On who/what informed the junk on our holiday wishlists
Reagan's deregulating opened up the floodgates for that too
By Chilltown Blues
Ads to buy things accompanied by Christmas music started a while ago, but tis the season in earnest now.
And it would not be unreasonable to say that Reagan’s administration helped ushered in this age of noise and junk. His broad deregulating in favor of a free market opened the floodgates for private monied interests to make everything that underlined the country’s social infrastructure more of a product, rather than something not inherently about profit that benefited a tiny few over the many.
Without those regulations in place, the definition of profit has changed to the point where for the shareholders of a company it should be somewhat exponential. If it can’t be, it should be reconfigured so the cycle can repeat — even if that’s not really sustainable.
But back when the sky was more of the limit in that regard, Reagan’s administration didn’t just disregard two national health crisis with the AIDs epidemic and the War On Drugs largely criminalizing poor addicts of color; it didn’t just deregulate federal environmental standards, including ones for noise; it also deregulated rules that were intended to limit advertising in programming intended primarily for children.
This last one may feel like the least of those by far, but it’s with all the others — let’s also add his administration’s large cuts in education spending — where it all adds to the same hydra.