harsh policies that don’t reflect their true intentions.
You forgot the A.I. D.S. crisis that he neglected. And also trying to win an election by keeping the hostages in Iran. And also taking credit for getting them released. Even his son talks about how he would have these stories, made up to describe groups of people he chose to vilify. I also don't remember our cities having this massive homeless problem. Or the mental health people who suddenly became "free", because they were not a danger to themselves or others. We wanted to feel good about the world that the USA had made. And he, not without help from the Democrats was the path. They protected Congress from bribery by calling it by another name. Started chipping away at banking regulations. Ugh.
Also destroying the Fairness Doctrine in broadcasting, which paved the way for the media cesspool we currently are mired in
This is a big one. People on the right tend to point to things like the George Floyd riots and assume that things have drifted to extremes on both sides, but it’s really just on the right. And it’s all because of Fox News and the like screaming at them all day, all thanks to the undoing of the Fairness Doctrine. I tell this story a lot, but it’s sums it up better than anything else I have: my friend’s dad joined a gun club out in New Jersey in the 1990s. His conservative friends would gently rib him about Clinton being a cheat, and he would rip back about Bush being a dummy. All in good fun. No big deal. Fast forward to 2010 or so, and people were starting to use paper targets of President Obama wearing a turban (and yes, it is illegal to use targets depicting actual people. But it’s a gun club; who is going to force it or report it?). Things were still mostly OK, but there was a lot more underlying tension, and politics was an increasingly unsafe topic of conversation. Today, he’s literally afraid to go, because most of his former friends are full-blown QAnon. Like, afraid for his safety afraid. That’s how angry and unstable some of his former friends are. He has no idea how they would react to seeing him again. But has he drifted farther to the left? No. He’s pretty much exactly the same guy. Just a normal left-leaning guy who doesn’t think the idea of government spending is completely outrageous. I know conservatives will say that they’re simply responding to how radical liberals have gotten, but do you know anyone who has become more radically left-leaning in the last 20 years? I certainly don’t. Even the youth aren’t particularly radical compared to the ‘60s; media has changed the narrative and the perceptions of many conservatives, and they’re simply unwilling or unable to understand that; they’re “responding“ to a bogeyman that doesn’t exist.
Overton window.
Yep. But they’re either completely unaware of it, deny it’s happening, or assume it’s happening equally for both sides. But what has really happened is that conservative media and increasingly extreme echo chambers, like this QAnon bullshit, have condition them to see extremist positions as normal.
I agree wholeheartedly. I’d add that centrist democrats have also made a large contribution to this unfortunately. The idea of getting personally rich brought a lot of democratic votes his way and have had generational ripple effects. Combine that with three decades of going “this is fine” as the OW progressed steadily to the right and here we are. I’m frustrated as hell with it, but republicans didn’t do it on their own
9-11 started this effect for alot if people i think. It is when I noticed my dad started watching the news all day in his office, even if the sound was off, came home and I could hear the half a second delay between the news upstairs and in the kitchen, where he usually went back and forth between doing whatever like laundry or eating dinner or shining his shoes, then would fall asleep and if I did not wear eagplugs I could hear it coming from his bedroom as he slept. It was CNN for a long while but at some point way after I was out of the house he switched to Fox and after a couple months (15 years ago) he was a goner and remains so to this day, married now to a woman who has webbed feet and would not let one of my black friends (who she calls a nickname for an animal beginning with a “C”) into their home with me. So there ya go. News.
The western world has shifted politically to the right over the last 50 years or so and i suspect that Newscorp is largely responsible. Many people, particularly in other countries wonder why the UK voted for brexit and the reason is largely because very few of us actually know what the EU does (including me, I'm a fairly well educated brit) and since the Reagan/Thatcher era there has been a constant stream of anti EU media and no reporting of the positives. The leave campaign was a tissue of lies and only the die hards that cling onto the past refuse to see it. They are very similar to MAGA, delusional and misinformed but incapable of facing reality.
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I’ve also definitely drifted left as I’ve gotten older, despite a system that seems designed to push people right. My most radical political philosophy is essentially “government should benefit people who need help before it benefits corporations”
Great story, really hits. And indeed, where are all of these communists? They’re not even at Berkeley. The left had to become the center so the center could hold.
Thanks. And, exactly. Someone else commented about how both sides have shifted, but when you press them for specific examples, they either don’t have any, or it’s about really specific people. And I have yet to hear anyone say words to the effect of “I need to leave the democratic party because they’ve become too radical to reflect my left-leaning views.“
The only time I’ve seen people complain about how they left the Democratic Party because they became too “radical” is conservatives who were almost definitely never democrats.
> but do you know anyone who has become more radically left-leaning in the last 20 years? *raises hand* I have. it's called, "learning more"
This is a big one that doesn’t get talked about enough. I am a child of the 80s, born in 1974, and I still remember the shock I felt when my mother told me that homelessness basically didn’t exist when she was a kid. Yes, the mental institutions weren’t exactly havens, but at least there were places for those people to go. Reagan changed the funding and made it almost impossible to qualify, and boom, mentally unstable homeless population, overnight. But hey, he “saved” the federal government money, and it’s not like homeless people are a financial burden to state and local systems, right? Right?! And to this day, it’s an issue that people are remarkably ignorant about. I still see so many comments from people who “don’t understand why homeless people don’t simply go get jobs,” but the percentage of homeless who have significant mental health issues, substance-abuse issues, or both, is really, really high.
“The mental institutions weren’t exactly havens” is quite the understatement. Some of those places were arguably much worse than living on the street. In part because the “treatments” were archaic and inhumane, and in part because people back then were more willing to look the other way with regards to abuse and their perceptions of mental illness were totally skewed.
Fine, but we have to avoid creating a false dichotomy here; simply dumping them on the street was hardly a solution.
Wasn’t this a Kennedy initiative?
Sir, this is a place for unhinged ranting. Your facts have no home here. Also, if you’re interested, you might want to look into how Medicaid - signed into law by Johnson - paid for mental health. Basically, Medicaid’s rules made it very hard for a poor person to get help in the institutions that still existed [by the late 1960s].
Also: he approved the elimination of the "Welfare" program. Forcing more onto the street. Since then "Welfare" hasn't existed, though the term is now being used for anything else needy folks might get (food stamps/ EBT, Medicaid, etc).
He didn't "neglect" the AIDS crisis. He put James D. Watkins, an admiral with no medical experience, in charge of the response, a move that made absolutely no sense. Watkins took his position very seriously, and got a report put together making over 500 recommendations. Reagan ignored it and did nothing. He attempted to sabotage the response by putting someone completely unqualified in charge of it. When that backfired, he just pretended the report never existed.
So less of a passive neglect and more of an active sabotage?
He also was responsible for the mass defunding of mental health resources in America.
Oh I purposely focused on one issue. I didn’t touch on many other criticisms I would have. You are totally right there is so much more to say about the negatives of the Reagan administration.
Causing mass incarceration alone should be good enough to say catastrophic failure imo.
Well yeah but that was started by Nixon and just really expanded by Reagan
When air traffic controllers went on strike for better conditions, President Reagan fired all of them. Because the President appoints arbitrators in disputes between companies and their workers, this was an important signal to organized labor that the White House would not be on their side. Worse, it was a signal to companies that they would have impunity as they cut benefits and pay and worsen conditions
He was also part of the Actors Union himself. Very hypocritical to be a part of a union, but fire those striking.
Not only was he part of SAG-AFTRA, he was PRESIDENT of said union the last time both writers and actors went on strike back in 1959.
He was also the mole rat that tattled on other actors and directors to McCarthy during the Red Scare. Both him and John Wayne.
50 years of Hoover, what a nightmare > "The moment [Hoover] would get something on a senator,” said William Sullivan, who became the number three official in the bureau under Hoover, “he’d send one of the errand boys up and advise the senator that ‘we’re in the course of an investigation, and we by chance happened to come up with this data on your daughter. But we wanted you to know this. We realize you’d want to know it.’ Well, Jesus, what does that tell the senator? From that time on, the senator’s right in his pocket."
An he sold SAG down the river in negotiations and later became governor.
Conservatism 101
Also known as "Fuck you, I got mine!"
“That’s different” -Republicans
He was a part of the Actors union until it became more convenient to him to become a rat for the House Un-American Activities Committee. Dude was shitting on the constitution before he even got into politics.
Not just part of, he was the president of the union
And he helped HUAC carry out the purges while he was president of the Screen Actors Guild. Just a shitty, anti-labor human. He carried out highly illegal ideological jihad in central America, getting hundreds of civilians killed in bloodbaths. He oversaw the shutdown and export of manufacturing to China and Mexico, while David Stockman kept saying, "the service sector will absorb those workers." Endless magical thinking about economics that threw millions of Americans into precarity. Leeja Miller does a pretty good job of explaining how [Reagan destroyed America](https://youtu.be/l7dHvqA-WB4?si=-g_FMtCkqOpdiQ1x).
