This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Veterans Issues

  • Time’s Swampland; Are Veterans Selfish?

    Mark Thompson asks that question today in Time’s Swampland, which, in effect, is an answer in the affirmative. In regards to the Cost Of Living Allowance (COLA) cuts to veterans pensions, Thompson writes;

    Then last week, a new storm arose when the Pentagon said it was considering cutting the subsidies it pays to military commissaries—on-base grocery stores boasting lower prices that are reserved for military personnel, including many veterans—that could force many such facilities to close their doors.

    “This is yet another undeserved blow to our men and women in service—and their families—in the name of ‘necessary cutbacks’ to reduce an ungainly national deficit,” American Legion National Commander Daniel Dellinger said, after learning of the commissary proposal. “Like the trimming of expenses to be made by reducing military retirees’ pensions, this is an inexcusable way of attempting to fix a fault by penalizing the blameless.”

    The notion that vets are seeking more than their fair share upsets some of their leaders. “Vets are anything but selfish!” says Norb Ryan, president of the Military Officers Association of America. “If anything, vets are too selfless. They are also idealistic…Vets are fair and therefore, they expect others to be fair.”

    Yeah, that’s kind of the point. We planned for our later years based on what Congress and the White House promised us for our loyal service, and sometimes asking of us more than would be considered reasonable by most of the people in this country. But we remained loyal and did what we were told. And this is the thanks we get;

    It suggests that the nation is developing a military caste, separate and apart from the nation. It seems the military is in danger of becoming just another special interest group.

    Yeah, well, we took it in the ass after Vietnam, we took it in the as in the 90s and now we’re expected to take in the ass again. Like it’s our job to take it in the ass. We didn’t become “another special interest group” all on our own – we were pushed. We were pushed by congressmen who won’t cut spending for illegals and criminals, but won’t blink an eye to slash a cost of living allowance for a widow or disabled veteran who gave as much as they could give. Those are people who can’t just go out and find a job to supplement their pensions, they depend on their pensions and and the cost of living increases. But the votes are what count, and military spending, especially personnel cuts are popular ecause it doesn’t cost them much politically.

    You’re darn tootin’ we’re another special interest group, but we were forced into it. We’ve always sat quietly we bore the burden of politicians’ vote buying frenzies. We’ve also watched the cost which always pays for the electioneering in blood and lives. We were treated like a special uninterest for centuries. Now because we won’t take it sitting down, somehow we’re filthy special interest beasts.

    Just because the 99% don’t accept us unless we’re fighting their wars, or digging them out from avalanches, or pulling them from the roofs of their flooded homes, or bringing them chow during power outages, or marching in their pretty parades so they can feel good about themselves, well, that doesn’t mean we will remain silent when they threaten our livelihoods. Unlike the illegal aliens who want a tax break, we only want what we earned for doing what the country wanted us to do, and we only want what we deserve, not a penny more. Is that really too much to ask?

    Thanks to ChockBlock and ANCCLT for pissing me off with the link.

  • Oregon businessman discovers that ripping off vets is bad for business

    Someone sent us a link to a KATU investigation of Tim Leatherby of Leatherby Tools who thought he could make money by ripping off veteran workers, because people like Leatherby sees us as bags of money, not people;

    KATU investigated Leatherby and showed how he hired local veterans to do remodeling work at a Salem apartment complex, but did not pay them the wages he promised them. The veterans said he owed them more than $15,000 in wages. He promised them multiple times that he would pay them their wages, but did not.

    In the report, the veterans said that Leatherby told them he was working closely with Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber. However, a Kitzhaber spokesperson told KATU that Governor Kitzhaber had never met Leatherby.

    So the Oregon Attorney General fined him a hundred grand and took away his business license for the state. I guess it didn’t pay all that well for him.

  • Daniel Henry Lopez sentenced for scamming vets

    A tiny article from My San Antonio reports that a 69-year-old was sentenced to 51 months in jail for trolling the local VA facilities for identities to steal;

    U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez also ordered Daniel Henry Lopez to pay $84,741 in restitution and to serve three years of federal supervision once he gets out of prison.

