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Excerpt:  Untold numbers of servicemembers residing off base will see their next paycheck shrink by as much as $250 -- and many of them may not even know the blow is coming.

Disbursing shops at several 1st Marine Division and 1st Force Service Support Group battalions surveyed over the past week said they learned only recently about the elimination of "geographic rate protection" under the Basic Allowance for Housing.

... but it's no match for Bush's organized, systemic mistreatment of troops   =Madeline Zane= | LINK

Excerpt:  The Wall Street Journal describes the pittance set aside for veteran’s benefits as "Congress’ generosity," even as the Republican- controlled Congress and Bush Pentagon get set to slash billions more from Veterans Administration’s (VA) programs. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal (1-25-05), Pentagon official David Chu, in a mockery of the contribution of veterans, defended a new round of cuts by ironically describing funding for programs like veterans’ education and job training, health care, pensions, VA housing and the like as "hurtful" to national security.

Excerpt:  The intent of this invasion was to establish a permanent military presence in the region, and to gain complete control over the Iraqi economy. Another goal of the invasion was to demonstrate US military invincibility to the rest of the world. The reality has accomplished exactly the opposite. There is no more significant outcome of this war than that.

... We not only want to appeal to those who are dissenting, it's time to start encouraging dissent in the ranks and more.

Some folks were uncomfortable recently when I said that we should see the US armed forces as ours, and begin to reclaim them. But we have to begin to see this struggle for what itmust become, a fight for control over state power. That includes the military.

And we have to attend to the situation in Venezuela and Cuba. A strong military committed to a people's agenda is essential. I am not calling for supporting the troops. This is a call for their eventual wholesale defection from the bourgeoisie's control.

In the same address, I called for the arrest and indefinite detention of the whole executive branch. That should put things in context. How are we going to preach revolution as long as it remains a figurative term? We have to set our sights higher. ...

Excerpt:  An army of U.S. veterans more than twice the size of Operation Iraqi Freedom have lost their health insurance benefits since Bush took office. As many as half a million vets are homeless. Seven VA hospitals are being closed as part of an effort to "restructure" the Department of Veterans Affairs. Meanwhile, veterans of the Iraq campaign can fall in line with over 250,000 U.S. veterans who are already waiting at least six months to see a doctor.

Excerpt:  "The women and men of our armed forces put their lives on the line every day to preserve and safeguard the freedoms that all Americans cherish and enjoy," said Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of the United States District Court in Washington.

"Absent an informed consent or presidential waiver, the United States cannot demand that members of the armed forces also serve as guinea pigs for experimental drugs," Sullivan said.

The Pentagon had no immediate comment.

Excerpt:  The administration also proposed levying a $250 annual charge on all Priority 8 veterans — those with “non-service-related illnesses” — who seek treatment at Veterans Administration (VA) facilities, and seeks to close VA hospitals to Priority 8 veterans who earn more than $26,000 a year.

# Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind-stone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice.

=Chris, quoting Dickens=

Excerpt:   Veterans get a quick ceremony, a wreath provided by the American taxpayers, and empty rhetoric.

An act of ‘betrayal’
In the midst of war, key family benefits face cuts
Army Times

Excerpt:   So just who truly supported the troops? Those who sent them to Iraq with no clear plan for bringing them home again or those who warned, don't go there, it's a quagmire?

The Bush administration is quietly piling up victories in a legal battle to block payments to 17 U.S. combat veterans who were captured and tortured in the first Gulf War and won a suit against Iraq for nearly a billion dollars.

The former POWs — whipped, beaten, burned, electrically shocked and starved by their Iraqi captors in 1991 — say they are baffled by the administration's refusal to let them collect any of the assets of Iraq now under U.S. control, and by the Justice Department's efforts to overturn a federal court decision upholding their claims to compensation.

Items needed include AA batteries, sunblock, Chapstick and personal products such as toothpaste, Gold Bond powders, aspirin, ibuprofen, shampoo, lotion, body soap, shaving cream, disposable razors, toilet paper, antiperspirant, sunglasses, eye drops, laundry detergent, clothespins, clothesline, papers, pencils, stationary, coffee, coffee filters, powdered creamer, sugar packets, sauce packets of all kinds (from fast food places), powdered drinks, duct tape, Ziplock bags, hand sanitizer, Windex and paper towels, Styrofoam cups, newspapers and magazines ...

• Troops dig into own pockets to pay for gear
• Bush ponders further cuts to veterans' disability benefits
• Wounded billed for hospital food

The Pentagon wants to cut the pay of its 148,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, who are already contending with guerrilla-style attacks, homesickness and 120- degree-plus heat.

