By Walter Brasch
A few million Americans may be thinking about it, but won’t be
celebrating Memorial Day. For them, there’s not much to celebrate or to
remember.
They’re the low-wage employees who may have to work all three days,
without overtime; about three million workers earn the federal minimum
wage of $7.25 an hour. Many work 30 to 35 hours a week, just low enough
that their employers don’t have to pay for insurance, holidays, or sick
leave. The corporate CEOs, of course, will be enjoying the long weekend
at their alternate vacation homes in the mountains, or along the coasts,
or at off-shore islands where they have found banks willing to hide
their money and avoid U.S. taxes.
Almost 600,000 persons are homeless on any given night. They are
homeless for any number of reasons, but whatever reason, the reality is
they are homeless—and the wealthiest nation in the world cheers $10
million a year pro athletes, but discounts social workers who have
graduate degrees and are paid an average of about $46,000 a year.
The homeless live beneath bridges, in subway tunnels, on the streets,
or if the shelters aren’t filled, in protected areas with cots for
beds, and grocery carts for what few possessions they have. In Atlantic
City, the homeless live beneath the boardwalk, unseen by hundreds of
thousands who go into casinos, buy expensive dinners, and think nothing
of dropping a few hundred or a few thousand dollars at gaming tables and
slot machines. In urban cities, those with jobs and families walk by
the homeless, as if they are invisible, sometimes erroneously thinking
that even if the homeless get a dollar or two, they’d rush off to buy
beer, liquor, or more drugs.
About 50,000 of the homeless on any given night are veterans,
according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Overall,
more than 150,000 veterans are homeless during the year. The reasons for
veterans being homeless are because of “extreme shortage of affordable
housing, livable income and access to health care . . . lingering
effects of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and substance abuse,
which are compounded by a lack of family and social support networks,”
according to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans. Under the
Obama administration, which has focused upon assisting veterans, the
number of homeless veterans on any given night has come down from about
80,000 six years ago, but even a few dozen homeless veterans are far too
many.
Hundreds of thousands of veterans won’t be able to march in Memorial
Day parades, or stand and salute the flag. They don’t have limbs, their
muscles have atrophied because of extensive bed confinement, or they
have other debilitating illnesses. About 2.2 million American veterans
were injured during their service; about 1.7 million of them were
wounded in combat, according to a Pew Research Center summary and
analysis. About 200,000 military personnel who served in the Iraq and
Afghanistan wars suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder of have
major depression, according to a study done by the Rand Corp. About
285,000 of the veterans of America’s most recent wars have suffered from
traumatic brain injury. Among other injuries, according to the VA are
chronic fatigue syndrome, depression, fibromyalgia, hearing
difficulties, hepatitis, malaria, memory loss, migraines, sleep
disorders and tuberculosis.
More than 120,000 Americans won’t celebrate Memorial Day; they died
in combat during the Korean, Vietnam, Persian Gulf, and Iraq/Afghanistan
wars.
During this three-day weekend, Americans will grill steaks, burgers, and
hot dogs; they will travel to relatives’ or friends’ houses, or take
mini-vacations. The nation’s politicians—from small town council members
to presidential candidates—will go from picnic to picnic, from rally to
rally, and deliver poignant speeches about how much they care about the
veterans who were injured or died for their country, and how much
veterans mean to the country, while delivering the underlying message to
vote for them in the coming election.
But, it is these politicians who, without hesitation, will quickly
send American youth into war, and claim that killing people a half-world
away somehow protects American citizens. And once Americans are in
combat, these same politicians will complain about the cost of war, and
vote against providing adequate funds for decent medical and
psychological treatment for those who come home damaged.
Dr. Brasch, an award-winning journalist and the author of 20
books, is co-founder of the Northeast Pennsylvania Coalition for the
Homeless. His latest book is Fracking America: Sacrificing Health and
the Environment for Short-Term Economic Benefit.
Showing posts with label Veterans. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Veterans. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 31, 2016
Sunday, May 29, 2016
Happy Memorial Day? 5 Times Republicans In Congress Screwed Veterans
By James Woods
This weekend, Americans will celebrate Memorial Day, and politicians will pay lip service to U.S. military veterans. It’s important to note that Memorial Day was originally started by freed black slaves in Charleston, South Carolina, who reburied Union war veterans killed in the Civil War, holding a special ceremony thanking them for their service. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed an official declaration of Memorial Day as a national holiday in 1966.
However, in recent years, Memorial Day has become the ONLY form of gratitude that our veterans can count on as the GOP has spent the last decade chipping away at the benefits and support afforded to our veterans when they return from deployment, while paying lip service to their struggles and heroism.
So this weekend, as members of the GOP stand behind podiums giving speeches in their home districts about the need for more funding to pay military contractors and to give missiles to Israel as part of their plan to continue the growth of “American exceptionalism,” please remember these instances of “gratitude” the GOP showed to our veterans by placing partisan politics above caring for our veterans.
The author of the bill, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), took to the floor of the Senate and made the following statement:
While arguing over the proposed amendments, other Republicans took to
the floor to raise concerns over the cost of the bill, and it was
ultimately defeated with 41 of 45 Senate Republicans voting against the
bill.
Ultimately, Senate Republicans blocked the bill because it was unpaid for…while simultaneously proposing a bill to increase military spending with no way to pay for it.
“We Republicans remain resolute in our commitment to deny the Democrats anything that looks like an accomplishment in an election year,” said Republican leader Mitch McConnell.
However, the bill was promptly killed as Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell, on behalf of Senator Tom Coburn, objected based on the cost of the program.
“If we don’t start paying for new programs and continue on our path to bankruptcy we’ll have a homelessness problem beyond imagination,” Coburn spokesman John Hart told HuffPost. “The old Washington excuse that it’s too hard to cut spending is undermining our troops, our veterans and our future.”
This weekend, Americans will celebrate Memorial Day, and politicians will pay lip service to U.S. military veterans. It’s important to note that Memorial Day was originally started by freed black slaves in Charleston, South Carolina, who reburied Union war veterans killed in the Civil War, holding a special ceremony thanking them for their service. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed an official declaration of Memorial Day as a national holiday in 1966.
However, in recent years, Memorial Day has become the ONLY form of gratitude that our veterans can count on as the GOP has spent the last decade chipping away at the benefits and support afforded to our veterans when they return from deployment, while paying lip service to their struggles and heroism.
So this weekend, as members of the GOP stand behind podiums giving speeches in their home districts about the need for more funding to pay military contractors and to give missiles to Israel as part of their plan to continue the growth of “American exceptionalism,” please remember these instances of “gratitude” the GOP showed to our veterans by placing partisan politics above caring for our veterans.
1. Veterans Affairs Funding Bill (2015)
The House Appropriations Subcommittee, met with VA Secretary Bob McDonald to remove more than $1.4 billion in veteran services from President Obama’s proposed 2016 budget. Included in those cuts was more than $690 million earmarked for direct VA medical care and $582 million in VA construction projects. As a result of the cuts, it was estimated that 70,000 fewer veterans would be able to receive needed care.2. Women Veterans and Families Health Services Act (2014)
This bipartisan bill would have provided fertility treatment and counseling for severely wounded veterans and their spouses. However, the bill was killed before making it out of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee after Republicans proposed an amendment to prevent any involvement with Planned Parenthood.The author of the bill, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), took to the floor of the Senate and made the following statement:
“Don’t take something that should be above politics, our sacred duty to our veterans, pull it down into the muck of petty politics. It is not fair to veterans and their families who have been hoping and praying for the opportunity to have children.”
3. Veterans Health and Benefits and Military Retirement Pay Restoration Act (2014)
This bill, proposed by Senator Bernie Sanders, was a piece of sweeping legislation that would have expanded healthcare and education for veterans. After clearing a procedural vote by a 99-0 margin, the bill was hijacked by Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans who attached an amendment to the bill which would have levied sanctions on Iran.4. Veterans Jobs Corps Act (2012)
Originally submitted by democratic Representative Bruce Braley of Iowa, this bill would have established the Veteran’s Jobs Corps to provide gainful employment to more than 20,000 veterans through public works projects in their own communities at a cost of $1 billion over 5 years.Ultimately, Senate Republicans blocked the bill because it was unpaid for…while simultaneously proposing a bill to increase military spending with no way to pay for it.
“We Republicans remain resolute in our commitment to deny the Democrats anything that looks like an accomplishment in an election year,” said Republican leader Mitch McConnell.
5. Homeless Women Veterans and Homeless Veterans With Children Act (2010)
Originally proposed to expand assistance for homeless women veterans and homeless veterans with children, as well as increasing funding for federal grant programs to address the issues surrounding homelessness amongst veterans, this bipartisan bill made its way through the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee with strong support from members of both parties.However, the bill was promptly killed as Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell, on behalf of Senator Tom Coburn, objected based on the cost of the program.
“If we don’t start paying for new programs and continue on our path to bankruptcy we’ll have a homelessness problem beyond imagination,” Coburn spokesman John Hart told HuffPost. “The old Washington excuse that it’s too hard to cut spending is undermining our troops, our veterans and our future.”
Tuesday, April 5, 2016
Conservative Plan To Fix The VA Has Vets Hopping Mad
Why is a commission charged with fixing the problems hoping to close down its hospitals?
—By AJ Vicens
Bruce R. Bennett/Zuma
But in a letter sent to the chair of the Commission on Care, leaders of eight of the country's most prominent veterans' advocacy organizations blasted the proposal.
"We are greatly alarmed by the content of [the proposal] that was developed and drafted outside the open Commission process by seven of the Commission's fifteen members—without the input or even knowledge of the other Commissioners," they wrote in a letter signed by senior leaders of the Disabled American Veterans, the American Legion, the Military Order of the Purple Heart, the Vietnam Veterans of America, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Paralyzed Veterans of America, AMVETS, and the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.
