Wednesday, May 10, 2006

National Day of Prayer: Hypocrisy Redux

I have written several postings that fall under the heading "Interesting People I have Known". A peer and lunching buddy of my Uncle Gordon was my dad, Charles Baker. He deserves his own posting, but that will come later. In brief, my Dad quit school to work in a factory when he was 16 and voted Republican until he met Norman Thomas when he was a conscientious objector during World War II. So impressed was he, that he voted Socialist in one presidential election and for the rest of his life voted a straight Democratic ticket. He was thrice dissappointed when Adlai Stevenson didn't win, but the worst was yet to come in the shape of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. He was so incensed by the Reagan years that he created a Reagan binder that he filled with clippings and his own commentary logging the egregious excesses of the Reagan years. He and my mother were also active correspondents to the White House in those years, and on rare occasions, they would get a form letter back from an assistant to the White House correspondence secretary. The Reagan binder (entitled "The Continuing Saga of Ronnie Wonderful") is the greatest inheritance from my Dad - a material object representing the moral and civic values and lessons he taught us.

Last Thursday was the National Day of Prayer. I hereby enclose a letter my parents sent to President Reagan in 1981. Their comments could equally apply today as Reagan and Bush share the common traits of piously mouthing religious comments while at the same time consistently governing without ethics or moral values.

This letter is particularly appropriate today as it appears that Congress has voted in another tax cut to rob from the middle class and poor to again reward the rich.

May 7, 1981

President Ronald Reagan
The White House
Washington, D.C.

Dear Mr. Reagan,

You have proclaimed today, May 7, as National Day of Prayer. We believe that every day is a good day for prayer.

It is our feeling, after watching the evening news that today is an especially good day for prayer. It is much needed. Today the House of Representatives passed the "Reagan Budget".

We will be praying for the handicapped, the poor, the elderly, and others whose lives will be drastically altered by the cuts in the various programs which affect them. We will be praying that local communities will be able to support the welfare program increases which will become necessary to provide for the thousands of CETA workers who will be jobless and untrained as a result of these cuts.

Above all, Mr. Reagan, we will be praying that your view of the needs of the disadvantaged in our society will be broadened. We will be praying also that you will re-consider the large increases you have proposed for the military. Since the United States and the Soviet Union each has the nuclear capacity to destroy the other, further increases appear to be a waste and rob the needy in our society.

We want you to know, Mr. Reagan, that we are retirees in our sixties and that we are Christians who have always believed in the philosophy that Jesus taught relative to our responsibility to our fellow citizens in need.

Yes, Mr. Reagan, we are praying on this national day of prayer as we do every day. We pray for your health, happiness and success. We pray also that you will review your budget cuts again and consider the very sad effects that they will have on the disadvantaged who need help most.

Sincerely,


Charles W. and Florence R. Baker

4 Comments:

At 9:15 AM, Blogger HispanicPundit said...

All of this, and yet Reaganomics brought in an era of more wealth for the United States than any that has ever been seen previously (remember the double digit interest rates of the Carter Administration?). Everybody in the United States, from the poor to the rich, from the disabled to the fully able, from the minority to the white, has seen a drastic rise in income and standard of living since Ronald Reagan's economics. The Wall Street Journal had an article titled, Still Morning in America -- Reaganomics, 25 years later, it is worth the read, here.

As far as foreign policy goes, well say what you will about Reagan's choice of military build up, but it is evident that whatever he did, it did not bring the boom and bust destruction everybody thought it would. On the contrary, the cold war was ended without a single shot being fired and Reagan's military build up was a significant cause of that.

On the other hand, look at all of the destruction the collectivist (including socialism and communism) economies brought. Collectivist regimes, it must be remembered, were the greatest killers of the twentieth century, killing significantly more people than even Hitler did. They also brought enormous poverty to anything they touched, killing off even farmers crops and producing mass starvation.

In other words, had events turned out the way your dad wanted, instead of us living in the land of greatest prosperity of the twenty first century, we might all be in death camps or experiencing mass starvation, while speaking Russian.

Your dad may have had his heart in the right place, but history has clearly shown that he was wrong, incredibly wrong, in his views towards Reagan and socialism in general.

 
At 8:18 PM, Blogger KJERRINGA MOT STRØMMEN said...

Dear HP: Thank you for sharing your opinions about the Reagan years. Clearly, not everyone reads the history of those years in the same way.

The claim that Reagan's policies ended the Cold War ignores several points. First, Reagan's reliance on a buildup of American conventional and nuclear weapons was nothing new, rather, it was in the tradition of previous presidents since Truman. It could also be argued that if the weapons he postured with were more threatening, it was due to the increased sophistication of military technology by that time.