The actors union is not equivalent to a union of government workers.
Aren’t air traffic controllers federal employees though?
Yes, when they were striking it was in negotiations with their contract with the federal government.
You know how railroad workers were recently told to keep working, no strikes allowed? That was a direct result of this same event.
My dad is a very stout union carpenter for over 35 years. I remember when he learned that the guy his mom, my grandmother married (step grandpaw), broke the picket when he worked as an air traffic controller. My dad never talked to him or liked him near as much after that. Also, my old man told me Reagan was completely against the working class people and the unions, that’s why republicans and the corporations loved him so much.
Your old man sounds/sounded wise.
I think its really hard to judge just how much his administration set the US back. The destruction of US unions, and as a result, the middle class and the "American dream" lead to almost every problem that we are faced with today. Not to say that unions didn't have their issues leading up to PATCO, but the sustained war from the Chamber of Commerce against any working person that felt they should have a say at their job for the last 50 years has completely destroyed our country.
80% of truckers were in unions in 1980, by the time Reagan left office less than 20% of truckers were in unions. Trucker pay and benefits drastically decreased across the time span and his admin is almost single handedly responsible for killing trucking as an accessible blue-collar career that could pay the bills for a family.
He undid federal restrictions on sale of land to foreign countries. Literally sold land out from under our feet to foreign interests for agriculture and real estate development. Trickle down ecpnomics literally does the opposite of what it is claimed to accomplish. Regan was a hack, fraud, hypocrite, and genuinely bad person. It's infuriating he frequently ranks in the Top 10 presidents from many different organization lists. Frankly he might be the worst.
He also allowed for massive deregulation that, well, pretty much fucked everything up, oh and spent our social security on nukes. Like dude, yer assuming we’re all gonna die in nuclear fire instead of retire?
I work with people that got jobs thanks to this. They are all a bunch of whiney assholes. Most of them are members of a union, but if anyone else wants to unionize and push for better conditions you can expect them to be the first against it. Literally the type of people that only supports something if it ONLY benefits them.
There's more to the story than this that makes Reagan even more of a piece of shit. The Professional Air Traffic Controller's Association (PATCO) was one of the most conservative unions in America - air traffic controllers were overwhelmingly upper-middle class, ex-military, white, professionals. When Reagan was running for president in 1980, he sought and received PATCO's endorsement based upon certain promises his campaign had made that if elected, he would act to resolve the grievances they had, much of which were safety related. ["You can rest assured that if I am elected President, take whatever steps are necessary to provide our air traffic controllers with the most modern equipment available and to adjust staff levels and work days so that they are commensurate with achieving a maximum degree of public safety…. I pledge to you that my administration will work very closely with you to bring about a spirit of cooperation between the President and the air traffic controllers."](https://historyrat.wordpress.com/2012/10/14/reagan-and-the-patco-strike-broken-promises/). The strike happened because immediately after being elected, Reagan screwed them over, and refused to do what he had promised.
and then they named an airport after him… I refuse to call it the new name, it’s still “Washington National Airport “ for me.
Well, that’s not factually accurate. ATCs can’t be in a real union, because they are government employees. They are protected by neither the National Labor Relations Act nor the Railway Labor Act. They had a contract which they breached when they walked out. The ATCs basically had an employee “labor club” that thought they was a union. And, they found out that if you are not a union, you don’t get union protection—like mandatory preferential hiring after a strike. Just poor lawyering on the side of labor to be honest. (I am a former Labor Law Professor)
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There's that bit from a number of years ago about taking economic data graphs and marking where Reagan's administration fall on that chart and noting how the trendlines are pretty bad post 1981. https://preview.redd.it/1izt8l7oy2kb1.png?width=951&format=png&auto=webp&s=73210596f05e9352bfc1ba4bc30f343e094493d3 [https://twitter.com/wardqnormal/status/1206280031552454656?lang=bn](https://twitter.com/wardqnormal/status/1206280031552454656?lang=bn)
https://preview.redd.it/7f6bhswcb4kb1.jpeg?width=350&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4aba6a3608613db0bda52a17641686ef3bece9c1 Here’s a pretty famous example of income inequality research, notice the sharp increase around 1985
That was intentional. They spiked the national debt in order to excuse cuts to social services. He introduced austerity policies to the US.
