There are so many things that happen these days that when I tell people about them they will say "I can't believe that".The issue of health care reform is only one of many issues where I can make the case.
Let me make the case by telling you that military thinkers believe that the number one enemy the military should fear is health care!
Now, unless you have researched this, you will exclaim "I can't believe that".
Let's look at what military scholars say by revisiting a Dredd Blog post from last March that focused on this issue:
Pentagonia, capitol of Bullshitistan, well aware of the current political climate, has declared who its greatest enemy is, believing it is health care:(Deja Vu - Guns v. Butter Election Looms). I can't believe that either, but there it is, written in military white papers for all to see.
The U.S. military keeps searching the horizon for a peer competitor, the challenger that must be taken seriously. Is it China? What about an oil rich and resurgent Russia?(The Enemy the Pentagon Should Fear Most: Health Care, National Defense Magazine, emphasis added). We have been pointing out this very strange ideology for a while now, using "MOMCOM" symbolism to isolate the militant energy fighting against the middle class and poor in the United States.
But the threat that is most likely to hobble U.S. military capabilities is not a peer competitor, rather it is health care.
I am very concerned that elements in and around the military are nuts, insane, yes, even criminally insane.
That is really not a stretch in the USA, because insanity in the form of dementia is a top ten killer of Americans.
In our etiology of dementia series we posted:
One post that ties the dynamics together is The Criminally Insane Epoch Arises.(Etiology of Social Dementia - 2). The military thinkers indicate that even though health care is sorely needed even for them, seeing as now they are committing suicide at record rates, health care is their greatest enemy.
In that regard, I must say that a piece in The New York Times caught my attention:
OUR government is ignoring what is likely to become the single greatest threat to the health of Americans: Alzheimer’s disease, an illness that is 100 percent incurable and 100 percent fatal. It attacks rich and poor, white-collar and blue, and women and men, without regard to party. A degenerative disease, it steadily robs its victims of memory, judgment and dignity, leaves them unable to care for themselves and destroys their brain and their identity — often depleting their caregivers and families both emotionally and financially.(The Age of Alzheimer’s, NY Times, emphasis added).
Guess where the political pundits, your friends, your co-workers, get their ideas that health care is bad?
The next post in this series is here.
Healthcare has always been a primary recruiting tool for the military - even 33 years ago when I first enlisted. It's also no circumstance that the minute you retire the DoD passes you off to the VA so as not to dirty themselves with the long and very much harder job of your continued care after they've used and abused you to their complete satisfaction, or to sully themselves with allegations of your abandonment as the VA is continually defunded and war vets are left to cope - or not - on their own. It's quite a racket these bastards are running, but you have to admit, they're only doing to the gullible naive American underclass what they permit them to do.
ReplyDeleteAs for Alzheimer's, I predict that we'll either rethink our cultural taboos against assisted early death, or, even more likely, we'll just get more comfortable with looking the other way as renegade family members and/or caregivers simply do what needs to be done. Hey, avoidance and denial has always been the American way.
Well said disaffected.
ReplyDeleteI might add that the granting or withholding of healthcare based on employment status has also served a very utilitarian purpose in the private sector as well, as a semi-official enforcer of the protestant work ethic. How else to explain big business's resistance to government run healthcare lock, stock, and barrell - for the working class masses at least? As a business student I never could understand how corporate America didn't lobby overtime to get the healthcare albatross off their backs. They could always offer premium plans for the execs and their star performers anyway on the front side, while lobbying against tax increases to support the public plans on the back.
ReplyDeleteOf course Obama's "reform" bill amounts to little more than a direct government subsidy to the insurance companies to cover the costs for the indigent, but it remains to be seen how much of that will ever actually go into effect, what with the imminent counter electoral landslides. The GOP's ability to convince grass roots Americans that "Obama Care" is a government takeover of the healthcare system and anything less than the complete corporate sellout that it is ranks right up there with extending the Bush tax cuts for the top 1%.
Say what you will about their methods, but their results simply speak for themselves. Of course when you've got opponents like the democrats, even a moron like George W. Bush manages to come off as a statesman.
The military thinkers quoted, and any who agree with them, consider health care to be their worst enemy.
ReplyDeleteThey need to study Pogo 101: "we have met the enemy and it is us".
I'll step out of character for a moment and play devil's advocate for the military commanders on the ground in Iraqistan. If they were to actually forthrightly address all the legitimate healthcare concerns of all the soldiers they were assigned, they simply wouldn't have enough bodies to even remotely carry out their mission. And as any military officer or non-com knows all to well, nobody but NOBODY continues up the promotion ladder by informing his/her superiors "we can't," regardless of the circumstances. For a scathing indictment of the military meatgrinder, watch PBS's most excellent documentary The Wounded Platoon. It'll make you hang your head in shame to be an American.
ReplyDeleteThe propagandists in the military who have urged nothing but quantitative dogmas, with their "more, more, more" philosophy have left the American mold.
ReplyDeleteThey have only one goal, more; more bases around the world, more WMD, more conventional weapons, more land, more money, more generals, more troops, and more wars.
With that cancerous military philosophy they have broken the economic viability with which to have a quality, sanity based force.
As a result of their propaganda based ideology we spend more on military than the rest of the other industrial nations combined.
Those military thinkers are the folks who have failed both "troops on the ground" and the citizens of the nation.
I am not ashamed to be an American, I am ashamed of the leadership that has allowed the military and economy along with it to go rogue.
Military intellectuals have known for centuries that prolonged wars will weaken a nation.
ReplyDeleteWashington's Blog has a story quoting an old military strategist whose tactical and strategic teachings are presented by our military to officers going to U.S. War Colleges.
The military leaders are going against their own teachings while the other industrial nations are staying with the wisdom of the ages, shunning that sure-to-fail ideology of run away imperialism.