46 Matching Annotations
  1. Aug 2023
    1. “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is theproblem.” So declared Ronald Reagan as he launched hisadministration in January 1981,

      Was this the end of government by the people? Government by the corporations had been building up for a long time, and this may have been the fulcrum at which things changed.

      Something ironic in a president saying this about the institution which he's running. Almost too meta. And naturally could be said about his own way of running the government.

    2. Most Americans know that before becoming a politician Reaganwas an actor, but fewer are aware that Reagan’s flagging screencareer was revived by a job with the General Electric Corporation(GE). Reagan hosted the popular television show General ElectricTheater, where each week his voice and face reached into tens ofmillions of homes, promoting didactic stories of individualism andfree enterprise. At the same time, he traveled across the country onbehalf of GE—visiting factories, making speeches at schools, anddoing the dinner circuit in communities where GE had a presence—promoting the corporation’s stridently individualist antiunion andantigovernment vision.

      From a philosophical viewpoint, Reagan grew up in Dixon, Illinois a small town (surrounded by farmland) in North West-ish Illinois roughly on the border of the political borders of what Colin Woodard calls The Midlands and Greater Appalachia. He seems to have been a Midlander for the first half of his life, but obviously had an easy time moving to a more Greater Appalachia viewpoint when working for GE.

    1. Was Ronald Reagan's shift in politics an example of “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” (Upton Sinclair)? (see also: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/)

      Link to https://hypothes.is/a/Kft7kDOrEe6TQKcW-dREwQ in The Big Myth on Regan's shift in political views while working for General Electric.

  2. Feb 2023
    1. Reagan’s Note Card Treasures<br /> by John H. Fund <br /> at August 10, 2011, 12:00 AM<br /> (accessed:: 2023-02-23 12:25:06)

      archived copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20151017020314/http://spectator.org/articles/37399/reagans-note-card-treasures

    2. WHILE REAGAN was governor, I will never forget his taking time out of his schedule after a television taping to show me—a 15-year-old high school student—how he could instantly arrange his packs of anecdote-filled index cards into a speech tailor-made for almost any audience. I still use a variation of Reagan’s system to construct my own speeches.

      John H. Fund wrote that while he was a a 15-year old high school student, Reagan taught him how he arranged his index card-based notes to tailor-make a speech for almost any audience. In 2011, Fund said he still used a variation of Reagan's system for his own speeches.

    3. No such care in sourcing was needed for the time-tested jokes: “Those congressmen who worry about being bugged by the FBI—you’d think they’d be glad someone was listening to them.”

      Reagan, however, did not source many of his one-liner jokes.

    4. As one looks at the yellowing speech cards, one can see Reagan was always careful to include the documentation and source at the top. In his shorthand, you can see him quoting Thomas Jefferson: “If a nation expects to be ignorant & free in a state of civilizations, it expects what never was & what never will be.”

      On many quote-based cards, Reagan was careful to cite his sources.

    5. Indeed, Martin Anderson, Reagan’s former domestic policy adviser, says that Reagan’s system did wonders for his ability to give speeches. Reagan was able to approach a lectern with no sign anywhere of a prepared speech. Only those seated on the stage behind him could see his left hand drop into his suitcoat pocket and pull out a neat, small packet of cards and slip off the elastic band with his right hand as he set the cards down. And as for helping him in preparing the speech material, “his system was unrivaled,” Anderson remembers. “Before the speech Reagan would pore over the packs of cards, then pluck a few cards from one pack, a few from another, and combine them. In a matter of minutes, he would create an entirely new speech. The system was as flexible as a smooth gold chain.”
    6. He compiled hundreds of them over the course of his career. Some were lost or given away as souvenirs, but 91 were recently discovered at the Reagan Library, stored in boxes that contained the contents of Reagan’s desk at his Los Angeles office on the day he died in June 2004.

      Ronald Reagan compiled hundreds of index card-based notes over his career. Some were lost or given away as souvenirs, but 91 we discovered at the Reagan library (circa 2011). They were discovered among boxes which contained the contents of his Los Angeles office desk after his death in June 2004,

    7. The cards would feature between five and 10 items and would be written on both sides in Reagan’s inimitable shorthand.

      Ronald Reagan broke the typical rule to "write only on one side" of his index cards. His cards would typically have five to ten items written out by hand.

