Stealth Target of Defense Spending Cuts: America’s Highly Effective Socialized Medicine Provider, th

[unhappycamper]

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/12/stealth-target-of-defense-spending-cuts-americas-highly-effective-socialized-medicine-provider-the-va-system-and-military-benefits-generally.html

Stealth Target of Defense Spending Cuts: America’s Highly Effective Socialized Medicine Provider, the VA System, and Military Benefits Generally
Tuesday, December 18, 2012

One element of the coming budget pact that is not getting the attention it warrants is a covert effort to gut military benefits by privatizing them. Privitization has rarely delivered on its promise of delivering better performance and/or lower costs. Indeed, in the military, it has served as an egregious ground for looting. And curiously the officialdom has chosen to turn its eyes to it. In the Iraq war, for instance, contract drivers allege that trucks that were used for moving corpses and body parts, which decomposed rapidly in the desert heat, were, in violation of regulations, then used for transporting food, such as ice in bulk, without so much as a hosedown in between. The forms of war profiteering have been numerous as the traditional protections against abuses in contracting, such as not allowing the firm that designed a contract to bid on it, have either been eroded through a misguided vogue for deregulation or simply ignored. And in Iraq, the use of sub-contractors, with as many as five or six layers, each taking a cut, means that as much as 50% of the value of a contract ends up being fraudulent through one ruse or another.

The manufactured fiscal cliff crisis means that more profiteering is coming to the military, this by fundamentally changing the relationship of soldiers to the armed forces. An article in Open Democracy describes how servicemembers were once assured of a high level of benefits in return for the sacrifices made. But the military, which resisted the blandishments of neoliberals, started to succumb in the 1990s. Tellingly, the Army changed its logo from “The Army Takes Care of Its Own” to ““The Army Takes Care of its Own so that They Can Learn to Take Care of Themselves.” This reflected a basic change in attitude:

The contracting out of the Pentagon’s support coincided with neoliberal efforts to combat “dependency” in the military. Policies forcing recipients of public assistance programs to achieve “independence” – largely through mandating employment requirements – had been gaining ground in conservative and neoliberal policy debates in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They also took hold in the military, where in the early 1990s the military retrenched its support for soldiers and their families. As the Army pulled back on spending for support services and contracted out services, for example, it also instituted programs to teach soldiers and their spouses “self-sufficiency.”

The plum for privatizers is the healthcare and pension budgets:

[ProgressiveProfessor]

1. If you or your family were ever subject to military medicine or the VA you would not call it

highly effective. BTDT