It’s so crazy to blame Reagan, while ignoring the vast industry that had already consumed the political infrastructure of dozens of states.
Carter was as much a creature of the O&G industry, when he supported our fascist allies in Saudi Arabia and Jordan, plus the industry at home.
Nixon was even worse.
But this goes so far beyond who was president at any given moment. Like, if you’re going to blame anybody, blame the folks who figured out Plastics. After the 1980s, plastic exploded the demand for petroleum.
Nobody drills well to make plastic.
Vertically integrated industries don’t care. The massive yields in refining and selling plastic go right back into the capex budgets of refineries.
Reagan was part of a concerted effort by the mega rich to destroy anti-corruption efforts and put power in the hands of a unitary executive more akin to a dictator. Oligarchs love strong centralized power because it’s easier to corrupt.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/master-plan/id1723377799
You can draw a neo liberal shitstorm bumpy line from Regan to Trump.
Regan telling Iran not to release the hostages until after the ekection and if he won he’d sell then weapons (Iran-Contra) and he’s elected twice.
Carter had bad ratings because he wasnt a typical US President, he actually gave a fuck about people and place. Welfare queens indeed ffs
Ironically the welfare queen bullshit was based off one very specific person, a career conwoman who was suspected for murder at the time she was mentioned as a part of insurance fraud. The implications was that welfare fraud was severe and she was just the top most fraudster, meaning the scale went down from the 150K fraud she did with lesser amounts all the way down.
Truth is, there was just her. Welfare fraud was so rare and NEVER even CLOSE to her level that they were negligible. But it didn’t matter to them. Also the actual proven amount of fraud was 4k to 8k at the most. A fraction of the amount the government claimed. This would have been closer to 20 to 40k in today’s money. Not petty theft, but far from some grand world shattering scheme.
BTW the overt scrutiny of her welfare fraud was so severe that a major reason why many of the investigations regarding her role in that murder were dropped because it would take away media attention from her fraud and reveal just what a career criminal she was.
Every piece of great propaganda is built on a truth and a lie. Thanks for that.
I’ve said it often enough that reagan was the worst. Even worst than the orange tumor. That backward criminal couldn’t exist without trash like reagan.
I’ve always said it and I’ll keep saying it because it is undeniably true.
Not a single one of America’s enemies on the face of the Earth could harm Americans more than the Republican party does.
It’s billionaire money - that’s the heart of it all. Everything can be traced back to billionaire financing. The Republican Party was just the easiest vehicle to power to corrupt. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/master-plan/id1723377799
In geopolitics it’s been well understood for some time that the only nation that could destroy the USA is the USA.
I guess only republicans. Okay.
It’s impossible for Republicans to do more harm than the Republicans.
Yes. It is hard for anyone to do more harm than themselves…
But it isn’t like they are unit 731, or the roman emperors.
Trumps style is very late-Roman emperor tbh
I wish. It would make more sense of what he is doing.
Yup
Conservatism should be considered a intensive hate crime against humanity.
Political manipulation on Lemmy. How fitting for Lemmings.
If only we always voted for the other party of our entrenched two party system, everything would be fine. Amirite?
🤡
I don’t like dems, but are you actually pretending republicans aren’t deliberately destructive?
Are you pretending that the dems aren’t deliberately destructive? Like, yeah, the republicans are obviously deliberately destructive, but so are the dems.
It’s two sides of the same coin manipulating the populace for a common goal. Controlled by the same puppeteers.
Both sides are ruled by money if that is what you mean but they definitely represent different groups of wealthy people. Tired of your voice not being heard? Just try being wealthy instead of poor.
they definitely represent different groups of wealthy people.
That’s sometimes true, but you’ll also often find the same person funding both parties.
Since at least the days of Senator Barry Goldwater, the petite bourgeoisie have tended to prefer the Republican party, but the haute bourgeoisie are less partisan and will often fund both.
Do you know how insanely wasteful was using solar panels at the time???
