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

Category: Veterans Issues

  • Service-Disabled, Veteran-Owned Small Business program broken

    Several of you folks sent us link to the Washington Examiner article about the government’s Service-Disabled, Veteran-Owned Small Business (SDVOSB) program and it’s rampant fraud. The program is designed to give service-disabled veterans and their businesses preference in government contracts, but, as with anything else that has to do with the government, the intentions are easily defrauded. We wrote about Warren Parker back when he was first arrested in 2011, and he’s just the tip of the iceburg;

    Only one agency – the Department of Veterans Affairs – is required to verify the claims made in the paperwork when a business owner seeks SDVOSB status. The rest do not even check the applicant’s qualifications unless a protest is filed, typically by an unsuccessful competitor.

    “The program is vulnerable to fraud and abuse,” GAO said in an August 2012 report, which echoed three years of the congressional watchdog agency’s prior findings.

    “The government-wide program remains particularly vulnerable since it relies on an honor-system-like process whereby firms self-certify their eligibility.

    The only way Parker was busted happened when he pissed someone off and they submitted his records to the government.

    From Fox News;

    The VA has since made changes to that certification process to great effect. “In 2011 when they changed the process for verification, 10,000 firms stopped, just dropped out of the program,” says Rep. Phil; Roe (R-Tn.) “That showed how much fraud there was in the program.”

    No other federal agencies have moved away from self-certification.

    10,000 folks just thought it wasn’t that important to rock their lies. We’ve seen teh VA’s process fail when they grant disability checks to people like Joseph Cryer and they could only find two people who had defrauded them with claims of being POWS, even though we know that there are thousands and more are exposed every day.

    I understand that the VA doesn’t want to screw any vets out of what they earned, but if we can do it from our LA-Z-Boys, certainly they can do it from their offices if they put a little effort into it. Because by letting the criminals slip through, they’re screwing all veterans.

  • SWAT team needed for vet with a shoe horn

    ROS and Eagle Keeper send us a link from the Chicago Tribune about the Park Forest, IL police department which felt that it needed riot shields, a taser and bean bag rounds to subdue a 95-year-old Army Air Corps veteran by the name of John Wrana who refused medical treatment in his nursing home room and held off staff with his cane and a shoe horn.

    The old man, described by a family member as “wobbly” on his feet, had refused medical attention. The paramedics were called. They brought in the Park Forest police.

    First they tased him, but that didn’t work. So they fired a shotgun, hitting him in the stomach with a bean-bag round. Wrana was struck with such force that he bled to death internally, according to the Cook County medical examiner.

    The police claim that Wrana had armed himself with a 12-inch knife, but staff and family say that there was no such weapon in the man’s nursing home room. the police also claim that nursing home staff was threatened by Wrana’s demeanor, but nursing home staff report that they were well-clear of the room after the police arrived. In fact, according to the article, staff begged the police to let them back in the room to calm the older gentleman down;

    [Wrana’s family attorney, Nicholas] Grapsas says he was told that police used a riot shield to come through the door before shooting bean-bag rounds at the old man as he sat in his chair.

    Riot shields are used to push back mobs of angry young protesters in the streets, or against dangerous convicts in prison cells, not to subdue an old, old man in a chair.

    “At some point, I’m told there were between five and seven police officers, they went back to the room with a riot shield in hand, entered the door and shot him with a shotgun that contained bean-bag rounds,” Grapsas said.

    His stepdaughter said that Wrana left the service as a sergeant and a veteran of the Army Air Corp and served in the India-Burma campaign of World War II. I guess the Park Forest police had read the warnings from the Department of Homeland Security in regards to dangerous veterans being the greatest terrorist threat.

  • Veterans sue New Rochelle City Council

    Gadsden_flag.svg

    The ignorant liberals on the city council of New Rochelle, NY forbade local veterans groups from flying the “Gadsden Flag” at the local armory, which is owned by the city, because they claim that the flag is “too political”, referring to the current usage by the various “Tea Party” groups. Of course, this is because the city council is not familiar, nor are they interested in learning the flag’s actual history. It has been used by the US Marine Corps for centuries since the first Marines enlisted under the flag in Philadelphia in 1775.

    The flag flew over the first US Naval commander-in-chief, Commodore Esek Hopkins, on the mainsail of his flagship that same year.

    If “too political” is a reason to ban things, New Rochell should ban the city council.

    According to the Washington Times, veterans groups in New Rochelle, are taking the city to court;

    City officials contacted on Friday did not immediately comment about the suit, or the case, AP reported.

    The lawsuit targets the mayor, the city manager and four council members, and seeks an injunction as well as unspecified damages.

  • Obama won’t agree to Congress’ spending cuts

    Fox News reports that the President won’t agree to any budget that limits the government’s domestic spending nor will he negotiate with Congress’ proposals to cut spending;

    [Treasury Secretary Jack Lew] also said the president was not going to accept a budget in which domestic spending is further cut to soften the blow to Defense spending.

    “That’s unacceptable,” Lew, who appeared on three Sunday shows to re-enforce the president’s positions, told NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “He won’t sign that.”

    Well, the president’s threats stand in stark contrast to his stance on raising healthcare costs on military retirees and reductions in military pay. He claims that he’ll veto any defense budget that doesn’t do both of those things, yet he’s immobile on domestic spending.

    And at the same time he says that he’s not going to balance the budget on the backs of veterans. So, I’m still wondering what all of my veteran friends out there who thought that Obama was good for veterans and defense have to say now.

