As much as we claim to "honor"
our veterans and mourn their deaths on Memorial Day, the plain facts show how
hollow that "honor" and "mourning" are.
In an April 29, 2013 article (Sixty-Seven Senators Urge Obama to Resolve VA Claims Backlog -
Nextgov.com),
the following statistics reveal our hypocrisy:
VA
reported it had 882,023 backlogged claims with 610,150 or 69.2 percent
backlogged more than 125 days. VA had 719,713 claims pending as of April 27,
2009, with 147,293 pending more than 180 days.
The
Senate letter to Obama said the average wait time for approval of first-time
disability claims ranges between 316 and 327 days, adding that in some cities
waits are double the national average. First-time claims take 681 days in Reno,
Nev.; 642 days in New York City; 625 days in Pittsburgh; 619 days Los Angeles;
612 days in Indianapolis; 586 days in Houston; and 510 days in Philadelphia, the
letter said.
"In the
worst cases, veterans have waited and continue to wait 800 days, 900 days and
even 1,000 days for a disability-claims decision from the VA," the letter
said.
Among
injured U.S. veterans returning from our illegal wars of aggression in
Afghanistan and Iraq, nearly 600,000 claims for disability have been backlogged
for more than 125 days (OpEdNews - Article: Nearly 600,000 Wounded Vets Claims for
Disability Suffered in Iraq and Afghanistan Wars "backlogged" for
M).
Mental-
health problems among U.S. drone pilots are higher (1 in 12) than among U.S.
combat pilots (1 in 17) (Harper's Index, May 2013 issue of Harper's
Magazine).
Suicides
among U.S. veterans are also at an all-time high. Since 2007, the number of U.S. veterans
committing suicide each day has increased by 22% (Harper's Index, May 2013
issue of Harper's Magazine).
Meanwhile,
the absolute refusal of President Obama and Congress to create jobs as President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt did to ease the effects of the Great Depression on
most Americans has kept unemployment unconscionably and unnecessarily high
(unless you are a corporation or Wall Street bank profiting from paying slave
wages to endangered workers in Third-World sweatshops such as in
Bangladesh).
The
result is that enlistment in the U.S. military is an alternative to joblessness,
with the patina of the myths of "helping others" or "serving one's country"
attached to it by the most effective propaganda campaign in history. Never mind that U.S. soldiers, now fighting
in multiple wars, are actually mercenaries for the U.S. Corporate State who wind
up occupying foreign countries and oppressing and killing the residents there in
a 21st-century version of colonialism. Never mind that U.S. troops are now stationed
in more than 1,000 U.S. military bases in more than 130 countries. Never mind that the U.S. under Obama has
"special operations" teams in at least 75 countries to spy, sabotage, and
subvert the workings of any governments that have the audacity to attempt to be
independent of U.S. policies. Never mind
that every ocean on earth has nuclear-armed U.S. warships patrolling on and
under its surface. Never mind that the
United States is now the most wide-spread global empire in history and that
"our" soldiers are the military component of that empire, contradicting all U.S.
pretensions to "democracy".
Memorial
Day for more and more of us is now a tragic lie. It presumes to honor our war dead, even as
the U.S. spends more than the rest of the nations on earth to fight unnecessary,
avoidable, illegal wars of aggression everywhere it believes its "national
interests" (i.e. corporate/Wall Street interests) are threatened, and where
nations refuse to knuckle under to the U.S. Empire's designs. The infamous Carter Doctrine of "The Middle
East oil belongs to the United States" has been expanded to the entire planet,
whose dwindling resources are viewed, by the Plundering Class, as belonging to
the United States by virtue of its military power. Might makes right.
Since
1945, all U.S. administrations have viewed our soldiers as tools of Empire, and
have then pretended to "mourn" and "honor" these fallen "patriots" on Memorial
Day in sincere-sounding, supposedly heartfelt speeches, even as they plan the
next military campaign abroad to enforce U.S. imperial goals, regardless of the
human cost.
Meanwhile,
the war-profiteering corporations and Wall Street, aided by the war-promoting
corporate media, rake in their mega-profits from all our wars, from production
of weapons, many of which are not even wanted by the Pentagon or are unusable;
to theft or control of resources such as oil, natural gas, and minerals used in
cell phones from other countries; to post-war construction in countries the U.S.
has devastated, such as Iraq.
This
rank hypocrisy stinks to high heaven, and must be called out for what it is: the
bloody lies of power-mad psychopaths in positions of prominence and wealth they
have taken by the blood of millions of others, including our soldiers and the
innocents killed and maimed for the plunder of our Empire.
Here
is what Major General Smedley Butler wrote in the last chapter of War
Is A Racket, titled "To Hell With War!":
Three
steps must be taken to smash the war racket.
1. We
must take the profit out of war.
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