It was a strong symbolic move though. Had America pushed harder on renewables we’d all be paying a lot less for energy now and we likely wouldn’t have pushed into the middle east at the behest of oil profiteers. Not to mention the climate outcomes. Reagan was strongly pushed by the oil lobby.
Nah, solar power just needed time to be viable. As the science progressed, the costs of solar power dropped by half every few years. Now its viable. Back then it really, really wasn’t.
Having a solar panel to signal intentions was nothing but cringe waste of taxpayer money at the time - costs were like two orders of magnitude too high. I’d remove that shit same as Regan did if I made the decisions.
Oh yes, that minuscule expenditure to encourage adoption was so wasteful. Our government has spent enough to cover the entire country over with solar panels in their misguided foreign wars, subsidies, and a million other wasteful expenditures for the oil industry.
encourage adoption
Bruh, at that cost there was NOTHING to encourage.
Bruh - you do understand almost all technology is prohibitively expensive when it’s new and becomes cheaper with investments in development and manufacturing improvements. That only happens with investments in that development. Visible endorsements like the president pushing for adoption make people invest more in these technologies. Not sure why you are so against this $28,000 project. The government wastes astronomically more on technologies that never become viable every year. Trump is literally canceling paid for wind projects and just giving contractors the money because oil lobbyists funded his campaign. The government wasted more on drill baby drill propaganda than this small project ever cost tax payers.
Even ignoring the fact that adoption spurs development of technology, once they were already installed it cost nothing to leave them there. Wouldn’t removing them also be a waste of taxpayer money?
Let me guess, the symbolism suddenly becomes worth it when it’s your side.
Do you know how insanely wasteful going to space is???
Also solar cells are about twice as efficient now as they were in the 1970’s. So those panels were definitely useful even back then, but let’s be honest they were for show. Regan definitely made a statement by tearing them down and that was we are all in on petroleum. Fucking stupid.
They were half as efficient and like 50x more expensive.
definitely made a statement by tearing them down
Yeah, statement of respecting taxpayers money. The tech just wasn’t there
Actually, it wasn’t solar panels it was a solar heater to warm water. This technology was cheap and effective back then.
Following the fall of the pro-American Pahlavi dynasty in early 1979, Iranian protesters regularly shouted “Death to America” and “Death to the Shah” outside the U.S. embassy in Tehran, including the day the embassy was seized on 4 November 1979, which commenced the Iran hostage crisis.[19] Throughout the crisis, Iranians surrounding the embassy chanted “Death to America” and “Death to Carter”.[20]
Iranian students storming the Embassy of the United States in Tehran on November 4, 1979
Which was a response to Carter granting the shah asylum, giving Iranians reason to believe he’d be installed in a coup as a US puppet, exactly as he had been before.
Those students weren’t just storming the embassy for fun, or because they just hated the US. They had a specific demand.
Conservatives are PURE EVIL. Every single one of them. They’ve fought against every civil right advancement in history. Under Reagan, they publicly celebrated the deaths of countless victims of AIDS and did everything in their power to maximise the number of victims. They attacked every researcher who tried to help.
Conservatives consider anyone who can experience empathy to be their enemy. They call empathy “woke” and want it to die. As long as they continue to live, conservatives will never stop oppressing and killing the normal people. They can’t. Because they are truly, deeply evil.
Every war and every genocide in human history has been caused by conservatives exclusively. Nothing good has ever come from conservatism. Nothing at all.
Conservatives are the very definition of evil and must be completely redacted if we are to ever know peace.
Every war and genocide has been done by people following a ideology blindly. Religion, communism, racism, conservative does not count toward all these ideologies so I wouldn’t say your message is true.
The difference between progressive and conservative is indeed empathy. But it stop short at who you think the ennemies are. If you are ready to ignore (or of course kill, emprison etc) all people that say they are from an ideology, you are not showing empathy.
The ideology is extrem. The people following it have different reason and degree of following the ideology. All of them aren’t extrem. Just like you have to explain to conservatives that not all x minorities are dangerous and need to be forcibly removed.