The plan—known as the "Strawman Document"—was floated in March by seven members of the 15-member Commission on Care, an oversight group that was established by Congress in 2014 in the wake of the national scandal surrounding the lengthy wait times for healthcare at VA facilities. The commission is charged with evaluating veterans' access to health care and with offering proposals for how the Veterans Health Administration should be organized over the next 20 years.
The "Strawman" report, which echoes VA privatization efforts that have been backed by the Koch brothers, says "bold transformation" is needed for the VA to address the needs of its enrolled veterans, and that the system is "seriously broken" with "no efficient path to repair it." The plan calls for closing many "obsolete" VA facilities and moving toward a model where veterans can seek taxpayer-funded care at private health care facilities. A process similar to the Base Realignment and Closure system—used by the military since the end of the Cold War to decide which bases to close—would be used to evaluate which VA medical facilities would close. Under the plan, there would be no new facilities or major renovations of the existing VA facilities.
The plan also called for private doctors to be reimbursed at 5 to 10 percent higher than the Medicare rate, so they would have a greater incentive to participate.
The authors wrote that eventually the VA would become a broad-based payer system, "though it will continue to pay for the veteran care provided by the community system."
Those who opposed the plan agree the VA needs to be improved, but they argue that essentially privatizing it would force veterans to search for care at private facilities that might not be trained or equipped to serve veterans suffering from the long-range effects of combat, such as spinal cord injuries "and the Polytrauma System of Care." The authors add that the proposal ignores recent research, some commissioned by Congress itself, that found that VA care is often better than care in the private sector.
Louis Celli, the national director of veterans affairs and rehabilitation for the American Legion, told the Arizona Republic that he was "angered and insulted" by the "strawman" plan, and that the commission is now "absolutely divided" between those who want to privatize VA care and those who don't.
The plan lines up with ideas from Concerned Veterans for America, a group that's backed by the Koch brothers. The group has called for more choice for veterans seeking health care and for the VA and its health functions to be partly privatized. Suzanne Gordon, a health care writer who has covered the VA, notes in her personal blog and in the American Prospect that the supporters and drafters of the "strawman" proposal include conservatives and several hospital executives "who stand to benefit financially from [VA medical] privatization."
Dan Caldwell, a spokesman for the Koch-backed group, told the Arizona Republic that the "Strawman" proposal has been "completely distorted by opponents," and that there is no call to abolish the VA health care system. "We are not proposing to abolish the [VA health care system] or to end government funding of veterans' health care," Caldwell said.
According to the Arizona Republic, the commission will have two public meetings before issuing a report on its proposal June 30. The report was due in February, but the commission asked for and received an extension.
Monday, March 7, 2016
Friday, December 25, 2015
South Dakota Man Plots to Bomb Veterans Hospitals — But Ends Up in One After Blowing Himself Up
Making bomb with phone. A close up
Photo Credit: Perutskyi Petro
Photo Credit: Perutskyi Petro
South Dakota man planning to blow up Veterans Affairs hospitals was arrested after he accidentally detonated his home-made bombs on himself, the Grand Forks Herald reports.
Martin Rezac, 59, was indicted Friday on felony charges of possession of explosives with criminal intent, relating to the explosion at his home, which sent him to the hospital on Thanksgiving with multiple cuts and abrasions, and possibly some missing fingers, according to court documents reviewed by the Herald.
That day, authorities question Rezac’s friend, Allen Kayl, who was incarcerated. Kayl told them Rezac was planning an attack on the hospitals because VA staffers were “pissing him off.” Kayl also told investigators”there was a possibility he would in fact do it.”
Investigators found extensive bomb-making materials, including a bomb made from a peanut butter jar and a PVC pipe bomb. There were also numerous explosive chemicals, including sodium nitrate, hydrogen peroxide, baking soda, isopropyl alcohol and sea salt.
Other items found included “modified colander, scales, an epoxy kit, a digital thermometer, a glass bottle labeled “flash” and a legal notepad with handwritten notes and directions to make a homemade explosive called hexamethylene triperoxide diamine,” according to the paper.
If convicted, Rezac faces prison time and tens of thousands of dollars in fines.
Bethania Palma Markus is a Los Angeles-based freelance journalist.
Thursday, September 17, 2015
Trump duped or worse in fundraiser speech to fake veterans group
Rachel Maddow reviews the background of the man behind Veterans for a
Strong America, the beneficiary of a Donald Trump fundraiser speech on
the USS Iowa, which does not appear to have any membership outside of
chairman Joel Arends, and which today had its non-profit status revoked
by the IRS.
Monday, July 20, 2015
What Donald Trump was up to while John McCain was suffering as a prisoner of war
By Michael E. Miller and Fred Barbash
It was the spring of 1968 and Donald Trump had it good.
He was 21 years old and handsome with a full head of hair. He avoided the Vietnam War draft on his way to earning an Ivy League degree. He was fond of fancy dinners, beautiful women and outrageous clubs. Most important, he had a job in his father’s real estate company and a brain bursting with money-making ideas that would make him a billionaire.
“When I graduated from college, I had a net worth of perhaps $200,000,” he said in his 1987 autobiography “Trump: The Art of the Deal,” written with Tony Schwartz. (That’s about $1.4 million in 2015 dollars.) “I had my eye on Manhattan.”
More than 8,000 miles away, John McCain sat in a tiny, squalid North Vietnamese prison cell. The Navy pilot’s body was broken from a plane crash, starvation, botched operations and months of torture.
As Trump was preparing to take Manhattan, McCain was trying to relearn how to walk.
The stark contrast in their fortunes was thrown into sharp relief Saturday when Trump belittled McCain during a campaign speech in Iowa.
“He’s not a war hero,” Trump said of McCain.
“He’s a war hero because he was captured,” Trump said sarcastically. “I like people that weren’t captured.”
[Trump slams McCain for being ‘captured’ in Vietnam; other Republicans quickly condemn him]
Trump’s comments drew scorn from his fellow Republican presidential contenders. But The Donald didn’t back down.
“When I left the room, it was a total standing ovation,” he told ABC News in reference to his already infamous Iowa speech. “It was wonderful to see. Nobody was insulted.”
In fact, a lot of people were insulted.
“John McCain is a hero, a man of grit and guts and character personified,” Secretary of State John Kerry said in a statement. “He served and bled and endured unspeakable acts of torture. His captors broke his bones, but they couldn’t break his spirit, which is why he refused early release when he had the chance. That’s heroism, pure and simple, and it is unimpeachable.”
If The Donald doesn’t think that that’s heroic, then what, exactly, is admirable in his eyes?
And what was he doing while McCain was locked up in a jungle dungeon?
The answer reveals deep divides in the two men’s lives and claims to leadership. They may similarly embrace free enterprise, but when it comes to character, the two GOP presidential hopefuls could hardly be more different.
McCain famously followed his father and grandfather — both admirals — into the Navy. He has said his role model was Teddy Roosevelt, the barrel-chested, bear-hunting war hero turned conservative president. He also saw his grandfather and father as heroes too, as he wrote in his autobiography, “Faith of My Fathers.”
“My grandfather was a naval aviator, my father a submariner. They were my first heroes, and earning their respect has been the most lasting ambition of my life.”
Growing up in Queens, The Donald’s role models were more … theatrical.
“Two of the people I admired most and who I kind of studied for the way they did things were the great Flo Ziegfeld, the Broadway producer, and Bill Zeckendorf, the builder,” he told the New York Times in 1984. “They created glamor, and the pageantry, the elegance, the joy they brought to what they did was magnificent.”
McCain grew up in a military household. Trump grew up in a home dominated by his hard-charging, penny-pinching businessman father.
Both young men had rebellious streaks. At the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, McCain was known as a “tough, mean little f——” who “was defiant and flouted the rules” but never enough to get kicked out, according to Robert Timberg’s “The Nightingale’s Song.”
McCain enlisted in the Navy in 1958. Around the same time, Trump was sent to the New York Military Academy to straighten him out after his own youthful transgressions. ”He was a pretty rough fellow when he was small,” his father told the Times in 1983.
But the similarities stopped there. Despite a successful stint at the military school, Trump doesn’t seem to have been eager to enlist. It was 1964 and the Vietnam War was escalating.
He considered going to film school in California. “I was attracted to the glamor of the movies,” he said in “Trump: The Art of the Deal,” adding that he “admired” Hollywood’s “great showmen. But in the end I decided real estate was a much better business.”
Instead Trump attended Fordham for two years before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania, where he took economics courses at its famed Wharton School. (According to a book by Gwenda Blair, Trump was allowed to transfer into the Ivy League school because of family connections, and has exaggerated his performance at Penn.)
During his time in school, Trump received four student deferments from the draft.
“If I would have gotten a low [draft] number, I would have been drafted. I would have proudly served,” he told ABC News. “But I got a number, I think it was 356. That’s right at the very end. And they didn’t get — I don’t believe — past even 300, so I was — I was not chosen because of the fact that I had a very high lottery number.”
As Trump was enjoying the Ivy League and avoiding the war, John McCain was about to become one of its most high-profile casualties.
The lieutenant commander had been flying for months, conducting targeted strikes on North Vietnam.
He had already been injured in an aircraft carrier fire that killed 134 fellow sailors. And he had already made a name for himself as a pilot.
On Oct. 25, 1967, McCain had destroyed two enemy MiG fighter planes parked on a runway outside Hanoi. He begged to go out the next day, too.
But as he flew into Hanoi again on Oct. 26, his jet’s warning lights began to flash.
“I was on my 23rd mission, flying right over the heart of Hanoi in a dive at about 4,500 feet, when a Russian missile the size of a telephone pole came up — the sky was full of them — and blew the right wing off my Skyhawk dive bomber,” he wrote in a 1973 account of his ordeal. “It went into an inverted, a most straight-down spin. I pulled the ejection handle, and was knocked unconscious by the force of the ejection.”
