Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

Con artists worshipped the Reagan "mantra" of "get the government off people's backs" and why not?  This allowed these charlatans to operate freely, when close supervision and tight regulations could have stopped their devious economic designs.

Out of prison and on the web, an ex-Rudolph Guiliani aide delivered a version of the past.

In the New York Times September 26, Michael Barbaro and Russ Buettner wrote a fascinating revelation of what caused him to go to jail:

"Russell A. Harding, a former Guiliani administration official and a son of a New York political power broker, has unveiled a Web site called Rudyveritas.com, which claims to be a warts-and-all -- emphasis on warts -- portrait of a mayor he once revered and from whom he is now estranged.

"On the site, created in August, Mr. Harding acknowledges his own sins, which include convictions and a prison sentence for embezzling $400,000 in city money and possessing child pornography.  But he says he is angry at how other former Guiliani aides have treated him since his release from prison, especially Mr. Giuliani's former chief of staff, Anthony V. Carbonetti, who Mr. Harding said pretended not to see him recently in Grand Central Terminal and failed to respond to a personal letter.

"So he is setting out to tell, he says, the '100 percent unvarnished truth' of Mr. Giuliani's tenure as mayor, describing it as the evolution of a principled, heroic leader into just another politician chasing personal glory and financial gain.  'He no longer has an inner core or a message,' Mr. Harding writes.  'He now stood for nothing.'"

A September 26 Seattle Times Letter to the Editors by Michael O'Leary of Seattle caught the precise horrifying economic nightmare.  That is the end result of the failed Reaganomics economic philosophy disaster.

O'Leary began with the $700 billion bailout -- recognizing regulation is a must.  He stated:

"Whether it is the savings-and-loan scandal of the 1980s, Enron in 2001 or the current mortgage crisis, the common thread to all of them is the deregulation of safeguards for American consumers pushed for by successive Republican administrations (`Bail package fiercely attacked on Hill,' page one, Sept. 24).

"The taxpayer bailout of the 1980s savings-and-loan debacle totaled $124 billion; the Enron scandal cost ratepayers untotaled billions in higher energy costs; and the current $700 billion mortgage bailout, on top of the huge deficits caused by the Iraq war, will literally push the nation's deficit to near bankruptcy levels.  Following each of these scandals, the economy was pushed into recession, costing tens of thousands of middle-class Americans their jobs.

"From the New Deal until the 1980s, no such grand financial-and-political-cor ruption scandals took place on either party's watch thanks, in part, to regulations adopted in the 1930s to prevent such corruption.

"The Reagan-Bush-Gingrich counterrevolution followed by the current Bush-Cheney-Rove administration have severely undermined those protections and ushered in an era of policy by campaign check.  The current crisis can be traced directly to the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, led by then Sen. Phil Gramm."

In the September 16 Seattle Times Letters to the Editors Michael McSweeney of Tacoma laid out the current crisis:

"Let's be honest and let's be clear:  A once-great political party has been left in ruins by eight morally bankrupt years of the Bush administration.  The national debt and the shattered economy, an energy policy based primarily on the myth that drilling will solve the problem, a war without end, warrantless wiretapping, Katrina inaction, cronyism, no-bid contracts, torture, Guantanamo, rendition, Plamegate and years of lying leave the McCain campaign and the Republican Party with nothing left to run on besides the fears-of-the-white-voters platform."