RR Double Crossing: Ronald Reagan's RailRoading of America.

The Art of the Double Cross

First there was the deliberate attack on labor, then the deliberate economic downturn to "wring out inflation" via Milton-the-monster Friedman's monetarism that let the market set the interest rates which caused their unpredictable gyration. Much like the free market in oil did at the beginning of the Oil age until Standard Oil standardized prices via monopolization: business hates uncertainty, hence the birth of the Corponation.

Although ignorance is pleaded as to the surge in oil exploration's intent of expanding Cental control of the Federal govenmnet, the oil man and Director of the CIA, GWH Bush, was RR's VP, and he certainly knew the, having benefitted immensly from it himself, the dynamics, but didn't care. Thus did RR set the template for every GOP administration since: adopt the Corpo-attitude toward the future: completely disregard the consequences of your actions on that future, since no one will then care to remember, as long as they are popular today: ie pandering to the masses.

One can say that's a politician's style regardless, but RR turned it into a purposeful scheme:

Sell small government in your campaign and then more than double its size;

Rail against Communism so as to increase already nosebleed levels of War preparations and then transfer America's industrial base lock-stock- and barrel to the largest Communist country in the world;

Decry budget deficits, and then use the doubling of the federal budget mentioned above via enormous deficit spending by

Selling the taxpayer down the drain by transferring their tax dollars into interest payments to the country's richest:

 Private buyers of these securities were assured decades of pocketing the interest, adding to the taxpayers of tomorrow's bill, what the same Republicans would call stealing from the next generation who, without being the least responsible, had to foot the bill, when it was the Republicans themselves that had crammed it down the throat of their constituents by filling them with unfounded Fear of Communism while simultaneously selling us out to the largest most entrenched Communist regime in the world. During the RR'ng of America, the administration marketed 30-year bonds for close to 14%, resulting in their well-heeled purchaser's collecting close to 15% yield from the federal taxpayers, even as he was busy destroying the entire Savings and Loan industry, so that by the time his VP's son took the reins, taxpayers more than a generation later couldn't get even a paltry 1% for their savings accounts. But Reagan knew what Bush knew: no one would connect the two. The administration that left the legacy of enormous tax dollar transfers to the richest of the rich would long be gone, the unnecessary debt they amassed blamed on the other party.

This equals the largest transfer  of wealth by a wildly popular president sanctioned by the poorest of the country's polity since they had about as much interest in and understanding of finance as an eight-year old. Trump's being one of the purchaser's of said securities is very likely, Trump as an observer of how to use populism against the very people who put you in office, bestowing on him that surety that would allow him to brag he could shoot someone dead in broad daylight in the middle of New York City, that braggadocio was directly inspired by Reaganomics. It was a conviction reinforced by the completely forgotten financial crimes of the Bush fils tenure as President: the largest rampant Cowboy Capitalism romp over fiduciary and monetary sobriety since John Law.

Tearing down the wall between Church and state to enable the lawless disregard for International Law and RailRoading of the public by a minority of self-anointed Holier than thou's setting the stage for an AIPAC, that declared any diminution of "Defense" spending as anti-Semitic, grab of the reins of power to allow a small, but Superior, high IQ, minority, consisting of less than 3% of the vast US electorate, to rule the vast majority who had to, without being the least responsible, foot the bill for the defense of a country now transformed in to one inimical to the very philosophy on which the US was founded: The separation of Church and State such that,

Abjuring the marriage of Church and State,
The people have all become consumed with hate:
The financial class has robbed us blind
Their money's more important than all of mankind;
Conspiring, they've embroiled us in Forever War's fog,
As the State's instead married the Synagogue.

