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Reagan the actor with Bonzo, one of his co-stars.

Citizens United turned billionaires into oligarchs, dictators and Kings
We have reached a stage in Divided States of America politics where if the Democratic Party decreed that zebras have black stripes imprinted on white bodies, the Trumplican Party would object by yelling “No!”: white stripes are strategically placed on black bodies. Then, after hearings and a filibuster or two, they would kill zebras to prove their case. 

We have reached that point because on January 21, 2010, the Republican Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy cast the deciding vote in the Citizens United case, overturning a century of spending restrictions on political campaigns that protected the rule of one-man one-vote. This decision opened the bank vaults, tax havens, the wallets and purses of billionaires. Financial management gurus made cash appear and disappear so politicians could be rented, leased, bought and trained to obey commands. Now we have billionaires who cast several million votes in one election.

In 2022, as an example, which was not a presidential election year, $14 billion was spent on federal House and Senate elections. The biggest spender wins 91% of the time to this date. $1.6 billion was spent on just a dozen Senate races – with $3 out of every $4 being spent in six key states – Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Wisconsin, Nevada and Ohio. 

One Senate race in Ohio in 2024 has already raced through $412 million. With a month of campaigning left, this one race may hit a billion dollars. What will be the total by Nov. 5? 
To quote a National Public Radio report: “Billionaires and massive corporations are taking ownership of the GOP (now called the Greedy Old Party) and much of the American political process with their poisonous Citizens United decision. This is not how a democratic republic is supposed to work.”

How Reagan’s presidency brought us to Donald Trump’s escalator trip
Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 two years after Fort Sumter fired up a civil war over slavery that eventually took 750,000 lives. But that war has never really ended. It started legal harassment of colored people we call Jim Crow and the sham we call “Separate but Equal.” 

While we lived in North Carolina, Corky’s high school-aged sister went to a nice new brick school for whites while black kids suffered in a black tarpaper shack. She was even elected Homecoming Queen. And the longest-living Jim Crow in the world is 160 years old and hasn’t even entered hospice yet. The 1960s Civil Rights and Voting Acts laws have clipped the wings on Jim Crow so it doesn’t fly as much anymore, but he can still go through a resurrection or insurrection. 

After World War II and the difficult recovery from the Great Depression energized by the Democrats and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and with the following progress enervated by the GI Bill strengthening a new middle-class, the United States was ready to become a real democracy. But then came Ronald Reagan, the two Bushes, Donald Trump and his “Make America Great Again” cult, and a Republican Party that is a wholly-owned subsidiary of greedy billionaires. Goodbye democracy, hello autocracy. 

Did you know that Reagan’s presidential campaign motto was “LET’S MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN?” (Trump doesn’t – he claims he came up with it.)

Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves from growing and picking cotton and from producing babies to sell at slave markets. Sojourner Truth had 13 babies (“I have born 13 children sold at slave markets”). 

The Roe V. Wade decision by the Republican Supreme Court has brought the specter of slavery and the politics of abortion back for pregnant ten-year-old girls to 50-year-old women, so now we have another phase of our everpresent civil war. That’s why girl and woman slaves in the Divided States of America are proclaiming a Ewomancipation Proclamation in 2024.

Here is what the greedy Ronald Reagan Revolution has been bringing to us on the Republican side of the aisle for more than 40 years: 
• regressive tax rates for corporations, millionaires and billionaires
• reduced the middle class
• laws restricting union recruiting and membership
• highest rate of child poverty among developed nations
• highest rate of maternal deaths in the OECD 
• most expensive (by double!) individual health care system in the world
• one in seven American children go to bed hungry  
• followed cost-plus profit contracts for military planes and ships
• have a $34 trillion national debt because of failure to tax the wealthy to pay old bills 
• created the political philosophy and government motto “Greed is Good.” 
This is a very incomplete list of Reagan libertarian and Trumplican failures.

Read conservative Max Boot’s book: The Corrosion of Conservatism
Max Boot was known as a “movement” conservative who had edited yhe conservative The Weekly Standard and was a senior adviser of the campaigns of Marco Rubio, Mitt Romney and John McCain. 
But he got so fed up with Ronald Reagan, the Bushes and Donald Trump by 2018 he published his idealogue-crushing critique of their presidencies. 

In my present lifetime I have been lucky enough to have been served or ill-served by 15 presidents and have voted for or against 14 of them. I hope I can make it through the next one – but only if it’s Kamala Harris. 

Born in 1932, I started with probably our best president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and have just survived the worst in Donald J. Trump. 