      Given some of the cards I've seen, it seems that they weren't categorized generally and with multiple ideas on the same card they also broke Gessner's other common advice.

    8. “These cards are the tools of his trade. He can take any speech and insert some of these zingers and one-liners. Let’s say he’s speaking to a Kiwanis Club. He knew what to put in. If he was talking to a group of firemen, he had a joke about putting out a fire. If you’re really looking for the hand of a president, and how his mind is working, all of these note cards together, in a way, give you the magic of Ronald Reagan.”
    9. Consisting of quotes, economic statistics, jokes, and anecdotes, they became the core of Ronald Reagan’s traveling research files.

      Ronald Reagan's index card-based commonplace book consisted of quotes, economic statistics, jokes, and anecdotes.

    10. One of his secrets was a stack of 4 x 6 inch note cards that he compiled over the span of four decades.

      Though other sources like the CBS News article look like 3 x 5" index cards, John Hunt indicates that Ronald Reagan used 4 x 6" inch cards for his notes.

    1. Ronald Reagan's index cards of one-liners at 2014-07-20 <br /> (accessed:: 2023-02-23 11:41:42)

      archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20200305070906/https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/ronald-reagans-index-cards-of-one-liners/12/


      ᔥ Manfred Kuehn in Ronald Reagan's Notecards at 2015-01-25<br /> (accessed:: 2023-02-23 11:34:10)

    2. "There's little danger of our government being overthrown – there's too much of it."

      —Ronald Reagan

      Little would he have expected January 6th...

    3. "It's a great kindness to entrust some one with a secret. They feel so important while telling it."

      —Ronald Reagan

    4. "Prosperity is something created by businessmen for politicians to take credit for."

      —Ronald Reagan

    5. "If at first you don't succeed, do it the way she told you."

      —Ronald Reagan

      Now that we know better about the history and the results of the Regan administration, we really should be listening more to women —Ronald Reagan said it himself!

    6. "Easier to forgive someone if you get even with them first."

      —Ronald Reagan

    7. "Used to talk our problems over cigarettes and coffee. Now cigarettes and coffee ARE our problems."

      —Ronald Reagan

    8. "The art of politics is making people like you, no matter what it costs them."

      —Ronald Reagan

    9. "Room bugged? Every time I sneezed the chandelier said, 'Gesundheit!'"

      —Ronald Reagan

    10. "I won't say he should be put in a mental institution, but if he was in one, don't think I'd let him out."

      —Ronald Reagan

      A sad show for the man who gutted mental health support in California and then more broadly in the United States.

    11. "Never start an argument with a woman when she's tired -- or when she's rested."

      —Ronald Reagan

    12. "Don't say he's old, but every time there's a knock on the door he yells 'Everybody hide, it's Indians!'"

      —Ronald Reagan

    13. Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Library

      One of Ronald Reagan's Index cards with four bullet-pointed one-liners has the annotation "(over)" written on the bottom which indicates that he wrote on both sides of his cards.

      If he was keeping these in clear plastic sheets in a binder, this would have been easy to see the opposite sides.

      Were all of his cards double-sided? This particular example seems to be a list of one liners which may have been used in the same speech (or timeframe) and thus served solely as a reminder of the jokes to be told.

    14. "You can talk to any number of President Reagan's speechwriters over the years, and when they might hand him a speech, the speeches would come back with a quote, or an expression or a joke that they hadn't seen before," John Heubusch, executive director of the Reagan Library, told CBS News' Mo Rocca.
    15. It turns out he had a secret arsenal: stacks of 3x5 index cards filled with one-liners, which he kept in his desk to append to speeches.

      Ronald Reagan used 3 x 5" index cards.

    16. "Nothing like a vote in the U.N. to tell you who your friends used to be."

      —Ronald Reagan

    1. Manfred Kuehn in Ronald Reagan's Notecards at 2015-01-25<br /> (accessed:: 2023-02-23 11:34:10)

      Kuehn felt that Ronald Regan's note taking "does not seem like a good system. In fact, it's hardly any system at all..."