  • White House threatens to veto defense budget

    The Obama Administration is stomping it’s feet and holding it’s breath until it’s collective face turns blue because the Defense Budget doesn’t do what they want it to do – screw the troops and retirees, according to the Army Times;

    A veto of a $512.5 billion defense funding bill was threatened Monday by the White House budget office, not so much because of complaints about the level of defense spending but because the Obama administration doesn’t want military spending to rob money from other federal programs.

    Additionally, the White House complains the House version of the 2014 defense appropriations bill is too generous with military pay, not generous enough with pay for federal civilian workers, and doesn’t include administration-proposed cost-cutting measures such as base closing and raising Tricare health fees for military retirees.

    I’m sure there are things that could be cut out of the House bill, since it’s their practice to seed a bill with giveaways to certain Congressional districts, but instead of targeting those, the Administration is complaining about retiree health care and troops’ pay – mostly because there aren’t enough votes against them to have an impact. It’s easier to cut personnel costs than it is to tell a district they’re not getting any government-funded orders at the local defense manufacturer.

    The House bill, scheduled to be debated and passed this week, represents reduction of about $5.1 billion less than the pre-sequester defense budget for 2013 and is about $3.4 billion less than the Obama administration’s request. When sequestration is taken into account, the proposed budget is $28.1 billion more than current spending, according to the House Appropriations Committee.

    Also included in the bill is $85.8 billion for war-related contingency funds.

    War? What war?

  • Vet hunger strikes to prevent deportation

    Dean sends us a link to the Military.com article about John E. Ferron, who Military.com calls a “Jamaica-born Vietnam veteran being held at the Eloy Detention Center in Arizona awaiting deportation” and to protest his deportation, he’s on a hunger strike. Well, as you read along in the story, he’s not a Vietnam veteran. He joined the Navy in late 1974 after he was ordered to be deported earlier in the year, which means that he finished his training at about the same time the Vietnam War ended. The awarding of the National Defense Service Medal for Vietnam Era veterans ended in August 1974.

    So Ferron, joined the Navy under an assumed named after he was ordered deported. the article doesn’t say whether he was honorably discharged or not, so let’s just assume that he was discharged under honorable conditions. He joined after he was ordered deported and didn’t use his real name. The article goes on to say that he was homeless and destitute at the time that he was apprehended. So why wasn’t the VA taking care of him. Well, he had a rather unsavory career after his discharge, according to the article;

    He continued to use the Steele name as late as 2005-2006. His conviction in 2008 on Social Security fraud, passport fraud, identity theft and aggravated identity theft not only got him three years in jail but resulted in the VA stripping him of his benefits after the Navy said it would no longer recognize his service.

    King concedes that Ferron is not a sympathetic case because he has had multiple run-ins with the law, though she believes much of that may be attributed to mental illness related to the head-trauma and PTSD.

    Yeah, well, apparently everyone who went through basic training, whether they completed it or not, suffers from PTSD, I suppose, I mean that’s everyone’s excuse these days. He needs to go back to Jamaica because we’re all stocked up with crazy here.

  • Pentagon’s MIA search “dysfunctional”?

    Several of you have sent us a link to an Army Times article about the Associated Press research on an internal investigation that DoD did on it’s own Missing In Action operations to recover the remains of service members who haven’t been accounted for from the Korean and Vietnam Wars. The report found that those recovery operations were “dysfunctional”, and in some cases, corrupt;

    The report paints a picture of a Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, a military-run group known as JPAC and headed by a two-star general, as woefully inept and even corrupt. The command is digging up too few clues on former battlefields, relying on inaccurate databases and engaging in expensive “boondoggles” in Europe, the study concludes.

    In North Korea, the JPAC was snookered into digging up remains between 1996 and 2000 that the North Koreans apparently had taken out of storage and planted in former American fighting positions, the report said. Washington paid the North Koreans hundreds of thousands of dollars to “support” these excavations.

    Some recovered bones had been drilled or cut, suggesting they had been used by the North Koreans to make a lab skeleton.

    Yeah, so who would have thought that our former, and in some cases, current, enemies would force us into situations we might otherwise avoid? North Koreans like our cash money, so why wouldn’t they delight in manipulating our agencies into pouring more into their dysfunctional economy? The same goes for the Vietnamese.

    I think it’s less the fault of the DoD and more the fault of the circumstances under which they labor. We’ve seen a large number of missing returned and interred back in this country over the past few years, and I think we should be more surprised at that than we are over the fact that Pentagon agencies are working under corrupt circumstances. In this case, I don’t think that DoD is at fault for money we’re wasting. It’s probably more the fault of the politicians, like John McCain and John Kerry, who have forced us to operate under these political conditions.

  • Marine stops bank robber

    Andy sends us a link to the story about Eugene Storley a 65-year-old former Marine who happened to be behind a bank robber in line at the teller’s window;

    From Space Coast Daily;

    As [Edward ] Sotelo demanded money, former U.S. Marine and Law Enforcement officer Eugene Storley, who was at the next window, intervened and began fighting the bank robber.

    Sotelo threw his gun and ran from the bank before he received any money and no one was hurt. Sotelo was apprehended a few moments later across the street. A short time later, Cocoa’s Police Chief was helping officers search the area and he located Sotelo’s gun.

    In addition to the armed robbery charges, Sotelo has been charged with assaulting an elderly person. That’ll make him popular in jail.