McCain regained consciousness when his parachute landed him in a lake. The explosion had shattered both arms and one of his legs. With 50 pounds of gear on him and one good limb, he struggled to swim to the surface.
North Vietnamese dragged him to shore. Then stripped him to his underwear and began “hollering and screaming and cursing and spitting and kicking at me.”
“One of them slammed a rifle butt down on my shoulder, and smashed it pretty badly,” he wrote.
“Another stuck a bayonet in my foot. The mob was really getting up-tight.”
He was interrogated for four days, losing consciousness as his captors tried to beat information out of him. But he refused.
As the voluble Trump was already making a name for himself sweet-talking deals for his dad’s real estate developing company, McCain was clamming up in his filthy prison camp.
And as Trump drove around Manhattan in his father’s limo, McCain was refusing to mention his dad for fear of handing valuable intelligence to the enemy.
McCain might have died from his injuries had the North Vietnamese not found out on their own that his father was an admiral. Instead, they moved him to a hospital and performed several botched operations on him. They sliced his knee ligaments by accident and couldn’t manage to set his bones.
“They had great difficulty putting the bones together, because my arm was broken in three places and there were two floating bones,” he wrote. “I watched the guy try to manipulate it for about an hour and a half trying to get all the bones lined up. This was without benefit of Novocain.”
That Christmas, as Donald Trump was celebrating the holiday with his family, McCain was starving to death in a prison camp called “The Plantation.”
“I was down to about 100 pounds from my normal weight of 155,” he wrote. “I was told later on by [cellmate] Major Day that they didn’t expect me to live a week.”
McCain survived, however, slowly regaining his strength. By the spring of 1968, he had taught himself to walk again. Not that there was anywhere to walk. He was in solitary confinement inside a hot, stifling, windowless cell.
Trump, meanwhile, was taking Manhattan by storm. He had already made a small fortune — $200,000 then is almost $1.4 million today — working for his father during college.
In his autobiography, Trump describes these early years as fraught with danger: a quick learning curve for the soon-to-be-celebrity CEO as he went around learning the business. “This was not a world I found very attractive,” he wrote in “Trump: The Art of the Deal.”
“I’d just graduated from Wharton, and suddenly here I was in a scene that was violent at worst and unpleasant at best.”
The danger? Collecting rent.
“One of the first tricks I learned was that you never stand in front of someone’s door when you knock. Instead you stand by the wall and reach over to knock,” Trump wrote of collecting for his father, who owned low-income housing blocks. “The first time a collector explained that to me I couldn’t imagine what he was talking about. ‘What’s the point,’ I said. The point, he said, is that if you stand to the side, the only thing exposed to danger is your hand.”
“There were tenants who’d throw their garbage out the window, because it was easier than putting it in the incinerator,” he wrote in horror.
Meanwhile, McCain languished in a genuine hell. When he wasn’t being tortured — several times his interrogators re-broke his mended bones — he was battling everything from dysentery to hemorrhoids.
The prisoner of war survived on watery pumpkin soup and scraps of bread. He saw several fellow prisoners beaten to death, yet McCain refused to sign the confession that would have granted him a speedy release (and a publicity coup to the North Vietnamese).
Trump was living large — maybe not by today’s Trump standards but larger than most Americans.
He ate in New York City’s finest restaurants, rode in his father’s limousines and began hitting the clubs with beautiful women.
“The turning point came in 1971, when I decided to rent a Manhattan apartment,” he wrote. “It was a studio, in a building on Third Avenue and 75th Street, and it looked out on the water tank in the court of the adjacent building. ….I was a kid from Queens who worked in Brooklyn, and suddenly I had an apartment on the Upper East Side. …. I got to know all the good properties. I became a city guy instead of a kid from the boroughs. As far as I was concerned, I had the best of all worlds. I was young, and I had a lot of energy.”
That energy went into signing some of his first real estate deals — and into partying.
“One of the first things I did was join Le Club, which at the time was the hottest club in the city and perhaps the most exclusive–like Studio 54 at its height,” he wrote. “Its membership included some of the most successful men and the most beautiful women in the world. It was the sort of place where you were likely to see a wealthy seventy-five-year old guy walk in with three blondes from Sweden.
“It turned out to be a great move for me, socially and professionally. I met a lot of beautiful young single women, and I went out almost every night,” he added. “Actually, I never got involved with any of them very seriously. These were beautiful women, but many of them couldn’t carry on a normal conversation.”
He was so good looking he said, that the manager of the club “was worried that I might be tempted to try to steal their wives. He asked me to promise that I wouldn’t do that.”
As McCain remained in solitary confinement, tapping messages on the filthy walls to his fellow POW's in Morse code, Trump was out partying at legendary nightclubs.
Several years later, The Donald was frequenting “Studio 54 in the disco’s heyday and he said he thought it was paradise,” Timothy O’Brien wrote in “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald.”
“His prowling gear at the time included a burgundy suit with matching patent-leather shoes,” O’Brien wrote.
“’I saw things happening there that to this day, I have never seen again,'” Trump told O’Brien. “‘I would watch supermodels getting screwed, well-known supermodels getting screwed on a bench in the middle of the room. There were seven of them and each one was getting screwed by a different guy. This was in the middle of the room.’”
As Trump made plans to buy and refurbish bankrupt hotels, McCain was staving off death in a prison dubbed “The Hanoi Hilton.”
And as McCain continued to refuse special treatment, The Donald actively courted it.
“The other thing I promoted was our relationship with politicians, such as Abraham Beame, who was elected mayor of New York in November of 1973,” he wrote in “Trump: The Art of the Deal.” “Like all developers, my father and I contributed money to Beame, and to other politicians. The simple fact is that contributing money to politicians is very standard and accepted for a New York City developer.”
McCain refused to meet with most visitors for fear of being used as a puppet by the North
Vietnamese. But back in the U.S., Trump was too eager to manipulate the press.
“At one point, when I was hyping my plans to the press but in reality getting nowhere, a big New York real estate guy told one of my close friends. ‘Trump has a great line of s–t, but where are the bricks and mortar?’” he wrote. “I remember being outraged when I heard that.” (Expletive deleted by the Post not by Trump.)
If Trump was used to dining well, the only decent meal McCain had during his five years in prison was the night before he was released.
It was March 14, 1973. McCain arrived back in America a physically broken man, but also a hero.
That word has yet to be applied to Trump.
That same year, the Department of Justice slapped the Trump Organization with a major discrimination suit for violating the Fair Housing Act.
“The Government contended that Trump Management had refused to rent or negotiate rentals ‘because of race and color,” according to the New York Times. “It also charged that the company had required different rental terms and conditions because of race and that it had misrepresented to blacks that apartments were not available.”
Trump at first resisted signing a consent decree, according to the Times. He hired his friend, Roy Cohn, the lawyer and former right hand man to U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. “Mr Trump said he would not sign such a decree because it would be unfair to his other tenants,” the Times reported. “He also said that if he allowed welfare clients into his apartments … there would be a massive fleeing from the city of not only our tenants but the communities as a whole.”
But ultimately the company came to terms with the government.
Trump would weather the scandal, of course, and go one to build his fortune to its present day tally of $4 billion.
McCain, in contrast, received a Silver Star, Bronze Star, Purple Heart and Distinguished Flying Cross. He would become a U.S. Senator and nearly become President.
Whether Trump can triumph where McCain came up short remains to be seen.
It was the spring of 1968 and Donald Trump had it good.
He was 21 years old and handsome with a full head of hair. He avoided the Vietnam War draft on his way to earning an Ivy League degree. He was fond of fancy dinners, beautiful women and outrageous clubs. Most important, he had a job in his father’s real estate company and a brain bursting with money-making ideas that would make him a billionaire.
“When I graduated from college, I had a net worth of perhaps $200,000,” he said in his 1987 autobiography “Trump: The Art of the Deal,” written with Tony Schwartz. (That’s about $1.4 million in 2015 dollars.) “I had my eye on Manhattan.”
More than 8,000 miles away, John McCain sat in a tiny, squalid North Vietnamese prison cell. The Navy pilot’s body was broken from a plane crash, starvation, botched operations and months of torture.
As Trump was preparing to take Manhattan, McCain was trying to relearn how to walk.
The stark contrast in their fortunes was thrown into sharp relief Saturday when Trump belittled McCain during a campaign speech in Iowa.
“He’s not a war hero,” Trump said of McCain.
“He’s a war hero because he was captured,” Trump said sarcastically. “I like people that weren’t captured.”
[Trump slams McCain for being ‘captured’ in Vietnam; other Republicans quickly condemn him]
Trump’s comments drew scorn from his fellow Republican presidential contenders. But The Donald didn’t back down.
“When I left the room, it was a total standing ovation,” he told ABC News in reference to his already infamous Iowa speech. “It was wonderful to see. Nobody was insulted.”
In fact, a lot of people were insulted.
“John McCain is a hero, a man of grit and guts and character personified,” Secretary of State John Kerry said in a statement. “He served and bled and endured unspeakable acts of torture. His captors broke his bones, but they couldn’t break his spirit, which is why he refused early release when he had the chance. That’s heroism, pure and simple, and it is unimpeachable.”
If The Donald doesn’t think that that’s heroic, then what, exactly, is admirable in his eyes?
And what was he doing while McCain was locked up in a jungle dungeon?
The answer reveals deep divides in the two men’s lives and claims to leadership. They may similarly embrace free enterprise, but when it comes to character, the two GOP presidential hopefuls could hardly be more different.
McCain famously followed his father and grandfather — both admirals — into the Navy. He has said his role model was Teddy Roosevelt, the barrel-chested, bear-hunting war hero turned conservative president. He also saw his grandfather and father as heroes too, as he wrote in his autobiography, “Faith of My Fathers.”
