January 20, 1981: #Hostages are formally released into United States custody after spending 444 days in captivity. The release takes place just minutes after Ronald #Reagan is sworn in as president. #newsrewind
Reagan was livid. He was shown pictures of dead children including a small baby with an arm blown off. He ordered aides to get Israel on the phone and then dressed Israeli PM Begin down sharply, 'It is a holocaust‘.
#PDS#Tornado Warning Northwestern Johnston County
East central Carter County
South central Pontotoc County
Northwestern Marshall County
Southeastern Murray County in southern #Oklahoma...
Until 1215 AM CDT.
At 1138 PM CDT, a confirmed large, extremely dangerous tornado located near Dickson, moving northeast at 45 mph.
L'idea che il neoliberismo si sia imposto grazie ad una manciata di figure chiave (Reagan, Thatcher, Pinochet) è a sua volta una fantasia neoliberale, perché rinforza l'idea che gli individui da soli (grazie al loro carisma e alle loro abilità) riescano a cambiare il mondo.
In realtà l'ideologia neoliberale si è imposta (e continua ad imporsi) grazie ai think-thank e alle fondazioni degli ultra-miliardari (e a tutto un reticolo di centri di potere). Dietro singoli rappresentanti ci sono sempre grandi gruppi.
Quando dite di voler pisciare sulla tomba di Margareth Thatcher, lei vi sorride dall'aldilà, perché è riuscita a colonizzare anche il vostro dissenso. È quello il segnale: hanno vinto loro.
Today in Labor History March 28, 1977: AFSCME Local 1644 struck in Atlanta, Georgia, for a pay raise. This local of mostly African American sanitation workers saw labor and civil rights as part of the same struggle. They saw their fight as a continuation of the 1968 Memphis sanitation strike. For several years, they organized to get black civil rights leaders elected to public office. They succeeded in getting their man, Maynard Jackson, elected mayor of Atlanta. After all, as vice mayor, Jackson had supported their 1970 strike. Yet, in his first three years as mayor, he refused to give them a single raise. Consequently, their wages dropped below the poverty line for a family of four. Jackson accused AFSCME of attacking Black Power by challenging his authority. He fired over 900 workers by April 1 and crushed the strike by the end of April. Many believe this set the precedent for Reagan’s mass firing of 11,000 air traffic controllers during the PATCO strike, in 1981.
As a preliminary matter, it’s difficult to get good info about the fairness doctrine because corporate media, of all stripes, loved its repeal. It makes money for both the #fox and #nbc#propaganda wings.
What’s the Fairness Doctrine, you ask? In a nutshell, it was an FCC policy that required the holders of broadcast licenses to present controversial issues of public importance, while doing so in a manner that fairly reflected differing viewpoints.
It was repealed in 1987 under the #Reagan administration, enthusiastically lap dogging to monied #elite media owners.
That’s background. You can read more at the link below.
Now for the impact, as told through an anecdotal experience I had today.
“Bowl a strike, not a spare—Revolution everywhere!” Members of the Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League (RABL) chanted bowling-themed slogans as they marched against President Ronald Reagan’s threat to invade Nicaragua in 1988.
Acting within a broad progressive coalition, RABL helped shut down major sections of downtown Minneapolis for three days in an outpouring of rebellion against the Reagan administration’s covert wars in Central America. They built barricades in the streets and occupied major intersections in the business district. Events reached a dramatic climax when a masked protester threw a bowling ball through the window of a military recruitment office. The crash of the broken glass marked the beginning of a new era of anarchist militancy in the United States. The rage of a generation of young people raised in Reagan’s America threatened to explode.
Promised a “new morning in America,” a generation of disaffected young people found themselves shut out of political life and raised in the alienation of the suburbs. Many of their parents lost their unionized factory jobs to neoliberal outsourcing or were kicked off welfare. They grappled with the reality of skyrocketing inequality, precarious jobs, and violent policing. The hopes of social democracy—not to mention the liberatory movements of the 1960s-1970s—were dead, and mainstream society seemingly offered little worth saving.