    Lopez pleaded guilty in October to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. He admitted he stole personal information from people he met at Veterans Administration rehabilitation facilities to take out credit cards and to submit $78,000 in fake income tax returns.

    So, I guess computers aren’t the only way you can lose data at the VA. I know this isn’t the VA’s fault, but sometimes we lose our personal information the old fashioned way.

  • CBO; remove working age retirees from Tricare to save billons

    Obviously, the Congressional Budget Office is looking for ways to screw the living shit out of veterans, especially retirees. We talked earlier last week about all of the ways that they could make healthcare more expensive for veteran retirees. I joked that doing away with Tricare altogether would save them the most money without gouging into the most constituents. They must have been reading, because they are now thinking about removing “working age” veterans from Tricare, according to a link sent by Travis from the Military Times;

    According to the CBO, proposals to increase Tricare enrollment fees and copayments for working-age retirees could save $24.1 billion from 2015 to 2023, while introducing minimum out-of-pocket charges for beneficiaries using Tricare for Life would save roughly $18.4 billion.

    But banning working age retirees from the Pentagon’s HMO-style Prime plan could save $89.6 billion — an amount difficult to ignore, budget experts said.

    So, what they want to do is force retirees into the current mess that they’ve created for the rest of America in regards to health care – that monstrosity dubbed Obamacare. Never mind that any of us stayed in the service to get cheaper healthcare, that we were promised healthcare as a condition of our continued service, that we’ve already fulfilled our part of that bargain and can’t get our youth back. They could save even more money if they just outright decided to stop giving us our pensions, too. Are they really that petty? Are they really that jealous of our retirement benefits that they just want to strip away every fiscal reason that we served?

  • Ayotte: COLA cuts hit widows, too

    New Hampshire Republican Senator Kelly Ayotte received confirmation from the Pentagon that the cuts to cost of living allowances includes recipients of the Survivor Benefit program – you know that thing that you take a reduction from your military to pay your spouse if you give up the ghost before him or her – you know, that you pay for because you intend for them to have a means to live after they sacrificed for your military career.

    “The more I press the Pentagon for answers, the more I learn how egregious the military benefit cuts are in the budget deal. The cost of living adjustment cuts unfairly shortchange military retirees, military survivors, and the combat-injured to pay for more Washington spending,” said Senator Ayotte, a member of the Armed Services Committee. “Those who have kept us safe and taken bullets for us shouldn’t be singled out to sacrifice even more, and these cuts should never have been put in the budget agreement or passed by Congress. I am continuing my efforts to immediately right this wrong and to ensure our military retirees, survivors, and combat-wounded receive the full benefits they’ve earned.”

    Based on Senator Ayotte’s questions, the Defense Department has confirmed that the CRDP, CRSC, and SBP programs are affected by the annual COLA reduction. The DoD response said, “The reduction can be greatest for disability retirees since many begin receiving retired pay well before the usual military retirement age.”

    I wonder if the Pentagon will be sending out it’s agents to snatch candy from the mouths of babies, too. Thanks to ROS for the link.

  • Karl Twilleager; PTSD made him want to blow up a bar

    Mary sends us the records of one Karl Twilleager who was recently sentenced to five years in prison for plotting to blow up a bar in Washington State because his motorcycle club’s rivals frequented the place. The 66-year-old claims that the year that he spent in Vietnam gave him PTSD and his lawyer wrote in a statement to the judge at sentencing that because of the government’s inability to treat veterans when they return from war, we’re all on the verge of bombing stuff, or something;

    James B. Feldman quoted William M. Dulaney who wrote: “What seems clear is that neither the American government nor society is attending to the effects of war on such individuals. Indeed it appears that no process exists by which combat veterans are able to assume their role as citizens, as people. Because of this lack of structured re-assimilation into American society, certain combat veterans have created over time a culture in which they are accepted as the people they have become. The outlaw motorcycle club structure can be seen as a society built along militaristic, hierarchal lines, a highly ordered, controlled and black and white world in which individuals may understand their role, their identity, their place in society.”