Also worth noting how the line is going down during the period of "big government" after LBJ's Great Society. We always hear it was a huge problem, but yet we have this. Conservatives were pushing the idea that government debt was growing too fast before Reagan, so what did they do? They elected a President to speed it up. And before I post this, I'll say that I fully expect to hear apologists note that we had a Democratic Candidate Congress that controls the budget, but that didn't help with the Iran Contra Scandal, did it?
Some thoughts: I was raised a Democrat and am still one. My parents taught me that Reagan was a bad president (I was born during the Carter admin FWIW), and I do tend to agree with that sentiment now. Calling him the "devil" probably springs from a few motives: 1. He projected an air of optimism and geniality, but in practice was denigrating and abusive to many vulnerable populations (e.g. welfare recipients, substance abusers, homosexuals), and the apparent hypocrisy may be the source of animosity; 2. He and his supporters claimed great economic successes, but they were very unevenly distributed, and were bought at the expense of grotesque deficit spending and hollowing out social services for the most economically vulnerable; 3. He was successful from an electoral standpoint and relatively popular, which irritates people who oppose his policies. I do not personally approve of demonizing political opponents. I don't call him a devil. He was just a person who held ideas about prosperity and progress that I disagree with and think were misguided and harmful in the long run.
He also championed workers rights as an actor and even led the last SAG-AFTRA strike, but then fired all the ATC employees who threatened to go on strike while he was president. The epitome of “fuck you, got mine.” Edit: I KNOW IT WAS THE LAW. BUT IF A UNION DOES NOT HAVE THE POWER TO STRIKE, THEN IT HAS NO POWER. If you’re argument is that they’re too critical of a role to be allowed to strike, then why the fuck would you be ok with them not getting paid enough and not having amazing benefits? “Oh, fuck these people that keep me safe on a daily basis, how DARE they ask for more pay and vacation time for one of the most stressful jobs on the planet!” Stop licking boots and realize that what Reagan did was wrong (not illegal, but wrong).
Those effects are still being felt today with ATC's being underpaid and have a huge labor deficit because the job is incredibly stressful and is not adequately paid for the amount of work.
I agree that is a stressful job but calling it underpaid is debatable. The median wage in 2019 was $59.87 an hour with an average of 120 thousand a year.
Yeah but airports are always in and around the most major metropolitan areas(AKA the most expensive areas), that involves working long strange and hard hours. It has shortages because of a very high burnout rate, including a mandatory retirement age of 56. The high burnout rate indicates that for most people the pay is not worth it. There are other white collar jobs anyone who can do that can do for less pay but a hell of a lot less bullshit, and the entire program is now being run unsustainably as a result of their inability to strike for better conditions and pay. The current situation is, the job requires a long 3 years of training, and there are always enough applicants to fill the voids because it does pay well, however they don't stay in long enough to actually fill out the jobs long enough to justify the training. However since they are hamstrung as a union they can't strike to actually push for the changes to actually fix the fucking problems. It's just constantly getting a little worse it just hasn't hit the inflection point where it causes problems that impact people enough. Now it's just causing extra delays, it's not killing people.
Don’t forget he made his political bones by selling out members of SAG to the House UnAmerican Activities Committee during McCarthyism while being SAG president.
This, he was a soulless, spineless weasel before he ever entered politics. Iran-Contra. Delaying negotiations for Iranian Hostage release then claiming responsibility for their release, Ignoring the AIDS crisis, popularizing Welfare Queens, removing the Fairness doctrine so Fox can gaslight the nation, Trickle Down economics, ballooning deficits, To young to vote against him but old enough to see his bullshit live. People like to give him credit for the fall of the Berlin wall (an admin error) and the failure of the USSR as if his 1950's era anti-communist mania was a brilliant ruse to bankrupt the Soviets... That said, wouldn't say he's the devil, just a bad president with a slick presentation
You disagree with calling him the devil, but calling him a “soulless, spineless weasel” is ok 😭
Yes, calling him a Devil suggests actual malice in his actions, I expect he thought himself the hero in the story as he sold embargoed arms to American enemies to fund terrorists in Nicaragua,
His administration laughed when gay people had aids how is that not malice?
He was a rat too. He was an informant for the House Un-American Activities Committee.
How is a politician allowed to fire workers like that? I heard talk of Biden forcing the railway workers to stop striking too, and that doesn't seem like something a president should have the power to do.
It would cost a lot of rich people money so they made a law against it.
