For those who think that the Peace people dishonor the veterans, think a bit on what the most prominent campaigns has to offer in the way of humiliation. One of the “new and improved” corporate motivational methods is called “peer recognition” because research showed that workers don’t want to actually be, you know, adequately paid for our labor which enriches our bosses and impoverishes us. No, we want the empowerment of “recognition” for our good deeds. Say (and this happens far too often to be hypothetical) you have an innovation that saves your company many times your annual salary. What does the boss do to reward you?
First he patents your innovation and declares it corporate intellectual property, then gives you an award ceremony where he more or less pats your head and tells you “Attaboy!” which those English speakers who own dogs might recognize. There’s even an award letter, usually hand-written by your supervisor, saying “Attaboy!” and sometimes a Warm Fuzzy, which is a recognition pin that looks kind of like a piece of pocket lint or a dust-bunny from under a desk. How special, right? Your peers get to recognize that your contribution made the boss wealthier and as a reward you get treated like a dog in front of God and everybody. In the Military, the ultimate enforcement arm of the Corporate Empire, you get something called a “medal” or a “service ribbon” and there’s even a medal for not getting arrested for a year. Seriously.
This type of manipulative behavior is as old as the idea of organized military. A pay and benefits raise would be a lot more meaningful than a piece of brass or maybe silver with a recycling value of maybe a buck. But gosh darn it, that would be Too Expensive. So the Corporates, the sole beneficiaries of Military Action, get to go even further with the “Thank A Vet” campaign, they get their publicly subsidized (corporate welfare) non-employees to do a really dangerous job, people who are being robbed of THEIR essential rights and freedoms in the name of making Americans (or at least their corporate owners) Free (to take all the resources of the subjugated nations and kill anybody who resists) tend to fight back. Throw airplanes at “our” buildings and such.
Add in that the equipment the military uses, at great public expense and huge private profits to the Corporates, is usually dangerous in itself. Take Depleted Uranium, (please) which makes a steel shell more massive in less space. Those of you who understand ballistics would appreciate that and those who don’t, study it. It’s simple Newtonian physics. With a titanium tip and an explosive charge it can go through any armor. “Terror” groups who are targeted by, say, American or British tanks realize this and if they can obtain an intact round (one that didn’t get smashed or exploded) will re-load it and send it back. The uranium, the heaviest naturally occurring element, has value especially in small pieces to be used in a “dirty bomb”. (The Corporates, natural born and then trained Terrorists themselves, unleash “dirty bombs” on Americans every damn day, witness the Toxic Waste Dump “Gold Hill Mesa” being sold as median priced McMansion real estate right here on the West Side of Colorado Springs.)
It’s also poisonous in the same way that mercury, lead and white arsenic are poisonous. A whole list of metals heavier than iron in fact.
Instead of paying the soldiers who contracted DU poisoning in the past few wars, the Publicly Funded enforcement arm of the Corporates, the Pentagon, denounced them as frauds, malingerers and punished them.
Thanks, Vet!
The same with Agent Orange. The Army investigators and lawyers (in Colorado that’s pronounced “liars”, true story) said something really scary about that, and it’s scary because it’s true. “The Military uses a vast array of chemicals to maintain the ‘safety’ of the bases” and coupled that with the truly chilling “there’s no significant difference between those exposed to Agent Orange and those soldiers who were not, in relation to cancers.”
True. Agent Orange is a weed killer, on base they can’t afford to have high brush, grass, weeds and trees. So they poison them. They also can’t have animals wandering around, snakes, the rodents on which the snakes feed, skunks, foxes, cats, dogs, or the local equivalents Bugs too. And of course birds. A bird being hit by an aircraft can seriously ruin the day for the pilot. And cost the Corporate Overlords a pretty penny for each (not really, the Corporates who gain the most from Military Action pay the least taxes, it’s the Taxpayers who pay).
And that parenthetical statement says a lot…
See, the “Thank A Vet” campaign, much lauded as Corporate Generosity, there’s a reason Corporate gift-giving is so well documented.
Because they don’t actually “give” the money or services. They deduct them from their taxes. Then do like they did in August and whine, snivel and wring their hands over the Deficit.
The “Thank A Vet” program, the “You are not forgotten” POW flags that line the pockets of Ross Perot and his butt-buddies like John McCain, publicly funded, most of them double-dipped public funds because they’re sold to municipalities. Can you think of a single government building that isn’t flying one of those retarded flags? And it’s based on a lie too, the Hanoi government turned over all the prisoners of war they were holding back in 1975. Notwithstanding all the Chuck Norris, Steven Seagal, Jean-Claud van Damm, Sylvester Stallone and other non-veterans-who-portray-soldiers-in-the-proud-tradition-of-Ronald Reagan-George Bush-and-John Wayne making a lot of money providing the propaganda that sells the flags.
Speaking of “double dipping” and George Bush, as in Bush the Elder, when he attained the presidency he ended “double dipping” meaning getting both CHAMPUS and Medicare benefits. Way to Thank A Vet, George!
My grandfather who had recently passed away had told me that I should have stayed in for the full twenty years because the Military would take good care of me in my old age. Yeah, right.
His widow, my Grandma, died penniless in a nursing home, her Social Security and Medicare benefits signed over to the home. Way To Thank A Vet, Reaganite Sucks!
The current wrangling over whether or not the Workers who EARNED the benefits of Social Security, SSI, Medicaid, etc… should actually receive them, with the theme that only the Rich deserve or even need to have leisure, discretionary income, health care, all the goodies that separate the industrialized world from the Third World… and the rest of us only need a warm fuzzy Attaboy!
George Bush the Chimpleton, by the way, actually went one step further in demeaning the people we’re supposed to pat on the head and tell them “Good Boy! Who’s a good boy? You’re a good boy, yes you are!”
He actually rubbed the head of a double amputee veteran in a photo-opportunity propaganda session at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
The veteran was a Black man as well, the racist connotations of rubbing the head of a black person are well known, but it’s so God-damn Plantation Ignorant that even people in TEXAS don’t do it.
Keep your thanks, I’d rather have the money due me. I didn’t stay in the military long enough to get anything but a free grave when I die, but my very poorly paid service to the Corporations in the private “workforce” (they don’t even call us Human Resources anymore, how’s that for recognition?) wherein they tore my right foot half off while taking 5 times what they paid me, that in itself earns entitlements Due Wages. Just, you know, I realize I ain’t going to be paid.
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