Wednesday, January 21, 2004
State of the Union:
The lead-up had Mara Liasson doing her usual selling for the Administration, referring to Bush’s “strong popularity” (vs declining poll numbers, down to his lowest point in his 3 years). The speech was thoroughly predictable, especially his leading off with the “War on Terror”, followed by “…tax relief you passed is working”; then, “going on” vs going back, turning back- “…we’ve not come all this way…only to falter and leave our work unfinished”. So, we should continue with him. After all, the environment isn’t totally destroyed, the deficit hasn’t yet reached 750 billion per, all taxes on income aren’t gone yet.
Favorite line: “[The] Kay Report identified dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities...”
What’s Happening, Iraq:
We’re losing the political fight to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. His followers are staging demonstrations of up to 100,000, insisting on elections. It is unlikely he will turn back, now that he has mobilized “the street”. The Administration has had to crawl back to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan for help in transferring power to an interim Iraqi government; Annan has leaned toward sending a UN mission, but the Administration’s desperate need to involve the UN may be, as Fareed Zakaria warned in her Washington Post article, “too little, too late.”
What does this man have that the United States doesn't?
Legitimacy. Sistani is regarded by Iraqi Shiites as the most learned cleric in the country. He is also seen as having been uncorrupted by Saddam Hussein's reign. "During the Iran-Iraq war, Sistani managed to demonstrate that he could be controlled neither by Saddam nor by his fellow ayatollahs in Iran, which has given him enormous credibility," says Yitzhak Nakash, the leading authority on Iraqi Shiites.
The United States fears that he will brand it as colonialist and the new transition government as a puppet regime. American officials know these few words could derail their plans. The occupation can survive an insurgency, but it cannot survive 10 countrywide protest marches with thousands chanting, "Colonialists go home!"
From the start, the Pentagon planners (or non-planners) believed the United States would have no legitimacy problems in Iraq. "We will be greeted as liberators," Vice President Cheney famously predicted. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30724-2004Jan20.html
Though Bush said in his speech that ‘we stand with the Iraqi people’, the crowds are chanting “yes to elections, no to occupation.”
The Shia, believed to number some 15 to 16 million out of a total Iraqi population of 25 million, fear the US and its local allies will seek to rob them of power by appointing members of a new assembly and government to which the US has pledged to hand over power on 1 July. http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=482907
Who is Paul Bremer? Danny Schechter cites Tom Hayden’s report from the World Social Forum in Mumbai, India, which provides a profile.
Paul Bremer is understood not only as point man for the U.S. government, but as managing director of Kissinger & Associates, which represents a secret list of U.S. multinational corporations with long-term stakes in the region. Bremer already has imposed a maximum flat tax of only 15 percent on corporate profits, privatized hundreds of Iraqi businesses and natural resources, and carried free market fundamentalism so far that he faces legal challenges to the U.S. authority based on the traditional international rules governing occupations. In addition, a Bremer order dictates that all non-governmental organizations in the "new Iraq" must be registered and provide detailed membership lists to the American authorities in Baghdad." http://64.224.42.246/weblog/dannylog.cfm]
What is the World Social Forum? From the NY Times (Saritha Rai)
Anti-globalization protesters jostled with opponents of war, and those fighting India's caste system performed street plays alongside groups opposing religious and sex discrimination. At the six-day annual World Social Forum here in India's financial capital, hundreds of groups raised their voices in protest, if not always in unison.
The agenda of the gathering, held for the first time outside Brazil, appeared to have shifted from its central focus on trade and the inequities of global capitalism, splintering into a long list of regional causes.
"I came here and went `Huh?' " said Ellen Lenox, an English teacher from Brasília. "The focus has changed from unfair global trade and the monopoly of big business toward antiwar, antidiscrimination causes."
As in the last three years, this year's World Social Forum is timed to run concurrently with the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, which is seen by critics and most of those in attendance here as a gathering of rich capitalists.
Amid the heat and dust of a vast derelict factory complex in suburban Goregaon usually reserved for home decor or auto expositions, thousands of people gathered from across India and abroad to make common cause, with the slogan "Another world is possible."