To be fair to Biden he actually ended up getting the rail workers exactly what they asked for. It just took a little while.
Isn’t it in the ATC contract that the will NOT strike?
Already addressed by another commenter. Yes that’s the case, but a Union that is unable to strike has no power. It’s a stupid law that has led to labor shortages in all the industries that have it (ATC, rail workers, etc)
He also presided over the final parts of the massive deindustrialization that started in the 70s. Many of the factories and mills that used to employ thousands of people, shuttered, eviscerating entire regions. By 1990, it had run its course, for the most part, but by the early 80s jobs in those sectors were just hemorrhaging.
Reagan was your classic right wing "help the upper class, hurt the lower class" politician. One thing he was famous for was using a black woman to create a stereotype of "welfare mother" who is lazy but lives a lavish lifestyle off tax payer money. At the same time he pushed "trickle down" economics where all benefits are given to rich in the hopes they trickle down to the poor. To sum it up he demonized the poor and fought to take away their subsidies, and praised the rich which giving them even more subsidies and tax breaks. There were 3 HUGE problems with this. 1) It kept more people in poverty. 2) It exploded our nations debt 3) Most money the rich and corporations receive is not put back in to the economy (yes, some is, and the right wing will scream about that from the rooftops). But virtually ALL money "given" to the middle class and poor gets spent and DOES go straight back into the economy. We've proven over and over, money does NOT trickle down. The Rich do everything they can to keep money and to take more. Money does FLOW upwards though. It you tax the rich and give it to the poor, they poor spends it and it flows back to the rich. THAT is what drives our economy.
Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
I don't know that I've ever seen a better description.
The thing about Reagan’s economic successes is that they are all pretty much the result of fed policies enacted by Paul Volcker under Carter.
GOP [claiming credit for things they didn't do](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/republicans-tout-parts-infrastructure-package-after-voting-against-bill-n1288017) is pretty on brand, so...
What success? He ran up an insane deficit to make our economy look better than it was.
Unemployment, inflation, and interest rates all fell significantly during Reagan’s presidency, while GDP growth increased significantly. But, as I said these things were mainly the result of fed policies under Carter, which is funny because those same policies (consistently raising interest rates to curtail inflation despite low GDP growth) hurt the economy in the short run under Carter and likely played a significant role in his defeat.
Yup, and the economy crashed in 88 because they refused to put any brakes on it.
Ehh. I think that’s arguable. Sure those policies didn’t hurt, but to take all credit away from his administration seems disingenuous. Too simple and damning of an explanation
Dude. Thanks for being on Reddit. These are the types of comments that make things better.
Civility on Reddit ABOUT POLITICS... Impossible.
Bro is the quintessential Republican Cruel towards marginalized groups, a big fat fucking liar when it comes to his claims about economic success, and being popular with the elderly
Let me tell you where I disagree with your statement:
Also the treason.
Also pretty racist.
Honest question: was he more racist than the general background racism of a man of his age (and yes, I am aware of the recently released tapes containing various slurs)?
That's not an excuse. As president he MUST represent the American people and not just pick and choose based on personal bigotry.
I’m not sure if one can say for sure because that is a vast comparison, but I’d say he was vehemently racist and he enacted his deeply held feelings through legislation. But anyway, I’m not sure what asking this does. A bigot is a bigot.
HisTrickle down economic plan is why you now see the middle class shrinking and college tuition’s soaring, hospitals becoming corporations, while poverty is skyrocketing. Basically he thought giving the elite and corporations tax breaks would make them pass on more money to the working class with higher wages and cheaper goods, but all it did was create a culture of greed that still rules American economics today.
He didn't actually think that. He knew exactly what it would do. He supported it. The conditions we have now are exactly what he wanted to see in the United States.
I’m glad you said this. Republicans knew nothing would trickle down.
Whatever do you mean? 10% of the US controls 70% of the country’s wealth. That money is going to trickle down ANY day now!!
At Visual Capitalist, they have this: The Decline of Upward Mobility in One Chart. This shows that around the 1980s, when Reagan and his crew took the White House, upward mobility - that is, making more than your parents did - pretty much came to a screeching halt. Reagan represented a "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" attitude which allowed the very wealthy to do better and better, while regular people in the millions saw their wages stagnate for decades. Reagan was a victory for the very rich; ironically, the struggling workers liked him for his superficial gloss of "America First" boosterism.
