Must read: Chris Floyd: Global Eye

"Reagan officially launched his successful 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia -- not the Quaker "city of brotherly love" in Pennsylvania, but a small town in the piney swamps of Mississippi, where three young civil rights workers had been brutally murdered by local officials in 1964 for the heinous crime of registering black people to vote. This was the famous "Mississippi Burning" case, a stark symbol of the era of violent race-hatred and government-sanctioned oppression. The decades-long struggle to bring full constitutional liberty into this system was fiercely resisted under the rubric of "states' rights" -- a codeword for the preservation of white privilege and black subjugation. Every Southerner raised in that system (including your correspondent) understood this secret language.
To win in the South -- and counterbalance the heavy black vote for Democrats elsewhere -- Republican elitists adopted this ugly, divisive code. Their deliberate stirring of base emotions was also aimed at preventing working-class whites from making common cause with blacks and other minorities against the elite's systematic destruction of Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal" social contract, which had placed a few mild restraints on the worst excesses of corporate greed.
Reagan, a long-time shill for corporate sugar-daddies, was a master at playing the race-card game on their behalf. Of course, he couldn't actually come out and say, "We're gonna put these darkies back in their place." But he didn't have to. Instead, he chose to stage the symbolic kick-off of his campaign in the symbolic city of Philadelphia, where -- to make his intent unmistakably clear -- he declared in the symbolic language of race hatred: "I believe in states' rights." This was a great communication indeed: Reagan carried every Southern state but one -- against a Southerner, the tepid New Dealer Jimmy Carter.
Once in power, Reagan slashed civil rights protections and supported the use of public money for private "religious" colleges that discriminated against blacks. He decimated housing, health, education and economic development programs for the poor. He helped flood the nation's ghettos with cheap cocaine through his criminal Iran-Contra scam, where the CIA countenanced -- and sometimes facilitated -- drug running by the Central American ganglords that Reagan employed to funnel illegal arms to his terrorist Contra army in Nicaragua -- as the CIA itself admitted in 1998, Consortiumnews.com reports.
Reagan then championed draconian drug laws and "mandatory sentencing" rules that transformed the American justice system into a vast gulag-state that imprisons more people than any nation on earth. When Reagan took office, there were approximately 300,000 people in prison; when he left, the figure was 800,000. Now, under his ideological soulmate, George W. Bush, the number has topped 2 million, Reuters reports. Incredibly, one in every 75 American men is now incarcerated; 68 percent of these are racial minorities."