Truth

May192013

invisiblelad:

covenesque:

zuky:

thesmithian:

…[some] may not remember what made Iran-Contra such an extraordinary scandal. The Reagan administration “raised money privately” by selling weapons to a sworn enemy of the United States. Why? Because it wanted to fund an illegal war in Nicaragua. And when I say “illegal war,” I mean that quite literally—Congress told the Reagan administration, in no uncertain terms, that Reagan could not send money to the Contras. Period. The Reagan administration, unrestrained by laws and the Constitution, did so anyway, and much of the president’s national security team ended up under indictment.

more.

Reagan knew everything. However, I bet this Time magazine piece doesn’t get into the juiciest part of Iran-Contra, which is that in the 1980s the CIA put into operation a crack cocaine pipeline to import narcotics from Central and South America and distribute it in US inner cities. This is not a “conspiracy theory”, this is a documented conspiracy, most rigorously researched and reported by Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Gary Webb, whose series in the San Jose Mercury News and subsequent book “Dark Alliance” literally got him killed. To me, that’s the story of Iran-Contra: not that Reagan sold weapons to Iran, but that the US government imported and sold crack to Black America, as part of an arms and drugs trade which funded war in the Third World and which devastated lives and filled prisons in the USA.

I’m old enough to remember this and it’s depressing that everyone forgot.

This conflicts with the neo-con narrative fiction that Reagan was the best president ever…so of course its been filed out of sight and mind. If a democrat had done it though, the outrage would be heard to the high heavens…

covenesque:

zuky:

thesmithian:

…[some] may not remember what made Iran-Contra such an extraordinary scandal. The Reagan administration “raised money privately” by selling weapons to a sworn enemy of the United States. Why? Because it wanted to fund an illegal war in Nicaragua. And when I say “illegal war,” I mean that quite literally—Congress told the Reagan administration, in no uncertain terms, that Reagan could not send money to the Contras. Period. The Reagan administration, unrestrained by laws and the Constitution, did so anyway, and much of the president’s national security team ended up under indictment.

more.

Reagan knew everything. However, I bet this Time magazine piece doesn’t get into the juiciest part of Iran-Contra, which is that in the 1980s the CIA put into operation a crack cocaine pipeline to import narcotics from Central and South America and distribute it in US inner cities. This is not a “conspiracy theory”, this is a documented conspiracy, most rigorously researched and reported by Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Gary Webb, whose series in the San Jose Mercury News and subsequent book “Dark Alliance” literally got him killed. To me, that’s the story of Iran-Contra: not that Reagan sold weapons to Iran, but that the US government imported and sold crack to Black America, as part of an arms and drugs trade which funded war in the Third World and which devastated lives and filled prisons in the USA.

I’m old enough to remember this and it’s depressing that everyone forgot.

This conflicts with the neo-con narrative fiction that Reagan was the best president ever…so of course its been filed out of sight and mind. If a democrat had done it though, the outrage would be heard to the high heavens…

(via recall-all-republicans)

Republican Ronald Reagan GOP

May162013

(Source: paxamericana, via recall-all-republicans)

Ronald Reagan Republicans video

May122013

How Ronald Reagan Made Genocide Possible in Guatemala

janedoe225:

http://How Ronald Reagan Made Genocide Possible in Guatemala

The early 1980s were particularly violent in the Latin American theater of the Cold War. Smack in the middle of Guatemala’s 36-year civil war which claimed 200,000 lives, Rios Montt edged out the winner of a sham election in a bloodless coup and began systematically repressing support for the Marxist opposition,as his forces raped women, burned villages, and murdered indigenous Mayan peasants.

From day one Reagan backed Rios Montt, feeding him millions first in jeeps and trucks, and then helicopter and plane parts, despite clearly articulated reports from both the CIA and international watchdogs that genocide was accumulating bodies in the ditches and gullies of Guatemala.

A cache of internal Guatemalan records from the time revealed the existence of Operation Sofia, which was the operation that led to the massacre of indigenous peasants. It was used by the 1999 UN-sponsored Historical Clarification Commission to classify the counterinsurgency campaign in the summer of 1982 as “acts of genocide against groups of Mayan people.”

The horror described by independent human rights reporters on the ground is enough to turn your stomach: “We heard many, many stories of children being picked up by the ankles and swung against poles so their heads [were] destroyed.”

Despite the fact that he knew all this, Reagan praised Rios Montt, calling him ”a man of great personal integrity and commitment” who wanted to “promote social justice.”

President Bill Clinton apologized in 1999, saying that the U.S. support for the death squads “was wrong.”

Ronald Reagan

April102013

reagan-was-a-horrible-president:

New Documents Show Reagan Gave Go-Ahead To Mayan Genocide

——-

Robert Parry on a newly-released document that spells out how President Ronald Reagan promoted genocide in Central America:

Soon after taking office in 1981, President Ronald Reagan’s national security team agreed to supply military aid to the brutal right-wing regime in Guatemala to pursue the goal of exterminating not only “Marxist guerrillas” but their “civilian support mechanisms,” according to a newly disclosed document from the National Archives.