“My grandfather was a naval aviator, my father a submariner. They were my first heroes, and earning their respect has been the most lasting ambition of my life.”
Growing up in Queens, The Donald’s role models were more … theatrical.
“Two of the people I admired most and who I kind of studied for the way they did things were the great Flo Ziegfeld, the Broadway producer, and Bill Zeckendorf, the builder,” he told the New York Times in 1984. “They created glamor, and the pageantry, the elegance, the joy they brought to what they did was magnificent.”
McCain grew up in a military household. Trump grew up in a home dominated by his hard-charging, penny-pinching businessman father.
Both young men had rebellious streaks. At the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, McCain was known as a “tough, mean little f——” who “was defiant and flouted the rules” but never enough to get kicked out, according to Robert Timberg’s “The Nightingale’s Song.”
McCain enlisted in the Navy in 1958. Around the same time, Trump was sent to the New York Military Academy to straighten him out after his own youthful transgressions. ”He was a pretty rough fellow when he was small,” his father told the Times in 1983.
But the similarities stopped there. Despite a successful stint at the military school, Trump doesn’t seem to have been eager to enlist. It was 1964 and the Vietnam War was escalating.
He considered going to film school in California. “I was attracted to the glamor of the movies,” he said in “Trump: The Art of the Deal,” adding that he “admired” Hollywood’s “great showmen. But in the end I decided real estate was a much better business.”
Instead Trump attended Fordham for two years before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania, where he took economics courses at its famed Wharton School. (According to a book by Gwenda Blair, Trump was allowed to transfer into the Ivy League school because of family connections, and has exaggerated his performance at Penn.)
During his time in school, Trump received four student deferments from the draft.
“If I would have gotten a low [draft] number, I would have been drafted. I would have proudly served,” he told ABC News. “But I got a number, I think it was 356. That’s right at the very end. And they didn’t get — I don’t believe — past even 300, so I was — I was not chosen because of the fact that I had a very high lottery number.”
As Trump was enjoying the Ivy League and avoiding the war, John McCain was about to become one of its most high-profile casualties.
The lieutenant commander had been flying for months, conducting targeted strikes on North Vietnam.
He had already been injured in an aircraft carrier fire that killed 134 fellow sailors. And he had already made a name for himself as a pilot.
On Oct. 25, 1967, McCain had destroyed two enemy MiG fighter planes parked on a runway outside Hanoi. He begged to go out the next day, too.
But as he flew into Hanoi again on Oct. 26, his jet’s warning lights began to flash.
“I was on my 23rd mission, flying right over the heart of Hanoi in a dive at about 4,500 feet, when a Russian missile the size of a telephone pole came up — the sky was full of them — and blew the right wing off my Skyhawk dive bomber,” he wrote in a 1973 account of his ordeal. “It went into an inverted, a most straight-down spin. I pulled the ejection handle, and was knocked unconscious by the force of the ejection.”
McCain regained consciousness when his parachute landed him in a lake. The explosion had shattered both arms and one of his legs. With 50 pounds of gear on him and one good limb, he struggled to swim to the surface.
North Vietnamese dragged him to shore. Then stripped him to his underwear and began “hollering and screaming and cursing and spitting and kicking at me.”
“One of them slammed a rifle butt down on my shoulder, and smashed it pretty badly,” he wrote.
“Another stuck a bayonet in my foot. The mob was really getting up-tight.”
He was interrogated for four days, losing consciousness as his captors tried to beat information out of him. But he refused.
As the voluble Trump was already making a name for himself sweet-talking deals for his dad’s real estate developing company, McCain was clamming up in his filthy prison camp.
And as Trump drove around Manhattan in his father’s limo, McCain was refusing to mention his dad for fear of handing valuable intelligence to the enemy.
McCain might have died from his injuries had the North Vietnamese not found out on their own that his father was an admiral. Instead, they moved him to a hospital and performed several botched operations on him. They sliced his knee ligaments by accident and couldn’t manage to set his bones.
“They had great difficulty putting the bones together, because my arm was broken in three places and there were two floating bones,” he wrote. “I watched the guy try to manipulate it for about an hour and a half trying to get all the bones lined up. This was without benefit of Novocain.”
That Christmas, as Donald Trump was celebrating the holiday with his family, McCain was starving to death in a prison camp called “The Plantation.”
“I was down to about 100 pounds from my normal weight of 155,” he wrote. “I was told later on by [cellmate] Major Day that they didn’t expect me to live a week.”
McCain survived, however, slowly regaining his strength. By the spring of 1968, he had taught himself to walk again. Not that there was anywhere to walk. He was in solitary confinement inside a hot, stifling, windowless cell.
Trump, meanwhile, was taking Manhattan by storm. He had already made a small fortune — $200,000 then is almost $1.4 million today — working for his father during college.
In his autobiography, Trump describes these early years as fraught with danger: a quick learning curve for the soon-to-be-celebrity CEO as he went around learning the business. “This was not a world I found very attractive,” he wrote in “Trump: The Art of the Deal.”
“I’d just graduated from Wharton, and suddenly here I was in a scene that was violent at worst and unpleasant at best.”
The danger? Collecting rent.
“One of the first tricks I learned was that you never stand in front of someone’s door when you knock. Instead you stand by the wall and reach over to knock,” Trump wrote of collecting for his father, who owned low-income housing blocks. “The first time a collector explained that to me I couldn’t imagine what he was talking about. ‘What’s the point,’ I said. The point, he said, is that if you stand to the side, the only thing exposed to danger is your hand.”
“There were tenants who’d throw their garbage out the window, because it was easier than putting it in the incinerator,” he wrote in horror.
Meanwhile, McCain languished in a genuine hell. When he wasn’t being tortured — several times his interrogators re-broke his mended bones — he was battling everything from dysentery to hemorrhoids.
The prisoner of war survived on watery pumpkin soup and scraps of bread. He saw several fellow prisoners beaten to death, yet McCain refused to sign the confession that would have granted him a speedy release (and a publicity coup to the North Vietnamese).
Trump was living large — maybe not by today’s Trump standards but larger than most Americans.
He ate in New York City’s finest restaurants, rode in his father’s limousines and began hitting the clubs with beautiful women.
“The turning point came in 1971, when I decided to rent a Manhattan apartment,” he wrote. “It was a studio, in a building on Third Avenue and 75th Street, and it looked out on the water tank in the court of the adjacent building. ….I was a kid from Queens who worked in Brooklyn, and suddenly I had an apartment on the Upper East Side. …. I got to know all the good properties. I became a city guy instead of a kid from the boroughs. As far as I was concerned, I had the best of all worlds. I was young, and I had a lot of energy.”
That energy went into signing some of his first real estate deals — and into partying.
“One of the first things I did was join Le Club, which at the time was the hottest club in the city and perhaps the most exclusive–like Studio 54 at its height,” he wrote. “Its membership included some of the most successful men and the most beautiful women in the world. It was the sort of place where you were likely to see a wealthy seventy-five-year old guy walk in with three blondes from Sweden.
“It turned out to be a great move for me, socially and professionally. I met a lot of beautiful young single women, and I went out almost every night,” he added. “Actually, I never got involved with any of them very seriously. These were beautiful women, but many of them couldn’t carry on a normal conversation.”
He was so good looking he said, that the manager of the club “was worried that I might be tempted to try to steal their wives. He asked me to promise that I wouldn’t do that.”
As McCain remained in solitary confinement, tapping messages on the filthy walls to his fellow POW's in Morse code, Trump was out partying at legendary nightclubs.
Several years later, The Donald was frequenting “Studio 54 in the disco’s heyday and he said he thought it was paradise,” Timothy O’Brien wrote in “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald.”
“His prowling gear at the time included a burgundy suit with matching patent-leather shoes,” O’Brien wrote.
“’I saw things happening there that to this day, I have never seen again,'” Trump told O’Brien. “‘I would watch supermodels getting screwed, well-known supermodels getting screwed on a bench in the middle of the room. There were seven of them and each one was getting screwed by a different guy. This was in the middle of the room.’”
As Trump made plans to buy and refurbish bankrupt hotels, McCain was staving off death in a prison dubbed “The Hanoi Hilton.”
And as McCain continued to refuse special treatment, The Donald actively courted it.
“The other thing I promoted was our relationship with politicians, such as Abraham Beame, who was elected mayor of New York in November of 1973,” he wrote in “Trump: The Art of the Deal.” “Like all developers, my father and I contributed money to Beame, and to other politicians. The simple fact is that contributing money to politicians is very standard and accepted for a New York City developer.”
McCain refused to meet with most visitors for fear of being used as a puppet by the North
Vietnamese. But back in the U.S., Trump was too eager to manipulate the press.
“At one point, when I was hyping my plans to the press but in reality getting nowhere, a big New York real estate guy told one of my close friends. ‘Trump has a great line of s–t, but where are the bricks and mortar?’” he wrote. “I remember being outraged when I heard that.” (Expletive deleted by the Post not by Trump.)
If Trump was used to dining well, the only decent meal McCain had during his five years in prison was the night before he was released.
It was March 14, 1973. McCain arrived back in America a physically broken man, but also a hero.
That word has yet to be applied to Trump.
That same year, the Department of Justice slapped the Trump Organization with a major discrimination suit for violating the Fair Housing Act.
“The Government contended that Trump Management had refused to rent or negotiate rentals ‘because of race and color,” according to the New York Times. “It also charged that the company had required different rental terms and conditions because of race and that it had misrepresented to blacks that apartments were not available.”
Trump at first resisted signing a consent decree, according to the Times. He hired his friend, Roy Cohn, the lawyer and former right hand man to U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. “Mr Trump said he would not sign such a decree because it would be unfair to his other tenants,” the Times reported. “He also said that if he allowed welfare clients into his apartments … there would be a massive fleeing from the city of not only our tenants but the communities as a whole.”
