Dick Cheney’s been making the rounds promoting his new book called “Heart.”
I will refrain from the obvious irony of someone promoting a book about a thing he does not have. (ooops...my bad)
There was a great article on the Truth-Out website about this very thing that I hope you take a look at. http://www.truth-out.org/...
Not only is Cheney singing the praises of the right wing radicals of the Tea Party who hoped to prevent Americans from receiving the kind of health care Mr. Cheney was lucky enough to receive, his stories about his family’s struggles and reliance on New Deal safety nets proves even more ironic hypocrisy.
You would think that Mr. Cheney would support a government to offer the same opportunities afforded his own family. In his 2011 book In My Time, Cheney describes the struggles of his father. “After scraping by for so long, he found the prospect of a $120 monthly salary and the security of a government job too good to turn down” wrote Cheney about his father’s struggle with employment. A good, secure government job? I wonder if that good government job would have been shut down along with the rest of the government as the Tea Party held America hostage with their antics. I imagine Cheney’s father might have had to struggle to support his family, much like the close to 1 million government workers who were out of a job during the shutdown.
His father had the great fortune of working for the Soil Conservation Service, a federal agency created to assist farmers and try to prevent more of the tragedies endured during the dust storms of the Great Depression. It was a part of the New Deal that looked to protect American soil from the aggressive commercial farming which had stripped farmlands of their soil’s nutrients. It saw the land as a “most basic asset.” http://history.house.gov/...
Somehow, the passion that Papa Cheney had spending 30 years of his life protecting the land across this country somehow did not trickle down to his son. The Energy Act of 2005 was created under Dick Cheney’s Energy Task Force in secret meetings. http://www.morphcity.com/... It’s been a source of endless compromises to American interests, from electricity deregulation scams (thing ENRON), corporate welfare for energy producers ($7 BILLION per year http://www.theatlantic.com/... ), and what is known as the “Halliburton loophole” that has allowed fracking companies free reign to collect natural gas from shale formations, causing unbelievable damage to our “most basic asset.”
So, here’s the real kicker. As Mr. Cheney writes, “My dad stayed with the SCS for more than thirty years, doing work of which he was immensely proud. He was also proud of the pension that came with federal employment - a pride that I didn’t understand until as an adult I learned about the economic catastrophes that his parents and grandparents had experienced and that had shadowed his own youth.”
How wonderful that Father Cheney was able to rely on the PENSION that he earned from working for the government for over 30 years. Having lived through the “economic catastrophes” that they witnessed during the Great Depression, the reassurance that he would not face an uncertain retirement was a benefit that a young Dick Cheney directly benefitted from. Yet across the country, pensions have been under intense attack from Wall Street. http://www.rollingstone.com/...
As with health care, protecting the land of America, and providing pensions to working Americans, I guess they were good for a Cheney, yet somehow not good for the rest of Americans.