In fact, I fear I am a jack-of-all-trades. (Posts tagged Politics)

straightallies

I hope one day that history looks back on ronald reagan as one of the 20th century’s most vile and disgusting serial killers

haydrion

may i ask why

straightallies

Remember when like 6 Americans had ebola and it was an international emergency, and Obama flew out to meet survivors?
Here is a list of things the United States government did in response:
-Increasing the number of Ebola testing labs throughout the U.S. that can quickly and safely screen a potential Ebola specimen -Educating more than 150,000 health care workers on how to identify, isolate, diagnose, and care for patients under investigation for Ebola -Developing countermeasures — including the first Ebola vaccine to progress to Phase 2 testing — to prevent and treat Ebola -Converting at least 10 of the Ebola Treatment Centers into long-term Regional Ebola and Pandemic Treatment Centers for long-term readiness for years to come -Helping state and local public health systems accelerate and improve their operational readiness and preparedness for Ebola or other infectious diseases
Source: https://whitehouse.gov/ebola-response

When the Reagan administration was faced with tens of thousands of gay men dying, they did nothing. They made jokes. They laughed. They caused an epidemic that killed 40 million people, because they hated gay men and thought we deserved to die.

northcoastbear

There is so much more to it. There is a myth perpetuated by Reaganites that he was an historically significant President, in some positive sense. If you are old enough to have voted in 1980, you probably know differently. If you were born after 1980 you have been raised on this myth. He sold Americans a fable about a Hollywood movie-like exceptional past and destiny, and led ordinary people around with portrayals of that mirage while his reactionary robber-baron friends set about dismantling 50 years of progressive advancements for working men and women, on their way to returning themselves to the position of unfettered economic domination they held between the Civil War and the Great Depression. He was a union buster. He gave us Scalia – need I say more? He tried to give us Robert Bork (does anyone under 30 even know who he is?). He lied about Iran/Contra. He avoided dealing with AIDS. He sealed the political sham-show between right wing capitalist kings and the evangelical thought-control snake-oil salesmen. Americans don’t want to hear that they are ordinary citizens of the world, and they don’t want to hear that the aren’t anointed by some deity to lead the world to salvation. They lapped it up, and they continue to do so.

ayellowbirds

I have to wonder how the response of a more competent presidency to the AIDS crisis might have changed even the global impact of the disease. Where might we be today? How many millions of people would be alive and not suffering? Yes, Reagan was historically significant—for fucking things up in a globally devastating way.

iammyfather

When you hear how he slashed Income taxes, he did on the Wealthy, but he increased the lowest tax rate from 10% to 15%.

wikdsushi

His campaign was funded by Christian radicals, whose entire goal was to dismantle Roe vs. Wade and see American women relegated once more to back alleys and dirty knives. He opened the door to religion in politics in a way the postwar McCarthyists never dreamed possible. Now, 36 years after his election, maybe a third of American medical schools offer proper access to even first-trimester abortion training (in an era where that should mean a pill or vaginal suppository), and there are currently fewer doctors trained to perform late stage abortions for the entire US than there were pre-RvW (when such operations were only performed as a heroic measure).

heylookitsarevolution

And no one has even touched on his legacy of racial
hatred, deliberate destruction of black communities and establishing of COONTELPRO to destroy the lives of black panthers and black activists, his actual murder of black activists and more. He was actually a demon.

gehayi

If you want to know how many lives could have been saved if the Reagan government had just fucking BUDGETED for AIDS research instead of telling AIDS researchers that they had to beg, borrow or steal any money for AIDS from other programs–then read And The Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition by Randy Shilts. And be prepared to have your heart broken at the unadulterated and wildly irresponsible waste.of time and human lives.

Other shitty things Reagan did:

1) He almost tripled the National Debt. And you need to see the difference with zeroes:

When Reagan took office in 1980: $909,100,000 owed.(909.1 billion)

When Reagan left office in 1988: $2,601,300,000,000 owed. (2.6 trillion)

2) He raised taxes on the middle class and the poor ELEVEN TIMES while in office.

3) Unemployment soared after Reagan passed his tax cuts for the rich, and it took decades to get back down again.

4) He turned the U.S. into an illegal weapons dealer.