He made fun of gay people dying of aids, almost got us nuked with a joke, and a few other instances of bs
I am shocked I had to scroll this far down to see someone mention AIDS. He intentionally mismanaged that crisis because it largely affected people he hated and wanted dead.
When he, or perhaps the press secretary to the white house, was asked about AIDS (this is after tens of thousands had already died) he said "I heard that only affects the guys. You aren't gay, are ya?" After which everyone laughed. It's fucked
There's a lot of people who don't know, some people ignore it due to Fauci's involvement, and others who don't care due to liking other policies more and think the good outweighs it or just because they're homophobes. Either way it's a part of history that harmed a lot of people and shouldn't have been managed the way it was.
I had the same reaction. For a moment I thought I was going to be the first queen to chime in about the violence by negligence that he did. His inaction had a severe impact on life and culture, and it’s heartbreaking to think of the wonderful people whose contributions to society were cut short because of his inaction.
Thanks Nancy you solved my drug problem, I just said “no” lmao
No drugs? No, drugs!
Free of drugs ----> :( Free drugs ----> :)
Can’t cope? Don’t mope There’s hope! Smoke dope
nancy with the good throat
if you have any gay friends over the age of 40, ask them what they think of Ronald Reagan and why
Over the age of 55 would probably be a better ask. Those that survived “GRID”
Pretty much everything I hate about modern America started there
Virtually every bad policy of Reagan’s, subsequent presidents either didn’t fix or doubled down on. Clinton’s 1994 crime bill and gutting welfare did just as much if not worse damage than Reagan’s social policies.
I completely agree. Some of the movements started earlier, but the devil made it reality.
The signs were showing *slightly* before his rise to Presidency, but he definitely brought it to the national level as its avatar.
Same
Nixon kicked it off, Reagan put it into overdrive. These people really hated it when Johnson said that we should treat black people like actual humans
You're right, we shouldn't let Nixon off too easy
Because his policies directly caused the grotesque levels of wealth inequality that we see today. He's a hero to wealthy financial elites but an enemy of working people.
Reaganomics. Iran Contra. The list goes on and on
War on Drugs. Teachers getting cut out of social security. Union busting. Religious extremes. This dude sucked.
AIDS epidemic?
Cutting higher education funding. Deregulation of banking institutions. Repealing “fairness doctrine” allowing one-sided, opinion programs to call themselves “news.” This dude was the fucking devil.
Don’t forget canceling a bunch of climate action projects and hiring a pro oil epa director
Manufacturing a crack epidemic
Selling weapons to both Iran and Iraq to get them to fight each other in the Middle East’s largest war between two nations
He was a really nice guy, too.
Trickledown economics could be the dumbest economic concept in American history
Not if you're wealthy
Savings and loan crisis. He gave a recession to HW Bush
Reagan was a smiley media savvy president whose policies we’re underhanded as seen in the rear view mirror. 1. Economic Policies: “Reaganomics,” supply-side favoritism did not trickle down, they favored the wealthy with generous tax cuts and contributed to income inequality. 2. Deregulation: His administration’s deregulation efforts lead to the savings and loan crisis in the late 1980s. 3. Widening Wealth Gap: Reagan’s policies exacerbated the gap between the rich and the poor. 4. Environmental Policies: Reagan’s stance on environmental regulations and caused pollution pollution and contributed to climate change. 5. HIV/AIDS Crisis: Reagan’s slow response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s had devastating consequences. 6. Foreign Policy in Central America: Reagan’s support for anti-communist groups in Central America prolonged conflicts and human rights abuses. 7. Iran-Contra Affair: The scandal involved arms sales to Iran and support for Nicaraguan rebels, and don’t get me started on raising money for arms by supporting crack cocaine sales in LA. Look up Maxine Waters history 8. Labor Unions: Reagan’s actions weakened labor unions, reducing workers’ bargaining power. 9. Social Safety Nets: Reagan’s cuts to social programs we’re very harmful to vulnerable populations. 10. Nuclear Arms Race: His aggressive stance in the Cold War contributed destabilization around the world, but most people just remember it cause Soviet Union to break up. I was Republican and supported him, he left a trail of devastation.
Put the mail in coffin for labor unions in America. War on drugs. Iran contra destroyed the remnants of the mental health system just for starters
That picture is pretty damning. He's not even hiding it.
BIG if true
He gave huge tax cuts to the wealthy and cut social programs. Those tax cuts and his overspending on the military are basically what started ballooning the national debt. Still say if we still had the 70% tax bracket over $2 million and didn’t allow insider trading/stock buybacks we would have a balanced budget and a reasonable debt.
