Ronald Reagan laid to rest : Melbourne Indymedia

Hundreds of close friends and family paid a final farewell to Reagan, whose passing at age 93 stirred an outpouring of emotion from a nation nostalgic for his warmth, charm and optimism.

At the burial ceremony at the Reagan Presidential Library, a lone bagpiper played Amazing Grace, US Navy jets flew overhead in what is called a ''Missing Man Formation'' and an honour guard presented widow Nancy Reagan with the flag that had draped his coffin for his last journey home.

She dabbed her eyes, hugged the flag to her chest and then walked to the coffin, placed her cheek on the polished wood and began to weep as her children Ron and Patti comforted her.

The frail 82-year-old widow placed a single kiss on the coffin and reluctantly allowed herself to be led away so that the burial service could be concluded.

In contrast to the formal, state funeral service held earlier in the day in Washington, DC, where Bush told an assembly of world leaders that ''a great American story'' had ended, Reagan's burial was a family affair attended by some 700 close friends, many of them people the late president had known since his days as a Hollywood actor.

In short but moving speeches, his three surviving children spoke lovingly of the man they knew as a father rather than a world leader and celebrated his humour and odd habits like pulling a stranger's earlobe.

''He is home now. He is free. In his final letter to the American people, Dad wrote, 'I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life'. This evening he has arrived,'' his youngest son Ronald Prescott Reagan said, briefly touching his father's flag-draped coffin.

''History will record his worth as a leader. We here have long since measured his worth as a man,'' he added.

Michael Reagan, the son he adopted during his first marriage to actress Jane Wyman, told the crowd his father once gave him marital advice: '''You'll never get in trouble if you tell her I love you once a day.' I am sure that he told that to Nancy.''

Daughter Patti Davis told how her father, when she was a young girl, gave such a touching burial service for a pet goldfish that she offered to kill all the other fish in the tank and he had to spend a lot of time dissuading her.

The ceremony concluded with the playing of Taps and a flyover by US Navy jets.

Among those in attendance at the burial service were Margaret Thatcher, Reagan's political soul-mate, as well as ex-US Secretary of State George Shultz and such celebrities as Nancy Sinatra, Tom Selleck, Merv Griffin, Bo Derek and Larry King.

Also there was another actor inspired to go into politics by Reagan's example - California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Selleck, who worked with Nancy Reagan on her ''Just Say No'' anti-drug campaign, said the national wave of emotion of the past week ''would mean a lot to him. ... I think he would be touched in his own self-effacing way''.

CNN's Larry King, a personal friend although at odds with Reagan politically, said ''He didn't hate. I think one of the reasons people are acting this way this week is they miss that.''

In a touch typical of California, many at the burial service wore sunglasses. And many sobbed.

In the week since Reagan died more than 150,000 people, in Simi Valley and in Washington, DC, have filed passed his flag-covered casket as his body lay in state.

As the casket carried Reagan home to southern California for the final time this afternoon, throngs of people lined the streets to catch a glimpse of the motorcade, some waving flags or dabbing tears from their eyes.

Our 13 years of unbroken economic growth have a direct link to this great US president, writes Gregory Hywood.

Ronald Reagan, never understood in this country much beyond his caricature as a simple-minded former B-grade Hollywood actor, was the inspiration behind the modern Australian economy.

Our 13 years of unbroken economic growth have a direct link to Reagan's decision nearly 25 years ago to cut the highest marginal tax rate in the US from 70 per cent to 29 per cent.

That Reagan-inspired bill of August 1981 resulted in all US federal taxes being cut by a quarter and indexed to inflation. Although watered down somewhat in 1986, these tax changes caused nothing less than an economic revolution.

As the world's powerhouse economy, the US changed the rules for all other Western countries. They either had to cut taxes or fail to compete in the emerging global economy.

In Australia two years later, the Hawke government understood the power of the new economics and climbed on board. But it was America under Reagan's revolutionary leadership that provided the model, the context and the impetus.

It was not all plain sailing. For confronting convention, Reagan was characterised as madly ideological, simplistic, even dangerous.

And the unwillingness of a Democrat-controlled Congress to cut spending in parallel with the tax cuts, together with Reagan's determination to confront the Soviet Union with a defence spending onslaught, resulted in an explosion of the US budget deficit - a blight on an otherwise extraordinary legacy.

But Reagan was one of the genuine change agents of the 20th century. A conventional president, fearful of the fiscal consequences, would have retreated in the face of congressional recalcitrance. He would have watered down his tax cuts and tempered his defence spending as part of the normal compromise of politics.

But not Reagan. Driven by his belief in the vulnerability of the Soviet Union and emboldened by the emerging theory of supply-side economics that placed personal incentive ahead of Keynesian demand management, he pressed on.

He laid the political responsibility for the deficit at the feet of Congress and ushered in a global tidal wave of tax reform and deregulation. He decisively broke with the muddle-through, inflation-infected politics of the 1970s and the rampant tax-and-spend interventionism of the 1960s.

Reagan was an extraordinary political package. He was a radical. But endlessly pleasant, optimistic and blessed with astonishing skill on the hustings, he emerged from the brunt of liberal Democrat jokes to become a defining US president.

Cass Sunstein, of the University of Chicago, places Reagan as second only to Franklin D. Roosevelt among America's greatest presidents of the 20th century. Why? Because where other presidents merely managed crises, Reagan changed the ideological landscape.