5) He funded terrorists, helping create the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. From NewsOne:

After Ronald Reagan was elected in 1981, U.S. funding of the mujahideen increased significantly and CIA Paramilitary Officers played a big role in training, arming and sometimes even leading mujahideen forces.
The CIA trained the mujahideen in many of the tactics Al Qaeda is known for today, such as car bombs, assassinations and other acts that would be considered terrorism today.

6) When his economic policies began wreaking havoc on the government, Reagan stole from Social Security–to the tune of 2.5 TRILLION–treating it for eight years as the private slush fund of himself and his rich friends.

7) [T]he Reagan administration demonized opponents of apartheid, most notably the African National Congress, as dangerous and pro-communist. Reagan even vetoed a bill to impose sanctions on South Africa, only to be overruled by Congress.

They called him the Teflon president for a reason. All this shit–and none of it stuck to him. He got away clean every single time.

whythatsbullshit

Reagan is also almost entirely responsible for making colleges in California tuition-based. College used to be far more accessible to more people before Reagan saw to that. Most of what makes Reagan popular today (especially among conservatives) are actually the result of popular myths.

elodieunderglass

My mother has a lot of tales of life in NYC in the 1970s-80s. And she will talk endlessly about how the Reagan administration closed NYC’s state-run mental hospitals and asylums, which meant that the previously institutionalized “crazy people”* simply went onto the streets. There was a huge, unsustainable boom in the homeless population. Some of the displaced people were violent and had been committed to institutions due to criminal behavior. Some were just painfully lost and abused or brain damaged or disabled. Some were recently returned Vietnam vets who had been receiving treatment for PTSD when the hospitals closed. All of them - being formerly institutionalized mental patients - were completely unequipped to be dumped on the frankly filthy, violent streets of NYC.

Of course, since mental institutions in NYC were LITERAL HELL HOLES OF HORROR, there were a lot of good reasons for closing them down and de-institutionalizing was genuinely meant to be a good thing but it was unfortunately implemented by TOSSING THE PATIENTS INTO THE STREETS, which is not “reform.”

Reagan’s chirpy explanation (apparently) was that this would save lots of money. (And there were some Supreme Court decisions that ironically made this easier, such as the SCOTUS ruling “You can’t just imprison people for being sick or disabled” which was immediately interpreted as “Literally throw the sick and disabled into the streets! All of them! yay! saving so much money! The community will take care of them!”)

The community did not care for the former patients. The community was terrified and hateful and resentful and afraid.

So you’d be walking to work with a spatter of light incomprehensible violence breaking out (shit is that a knife shit is that blood, oh no I don’t want to get AIDS). Or scenes that really stick with you like walking past an amputee war vet, triggered and dissociating, crying and dragging himself along and grabbing for your ankles and begging you to help him find his legs AND YOU HAVE TO WALK PAST OH GOD OH GOD as you kind of ascend to another plane of anxiety because you will be fired if you’re late for work so this man just has to deal with his own shit. WHICH DID NOT CREATE AN ATMOSPHERE OF SERENITY, especially for a mentally ill person like my mother who still isn’t over it.

And there was AIDS. And some cold fucking winters. And bodies in the streets.

This contributed greatly to America’s fear of the mentally ill. So many stereotypes about homeless people and neurodiversity came from this. So much of the fear of this incredibly vulnerable population came from this. And the needed reforms didn’t happen. “Oh, we put them in asylums but that was bad, apparently, so we let them out and that was AWFUL, so.”

This has mostly been forgotten, anyway. But you can read articles like this one which talk about how instead of leading to mental healthcare reform this whole bright idea just … ended up channeling mentally ill people into prison, and we’re still paying for that in America, because prisons aren’t actually for that.

SO IT DIDN’T SAVE ANY MONEY, IS WHAT I’M SAYING.

* A lot of this memory/imagery is filtered through my mother and she was accurately reporting her beliefs and experiences but was not coming from a politically informed place at the time.

njdotcom

WHEN IS THE LAST DAY TO REGISTER TO VOTE IN THE GENERAL ELECTION?

October 18 is the last day to register to vote in N.J.

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Tuesday, November 8.

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From 6 a.m. to 8 p.m.

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You can find your polling place by either visiting voter.njsvrs.com or calling your town clerk.

WHAT IF I CAN’T MAKE IT TO THE POLLS ON ELECTION DAY?

You have until a week before Election Day to apply for an absentee ballot, which allows you to vote by mail.
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