President Reagan has come to a unique distinction among the past presidents. No other president comes close to the relentless play his memory and image are getting from Republicans determined to deny and distort history. They are counting on their campaign to immortalize him, to anoint him with sainthood, to give him a place in history that is at odds with history. But the roadblock that they can’t conquer will always be there: He personified political paradox, swimming in contradictions and ironies. His favorite words: “Trickle down.” At last, a demigod of corporate power, Wall Street, the One Percent. The only president seemingly who didn’t know that the pulse of democracy is trickle up, not trickle down.

One of the large ironies of his political career lay in his ardent devotion to the Democratic Party for most of his Hollywood years. It made his political success an enduring contradiction of real conservatism: fiscal responsibility had long been the hallmark of Republican faith. It died without the funeral it deserved because the GOP couldn’t face the embarrassment.

Yet none of the contradictions he practiced was larger than his incessant claim that “government is not the solution, government is the problem.” He knew better, of course. He knew that the great advances that the nation made in the 20^th century were largely the products of public-private partnering. The towering example was the Allies’ complete victory over the fascist Axis, led by American industrialization that dwarfed anything the world had seen before. It was the crowning gamble of the FDR presidency, whose vision and dividends would keep the USA tracking to become the lone superpower well before the turn of the millennium.

I remember as a boy the excitement that swept Utah County when ground was broken on the eve of WWII for the new USSteel works that would replace the old Geneva swimming resort on the edge of Utah Lake. It came from FDR’s desire to put more basic industry inland, out of range of Nazi submarines and Japanese bombers. It was consistent too with the initiatives that FDR had chosen to fight the Great Depression.

Victory in WWII would play out as the ultimate public-private partnership. It’s a history that neither Reagan worshippers or Tea Party zealots can change. It topped a series of public-private partnerships that would go on forging two incomparable, interlocking rewards: American economic and military supremacy and an unrivaled middle class that was the envy of the world. Other important strides that sprang from FDR’s vision include, but are by no means limited to, the vast expansion of basic infrastructure, notably waterworks and sewer systems, revival of the South also through dams that provided both river management and huge new lakes afloat in booming recreational pleasures.

But these historic lessons were lost on RR and his camp. Accustomed as they were to  Hollywood living, they were dimly aware at best that the thriving middle class was the workhorse that  in the second half of the 20^th century was at last making America the fulfillment of its dreams of life, liberty, and happiness.

What they were aiming for instead was an America that would work to their advantage. Sadly, RR’s insistence that “government’s the problem” would not only contradict history but also his own politics. It would slacken those great lessons and rewards. Their motive and ideal were one and the same:  trickle down. Their America would become one that rode the twin rails of privilege and advantage, working together as hand and glove. Each was its own reward.

The camp that came with him to the White House was light on conservatives and deep in a new breed becoming popularly known as neoconservatives, or neocons. The contradiction of Reagan they embodied was approaching government “the problem” as something else: a work to be molded to their liking, to their benefit.

They moved boldly to choke conservatives with their own petard, by ramping up defense. Always-arms-happy Casper Weinberger was given the Pentagon, and as secretary of defense he immediately ordered production of a score of new weapons systems. Reagan fans will always insist that this buildup of arms hit the Soviet Union with the competitive pressure that sank it. But the larger truth found the USSR unable to rise from the ravages of World War II and the devastation left by Hitler’s armies. The endless American shipments of essential supplies that enabled the Red Army and a bitter winter to stop Hitler cold had long since ceased. The largest country on the planet was left too poor to resuscitate either its bumbling bureaucracy or its basic industry. Beyond co-opting captured German scientists into helping it produce its own atomic bombs, it had no chance of making itself competitive in the economic boom that followed the war. My dear late-wife Carol, watching TV news, remarked several times, “How do the Russians imagine competing, when they can’t grow good potatoes two years in a row, or build a car that isn’t junk after 10,000 miles?”

But against this history, the neocons loved the arms race too much to give it up. Most of the new arms on which the Reagan White House was accelerating production were delivered on budget-busting cost overruns, with huge profits lining the pockets of the makers, who then were doubly happy that they were Reagan boosters. All as intended by the neocons.

Who were conservatives to complain?  How dare they think they could have their cake and eat it too? With more defense their first priority in the Cold War, they would have to swallow the cost. Thus, in stunning contradiction of the Grand Old Party’s oldest and dearest plank, the national debt would double under President Reagan.  History must have blinked twice: the national debt doubling under a Republican president! Absolutely unthinkable — until it happened.