But ultimately the company came to terms with the government.
Trump would weather the scandal, of course, and go one to build his fortune to its present day tally of $4 billion.
McCain, in contrast, received a Silver Star, Bronze Star, Purple Heart and Distinguished Flying Cross. He would become a U.S. Senator and nearly become President.
Whether Trump can triumph where McCain came up short remains to be seen.
Sunday, June 14, 2015
The Hacking of Federal Data Is Much Worse Than It First Seemed
By Adam Chandler
To truly understand just how rigorous and intrusive the process to get security clearance for the federal government is, take a look a Standard Form 86.
Formally known as the Questionnaire for National Security Positions, the document requires that an applicant disclose everything from mental illnesses, financial interests, and bankruptcy issues to any brush with the law and major or minor drug and alcohol use. The application also requires a thorough listing of an applicant’s family members, associates, or former roommates. At the bottom of each page, a potential employee must submit his or her social security number. Given the questionnaire’s length, that means if you’re filling out this document, you will write your social security number over 115 times.
On Friday, it was revealed that all of the data on Standard Form 86— filled out by millions of current and former military and intelligence workers— is now believed to be in the hands of Chinese hackers.
This not only means that the hackers may have troves of personal data about Americans with highly sensitive jobs, but also that contacts or family members of American intelligence employees living abroad could potentially be targeted for coercion. At its worst, this cyber breach also provides a basic roster of every American with a security clearance.
"That makes it very hard for any of those people to function as an intelligence officer,” Joel Brenner, a former top U.S. counterintelligence official, told the AP. “The database also tells the Chinese an enormous amount of information about almost everyone with a security clearance. That's a gold mine. It helps you approach and recruit spies."
What’s particularly stunning about this development is how quickly it grew into something so severe. Last week, officials estimated that the personal data of 4 million current and former federal employees had been compromised. Then that figure ballooned to as many as 14 million.
Speaking to The Washington Post, one official ominously likened this new revelation to cancer, “Once you start operating on the cancer, you find it has spread to other areas of the body.” The subtext here is that we may not have even hit the apex of this scandal yet.
In the meantime, China continues to deny that it stole the information and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management isn’t saying much either. “Once we have conclusive information about the breach, we will announce a notification plan for individuals whose information is determined to have been compromised,” said OPM spokesman Samuel Schumach.
Given the reach of the data thought to be stolen, it might be easier for the OPM to contact those whose information hasn’t been compromised.
Cyber-attacks
linked to China appear to have resulted in the theft of
security-clearance records with sensitive data about millions of
American military and intelligence personnel.
To truly understand just how rigorous and intrusive the process to get security clearance for the federal government is, take a look a Standard Form 86.
Formally known as the Questionnaire for National Security Positions, the document requires that an applicant disclose everything from mental illnesses, financial interests, and bankruptcy issues to any brush with the law and major or minor drug and alcohol use. The application also requires a thorough listing of an applicant’s family members, associates, or former roommates. At the bottom of each page, a potential employee must submit his or her social security number. Given the questionnaire’s length, that means if you’re filling out this document, you will write your social security number over 115 times.
On Friday, it was revealed that all of the data on Standard Form 86— filled out by millions of current and former military and intelligence workers— is now believed to be in the hands of Chinese hackers.
This not only means that the hackers may have troves of personal data about Americans with highly sensitive jobs, but also that contacts or family members of American intelligence employees living abroad could potentially be targeted for coercion. At its worst, this cyber breach also provides a basic roster of every American with a security clearance.
"That makes it very hard for any of those people to function as an intelligence officer,” Joel Brenner, a former top U.S. counterintelligence official, told the AP. “The database also tells the Chinese an enormous amount of information about almost everyone with a security clearance. That's a gold mine. It helps you approach and recruit spies."
What’s particularly stunning about this development is how quickly it grew into something so severe. Last week, officials estimated that the personal data of 4 million current and former federal employees had been compromised. Then that figure ballooned to as many as 14 million.
Speaking to The Washington Post, one official ominously likened this new revelation to cancer, “Once you start operating on the cancer, you find it has spread to other areas of the body.” The subtext here is that we may not have even hit the apex of this scandal yet.
In the meantime, China continues to deny that it stole the information and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management isn’t saying much either. “Once we have conclusive information about the breach, we will announce a notification plan for individuals whose information is determined to have been compromised,” said OPM spokesman Samuel Schumach.
Given the reach of the data thought to be stolen, it might be easier for the OPM to contact those whose information hasn’t been compromised.
Thursday, May 21, 2015
The truth about the Iraq War
This is the treachery. This is the lie that sold the war. It's when
Dick Cheney told the American people that Saddam Hussein possessed
nuclear weapons. But how can that 2003 claim come to haunt us today in
Iraq? David Corn and Eugene Robinson discuss.
Iraq war: Mistake, or crime?
Republicans running in 2016 struggle to defend the 2003 Iraq
war…meanwhile, Hillary Clinton says “she made a mistake” on Iraq.
Former CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell and USA Today’s Susan Page have
more.
Saturday, January 24, 2015
"I don't give a fuck it's your house" - American Sniper's Failure
Posted By Rude One
The Rude Pundit pushed aside as many preconceived notions as he could when he watched American Sniper, the Clint Eastwood-directed, Oscar-nominated film about Chris Kyle, the Navy SEAL who chalked up the most kills of any sniper in the military during the Iraq war. As you may know, the film has become a political battlefield between some on the left who see it as glorifying the Iraq engagement and those on the right who see it as a celebration of the innate good of the American soldier.
And even while viewing it, the Rude Pundit thought the film had been treated unfairly by many of its critics. Sure, it offers few sympathetic Iraqis, but no one faulted Saving Private Ryan for not spending time with the nice Germans. As for the racist remarks by Bradley Cooper's Kyle and the other soldiers, well, sorry, if you want polite talk about the ostensible enemy, you probably shouldn't watch a war film. Also, Eastwood and writer Jason Hall weren't really under an obligation to hew closely to Kyle's story. It ain't a documentary.
So, really, truly, the Rude Pundit is coming at this from as open-minded a position as possible. (Does he have to list all his family members who are or were in the military?) And he thinks this:
American Sniper is a film about stupid people who were brainwashed into doing something stupid and it justifies their stupidity so that the stupid people watching can feel good about themselves. See, the one thing you can't separate out from the film is history. It tries to elide over history, but just because it isn't mentioned doesn't mean it isn't there. Because of that, the overwhelming feeling the Rude Pundit had was pity, not pride.
After a set-up where Kyle is about to shoot a child in Iraq, we get what can best be described as a psycho killer origin story. Kyle learns to hunt at an early age, something his father tells him he's good at. The father fills his sons with nonsense about their place in the pecking order of the universe. This hypermasculine bullshit plays out, as it does in Texas, with Kyle becoming a rodeo rider who joins the Navy to become a SEAL after he sees the U.S. embassy attacks in 1998. That leads to his brainwashing during his training (apparently, SEALs have to constantly be wet). In short order, he meets a woman, Taya, the World Trade Center attack happens, he gets married, and then he's sent to Iraq. We get no sense that the invasion of Iraq happened 18 months after 9/11. Then, boom, we're in Iraq and the tedious pattern of the film is set: shooting people in Iraq, coming home to weepy, concerned wife, rinse, repeat for four tours.
Ultimately, the film fails not because it doesn't present the Iraqis in a more complex way, but because it banks on our credulity. It treats us like we're fucking idiots who are willing to forget anything about the truth behind the invasion of Iraq. It counts on our fucking idiocy in order to convey its simplistic message that American soldiers are awesome and everyone else needs to shut the fuck up.
So we get scenes of Americans going house to house to find insurgents. They break down doors and rush in, grabbing anyone they can. When one Iraqi man protests that they are in his house, Kyle says, "I don't give a fuck it's your house." Then they berate and threaten the man until he gives up the name of a specific enemy torturer, "the Butcher." (Seriously, names in this film are dunderheaded. One soldier is, swear to Christ, "Biggles," like a fuckin' cat.) That family, the only "good" Iraqis we see, ends up having the father and a son brutally murdered. In another scene, the soldiers barge into an apartment and, more or less, take a family hostage so they can use the apartment for surveillance on some "Hajis." Of course, it turns out the father is hiding weapons. Of course, he ends up dead.
Through it all, all the people he shoots (and, truly, Bradley Cooper seems like he's acting in a different, much deeper film), all the scenes of him watching fellows soldiers get killed and wounded, all the psychological damage he does to his poor wife when he calls her during firefights, Kyle maintains a pathetic belief in the good of his mission and in the protection of his "brothers." It has an effect on him - he suffers from PTSD - but the film wants us to believe that it was necessary. So, in the end, American Sniper is the story of a dumb man who wrecked himself for a worthless cause and about all the young men (and it is all, mostly white, men in it) who were sacrificed for nothing.
It's not the film that tells us it's nothing. We know it was for nothing. We know that one of the great crimes of the new century is the invasion of Iraq for absolutely no rational, demonstrable reason. We know that all those "savages," as Kyle calls the Iraqis, that we killed were for nothing. We know that all those Americans who died lost their lives for nothing. Our military was protecting us from nothing. Our freedoms weren't at risk from Iraq.
And the lie many soldiers from Iraq cling to and the lie we tell ourselves, and the lie that so many have worked so hard to maintain, is that as long as we don't discuss that it was for nothing, as long as we pretend that the fact that soldiers fought when they were told to fight and, mostly, did so nobly, we don't have to face the truly gut-wrenching reality of our national complicity in the crime.