Over the next several years, the military assistance from the Reagan administration helped the Guatemalan army do just that, engaging in the slaughter of some 100,000 people, including what a truth commission deemed genocide against the Mayan Indians in the northern highlands.

Recently discovered documents at the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, also reveal that Reagan’s White House was reaching out to Israel in a scheme to circumvent congressional restrictions on military equipment for the Guatemalan military.

…..

(via recall-all-republicans)

Ronald Reagan Mayan Genocide Central America

11AM

“… [Margaret[ Thatcher left a dark legacy that, like her successes, has still not disappeared behind the historical horizon.”

Hugo Young, who covered the Thatcher era for the wonderful newspaper, The Guardian: Margaret Thatcher left a dark legacy that has still not disappeared | Politics | The Guardian

Young wrote this piece shortly before he died in 2003 and all of it still rings true. The dark legacy left by Thatcher also was left by her contemporary Ronald Reagan in the United States. These leaders ultimately made the world they inhabited a poorer society than the one they entered as political leaders.

(via tartantambourine)

Margaret Thatcher Ronald Reagan dark legacy

April42013

odinsblog:

Ronald Reagan and Racial Politics: What Republicans Won’t Admit About Their False Idol (A Comprehensive List)

Read More

h/t ReaganAndRacism

(via abaldwin360)

Ronald Reagan Racist Republicans Racism GOP

March312013

(Originally posted in 2011. Posted again now, because the truth about Ronald Reagan needs to be told every day.)

reagan-was-a-horrible-president:

Remembering the Real Ronald Reagan

As we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of our 40th president amid glowing plaudits, folksy reminiscence, and an abundance of praise, it’s important to remember one thing: the election of Ronald Reagan is the central and enduring tragedy of our age.

By that I don’t mean “it’s the worst thing that has happened.” It would be foolish to raise (or lower) the political fortunes of any one man to equal the human toll of the earthquake in Haiti, the horrors of ethnic cleansing in Eastern Europe and in Africa, or the ravages of the Iraq War. I mean that the rise of Ronald Reagan was the tipping point, the axis around which history turned away from one view of the world towards another. And it was a devastatingly wrong turn. […]

Republican Ronald Reagan Reaganomics Wrecked America GOP

March82013

“The point in our history at which we had the highest rate of equity in funding and spending was in the 1970s. In fact, the “war on poverty” — the Great Society period — made a big difference; there was far less childhood poverty than there is now. Unemployment was lower, there was a lot of federal money going into urban school districts and poor rural schools districts and school finance litigation had caused quite a bit of equalization. In 1975, for the first time, the rate of black, Latino and white students going to college was exactly equal. We had made a lot of strides. But most of those programs were eliminated or greatly reduced in the 1980s as part of the Reagan revolution and so we saw the federal dollars get cut in half for public schools. Almost all of that came out of equity-oriented programs that were facilitating both fiscal equity and school desegregation – and making investments in tiny communities. Similarly, during the 1990s — during the 1980s and the 1990s — we had many states doing as California did: putting in place tax caps and other strategies to make it harder to invest in public education and those reforms basically increased the inequality in funding for schools and in the other resources that communities receive.” Linda Darling-Hammond (via azspot)

(via azspot)

Republican Ronald Reagan Regression Racist

March62013

Isn’t it ironic that we’re supposed to be in the midst of a Great Recession at the very same time that the DOW is closing at all time highs?

abaldwin360:

what-a-time-waster:

There’s only one recession going on, and that’s for the middle and working class.

Wall Street’s doing just fine.

-

Yep.

This is the America we live in now, and is the culmination of policies that have been getting put in place since Reagan.

All this “trickle down” and “job creators” and supple side BS were just a way for your boss’s boss’s boss to keep more company profits.

Hell, the whole low taxes on the rich bullshit is just more incentive to keep money concentrated at the top.

I just hope more people will eventually see what has happened over the last 30 some odd years.

(Source: thisisnottheblogyouareseeking)

Republicans Ronald Reagan Trickle Down Nonsense

March52013

How Reagan Promoted Genocide

Soon after taking office in 1981, President Ronald Reagan’s national security team agreed to supply military aid to the brutal right-wing regime in Guatemala to pursue the goal of exterminating not only “Marxist guerrillas” but their “civilian support mechanisms,” according to a newly disclosed document from the National Archives.

Over the next several years, the military assistance from the Reagan administration helped the Guatemalan army do just that, engaging in the slaughter of some 100,000 people, including what a truth commission deemed genocide against the Mayan Indians in the northern highlands.

(Source: azspot, via reagan-was-a-horrible-president)

Republican Ronald Reagan Genocide Mayan slaughter