ABSTRACT
Ironically, the alternative regime was implemented by someone hostile to the Trilateral Commission’s sense that “America’s best days are behind us,”1 President Ronald Reagan; and as of 2012, we still live in the Age of Reagan. Reagan dismissed the Trilateralists’ message as “doom and gloom.”2 Of all the possible solutions to the crisis of the time, Reagan may have chosen the worst one, the one most likely to yield a permanent majority of surplus US workers. Although an aggressive militarist, he tried to restore the domestic economic paradigm of the Roaring Twenties, the one that brought about the Great Depression. He undid the Keynesian New Deal and gave the 1 percent virtually a license to do whatever it wanted. He blamed all of America’s problems on what one of his heroes, Ayn Rand, called parasites3: parasites in the government who steal resources from the productive private sector, parasites within academia and the media who undermine the nation’s will, and parasites who choose to wallow on welfare rather than uplift themselves by their bootstraps.