American Sniper exists, then, to play to that lie, to silence anyone who would point it out. Shit, once Kyle goes to war, the movie is so devoid of any rationale for being in Iraq that no one mentions Saddam Hussein or weapons of mass destruction. Even George W. Bush isn't mentioned. The film fails, too, because all it's really saying is that, if you put some soldiers somewhere and tell them to do something, they will defend each other and do the job. The fact that the leaders of their country betrayed them in the most elemental way possible never enters the equation. So all we're left with is killing Iraqis because Iraqis are trying to kill us, fuck if we care whose house it is.
At some points, the Rude Pundit wondered if Eastwood was trying to frame it this way, but, when the credits roll, after Kyle's murder at the hands of a disturbed vet, we are treated to scenes of the motorcade heading to his funeral, the streets lined with people with signs and American flags. No, then. We're supposed to feel proud that men like Kyle defend us. We should instead feel intensely angry that they died in vain.
The Rude Pundit pushed aside as many preconceived notions as he could when he watched American Sniper, the Clint Eastwood-directed, Oscar-nominated film about Chris Kyle, the Navy SEAL who chalked up the most kills of any sniper in the military during the Iraq war. As you may know, the film has become a political battlefield between some on the left who see it as glorifying the Iraq engagement and those on the right who see it as a celebration of the innate good of the American soldier.
And even while viewing it, the Rude Pundit thought the film had been treated unfairly by many of its critics. Sure, it offers few sympathetic Iraqis, but no one faulted Saving Private Ryan for not spending time with the nice Germans. As for the racist remarks by Bradley Cooper's Kyle and the other soldiers, well, sorry, if you want polite talk about the ostensible enemy, you probably shouldn't watch a war film. Also, Eastwood and writer Jason Hall weren't really under an obligation to hew closely to Kyle's story. It ain't a documentary.
So, really, truly, the Rude Pundit is coming at this from as open-minded a position as possible. (Does he have to list all his family members who are or were in the military?) And he thinks this:
American Sniper is a film about stupid people who were brainwashed into doing something stupid and it justifies their stupidity so that the stupid people watching can feel good about themselves. See, the one thing you can't separate out from the film is history. It tries to elide over history, but just because it isn't mentioned doesn't mean it isn't there. Because of that, the overwhelming feeling the Rude Pundit had was pity, not pride.
After a set-up where Kyle is about to shoot a child in Iraq, we get what can best be described as a psycho killer origin story. Kyle learns to hunt at an early age, something his father tells him he's good at. The father fills his sons with nonsense about their place in the pecking order of the universe. This hypermasculine bullshit plays out, as it does in Texas, with Kyle becoming a rodeo rider who joins the Navy to become a SEAL after he sees the U.S. embassy attacks in 1998. That leads to his brainwashing during his training (apparently, SEALs have to constantly be wet). In short order, he meets a woman, Taya, the World Trade Center attack happens, he gets married, and then he's sent to Iraq. We get no sense that the invasion of Iraq happened 18 months after 9/11. Then, boom, we're in Iraq and the tedious pattern of the film is set: shooting people in Iraq, coming home to weepy, concerned wife, rinse, repeat for four tours.
Ultimately, the film fails not because it doesn't present the Iraqis in a more complex way, but because it banks on our credulity. It treats us like we're fucking idiots who are willing to forget anything about the truth behind the invasion of Iraq. It counts on our fucking idiocy in order to convey its simplistic message that American soldiers are awesome and everyone else needs to shut the fuck up.
So we get scenes of Americans going house to house to find insurgents. They break down doors and rush in, grabbing anyone they can. When one Iraqi man protests that they are in his house, Kyle says, "I don't give a fuck it's your house." Then they berate and threaten the man until he gives up the name of a specific enemy torturer, "the Butcher." (Seriously, names in this film are dunderheaded. One soldier is, swear to Christ, "Biggles," like a fuckin' cat.) That family, the only "good" Iraqis we see, ends up having the father and a son brutally murdered. In another scene, the soldiers barge into an apartment and, more or less, take a family hostage so they can use the apartment for surveillance on some "Hajis." Of course, it turns out the father is hiding weapons. Of course, he ends up dead.
Through it all, all the people he shoots (and, truly, Bradley Cooper seems like he's acting in a different, much deeper film), all the scenes of him watching fellows soldiers get killed and wounded, all the psychological damage he does to his poor wife when he calls her during firefights, Kyle maintains a pathetic belief in the good of his mission and in the protection of his "brothers." It has an effect on him - he suffers from PTSD - but the film wants us to believe that it was necessary. So, in the end, American Sniper is the story of a dumb man who wrecked himself for a worthless cause and about all the young men (and it is all, mostly white, men in it) who were sacrificed for nothing.
It's not the film that tells us it's nothing. We know it was for nothing. We know that one of the great crimes of the new century is the invasion of Iraq for absolutely no rational, demonstrable reason. We know that all those "savages," as Kyle calls the Iraqis, that we killed were for nothing. We know that all those Americans who died lost their lives for nothing. Our military was protecting us from nothing. Our freedoms weren't at risk from Iraq.
And the lie many soldiers from Iraq cling to and the lie we tell ourselves, and the lie that so many have worked so hard to maintain, is that as long as we don't discuss that it was for nothing, as long as we pretend that the fact that soldiers fought when they were told to fight and, mostly, did so nobly, we don't have to face the truly gut-wrenching reality of our national complicity in the crime.
American Sniper exists, then, to play to that lie, to silence anyone who would point it out. Shit, once Kyle goes to war, the movie is so devoid of any rationale for being in Iraq that no one mentions Saddam Hussein or weapons of mass destruction. Even George W. Bush isn't mentioned. The film fails, too, because all it's really saying is that, if you put some soldiers somewhere and tell them to do something, they will defend each other and do the job. The fact that the leaders of their country betrayed them in the most elemental way possible never enters the equation. So all we're left with is killing Iraqis because Iraqis are trying to kill us, fuck if we care whose house it is.
At some points, the Rude Pundit wondered if Eastwood was trying to frame it this way, but, when the credits roll, after Kyle's murder at the hands of a disturbed vet, we are treated to scenes of the motorcade heading to his funeral, the streets lined with people with signs and American flags. No, then. We're supposed to feel proud that men like Kyle defend us. We should instead feel intensely angry that they died in vain.
Monday, October 27, 2014
Thanks for your Service = Silencing the Vets
Posted by Rory Fanning at 6:56pm, October 26, 2014
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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Today’s piece is out of the ordinary, the sort of thing that’s largely untouchable in the mainstream. A former Army Ranger writes about why the endless “thank you"s for service in America’s wars ring hollow. And that Ranger-turned-conscientious-objector, Rory Fanning, has quite an all-American odyssey to tell, which is exactly what he’s done in his new book Worth Fighting For: An Army Ranger’s Journey Out of the Military and Across America. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a must read and, as it happens, for a $100 contribution to this site, you can be the first on your block to get a signed, personalized copy of it.
Just check out the offer at the TomDispatch donation page and while you’re at it, note that signed, personalized copies of my new book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World, are still available. My thanks again to all of you -- it was a genuine outpouring of support -- who have already contributed! Tom]
More than a few times I’ve found myself in a crowd of Vietnam veterans, and more than a few times at least one of them was wearing a curious blue or yellow t-shirt. Once that shirt undoubtedly fit a lean physique of the late 1970's or early 1980's, but by the time I saw it modeled, in the 2000's, it was getting mighty snug. Still, they refused to part with it. On it was some variation of the outline of a map of Vietnam with bit of grim humor superimposed: “Participant, Southeast Asia War Games, 1961-1975: Second Place.”
I was always struck by it. These men of the “Me Generation” had come home to the sneers and backhanded comments of the men of the “Greatest Generation,” their fathers’ era. They had supposedly been the first Americans to lose a war. However, instead of the defensive apparel donned by some vets (“We were winning when I left”), they wore their loss for all to see, pride mingling with a sardonic sense of humor.
Today’s military is made up of still another generation, the Millennials, representatives of the 80 million Americans born between 1980 and 2000. In fact, with nearly 43% of the active duty force age 25 or younger and roughly 66% of it 30 or under, it’s one of the most Millennial-centric organizations around.
As a whole, the Millennials have been regularly pilloried in the press for being the “Participation Trophy Generation.” Coddled, self-centered, with delusions of grandeur, they’re inveterate narcissists with outlandish expectations and a runaway sense of entitlement. They demand everything, they’re addicted to social media, fast Wi-Fi, and phablets, they cry when criticized, they want praise on tap, and refuse to wear anything but their hoodies and “fuck you flip-flops” like the face of their generation, the Ur-millennial: Mark Zuckerberg!
At least that’s the knock on them. Then again, when didn’t prior generations knock the current one?
The National Institutes of Health did determine people in their 20's have Narcissistic Personality Disorder three times more often than those 65 or older and a recent survey by Reason and pollster Rupe did find that those 18-24 are indeed in favor of participation trophies unlike older Americans who overwhelmingly favor winners-only prizes. Still, it’s a little early to pass blanket judgment on an entire generation of whom the youngest members are only on the cusp of high school. The Millennials may yet surprise even the most cantankerous coots. Time will tell.
The Millennial military, however, isn’t doing the generation any favors. Despite its dismal record when it comes to winning wars and a recent magnification of its repeated failures in Iraq, today’s military seems to crave and demand that its soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen be thanked and lauded at every turn. As a result, the Pentagon is involved in stage-managing all manner of participation-trophy spectacles to make certain they are -- from the ballpark to the NASCAR track to the Academy of Country Music's “An All-Star Salute to the Troops” concert at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas earlier this year.
And like those great enablers of the Millennial trophy kids, so-called helicopter parents, the American public regularly provides cheap praise and empty valorization for veterans, writes Rory Fanning in TomDispatch debut. A veteran of the war in Afghanistan -- having served two tours with the 2nd Army Ranger Battalion before becoming a conscientious objector -- Fanning explores America’s thank-you-for-your-service culture, what vets are actually being thanked for, and why Rihanna’s hollow patriotism left him depressed. His moving new book, Worth Fighting For: An Army Ranger’s Journey Out of the Military and Across America, captures his 3,000-mile trek through and encounter with this country, an unforced march meant to honor Pat Tillman and question the nature of our recent wars.
