Reagan “Revolution” Destroyed Pattern For Progress.
(EUGENE, Ore.) - Oregon again faces desperate destroying slashes in its educational programs, at every level from k-garden through grad-school. “The best and brightest” (!?!) Oregon Legislators are scrambling and scamming and schooling each other again.
They are driven to defensive fortress-walls of still-presumed “political party/principle”, built higher each day, defended by futile press-releases offering excuses.
Every other State in this tottering once-democracy must cope with very considerable cuts in education, too.But only Oregon, California currently must still slash school-days, proving up potent past tax reform failures, even given huge national stimulus-funding NOW. Deeper, more destructive consequences to American lifestyle and opportunities --pledged in our Constitutionand even more consequential now-- follow for sure.
Those withering wounds to a once-great educational system are consequences of the Reaganomics debacle. That’s the price we NOW pay for allowing ourselves to be sold the atrociously perverted political pablum: “Government is NOT the solution -- It IS the problem”.
We were then misled to believe that looming danger could only be contained by constant cuts to both taxes AND expenditures, of ANY kind but especially for social aims and safety-net. “Greed is good” became the controlling attitude, reflected throughout America’s working world.
That shaped public/private --especially corporate--attitudes, setting up the great fall when consequences from too-easy credit to all parts of commerce and the economy came back to plague us. For THIRTY YEARS, that UNreality was perpetrated on this nation, generated by huge Far Right billionaire-funded midstream/media-based distortion/perversion.
There can be no question of Far Right intent and action, now fully evident in widespread think-tank, brain-group, publication and published statement --including bestseller books by participants in the scams. During those decades deep, sometimes disastrous, cuts and stalling containment of educational growth and development were constantly emphasized.
That major attack-point is specifically stated, described, documented and on public record over those years since educational support is atop the tax-costs for any democratic government. Those are the most pernicious controlling acts of massive neocon tax policies nationwide.
The Reagan era saw their imposition, camouflaged as “Reaganomics”, reflecting “supply-side” theory described as “voodoo economics” --until he was offered the VP--by Bush I. The whole Reagan approach was characterized as “a “Trojan horse’ full of treasure for the rich --by his own Budget Director, David Stockman, in an ATLANTIC Magazine article.
Stockman faced an irate, angry “Dutch” Reagan, did not resign, stayed on for more than three years, finally presiding over the horrendous annual budget deficit of $233 billion --proving his original point. (From DUTCH, Reagan’s authorized biography by his early school companion and friend Edmund Morris.)
The longtime consequences of these neocon policy impacts still dominate, distort, depress whatever any state legislature tries to do NOW -- in fundamentally different circumstances brought on by worldwide changes forced by fantastic globalization and new technologies of communication, production and distribution.
Every State has been victimized --ironic since it was Reagan’s longtime record of nationwide visit to GE plants as their corporate spokesperson that is reported to have shaped his conversion from labor leader to his professedly “conservative” views later.
Education lives-and-dies via the property tax; that makes it both the primary target, the most vulnerable victim of potent neocon destruction.It is there that desperate distortion of democratic demand --strong education for all, with equal facilities and teaching--has been allowed to pervert, permeate,even destroy what we owe to our progeny.
That surely includes an education closely geared to 21st Century realities, developments, and future certainties --such as much sharper competition from the rising billions of workers reaching middle-class all around the globe. (See preceding Op Ed for special ECONOMIST report.)
Anyone knowing and appreciating the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, from the historical record since the Revolution, knew better and saw clearly --even in the Nixon/Carter era-- how far off-base that effort was -- imperiling all we had learned from 1776 onwards.
It was the combined impacts of Nixon’s notorious duplicity --he resigned to avoid sure impeachment-- and Carter’s capture, by consequences beyond any control, that set up that situation --now so recognized widely by most well-documented sources. No wonder many Americans, uninformed and misinformed by mainstream media, fell into crafty-trap by canny-cabal combined with complicit “brain-tank” and Far-Right/religious exhortation.
Widespread, increasingly deep public concern stemmed directly from personal/family and business-professional painful experience.That smashed through patterns of misinformation spread nationwide by neocon agency at all levels.
The surest proof is your local neighborhood association, your friends and colleagues, via open, honest democratic dialog; test it by frank conversation NOW with them. Finishing touches for strong motivation in every State was supplied by the awkward Bush II thrust of No Child Left Behind, forcing test pressures, threatening penalties for both teachers and schools, jeopardizing participation by school districts.
But it has has taken the Earthshaking impacts of globalization to drive home the WHY of the inevitable change in education --as for all other areas in this new 21st Century.
Underway for two centuries, as America reached out in strong free trade benefitting both parties, our honest entrepreneurship built this nation AND opened up the world for others. But then came the corporate confluence worldwide, forcing rapid failure of true “free trade” and distorting entrepreneurship into widening “increasingly false semi-competition contrived and controlled for multinational corporate interests.” We are now left with “competition” for common labor-work and manufacturing method against the low-costs of primitive lifestyle and precarious existence of near-slave/worker conditions in still developing nations.
Many stand ready to provide refuge and support for corporation-controlled manufacture fleeing former producing areas with democracy-supporting lifestyle. In our longtime American “exceptionalism”, with its strong characterization of a nation driven by intense motivation and equally intense love of family, do we now stand ready to move as we MUST --to guarantee a real world-class education for all, in equal preparatory participation, for the commonweal?
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Henry Clay Ruark is the one of, if not the most experienced, working reporter in the state of Oregon, and possibly the entire Northwest. Hank has been at it since the 1930's, working as a newspaper staff writer, reporter and photographer for organizations on the east coast like the Bangor Maine Daily News.Today he writes Op-Ed's for Salem-News.com with words that deliver his message with much consideration for the youngest, underprivileged and otherwise unrepresented people.
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