As though hellbent on avenging themselves against their treatment by another culture in another land, they have turned their eye-for-an-eye philosophy expressed in the tale of the lamb in the Haggadah onto the land that gave them refuge. Such that, under their careful manipulation of the financial markets and the Federal Government, lies and misery go hand in hand. The German Nationalists spoke of "Freedom and Bread", as does the Leader of Nationalist Americans now, calling the pirating of the American fossil fuels and selling it abroad, "Freedom Gas", "our beautiful gas", but the "our" he has in mind doesn't include a single person cheering so vociferously at his Partietag events. With a star of David as his senior adviser,  they mean only freedom for their adherents with the bread and opportunity of those who have been destroyed, thrown out of their homes and left homeless by the millions as untrammeled Greed was trumpeted as a Virtue, allowing fiduciary duty to become a hollow mockery, moral hazard a Safe Haven, they raise the cost of living while lowering wages. Hunger and misery increased among the people while mortality and suicide increased. The rate of unemployment climbed, but the Nationalists then, as now, declared that they had reduced unemployment. Forgetting that it had never reached such enormous percentages until they ransacked the Treasury to its last plugged nickel.

Lies, profiteering and selfish indulgence went hand in hand.

Germany then is what giving the financial system over to cons and cheats has landed us in today, sure:

"Externally the country seemed much the same as usual; street cars and autos ran; shops restaurants and theaters maintained their activities, many by virtue of State rescue. The newspapers all had the same headlines and used the same type. But internally the country grew daily more barbarous, more poverty-stricken, more corrupt, more demoralized. It reeked with lies and casual brutality; life was fast becoming nothing but a rotten sham.

In this new Nationalist mirror-image of the nineteen thirty's Germany there is no worse crime that the profession of reason, peace, and honorable sentiments The Leader preferred murderers, as ours now kowtows to MBS, Kimmy-poo and Duterte, precisely because they are murderers, as his "comrades" (Jared Kushner and his close friendship with MBS, reflecting perfectly the Bush family's duplicitous relationship with the Bin Ladens).

"The story of Germany (America?) as a democracy is over; their homeland was taken away from them. There was no relying on books and newspapers (or the internet); one should see with one's own eyes what was happening in America, in Palestine, in Russia. Meanwhile (because) a fog of deception, spread by and endlessly repeated fake news, was spreading more and more densely over Germany. The Reich was hermetically sealed, cut off from the rest of the world, completely abandoned to the lies of the Nationalists' daily dissemination through millions of loudspeakers and printed pages, as now from tweets and fake news, rallies when there are no elections more akin to a Partietag than a political stump speech.

In the next hall of mirror reflection we see that during those days people in Germany learned to lie. Many praised the Nationalists aloud but secretly cursed them.


All the methods of modern technique were employed to suggest to the hungry that they were fed, to the oppressed that they were free, to those threatened by the growing universal indignation that all the peoples of the earth envied them their strength and glory. The Reich, as this one, was preparing for war within and without its frontiers and was openly breaking the terms of its treaties. A pattern now just accepted as normal.

"The most eminent experts in the art of lying scattering billions of lies throughout the country by means of the most modern devices. The citizens breathing in that miasma of lies day after day, hour after hour. To befog people and conceal the truth was the sole purpose of the ministry of lies, the epicenter of which is now the Pentagon, the Department of Defense having as its very name a lie, as though changing its name from the Department of War altered its true nature in the least. Once saturated with these lies, to purge the poison was a task requiring time and patience, both of which are in short supply.

So their adversaries collect knowledge, deluding themselves that they will stop what's a fait accompli by "Speaking Truth to Power", but knowledge does not protect one. Life is contemptuous of knowledge. Passion ... energy ... Lies: these are what we admire. But anything can be tolerated if all humanity is watching. The martyrs proved it. Royalty proves it. Today Celebrity does. The Famous live in the bask of the glow afforded by the attention of others. They turn to it as flowers to the sun. The very mass media they abjure they need to endure.

We are all turning into swine. These times are turning us all into swine and ruffians.