Secondly, your argument fails to recognize the role of a self-destructive military/economic policy in the Soviet Union, causing it to implode from within, and moreover, the role of Gorbachev in promoting policies of glasnost and perestroika. Although his policies ultimately led to the end of the USSR as it then was, perhaps Gorbachev was the truly valiant one willing to risk all to cleanse a corrupt and unworkable system. It could also be argued that in spite of the huge military build up in the U.S. and the U.S military posturing during those years, Gorbachev took the leap of faith that the U.S. would not use that destructive power on the Soviet Unions as he was working toward a more open society.

I would also like to state that I am no apologist for the many excesses of the Soviet regime over the years, from the Stalinist purges on down. On the other hand, the alleged threat of similar regimes in our hemisphere has been used many times to topple democratically elected governments (Guatemala in 1952, Chile in 1973, to name only two) in order to impose brutal military dictators friendly to the U.S. but also guilty of horrible human rights violations. Our history is simply not pure in that regard.

As to the wonderful long term effects of the trickle down Reagonomics, the wealth is simply not flowing down, if it is even trickling. While your Wall Street Journal article speaks in glowing terms, many other sources point to the ever increasing gap between the rich and the poor starting in the 80's, the ever larger share of productivity wealth going to top management and the smaller portion to labor, and finally, the recent observation that a single earner working full time on a minimum wage is no longer able to pay market rate housing. (And please don't tell me that this is to rent controls - they are just not that prevalent). Let's look, rather, to inflation.

 
At 9:08 PM, Blogger HispanicPundit said...

KMS,

Now we are getting somewhere. Thanks for responding. Many points of disagreement, so I will just jump right in.

First, Reagan's reliance on a buildup of American conventional and nuclear weapons was nothing new, rather, it was in the tradition of previous presidents since Truman.

I couldn't disagree more. Reagan dramatically changed the climate with the Soviet Union, not just in military build up but in a complete revamp of our foreign policy. Reagan discarded the old containment policies and brought in a much more confrontational policy towards the Soviet Union. He went from the previous détente to direct rebuttal of everything communist. Remember the whole 'evil empire' speech? The arms race? Star wars? etc...this is why Reagan was met with large protests around the world, much larger protests than you see against Bush and the Iraq war. Everybody thought his dramatic change in foreign policy and weapons build up was a dangerous direction for a superpower to take.

With all due respect, to say that Reagan "was in the tradition of previous presidents since Truman" is to not know much of cold war history. Reagan has been described in a lot of ways - especially 'too hawkish' - but being "in the tradition of previous presidents since Truman" has never been one of them.

Secondly, your argument fails to recognize the role of a self-destructive military/economic policy in the Soviet Union, causing it to implode from within, and moreover, the role of Gorbachev in promoting policies of glasnost and perestroika.

There were many people who helped bring down the 'iron curtain', I am not denying that. Certainly Gorbachev had a role, but of all of those people, Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and Margaret Thatcher were by far the biggest.

This is not just my personal opinion, it is also the opinion of those most intimately involved with the resistance movements taking hold at the time, for example, Wiki writes:

Lech Walesa, leader of the Solidarity movement in Poland, said in 2004, "When talking about Ronald Reagan, I have to be personal. We in Poland took him so personally. Why? Because we owe him our liberty. This can't be said often enough by people who lived under oppression for half a century, until communism fell in 1989."

Helmut Kohl, chancellor of West Germany, said, "He was a stroke of luck for the world. Two years after Reagan called on Gorbachev to tear down the wall, he noted, it fell and 11 months later Germany was reunified. We Germans have much to thank Ronald Reagan for." Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern said, "President Reagan was a determined opponent of Communism and he played an important role in bringing an end to Communism and to the artificial division of Europe imposed after the Second World War." Vaclav Havel, who became the Czech president in 1989, said, "He was a man of firm principles who was indisputably instrumental in the fall of Communism."

...and with regard to "self-destructive military/economic policy in the Soviet Union", we musn't forget that collectivists economies have been a failure where ever they have been implemented, not just in the Soviet Union. They have repeatedly shown to result in mass famine, horrible human rights, and the the highest poverty for all.

Now, as far as the economics go, you write,

As to the wonderful long term effects of the trickle down Reagonomics, the wealth is simply not flowing down, if it is even trickling.

Regardless, it is still an undeniable fact that the economy is 10x, no, 100x better than it was when Reagan first took office. Again, don't you remember the double digit interest rates of the Carter years? The 'stagflation' that was a large part of his time in office? Economic growth, a rise in income for all Americans, and interest rates all started to improve precisely when Reagan took office (although, to be fair, a large part of the reason for that was Volckers policies too).

I am not arguing that the economy is now perfect, only that those who derided Reagan - both on an economic and foreign policy level - turned out to be the ones with the biggest egg on their faces.

 
At 10:21 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

What was it?
[b][url="http://hydrocodone.dewall.info "]hydrocodone online[/url][/b]

 

Post a Comment

<< Home