Posts that I especially recommend for Tuesday, June 1, 2021

• Depopulation and the mRNA Vaccine: The New York Times Predicts Massive Population Reduction by Peter Koenig from Global Research. 

• The Veterans We Dare not Remember on Memorial Day by Michael Hoffman, historian, from his weblog. My reaction: Compare two different posts I found on "Michael Hoffman"--on Amazon and the corrupted entry on Wikipedia.
  

• US Troops Die For World Domination, Not Freedom by Australian Caitlin Johnstone with her American husband reading the script, which is provided, from her weblog. 

The irony of course is that capitalism was supposed to offer something different. It was meant to offer a life of more leisure and free time. Technology was supposed to advance in ways that would bring public holidays every month, possibly even every week. Luminaries like economist John Maynard Keynes dreamt of a 15-hour work week by 2030. Yet capitalism has produced the exact opposite. Its effect has been to preserve and extend work. It has also created problems in the content and meaning of work.

• The need to work less is a matter of life and death by Prof. David Spencer from the Leeds University Business School in Britain.
  

• How to Access the Library of Alexandria featuring James Corbett of The Corbet Report. (Note: Corbett uses the "Library of Alexandria" as metaphor for hard-to-find books).

• 💥Israel, a Beachead in the Middle East by Stephan Gowans at the Institute for the Critical Study of Society (ICSS Marxist). This is a best post. (Note: This is a webinar featuring a talk by Gowans via YouTube arranged by this Oakland, California Institute. Gowans' talk begins after the introduction at 03:59m and ends at 58:36m followed by a Q&A. (I recommend the talk only because he has recently done extensive research on Israel which resulted in a book.)

One US military leader has called Israel “the intelligence equivalent of five CIAs.” An Israeli cabinet minister likens his country to “the equivalent of a dozen US aircraft carriers,” while the Jerusalem Post defines Israel as the executive of a “superior Western military force that” protects “America’s interests in the region.” Arab leaders have called Israel “a club the United States uses against the Arabs,” and “a poisoned dagger implanted in the heart of the Arab nation.”

In his latest book, Israel, A Beachhead in the Middle East, Stephen Gowans challenges the specious argument that Israel controls US foreign policy, tracing the development of the self-declared Jewish state, from its conception in the ideas of Theodore Herzl, to its birth as a European colony, through its efforts to suppress regional liberation movements, to its emergence as an extension of the Pentagon, integrated into the US empire as a pro-imperialist Sparta of the Middle East.

• Not Forgetting Palestine by Craig Murray, a Scotsman, from his weblog.
  

• Colombia: “The Government Murders with Impunity because the U.S. Empire is Behind it.” by Carlos Aznarez from  Internationalist 360°. (Note: This is a report of the US's major beachhead in South America to police that continent for any nation that aspires to become independent.) My reaction: This is another instance where the well-indoctrinated American people, many of whom are struggling to survive, ignore such a report--if they are exposed to it at all.

• 💥Sitrep: Here Comes China: Buried lies & betrayals – Viruses, Nukes – and a Plasma sun from "The Saker" weblog. (Note: This is a best post especially for readers who want to follow developments in China from Chinese sources of information--not from Western propaganda sources.)
  

• Over a third of heat-related deaths caused by global warming from Climate & Capitalism. (Note: This research study was reported in a peer-reviewed British science journal.)

• The Yenisey River sheds its icy coat from RT via YouTube. My reaction: More evidence of global warming that is currently threatening human species (and most others). Isn't it ironic to see a Wikipedia entry on this river in Russia's Siberia before which YouTube warns you about Russian influence in a quote from a corrupted Wikipedia entry?
  

• Means of Extinction: Conspicuous Consumption featuring Prof. (retired) Guy McPherson, an independent scientist (via his YouTube channel--3:20m) who has focused on the climate crisis. My reaction: Because McPherson is a physical scientist and not a social scientist, he is not aware that capitalism, and its propaganda machine of advertising, constantly exhorts people to consume unnecessary products to promote profits and power for the capitalist ruling classes. Thus capitalism has caused the climate crisis which McPherson argues with much evidence that abrupt global warming will result in the extinction of humans and most other species inhabiting the Earth. That is precisely why capitalists are now energetically exploring other planets in the hope of migrating there after they have spoiled the Earth for humans.
  