Untraceable in the red ink was RR’s war within the war. Col. Ollie North was given the basement of the White House to orchestrate the secret war that zealous reactionaries were promoting to sink a small commie beachhead in Central America. Congress was never consulted, the Constitution be damned! It was easily the most impeachable gambit ever made by a president. But the rather recent embarrassment of the fatally criminalized Nixon presidency left both the public and the Congress without stomach to dig at the Reagan-North crimes.

The neocons were succeeding in spades. Government was the clay with which they were making it a monument to themselves — in the image, of course, of RR. The federal payroll was much bigger on RR’s last day in office than on the first. And, lots and lots of the red ink he was spilling was ending up — one way or another — in the pockets of the Bohemian cronies and allies of his California days.

Spilling on too into the 21^st century has been the lingering misdirection of “trickle down.” It came to an abrupt pause in the Bill Clinton presidency,  whose years of job growth showed promise of a middle-class revival. But that hope was dampened by the non-election of George W. Bush, who was handed the White House by a 5-4 vote of the right-leaning Supreme Court, which had rejected Democratic pleas for a recount of the Florida returns that could have put Vice President Gore in the Oval Office.

While Bush II pledged a reign of “compassionate conservatism,” he invoked priorities that quickly turned the pledge hollow. Certain Congress would show good faith by granting his first wish, he won a code-wide tax cut that no one else was pressing for, thus keeping faith with Reagan on “trickle down” but targetting all the compassion on the rich. With Vice President Cheney at his elbow, pointing the way, he would prove a match for RR also as a warrior.

They had the attack on Iraq in mind even before they took office. They needed only the word of one unreliable observer who claimed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (MSD) in the works to launch the invasion. They had first wooed Congress into neutrality with lies they used Secretary Colin Powell to tell the United Nations. Their strike on Baghdad treated the world to a show of military “shock and awe” unlike anything it had seen before. The president took to military uniform on a carrier deck to declare with banner “Mission Accomplished.”  More than a decade later the “shock and awe” lingers on in rising national debt, which for the second time was doubled under a Republican president. Unthinkable — until it happened.

Between that unconscionable Iraq War and the Great Recession — larger in every way than the Great Depression — that the deceitful Bush-Cheney reign of “compassionate conservatism” handed on to President Obama, their presidency is bound to be remembered as the most destructive in American history.

Yet its bloodline flows clearly from the “trickle down” that RR and the neocons have delivered in spades. It has given us an endless string of budget deficits, but for Clinton’s second term, and a future of growing inequality, an insecure middle class, an endangered  ecosystem, relentless extremism of both political and religious bents, and spreading oligarchy that turns cherished capitalism on its head.

The 21^st century already is showing us that TD, oligarchy, smaller government and evangelical fervor, singularly or combined, form no defense against terrorism, the Mafia and like gangs, corporate power, Wall Street abuses, or climate change. A true list of serious threats and risks is much longer, obviously. All are fed in one degree or another by our assorted appetites.

Capitalism is driven to oligarchy by ego and greed. Marx counted on capitalism never working the way it’s meant too for its own success. Capitalism becomes the snake that swallows itself when it concentrates wealth more than it spreads it. Great wealth is no guarantee of security for the long run. Consumer economics no longer holds the promise of the good life.

Nature is rewarding our wasteful ways with a trickle down of its own. As the polar ice caps keep trickling away, every inch that the oceans rise erases trillions of dollars in coastal enterprise and property values. As the glaciers also trickle away, safe water supplies will become increasingly problematic on every continent. The serious minds in science, business and economics are telling us this century has grave challenges coming hard in waste management and pollution control. Will our answer be an epidemic of drug addiction? Or will we find it in the NRA and Second Amendment?

So much for the legacy of Ronald Reagan and TD. Stubborn revisionists can’t sweeten it. Still-eager neocons and the endless arms race can’t redeem it. They, not he, are at fault. An endless arms race was not his wish. Military muscle was his answer to the Cold War. But it has played on into a conspiracy of arms-makers and gun-nuts that ironically threatens freedom itself.

Its price has become more than a chronic string of budget deficits. It dogs the Tea Party with hypocrisy because it makes smaller government unworkable, since it claims one half of the discretionary spending of the annual federal budget. It equals the combined military budgets of the other ten largest nations. Such might makes its own engine of fear. It keeps us fearful, though we know instinctively that military muscle is not the cure for terrorism.

Rarely recalled in the lessons of leadership that FDR gave America and the world in the triumph of democracy over WWII fascism was his manifesto of the Four Freedoms: freedom of expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. The desired fruits of American democracy were never better uttered, yet always left to WeThePeople and the Constitution to defend. It is terribly sad that the Supreme Court in its narrowing grasp of law, in its preoccupation with technicalities, can’t realize this. By opening the Bill or Rights to corporate power, as it did in 2010 in Citizens United, the court has lessened the people’s claim on the Four Freedoms, and reinforced TD.