Members of the organizing committee in Bombay, also known as Mumbai, said about 80,000 people from more than 100 countries were taking part.
Prominent among the speakers in the first three days of the forum were José Bové, the French farmer who led the demolition of a half-built McDonald's outlet; the Iranian human rights activist and Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi; and the Indian novelist Arundhati Roy.
Coca-Cola and Pepsi were barred from the refreshment stands in favor of water and freshly squeezed sugar cane juice and lemonade. Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer were discarded in favor of Linux operating systems and Mozilla browsers.
Continuing with the theme of the previous three global gatherings, all held in Porto Alegre, Brazil, peace activists vehemently criticized President Bush's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But some new themes emerged.
Pratap Kumar complained that for Dalits, or untouchables, like him, who were on the lowest rung of India's caste system, diatribes against globalization ring hollow to people denied basic human rights.
"What does anti-liberalization mean when we don't have the basic freedom to drink water at the village well or send our children to the same school as those from the upper castes?" asked Mr. Kumar, from Vijayawada in the southeastern state of Andhra.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/20/international/asia/20FORU.html?pagewanted=print&position=http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/20/international/asia/20FORU.html?pagewanted=print&position=
Jobs
James K. Galbraith writes about the Administration’s “effort” re jobs: “Don't believe the Bush administration's hand-wringing over its pathetic record on employment. The president's backers want a stagnant job market -- it keeps the help from getting uppity.”
President Bush will use his State of the Union to claim that tax cuts have restored economic growth, and he may mention the stock market's rise last year. But the transcendent economic issue this election year isn't the growth rate. It isn't the stock market. It also isn't the budget deficit the tax cuts caused. And it isn't even the rate of unemployment. It's the number of people in this country who have decent work -- and the number who don't.
There are no new jobs. Total job growth in the Clinton years: 23 million. Total job losses so far in the Bush years: over 2 million. Total gains in the last six months, since the so-called recovery supposedly accelerated in the third quarter? Just 221,000. That's less than a single month's average under Clinton. And last month? One thousand new jobs. … (http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/01/19/no_jobs/print.html
Robert Reich on O’Neill and Bush.
Reich doesn’t hold back, bless him…
O'Neill is correct, America has lost many lives and paid a huge price to get rid of a terrible dictator who posed no direct danger to this nation. The world is better off without him, but at what price? We were directly and intentionally misled.
By coming forward, O'Neill shows once again that sometimes cabinet secretaries - especially former ones - have a higher patriotic duty to their country than blind allegiance to the president they serve
The central question his book raises isn't really the loyalty a cabinet officer owes a president. It's the loyalty a president and his inner circle owe to the country and to its democracy. If O'Neill is telling the truth - and we have no reason to doubt his veracity - there's serious doubt about the loyalty of this administration to America
http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-vprei163628454jan16,0,3580276.story
Tax The Rich! Another Governor tries to raise taxes on the Wealthy
I’ve cited my efforts working with Fairness in Taxes for Everyone (FITE) which focuses on the theft of the public’s riches by the “mega rich”. [See http://www.fairnessintaxes.org/pages/howthemegarich.html] Only a few states have thus far taken the politically risky, but desperately needed step of raising the taxes on those who previously have had a drastic lowering of their tax burden.
Now, Virginia’s Democratic Governor Mark Warner is attempting the step.
Since his election in 2001, Mr. Warner has cut a beleaguered figure in Richmond, struggling to close a $6 billion budget shortfall that drained money from nearly every state program and made ambitious programs all but unthinkable.
But he has taken the offensive this year, proposing an overhaul of the tax system that he says will cut taxes for 65 percent of Virginians while raising them for the rich, preserve the state's triple-A bond rating and close a projected $1.2 billion budget shortfall in the next two years.
His proposal comes at what seems an unpropitious time for raising taxes. Last fall, voters in Alabama overwhelmingly rejected a similar tax overhaul, while Californians overwhelmingly elected an anti-tax governor in October. In 2002, voters in Northern Virginia and in the Hampton Roads area rejected sales-tax increases intended to raise revenue for transportation projects.
