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compelling argument of executive privilege, but simply because they didn’t want the people to know the people’s business. You can draw your own parallels to Dick Cheney’s stonewalling on his secret meetings with Enron officials. One bit of good environmental action emerged from the Reagan years: Congress passed an extension of the Clean Water Act. Reagan vetoed it, of course, but Congress overrode his veto. In other areas, antitrust regulations were ignored, workplace safety was compromised, medical research and services were curtailed, understaffing and underfunding of agencies contributed to everything from lax customs inspections to space shuttle explosions, AIDS was a disease Reagan couldn’t even bring himself to mention, and ketchup was almost reclassified as a vegetable for school lunch programs. Don’t like rap music? Blame Reagan. His administration slashed inner-city programs like Head Start,
and his budget cuts forced schools to drop “nonessential” programs such as the arts. Remove the music education and access to instruments from kids who still have an artistic impetus, and you get rap. As we Californians learned anew in our energyderegulation woes, a bit of government regulation isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In 1982, Reagan signed the law deregulating the savings and loan industry, announcing, “All in all, I think we’ve hit the jackpot,” which many wealthy thieves did—leaving the rest of us to pay the casino for the most expensive boondoggle in U.S. history. Though there were plenty of Democrats involved in that mess, don’t forget to thank Reagan as well for costing us hundreds of billions of dollars in freeing us from those fussy regulations. Nowhere were Reagan’s civic Luddites more cynically effective than at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Programs intended to finance and build low-cost housing for the poor
instead became a cash trough for the administration’s cronies. In eight years of unabated corruption that only came to light during the Bush administration, HUD, Congress found, had lost billions of taxpayer dollars to fraud and mismanagement. As if cutting HUD’s budget 57 percent hadn’t been enough, much of the remaining funding was allocated by ideological appointees with no housing experience, low-cost or otherwise. They awarded contracts to persons with even less experience, such as James Watt, who, after being forced from his Interior job for telling one racist joke too many, was paid $440,000 for making a few phone calls to HUD. One outraged observer wrote, “It now appears that the taxpayers will take a loss of at least $2 billion (it ultimately was more than $8 billion) on the cozy little, sleazy little, greedy little deals that were made. Let it be said up top: the primary responsibility for this debacle lies squarely in the lap of Ronald Reagan.” The source of this quotation? Conservative columnist James J. Kirkpatrick. Like Dubya’s call to let “faith-based” organizations cure society’s ills, Reagan said he believed his budget gouges could be offset by citizens practicing the biblical notion of tithing, as he said, “the giving of a tenth to charity.” Reporters’ perusal of Reagan’s tax records found that he was giving more like a hundredth—1.4 percent—of his own earnings to charity. And the next time someone tries to tell you that Reagan was a fiscal conservative, remind them that he left the country with a financial debt that surpassed the debts accrued under all other U.S. presidents combined and that he never once submitted a balanced budget to Congress. That bit of fiscal restraint was left to a Democrat, Bill Clinton. Speaking of Bubba, the conservative-bias media went apeshit when he pardoned fugitive financier Marc Rich. Imagine the howls if Rich had gone on to kill his ex-wife, dismember her body and burn it. Oregon authorities in December 2000 arrested Robert Wendell Walker Jr. for doing just that to his former bride. Reagan had pardoned the convicted bank robber in 1981. Law-enforcement authorities could not recall another instance in which such a violent criminal had received a presidential pardon. Walker had no political ties, and no one knows to this day why Reagan cut him loose.
YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH Not every government office suffered under Reagan. He bloated the Pentagon with the largest peacetime military buildup in our history, while the National Security Council, which had a staff of 35 at the height of the Vietnam War under LBJ, swelled to 255 employees under Reagan. Spying on American citizens reached new heights, with numerous examples of government infiltration of labor unions and of organizations opposed to our involvement in Central and South America. And we were pretty involved, backing the wrong sides in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Chile, Argentina and other military dictatorships or oligarchies where citizens were living under hideously worse circumstances than our founding fathers had endured. In many cases, they were virtual slaves, with no vote and no rights in dictatorships that routinely tortured and murdered opposition voices. (Guatemala’s three-decade-old military regime, described by Reagan as “totally committed to democracy,” killed more than 200,000 of its own people in the 1980s. In Argentina, it has since been revealed, the babies of murdered political prisoners were given
PHOTO: SUNSHINE / ZUMA PRESS
When he proposed his Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983, the Star Wars technology he spoke of bore less relation to what scientists thought possible than to an “inertia projector” he had guarded in the 1940 Warner Bros. spy movie Murder in the Air. His era of movies didn’t deal in ambiguities but clearly defined good guys and bad guys. There’s no drama if the bad guy is a pushover, so in Reagan’s real-time movie, the Soviet Union became the Evil Empire. He claimed they had superiority over us in submarine and missile technology, when the opposite was true. With our multi-warhead missiles, we had a clear atomic superiority, if such a thing even matters once you’re untold megatons beyond mutually assured destruction. Reagan stated the Soviets were engaged in a massive military buildup, while its growth had been essentially flat since 1975, with most of its new resources supporting its war in Afghanistan, which proved to be the Soviets’ Vietnam. And now, of course, it has become our Afghanistan, with our troops fighting a regime of extremist thugs, some of them “freedom fighters” the Reagan administration trained and armed to fight the Soviets. Osama bin Laden was one of the freedomhating freedom fighters enjoying our none-too-particular largesse back then. In Reagan’s world of absolutes, there were no pollution problems and the homeless were that way because they chose to be. Jobless? Reagan would wave a 30-page want ads section at you, heedless that most of the jobs required a high level of skill. Welfare was to be judged wholly on the evidence of a “Chicago Welfare Queen,” who in Reagan Anecdote Land had used 80 names and 30 addresses to bilk the system of $150,000 but in reality was a woman accused of using four names to accrue $8,000. Recall how Republicans hammered Al Gore as a habitual liar after he uttered a few half-truths? Reagan quite possibly never gave a speech without lying, and it wasn’t dopey stuff about what medications his dog was taking but instead was the material that shaped his administration. Based on a few skewed anecdotes about wasteful, bureaucratic government, Reagan set about dismantling it. The people he brought in to head the various departments were mostly persons with a noted antipathy for those departments, such as Secretary of the Interior James Watt, whose previous job was running anti-environmentalist Joseph Coors’ Mountain States Legal Foundation. Watt proudly didn’t enforce the Endangered Species Act or strip-mining laws, gave billions of dollars of publicly-held coal reserves to private companies, and tried to put another 30 million acres of public land into private hands. Watt said he saw no need to preserve our environment for future generations because he was convinced the Lord was returning soon to scourge the earth clean anyway. That’s good, solid science for you: the world is just a big cheese wheel, and Reagan’s godly men were privileged to know the expiration date, so forget about having respect or wonder for the magnificent and fragile processes that make the planet work, forget future generations or a sense of responsible stewardship. Just shut up and drink your slurry. Watt’s counterpart at the Environmental Protection Agency, Anne Gorsuch, was similarly lax about enforcing existing laws and allowed the agency’s new policies to be shaped by the same corporations accused of violating pollution laws. When Congress questioned these cozy ties, the Reagan administration initially refused to turn over requested documents (Gorsuch was cited for contempt of Congress), not for national security reasons or a
DINING
DAY&NIGHT
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CLASSIFIEDS
MAUI TIME WEEKLY
JUNE 10, 2004
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