Conservatism get more conservative the longer it exists because they huff their own propaganda. They don’t see anyone even remotely left of center as humans. So if you get slammed for “dehumanizing” them, remind the mental deficient that you are producing noises at, that the conservatives did it first, have a history of doing it, and will continue to do it. Conservatism is a carcinogenic weed and needs to be nipped in the bud whenever possible.
Also I will ALWAYS post this clip to remind people what needs to be done if the Conservatives ever start something (which they also have history of doing): https://youtu.be/eOcimzsviFA
Name checks out.
Let’s not let Nixon off the hook here
Nixon may have been a criminal and an asshole, but he actually had some positive accomplishments - for example, he vastly improved diplomatic relations with China, established the Environmental Protection Agency, and supported lowering the voting age from 21 to 18.
[Note: contrary to social media standards, acknowledging someone’s legit accomplishments does not equal forgiving all their bad shit.]
Trump makes Nixon look like Abraham Lincoln.
Well, it was already on the decline going into Reagan, even on that graph
Or Roger Ailes
A lot of environmental reform happened under Nixon
he’s literally the problem almost every single time there’s a long standing problem. most of it traces ban to Ronny which is amazing considering he may have been brain dead the entire time.
And the only exceptions are when it’s really Nixon who’s the problem
he may have been brain dead the entire time
They say history repeats itself.
They say those that know history are cursed to watch those that don’t repeat it
Jimmy Carter also understood the risks of nuclear power and had NASA design massive orbital solar panels
Carter was almost certainly America’s most tech-savvy president. He received some training in nuclear engineering just before leaving the Navy - although he wasn’t a nuclear engineer and never served aboard a nuclear sub - two common myths. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t a climate change denier or an anti-vaxxer, and that he never thought the Internet was “a series of tubes” (Ted Stevens, R-Alaska), or that rape victims don’t need abortions because, “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” (Todd Akin, R-Missouri).
Yeah, solar panels are nice, but in spite of the different branding, “the path Carter set us on” was still neoliberalism. Carter was the beginning of the end of the unions and the postwar consensus around Keynesianism and progressive New Deal policies.
Carter was facing an economic problem known at the time as “stagflation,” where things were getting more expensive while wages remained stagnant. Keynesianism called for the government spending more when wages are low in order to stimulate the economy, and spending less only under good conditions, to balance the budget and save for a rainy day. It failed to predict stagflation because stagflation was caused by the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. But Carter chose to focus on inflation rather than stagnant wages, against the interests of unions and setting us on the path of neoliberalism.
The big difference between Carter and Reagan was that Reagan was much better at selling Americans on neoliberalism because he was willing to lie through his teeth about it. Carter’s message was that neoliberalism would mean tough times and sacrifices, but that it’s a chance to set aside crass materialism and focus on finding other forms of fulfillment, because what really matters is being a good person on an individual level. Reagan’s message was fuck all that, think of all the cheap plastic shit you’ll be able to buy, plus unions are commie shit anyway, and all that social responsibility crap is just helping black people and gays so fuck it and fuck them. But it was the same economic policy of neoliberalism under both. Americans preferred Reagan’s messaging so much that he got literally 10x the electoral votes as Carter in 1980.
The reason why we’re here is not because we failed to chose Carter over Reagan, but because those were the two choices we were stuck with, one neoliberal who lies and one neoliberal who tells the truth. Since neoliberalism fucking sucks, most people are going to go for the one that lies and says it’ll be good, which is why Reagan beat Carter in 1980 with 10x the electoral votes. But the solution is not to somehow convince people to vote for the more honest neoliberal, it’s to provide an alternative to neoliberalism altogether.
which is why Reagan beat Carter in 1980 with 10x the electoral votes.
The reason why Reagan beat Carter by such a significant margin was because reagan conspired with the Iranian revolutionaries to draw out the crisis until after the election so he could use it in his messaging against Carter.