He contends his plan makes the antiquated tax code fairer. It would cut taxes on food and eliminate them on cars and estates worth less than $10 million. The nearly flat income tax would rise for people earning more than $100,000 but fall for most others. He would increase the sales tax by a penny, to 5.5 cents, and raise cigarette taxes to 25 cents a pack, from 2.5 cents. He would close special deductions for the high-income elderly and certain corporations. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/20/national/20WARN.html
Health Care Trend: More Coverage = Less Coverage
So, the only way to spread health care is to lower the benefits provided. That’s American ingenuity. From the NY Times business pages (Milt Freudenheim)
With the number of uninsured Americans rising to new heights, some policy makers and influential health care experts are saying that the best way to give health coverage to more people is to give some people less.
Experiments in several states are establishing stripped-down packages of basic benefits intended to be affordable for employers and uninsured workers, including young, middle-class people who have dropped out of the health insurance pool. Some officials say that government health benefits could be extended to more people, too, if the benefit package were narrower. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/20/business/20care.html
Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill: Cabinet debates were exercises in "incestuous amplification."
From the Times (Edmund L. Andrews)
The comment is made in "The Price of Loyalty,'' a new book by Ron Suskind about Mr. O'Neill's tumultuous tenure before being fired in December 2002. Rather than encouraging policy debates, Mr. O'Neill contended that big decisions were made with almost no discussion and even less debate.
Mr. O'Neill has provoked a political firestorm with his contention that President Bush tilted toward war with Iraq almost as soon as he took office; the administration has vigorously denied that. But the former Treasury secretary described a similar pattern in Mr. Bush's push to cut taxes by at least $1.7 trillion over 10 years.
Mr. O'Neill was openly skeptical about the need for big tax cuts and expressed concern about frittering away what were then huge budget surpluses.
In hindsight, he may have been too sanguine about the economy's prospects in early 2001 and too dismissive of the value in cutting taxes as a way to soften the downturn. But Mr. O'Neill may also prove to have been prescient about other issues that are likely to have long-lasting significance. One was the idea of building "triggers'' into Mr. Bush's tax cuts, provisions that would prevent some of the cuts from becoming effective if budget surpluses evaporated. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/18/business/yourmoney/18view.html?pagewanted=print&position=
Reagan and ML King The NY Times Strikes Out
Check out this “whitewashing” of Reagan. Let’s recall that he chose to begin his campaign for president in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where 3 civil rights workers were murdered; that he supported tax-exempt status for the racist Bob Jones University, that he characterized the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as “humiliating to the South”, and he noted that “Jefferson Davis is a hero of mine.”
Whatever his failings, Ronald Reagan was not a political panderer; to critics and supporters alike, he was perceived as being rooted in his beliefs.
Something else was at work. And it goes to the heart of why the King holiday has evolved into a powerful and positive American symbol. Party affiliation and politics — and, surely, background and race — separated the president from Dr. King. "Finding material for the remarks was easy," says Peter Robinson, the White House speechwriter who drafted the speech that the president delivered when he signed the King holiday into law. "The dignity of the individual, the equality of all men before God, the promise that America could set an example for the world — I kept finding passage after passage in King's work that Reagan might almost have written himself."
Indeed, when one looks closely at each man's writings, it's clear that they shared an unswerving commitment to democracy, liberty and equality. Having spent years studying and archiving the former president's letters and speeches, I have concluded that he overcame his reservations about the King bill by tapping into his personal experiences — and coming away with an understanding of the ways in which racism and bigotry violate the basic American values he and Dr. King worked to make real.
In his private writings, Ronald Reagan has always maintained that his earliest encounters and views on race were shaped by his parents' quiet activism. Mr. Reagan has told the story of how, one bitterly cold night, his father slept in his car to protest a hotel's policy of not admitting Jews. The president's father also refused to allow his sons to see the movie "Birth of a Nation," on the ground that it glorified the Ku Klux Klan.