Meanwhile, Reagan crushed the hopes of a better world in Central America by funding and training Guatemalan death squads, Nicaraguan Contras, and violent Salvadoran elites. The 1980s was the decade of the triumph of American capitalism against both the left-wing idealism of the 1960s at home and the “Evil Empire” of Soviet Communism abroad. The New Right remade American society in its image, spreading suburbia and waging war on what it called the liberal “nanny state.”
But dissidents emerged out of the cracks of the new society. A new generation growing up in Reagan’s America turned to anarchism. Young people found a new form of politics in mosh pits at punk shows and street fights against fascists and police. Anarchism provided a political home and a strategic program for rebels of the new generation.
How can you tell #brianMulroney was a spineless sellout who (like his buddy #reagan) severed the last shackles that controlled corporations, gutted the national infrastructure, public housing, public everything? Just look at this picture.
He was an unrepentant greedy, murderous, scum sucking vomit vacuum who profited from suffering and death in his companies mines.
2/29/24 — Open 6-9p. Mask recommended. No open containers, please.
Here's another that, if someone doesn't buy it soon, I may just take home. Not an audiobook but, a collection of audio from historic events on 2 CDs, compiled with a book of background info. Primarily concerned with US events.
Today in Labor History February 25, 1986: As a result of ongoing protests, Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos begged President Ronald Reagan for advice. Reagan told him to “cut and cut cleanly.” That evening, Marcos and his wife Imelda fled the nation aboard a U.S. air force plane, after 20 years of rule. He and his family, and an entourage of 90 people (mostly servants), arrived in Hawaii the next day. They brought 22 crates of cash valued at $717 million, 300 crates of jewelry of unknown value, $4 million worth of unset precious gems, $200,000 in gold bullion, $1 million in Philippine pesos and deposit slips for $124 million in banks in the Cayman Islands. Plus, countless crates of shoes. The Marcos’s hold the Guinness record for the largest ever theft from a government. Their son, Bong Bong Marcos, is the current president of the Philippines. His vice president is Sara Duterte, daughter of the Philippines last president, the violently repressive Rodrigo Duterte, who oversaw the assassinations of well over 1,000 street children and alleged drug dealers. Under Ferdinand Marcos, there were over 3,000 documented extrajudicial murders, 35,000 documented victims of torture and tens of thousands of people imprisoned.
"Historically, the antitax movement was steeped in racism and nativism. Cranky well-to-do white people resented having to pay more in taxes to underwrite welfare programs that tended to help people of color, or fund public schools attended in the main by children of immigrants."
Oh, it was #Reagan. And it's now the #GOP. By gutting school lunch programs younger children are getting less nutritional food. Our health got worse and our health care costs got higher
And finally, 1980s is when the wealthy got wealthier with tax cuts that benefited corporations and the rich
"The beginning of the Reagan administration is a watershed moment in the economic history of the U.S.,” he told us, pointing to his book, “Foundations of Real-World Economics.” “It was the end of the New Deal philosophy and a turn toward the idea that the market can deliver a good life.”
By driving down #inequality, the New Deal and the Great Society literally lifted up the most vulnerable (and often shortest) Americans...."
"With the Reagan-era pivot to market-based solutions, #health-care costs soared. In the space of a decade, the United States went from spending 1.7 times as much as a typical advanced nation on health care to spending 2.1 times as much — a level near which it remains to this day.
As America’s health-care costs were rising, #millennials were in their crucial early growth stages. Not coincidentally, Komlos has found that this is also when U.S. life expectancies began to falter.
.....there’s an even deeper issue than health care: rising inequality. Exact estimates vary, but sources tend to agree that 1970s were one of the most equitable eras in American history. Then, around 1981, inequality began to rise..."
"We’re guessing education doesn’t prevent shrinking. Instead, Komlos urges us to think about height the way we think about inheritance, as a visible sign of deeper advantages. If you’re given the resources you need to reach your full potential height, you’re also getting the resources you need to succeed in school and beyond.
For the rest of their lives, shorter #millennials will bear the physical stamp of the inequality that erupted in their infancy. When we’re trying to explain America’s unluckiest generation, we should consider not just what they’ve become, but how they started out."
“I don’t see how he would want to be in it,” Davis told CNN’s Jim Acosta in an interview Sunday. “It’s so diametrically opposed to what he believed and to the dignity that he felt that people in government should have.”