  3. Jan 2023
    1. it's what i write about and that is why what  is it that has created this uh uh disparity   and why is it widened so much since 1980. well  the most obvious reason is uh interest rates   reached a peak of 20 in uh 1980 and they've gone  down ever since well in the late 1970s uh my old   00:16:50 boss's boss at chase manhattan paul volcker  said let's raise interest rates to very high   because the 99 are getting too much income their  wages are going up let's uh raise interest to slow   the economy and that will prevent wages from going  up and he did and that was a large uh reason why   carter lost the the election to ronald reagan  interest rates then went down from 20 to almost 0   00:17:20 today the result was the largest bond market boom  in history bonds went way up in price the economy   was flooded with bank credit and most of this  credit uh apart from going into the bond market   went into real estate and there is a uh symbiosis  between finance and real estate and also between   finance and raw materials and also like oil and  gas and minerals uh extraction natural resource   00:17:48 rent land rent and also monopoly rent and most of  the monopoly rent has come from the privatization   that you had from ronald reagan margaret thatcher  and the whole neoliberalism uh if you look at how   did this one percent get most of its wealth well  if you look at the forbes list of the billionaires   in almost every country they got wealth in  the old-fashioned way from taking it from   00:18:13 the public domain in other words privatization  you have the largest privatization and transfer   of wealth from the public sector to uh the private  sector and specifically to the financial sector uh   in in history uh sell-offs and all of a sudden  instead of uh infrastructure uh public health uh   other uh basic needs being provided at subsidized  rates to the population you have uh privatized   00:18:41 owners uh financed by the banks raising the rates  to whatever rate they can get without any market   firing power uh in the united states the  government is not even allowed to bargain with   the pharmaceutical companies for the drug prices  so there's been a huge monopolization a huge   privatization a huge flooding of the economy with  credit and one person's credit is somebody else's   00:19:11 uh debt so you you've described the one percent's  wealth in the form of uh savings but uh i focus   on the other side of the balance sheet this one  percent finds its counterpart in the debts of the   99 so the one percent has got wealthy by indebting  the 99 uh for housing that is soared in price 20   00:19:37 uh just in the last year in the united states uh  for medical care for uh utilities for education   uh the economy is being forced increasingly  into debt and how how can one uh solve this   taxation will not be enough the only way  that you can uh actually reverse this uh   concentration of wealth is to begin wiping out uh  the debt if you leave the debt in place of the 99   00:20:10 uh then uh you're going to leave the one percent  savings all in place uh and these savings are   largely tax exempt uh so basically i think you  you uh left out the government's role in this   wealth creation of the one percent so your  finance has indeed grown faster than economy   absorbed real estate into the finance insurance  and real estate sector the fire sector finances   00:20:39 absorb the oil industry the mining industry  and it's absorbed most of the government so the   financial wealth has spilled over to become  essentially the economy's central planner   it's not planned in washington or paris or london  it's planned in wall street the city of london   and the paris ports the economy is being managed  financially and the object of financial management   00:21:04 isn't really to make money it's capital gains  and again as your statistics point out capital   gains are really what explains the increase  in wealth you don't get rich by saving the   income rent is for paying interest income is for  paying interest you get rich off the government   basically subsidizing an enormous increase in the  value of stocks the value of bonds by the central   00:21:31 banks which have been privatized and uh the reason  that this is occurring is that uh the largest   public utility of all money creation and banking  is left in private hands and private banking   in the west is very different from what government  banking is in say china

      !- Michael Hudson : Wealth is created in the 1% through privatization and loss of the 99% - Largest transfer of wealth in history from the public sector to the private sector, especially through financial sector - govt fire sale of public infrastructure - credit was created and invested in the biggest bon market boom in history - many of Forbes billionaires got rich through such privatization - the 1% got wealthy by indebting the 99% through privatization all around the globe - this was the effect of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher's neoliberal policies - taxation alone is not sufficient to reverse this wealth concentration, the debt has to be completely wiped out

      !- key statement : the elite get rich off the government subsidizing an enormous increase in the value of stocks the value of bonds by the central bank which have been privatized. The reason THAT is happening is because the largest public utility of all, money creation and central banking has been privatized.

  4. Nov 2022
    1. "If the Reagans' home in Palisades (Calif.) were burning," Brinkley says, "this would be one of the things Reagan would immediately drag out of the house. He carried them with him all over like a carpenter brings their tools. These were the tools for his trade."

      Another example of someone saying that if their house were to catch fire, they'd save their commonplace book (first or foremost).