Posts that I especially recommend for Sunday, May 30, 2021

• The ‘New Normal’ Lexicon by Ian Jenkins from Off-Guardian.

• Is Ivermectin the new Penicillin? by Dr. Justus R. Hope, MD fro The Desert Review. (Note: This post from an unnamed activist source (according to his wishes) writes the following:  

Vermectin, an anti-parasitic drug placed the same radioactive category as Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) for the treatment of COVID-19, has reemerged as a promising treatment in the battle to extinguish the pandemic. 

 

New York Times best-selling author Michael Capuzzo has called it the "drug that cracked Covid," writing that there are “hundreds of thousands, actually millions, of people around the world, from Uttar Pradesh in India to Peru to Brazil, who are living and not dying.”

 

Doctors in India are big fans.  

• Coronavirus Fact-Check #11: Is Sars-Cov-2 a bioweapon? from Off-Guardian. My reaction: I certainly take issue with their conclusions:

Maybe the virus was grown in a lab, maybe it just jumped from bats to people. Since all evidence suggests it’s not very dangerous, it doesn’t really matter.

The debate sure does make a good distraction though. 

 

Does it matter that many after the age of 70 died from it if it was designed and used as a bioweapon for whatever purpose? What about all the severe restrictions on people's civil rights that were dictated by various governments of the world based on the declaration of WHO that the threat constituted a pandemic and the virtual diktats by the CDC or similar agencies throughout governments of the world? What about the censorship that was imposed on many other relevant medical specialists who differed about various aspects of the declared pandemic?

• The Bogus January 6 Commission Poses a Real Threat to Freedom by James Bovard from Mises Institute. (Note: Mises Institute is a nationalist capitalist website/weblog which features old-fashioned capitalists who no longer control the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire. The latter is controlled by "neoliberals" or transnational capitalists.)
  

• ‘Stop the Monopoly Madness’: Biden Urged to Block Amazon’s $8.5 Billion Purchase of MGM by Jake Johnson from Children's Health Defense.
  

• Obama's Labor Secretary Joins Union Busters featuring Jimmy Dore of the Jimmy Dore Show (via his YouTube channel).

• Once a US Soldier, Always Wounded, Always Losing! by Paul Haeder from Dissident Voice.

... we can either prepare for the ultimate disaster that disaster capitalism gives us, or, put our heads back in that sand ....

• The Conscious Resistance Network Presents: The Pyramid of Power Ep. 4 – The Hollywood-Military-Intelligence-Complex by Derrick Broze from Activist Post.  My brief commentary follows: 

I remember one of the first acts formally announcing a Cold War against the Soviet Union after the conclusion of WWII (1st article) was Winston Churchill's speech in Fulton, Missouri (with Pres. Harry Truman on the stage) in 1946 declaring that an "iron curtain has descended" across Europe. This was a shock to the American people because we had been allied in WWII with the Soviet Union against the Axis powers. 

 

 

This was followed a year later with the Un-American Activities Committee investigations of Hollywood playwrights, directors, and actors that weren't sufficiently anti-communist enough to suit the interests of the capitalist ruling class. This constituted a major purge of all left-wing influential people associated with the Hollywood film industry in order to stifle any kind of dissent and further propagandize people into smearing any kind of socialism. Churchill's visceral hatred of the Russian Revolution and his role beginning with the capitalist intervention in the Russian Civil War made him an exceptionally qualified person (in the eyes of the ruling capitalist class) to announce this new effort against the Soviet Union. 

• Biden Cynically Politicizes Lab-Leak Theory to Bash China by Finian Cunningham from Strategic Culture Foundation. 

• The politics of the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis by Stephen Gowans from his weblog What's Left. Gowans concludes his article with this statement:

If Biden were genuinely interested in learning how to prevent a future pandemic he would be exploring how to prevent zoonotic spillovers, both in nature, and in the lab. On the other hand, if he’s interested in tarring the reputation of a country he has labelled a competitor, as his predecessor was, he is proceeding along the right path. Unfortunately, that path has nothing to do with protecting humanity from future pandemics.

• Loophole lets soya farmers tear down the Amazon by Andrew Wasley , Alexandra Heal , André Campos, and Daniel Camargos from The Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
  

• Methane and the mass extinction of species by Andrew Glikson from Arctic News. 

• The Net Zero Mirage by Robert Hunziker from Dissident Voice.
  

