So Illinois has decided to rename I-88 (the east-west tollway which runs from Chicago to Iowa, about 5 miles from my apartment) from “The Eisenhower Expressway” to “The Ronald Reagan Memorial Tollway”. Originally, they had planned to re-name it only west of Dixon, but in a case of moronic one-upsmanship, the Democrat governor decided that his postmortem fellatio needed to be superior to the lowly Republican-controlled legislature’s, and renamed it from the western suburbs onwards. Chicago is exempt, of course, because Reagan’s drug, AIDS, economic, and foreign policy managed to cause record levels of crime, disease, poverty, and anger amongst most Chicagoans — which would almost certainly lead to the “Reagan Memorial Highway” being riddled with bullet-holes, and people shooting at road-signs in an urban area is pretty dangerous.
Now, I’m of the opinion (in which I’m not alone), that all this postmortem fellatio is not only a disgustingly idiotic, but horribly incorrect. I will not miss Ronald Reagan. In fact, I think that if life were fair, he would’ve died homeless too. (And yes, I’m familiar with the horrifying effects of Alzheimer’s: my grandma died having had it for 10 years). There are, of course, some who discard this rosy picture, but they are one of the better examples of “an exception which proves the rule.”
I say all this because I’m also pretty confident that 50-100 years from now, Ronald Reagan (and certainly his like-minded successors) will be viewed as an unmitigated disaster for the United States: either as the single largest enabling factor in its economic and social collapse, or a dangerous run-up to that edge which required years of herculean efforts to pull back from. Remember folks, the U.S. “National” Debt is now over 7.2 trillion dollars—increasing at a rate of 1 billion dollars a day—and 3.1 trillion of that is not owned by the public at large (i.e. rich people in the U.S.). If banks (who get their money on loan from the Federal Reserve) are included, 4.1 trillion dollars is owed to foreign creditors. This means that nearly all the money that circulates in the entire domestic economy in 3 months is owed by the government and the banking system to somebody outside the U.S. Guess who’s going to end up paying it off?
Hint: It’s not going to be the multinational corporations, who can always relocate, taking their epic piles of cash (WalMart takes in more money than the entire Saudi Arabian economy spends) with them.
James Cape 