It was an earthquake, one of those great upheavals of concentrated, fathomless, world-wide stupidity and wisdom of the individual is useless, but it was not true about the DJ's election being something "nobody could have seen coming" anymore than the financial crisis was. He is no more than the realization of the dreams RR dog-whistled to his followers, a fulfillment of a promise to make America great again by full-spectrum domination of the rest of the world via militarily-enforced projection of power to overtake and control the supply and availability of the lifeblood of modern industrialism: energy, more specifically, Oil. "I would have taken the Oil!"

Trump is simply the apotheosis of the RR'ng of America by using the fact that we are all completely selfish, and as long as we get what we want, we think everything is all right. Build it and they will come. Supply-side economics turned what was a land of democracy into a mob of consumers, where the only the cheapest, most throw-away goods reflect the cheapness held in the value of what they consider our throwaway lives.

Epilogue:

To demonstrate the strange case of literary serendipity, I'd like to point out that most of the quotes I used from the past that are confusingly mixed in with those of the present come from Lion Feuchtwanger's, The Oppermanns, recommended to me by a Russian Jewish woman I was sharing a table with while lunching in a Vietnamese restaurant.

After I finished writing my post, I went upstairs and turned on the TV, and there on Netflix was Cabaret ... it was not there the night before. In the movie, the Baron says to Michael York that "they" can control the gang of brigands then called the Brownshirts. Later in the film, as they stand outside the Baron's ridiculously ostentatious chauffeured automobile watching the Nazi's beat up a helpless victim, York asks him, "Do you still think you can control them?"

Make the Baron Jewish, and you get the far more nuanced situation in Germany that existed, and yet that has always remained in the shadows; to illustrate, I return to the Oppermanns:

Martin Oppermann is the owner of the furniture store that is the source of the family's prosperity. Unfortunately for him, his brother puts his signature to a document criticizing the direction the country is heading at precisely the wrong time: right before the Reichstag fire that is set by the Nazi's and blamed on the Communists ... which puts his brother Gustav, although he is neither, on their hit list, and he takes a friend's advise and flees. So they soon enough arrest his brother instead. After his ordeal while in German custody, he says during a conversation with his in-law:

"You must remember that I am a Jew as well as a capitalist. When you tell me: 'It's true we are murdering Jews, but we only mean to attack the trade unions', that doesn't bring my Jews back to life again."

 In other words,  go ahead and murder all the Germans you want, kill all the communists, please; we'll stand by in silence, hell, we'll even continue to pay the "insurance" to this gang of hooligans to keep our shops unmolested, just leave we capitalist Jews alone.  But lots of Jews were communists; it should have come as no surprise that such niceties of distinction would be eventually discarded.

 "Even when escape was possible, 'They preferred to live a life of continual anxiety and danger but to remain near their money'", because  ... "one had investments in Germany one did not want to lose, one wanted to keep on supplying Germany (which in 1934, the year The Oppermanns was published, was ruled by the Nazi Party) with arms, one feared that Bolshevism might succeed the rule of the Nationalists".

Better the Nazis than the Reds. A fatal miscalculation.

This is the same mentality that came to the surface during the RR administration that persuaded it to jettison detente and go for the hell or high water dissolution of the Soviet Union using oil, of which the oil capitalist and Director of the CIA, GWH Bush knew a little about, as the means of that destruction, in conjunction with the funding and arming of the Wahhabi school of Islamic fundamentalism in Saudi Arabia, who were then smuggled via Pakistan through the mountains and into Afghanistan to use a as proxy force to project American power against godless communism.

It reasserted its ugly head during the GW Bush administration as William Kristol, on the Jon Stewart show, flashing his creepy smirk of intellectual superiority, eerily reminiscent of William F. Buckley's twisted smile, explained to him how, just as Madeleine Albright had no problem with the death of half a million Iraqi children due to sanctions, He had no problem with sending thousands of Americans to their deaths for no other reason (after the lie of WMD and others were exposed, they simply stopped trying to pretend there was any reason at all, leaving our current president to proffer his own version  that it was for the oil ... yeah, to keep it in the ground) than to assuage the fear of Israeli leaders.

