Mob Muscle For Thugocracy

It's patently obvious how this corrupt cabal views the military. The people in the armed forces are merely expendable pawns, convenient and subservient props when Dim Son and his cronies need to speechify. They're cannon fodder as the criminals plan their agenda for total world domination and disposable garbage if they get hurt or sick during service. All that posturing aside that the Bushistas love to do, the military rank and file is treated exactly like the general american public - with contempt and disdain.

It seems people are waking up to this fraud, so there's a few changes to boost enlistment.

U.S. Army expands by lowering the bar on recruits

"Two weeks ago, the Pentagon announced the "good news" that the army had met its recruiting goal for October, the first month in a five-year plan to add 65,000 new soldiers to the ranks by 2012.
But Pentagon statistics show the army met that goal by accepting a higher percentage of enlistees with criminal records, drug or alcohol problems, or health conditions that would have ordinarily disqualified them from service."

So the military is offering waivers, expunging criminal records and overlooking those slightly alarming sociopathic problems. That's just fine for the manipulative crew in the front of this bus plunge. Their worldview is strictly corporate short term expediency for their agenda - fill the ranks and get the boots on the ground. Too bad if the promises made to lure them into service aren't kept or if the wounded and disabled rot their lives away at places like Walter Reed.

It wasn't always like this. The first GI bill in 1944 actually ensured that service personnel were to be looked after and given tremendous opportunities after their service, unlike the bogus recruiting gimmick it is today. It's generally seen as the greatest piece of legislation in american history, and it made modern america. The government at the time seemed to care for the soldiers and the GI bill, if inadvertently, fueled the tremendous post war boom and built the middle class. An average GI in 1940 had only one year of high school but some eight million veterans used the bill to complete school and get degrees.

"When President Franklin Roosevelt signed the GI Bill into law in the waning days of World War II, he saw it as part of his New Deal program. The law, officially called the Servicemen's Readjustment Act, promised returning veterans that the government would pay the full cost of tuition and books at any public or private college or job-training program. It also provided unemployment insurance and loans to buy homes and start businesses.

By contrast, the current Montgomery GI Bill, passed in 1984, asks active duty members to accept a pay reduction of $100 per month through twelve months of military service. When they return to school, they receive $1,100 monthly for a maximum of three years of education benefits. It's an amount that doesn't come close to covering the cost of a modern college education, but it does help some veterans--if they can get through the red tape."

The original GI bill paid back $5 to $12 in taxes for every $1 of federal money spent because educated vets earned more dough in the long run, but that's way too farsighted for the current thugs. A democratic bill to cut through the current bureaucratic mess to really help vets is opposed by this administration and won't go anywhere. They simply do not care who joins the military now because they aren't going to care for them after their service. The fascists plainly believe recruits are merely hired killers in service to the empire, just mercenaries that they don't have to pay so much. Contrast the crumbs sparingly handed out to vets to the hundreds of billions shovelled into corporate pockets after the american public is bludgeoned with that "support the troops" mantra, and you see the real priorities.

"In short, the government's approach is not to benefit veterans, but to make the benefits of service seem attractive to soldiers when they enlist, while extracting as little money as possible from the federal Treasury. Today's GI Bill is not so much a ticket to college but a recruiting tool that can be used to persuade skeptical young people to join the military."