• Ask an Ecologist Anything -- Saturday, May 29, 2021 featuring Prof. (retired) Guy McPherson, an independent scientist who has focused on the climate crisis, from his YouTube channel. (Note: This has been removed from YouTube by the administrators of this platform. Apparently he said something which they, in their scientific wisdom, do not like.)
  

Posts that I especially recommend today: Thursday, February 11, 2021

• Further Proof that U.S. & UK are One Empire, Not Two by Eric Zuesse from The Duran. Finally, he gets around to noticing after its origins in 1946.

• New NORAD Warfare Strategies and Canada’s Role in the Great Game Revisited by Matthew Ehret from Strategic Culture Foundation. My reaction: Although I don't agree with his main thesis that the British ruling class has taken the initiative and was the main actor behind the construction of what became the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire (it was a transnational capitalist project), this paragraph got my attention:
  

Anyone who has read Cynthia Chung’s Dr. Strangelove’s Spoonbenders will quickly realize why using AI to pick up algorithms that would normally be missed by human analysts, and generate hair-trigger decisions to counter threats from Eurasia creates a mountain of trouble for humanity, as glitches and mis-readings of Russian/Chinese intentions can easily escalate unstoppably into a nuclear retaliation by deductive/inductive machine thinking.

• Why is America getting a new $100 billion nuclear weapon? by Elisabeth Eaves from Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
  

• Empire Files: Afghanistan Mercenary Shocker + US Says Nuclear War “Very Real Possibility” featuring Abby Martin reporting via a 5:44m video on two topics from Media Roots.
  

• The Big Tech Exodus Has Begun — Join Us! (Updated) from Activist Post.
  

• New US Military Base in Northeast Syria Latest of Biden’s Warlike Moves by Alan Macleod from Mint Press News.

•  Interview 1618 – New World Next Week with James Evan Pilato featuring James Corbett and Pilato reporting and sarcastically commenting on the news. Posted on The Corbett Report in a 22:08m video with links to relevant documents. The topics they discuss: The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election [from Time Magazine]; Germany Hired Koch Institute And Other Scientists To Justify Unconstitutional Lockdowns; and Nevada Bill Would Allow Tech Companies to Create Governments.
  

• Lithium, Batteries and Climate Change by Jonathan Neale from Climate & Capitalism.
  

• U.S. State Department Admits Signs Point To C0VlD Created in Wuhan Lab featuring Ben Swann examining the latest evidence from the Wuhan lab. Posted on ISE.

• Coronavirus Scandal Breaking in Merkel’s Germany. False Positives and the Drosten PCR Test by F. William Engdahl from Global Research.

• ‘Unseen Enemy’: Coronavirus as an archetype of perception. By Ludovic Noble from Off-Guardian (based in Britain).
  

• The Fire Next Time by Rebecca Gordon from Tom Dispatch. (Note: You will need to scroll down to the article following Tom Engelhardt's introduction. I am posting this article only to criticize its weaknesses.) My commentary follows:

Although well-meaning, this is a post that exemplifies the blindness that has infected American "progressives" and (political) liberals (in the contemporary sense--def#5) since WWII. The tremendous war effort and reactionary historians succeeded to erase the memory of radicalism that appeared in the 1930s. Gordon also exemplifies a person who has been thoroughly brainwashed by the secret cabal that has taken over not only American education but every other institution in the USA. This aggressive capitalist ruling class now rules over an Empire built on the ashes of the war when the US first reigned supreme in its military and economy.

She is the perfect product of an "education" that forgot the rising tide of the appeal that truly radical parties had on ordinary Americans. Gone is the memory of general strikes that hit San Francisco, Minneapolis, and many other cities. Gone are the memories of this radical appeal when Soviet citizens enjoyed rising standards of living and no unemployment. Gone, too, is the memory of FDR's reply to the charge that he was promoting socialism. Gone are Upton Sinclair's and John Steinbeck's descriptions of life during the Great Depression. Gone are the reports of US capitalists' approval of fascist developments in Germany and Italy. So much has been erased from history that is taught in American schools; and what was not erased, has been revised by historians that serve the ruling class.

Gordon (and by inference, Tom Dispatch and CounterPunch who re-posted this article) supports the "correct political line" of the day by condemning Trump's faction of the capitalist ruling class, but not capitalism which has led the nation and world towards either, in the short-run, nuclear war, or, in the long-run, climate destabilization and extinction of nearly all life on our Earth. 