Unless Congress and President Bush take quick action when Congress returns after Labor Day, the uniformed Americans in Iraq and the 9,000 in Afghanistan will lose a pay increase approved last April of $75 a month in "imminent danger pay" and $150 a month in "family separation allowances."

Aug. 15:
Doubletime change of heart:
DoD now says pay won't be cut

Rush Limbaugh: "Folks, we're getting a daily death update out of Iraq, and we're hearing slogans like, ‘One a day,’ and ‘Our troops are being slaughtered,’ from the Democrats, as their willing accomplices in the press try to concoct this notion that the casualty rate over there is outrageous and intolerable. The following statistics come from the Centers for Disease Control website: On a daily basis, on average, 10 Americans die by drowning, and nine Americans die by fire in their homes. 14 Americans die by pedestrian accidents. 27 Americans die in falls. On average, 50 Americans a day are murdered. 118 die in auto accidents, and 25 people die from AIDS every day, on average. Yesterday, two Americans died in battle in Iraq."

The new chief of US military operations in Iraq has criticised disgruntled American soldiers who have become angry about the length of their deployment.

General John Abizaid says his troops need to understand what they are fighting for.

The article doesn't suggest what that might be.   —H&HH

New Jersey Democratic Sen. Frank Lautenberg sharply criticized Bush for the "bring them on" comment.

"I am shaking my head in disbelief. When I served in the army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander — let alone the commander in chief — invite enemies to attack U.S. troops," said Lautenberg in a statement.

Taken piecemeal, all these corner-cutting moves might be viewed as mere flesh wounds. But even flesh wounds are fatal if you suffer enough of them. It adds up to a troubling pattern that eventually will hurt morale — especially if the current breakneck operations tempo also rolls on unchecked and the tense situations in Iraq and Afghanistan do not ease.

"Military salaries are so low that they are almost impossible for a family to live on, leaving some women desperate, especially now when we also have the emotional turmoil of worrying if our men are safe in Iraq," she said.

Like many of her friends, the mother of a seven-month-old boy, relies on an American Red Cross program to supply her with crucial baby formula and on additional help from the military community.

Just this past week, as our military was ordered into combat in Iraq by President Bush, his party was working on a federal budget that would reduce funding for veterans health care and benefit programs by nearly $25 billion dollars!

Over a ten-year period the GOP is proposing a cut of $9.7 billion in veterans' health care. For other veterans' benefits, including cash payments to veterans disabled by military service, the Republican budget calls for a $463 million cut during the next year and a $15 billion cut in spending from current levels during the next ten years.

What will this 463 million dollar cut in mandatory spending mean to veterans? There will be severe cuts in benefits paid to those who are disabled as a result of military service. Such benefits comprise the vast majority of the Veterans Affairs budget for military programs. Ninety percent of the proposed cuts will be from cash payments to service disabled veterans, low-income wartime veterans and their families/survivors.

The Disabled American Veterans (DAV) has labeled as "indefensible and callous" a plan by the House Budget Committee to slash $470 billion from domestic spending, including health care for sick and disabled veterans. The draft budget resolution would leave the $1.6 trillion Bush tax cut plan intact and allow huge spending increases on defense and homeland security.

DAV National Commander Edward R. Heath, Sr. expressed the organization's outrage at the spending cuts proposed in a March 12 House Budget Committee hearing. "You are asking veterans to swallow a bitter pill to remedy an illness of your own making," National Commander Heath said in a letter to Committee Chairman Jim Nussle (R-Iowa). "Cutting already under funded veterans' programs to offset the costs of tax cuts is indefensible and callous." National Commander Heath cited a Congressional Budget Office report that the President's tax cut plan would cause a $1.8 trillion budget deficit over the next 10 years.

"You will be cutting benefits and services for disabled veterans at a time when we have thousands of our servicemembers in harm's way fighting terrorism around the world and when we are sending thousands more of our sons and daughters to fight a war against Iraq," Commander Heath wrote. ...

Troops heading for the Iraqi theater are not getting health screenings, especially blood sampling, mandated by a law Congress enacted in 1997.

The law, which grew out of concern about unexplained illnesses that followed the 1991 gulf war, required that troops receive mental and medical examinations before and after deployment overseas. The tests are intended to provide clues in case the phenomenon known as gulf war syndrome should recur.

Instead, the Pentagon requires only a brief, one-page questionnaire asking for general health-related information. A top Pentagon health official said blood tests would not be especially useful. ...

Veterans groups are angry at President George W. Bush for supporting a 1995 government decision to rescind an old promise of free lifetime health benefits for military retirees.

This is the man who told veterans and active-duty military personnel after the 2000 campaign that he would make sure "promises made to our veterans will be promises kept." So why does he persist in short-changing the retirees, especially when he is preparing for another war and hoping to lure more volunteers for the military? ...

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