Mr. Reagan has said that his first personal experience with racism against blacks occurred while he was on the football team at Eureka College. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/19/opinion/19SKIN.html
-R
The lead-up had Mara Liasson doing her usual selling for the Administration, referring to Bush’s “strong popularity” (vs declining poll numbers, down to his lowest point in his 3 years). The speech was thoroughly predictable, especially his leading off with the “War on Terror”, followed by “…tax relief you passed is working”; then, “going on” vs going back, turning back- “…we’ve not come all this way…only to falter and leave our work unfinished”. So, we should continue with him. After all, the environment isn’t totally destroyed, the deficit hasn’t yet reached 750 billion per, all taxes on income aren’t gone yet.
Favorite line: “[The] Kay Report identified dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities...”
What’s Happening, Iraq:
We’re losing the political fight to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. His followers are staging demonstrations of up to 100,000, insisting on elections. It is unlikely he will turn back, now that he has mobilized “the street”. The Administration has had to crawl back to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan for help in transferring power to an interim Iraqi government; Annan has leaned toward sending a UN mission, but the Administration’s desperate need to involve the UN may be, as Fareed Zakaria warned in her Washington Post article, “too little, too late.”
What does this man have that the United States doesn't?
Legitimacy. Sistani is regarded by Iraqi Shiites as the most learned cleric in the country. He is also seen as having been uncorrupted by Saddam Hussein's reign. "During the Iran-Iraq war, Sistani managed to demonstrate that he could be controlled neither by Saddam nor by his fellow ayatollahs in Iran, which has given him enormous credibility," says Yitzhak Nakash, the leading authority on Iraqi Shiites.
The United States fears that he will brand it as colonialist and the new transition government as a puppet regime. American officials know these few words could derail their plans. The occupation can survive an insurgency, but it cannot survive 10 countrywide protest marches with thousands chanting, "Colonialists go home!"
From the start, the Pentagon planners (or non-planners) believed the United States would have no legitimacy problems in Iraq. "We will be greeted as liberators," Vice President Cheney famously predicted. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30724-2004Jan20.html
Though Bush said in his speech that ‘we stand with the Iraqi people’, the crowds are chanting “yes to elections, no to occupation.”
The Shia, believed to number some 15 to 16 million out of a total Iraqi population of 25 million, fear the US and its local allies will seek to rob them of power by appointing members of a new assembly and government to which the US has pledged to hand over power on 1 July. http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=482907
Who is Paul Bremer? Danny Schechter cites Tom Hayden’s report from the World Social Forum in Mumbai, India, which provides a profile.
Paul Bremer is understood not only as point man for the U.S. government, but as managing director of Kissinger & Associates, which represents a secret list of U.S. multinational corporations with long-term stakes in the region. Bremer already has imposed a maximum flat tax of only 15 percent on corporate profits, privatized hundreds of Iraqi businesses and natural resources, and carried free market fundamentalism so far that he faces legal challenges to the U.S. authority based on the traditional international rules governing occupations. In addition, a Bremer order dictates that all non-governmental organizations in the "new Iraq" must be registered and provide detailed membership lists to the American authorities in Baghdad." http://64.224.42.246/weblog/dannylog.cfm]
What is the World Social Forum? From the NY Times (Saritha Rai)
Anti-globalization protesters jostled with opponents of war, and those fighting India's caste system performed street plays alongside groups opposing religious and sex discrimination. At the six-day annual World Social Forum here in India's financial capital, hundreds of groups raised their voices in protest, if not always in unison.
The agenda of the gathering, held for the first time outside Brazil, appeared to have shifted from its central focus on trade and the inequities of global capitalism, splintering into a long list of regional causes.
"I came here and went `Huh?' " said Ellen Lenox, an English teacher from Brasília. "The focus has changed from unfair global trade and the monopoly of big business toward antiwar, antidiscrimination causes."
As in the last three years, this year's World Social Forum is timed to run concurrently with the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, which is seen by critics and most of those in attendance here as a gathering of rich capitalists.
Amid the heat and dust of a vast derelict factory complex in suburban Goregaon usually reserved for home decor or auto expositions, thousands of people gathered from across India and abroad to make common cause, with the slogan "Another world is possible."
Members of the organizing committee in Bombay, also known as Mumbai, said about 80,000 people from more than 100 countries were taking part.
Prominent among the speakers in the first three days of the forum were José Bové, the French farmer who led the demolition of a half-built McDonald's outlet; the Iranian human rights activist and Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi; and the Indian novelist Arundhati Roy.
Coca-Cola and Pepsi were barred from the refreshment stands in favor of water and freshly squeezed sugar cane juice and lemonade. Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer were discarded in favor of Linux operating systems and Mozilla browsers.
Continuing with the theme of the previous three global gatherings, all held in Porto Alegre, Brazil, peace activists vehemently criticized President Bush's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But some new themes emerged.
Pratap Kumar complained that for Dalits, or untouchables, like him, who were on the lowest rung of India's caste system, diatribes against globalization ring hollow to people denied basic human rights.
"What does anti-liberalization mean when we don't have the basic freedom to drink water at the village well or send our children to the same school as those from the upper castes?" asked Mr. Kumar, from Vijayawada in the southeastern state of Andhra.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/20/international/asia/20FORU.html?pagewanted=print&position=http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/20/international/asia/20FORU.html?pagewanted=print&position=
Jobs
James K. Galbraith writes about the Administration’s “effort” re jobs: “Don't believe the Bush administration's hand-wringing over its pathetic record on employment. The president's backers want a stagnant job market -- it keeps the help from getting uppity.”
President Bush will use his State of the Union to claim that tax cuts have restored economic growth, and he may mention the stock market's rise last year. But the transcendent economic issue this election year isn't the growth rate. It isn't the stock market. It also isn't the budget deficit the tax cuts caused. And it isn't even the rate of unemployment. It's the number of people in this country who have decent work -- and the number who don't.
There are no new jobs. Total job growth in the Clinton years: 23 million. Total job losses so far in the Bush years: over 2 million. Total gains in the last six months, since the so-called recovery supposedly accelerated in the third quarter? Just 221,000. That's less than a single month's average under Clinton. And last month? One thousand new jobs. … (http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/01/19/no_jobs/print.html
Robert Reich on O’Neill and Bush.
Reich doesn’t hold back, bless him…
O'Neill is correct, America has lost many lives and paid a huge price to get rid of a terrible dictator who posed no direct danger to this nation. The world is better off without him, but at what price? We were directly and intentionally misled.
By coming forward, O'Neill shows once again that sometimes cabinet secretaries - especially former ones - have a higher patriotic duty to their country than blind allegiance to the president they serve
The central question his book raises isn't really the loyalty a cabinet officer owes a president. It's the loyalty a president and his inner circle owe to the country and to its democracy. If O'Neill is telling the truth - and we have no reason to doubt his veracity - there's serious doubt about the loyalty of this administration to America
http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-vprei163628454jan16,0,3580276.story
Tax The Rich! Another Governor tries to raise taxes on the Wealthy
I’ve cited my efforts working with Fairness in Taxes for Everyone (FITE) which focuses on the theft of the public’s riches by the “mega rich”. [See http://www.fairnessintaxes.org/pages/howthemegarich.html] Only a few states have thus far taken the politically risky, but desperately needed step of raising the taxes on those who previously have had a drastic lowering of their tax burden.
Now, Virginia’s Democratic Governor Mark Warner is attempting the step.
Since his election in 2001, Mr. Warner has cut a beleaguered figure in Richmond, struggling to close a $6 billion budget shortfall that drained money from nearly every state program and made ambitious programs all but unthinkable.
But he has taken the offensive this year, proposing an overhaul of the tax system that he says will cut taxes for 65 percent of Virginians while raising them for the rich, preserve the state's triple-A bond rating and close a projected $1.2 billion budget shortfall in the next two years.
His proposal comes at what seems an unpropitious time for raising taxes. Last fall, voters in Alabama overwhelmingly rejected a similar tax overhaul, while Californians overwhelmingly elected an anti-tax governor in October. In 2002, voters in Northern Virginia and in the Hampton Roads area rejected sales-tax increases intended to raise revenue for transportation projects.
