Rebirth of a Realist

Rebirth of a Realist
As an old warrior I sometimes think that I am looking though the wrong side of the binoculars. I have heard it all before. The Vietnamese will welcome us. ..They are marching with their feet to democracy...we killed a thousand of them and lost only one...we have now established a democratic governmwent and we can soon bring our troops home...we can not turn tail and run.."
It was all said before and we got our tail kicked in Korea and again in Vietnam. The question always remains
why did so many people have to die.
Please read Rebirth of a realist see it at www.erols.com/suttonbear.

Our repetition of the runaway, disastrous and painful " Trickle down" economics can be traced directly
back to the media war on the Roosevelt constraints placed on the robber barons of the twenties.
That war raged from April of 1947 when Harry Truman, obviously intimidated by the power of the conservatives, announced, "There is more of a need for co-operation by business rather than
regulation," until the remnants of the Roosevelt Realists surrendered to Ronald Reagan in 1981
and allowed him to tear down what ever was left of the regulatory structure. He gutted the major agencies. Reagan’s firing of the striking air controllers severely wounded all of organized labor. It was a near fatal wound that still has not healed. On August 5,1981 a petulant President Reagan fired the 11,359 air-traffic controllers; he declared a lifetime ban on the rehiring of the strikers by the Federal Aviation Agency, and on August 17, the FAA began accepting applications for new Air traffic controllers. On October 22, the Federal Labor Relations Authority decertified PATCO. The Controller’s union. Those behind the throne of Reagan smashed the Union and deprived trained workers of ever returning to their life occupation. The Reagan administration was filled with "Trickle down" devotees who did all they could to deregulate big business. He became known as the, "de-regulation President." His reverting back to 1920 economics caused horrendous results.
Unemployment shot up 10.6% by the end of 1982. On Oct.19, 1987 the stock market plunged 508 points on the Dow Jones average. It was another one of those close calls with economic depression that America has from time to time. It took a Herculean effort from banks and bankers to save the market and the system.
Conservatives still claim that Reagan was a great president because of the fall of Communism during his administration, "He won the cold war" they claim, but the facts are that Ronald Reagan should have been impeached and had there not been so many cowardly Democrats turning a political blind eye to the illegal acts of the Reagan administration he would have been impeached.
Reagan authorized direct sales of weapons to Iran. National Security Adviser John M. Poindexter and
his aide, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver L. North, were convicted of criminal acts that included North purchasing weapons at cost, selling them with huge profits that he diverted to the Contras, who were waging a civil war in Nicaragua. North ran the Contra operation out of the White House, despite a congressional ban against funding their operation. In the fall of 1986, it all blew up when a Lebanese journal wrote about the sales to Iran and when a plane carrying weapons to the Contras was shot down in Nicaragua. The pilot was captured and admitted that he was a CIA pilot. Laws were broken, many on the white House staff were convicted,
but North had his conviction overturned on a shrewd legal maneuver while others were pardoned by President Bush and went on to other administration jobs. Reagan escaped unharmed as easily as he escaped overseas duty when he was made a captain in the army in charge of making movies for the army during World War II. Real stars of his time like Clark Gable and Jimmy Stewart worked no such deal. I can remember those days clearly. I can remember my anger and the anger of many of my friends. President Ford had already pardoned one president that should have gone to jail, Richard Nixon. On September 8,1974 Ford said, "The facts, as I see them, are that a former President of the United States, instead of enjoying equal treatment with any other citizen accused of violating the law, would be cruelly and excessively penalized either in preserving the presumption of his innocence or in obtaining a speedy determination of his guilt in order to repay a legal debt to society."
What he said was that Presidents were above the law. I was no longer on the scenic train viewing the beauty of America. I was on a train of cynicism traveling at increasing speed toward the political left.
Americans my age were called, "The Great Generation." Those patriots, who were born in the depression and who joined their parents in the labor wars of the thirties, fought the great war against fascism, and came home to build a new America, were trying hard to save the system. They wanted to make the place of Roosevelt’s promise for their children. The JFK assassination, the murder of King, and Bobbie Kennedy Caused many of them to pull the blankets over their heads. The revolutionary spirit that made the nation great began to disappear. The confidence that the American worker had that in union, there is strength and the union will protect them began to wane and with it went the pride we all had in the forties.
President G.W. Bush, in 2003 is still riding on the momentum of those horrendous anti-labor acts. He like Nixon and Reagan before him lied to the congress and the people about the danger of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of the evil Saddam Hussein. There are many who speak again of impeachment. That would make the fourth president who faced the possibility of impeachment in my time. It is hard to keep the faith under such shaky leadership. G.W. Bush ordered an end to all labor-management partnerships in federal government. He urged Congress to overturn standards adopted to protect workers from stress injuries on the job He destroyed the unions ability to insist that Government contracts are awarded only to Companies that have protected their workers. On September 11,2003 business pages across the country reported that many corporations are rescinding family insurance coverage and rewriting retirement plans, all part of the Bush Republican agenda. One would think that organized labor would have people out in the streets protesting. They did not, mainly because organized labor is no longer organized.
. The union membership rate has steadily declined from a high of 20.1 percent in 1983. Union membership dropped to 13.4 percent in 2001 Many dues paying union members feel let down by union leaders who are much more involved in the investment of pension plans than they are in protecting workers. I say again, labor has not yet recovered from the Reagan years.
According to a report from FAIR, "workers being brought into the U.S. labor pool through the so-called L-1 and H-1B visa programs (L-1 visas, which allow multinational firms to transfer overseas workers to their U.S. facilities,) have nearly doubled since 1995. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported, "In 2002, 13.2 percent of wage and salary workers who were electrical and electronics engineers lost 241,000 jobs in the past two years and computer scientists lost 175,000 jobs," the report states.
When a person in a position of power such as a President or a Governor takes a dictatorial, anti-labor position and receives no resistance, the Nation, or the State, will suffer the consequences for many years. Roosevelt tried it with the striking miners during the war. He threatened to send the National Guard in to end the strike. Head of the miners Union John L. Lewis told the president he can try to dig coal with bayonets, but the miners will strike for better conditions. He knew that to give in at that time might very well mean the end of the union. John L. Lewis made peace with Roosevelt eventually and both sides benefited.
"I have pleaded (labor’s) case, not in the quavering tones of a feeble mendicant asking alms, but in the thundering voice of the captain of a mighty host, demanding the rights to which free men are entitled," John L. said. In 1981, there was no John L. Lewis to speak for labor. In 2003, there is still no John L. Lewis type of labor leader, and labor is floundering. Thousands of jobs are sent out of the country every year and the labor response is meek.