Obituary: Neo-con icon Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) On 5 June former United States President and movie star Ronald Reagan, 93, died of pneumonia at his home in Los Angeles. Paying homage to the 40th American president, whose tenure extended from 1981 to 1989, US President George W Bush ordered flags to be flown at half mast for 30 days at all government buildings. For the better part of the last decade Reagan battled Alzheimer's, a disease that destroys brain cells and ultimately causes total memory loss. Last month the ex- president's wife of 52 years, Nancy Reagan, revealed that the illness had finally taken its toll. "Ronnie's long journey has taken him to a distant place where I can no longer reach him," she said. True to form, heads of states and US politicians of all shades and persuasions scurried to pay tribute to the US president who was credited for having successfully schemed and manoeuvred to dismantle the Soviet Union. Former United Kingdom Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher eulogised her close friend and political ally as the man who "won the Cold War for liberty... without a shot being fired. To have achieved so much against so many odds and with such humour and humanity made Ronald Reagan a truly great American hero," said Thatcher. George W Bush rose to the occasion in a rare and dispassionate display of eloquence. "President Reagan leaves behind a nation he restored and a world he helped save. He won America's respect with his greatness. And won its love with his goodness," he said. Rhetoric and lyricism aside, George W Bush has good reasons to hail Reagan -- an ideological soul mate and mentor. Ronnie was indeed the pioneer who paved the way to the eventual neo-con take-over in Washington. It took his perfected brand of the "good ole-boy" all-American good looks, enhanced with the easy banter of a stand-up comedian, to roll back years of social gains for the sake of bank-rolling the coffers of corporate America. Thus Ronnie became "the great communicator", a talent Bush never acquired. Besides sharing a profit-over-people philosophy, the two men were sponsored by the same multinational: General Electric (GE), an enterprising defence contractor for the Pentagon, among other things, whose TV ad promises to "bring good things to life". While GE chose Reagan to host their theatre on NBC and launched him politically by sponsoring his inaugurational nationwide campaign tour, GE generously donated 70 per cent of their campaign contributions to candidate Bush and the Republicans. In Ronnie's case GE's pay-off entailed a gigantic military build-up, including "Star Wars", a visionary nuclear defence programme orbiting in outer space. When facing recalcitrant sceptics and hardcore anti-nukes of the "evil" communist kind, Ronnie argued about "winnable nuclear wars" and "recallable nuclear missiles". Reagan's creative version of nuclear warfare failed, however, to impress the Russians and he had to retract when the Soviets refused to sign the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty should the US proceed with Star Wars. But Ronnie was not fazed by losing one battle. Ever the eternal optimist, he went back to work -- fervently selling militarism coast to coast. Like Bush's current "war on terror", Reagan's simplistic defence of American democracy and freedoms against the "Evil Empire" sold like hot cakes in the 1980s. Coupled with huge tax breaks for the multinationals, Reagan got Congress to approve the largest military budget in US history, along with unprecedented budget deficits. But those only served to fuel the general Republican feeling of euphoria. The Republican Party reified Ronnie's fiscal policies and the Bush administration assiduously continues to provide welfare for the rich in the guise of staggering tax breaks. Meanwhile, the current generation of US tax-payers are still crushed by the weight of the Reagan debt. Critics dismissed Reagan's alleged "trickle down effect" from the rich to the poor as a model case of "voodoo economics". Reviewing 10 years of Reaganism in 1992 a congressional report estimated that hunger in America grew by 50 per cent between the mid-1980s and the end of the decade, afflicting some 30 million people. Distinguished linguist and writer Noam Chomsky quoted another report as saying that the number of hungry American children grew by 26 per cent "as aid to the poor shrank during the booming 1980s". This the "great communicator" duly blamed on lazy, mostly African-American, welfare mothers who let their own children starve. Meanwhile, Ronnie had directed the Department of Agriculture in 1981 to classify ketchup as a vegetable in order to eliminate real vegetables from school lunches for disadvantaged children. This, the Republicans lauded as a commendable attempt to balance the budget and cut 1.5 billion from the federal school lunch programme. In the wake of similar efforts, real wages plummeted and the poverty rate increased by 20 per cent by the end of the 1980s. "Ronald Reagan presided over the worst recession since the 1930s," commented political analyst Phil Gasper in Counterpunch. Facts and figures, however, never seemed to faze Ronnie. "Facts are stupid things," was one of his favourite mantras. By Faiza Rady
