A Catholic nun friend of mine said some years ago about the US, "We are a killer nation, we can kill them fast or we can kill them slow."
This budget represents perfectly those words. We can kill people around the world fast with our obscene stock of deadly military machines and we can kill our own people slowly by calculated and cruel neglect as social programs are destroyed and life expectancy diminishes.
The soul of America is dark.
Bruce
8 1/2 times making a necessity for Veteran's benefits than the actual benefits... and that's since the massive shift to making Vets into the pretty boys of the establishment. There's going to be a lot of that this weekend, alongside the recruiter ads about how you can improve your life forever by joining the Death Machine today.
ReplyDeleteA friend with whom I shared a few joints and a bit of philosophy, a Scout for the 3rd Herd, still a dangerous military job on which Boy Scouts was and is patterned, said the 'civilian' applications of what he did would be a hit-man or a cop. The same corporations who make the hardware for the Army own all those trade school 'universities' and they get you both ways, learn valuable skills that will get you the best jobs etc... but the only honest answer to that was from the Air Training Command at Lackland. The guys who were separated from us recruits by a few pay grades.
They said the Force wasn't actually concerned about our futures, benefits while in service and certainly not after, And this for the Most Favored of the 99%. They even had recruiters at Lackland do a MAS briefing on, basically, becoming recruiters. Which mainly means sales and marketing of the Air Force product, and you had to be comfortable with parroting the same script we heard at the office and shattered at the Armed Forces Entry and Examination Station and look good in your uniform. From the slickness of the commercials they're releasing now, they have a bigger budget than the bottom three budget sectors combined. There are other commercials which say we the poorest need to pony up the bread to support Wounded Warrior and similar Vet 'charity' organization. Charity in Latin and Greek means Caring. Spank a Vet is more like the reality. But they do acknowledge there is a problem.
The recruiters won't. Your congress critter won't. What about the people who haven't had pieces removed on a far away battlefield, the ones They count on to be or beget the next wave of recruits and thus disabled vets? The Great Society bills were sold as raising kids who would be emotionally and physically healthy, not malnourished, uneducated and lacking enough teeth to pass the draft board.
The reluctant members of Congress were told bluntly that if not enough of the poorest could be drafted, THEIR kids would be.
It might not have been the ONLY selling point, but it was a closing of the deal.
And now they're strangling the Great Society gains. The hypocrisy stinks. But they have a budget for Public Awareness which is about the most mixed up oxymoron they've invented yet, to tell us constantly how good we have it and how we should believe every thing we're told from official sources. Go play and let the Grownups do the thinking.