One of the things that has pissed me off more than anything else in the last, oh, 28 years or so is this bullshit about Ronald Reagan being a "great" President.
He was not. His administration was utterly corrupt and dishonest, and started us down this road which where we find ourselves today, with our economy literally imploding beneath our feet, our stock markets and retirement plans in sickening, devastating freefall, with no end in sight.
The Reagan administration contained many of the most nefarious liars and bastards we have on the scene today, and it coincided with the creation of the vast "Right Wing Noise Machine" which now dominates our airwaves and cable "news" outlets, with the resulting engines of hate mongering such as Fox News, Clear Channel and Sinclair, and the empires of Limbaugh and Hannity, who are making fortunes brainwashing an entire generation of Americans.
At any rate, what I want to show you here is a spectacular, absolutely spectacular, take-down of Reagan's own economic advisor Art Laffer, the man who invented "The Laffer Curve" and "supply side economics" (i.e. "trickle-down" economic theory):
The important thing to note about this video is that it's from August of 2006.
Besides the revolting smarminess of Art Laffer, he is simply, and astoundingly, wrong. About everything. And I mean EVERYthing:
If Republicans like Laffer had any sense of honor, they would all be resigning, committing hari-kari, or at the very least commiting themselves to exile, or maybe giving away all their money and checking into hermitages. But they have no shame, and no honor. They are human scum.
Peter Schiff is definitely a guy to watch. He's obviously smarter than Alan "gosh who could have foreseen such a thing" Greenspan, and just about every other guy in the room.
But the main point I want to make here is that this economic disaster should, hopefully, if there is a God, or at least some semblance of common sense among a race of beings who invented things like controlled combustion and the printing press, lead to the legacy of Ronald Reagan and his gang of crooks forever being buried. Ronald Reagan was a tool, a puppet, of these powerful people who managed to loot this country for twenty years and turn it into a hollow shell of its former self, a farce, a paper-mache turd-filled pinata of mythic stupidity and self-delusion.
Now we're left with fucktards like Art Laffer actually being allowed to run businesses and appear on CNBC as some kind of "expert", we're left with a propaganda machine where hate-mongers like Limbaugh and Hannity are paid scores of millions of dollars to brainwash entire populations, and we're left with economic and environmental disaster of global proportions.
I blame Reagan. Not batty old Ronnie himself, but the people who shoved him down our throats, propped him up in front of us, told us he knew what he was doing, lied to us about things like "supply side econmics" and actually managed to conjure up massive hatred of people who wanted to do nothing more than protect the common good of our air and water and forests, who wrote his speeches and his scripted monologues, and who then bought the media companies to tell us that he was a great President.
In the current "everything is changing" environment, let's change history back to the truth -- Ronald Reagan was a disaster, and led us here. He was NOT a great president, he should not have airports and highways named after him, he should NEVER be on any of our money, or on Mt. Rushmore, and the FACT IS he had absolutely NOTHING to do with the downfall of the Soviet Union. Absolutely nothing. The man is and was a fraud, a myth, a lie.
And I'll leave you off with another Peter Schiff Youtube, where he talks about the present day, 2008, right now .... in this case about the inexplicably rising dollar: