Participación del docente en el proceso de Toma de Decisiones 28 

“The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language” (96). —Karl Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire

“The era of big government is over.” —Democratic President Bill Clinton, State of the Union Address, 1996

“How can a president not be an actor?” —Republican President Ronald Reagan

Mike Davis in Prisoners of the American Dream writes of United States President Ronald Reagan, “Like some shaggy beast of the apocalypse, Reaganism hunkered out of the Sun belt, devouring liberal senators and Great Society programs in its path” (157). “Reaganism” refers to Reagan and the New-Right, which gained mass popularity during the 1970s. Reagan’s incessant critique of big government and “liberals,” most notably President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” program, the war on poverty, gave crucial form to America’s conservative backlash against the sixties. In the United States, the Sun belt refers to the geographical band of states in the south,

in which the Bible Belt and the US Southwest converge to form a voting block responsible for sending conservative Republicans to Washington to dismantle America’s social welfare state.80 In America’s culture of austerity of the 1980s, millions of average income Americans elected Reagan to transfer wealth to the country’s economic royalty and to impose depression conditions on millions of poor Americans. The Sun belt tightened the American dream, because this geographical locale, where Reaganism “hunkered” onto the national scene, harbours US corporations relocating to the US South from the Northeast’s Manufacturing Belt. While Reaganism exhausted its potential before the end of the decade, the culture of austerity it instilled has only further entrenched itself into America’s post-Fordist economy.

Reaganism

Reaganism refers to the political marriage of Christian conservatism and economic liberalism of the New-Right that provided mass support for Reagan in the 1980s. The Christian faithful regarded Reagan as the moral (religious) grandfather propagating their conservative values, on matters such as school prayer and drugs. In his First Inaugural address, Reagan said the famous words, “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”81 The “crisis” is the recession during the early 1980s, when stagflation, a combination of high inflation and high unemployment, meant high interest rates, a result of tight monetary policy, and little or no economic growth. From Reagan’s statement about government being the problem in this particular crisis, the Republican faithful argue

that government is the problem period. Reaganomics refers to Reaganism’s economic policies, which consist mainly of privatization, deregulation, and tax and spending cuts. Republicans denounce the tax and spend policies of liberals, but advance the doctrine of spend and borrow, even while denouncing the federal government’s budget deficit. Reagan’s supply-side economics, what George H. W. Bush called “voodoo economics” during the 1980 presidential nomination campaign, relied on the belief that tax cuts would stimulate government revenues, which are paid for by a decline in the national saving’s rate and the tremendous growth of the federal budget deficit.

The central plank of Reaganomics is tax cuts for the wealthy and the austerity of economic depression for the poor. Early in his first year in office, Reagan significantly cut taxes for the wealthy elite and business corporations. Iwan Morgan in Reaganomics and its Legacy argues that the cost of Reagan’s 1981 Economic Recovery Tax Act, “the largest tax reduction in U.S. history,” “cost $643 billion in revenue in the first five years of operation” (106-7). While other changes in the tax code absorbed about a third of the cost of this reduction, according to Morgan, Reagan in his first year in office transferred over four hundred billion in public monies to the country’s economic royalty. A twenty percent reduction in the top individual income tax rate, from seventy to fifty per cent ensured that wealthy Americans had more income, and was followed by a further cut from fifty to twenty eight percent in 1986, made with bipartisan support. According to Reagan’s supply-side economics—later whole-heartedly renewed by George W. Bush, who, according to Morgan, granted forty five percent of his 2001 tax benefits to the richest one percent of taxpayers, with the poorest sixty percent receiving thirteen percent of the tax benefits—the wealthy

create demand that trickles down the class hierarchy. Rather than give money to the poor, who stimulate domestic spending by consuming televisions and other goods, money is given to the wealthy to buy more jewelry, designer clothing, art, another luxury car and a second vacation home. Ultimately, however, the economic royalty consume enough already, which means they save and invest their tax cuts. Rather than invest in higher wages or social security, such as unemployment benefits and food stamps, the wealthy invest in corporate policies that increase profits by reducing the workforce and cutting wages and benefits. Hence, Reagan’s tax cuts generated investment, with the dot.com and the subprime housing booms responsible for Wall Street’s growth of speculative value. In addition to cutting taxes for the wealthy elite and corporations, Reagan cut business regulations and scaled back protective welfare state measures. The Reagan Administration’s pro-business appointments to the National Labor Relations Board ensured that labor legislation further eroded trade union power. Although Reagan preached the gospel that government is the problem, his administration increased military spending, an example of Keynesian stimulus funding, where US corporations enjoy no-bid contracts and have all project cost overruns covered by the US government.

The Reagan Revolution and the Republican Party rhetoric propagates the virtue of absolute self-sufficiency. In America, individuals are encouraged to become independent and to not seek assistance from government. This ideal of the independent spirit is individual freedom from government, a libertarian but also an anarchist ideal, but one that nonetheless overlooks the obvious role of the government in securing the material conditions for capitalist growth. Individuals are encouraged to be

economically independent. Autonomy from the other means the individual should seek out liberty from constraint that is imposed by the rule of law. This largely Republican mythology of rugged individualism of the American dreamworld confirms the power of mass conformity that is achieved by way of socialized production (i.e. Wal-Mart) and centralized authority (i.e. DEA).