But, no worries, because our masters have a plan to avert climate destabilization. It's called the Great Reset. But carefully disguised in the plan is population reduction, and that reduction is ridding our working class of low-level workers, including small businessmen, who do not contribute to the wealth accumulation of today's corporations and many of their billionaire owners.

• Arranging The Middle East Narrative To Push The Agenda Forward from South Front.
  

• The Fight for Belarus: An Interview with Nadezhda Sablina by Kayla Pop from Internationalist 360°.

• Extinction Foretold, Extinction Ignored featuring Prof. (retired) Guy McPherson (via YouTube) summarizing the document he wrote by the same title.
  

I especially recommend these posts for today: Thursday, October 10, 2019 (updated)

• Trump admits US killed millions in war based on lies by Bill Van Auken from World Socialist Web Site.

• Who Are the Real Friends of the Troops? by Jacob G. Hornberger from his weblog The Future of Freedom Foundation.

• Ukraine whistleblowers are actually CIA agents – Lee Stranahan from RT America (via YouTube). (In case your interested: Official readout: President Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky from The Washington Post.)

• US TV networks now filled with ex-spies, already state-run from RT America. (Note: starts at about 16 seconds into the video).

• CIA got footage of Assange friend Pamela Anderson in loo – Galloway from RT America.

• Syria - Turkey Again Invades by Bernhard from his weblog Moon of Alabama.

• Turkey’s safe-zone and refugee peace-corridor is a cover for encroachment by Sarah Abed from BRICS information portal. 

• How IMF sabotages economies with debt (Ecuador breaking) from Rick Sanchez, RT America.

• Return to Russia: Crimeans Tell the Real Story of the 2014 Referendum and Their Lives Since by Eva Bartlett from Mint Press News.

• The ‘Whistleblower’ Probably Isn’t by Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone. (An activist just emailed this article to me.)

Recommended articles for Saturday, July 13, 2019 [updated]

• Challenging capitalism is the ultimate climate mitigation strategy by Hans Baer (Australian) from Climate & Capitalism.

• What’s really going on in Hong Kong by Reese Ehrlich from 48 Hills (San Francisco based). 

• Top Assange Defense Account Deleted By Twitter by Caitlin Johnstone from her weblog. 

• ‘We did bad, evil things there’ – Vet turned peace activist on growing dissent with US forever wars by Kareem Raheem from RT.

“Is This What We Destroy Lives For?” Iraq, Afghanistan Vets’ Guilt, Unanswered Questions Spike Suicide Rate

Click here to access article by Whitney Webb from Mint Press News. 

Baffled by the increase in the rate of suicides by young veterans, the experts seem to overlook the explanations of these veterans in their suicide notes.

For instance, the suicide note of Daniel Somers, an Iraq war veteran who took his own life at age 30, stated that his PTSD was largely the result of having been ordered to “participate in things” including “war crimes, crimes against humanity.” Somers noted that “though I did not participate willingly, and made what I thought was my best effort to stop these events, there are some things that a person simply cannot come back from.”

Indeed, some of the atrocities that have been conducted by U.S. troops in Iraq include orders to slaughter all “military age men” in a given area, torturing detainees, raping children, massacring groups of civilians, and sodomizing prisoners with broom sticks.

Nuking Sounds Fun When You’re High as a Kite

Click here to access article by Martin Berger from New Eastern Outlook. (Although I regard Berger's arguments in most of his articles as consistent with reality, I often see signs that they were written in haste and this article is no different. Some examples in this article: I would like to have seen some documentation for the phrase "According to one of the Pentagon press conferences given in 2014" which referred to commanding officers distributing drugs to their soldiers, some of whom controlled nuclear missiles, and some documentation about the BZ agent; and the use of the "OPCW" instead of Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.)

Berger points out how many commanders of armies throughout history have drugged their soldiers in order to prepare them to engage in all sort of horrible acts in war time, and juxtaposes this with a more recent startling documentation that the Pentagon is drugging soldiers who are in control of nuclear weapons.

Recommended articles for Tuesday, June 12, 2018

• As Net Neutrality Officially Ends, Internet Defenders Gear up for a Fight by Jessica Corbett from Mint Press News. 