Ronald Reagan could hardly have imagined that wealth and privilege would set the stage for a 21^st century global showdown between  corporate power and terrorism. Fear will grow and so will guns, both fed by the NRA and the gun-makers who swell the NRA budget. The gun nuts can see only their own right to pack heat. But what about the folks without guns, who are nearly two-thirds of the nation’s households? They keep no guns because most fear them — as they should — since the fatalities from use and misuse of guns approach the highway toll every year. When will they bring a class action against the NRA for infringing their freedom from fear?

Second Amendment fever has helped TD grow the arms race and corporate power into the ultimate double-barrel shotgun. But all the firepower in the world won’t defeat terrorism. That’s a battle of the spirit. Have consumer economics and material comfort so soften free people that they can’t outlast the extremists? Or make peace with the earth?

All the wealth in the world won’t tame global warming. The rich can run, but they can’t hide. They can’t buy off science, either. If the oceans rise ten feet within the century, as some scientists foresee, most of what passes for wealth today will drown. The oceans — not the churches, not the scientists — will have the last word. Unless, of course, people of every stripe vastly modify their ways of life. May we learn that to live better is to live simpler, and survive? The odds are long, and the time is short. So short.

Yet science estimates that our solar system and the earth could well live another five billion years. With the oceans taking charge, they may yet make another start. Let the earth rest a million years, then Adam and Eve might get another chance. It’s been the opinion of a brilliant psychiatrist friend that “Our race has been one of God’s failed experiments.”  Surely God deserves another chance – if He wants one. Or needs one. The Hubble is showing us a universe whose vastness suggests God may have bigger things to do. Real TD has only one source — the universe.

Frank Mensel  —  June 2014

The fortunes of community colleges in most states are a gauge on the economy of both state and nation.  Clearly, they are helping weave the recovery from the Great Recession, which marked the start of the Obama presidency, and hit it hard.

This is the picture that emerges from the continuing studies that the Education Policy Center of the University of Alabama is making of high education finance and student aid. Among the key findings of the Center’s February 2014 report, “Halfway Out of Recession, But a Long Way to Go,” are these:

• College opportunity is widely threatened by both tuition increases and the changing demands on state budgets. A majority of college students “are enrolled in one of the 19 states with threats of access in one, two, or all three public higher education sectors,” which “served 8.1 million of the nation’s 15.l million full-time equivalent students in 2010-11,” or 54% of all enrolled. . . .  “tuition  is still increasing by 2 to 3 times the rate of inflation in all three sectors . . .”
• Higher education is less a state budget priority than it was before the Great Recession. It no longer ranks among the top budget drivers. “In 2013 legislative sessions, Medicaid and K-12 were the top budget drivers,” followed by pensions.  “Costs related to the Affordable Care Act replaced Higher Education among the top five drivers.”
• “As state support fails to keep up with inflation, students and families will be squeezed . . . Colleges are forced to raise tuition at more than double the inflation rate to meet shortfalls.”
• “All community colleges face predicted financial strain; rural colleges face record levels of strain.”

These trends are largely drawn by and from the EPC’s annual survey of the state directors of community colleges. The 2013 survey, compiling returns received between early June and late August, was answered by all 51 state directors.

The higher demand that the recession has imposed on community colleges is borne out by the data. It appears that the recession intensified two developments that were changing higher education before the recession began. Women had become the still-growing majority of undergraduate enrollment, now claiming three of five new degrees. It was their liberal use of community colleges that gave them this majority, at the same time making community colleges the largest producer of undergraduate credit.

Accentuated by the recession, these trends are propelling change in higher education that is unlikely to be reversed, and more likely to continue. As economic and technological change continue to propel each other at a growing pace, the demand for new job skills is likely to be largely centered in community colleges. They will be increasingly knows as the colleges of lifelong learning. If they are shortchanged in this mission, American competitiveness will suffer.  Success at this mission will make them the wellspring of the new middle class.

Frank Mensel ― July, 2014

The Dallas Morning News gave a recent column about dysfunctional Washington the headline “Dancing with the devil.” The nation’s capital lends itself to this distinction in the 21^st century for various reasons. One of the biggest, if not the biggest, is its rank now as the costliest city to do business. Not New York. Not San Francisco or Los Angeles. Yes, greater Washington now claims first place in the costs of living. And in access to the less fortunate – in either direction!

The article under the headline is a column by Jonathan Rauch, a contributing editor of the Atlantic Journal, arguing that the capital “would benefit from a return to honest graft.” It can’t happen, simply because the city has reached a state that tramples Tip’s rule that “All politics is local.” For those who believe in Satan, the capital has to look like the devil’s workshop.

