America Pays the Piper, Big Time
By Robert Parry
September 24, 2008
After a 28-year binge of drunken optimism and blind nationalism – often punctuated by chants of “USA, USA!” and “We’re No. 1!” – Americans are waking up with a painful hangover, facing a grim “morning in America,” not the happy vision that Ronald Reagan famously sold them on.
As the United States begins to assess how the nation got into its trillion-dollar bailout mess, a true understanding must go back three decades or so when Reagan deployed his well-honed communications skills and the Republican Right mastered the dark arts of propaganda to get the American people to shed the annoying strictures of rationality.
In the 1970s, there had been stumbling efforts by three presidents – Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter – to begin confronting stubborn structural problems, such as a growing dependence on foreign oil, environmental damage, and excessive military spending which had sapped resources away from a productive economy.
Nixon helped create the Environmental Protection Agency; he imposed energy-conservation measures; he opened the diplomatic door to communist China; and he initiated “détente” with the Soviet Union. But his presidency foundered on the rocks of his political paranoia that led to the Watergate scandal.
President Ford tried to continue many of Nixon’s policies, particularly winding down the Cold War with Moscow and slimming down the bloated Pentagon budget, which had fed what President Dwight Eisenhower dubbed the “military-industrial complex.”
However, confronting a rebellion from Reagan’s Republican Right in 1976, Ford abandoned “détente”; he let hard-line Cold Warriors (and a first wave of young intellectuals called neoconservatives) pressure the CIA’s analytical division; and he brought in a new generation of tough-minded operatives, such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
After winning in 1976, President Carter injected more respect for human rights into U.S. foreign policy, a move some scholars believe put an important nail in the coffin of the Soviet Union, leaving it hard-pressed to justify its repressive internal practices.
At home, Carter proposed a comprehensive energy policy and warned Americans that their growing dependence on foreign oil represented a national security threat of the first order, what he called “the moral equivalent of war.”
However, powerful vested interests managed to exploit the shortcomings of all three of these presidents to sabotage any sustained progress. For instance, Carter’s prescient energy address was widely mocked as the “MEOW speech.”
and he was right all along. but he was not heard because the heavy handed right undercut him at every turn. My they HATED HIM .to the point their hatred blinded them to anything rational
Soon, the American people were persuaded to turn away from their real-world challenges and enter a land of make-believe. Don’t worry, they were told. Be happy.
Reagan as Piper..........
More here:http://consortiumnews.com/2008/092408.html