He contends his plan makes the antiquated tax code fairer. It would cut taxes on food and eliminate them on cars and estates worth less than $10 million. The nearly flat income tax would rise for people earning more than $100,000 but fall for most others. He would increase the sales tax by a penny, to 5.5 cents, and raise cigarette taxes to 25 cents a pack, from 2.5 cents. He would close special deductions for the high-income elderly and certain corporations. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/20/national/20WARN.html
Health Care Trend: More Coverage = Less Coverage
So, the only way to spread health care is to lower the benefits provided. That’s American ingenuity. From the NY Times business pages (Milt Freudenheim)
With the number of uninsured Americans rising to new heights, some policy makers and influential health care experts are saying that the best way to give health coverage to more people is to give some people less.
Experiments in several states are establishing stripped-down packages of basic benefits intended to be affordable for employers and uninsured workers, including young, middle-class people who have dropped out of the health insurance pool. Some officials say that government health benefits could be extended to more people, too, if the benefit package were narrower. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/20/business/20care.html
Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill: Cabinet debates were exercises in "incestuous amplification."
From the Times (Edmund L. Andrews)
The comment is made in "The Price of Loyalty,'' a new book by Ron Suskind about Mr. O'Neill's tumultuous tenure before being fired in December 2002. Rather than encouraging policy debates, Mr. O'Neill contended that big decisions were made with almost no discussion and even less debate.
Mr. O'Neill has provoked a political firestorm with his contention that President Bush tilted toward war with Iraq almost as soon as he took office; the administration has vigorously denied that. But the former Treasury secretary described a similar pattern in Mr. Bush's push to cut taxes by at least $1.7 trillion over 10 years.
Mr. O'Neill was openly skeptical about the need for big tax cuts and expressed concern about frittering away what were then huge budget surpluses.
In hindsight, he may have been too sanguine about the economy's prospects in early 2001 and too dismissive of the value in cutting taxes as a way to soften the downturn. But Mr. O'Neill may also prove to have been prescient about other issues that are likely to have long-lasting significance. One was the idea of building "triggers'' into Mr. Bush's tax cuts, provisions that would prevent some of the cuts from becoming effective if budget surpluses evaporated. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/18/business/yourmoney/18view.html?pagewanted=print&position=
Reagan and ML King The NY Times Strikes Out
Check out this “whitewashing” of Reagan. Let’s recall that he chose to begin his campaign for president in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where 3 civil rights workers were murdered; that he supported tax-exempt status for the racist Bob Jones University, that he characterized the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as “humiliating to the South”, and he noted that “Jefferson Davis is a hero of mine.”
Whatever his failings, Ronald Reagan was not a political panderer; to critics and supporters alike, he was perceived as being rooted in his beliefs.
Something else was at work. And it goes to the heart of why the King holiday has evolved into a powerful and positive American symbol. Party affiliation and politics — and, surely, background and race — separated the president from Dr. King. "Finding material for the remarks was easy," says Peter Robinson, the White House speechwriter who drafted the speech that the president delivered when he signed the King holiday into law. "The dignity of the individual, the equality of all men before God, the promise that America could set an example for the world — I kept finding passage after passage in King's work that Reagan might almost have written himself."
Indeed, when one looks closely at each man's writings, it's clear that they shared an unswerving commitment to democracy, liberty and equality. Having spent years studying and archiving the former president's letters and speeches, I have concluded that he overcame his reservations about the King bill by tapping into his personal experiences — and coming away with an understanding of the ways in which racism and bigotry violate the basic American values he and Dr. King worked to make real.
In his private writings, Ronald Reagan has always maintained that his earliest encounters and views on race were shaped by his parents' quiet activism. Mr. Reagan has told the story of how, one bitterly cold night, his father slept in his car to protest a hotel's policy of not admitting Jews. The president's father also refused to allow his sons to see the movie "Birth of a Nation," on the ground that it glorified the Ku Klux Klan.
Mr. Reagan has said that his first personal experience with racism against blacks occurred while he was on the football team at Eureka College. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/19/opinion/19SKIN.html
-R