It’s not even a conspiracy theory, it’s a historical event with a name. Iran Contra scandal, since you seem to have never heard of it…
Lol, you should probably get your facts straight before you start accusing me of not knowing history. The Iran Contra scandal was a separate thing that began 5 years after the 1980 election.
As I said to someone else, that was only one factor, and regardless, Carter could’ve avoided the whole hostage crisis if he hadn’t granted the shah asylum.
Ah, it seems I had my hostage crises mixed up. For some reason when I read “arms-for-hostages deal” in the past, I had assumed it was the hostages in Iran.
Also, the arrangements started in 1981, it just didn’t become public knowledge until 86. Your point stands about it not influencing the 1980 election, but it’s not exactly points in favor of Reagan, or him being no worse than Carter. Especially since it was done specifically to fund an anti-socialist militia in Nicaragua.
Fairly certain I remember reading about him conspiring with the nation’s adversaries in the lead-up to that election too though, but maybe it was a separate scandal…
but it’s not exactly points in favor of Reagan, or him being no worse than Carter.
I’m not sure when or where exactly I made the claim that Reagan was no worse than Carter. Clearly, I must have said it, since so many people keep trying to argue against it to me, but I just can’t seem to find it in anything I actually wrote. Maybe you could point me to it?
What I do recall saying was that Carter’s policies were neoliberal and that neoliberalism is not the answer to our problems. But I must be misremembering.
Fairly certain I remember reading about him conspiring with the nation’s adversaries in the lead-up to that election too though, but maybe it was a separate scandal…
What you are thinking of is known as an “October Surprise.”
For me it was in response to this:
The reason why we’re here is not because we failed to chose Carter over Reagan, but because those were the two choices we were stuck with, one neoliberal who lies and one neoliberal who tells the truth. Since neoliberalism fucking sucks, most people are going to go for the one that lies and says it’ll be good, which is why Reagan beat Carter in 1980 with 10x the electoral votes.
Not exactly the same thing as “both sides” -ism, but verrry close. And the main part I was countering was about ascribing the reason for the electoral outcome solely to their differing levels of honesty
Anyway, this is exactly what I was thinking of:
After the release of the hostages on January 20, 1981, minutes after Reagan’s inauguration, some charged that the Reagan campaign had made a secret deal with the Iranian government whereby the Iranians would hold the hostages until after Reagan was elected and inaugurated.[14] Gary Sick, member of the U.S. National Security Council under Presidents Ford and Carter (before being relieved of his duties weeks into Reagan’s term),[21] made the accusation in a New York Times editorial[22] in the run-up to the 1992 election.
Abolhassan Banisadr, the former President of Iran, has also stated “that the Reagan campaign struck a deal with Tehran to delay the release of the hostages in 1980”, asserting that “by the month before the American Presidential election in November 1980, many in Iran’s ruling circles were openly discussing the fact that a deal had been made between the Reagan campaign team and some Iranian religious leaders in which the hostages’ release would be delayed until after the election so as to prevent President Carter’s re-election.”
Thank you. My bad for conflating it with Iran-Contra, though. I wasn’t alive at the time.
Not exactly the same thing as “both sides” -ism, but verrry close.
Both sides were objectively neoliberals enacting neoliberal policy. “Both sides-ism” is a vacuous term. Sometimes two people have a trait in common, understanding that objective fact is not an “-ism.” Imagine if I tried to paint JD Vance as being significantly different from Trump, and when someone said they both sucked I dismissed it as “both sides-ism.” Maybe it’s true that one is worse than the other, but between Trump and Vance, it’s undeniable that both sides are bad.
Comparing “Carter & Reagan” diffs to “Trump & Vance” diffs has got to be a disingenuous argument.
You didn’t really expect me to bite that obvious bait, did you?
Yet another revisionist wanting to blame Carter for the actions of the oil industry driving world policy. Carter was not the most brilliant but he did try to do the right thing. He was trying to show the world they didn’t need to be under the complete stranglehold of the oil barrons.