    The Seattle PI writes;

    An Army veteran, Twilleager turned to crime after leaving the military following his service in Vietnam. His attorney contended Twilleager and other veterans found the structure of outlaw biker gangs appealing after life in the military.

    Having been convicted of drug crimes in Oregon, Twilleager was sentenced to 12 years in state prison for a 1993 murder in Grant County. Twilleager shot a man three times, loaded his body into the trunk of a car and dumped the remains on a roadside.

    As a convicted felon, he wasn’t allowed to have guns. He also lacked the required federal permits to possess a short-barrel shotgun or explosives.

    Yes, Twilleager spent a year in Vietnam, here are his records, if you need verification;

    Twilleager FOIA
    Twilleager assignments

    My complaint is that there are thousands of Vietnam veterans and thousands of them belong to motorcycle clubs and they’re not plotting to blow up their rivals or a bar or even an outhouse. I understand that the lawyer needed something to mitigate his client’s bad behavior, but using the blood and minds of millions of veterans to do that is irresponsible.

    I’m not going to judge Twilleager’s time in Vietnam, I wasn’t there and I don’t know if he did anything that would have brought on PTSD. But, that doesn’t give him or his lawyer the right to propagate the crazy vet myth.

  • Cutting pension growth; The lazy way out

    In the 90s, we all remember how the Clinton Administration “balanced the budget” by slashing military spending. By the end of the decade, soldiers were enduring turnstile deployments to hand out sandwiches around the world. Retirees were forced out of Tricare and into Medicare when they turned 65. There was a training ammo shortfall. All training dollars were spent on the “Meals on Wheels” operations. Troops and their families were on food stamps. What few troops there were left after the manpower cuts. After a decade of turning that around, it seems that we’re headed back in the same direction.

    Last month, Congress decided to cut the rate of growth of military pensions. They explained that personnel costs are eating up half of the Defense budget. The Military Officers’ Association of America (MOAA) explains how that is not exactly true;

    This may sound alarming, especially in light of the Pentagon stating in April of this year that military personnel costs consumed about a third of the budget.

    But the fact is it does consume nearly half the budget if you include all personnel costs — military and civilian personnel, delivery of military health care, and in-kind compensation (DoD schools, commissaries, etcetera).

    What’s difficult to find is what goes into in-kind compensation, because these figures and facts are imbedded in several accounts and only DoD knows how it’s defined.

    But when analyzing the first three budget items — military personnel (MilPers account), civilian personnel (CivPers account), and defense health program (DHP) — history shows in the chart below that these personnel costs over the past 30 years have gone from a high in 1980 and 1991 of half of the defense budget share to now less than 40 percent.

    So, basically, the Pentagon is using personnel costs as an excuse, and not a very valid excuse. And, oh, they’re lying about it all. In Stars & Stripes, the VSOs warn that this is just the beginning for Defense to begin shouldering the political load of cuts;

    “This is what happens when you have an unengaged population whose focus starts to shift away,” said Tom Tarantino, chief policy officer for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. “When times get tough, people say everyone has to sacrifice. But not everyone has been sacrificing for the last 10 years.”

    Yeah, see, that’s the problem. The troops shouldered the burden of war, so the rest of the country could head to the mall, now that the economy has made the average American uncomfortable, the troops and the casualties of the war are expected to to shoulder the burden of correcting economical woes.

    In the last week, editorial boards at USA Today and the Washington Post have called the veterans’ opposition out of touch, noting that the military’s generous retirement benefits aren’t comparable to any private sector pensions. The Post called it a “dishonor” not to change a military retirement system long overdue for an update.

    Yeah, when veterans resist cuts to what we’re owed, it’s dishonorable. What’s dishonorable are the lies that are being told in order to screw the true 1% so the 99% can be more comfortable. I don’t see the Washington Post, USAToday or Congress making any sacrifices, or recommending sacrifice from any other sector of the population, including criminals and illegal aliens who are owed nothing.

    Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno tried to defend the cuts;

    Though he would not directly address the cuts to military retirement pay contained in the budget signed in late December, Odierno said the Joint Chiefs of Staff are not looking to cut pay and benefits. Rather, they are trying to reduce rate of growth of pay and benefits.

    Odierno said the military had closed the gap in pay disparity and, in some cases, even exceeded it. Now the service leaders need to look at pay and benefits to ensure the package is accurate and sustainable. Otherwise, the growing cost will force the services to reduce end strength.

    “We have to look at this as a total package,” he said. But as the Pentagon looks to reduce future cost, it has “to be very careful because we don’t want to undercut the foundation of an all-volunteer Army.”

    Yeah, well, Congress should look at the “total package” that they’re dealing with, rather than focus on the Defense Department for their cuts. I’ll remind the reader that sequestration happened because the White House proposed it and implemented it when Congress couldn’t summon the testicular fortitude to cut government across the board.

    Thanks to PavePusher and Chief Tango for the links.

  • USAToday; cut military pensions

    The editorial board of the USAToday comes out in favor of military pension cuts in a green-eyed envious opinion piece today, sent to us by Chock Block. Of course, they blame Reagan for our “generous” retirement benefits;

    But one big group was largely untouched by Reagan’s overhaul: members of the military. They are still on a plan so generous that it allows them to retire in their late 30s or early 40s and collect a pension, with cost-of-living increases, for the rest of their lives. This is accompanied by lifetime health coverage whose premium, $460 per year for a family policy, has not risen since 1995 even as costs for everyone else have skyrocketed.

    In last month’s bipartisan budget deal, Congress made some wholely defensible trims in military pensions, prompting a howl of complaints from veterans groups.

    They protest too much. Way too much. The military pension system is not only extremely generous, it is also counterproductive. It drains defense money from today’s troops and weapons. And while the system encourages some people to consider the military who otherwise might not, it also encourages them to leave early, taking their first-rate training to go double-dip by moving into a civilian government job. In any case, they can collect pensions — intended as old-age protection — in the prime of their working lives.

    Yeah, the system is way too generous. When I retired, twenty years ago yesterday, my pension was less than $12,000/year. In those twenty years, the generous COLA increases have brought the generous pension to a little more than $18,000 last year. So yeah, I’m cleaning up. I’d like to see some of the editorial board of the USAToday eat the shit I ate for two decades and settle for $1500/month before taxes. The thing that kept me in the service for twenty years was the FREE medical care I knew I’d need after gobbling down those shit sandwiches everyday. Before I got out, the FREE medical care was gone, but it was at least affordable. But obviously, it’s too affordable – while the Obama Administration and the editorial board of USAToday want lower medical for everyone else in the country, they want raise the medical costs for veterans, as a way of saying “thanks for your service, asshole”.

    They want single-payer healthcare for illegal aliens, but screw veterans for expecting the government to keep their promises.

    The editorial board of the USAToday continues;

    This approach would save taxpayer money and help reach budget targets. It also would discourage people from leaving early after the government has invested so much in them.

    The change would also make military pensions less wildly out of line with most Americans’ experience. Private-sector pensions, to the extent that they exist at all, are routinely scaled back or frozen in ways much more dramatic than these changes.

    Certainly, protecting veterans impaired by their service is a different sort of issue. But the current system rewards all equally, including the 40% of servicemembers who have never seen a combat zone.

    Yeah, suddenly the Left is worried about saving the taxpayers money – I almost believe that. And, oh, yeah, all veterans participated in war in some manner or another. Those who haven’t deployed filled some necessary function that contributed to the war effort, so don’t try to pit combat veterans against POGs with this battle, especially what with you, the editorial board of USAToday, being the most POG in this discussion, you cowardly assholes who rode out the war from behind your glass-topped desks, sniping at the troops every time you had the opportunity. And the sniping continues. Assholes.