Carter played a significant role in dismantling New Deal legislation with the deregulation of major industries including airlines, banking, trucking, telecommunications, natural gas and railways. He appointed Paul Volcker to the Federal Reserve, who, in an effort to combat inflation, drove up interest rates and pushed the U.S. into the deepest recession since the Great Depression, a move that saw the start of punishing austerity cuts. Carter is the godfather of the pillage known as neoliberalism, a pillage fellow Democrat Bill Clinton would turbo charge.
Carter fell under the disastrous influence of his Svengali-like national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Polish exile, who rejected the Nixon-Kissinger reliance on détente with the Soviet Union. Brzezinski’s life’s mission, one that meant he saw the world in black and white, was to confront and destroy the Soviet Union along with any government or movement he deemed to be under communist influence or sympathetic to it.
Carter, under Brzezinski’s influence, walked away from the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks treaty (SALT II) with the Soviet Union, which sought to curb nuclear weapons deployment. He increased military spending. He sent military aid to the Indonesian New Order government during the Indonesian invasion and occupation of East Timor, which many have characterized as a genocide. He supported, along with the apartheid state of South Africa, the murderous counter revolutionary group, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), led by Jonas Savimbi. He provided aid to the brutal Zairian dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. He supported the Khmer Rouge.
He instructed the Central Intelligence Agency to back opposition groups and political parties to bring down the Sandinista government in Nicaragua once it took power in 1979, leading under the Reagan administration to the formation of the Contras and a bloody and senseless U.S.-backed insurgency. He provided military aid to the dictatorship in El Salvador, ignoring an appeal from Archbishop Oscar Romero — later assassinated — to cease U.S. arms shipments.
He poisoned U.S. relations with Iran by backing the repressive regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi until the last minute and then allowing the deposed Shah to seek medical treatment in New York, triggering the occupation of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and a 444-day hostage crisis. Carter’s belligerence — he froze Iranian assets, stopped importing oil from Iran and expelled 183 Iranian diplomats from the U.S. — played into Ayatollah Khomeini’s demonization of the U.S. and calls for Islamic rule. He obliterated the credibility of Iran’s secular opposition.
Carter gave Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, although he ruled under martial law, billions in military aid. He armed the Mujahideen in Afghanistan after the Soviet intervention in 1979, a decision that cost the U.S. $3 billion, saw the deaths of 1.5 million Afghans and led to the creation of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The blowback from this Carter policy alone is catastrophic.
He backed the South Korean military in 1980 when it laid siege to the city of Gwangju, where protestors had formed a militia, which led to the massacre of some 2,000 people.
Finally, he sold out the Palestinians when he negotiated a separate peace deal, known as the Camp David Accords
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