  5. Aug 2022
    1. Protect it at all costs. As the historian Douglas Brinkley said about Ronald Reagan’s collection of notecards: “If the Reagans’ home in Palisades were burning, this would be one of the things Reagan would immediately drag out of the house. He carried them with him all over like a carpenter brings their tools. These were the tools for his trade.”

      Another example of saving one's commonplace in case of a fire!

      link to: - https://hypothes.is/a/BLL9TvZ9EeuSIrsiWKCB9w - https://hypothes.is/a/zHUghMiaEeuKKvcrc5ux5w

    2. Ronald Reagan actually kept quotes on a similar notecard system.

      By at least 2013 Ryan Holiday was aware of Ronald Reagan's note card system from a 2011 USA Today article and related book.

  6. Jun 2022
    1. The Invention of the Welfare State: Education,Health Care, and Social Security

      Welfare state has largely been given a negative connotation in America beginning roughly in the 1980s during the Reagan administration.

      Will Piketty continue this negative tone here?

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    Annotators

    1. A sign of the NRA’s new determination to influence electoral politics was the 1980 decision to endorse, for the first time in the organization’s 100 years, a presidential candidate. Their chosen candidate was none other than Ronald Reagan,
    1. Governor Ronald Reagan, who was coincidentally present on the capitol lawn when the protesters arrived, later commented that he saw "no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons" and that guns were a "ridiculous way to solve problems that have to be solved among people of good will." In a later press conference, Reagan added that the Mulford Act "would work no hardship on the honest citizen."
    2. The Mulford Act was a 1967 California bill that prohibited public carrying of loaded firearms without a permit.[2] Named after Republican assemblyman Don Mulford, and signed into law by governor of California Ronald Reagan, the bill was crafted with the goal of disarming members of the Black Panther Party who were conducting armed patrols of Oakland neighborhoods, in what would later be termed copwatching.[3][4] They garnered national attention after Black Panthers members, bearing arms, marched upon the California State Capitol to protest the bill.

      WTF!

    1. Elie Mystal writes in Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy's Guide to the Constitution:

      There was an original purpose to the Second Amendment, but it wasn't to keep people safe. It was to preserve white supremacy and slavery. (p36)

      He indicates that there are quotes from Patrick Henry and George Mason, governor of Virginia. They needed the ability to raise an armed militia to put down slave revolts and didn't want to rely on the federal government to do it.


      • [ ] Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy's Guide to the Constitution by Elie Mystal #wanttoread

      link to 1967 Mulford Act signed by Ronald Reagan see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act

  7. Apr 2022
    1. Neuropsychiatrists at UCLA had found a willing partner in Governor Reagan’s California Department of Justice, to the tune of $750,000 (equivalent to roughly $4.5 million today), and a whopping $1.5 million from the state. It was prominently affiliated with researchers like Vernon Mark and Frank Ervin, who had gained scientific fame for their work creating brain implants in human patients to change behavior and motivation; also on board was former LAPD police chief James Fiske, a man known for terrorizing the city’s Black population.

      It looks like Ronald Reagan had issues with mental health care even as far back as the 1970s. This incident at UCLA was just a precursor to defunding state mental health care that was already apparently having issues at the time.

  8. Aug 2021
    1. http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2011-05-08-reagan-notes-book-brinkley_n.htm

      An article indicating that President Ronald Reagan kept a commonplace book throughout his life. He maintained it on index cards, often with as many as 10 entries per card. The article doesn't seem to indicate that there was any particular organization, index, or taxonomy involved.

      It's now housed at the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, CA.

    1. Ronald Reagan also kept a similar system that apparently very few people knew about until he died. In his system, he used 3×5 notecards and kept them in a photo binder by theme. These note cards–which were mostly filled with quotes–have actually been turned into a book edited by the historian Douglas Brinkley. These were not only responsible for many of his speeches as president, but before office Reagan delivered hundreds of talks as part of his role at General Electric. There are about 50 years of practical wisdom in these cards. Far more than anything I’ve assembled–whatever you think of the guy. I highly recommend at least looking at it.

      Ronald Reagan kept a commonplace in the form of index cards which he kept in a photo binder and categorized according to theme. Douglas Brinkley edited them into the book The Notes: Ronald Reagan's Private Collection of Stories and Wisdom.

  9. Mar 2021
  10. Jul 2019