Now that the repeal is in effect, ISPs “have the green light to begin degrading our access to the internet,” said former FCC commissioner and Common Cause special adviser Michael Copps. “Monopoly phone and cable companies will undoubtedly seek to maximize profits by favoring their own content over their competitors and creating fast lanes and slow lanes ultimately at the expense of consumers.”

And later in the article:

... it has sparked an unprecedented backlash from across the political spectrum, and internet users are coming out of the woodwork to fight tooth and nail in Congress, in the courts, and at the local and state level,” she continued. “This summer we’ll channel our anger productively and harness the power of the internet to mount an unprecedented district-by-district campaign to get Congress to do their job.”

• The end of net neutrality: The US ruling elite escalates campaign of internet censorship by Andre Damon from World Socialist Web Site.

The control over the internet by a handful of social media monopolies and internet service providers, which conspire against the democratic rights of the population, makes clear that the defense of democratic rights is inseparable from the ending of private ownership of the internet infrastructure. Internet access is a basic social right, which must be freely available to all without the interference of corporations or the state.

I'm sure the author would agree that private ownership over any significant segment of our capitalist economy results in private interests taking both wealth and power away from the people. 

• Twelve Tips For Making Sense Of The World by Caitlin Johnstone from her blog.

• There Are No War Heroes. There Are Only War Victims by Caitlin Johnstone from her blog. I especially liked the title. She attacked another lie that our official leaders always say at gatherings related to veterans: our hero-soldiers died serving their country, the USA. 

• What Sy Hersh Knows by Christian Lorentzen from Vulture (a website produced by the New York Magazine). Lorentzen interviews one of America's top independent journalists, Seymour Hersh, about his latest book entitled Reporter: A Memoir.

An Afghan Year: My Road from Soldier to Socialism

Click here to access article by Adam Denker from The Greanville Post.

I found reading this article to be an emotionally gripping experience. Denker sounds like a very ordinary young American:

I joined the National Guard to pay for college. I didn’t really think of the consequences at the time. After all: I’m an American, I was raised to worship my country and adore the military, and I did. Receiving a college education seemed like fair payment for "service to my country".

 It was a transforming experience for him.

... the worst part was what I was slowly being forced to accept: everything I had believed in my whole life was a lie. I had always been a patriotic American. I believed we weren’t perfect but that we were “the good guys.” I truly believed that the Afghans wanted us there, that we were protecting and helping them. But now, as I saw the war around me, and why it was being fought, as well as the inhuman attitude towards even the Afghan civilians that my fellow soldiers had, I couldn’t keep believing this lie.

There was no greater example of the lie than the contractors who were there.

But the worst was yet to come. Read (if you can) what he experienced and concluded looking at a five or six year old girl who was searching for and collecting old Soviet mines from a field. 

One Hundred Years Ago: The Bolsheviks Seized Power, but Could They Hold It?

Click here to access article by Michael Jabara Carley from Strategic Culture Foundation.

Canadian Professor Carley describes the conundrum posed by the new Soviet government to the allies in WWI. While Lenin and Trotsky tried to seek a general armistice among civilians across Europe, allied ruling class leaders were thrown into confusion about how to deal with the new Soviet government.

Lenin’s idea was to mobilise European public opinion against the war and provide propaganda for militants in the west who wanted to make their own October Revolutions. As Trotsky made clear, the Soviet government desired a general, not a separate peace, so soldiers in Europe could turn their bayonets against their own bourgeois elites.

At a meeting in Paris at the beginning of December (new style), the Entente powers could not agree on a collective reply to Trotsky’s call for an armistice on all fronts. Once anyone started to talk peace, the Italian foreign minister noted, French and Italian soldiers would refuse to take up arms again. Prime Minister David Lloyd George feared “a rot would set in” over continuing the war. The Bolsheviks were counting on just that. It was not an unrealistic calculation: even Allied leaders feared popular anti-war opposition. A general armistice was therefore out of the question. The Allies agreed to stop shipping supplies to Russia and to start generous funding of “pro-Allied propaganda” hoping an acceptable Russian government would replace the Soviets.

Pride, Pain and War

Click here to access poem that was written by Michael John Pike (Spike the Poet) who reads his poem in a video posted by BSNews (Britain).  

Spike is a former [British] soldier, now a poet and peace activist. Once his experiences drove him on a path to self destruction. But through poetry, he has found an outlet. He is now a performance poet and speaker where he attacks the establishment that thrives on war. He is polemic and unswerving in his damning condemnation of the war machine.