I don’t get to hang out with Vietnam vets as much as I used to, but late one night a year or two ago I found myself with a few of them in an almost deserted bar. Having ducked out of the annual meeting of a veterans’ group, we ordered some beers from a Millennial-age waiter. He asked if my 60-something compatriots were attending the nearby conference and they mumbled that they indeed were. The waiter seemed to momentarily straighten up. “Thank you for your service,” he solemnly intoned before bounding off to get the beers. One of veterans -- a Marine who had seen his fair share of combat -- commented on how much he hated that phrase. “They do it reflexively. That’s how they’ve been raised,” I replied. “I hope they wise up,” said another of the vets. Time -- as with all things Millennial -- will tell. Nick Turse
Thank You for Your Valor, Thank You for Your Service, Thank You, Thank You, Thank You…
Still on the Thank-You Tour-of-Duty Circuit, 13 Years Later
By Rory Fanning
Last week, in a quiet indie bookstore on the north side of Chicago, I saw the latest issue of Rolling Stone resting on a chrome-colored plastic table a few feet from a barista brewing a vanilla latte. A cold October rain fell outside. A friend of mine grabbed the issue and began flipping through it. Knowing that I was a veteran, he said, "Hey, did you see this?" pointing to a news story that seemed more like an ad. It read in part:
"This Veterans Day, Bruce Springsteen, Eminem, Rihanna, Dave Grohl, and Metallica will be among numerous artists who will head to the National Mall in Washington D.C. on November 11th for 'The Concert For Valor,' an all-star event that will pay tribute to armed services."
"Concert For Valor? That sounds like something the North Korean government would organize," I said as I typed Concertforvalor.com into my MacBook Pro looking for more information.
The sucking sound from the espresso maker was drowning out a 10 year old Shins song. As I read, my heart sank, my shoulders slumped.
Special guests at the Concert for Valor were to include: Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, and Steven Spielberg. The mission of the concert, according to a press release, was to “raise awareness” of veterans issues and “provide a national stage for ensuring that veterans and their families know that their fellow Americans’ gratitude is genuine.”
Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Michael Mullen were to serve in an advisory capacity, and Starbucks, HBO, and JPMorgan Chase were to pay for it all. "We are honored to play a small role to help raise awareness and support for our service men and women,” said HBO chairman Richard Plepler.
Though I couldn’t quite say why, that Concert for Valor ad felt tired and sad, despite the images of Rihanna singing full-throated into a gold microphone and James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett of Metallica wailing away on their guitars. I had gotten my own share of “thanks” from civilians when I was still a U.S. Army Ranger. Who hadn’t? It had been the endless theme of the post-9/11 era, how thankful other Americans were that we would do... well, what exactly, for them? And here it was again. I couldn’t help wondering: Would veterans somewhere actually feel the gratitude that Starbucks and HBO hoped to convey?
I went home and cooked dinner for my wife and little girl in a semi-depressed state, thinking about that word “valor” which was to be at the heart of the event and wondering about the Hall of Fame line-up of twenty-first century liberalism that was promoting it or planning to turn out to hail it: Rolling Stone, the magazine of Hunter S. Thompson and all things rock and roll; Bruce Springsteen, the billion-dollar working-class hero; Eminem, the white rapper who has sold more records than Elvis; Metallica, the crew who sued Napster and the metal band of choice for so many longhaired, disenfranchised youth of the 1980's and 1990's. They were all going to say “thank you” - again.
Raising (Whose?) Awareness
Later that night, I sat down and Googled “vets honored.” Dozens and dozens of stories promptly queued up on my screen. (Try it yourself.) One of the first items I clicked on was the 50th anniversary celebration in Bangor, Maine, of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the alleged Pearl Harbor of the Vietnam War. Governor Paul LePage had spoken ringingly of the veterans of that war: “These men were just asked to go to a foreign land and protect our freedoms. And they weren’t treated with respect when they returned home. Now it’s time to acknowledge it.”
Vietnam, he insisted, was all about protecting freedom - such a simple and innocent explanation for such a long and horrific war. Lest you forget, the governor and those gathered in Bangor that day were celebrating a still-murky “incident” that touched off a massive American escalation of the war. It was claimed that North Vietnamese patrol boats had twice attacked an American destroyer, though President Lyndon Johnson later suggested that the incident might even have involved shooting at "flying fish" or "whales." As for protecting freedom in Vietnam, tell the dead Vietnamese in America’s “free fire zones” about that.
No one, however, cared about such details. The point was that eternal “thank you.” If only, I thought, some inquisitive and valorous local reporter had asked the governor, “Treated with disrespect by whom?” And pointed out the mythology behind the idea that American civilians had mistreated GIs returning from Vietnam. (Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for the Veterans Administration, which denied returning soldiers proper healthcare, or the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion, organizations that weren’t eager to claim the country’s defeated veterans of a disastrous war as their own.)
When it came to thanks and “awareness raising,” no American war with a still living veteran seemed too distant to be ignored. Google told me, for example, that Upper Gwynedd, Pennsylvania, had recently celebrated its 12th annual “Multi-Cultural Day” by thanking its “forgotten Korean War Veterans.” According to a local newspaper report, included in the festivities were martial arts demonstrations and traditional Korean folk dancing.
The Korean War was the precursor to Vietnam, with similar results. As with the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the precipitating event of the war that North Korea ignited on June 25, 1950, remains open to question. Evidence suggests that, with U.S. approval, South Korea initiated a bombardment of North Korean villages in the days leading up to the invasion.
As in Vietnam, there, too, the U.S. supported a corrupt autocrat and used napalm on a mass scale. Millions died, including staggering numbers of civilians, and North Korea was left in rubble by war’s end. Folk dancing was surely in short supply. As for protecting our freedoms in Korea, enough said.
These two ceremonies seemed to catch a particular mood (reflected in so many similar, if more up-to-date versions of the same). They might have benefited from a little “awareness raising” when it came to what the American military has actually been doing these last years, not to say decades, beyond our borders. They certainly summed up much of the frustration I was feeling with the Concert for Valor. Plenty of thank yous, for sure, but no history when it came to what the thanks were being offered for in, say, Iraq or Afghanistan, no statistics on taxpayer dollars spent or where they went, or on innocent lives lost and why.
Will the “Concert for Valor” mention the trillions of dollars rung up terrorizing Muslim countries for oil, the ratcheting up of the police and surveillance state in this country since 9/11, the hundreds of thousands of lives lost thanks to the wars of George W. Bush and Barack Obama? Is anyone going to dedicate a song to Chelsea Manning, or John Kiriakou, or Edward Snowden - two of them languishing in prison and one in exile - for their service to the American people? Will the Concert for Valor raise anyone’s awareness when it comes to the fact that, to this day, veterans lack proper medical attention, particularly for mental health issues, or that there is a veteran suicide every 80 minutes in this country? Let’s hope they find time in between drum solos, but myself, I’m not counting on it.
Thank Yous
While Googling around, I noticed an allied story about President Obama christening a poetic sounding “American Veterans Disabled for Life Memorial” on October 5th. There, he wisely noted that “the U.S. should never rush into war.” As he spoke, however, the Air Force, the Navy, and Special Forces personnel (who wear boots that do touch the ground, even in Iraq), as well as the headquarters of “the Big Red One,” the Army’s 1st Infantry Division, were already involved in the latest war he had personally ordered in Iraq and Syria, while, of course, bypassing Congress.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you! Damn, I voted for Obama because he said he’d end our overseas wars. At least it’s not Bush sending the planes, drones, missiles, and troops back there, because if it were, I’d be mad.
Then there were the numerous stories about “Honor Flights” sponsored by Southwest Airlines that offered all World War II veterans and the terminally ill veterans of more recent wars a free trip to Washington to “reflect at their memorials” before they died. Honor flights turn out to be a particularly popular way to honor veterans. Local papers in Richfield, Utah, Des Moines, Iowa, Elgin, Illinois, Austin, Texas, Miami, Florida, and so on place by place across significant swaths of the country have run stories about dying hometown “heroes” who have participated in these flights, a kind of nothing-but-the-best-in-corporate-sponsorship for the last of the “Greatest Generation.”
“Welcome home” ceremonies, with flags, marching bands, heartfelt embraces, much weeping, and the usual babies and small children missed during tours of duty in our war zones are also easy to find. In the first couple of screens Google offered in response to the phrase “welcome home ceremony,” I found the usual thank-you celebrations for veterans returning from Afghanistan in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, and Saint Albans, Vermont, among other places. "We don't do enough for our veterans, for what they do for us, we hear the news, but to be up there in a field, and be shot at, and sometimes coming home disabled, we don't realize how lucky we are sometimes to have the people who have served their country," one of the Saint Albans attendees was typically quoted as saying.
“Do enough...?” In America, isn’t thank you plenty?
Oddly, it’s harder to find thank-you ceremonies for living vets involved in America’s numerous smaller interventions in places like the Dominican Republic, Lebanon, Grenada, Kosovo, Somalia, Libya, and various CIA-organized coups and proxy wars around the world, but I won’t be surprised if they, too, exist. I was wondering, though: What about all those foreign soldiers we’ve trained to fight our wars for us in places like South Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan? Shouldn’t they be thanked as well? And how about members of the Afghan Mujahedeen that we armed and funded in the 1980's while they gave the Soviet Union its own “Vietnam” (and who are now fighting for al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or other extreme Islamist outfits)? Or what about the Indonesian troops we armed under the presidency of Gerald Ford, who committed possibly genocidal acts in East Timor in 1975? Or has our capacity for thanks been used up in the service of American vets?
