The Reagan administration declared war on middle class working families when it gave Capital the mobility to seek ultra-cheap labor from dictator-run, sweatshop nations like Communist China.
One of the GOP's largest contributors, Walmart, gets over 50% of its products made in Communist China.
This was Reagan's dream: to expand profits by giving investors access to cheaper labor. -to send the jobs of hard working American families to places where their products could be made for pennies a day by unfree workers who lived in hovels.
The Reagan Revolution (which Clinton supported) sent the manufacturing jobs upon which middle class families depended overseas, to places where ultra-cheap labor translated directly into higher profits. John Galt's partnership with the sweatshops of Communist China, Korea, Taiwan, Grenada and Vietnam has destroyed the middle class. (Patriotism? Nope, not our capitalists. They have sold the American worker down river. They have gotten in bed with freedom-hating nations in order to get cheap labor.)
This move by Reagan (and every president thereafter) lead to the dangerous expansion of credit (debt) to American families. That's right - our loyal hard working families replaced high wages/benefits with credit cards.
This was a wet dream for the capitalist, who Reagan was sent to Washington to protect. After Reagan, instead of paying high wages to Americans, they leant hard working Americans money to survive. That is, the capitalist leant the worker the money he used to make in wages.
Which is to say: they leant the American worker money for consumption at a very high interest rate. Rather than a free, well educated and powerful middle class, the capitalist created an indebted and disenfranchised middle class - (... a middle class that was so drained of political power that it could not strike for livable wages so American Families could afford for the mother to stay home and raise the kids. This is why the 50's were the "heyday" of American Conservatism, because Washington and Unions extracted higher wages/benefits from corporations so that the mother could stay home and raise the kids. This meant that the mother wasn't forced into the labor market, and that we didn't, as a result, end up with "latchkey" kids who were raised by television or gangs. Regan's gift to capital - i.e., lower labor costs - ended the American Middle Class family). To top it off, Reagan and his uber-capitalist policy makers cut off funding to programs which created affordable middle class education (ending the GI Bill and its many successors) in order to make room for tax cuts. This ended upward mobility for the middle class and resulted in the kind of wealth inequality that is seen in 3rd world nations, i.e., nations where labor is ultra-cheap. (hmmm?)
Meaning: the Reagan war on the postwar middle class wage/benefit system has destroyed the middle class.
What is pathetic and disgusting about the Reagan War on Families is that it was covered up in true Orwellian fashion by a false ideology of "Family Values".
America swallowed poison in 1980.
This is why we are finally in the never-ending recession which Clinton and Bush tried to avoid with their Tech/Housing bubbles. We have spent 30 years shipping jobs to places where the capitalist could make higher profits. And we have spent 30 years replacing the high wages of those lost jobs with credit cards (i.e., debt). Now, we have finally bumped into our borrowed-against future and there are not enough solvent consumers left. The Reagan Revolution has irreparably destroyed consumer demand. Of course, this doesn't bother the capitalist, who doesn't need the American Consumer. He has a global marketplace of consumers to choose from. [This was one of the purposes of the global market system, which was created w/the help of the Cold War, where the U.S. used the Soviet Threat to intervene in the developing world in order to create trading "partners". By un-burdening the Capitalist from expensive middle class labor, it meant that the Capitalist could benefit from expensive taxpayer-provided Pentagon support (who do you think stabilizes the capitalist's overseas supply chains?) without having to include that taxpayer in the gains of economic growth. This meant they could drain the resources of the host nation - in this case the USA - without having to reciprocate by providing jobs or making the nation stronger (like during the postwar years when the wages of American families were tied to economic growth. Reagan ended this so that he could increases profits on top)]
The defeat of the American working family is now complete. In order to expand profits, the Reagan Revolution got rid of high American labor costs, and with it, the American middle class. The only thing that remains is a smoldering nation punctuated by the moronic cheerleading of the Tea Party who do not see what was lost in the Reagan victory of Capital over expensive middle class labor, anti-trust laws and affordable education.
1980 = poison.
