Have you ever played the Six-Degrees of Kevin Bacon movie trivia game. The object is to spit out the name of an actor and attempt to connect them to Kevin Bacon within six degrees or less. For example, if the actor is Keanu Reeves, the degrees of familiarity would look like this: Keanu Reeves stars with Jack Nicholson in the film Something's Gotta Give > Jack Nicholson starred with Kevin Bacon in A Few Good Men.
It seems you can play this type of game with the current administration. Someone has ties to someone else stretching back decades. Today's new revelation, at least it was for me, was in regards to Rummy's early ties with Cheney. TomPaine published the article "Same Folks, Different Strokes," by Laura Flanders, author of the forthcoming book Bushwomen: Tales of a Cynical Species. In the article, she describes how Rummy and Cheney ended up working together and how they fought to rid the U.S. of it's government-funded projects to fight poverty (and other subversive elements, of course).
According to a 2001 New Yorker article, what impressed Rumsfeld most about the young Dick Cheney was the job he'd been doing for a group of congressman, including George H.W. Bush, who were developing legislation to cut off federal funding to troublesome universities. Cheney sat in on campus meetings and gathered information on faculty involvement in anti-war protests and their relationship to groups like Students for a Democratic Society. At OEO, Rumsfeld and Cheney embraced as their mission not to direct the office, but to discredit its programs and ultimately to dismantle the agency. From a federal funding service, they turned OEO into a tool of federal surveillance.
Federally funded community groups found themselves investigated for alleged misuse of public money and accused of subversive activities. By 1972, the OEO was near death (it was disbanded officially under President Ford) and government-funded community action had became one of the red-hot, hot-button undesirables of LBJ's Great Society. The legacy persists, echoing through every bitter debate over Congressional appropriations for grassroots projects from public broadcasting to the NEA.....
The continuum, however, is not so hard to make out. "Maximum feasible participation" has been anathema to the Bush crew from the start.
Forty years ago, the War on Poverty and its anti-poverty empowerment programs were the dreaded threat. Publicly endowed "community action" just might have empowered poor and marginalized Americans by giving them the means to organize and advocate for themselves.
The very same men who rolled that program back are now pursuing Washington's unchallenged dominance of the world. Same folks, different strokes; the 40th anniversary of the War on Poverty is a good time to consider the many ways in which today's wars for global supremacy began at home.
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