Since 9/11, those thank yous have been aimed at veterans with the regularity of the machine gun fire that may still haunt their dreams. Veterans have also been offered special consideration when it comes to applications for mostly menial jobs so that they can “utilize the skills” they learned in the military. While they continue to march in those welcome home parades and have concerts organized in their honor, the thank yous are in no short supply. The only question that never seems to come up is: What exactly are they being thanked for?
Heroes Who Afford Us Freedom
Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz has said of the upcoming Concert for Valor:
“The post-9/11 years have brought us the longest period of sustained warfare in our nation’s history. The less than one percent of Americans who volunteered to serve during this time have afforded the rest of us remarkable freedoms - but that freedom comes with a responsibility to understand their sacrifice, to honor them, and to appreciate the skills and experience they offer when they return home.”
It was crafty of Schultz to redirect that famed 1% label from the ultra rich, represented by CEOs like him, onto our “heroes.” At the concert, I hope Schultz has a chance to get more specific about those “remarkable freedoms.” Will he mention that the U.S. has the highest per capita prison population on the planet? Does he include among those remarkable freedoms the guarantee that dogs, Tasers, tear gas, and riot police will be sent after you if you stay out past dark protesting the killing of an unarmed Black teenager by a representative of this country’s increasingly militarized police? Will the freedom to be too big to fail and so to have the right to melt down the economy and walk away without going to prison -- as Jamie Dimon, the CEO of Chase, did -- be mentioned? Do these remarkable freedoms include having every American phone call and email recorded and stored away by the NSA?
And what about that term “hero”? Many veterans reject it, and not just out of Gary Cooperesque modesty either. Most veterans who have seen combat, watched babies get torn apart, or their comrades die in their arms, or the most powerful army on Earth spend trillions of dollars fighting some of the poorest people in the world for 13 years feel anything but heroic. But that certainly doesn’t stop the use of the term. So why do we use it? As journalist Cara Hoffman points out at Salon:
“‘[H]ero’ refers to a character, a protagonist, something in fiction, not to a person, and using this word can hurt the very people it’s meant to laud. While meant to create a sense of honor, it can also buy silence, prevent discourse, and benefit those in power more than those navigating the new terrain of home after combat. If you are a hero, part of your character is stoic sacrifice, silence. This makes it difficult for others to see you as flawed, human, vulnerable, or exploited.”
We use the term hero in part because it makes us feel good and in part because it shuts soldiers up (which, believe me, makes the rest of us feel better). Labeled as a hero, it’s also hard to think twice about putting your weapons down. Thank yous to heroes discourage dissent, which is one reason military bureaucrats feed off the term.
There are American soldiers stationed around the globe who think about filing conscientious objector status (as I once did), and I sometimes hear from some of them.
They often grasp the way in which the militarized acts of imperial America are helping to create the very enemies they are then being told to kill. They understand that the trillions of dollars being wasted on war will never be spent on education, health care, or the development of clean energy here at home. They know that they are fighting for American control over the flow of fossil fuels on this planet, the burning of which is warming our world and threatening human existence.
Then you have Bruce Springsteen and Metallica telling them “thank you” for wearing that uniform, that they are heroes, that whatever it is they’re doing in distant lands while we go about our lives here isn’t an issue. There is even the possibility that, one day, you, the veteran, might be ushered onto that stage during a concert or onto the field during a ballgame for a very public thank you. The conflicted soldier thinks twice.
Valor
I’m back at that indie bookstore sitting at the same chrome-colored table trying to hash all this out, including my own experiences in the Army Rangers, and end on a positive note. The latest issue of Rolling Stone appears to have sold out. Out the window, the sun is peeking through a thick web of clouds. They sell wine here, too. The sooner I finish this, the sooner I can start drinking.
There is no question that we should honor people who fight for justice and liberty. Many veterans enlisted in the military thinking that they were indeed serving a noble cause, and it’s no lie to say that they fought with valor for their brothers and sisters to their left and right. Unfortunately, good intentions at this stage are no substitute for good politics. The war on terror is going into its 14th year. If you really want to talk about “awareness raising,” it’s years past the time when anyone here should be able to pretend that our 18-year-olds are going off to kill and die for good reason. How about a couple of concerts to make that point?
Until then, I’m going to drink wine and try to enjoy the music over the sound of the espresso machine.
Rory Fanning walked across the United States for the Pat Tillman Foundation in 2008-2009, following two deployments to Afghanistan with the 2nd Army Ranger Battalion. Fanning became a conscientious objector after his second tour. He is the author of the new book Worth Fighting For: An Army Ranger’s Journey Out of the Military and Across America (Haymarket, 2014).
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Rebecca Solnit's Men Explain Things to Me, and Tom Engelhardt's just published Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2014 Rory Fanning
Saturday, August 30, 2014
National Guard Turns to Food Banks Because Rick Perry Hasn't Paid Them Yet
By Arit John
Last month, Perry announced he was sending 1,000 National Guard troops to defend the border in the wake of inaction from the federal government. The move was met with skepticism, especially from border town sheriffs who wanted the resources to go towards police officers, since National Guard troops aren't allowed to arrest or detain undocumented immigrants. Others balked at the price — it will cost an estimated $12 million a month to sustain the troops, and as of last month the state wasn't sure how it would pay that price.
Here's the full statement from Perry's office:
The National Guard
troops Texas Gov. Rick Perry ordered to the U.S. Mexico border last
month are using food and gas aid from a local food bank because they
haven't been paid in weeks, according to the KGBT.
Members of the National Guard reach out for assistance for 50 troops
who were deployed around August 11 visited the food banks, and members
of the group told KGBT that they won't be paid until September 5th.
Related Stories
- 2 Guard troops along border getting financial help Associated Press
- Texas National Guard Troops At Border Can't Afford Food Huffington Post
- Some Texas National Guard troops on border using food handouts: lawmaker Reuters
- Correction: Immigration-National Guard story Associated Press
- Mexico protests Texas National Guard troops on US border AFP
(Update 3:30pm: In
a statement to The Wire Gov. Perry's press office challenged the
account given by the RGV food bank, and said the Texas National Guard
only has a record of two troops receiving aid.)
Last month, Perry announced he was sending 1,000 National Guard troops to defend the border in the wake of inaction from the federal government. The move was met with skepticism, especially from border town sheriffs who wanted the resources to go towards police officers, since National Guard troops aren't allowed to arrest or detain undocumented immigrants. Others balked at the price — it will cost an estimated $12 million a month to sustain the troops, and as of last month the state wasn't sure how it would pay that price.
Now it seems that the troops arrived before the funds did. Democratic state Rep. Rene Olivera, who earlier condemned the "militarization" of the border, said "it's embarrassing that our troops have to stand in a food pantry line. This is the fault of the state."
Here's the full statement from Perry's office:
First, the suggestion that Guardsmen aren’t getting paid is false. They are getting paid on a regular schedule with their first pay day on Sept. 5, then every two weeks after that.
Second, based on information provided by the Texas National Guard, two soldiers sought and received assistance through the Family Assistance Coordinator. Family Assistance Coordinators routinely help Guardsmen all across the state with needs they may have, regardless of deployment or duty status.
Also, based on information provided by the Guard, they currently have no indication that any Guardsmen received any assistance from the Rio Grande Valley Food Bank.
Governor Perry is confident the Guard stands ready to assist to any Soldier who may need it, regardless of deployment or duty status so they can meet the needs of their family, or the mission they are performing.
This article was originally published at http://www.thewire.com/politics/2014/08/national-guard-troops-turn-to-food-bank-because-rick-perry-hasnt-paid-them-yet/379384/
Friday, August 8, 2014
Obama Authorizes Air Strikes, Aid Mission in Iraq
By ABC News via World News
President Obama
said tonight he has authorized "targeted" air strikes if necessary to
protect American interests in Iraq from insurgent forces that are taking
over the country's northern cities.
If the terrorist group ISIS reaches Erbil, the president said he will
call in U.S. air strikes. The U.S. has an embassy and other staffers in
the city. Air strikes have also been authorized to protect families
fleeing ISIS in the Sinjar Mountains.
"These innocent families are faced with a choice: descend and be slaughtered or stay and slowly die of hunger," he said.
Obama said U.S. combat troops will not return.
"As commander in chief, I will not allow the United States to be drawn into fighting another war in Iraq," Obama said.
The announcements marked the deepest American engagement in Iraq since
U.S. troops withdrew in late 2011 after nearly a decade of war.
"Today, America is coming to help," Obama said. "The U.S. cannot turn a blind eye."
An air drop of food, water and medicine made at the request of the Iraqi
government has been completed, the president said in the statement from
the White House.
U.S. aircraft, escorted by fighter jets, dropped 5,300 gallons of fresh
drinking water and 8,000 meals ready to eat. The aircraft were over the
drop area for less than 15 minutes flying at a low altitude, the U.S.
Central Command said in a statement.
The emergency effort is being deployed to help a group of 40,000
Yazidis, a group of ethnic Kurds, who fled villages in northern Iraq
under threat from ISIS.
The Yazidis fled to the Sinjar Mountains, in a remote part of northern
Iraq near the border of Syria, where they are stuck without food or
water while ISIS forces are gathered at the base of the mountains.
ISIS has overtaken much of the northern part of Iraq, including the city
of Mosul, over the past two months. They are simultaneously waging
campaigns for territory in Syria and Lebanon in their quest to create a
unified Islamic state encompassing territory from all three countries.
The Iraqi government has had little success battling ISIS.
In a statement, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said a solution to the
threat posed by ISIS "will require further reconciliation among Iraqi
communities and strengthened Iraqi security forces."
"Department of Defense personnel in Iraq therefore continue to assess
opportunities to help train, advise, and assist Iraqi forces, and will
provide increased support once Iraq has formed a new government," he
said.
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