The Poverty Draft

[unhappycamper]

Poverty Draft
Poverty Draft
by bmcfann25 | Thu, 04/29/2010 - 6:32pm

As the United States' imperialist aggression in the Middle East reaches its ninth year, military recruiters continue to meet or exceed their enlistment quotas. Even with the near certainty of deployment, enlistments are at their highest since the establishment of an all volunteer force in 1973. Last year the Army alone brought in 168,00 active duty troops. That is 103 percent of its goal for the fiscal year. $22,000 is spent on advertising, marketing, recruiters and other budget items per recruit bringing the grand total to $3,696,000,000 that one branch of the military spends on recruitment. In 2010 the Army plans to cut its recruitment spending by 11 percent. Wonder why? Because poverty is doing the recruiting for them.

According to a 2007 Associated Press analysis, “nearly three-fourths of killed in Iraq came from towns where the per capita income was below the national average. More than half came from towns where the percentage of people living in poverty topped the national average.” In order for the military industrial complex to continue to function on the scale projected by our politicians the altruism of working-class young people will continue to be exploited to further the agenda of a very small group of policy makers in Washington.

While de-industrialization continues in the United States it is becoming increasingly evident that politicians will use the military for wars premised on control of natural resources like oil and strategic placement for future imperialistic adventures. Exactly who will have to fight in these wars? The sons and daughters of a disenfranchised working-class.

So what is to be done? We must realize that protesting American aggression in the Middle East doesn't address the root cause of the problem. What happens when another unprovoked act of American imperial aggression inevitably occurs? Will we continue to be reactionary or will we look at the root of the problem. The profiteering politicians that control the military industrial complex will continue to exploit the working-class until we rise up and say, “enough!” The one thing that scares politicians the most is a class conscious, educated and motived working-class. We alone hold the key to eliminating the conditions in which our children are subjected to a poverty draft. Together we can stop this exploitation and force our nation to stop its illegal imperialist wars.

[ipaint]

1. That's what Duncan, Obama's education secretary, is all about-

Military charters in poor mostly minority neighborhoods.


AMY GOODMAN: Jitu, I wanted to ask you about the militarization of the schools in Chicago. Perhaps in Chicago they’re the most militarized in the country. Five public schools have been turned into military academies. I think there are 10,000 students in uniform, over three dozen junior ROTC programs in Chicago’s high schools. Duncan said, in 2007, “I love the sense of leadership. I love the sense of discipline.”

JITU BROWN: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Well, to us, it’s an indictment, because, one, many of our young people, after being underserved by the public school system, end up going to the military because they feel they have no other choice, because the quality of their education hasn’t really prepared them to go on to college, or they don’t have the resources. So they look to the military as a last resort. I experience this every day, try to talk young people out of it.

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/3/26/a_look_at_arne_duncans_vip

[Gaedel]

4. Junior ROTC

Jr ROTC often helps to keep kids in school. Like athletics and music, ROTC is a way for a teenager to become motivated to do well in his other classes to remain in the program.

[ipaint]

6. Five public schools have been turned into military academies. nt

[Ozymanithrax]

2. It really sucks being on the bottom tier of Maslow's pyramid...

People who join make a pragmatic decision.

There is a chance of dying...

There is a much better chance of killing...

However, the poor person who enlists will have those basic physiological needs met. They leave the bottom tier of Maslow's pyramid.

That poor person's family will have those pasic physiological needs met. They leave the bottom tier of Maslow's pyramid.

They move up to the second level...the safety part...some of thsoe are not there. (And, really, the chance of dying are still on the low side.) But it sure as hell beats starving, and, like a leach, draining your family of their means of living .

The poor have always fought the wars, led by a middle and upper class group of officers. So just calling for them not to enlist without offering another rout to economic security on that second level of Maslow's pyramid is not going to work.

[rrneck]

3. They're cultural cannon fodder no matter what they do.

At least in the military they get to shoot back at somebody.

[G_j]

5. "Poverty Draft" is dead on

sad but true

[Peace Patriot]

7. This is possibly the foulest aspect of Bushwhackism, although it's hard to choose:

The deliberate ruination of our economy, including their Financial 9/11 of September 2008, resulting in poor young people having no choices except to go fight corporate resource wars. The educational system decimated (even for the middle class these days), 40% to 50% unemployment in poor areas, vast outsourcing of jobs by multinational corporations, deliberate targeting of poor youth and LYING to poor youth by military recruiters--and their grand success at enlisting "cannon fodder" for Exxon Mobil and Chevron and the whole gang of war profiteers. "Stop loss" was getting to be a scandal, so they crashed the economy. That's my read on it. None of this is happenstance. Read the "Project For A New American Century" that was guiding Bushwhack policy. It includes the ominous statement that they will need a "new Pearl Harbor" to help the American people get over their loathing for unjust war (the "Vietnam syndrome").

Well, it needed more than that, as it turns out. It needed financial ruin whereby the very rich stay very rich and get even richer, there are a few financial casualties among the medium rich and most of the burden falls upon the vast majority of once decently prosperous citizens and the poor and the very poor. They needed soldiers to carry out their plan of world domination. They didn't want to risk a Draft and another American rebellion against unjust war. So they did everything they could possibly do--vast and extremely corrupt government spending, mostly on the military, while cutting taxes for the very rich, deregulation, deliberate malfeasance and deliberate blindness to the perilous activities and crimes of the banksters, outright looting (a billion dollars 'disappeared' in Iraq), crony contracts, no-bid contracts, profit-guaranteed contracts, contracts that produced nothing, and on and on, in an orgy of the most criminally malfeasant governance the world has ever seen, and, when that didn't work, they crashed the whole financial system, just before they left office--and got billions and billions of dollars further drained out of federal coffers, into the pockets of the rich, creating vast indebtedness for generations to come, and now they have plenty of soldiers to keep the Forever War going.