"What was then in the centre is now on the left, what was then in the far right is now in the centre, what was then on the left no longer exists," Sunstein wrote last year.

Nowhere was this more evident than in economic policy.

The Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Carter administrations had left a legacy of loose monetary and fiscal policies and a commitment to regulation that led to high taxes, inflation and the collapse of the productivity growth that was the heart of the postwar economic boom. This was the era of wage and price controls, retaliatory protectionism, expanding government regulation, massive public works programs and national development banks.

It was not until Reagan became president that the dominance of Keynesian economics in the US ended.

"Reaganomics", as it became known, is popularly remembered by the claims of the more extreme supply-siders - Arthur Laffer, Jude Wanniski - that the power of personal incentive was so great that revenue would rise as taxes were cut. But the Reagan economic team was actually dominated by a broadly based group of fiscal and monetary conservatives determined to redirect the trajectory of US policy in a more conventional manner.

The present Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan, and high-profile academic economists Murray Weinbaum, Martin Feldstein and Michael Boskin, were all key players. They were generally contemptuous of the Laffer-Wanniski set.

"These extreme supply-siders conjured up a most implausible scenario and raised expectations to a level that could not possibly be met," Boskin wrote in his definitive book, Reagan and The Economy.

Reaganomics as practised by Greenspan, Boskin and others was based on disinflation, control of federal spending, reduction of marginal tax rates, steady monetary policy and deregulation.

The main aim was to restore productivity growth. This was achieved - in spades - and transformed not just the American but the global economy.

Lifting labour productivity growth in the advanced economies from less than 1 per cent a year in the 1970s to 2.5 to 3 per cent a year by the 1990s was the basis of the rapid, non-inflationary growth that has driven the global economy and equity markets so hard over the past two decades.

Critics of Reaganomics point to the legacy of US budget deficits that his reshaping of the tax/spend mix exacerbated. But there is no denying that history has shown Reagan's small government ethos was essentially correct.

He saw an economy that was dysfunctional and, with great determination, executed a radical change in the face of intense institutional and ideological opposition.

It was a rare example of leadership and Americans - and we in Australia - should be thankful he prevailed.

Remembering Reagan

firing of the air traffic controllers
"winnable nuclear war"
recallable nuclear missiles
"trees cause pollution"
Elliott Abrams lying to Congress
"ketchup is a vegetable"
colluding with Guatemalan thugs
pardons for F.B.I. lawbreakers
voodoo economics
trillion dollar budget deficits
toasts to Ferdinand Marcos
public housing cutbacks
redbaiting the nuclear freeze movement
James Watt
getting cozy with Argentine fascist generals
long live Horatio Alger!
tax credits for segregated schools
disinformation campaigns
the new homeless population
"homeless by choice"
Manuel Noriega
falling wages
the HUD scandal
air raids on Libya
"constructive engagement" with apartheid South Africa
United States Information Agency blacklists of liberal speakers
attacks on OSHA and rights of the worker
the invasion of Grenada
assassination manuals
SOA South American deathsquad training camps
Nancy's astrologer
Drug tests
lie detector tests
crack introduced to America
Fawn Hall
female appointees (8 percent)
mining harbors
the S&L scandal
239 dead U.S. troops in Beirut
Al Haig "in control"
silence on AIDS
food-stamp reductions
Debategate
White House shredding
Jonas Savimbi
tax cuts for the rich
"mistakes were made"
Michael Deaver's conviction for influence peddling
Lyn Nofziger's conviction for influence peddling
Caspar Weinberger's five-count indictment
Ed Meese ("You don't have many suspects who are innocent of a crime")
Donald Regan (women don't "understand throw-weights")
education cuts
massacres in El Salvador
"The bombing begins in five minutes"
$640 Pentagon toilet seats
African- American judicial appointees (1.9 percent)
Reader's Digest
C.I.A.-sponsored car-bombing in Lebanon (more than eighty civilians killed)
200 officials accused of wrongdoing
William Casey
Iran/contra
supporting Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons
"Facts are stupid things"
three-by-five cards
the MX missile
Bitburg
S.D.I.
Robert Bork
naps
Teflon
Hollywood Govertainment

Report on Reagan protest Current rating: 5
by Luke
(No verified email address) 11 Jun 2004
Modified: 07:08:52 PM
There were two separate protests today of the Reagan media event funeral. Some say "why protest a funeral?" Well, this thing is as much a Bu$h campaign rally as it is a funeral, and in addition all too many of Reagan's victims are still buried in unmarked mass graves in Central America. We shall not forget that!
Both groups that announced plans for protests deployed sucessfully. I was with the DAWN contingenty that assembled at Q st. With signs such as "It's Fascism in America again" and "Reagan: The Godfather of the Death Squads," we marched up the route almost all the way to the cathedral.

When we got there,we saw to it that our signs could be read from the motorcade to make sure all those Congressmen in it understood that not all Americans look back so fondly on the Reagan era.

Afterwards we gave out a tone of press interviews focussing on the horrors that Reagan visited on Central America, the econony, corporate fascism, and how Reagan set the stage for Bush and the war. When asked about mourning the dead, I replied "when are we going to mourn the quarter million people Reagn killed in Central America.

The second group deployed right from the start up at the Cathedral, and got some police harassment according to reports that reached us during the approach march. It was reported that cops were frisking them, but that abuse evidently had ended by teh time we arrived.