It's About Coalitions Not Purity, Part Seventeen

"Reagan's Last Years In Office"

Libya, a North African nation, was once part of the vast Ottoman (Turkish) Empire, and then a colony of Italy until after Mussolini's defeat in World War Two. Shortly thereafter it became a kingdom. In the late 1960s, Muammar Gaddafi,* the leader of a group of army officers, overthrew the government when the king was out of the country. Gaddafi established a dictatorship, with socialism as the economic base of the oil-rich country. Gaddafi militarized Libya and supported various anti-government, anti-Western groups in other countries, particularly, but not exclusively, in his own part of the world. In the spring of 1985, Gaddafi's agents bombed a nightclub in (then) West Berlin, killing and injuring a couple of hundred people, including a number of Americans. Intelligence from a number of sources, not just American, clearly linked the terrorist attack to Gaddafi. Reagan ordered air attacks against Libya not long thereafter. The American planes were given permission by Britain to operate from bases there, which then moved the British up on Gaddafi's hit (or hate) list, too. Gaddafi began to deal with the Soviet Union more and more. In December 1988, a Pan Am flight from London to New York exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all aboard the plane and causing further deaths on the ground. Evidence pieced together led investigators to believe the bombing was orchestrated by Gaddafi. The extensive investigation was ongoing when Reagan left office in January 1989. 

 During the mid 1980s, members of both political parties tried to work out a law to deal with the nation's problem with illegal immigration. The law basically made it illegal for employers to "knowingly" hire people who were in the country without documentation. This was an attempt to restrict employment, primarily, but not exclusively, by agricultural firms, in hiring undocumented workers, which the theory went, then only encouraged more illegal immigration. These workers typically made far less than the average American worker and provided a cheap labor source. The idea was, curtail hiring of illegals, and this would then discourage other potential illegal immigrants from trying to enter the country. Many American business people, led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, opposed the bill, not just because of the cheap labor sources it provided to some businesses, but because the law would involve them in checking worker documentation. Latino-American groups opposed the bill because they feared hiring discrimination against LEGAL immigrants, or even Latino-American citizens, simply because of their appearances, and the desire by employers to avoid any possibility of hiring illegal immigrants. In an effort to please both business people and the Latino-American community, the law provided for undocumented workers to become legal under certain circumstances.** With many of the grievances addressed for both business and Latino-Americans, a successful coalition had been formed to advance the legislation, and the bill passed and was signed into law by President Reagan.

By 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev took power in the Soviet Union. Gorbachev sought to modernize and to liberalize Soviet society by granting a degree of freedom of speech and freedom of the press, plus by releasing a number of political prisoners from Soviet custody. Gorbachev himself criticized corruption in the Soviet system. He also desired a lowering of tensions in the Cold War and met with President Reagan, with whom he signed an agreement about limiting nuclear weapons.***

Next.... "Assessment of Reagan"

* Until more recent times in English, it was more typically spelled "Qaddafi," the "q" being pronounced like a "k."

** The law granted legal status (amnesty) to certain "seasonal workers" (almost by definition, agricultural workers) who had worked at least 90 days in the U.S. by May 1986 and to illegal immigrants who had continuously lived in the U.S. prior to 1982. These provisions granted amnesty to about three million previously illegal immigrants.

*** Earlier in his administration, Reagan had proposed an elaborate space defense system against attack, dubbed "Star Wars" in the media. The plan created much debate as to its possibilities, but its major stumbling block was the estimated cost at a time when Reagan had already proposed large defense budget increases and the country was running huge budget deficits. A further problem was the time needed to develop the technology for such a system, which involved a system of space deployed lasers to destroy incoming enemy missiles (usually in those times thought of as "Soviet"). 

WORD HISTORY:
Broth-This word traces back to Indo European "bhreuwhe," which had the notion of "to boil;" thus also, "to bubble, to seethe, to cook." This gave its Old Germanic offspring "breuwanan," which meant "to brew" (indeed, the ancestor of "brew"), which then also produced a noun "breuthan," meaning "broth;" that is, "liquid produced after cooking/boiling something in it." This then gave Old English (Anglo-Saxon) "broth." Since this word is derived from the same source as "brew," its other Germanic relatives have retained the forms generally closer to that, like German "Brühe" (broth), although German also has the derived verb "brodeln," which means "to boil," along with the figurative "seethe with anger." Low German Saxon has "Bröh" (broth). Latin borrowed a form of the word from Germanic, which then gave Italian, for instance, "brodo," their word for "broth."