Iran was a fucking mess. But it wasn’t his “fault.” He made mistakes but he didn’t betray his country to get elected.
Reagan was a traitor and should have gone to prison for what he did with Iran.
But you keep talking about how everything would be the same if we had kept Carter’s policies.
I am sure you also think the same with Harris. I am sure we would be talking about how she “should have attacked Iran and that Iran wouldn’t be crazy enough to close the strait of Hormuz.” Or “her targeted air strikes would never have happened with Trump.”
We don’t know for sure what would have happened but the character of a person is enough to at least determine their intentions even if they make mistakes. There are mistakes and there are MISTAKES.
try to do the right thing.
the character of a person
determine their intentions
None of that is remotely relevant to the discussion. I am not St. Peter deciding whether or not Carter deserves to go to heaven. Regardless of what was going on in his mind, whether he was acting with good or bad intentions, the policy he enacted was neoliberalism and the effects of his policy were the effects of neoliberalism.
I am sure we would be talking about how she “should have attacked Iran and that Iran wouldn’t be crazy enough to close the strait of Hormuz.”
You are completely and utterly delusional. My opposition to US imperialism does not depend on which party is doing it. I have never, and will never, criticize a president for not being aggressive or interventionist enough. A completely baseless acusation based on nothing but your own desire to play the victim.
Iran was a fucking mess. But it wasn’t his “fault.”
Granting the shah asylum absolutely was his fault.
You don’t have to be St. Peter to simply understand intent.
on granting Asylum. IIRC Kissinger and Rockerfeller were pushing to get the shah medical treatment. Carter agreed and all hell broke loose.
On the imperialism topic. OP talks about how things would be different If Carter’s policies had stuck around. You said “nah ah Carter and Reagan are basically the same”
You are the same type of revisionist who would say whatever cherry-picked anecdotes of the past to put forward the idea that both parties are the same.
Neoliberalist or not there is no realistic alternative on the menu right now. So let’s at least try to be moral in what we do.
So what are some of Carter’s policies?
Are you arguing in bad faith, or just failing to see how you just failed to address any of this guys points?
So saying mumbo thing would have changed everything would be the same is a point?
What?
Uhhh what points?
Ah. You can’t even see the point. Got it.
Question: What do you think about the policies that Carter implemented to address stagflation of the 70s?
EDIT: to be clear, I’m not trying to argue one side or the other. I’m just trying to point out that your posts appear to be arguing in bad faith.
That’s not relevant to OP’s post.
OP was talking about how things would be better. This guy said they (Carter and Reagan) would be the same and cherry picked some data.
70s was a mix Stagflation, inflation and high unemployment meant hard choices. Carter made hard choices some very likely bad because he was too conservative.
Carter tried some questionable things and definitely shares some blame but he wasn’t a traitor and he sure isn’t the same as Reagan.
why Reagan beat Carter in 1980
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_surprise#Secret_deal_accusation
That wasn’t all of it. Carter got blamed for both Stagflation and the high interest rates his Fed used to get it under control. And of course the Iran Hostage Crisis and oil shortages. Then Reagan got all the credit for the economy the high interest rates helped save.
Of course, that was a factor, but not the only one.
Carter’s handling of Iran was poor even accounting for Reagan’s sabotage. The hostage crisis and corresponding breakdown of relations would never have occurred in the first place if Carter hadn’t granted the shah asylum, leading the Iranians to believe the US was plotting to install him in a coup exactly as it did before.
“stagflation,” where things were getting more expensive while wages remained stagnant
I think we just call that “normal” in America.
Today? Sure. But it wasn’t normal in the context of the post war, New Deal/Great Society era, which is why they coined a new term for it, historically.
I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
I would recommend the podcast “Hell of Presidents,” which talks about this era in episode 12.
Ask every “progressive” running for POTUS in 28’ if they plan to put them back and then follow up if they will put that in writing on their platform. If they say yes, suggest they use tungsten carbide bolts to attach them.
This is good people right here