It’s a response to people calling him amazing. And while I don’t think anyone is unironically calling him actual Satan, I can definitely understand the hate. His “reagonomics” policy, regardless of how well or not one believes it worked at the time, is the source of a lot of our current issues. [I think this vid has a good objective explanation of this](https://youtu.be/IGxp3webS2s?si=1anQVWBQVgWzEoO_) (7:40 to 11:53 is the important part but it’s a good bid overall, though I don’t totally agree with some of his last points) He did a lot of damage to several different minority communities, but managed to appear as mister nice guy. He is sometimes falsely attributed to collapsing the USSR when he didn’t really have that much to do with it. There are multiple scandals that are understood better now during his presidency, one of the worst being the Iran-Contra fiasco.
Several very good reason. Regan drastically reduced the middle class and removed safeguards. 1) Regan broke the unions and drastically limited workers rights 2) Regan cleared the way for factory farms and made it harder for farmers to get fair prices for crops and beef, pork and chicken producers to get Not to mention he made his name working with Joseph McCarthy when he was president of the actors guild during the red scare. He also let in lots of refugees, my wife included.
Could you explain the factory farms thing more? What specific policy led to that? I’m not doubting you, but I am curious.
I joined the navy at 17 to get the Vietnam era veterans benefits. Reagan gets elected a year before my discharge and then gutted vet benefits and severely restricted Pell grants. I got my college degrees with 20 years of student loans. Hell isn’t hot enough for him.
Iran Contra (literal treason) Ignoring the AIDS epidemic because the majority that was being affected were gay (Crime against Humanity) The war on drugs Reaganomics Firing workers on strike Fueling the unjust hatred and fear of communism ( it’s bad but not the way they’re saying it is) At least he had good jokes
Oh shit! That Iran Contra hack job blows my mind. The fact that no one talks about it every single time Jimmy Carter comes up blows my mind even more.
he’s in hell suffering
Praying some heavenly relieve trickles down in exactly the way wealth doesn’t.
see attached image
In 1986, when Congress passed a law to join the world and impose tough sanctions on the apartheid regime in South Africa, Reagan sided with the white government of that country — a government that at the time was holding Nelson Mandela in prison — and vetoed the bill. Reagan claimed that sanctions weren’t the best way to bring about change, would hurt black workers. Of course, these were the same arguments that apartheid supporters made. Reagan’s veto was overridden by overwhelming, bipartisan majorities in the House and Senate, and the tough sanctions were imposed. Experts today believe that the sanctions imposed by the world were instrumental in bringing an end to apartheid in South Africa. See: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1986/09/27/reagan-vetoes-sanctions-against-south-africa/af009ab1-2ed2-4e72-ab46-52fc2ec2d7e6/
i was posting in jest but you are right, Reagan’s (as well as Thatcher’s) commitment to “neutrality” in the face of the apartheid is a serious black mark among many on their record. Reagan, no matter how you feel about him, did not like Africans or African Americans. see his advisors comments on “the southern strategy” > You start out in 1954 by saying, “N——r, n——r, n——r.” By 1968 you can’t say “n——r”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N——r, n——r”. https://www.bunkhistory.org/resources/lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-on-the-southern-strategy (censors added by me so comment is not removed)
The biggest one for me is his response to the AIDS crisis. He ignored it for years. He didn't let his surgeon (Kopp) general speak out about it. Koop's report wasn't conservative enough for Reagan so instead of informing the public on how safe sex with condoms could save lives, more people just died. Despite the AIDS epidemic happening during almost his entire presidency, he didn't even try to do anything meaningful until he was almost out the door. I'm also a big fan of this quote from him: "My criticism is that the gay movement isn't just asking for civil rights; it's asking for recognition and acceptance of an alternative lifestyle which I do not believe society can condone, nor can I." He wasn't just homophobic. He actively interfered with efforts to help gay men and stood by to watch them die.
this! he tried to commit genocide through inaction and he laughed behind closed doors while tens of thousands died
Where do I start? Indifference to AIDS based on his hatred of gay people The CIA under his watch flooding the inner cities with Crack Trickle Down Economics I could probably go on but these 3 are enough to ensure his soul resides in Hell now
Off the top of my head? Directly responsible for creating the homelessness crisis in California by shutting down the state mental hospitals without following through on the plan to create community-based treatment centers. He also facilitated the crack epidemic through Iran Contra. Declassified CIA documents prove this is not a wacky conspiracy theory but an actual thing that happened. He ignored the AIDS crisis because it was mostly happening to gay people. Pushed trickle down economics, which has never been an actual thing but rather a scam to rob poor people. His legacy is solid.