Now, lo and behold, what do I see when I get up this morning but our own Fearless Leader extolling the Normandy invasion only to have his speech become the catalyst for an article in TruthDig featuring a conversation between American University professor Peter Kuznick and Paul Jay of The Real News Network in which they discuss the ruling class' support not only up to, but during, WW2, and how,

"Prescott Bush, the uncle of George Bush, and father, and grandfather,  were very much instrumental in working with Brown Brothers Harriman, and got called on the carpet for this during the war with the Trading with the Enemies Act."

Which brings us back to the charge of anti-Semitism hurled at anyone daring to criticize the level of Defense spending in RR's America.

As anyone who has read any of my posts, my struggle to express myself hopefully makes it clear how fond I am of language, and no one has a greater command of our American English than the Jews. I can only assume, well not quite, there is after all Proust, that the same holds true in other countries they reside in. So when they continue to use the term anti-Semitic, even though one of the Semitic languages is Arabic, the most widely spoken language in Iraq, it makes one wonder exactly why? Because to me, you can't be more anti- someone than to murder them en masse, so using the definition of what Semitic is, it's quite clear that no single group of people has killed more Semitic people in the 75 years since the end of WW2 than the Jews. Ergo, the Jews are currently the most anti-Semitic people on the planet.

So why should a group with such a facility with language and respect for its power (Noam Chomsky, after all started his career as a linguist, espousing the theory that a language organ was part of the human brain) as the Jews (I don't even like that term. Because it makes it sound like they are a monolithic block, which, like any other group, they are anything but: you would be hard-pressed to find two people more different than Noam Chomsky and William Kristal, for example) continue to use that term?

I think you already know the answer from my little ditty in the first part of this piece: to conflate religion with ethnicity so as to allow the use of the supernatural and superstition as a means of political dominance. To profane their sacred text by using it as a Title Deed.

The comedian Lewis Black (made famous by his hilarious diatribes on the Jon Stewart Show, the man who single-handedly made Comedy Central a must-watch channel, who, claiming that his show was Fake News, became the go-to night-time host to watch to get something besides MSM pablum during the Iraq War. Jon Stewart is a hero to many of us who watched his show during the aughts) used to, during his one-man shows, chide the evangelicals about using the Bible as though it were truths written in stone. He would say, "That's our book, we should know ... They're parables ...  but,  but when you use that same Book to justify the occupation of another land because the Supreme Being said it's your land, then that doesn't quite jive.

There may in fact be a realm of the supernatural, but the only proof of its existence ever offered is our own existence.

If I put a flame underneath a pan of covered water, I know the exogenous heat thereby introduced to the closed system will excite the molecules of water and change their state from a liquid to a gas, and that I can use the resultant steam to power a tea kettle to whistle, a boat to paddle, a nuclear reactor to turn turbines and generate electricity. I also know that I, or you, an Imam, Rabbi or priest, can sit in front of that same pan of water and pray to Jesus, or Yahweh, Jehovah or Allah, until we're blue in the face and absolutely nothing will happen. The supernatural, if it does exist, has never shown the slightest interest in our own existence.

 If it is, it simply is.

So anyone who claims they have congress with the supernatural is a charlatan, an Elmer
Gantry who has never shown by the slightest manifestation that they have any more insight or power to elicit an action from the supernatural than you or I.

And since governance in our democracies is about fulfilling peoples' desires, supernaturalism, whenever it is invoked, is a ruse, a subterfuge like "Manifest Destiny", to pretend that our murderous actions are justified by the supposed will of the supernatural, when it is only our own will we wish to impose. The mujaheddin didn't pray to Allah to help the Afgahni's: they used American-supplied armamentaria. 

The Americans, likewise, didn't wait for divine intervention to bring an end to godless communism, they used Greed. If there is any god the world today worships in united fervor it is that. Greed is the real reason  for robbery, land-theft, pre-emptive War, and the myriad other crimes mankind indulges in. Invoking the supernatural is merely the most tried and true method to get one group of citizens to send their very progeny, their only future, to die for another group.

... and that's just not right.