Rauch and the rest of the media stars need to realize that “local” no longer has meaning in Washington, in the sense of its connection to the American people. The high cost of doing business there has virtually eliminated their voice, and turned the capital into a playpen where only Special Interests play. To play, you pay. And, no less than the Supreme Court is jacking up the price.

Twice in less than four years the Supreme Court has made the same mistake, telling us that corporations are people, because they are formed by people. But alike in form they are not. Corporations are formed by state laws. People are formed by creation.vStates give corporations no responsibility to the public interest, a glaring snub of the Constitution.

It comes from the clause that passes to the States powers not explicitly set forth in the Constitution, the very wrench that the devil counted on to jam up the works. Believers saw him using it to tear both the country and the Constitution into the Civil War that nearly destroyed both. The States should have been counted on to keep to the spirit of the Constitution in their use of this power. Consistency would and should demand it.

But the legal profession could hardly be counted on to choose the right, however obvious. There are no fat fees in that! So the rule of law perishes under a thousand nicks, giving us rule by the profession of law. No sense applying the law as it reads, when the devil dishes up details that make the practice of law a game played on technicalities, from the simple court of the justice of the peace into the machinations of the Supreme Court.

It’s a game that works this way because the lawyers own it. They tout their Bar Association as the protector of the law itself, but self-regulation is exactly that: Self first. It’s akin to expecting the NCAA to put the public interest first (e.g., child safety) in policing inter-mural football and basketball. Slavery has redefined itself in football, and by its growth into the largest entertainment industry, it writes its own rules in the exploitation of the flesh, offering enticements and rewards that make it difficult for parents and students to resist. The bigger the industry, the greater the power and influence of the lawyers it can afford to sidestep any regulation that might threaten its growth. Multinational corporations are flexing this muscle freely and, with the help of the Supreme Court, shrinking the personal worth of the Bill of Rights.

Cast your mind for a moment to a Washington visit in which you are a tourist touring the capital by car with your family. You’re looking for a parking place to pay respects to your senators, or catch the Supreme Court in session. Forget it — or park in the Maryland or Virginia suburbs and take the subway to Union Station, a short walk to the Senate offices.

It’s a playpen where money does all the talking. How easily we forget the old truth: money is the root of all evil. Personified, of course, by the devil. The capital’s isolation is the political mockery of the Safety Net, of which Washington players speak so blissfully. Remnants of the safety net are rather like a church whose members are largely the poor, but they pride themselves on keeping their minister living well, as the manifestation of the well-being to which they aspire, and for which they pray. The House and Senate appease and tease them by opening every session with prayer.

But prayers aren’t changing the reality outside the sanctuary, where unprecedented poverty is having its way — be it the devil’s work, or not. In the 21^st century, poverty racks the nation in far larger numbers than its peak in the Great Depression. When sports in general, and football in particular, have become national obsessions (by far the largest entertainment industry) statisticians are thereby too preoccupied to take time to count the poor. The devil has them tallying pass completion rates and runs batted in.

Even inside the moat that money floats around the capital poverty is rampant. It’s just tougher to see, beneath the granite of the majestic seats of government or the shimmer of luxury that paves Pennsylvania Avenue, and embassy row, and the other corridors of influence. Go a few blocks  north, east, or south from the Capitol — any direction but Pennsylvania Avenue west — you’ll have no troubling shaking hands with the poor.

So who’s brokering all this decadence? All the peevishness paralysis of the Congress? Where’s the root of this dysfunctional Washington? Money makes it so. Yes, the root of all evil.

The dance of democracy finds us dancing with the devil. Graft isn’t the answer. There’s no such thing as honest graft. How can it be when money is the root? It’s Satan’s coin. Will we go on allowing the Koch Brothers and other billionaire oligarchs to call the tune? Tom Toles got it right in his recent NYTimes cartoon, lampooning the Supreme Court for allowing big money to buy legislators by the handful, not one at a time.

Worse, will we go on letting football dictate the worth of high school and college educations, leaving only the boys that make the team feel like first-class citizens, and rest feeling diminished manhood — while at the same time shortchanging America’s economic competitiveness. Little wonder that boys overall are losing interest in school. They must suffer the irony of knowing that sports do zero for national competitiveness.

It’s time for mothers to take charge, and insist that their sons compete with the daughters for good grades. If necessary, leave the old boy to his couch, his beer, the TGV guide — and the devil. The 21^st century is their opportunity to show the world that mothers are the real makers now of the American Dream. The truth is that they always have been.  As the one true majority of voters, they can take us back to our true roots, which are “All politics is local” – the devil’s worst nightmare.

Frank Mensel — April 2014