The Sun Belt

The “Sun belt” is a term coined in 1969 to refer to the geographical locale to where US industry relocated to escape the demands of organized labor in America’s Manufacturing Belt. Gary N. Chaison, author of Unions in America, argues that during the early 1980s government deregulation allowed the corporate sector to reduce wages in reaction to the recession and competition from lower cost imports.82 The business friendly conditions, including low-cost women workers, and the proximity of US military bases, made the Sun belt an attractive locale to US corporations in search of cost saving. This trend of the 1980s continues in the Great Recession of 2008:

Sub-Zero, which makes refrigerators, freezers and ovens, warned its workers last month that it might close one or more factories in Wisconsin and lay off 500 employees unless they accepted a 20 percent cut in wages and benefits. Management warned that it might transfer those operations to Kentucky or Arizona, saying it needed lower costs because sales were weaker than hoped (Greenhouse).

The trend of relocating high-wage unionized industrial jobs from the Northeast as low- wage to the union-free, business-friendly Southwest accelerated in the 1980s.

US corporations, such as General Electric, the current owner of NBC, sought competitive efficiencies against rival industrial firms. Reagan is upheld as a free- market enthusiast, and his commitment to the free-market was not betrayed by his escalating military budgets. However, cracks in America’s uneasy postwar capital- labor's alliance began to show as early as 1957. Capital's postwar strategy of peaceful coexistence would give way to a renewal of class warfare. Davis credits Lemuel Ricketts Boulware with articulating the philosophy and program of the capitalist postwar counter-revolution against American labor. An advertising executive by training, Boulware served as corporate executive of public relations at General Electric (GE), another US capitalist firm, like General Motors or General Mills, with names that attempt to capture the essence of the general will. This leading manufacturer of electric generators and industrial machinery GE benefited the growth of what President Dwight Eisenhower termed the military-industrial-complex. Originally a producer of capital goods, such as industrial electrical turbines, GE under Boulware’s lead, forayed into shaping public consciousness.83 Davis defines Boulwarism as “a sophisticated strategy of gradual deunionization, an internal undermining of the collective bargaining system” (American 121-2). Boulware re-envisioned the peaceful coexistence of labor relations in the terms of ideological combat between the company and trade union for the worker's loyalty.84 Perhaps most interesting about Boulware’s ideological influence was his role as corporate mentor for the struggling actor Ronald Reagan, who refined his stump speech during his seven years serving as corporate spokesman for GE.85 In the business press, GE is discussed as a bellwether of the American corporate sector, for the industrial producer would post record-breaking

profits as a credit lender. GE is exemplar of the concentration industrial corporate factored into the financialization of the real economy. The firm not only led the charge to break the union, by relocating several plants in a relatively short time period to non- union states, but also by automating industrial production to displace workers with technology. Moreover, under Boulware's tenure, private profits were redirected to reshaping public opinion, an objective that arguably no business corporation should perform in an open society. Instead of class warfare with their workers over wages and benefits, Reagan’s appointment changes to the National Labor Relations Board meant the NLRB would not seriously penalize US corporations for bad-faith in collective bargaining (139-40). When the NLRB failed to seriously penalize the companies practicing this policy of non-recognition, US corporations gradually relocated their industrial production to the Southwest. Sun belt working mothers in need of any employment were happy to work industrial jobs at a much lower rate than the former rate paid to industrial workers in the Northeast. In Sun belt Working Mothers: Reconciling Family and Factory, the authors reveal that in the post-Fordist Sun belt, “Being pro-union was defined by facilitators as being anti-company, and union supporters were labeled ‘losers.’ These tactics of labeling and isolation went hand in hand with the company’s major illegal strategy: firing pro-union workers” (177). The business friendly environment, while a realized utopia for corporate management, tramples on the workers and their desire for industrial participation.

In Arizona Republican senators, such as Jon Kyl, advance the Republican dogma that “a long-term extension of unemployment benefits, for example, if anything, could be a disincentive to find work.” For example, consider Alexandra

Jarrin, who after losing her job in the Great Recession, acknowledges, “The only help I’m going to get is from myself” (Luo Ninety-Nine). In the days following the expiry of her ninety-nine weeks of unemployment benefits, Jarrin has nothing to live-on. Yet to find a job and temporarily living off the charity of friends, she can only afford a week-to-week motel room, with little money for food, except a diet of ramen noodles and peanut butter and jam on white bread. According to Republican rhetoric, unemployment benefits deter Jarrin from taking a lower paying job. Even though typical unemployment benefits are so low that they cannot sustain a bare-bones food budget, we should believe that a small unemployment stipend prevents people from getting work. When compared to the luxuries afforded by a low-wage job, providing enough money to rent a room or basement apartment, plus hydro and a diet of convenience food, why would anyone prefer unemployment benefits which hardly pays for the basics? The fact that welfare often supports children of single mothers does not lessen the ire of the conservative bent on eliminating government social welfare. This ideological bias against a minimal social wage overlooks the obvious fact that the entire US economy is organized to eliminate jobs, nor does it acknowledge that in time of an economic recession, businesses can pick and choose their employees from the mass of unemployed, what Marx calls a reserved army of unemployed labor. Some Americans who cannot even find minimum wage employment, especially in the Great Recession, when US corporations were reluctant to hire and are estimated to be currently hoarding two trillion dollars in cash.

