Alas, like New Orleans’ redevelopment disaster, W’s pledge to revamp military healthcare has become equally scandalous. Almost one year to the day after Dubya commissioned a report on military healthcare, Veterans for America, a veterans advocacy group, delivered a report recently to the New York Times, entitled: “Fort Drum: A Great Burden, Inadequate Assistance.”
“The system is very much overburdened,” said Jason W. Forrester, director of policy for Veterans for America. “These problems are going to continue as long as we have units, such as the Second Brigade Combat Team, that have seen high-intensity combat, extended deployments and inadequate time between deployments.” NYTimes and other reports remind us that W has once again dropped the ball.
Child Custody Lost
On top of decrepit healthcare, returning soldiers often lose their families while ‘over there.’ Military family advocates say a growing number of soldiers are losing custody of their children, not because they're bad parents but because of extended missions in Iraq. Like many other soldiers, when reservist Tanya Towne was stop-lost to extended missions, her family broke up and she lost custody of her son.
Only last month W signed a bill to help protect service members and their families. Though legal experts say some military moms and dads, absent for so long, still lose custody of their kids, (NPR).
Debt Collectors Take Aim at Soldiers
To add insult to injury, while on stop loss, many soldiers have to deal with the bill collectors knocking on the door at home—as the NYTimes reports.
Sgt. John J. Savage III, an Army reservist, was about to climb into a troop transport plane for a flight to Iraq from Fayetteville, N.C., when his wife called with shocking news: "They're foreclosing on our house." Savage boarded a plan returning to combat, brooding all the time about losing his house and wondering where his wife would sleep the next night.
Although a longstanding federal law strictly limits the ability of a soldier’s lenders to foreclose, they do so often and aggressively. Court records and reports from military and civilian lawyers tell how soldiers often face demoralizing demands from financial companies collecting on bills.
Some cases involve prominent corporations like Wells Fargo and Citigroup; though they claim to comply with the law, they are also strapped for cash and need to collect. After six years of an unbridled, unregulated, ‘free market’ mortgage boom that helped to prop up Bush’s war time economy, a plague of foreclosures are busting the banks.
• At Fort Hood, Texas, a soldier's wife was sued by a creditor trying to collect a debt owed by her and her soldier husband fighting in Baghdad at the time. A local judge ruled against her, saying she had defaulted, despite laws protecting soldiers.
• At Camp Pendleton, California, more than a dozen marines returned from Iraq to find their cars and other property sold to cover unpaid storage and towing fees.
• In northern Ohio, Wells Fargo served a young Army couple with foreclosure.
The Big Picture—Theocon Ideology
At least Dubya and his theocon buddies are consistent in their disasters. In 1992 the theocon cabal, which includes John McCain, had written the Defense Plan Guidance document when planning to invade Iraq and seize its 115 billion barrels of oil reserves, second only to that of Saudi Arabia. The document promotes American global imperialism and outlines a policy of unilateralism and pre-emptive military action. It clearly states the theocon strategy in seizing control of oil: "In the Middle East and Southwest Asia, our overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in the region and preserve U.S. and Western access to the region's oil."
Whatever happened to Yankee ingenuity? Can’t we develop renewable energy rather than wage war for toxic oil? When Jimmy Carter advocated this approach in the 70’s, he was voted out of office. That was during one of many oil-price induced recessions.
As of the Reagan years, the theocons have followed the thought leaders like Norman Podhoretz a right-wing fundamentalist theocrat and Milton Friedman a free-market, corporatist economist, and others.
The young well-intended soldiers now fighting involuntarily in extended Stop Loss missions are mere pawns in a grander ideological project about which they are clueless. Most soldiers enlist to serve their country with noble, patriotic values. Meanwhile the theocons exploit these traditional ideals by transforming the military into a security service to the status quo petroleum corporations, huge campaign contributors…not to mention the contractors who profit from rebuilding Iraq after being bombed.
The Defense Plan Guidance report leaked out into public domain. Authored by theocons Scotter Libby (since then a convicted felon) and Paul Wolfowitz (‘retired’ from W’s Admin and then fired from the World Bank), the report is only a smaller artifact of a much grander project, namely: The Project of a New American Century—a.k.a. NPAC, a neoconservative think tank whose stated goal is to promote America’s dominance globally and to support "a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity."
What “Reganite military strength” means here is the traditional industrial-military complex that Eisenhower warned us against as our own Achilles heel. Bush calls for a conventional warfare—one based on big profits for defense contractor corporations—to fight non-conventional terrorists. In doing so Dubya follows the theocon ideological approach to global dominance and radical corporatist economics per Milton Friedman’s failed theories.
As for Reagan’s ‘moral clarity,’ this refers to the likes of fundamentalist Christians, Falwell, Podhoretz, Dobson, Pat Robertson… The policy laid out from this radical ideology greatly resembles that of right-wing, fundamentalist theocratic regimes. The destabilizing of the Middle East plays into their psychedelic ‘rapture’ vision of the second coming of Christ…something they learned from rubbish novels about being Left Behind.
The Wahhabist regime in Saudi Arabia provides one vivid and real political system similar to the one NPAC promotes. A religious doctrine reigns over every aspect of society—the military, judicial, educational, and economic systems. The members of this theocratic conservative political movement also call for a return to the old, ‘pure values’ of the original prophets. This includes teaching non-scientific accounts of the origin of the world as well as intolerance of homosexuality, birth-control... It’s a map to return to a Dark Ages where corporatists profit and religious nuts reign.
With a long list of other theocon buddies, including John McCain, Dubya adheres to this program as religious movement. It also includes ‘Milty’s’ economic policies of a purely unbridled, free market where corporations are uncontrolled, unregulated. During W’s watch we witness results of this policy now in the current mortgage and credit fiascos…not to mention the gun-slinging corporate militia in Iraq…
Driven by high profits, banks sold mortgages to anyone with a pulse, luring them in on teaser interest rates, starting them off low and then ‘ballooning’ them into foreclosures. Likewise, the highly profitable, yet socially irresponsible operations in the petroleum industry, or in the military industry—Halliburton, Blackwater, DynCorp…—defense contractors earn reputations for atrocious business practices...not to mention lawless slaughter of innocent civilians.
The theocons preach and practice their new world order. We see the results in places like…Iraq, Afghanistan, New Orleans, in the military healthcare...
Over and over again, W’s close adherence to the theocon ideology favors big contracts with corporations…such as the theocon owned and managed Blackwater, Carlyle Group, CACI… This list of corporations goes on and on. Meanwhile in areas where regular citizens are concerned, wounded war veterans, Dubya’s Admin drops the ball.
The theocons’ new world order supports an elite corporate-owner class in a so-called free market…anyone outside this bubble of the super-rich is left to pull himself up by his own combat boot straps. The poor are disposable pawns—‘troops’—in this Christian corporatist crusade.
No comments:
Post a Comment