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NEWS & LETTERS, July 2004Workshop TalksReagan’s damageby Htun Lin The endless stream of choreographed state remembrances of Ronald Reagan somewhat resembled the month-long spectacle in North Korea after the passing of Kim Il Sung. Many propagandists are trying to enshrine Reagan on Mount Rushmore as they try to revise history through the prism of their distorted vision. One such distortion, for example, is when Newt Gingrich said to Bob Schieffer on “Face The Nation,” if there’s one thing Reagan should be remembered for, it should be “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” The Reagan idolators fantasize that he single-handedly “brought down the Soviet Union.” They ignore the millions of workers behind the “iron curtain” who resisted that system over decades with their revolts. REWRITING HISTORY The trillion-dollar nuclear bombs and missiles which our own Big Brother amassed during the Cold War (by tripling our national debt) did not bring down the Soviet Union. Rather, the workers of Eastern Europe, starting with the East German workers in 1953, and on through the creation of Solidarity in Poland, brought down the Soviet Empire. Ronald Reagan prided himself by reminiscing, “All I really did was get the government out of the way, and the people did the rest.” Government today is bigger than ever, in the service of the war machine and capitalist expansion. The truth is closer to getting labor unions out of the way, and sustained corporate attacks on workers did the rest. No working man or woman in America could ever forget Reagan’s first act as president was to dishonor labor when he denied a fundamental American right to picket and to strike during a labor dispute by firing en-masse air traffic controllers represented by PATCO. The destruction of PATCO was a harbinger of all that was to come during the Reagan “Revolution.” A decade-long corporate restructuring downsized working America with a long series of lay-offs and contract concessions. The era of plant closings, offshore production and cutbacks in healthcare and education began in deadly earnest. Also forgotten seems to be his trampling of all voices for human respect and dignity: dismantling affirmative action, blaming poverty on the victims by inventing the concept of a "welfare queen," and more. OPENLY CONNIVING What big government can do against workers when acting in the service of corporate America has by now come into full bloom with the Bush White House’s unapologetic collaboration with America’s crooked corporate executives such as Ken Lay of Enron. We Americans can no longer see them in action. They hammer out secret deals behind closed doors with top corporate executives for energy regulation or loot the national treasury with massive tax cut giveaways for the super-rich, while working America suffers massive plant closures as well as schools and hospitals. Meanwhile, the Pentagon has demanded from Congress another $100 billion to add to the hundreds of billions already committed to a growing war machine dedicated to a permanent war against an “enemy” that is everywhere and nowhere. Asa Hutchison, Undersecretary of Border Security for the Homeland Security Department, has awarded a multi-billion dollar contract to Accenture (formerly Arthur Andersen Consulting) to create a “virtual border against terrorists” with the use of biometrics technology. This technology was first employed in America’s workplace, such as my shop where we are tracked by biometrics surveillance systems. BIG BROTHER Our government using such high-tech methods tracking individuals through fingerprints, voiceprints, and eye and facial profiles, is probably more effective in fighting against internal dissidents, union activists, gay matrimonials and abortion providers than in fighting Al Qaeda. Big Brother is becoming more intrusive into every individual’s personal life. Whenever Reaganites speak of freedom, one should be reminded of what Marx said about bourgeois freedom: in the place of all the inalienable freedoms mankind has fought for, one freedom has emerged which has replaced all other freedoms: Free Trade. Their concept of freedom is antithetical to that of the workers’ concept of freedom. The “Reagan Revolution” has certainly gotten government out of the way. In the ensuing years under Bush senior, Clinton (who pretentiously declared “The era of big government is over”), and now, Bush Jr., government has become servant of corporate America’s permanent war against working America, as well as workers of the world. |
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