I do think that it is an organized plan. I don't know exactly who the conspirators are--except for the obvious ones (for instance, the Bush Cartel)--nor exactly how they are organized. There are many historical precedents although in most historical precedents there is an identifiable "dictator" running the fascist program. In this case, Bush Jr was an obvious puppet, Cheney was an obvious oil corp front man and Rumsfeld was an obvious war profiteer front man. But who gave the orders and who designed the plan--I mean, who was BEHIND the PNAC (and behind a parallel financial plan)? I think it's a cabal of very, very, very rich players, some American, some not, and it is very well organized, indeed. And I think it's pretty obvious that Obama has little or no power in relation to this cabal. The next phase of the plan may be to use the 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines, now 80% controlled by ONE, far rightwing-connected corporation (ES&S, which just bought out Diebold) to re-install the Bush Junta perhaps with different front people and with the controlled press providing a narrative of Obama "failure" (a narrative that has already begun) whereby he and "the liberals" get blamed for the many crimes and massive looting of Bush Junta I.

Many Democratic leaders (and I don't know about Obama) have been very collusive as to aiding and abetting this immensely powerful corpo-fascist cabal--including their mind-boggling silence on 'TRADE SECRET' vote counting by rightwing corporations. But, if Bill Clinton is representative of such leaders, and I think he is--they require more of a facade of democracy AND general prosperity for Americans, in their service to the corporate rulers. Well, that facade and that prosperity came crashing down with the Bush Junta, which didn't even pretend to like democracy and went out of their way to ruin the economy. What do they intend to do next? They're all set up to install Bush Junta II. The vote counting systems is actually worse now than it was in 2004. Americans in general are hurting so badly that they have even less time and energy to pay attention to elections, politics and government actions. They are even more demoralized. We are really not far from potential riots and civil disorder. (How much more can Americans take?) Is that the plan--civil disorder aimed by the corpo-fascist press at Obama and "the liberals," a false narrative in combination with easy--EASY!--fiddling of election results, and installation of an even more draconian regime than Bush Junta I?

They wanted us to get over the "Vietnam Syndrome"; they wanted us to learn to like the army; they wanted to smash the prosperity that had fostered the great American progressive majority; they wanted lots of "cannon fodder" without student protests; they wanted to destroy Social Security and all vestiges of the "New Deal"; they wanted to suppress votes especially black votes to help cover up their election rigging; they wanted to wreck the federal government's beneficial functions with malfeasance and massive looting, while enhancing its powers of war and oppression; they wanted to de-fund and destroy the greatest educational system in the world; they wanted to use the U.S. military for their own private purposes; they wanted us on our knees--and there is enough evidence that all of these things, and more, were quite deliberate, to believe that this has been an ORGANIZED effort by very powerful people--very hard to identify but working in concert to pull off these various coups.

I think that the fact that there are now many more desperate poor people in the U.S. in 2010 than in 2000, and the fact that PNAC lays out a scheme for world domination of resources through use of the U.S. military are not accidental facts or a coincidence. They are part of a designed program to destroy our sovereignty as a people--to brainwash, loot and enslave us--and to foreclose our potential as one of the most progressive forces on earth.

I think I detected a breach in this theorized cabal, circa 2006, when Rumsfeld was ousted and Cheney curtailed, and nuking Iran was taken "off the table" (along with impeachment). I think Junior was in big trouble with the CIA (over the outing of their WMD counter-proliferation project, and possibly other matters), and Daddy Bush intervened. I think that is how one of his "Iraq Study Group" members became CIA Director (Leon Panetta, appointed by Obama). SOMETHING was going on, the upshot of which is that Cheney/Rumsfeld had "gone too far" and were jeopardizing something--possibly the very cabal that is so hard to identify. And a schism occurred. The "cabal," if it exists, likes to operate in secret, behind-the-scenes, impenetrably, with a solid facade, and things were cooking--perhaps the Fitzgerald investigation?--that threatened to rip the veil off our true rulers. Fitzgerald was clearly (in his own words) targeting Cheney--and maybe Cheney threatened others, and thus the "no impeachment" deal was sealed?

My candidate for main perp of the CIA outings is Rumsfeld, but Cheney was handling the political end of it and thus came into Fitzgerald's sights. The upshot of Fitzgerald's work was that Cheney, an alleged elected official, was a matter for Congress--which notoriously dropped the ball. Rumsfeld was quickly and rather quietly removed. And Cheney served out his term. Was all this a brokered deal? Brokered by Bush Sr, who also didn't like the look of China's and Russia's nuclear arsenals coming to Iran's defense? Was who gets Iran's oil an issue better settled by private negotiation than by what could have become Armageddon? Would nuking Iran have brought the house down, so to speak--the facade of democracy here, the impenetrable veils over the real decision-makers?

All those crimes--torture, massive looting, treason, slaughtering a hundred thousand people to steal their oil and dominate the Middle East --have been sent down the "river of forgetfulness." And maybe with them has gone the identiies of those who designed it all and gave the orders. The actual rulers of our land.

One bit of advice: Get rid of the 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines! That is the first layer of secrecy that we MUST peal back, to even begin restoration of our democracy. Without transparent vote counting, we have no hope of ever re-gaining our sovereignty--and we will very quickly become a country of disregarded slave labor and traumatized soldiers. We are well along that path now. We CAN reverse it--but it will take a great citizen movement--a REAL "Boston Tea Party," not this fake shit that the corpo-fascist press is promoting. Step One: transparent vote counting!

[Greyhound]

8. Since all economic solutions have been taken "off the table", conscription is the answer.

Economic scarcity and hopelessness are the only tools they have to lure targets into their shooting gallery.
:kick: & R