It seems to me that many combat veterans like Spike could benefit psychologically by engaging in anti-war and anti-establishment activities that a genuine revolutionary movement could provide for them. The challenge to return such veterans to civilian life is monumental, but mainly the ruling class has taken this challenge by keeping damaged veterans in ideologically controlled "therapy" sessions. In other words, the veterans are lied to by the ruling class to sign up for such killing activities and they lie to them again when they return damaged in body and soul to civilian life by portraying them as heroes, people who have "sacrificed" for some noble cause. It seems to me that a real healing, a real return to psychological health could be provided by a revolutionary movement that would engage these wounded people in activities that would serve to undermine the power of their real enemies: the ruling capitalist class.

Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard from Hawaii reports on her contact with Donald Trump

The following is an interview of Tulsi Gabbard on (of all places) Fox TV! (A must watch)

This Iraqi veteran and now Congresswoman tells of her discussion with Trump and about her views regarding the Syrian conflict. 

Ed Norton Occupies the World

Click here to access article by Philip A. Farruggio from World News Trust. 

Farruggio's reactions to seeing our dressed up combat soldiers in various parts of the world really resonated with my own feelings. Even though this writer in many ways comes from a liberal perspective, it may serve as evidence that many such people are finding US media coverage of issues as absurd. I especially like this observation:

Empires fold up when either they get overrun or their citizens have had enough. No one is preaching the "R" word here. We need to first educate our fellow citizens with nothing more than the truth.

Our mainstream media will never play a part in that. No, more and more of us must continue to seek out the alternative media to find out what is really happening and what is really true. Our military personnel, whether it be the grunts, the officers or the big shots in Washington, need to begin to "speak truth to power" and say NO to empire.

Life after Wartime

Click here to access article by Christy Rodgers from Dissident Voice. 

What a powerful writer! Rodgers expresses, like no other I have found, what it is really like to be a veteran of US wars and having a hard time fitting back into civilian life.

After reading this, I recommend another entitled "What If?" which gives you the experience of a long life in prison: "Today I got my release papers from the Castle. Twenty years I served behind its ...."

On The Inevitability Of Human Progress

Click here to access these dramatic images posted by Bernhard of Moon of Alabama.

The juxtaposed images need little interpretation.

Used & Betrayed – 100 Years of US Troops as Lab Rats

Click here to access this brief introduction to the following 30:52m video exposé by Abby Martin posted on Media Roots of one of the worst types of the abuse of soldiers by our ruling masters. This might balance the unbalanced reports you will be subject to by corporate media in their coverage of this year's Memorial Day.

'Idiocracy' Realized: How Our Current Situation Is Worse Than the Film Predicted

Click here to access article by Paula Young Lee from AlterNet. 

This just may be the article to put you in a sick humor mood for the long holiday weekend. After all this could be the proper mood considering that our capitalist overlords designated Monday as Memorial Day as some sort of remembrance for all those working class soldiers they've sent to their deaths in service to them and their Empire.

The corporate overlords the movie indicted are creating a world where water is inaccessible to the poor and Trump Nation darkly looms. 

If this article doesn't succeed to put you in the mood for sick humor, "Tom Tomorrow's" cartoon might do the trick.

 

The Empire's cannon fodder

Click here if you wish to access this from cartoonist Andy Singer's website. 

The Sacrifice of Soldiers

by cartoonist Andy Singer posted on occasional links & commentary.

 

The VA, Another American War We Don’t Talk About

Click here to access article by Gordon Duff, Senior Editor at Veterans Today.

This author depicts the way our capitalist masters "support our troops"--or don't.

As a 100% combat disabled veteran and editor of the largest military and veterans new site, I have spent years dealing with abuses and fraud at the VA.  The body count for the VA itself is actually higher than any war, they kill more American veterans than wars have ever killed of our military.  If only I were making this up, and I am not.

For those who are unaware, there is a pecking order at the VA.  Only those who are 100% disabled, something the hierarchy makes it almost impossible to qualify for, get all available treatments.  Processing a compensation claim for a totally disabled veteran can take years.  Mine took 12 years, the oldest I have worked on has taken 43 years.  Many take 25 years.  In most cases, the veteran dies while waiting for appeals.