Adventures in Reagan and Bush Sr’s USA: The Color of Money and GoodFellas

Abstract

The presidencies of Ronald Reagan oversaw a polarization between the rich and the poor within the USA that found cause in his administrations’ implementation of deregulatory, free-market policies. The attendant dismantling of federal restrictions and programmes saw the erosion of the post-New Deal social contract. With welfare cut back, employment regulations culled and — in a separate but related assault — unions diminished, the working and lower-middle classes discovered themselves despatched to a brutal social and economic realm. Exacerbating things for many, the time similarly saw the unmaking of traditional heavy industries before emerging service industries, a shift in economic power from the Northeast and Midwest to the South and the export of ‘American’ jobs abroad. The same regressive tax regime that had been introduced coextensive to the dismantling of ‘big government’ resulted, meanwhile, in the already moneyed benefiting disproportionately. Finance capital flourished, and by the mid-1980s often deficit-funded or even fraudulent speculation — with its culture of asset stripping, quick profits and triumphal posturing — had become widespread. Some economic chickens did, however, come home to roost, at least temporarily, when on ‘Black Monday’, 19 October 1987, a stock-market crash saw $500 billion wiped off share values. In the latter part of the 1980s, moreover, Right-wing hegemony began to fragment in the face of, inter alia, spreading discontent regarding the social and economic consequences of the preceding years, the revelation of the corruption implicit in the Reagan administrations’ covert overseas adventurism and the investigation of insider trading and other illegalities within the stock market.