I have not missed a presidential or midterm vote in my lifetime and have always had a paddle in the water concerning politics. That’s why I was fascinated by Boot’s book. He keeps picking at the wounds of Reagan until they festered for me. Cats and some politicians have nine lives. Reagan had several – but never close to nine. A short list:

When he went to Hollywood, he considered himself “a near hopeless hemophiliac liberal who bled for causes.” He considered himself “a rabid union man” and served seven terms as president of the Screen Actors Guild. After completing a few “B” pictures, a poll was taken in 1942 to name who was the best male actor in Hollywood. Ronnie – as his wives called him – came in 74th. 

I have watched many of his movies out of curiosity. He was not a bad actor, had a supporting-actor face, but didn’t seem to be a great fighter, lover or leading man. He played Reagan rather well. He worshipped FDR and the UN and hated Republicans who cut taxes and stole benefits from workers. 
Here are a few of Boot’s facts:

• His children said he made things up. If he said something five times it became true. Sometimes he thought he was a military hero in wars. He did serve as a public relations officer during World War II, as a captain in the Army Air Force. He assisted in making training films. Later in life he often teared up when he told the story of two airmen doomed in a falling airplane. He told the story so often he believed it, although the men never existed. There had been a similar scene in a 1944 movie. 

• The Reagan family had a dog named “Millie,” but Reagan called it “Lassie.”

• In 1954 he become spokesman for General Electric Theater, a very popular Sunday night show between the Ed Sullivan Show and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The GE program drew more audience than either. 
During slightly more than a decade he transformed his politics as he traveled the country pushing General Electric products and conservatism. By 1960, Reagan was “as far right as a public figure could be,” according to Boot. 

Reagan saw Communists between the sheets and under beds. He followed the talking points of the ultra-right John Birch Society, which was the QAnon of that day. He traveled to GE plants talking to workers and managers and often to Republican groups in cities he visited. He became a symbol of conservatism and far-right “energies.” 

General Electric was an anti-union corporation, so Reagan evidently was easily transformed to this position from when he enjoyed being president of a strong union. He kept his favorite lines and notes on 3X5 cards that filled his pockets. He was now so conservative he opposed a Republican Party platform that denounced the Ku Klux Klan and the John Birch Society!

• Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher became friends, but when she visited him in the White House, she later pointed to her head and told a member of Parliament: “There’s nothing there.” His biographer Lou Cannon said: “President Reagan is unbelievably passive when not on stage. His aides described telling him where to stand, what to say, and how to say it.” He always obeyed without question.

• Although preaching a strong game, he was not interested in actually governing the country. He delegated the operation of government to people in the Republican Party. Sometimes he forgot their names. 
Secretary of the Treasury Don Regan served Reagan and later wrote: “In the four years I served as Secretary of the Treasury (often the most powerful cabinet member) I never saw President Reagan alone and never discussed economic philosophy or fiscal and monetary policy with him one-on -one. He never told me what he believed or what he wanted to accomplish.” 

His aides – he called them “fellas” – held extraordinary power. Others called them the “California Mafia” because many served him when he was governor. He accepted their views without questioning and often fell asleep while listening to them. He thought they knew more about the subject than he did. (He was right!) It was unbelievably ironic. Here was a great foe of bureaucracy giving up without a fight.

• In 1994, six years after Reagan left the Oval Office, Reagan revealed to the world that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease. Experts in the field of dementia, after examining changes in his language patterns and speech in his last term, suggested that he was suffering from minor dementia in his last years of office. 

Boot claimed that Reagan also suffered three great delusions while in office: 
(1) Communists were close to seizing the United States, 
(2) cutting taxes would increase government revenues, and 
(3) satellite weapons, particularly particle beams and lasers, could stop all nuclear missiles. 

In 1986 while meeting with Russia’s Gorbachev in Iceland, the two came close to total nuclear disarmament, but Reagan refused to place limits on U.S. outer space defenses. Today, the two countries collectively have more than 10,000 nuclear warheads. 

With Vladimir Putin playing Joseph Stalin in Russia for decades, the chances are slim to none that the world might see total nuclear disarmament by the nine countries that currently possess them – and Slim is living in Alaska and adding to his permafrost bunker. 

Seven other countries – China. France, United Kingdom, Pakistan, India, Israel, North Korea – have collectively 3,000 more warheads. What are the odds on which will be the second country to use them? 
Reagan dreamed of “shining cities on hills,” but his tax cutting policies put them in dark valleys and filled them with homeless families, hungry kids and poverty-stricken parents.