The Actor President

Ronald Reagan was a Hollywood B-actor of radio, film and television fame before he would reverse his image as a conservative politician. With the aura of a Hollywood actor, Reagan’s political life was arguably his greatest performance. As a union leader, and company spokesman for General Electric, Reagan honed his public persona. Stephen Vaughn in Ronald Reagan in Hollywood traces Reagan’s earlier film career at Warner Studios and his gradual exposure to the American people. For example, before staring in military films, Reagan in films such as played the secret service agent, whose patriotic duty was exemplar of the American dream.

The critique of Reagan becoming President of the United States was the belief that he was illiterate actor. Certainly this is the position adopted by Godfrey Hodgson at the outset of Only an Actor: Memories of a Reagan Biopic. Hodgson begins his article by relating a typical anecdote about Reagan the unintelligent actor:

“I though it was a joke,” said Pat Brown, the admired Democratic governor of California, when they told him that the Republicans were running an actor called Ronald Reagan against him. He was not even a Grade A actor, Brown pointed out. So he didn’t regard Reagan as a strong candidate, though he was all too well aware of any liberal Democrat’s vulnerability in the backlash climate of 1966. So at first he tried to ridicule the idea that a mere actor would run for governor of the most populous state in the Union. Passing two little African American boys, he said, “Who are you going to vote for? And the boys stared at him in amazement, Brown said, “Well, remember, if you don’t know, it was an actor who shot Lincoln.” When I interviewed him, Pat Brown readily

acknowledged how foolishly he had underestimated Reagan. He said Reagan’s acting experience was a “real plus” in his campaign, and attacking him as an actor had been a bad mistake, “absolutely fruitless,” Reagan was “far superior” on television, and in the end he won “by a cool million votes.” (29)

Pat Brown, the Governor of California from 1959 to 1967, whose son Jerry Brown also served as Governor from 1975-1983, provides the initial reaction and later reflection to Reagan’s status as a political actor. Brown’s earlier reaction concerns the idea of an actor running for political office, which draws upon the belief that acting and politics are mutually exclusive professions. While politics is often the subject of ridicule and cynical reproach, a position that effectively turns people away from political participation, acting is a profession in which one is either a celebrity or a waiter hoping for the big acting break. This sentiment is implied in Brown’s account that “it was an actor who shot Lincoln,” the sixteenth president of the United States during the Civil War. However, it is evident that Brown miscalculated the matter, when he, presumably much later, admits that Reagan’s acting experience was a “real plus” in his campaign.

To many his choice of profession suggests that Reagan was not particularly intelligent, certainly not intelligent enough to be president, as an individual’s preference for acting implies an aversion to deep thinking. Certainly George W. Bush later perfected this persona, with his malapropisms becoming the subject of popular ridicule, a convenient distraction to political debate. The myth that Reagan was not an independent thinker is because an actor is regarded as someone open to taking cues from directors. Thomas Evans, the grandson of American socialist Norman Evans, in

The Education of Ronald Reagan comments that Reagan was a slow reader focused on memorization of the material.86 Although he earned his living as an actor, corporate spokesman and public persona, Reagan’s books suggest he was a pensive reader, who spent a great deal of time and effort memorizing and rehearsing his lines. Evans remarks that while Reagan was employed with General Electric as a company spokesman he developed and refined his political speech, referred to as “The Speech” throughout the book. On hundreds of occasions Reagan the public speaker practiced his political treatise on liberty, government and America, even before he became governor of California. The country’s anticommunist sentiment in the postwar era provided the ideological threat to warn of the evil of socialized medicine in the United States, as Reagan was a paid speaker for the American Medical Association against public healthcare.

The acting profession implies that an actor is good at being insincere, a cynical judgment, but one conveying the fact that an acting role is a rehearsed act with prepared lines. While Reagan’s short career as an actor suggests he was not good enough to secure him leading roles in Hollywood A films, his acting skills did serve him well as a politician. The line between Reagan the actor and Reagan the politician was a faint one, because there was no way to differentiate the skills that made him a Hollywood actor (good looks, well spoken, popular stories) from those that made him an effective statesman:

If Kennedy introduced politics to entertainment, Ronald Reagan merged them. His first memorable outing as a presidential candidate was in February 1980 in Nashua, New Hampshire. During a debate with George H. W. Bush, an angry