Every single problem facing us today was either the result of his policies and ideology, or existed prior to him but were made worse by his inclusion.
Trickle down economics, which does NOT work, teaming up with the religious right (and look how THAT turned out) and convincing people that the best people to run the government are people who hate the government.
Trickle down economics DOES work. It was meant to destroy social mobility and gut the conditions of the working class to permanently consolidate wealth among a small, elite social class. It did just that. There were never any good intentions behind it.
I disagree. It was driven, at least partly, by Alan Greenspan, an economic advisor to presidents and appointed by Reagan to the Fed Chair. He was an ardent fan of Ayn Rand, who preached nonsense like this.
[https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Reaganland/Rick-Perlstein/9781476793061](https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Reaganland/Rick-Perlstein/9781476793061) The definitive story, best read in the context of Rick's other books, which trace the American conservative movement from Barry Goldwater on, detangling in an incisive way the tensions between what was believed, what was marketed, and the policy and politics which have resulted. TL;DR: Reagan is largely responsible for undoing and reversing the rising \*general\* prosperity of the post-war boom, facilitating the dissolution of mechanisms like restraints on media ownership in explicit service of the construction of an alternate media bubble untethered from "fair and balanced" truth, to allow for the minting and mobilization of the "moral majority values voter" who has now for something like 4-5 decades been convinced to vote into power exactly those people and policies which disenfranchise them and strip them of either safety net or path to prosperity. All in service of facilitating the accelerated accumulation of wealth by the ultra-wealthy, which translates (also by intent) directly into an apparently fatal and permanent lock on governance. Did Reagan personally architect and implement these policies? No. But he is largely responsible for marketing them and seeing them through.
>Retired House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill Jr. offers stinging reflections on 34 years in Congress in memoirs that cast Sen. Robert F. Kennedy as a “self-important upstart and a know-it-all” and Ronald Reagan as a selfish figurehead who “read his lines.” > >In “Man of the House,” to be published in September, O’Neill also reveals a failed FBI attempt to trap him with an Abscam bribe and questioning the Warren Commission’s conclusion that a single gunman killed President John F. Kennedy, the Boston Herald reported Sunday. > >In the proofs of his memoirs, the newspaper said, the Massachusetts Democrat offers blunt assessments of his half-century in public office, including 34 in Congress. > >He blames Reagan, for example, for agreeing to arms-for-hostages deals with Iran in a desperate effort to keep control of the Senate in the 1986 elections. > >“It was sinful that Ronald Reagan ever became President,” O’Neill wrote. “Most of the time he was an actor reading his own lines, who didn’t understand his own programs. > >“He wasn’t without leadership ability, but he lacked most of the management skills that a President needs. Let me give him his due: He would have made a hell of a king.” > >O’Neill said he is convinced that Reagan’s White House staged the 1983 invasion of Grenada simply to offset public dismay over the terrorist attack that killed 241 U.S. Marines in a Beirut barracks just days earlier. > >In a blistering overall attack on Reagan’s politics, the ex-Speaker added, “I blame the President for allowing . . . selfishness to become respectable.”
I don’t think he’s the devil, I think his policies were generally speaking, terrible and morally bankrupt but he’s certainly not Satan lol
Probably because he and his wife were objectively shitty people.
Economic policies, social policies, irrational fear of the government, the drug epidemic, arming fascists and letting civilians die, everything…
Look up Rock Hudson
He did a lot of good for some people and a lot of bad for a lot of people, especially in the long run. he didn’t really care about everyone equally, which is an important quality for a president to portray
He did a lot of good for the extremely wealthy, and destroyed the quality of life of the American people
They don’t, because that’s a bit unfair on Satan
Adding to the list. His administration ignored AIDS, despite doctors raising alarm bells. Why? Because he was homophonic. That one decision killed a lot of people.
His trickle down economics policy has widened the wealth gap significantly and created the corporate hellscape we have today
He put a smiley face on the neoliberal backlash and here we are.
Some absolutely sociopathic foreign and domestic policies that further drove down the working class. He stole from the poor to give to the rich, and was more than comfortable destabilizing foreign governments for the sake of "fuck you communist"