Conservative Extremism and You

Such fun listening to the likes of Sean Hannity, Mark Levin and Rush Limbaugh on the radio. All of these talking heads are "bastions of conservativism" and each of them speaks the name of Ronald Reagan as if glorifying God with each syllable. They are also aligned with the views of Heritage.org, which itself glorifies the Reagan name and era. You may have heard about the man who goes into a restaurant and orders his meal along with a nice, hot bowl of soup for an appetizer, which, when it arrives, has a fly in it. The man, being horrified, calls the waiter over and complains to him that there is a fly in his soup. The waiter upon spying the fly tells the man not to worry, the fly doesn't eat much. Conservative principles are much like the fly in the soup. They're not good for you, but the talking heads tell you that because they don't eat much, you should ignore the flies. Ronald Reagan is the perfect example of why you should fear the flies. In the 1910s up through the 1970s, labor unions consistently gained strength in the nation. Many of their complaints dealt with working conditions: child labor, unsafe working conditions, extended work hours without additional compensation, and physical exhaustion and poor overall health due to many consecutive days working with no time off. Labor unions are what finally led to the acts in Congress that created the 48-hr standard workweek (subsequently modified to a 40-hr week), eliminated child labor, and provided that non-exempt employees are to be compensated at 1.5 times pay for overtime hours. Labor unions are responsible for not only the eventual creation of OSHA, but also many of the perks that companies eventually began providing to all employees as standard fare: group health insurance coverage, 401k plans, retirement funds, and paid vacation. Now comes the late 1970s and Ronald Reagan runs for President on a conservative platform within the Republican party. He is elected in the 1980 elections and begins execution of his plans early in 1981. In spite of Reagan having been president of the Screen Actors Guild, the actors union, Reagan had always shown that he was pro-management. In the summer of 1981, thirteen thousand air controllers went on strike. Their complaints were as valid then as they are now: overworked, supremely stressed workers who are in charge of the safety of hundreds of thousands of people each day tend to make mistakes when their workload is too much to handle. [Air traffic controller is one the most consistently high stress jobs in the world.] Since the government was not going to budge on getting more workers to handle the load, the controllers decided they had to go on strike in order to get the government's attention. What they did not count on was Reagan and his anti-labor stance. All thirteen thousand striking controllers were fired from their jobs, removing from the traffic controller talent pool over one quarter million years of experience, thus placing the air-traveling public at serious risk until new controllers could be thoroughly trained. However, the impact of Reagan's presidency on labor was considerably more far-reaching than this single incident with the air traffic controllers. Reagan's shift from government favoring, or at least tolerating, labor to government favoring management led corporations to begin dealing much less fairly than before with labor unions, and the pattern spread into every area where unions previously had clout. If corporations had difficulty dealing with a particular union in a location, that plant would be scheduled for closing, citing labor costs in a tough economy as the reason. The corporation then shifted work to overseas plants, both within and outside of the company, where they could pay a few cents on the dollar to foreign workers by comparison to workers in the United States. Corporate CEOs could readily see how this would quickly lead to increased compensation on their part because they could improve the bottom line of profitability by leaps and bounds almost overnight, thus leading them to take an even harder stance with labor demands. Where CEOs has been making between $100k and $250K per year, their salaries quickly doubled up until today where we see the majority of CEOs making many multiple millions of dollars each year, oftentimes doing much less real work than their 1980s counterparts. [I can't speak for everyone, but I am not making 200 times as much money today as I made in 1980.] So, while Reagan may have declared war on unions per se, what he did, in effect, was to wage war on the middle class. Most labor jobs in union shops paid $15-$50/hr, even in the 1970s. That amounts to jobs that make between $32,000 and $110,000 per annum. To most folks' standards those would be considered middle class jobs. As corporations saw their hands completely unfettered by unions, jobs in the hundreds of thousands annually began being eliminated in this country and were sent overseas, thus all but totally eliminating the middle class. Now approaches the year 2000 and the Y2K fiasco. Everyone was frightened into thinking that computers around the world would all crash, that precious financial data and other invaluable information would be irretrievably lost. As a result, the nation's corporations spent a lot of money preparing for that eventuality. The national economy soared. This was also a time of the birth of the internet phenomenon. As visionaries could see the commercial applications and implications, they began investing their time and energy into developing ideas for early capture of the business dollars that could begin flowing in the near future. With the expenditure of many millions of dollars on servers and networking equipment each month, the country had been enjoying unprecedented economic growth and a general feeling of wealth pervaded many homes across the nation, leading them to invest heavily in the stock market. However, the Federal Reserve Board Chairman, Alan Greenspan, constantly warned that inflation was threatening to cave in the national economy due to "irrational exuberance" on the part of investors, mainly in the technical sector of the stock market. Therefore, Greenspan began to ratchet up the interest rate, a bit here, and a bit more there, until the availability of credit was practically nil. These measures began being felt their strongest at a point in time where many of these new internet companies had fully depleted their "angel funding" -- their start-up capital. With credit as tight as it was, they could no longer get ready cash on the promise of future earnings. Thus, they went broke and out of business, creating the "dot.com bust". The impact on the nation's economy was immediate and strong. Retail companies were hit hard as those who had previously had good jobs with high salaries were no longer able to buy their goods. This fact led to the lack of need for transportation companies to deliver goods across the nation because of decreased retail demand. Housing contractors, most who were in the middle of making homes, suddenly had no buyers. Eventually, mortgage companies began losing customers and had to foreclose on homes until it became a near epidemic. Banks and investment houses who had been speculating on derivative investment vehicles based on those mortgages began losing money in the 10s and 100s of millions of dollars. Some even lost billions. All lending institutions tightened their credit policies which, in turn, led to a further decline in overall spending, significantly impacting the car-makers of the country. In times past when such an occurrence came along, the middle class could be counted on to spend us out of the recessionary times. However, thanks to Ronald Reagan and corporate greed unleashed, the middle class had no such power to turn the tide because there was barely any middle class that survived in this post-union era. Consequently, what would have been a mere economic blip in an overall improving trend became what we now have -- financial disaster around the globe that is struggling very weakly to regain some footing for improvement. So, when those talking heads on the extremist right-wing shows like Limbaugh's and Hannity's begin to tell you that the fly won't eat much, know the truth and think again.