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 Veterans of the Navy, Coast Guard and Fleet Marines (often referred to as the Blue Water Navy) who served in Vietnam in the offshore waters need your help and the help of everyone in your organizations. Veterans from this group who are currently disabled by diseases the VA links to the dioxin contained in Agent Orange are denied any health care and lost wage compensation. Ironically, any service member who can prove their boots touch the soil of mainland Vietnam automatically receives those benefits under a “presumption of exposure” rule. This rule allows those boots-on-ground veterans to claim their benefits without the need to prove any exposure to Agent Orange, the worst of the dioxin-based herbicides.
So, where’s the problem?
Between 1962 and 1971, the United States military sprayed 21,000,000 gallons of chemical herbicides and defoliants in Vietnam, eastern Laos and parts of Cambodia, as part of Operation Ranch Hand. The program’s goal was to defoliate forested and rural land, depriving the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army of places to hide. Another goal was to (Read More....)
 America must recognize it does not stand alone. Our present political and economic crises are as much a part of the natural order of world events as evolution itself, and cannot be viewed shortsightedly as just a national issue. We must perceive ourselves for what we are: an integral part of the global economy where our influence, massive though it is— roughly 25 percent of the world’s GNP—cannot be expected to turn this economic malaise around. As never before, we “fatties” sit in the same bathtub with the other slimmer nations of the world, and it is overflowing. Our combined productive capacity (the bathtub’s water) has outstripped our ability to consume it all, with the result that the goods and services of our labors are worth less than the value of labor itself. Now we witness our current depression hitting the working class disproportionately, as it always does. Only by reducing our fat can we stabilize the water level, easing the worldwide depression at the same time.
The trick is to do this carefully; otherwise, the toll of our weakness is the fatal consequence of war. And it is this choice, (Read More....)
 Bush and Cheney entered office in 2000, well before 9/11, ready to topple Saddam Hussein, according to then Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill in Ron Suskind’s The Price of Loyalty.(1) At their first National Security Council meeting, ousting Saddam was high on the agenda. After 9/11 no excuses were necessary. (Perhaps they knew it was coming?) So to get America into an imperialist war, contrary to the Constitution, both lied about Saddam’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. More than a decade later, with 4,000 dead and 50,000 seriously injured US troops, and at a conservative estimate, 650,000 dead and 1,000,000 displaced Iraqis, we are still there, stuck in alien territory. They even branched out to include Afghanistan, “surging” along attempting to “spread democracy.” Eight years later Obama took over. Instead of the promise of change he told us we could believe in, he widened the war, blowing up the Afghan campaign into a surge we were all made to believe in—meanwhile receiving the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize (sign on Texas gas station: “Free Nobel Peace Prize with Oil Change”)—while holding an election no one can believe (Read More....)
 ***The following is a guest post for Personal Security by author Jim Knapton***
Fourteen trillion dollars is a lot of money. That is the size of our national debt. Someone said recently that if it were in five-dollar bills placed end to end, they would almost reach the moon. That’s what the USA owes the world, from the newest born to the oldest still with us: $45,000 each! Yet we’re at war in Afghanistan wasting billions on what? Fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda apparently. If we are the greatest military machine the world has ever known and they are a bunch of “desert derelicts” (quoting Mark Steyn’s delicate words in America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It), after a hundred months of conflict, why is President Obama “winding it down”? Isn’t it because we can’t afford it? In other words, thirty-six years since the end of the Vietnam War, haven’t we lost again?
I am sure President Obama doesn’t wish to see it that way. Motivated by pressure from the military-industrial complex, whose (Read More....)
That ultimately we too will fall…
By Jack E. Lohman
Americans do not like to talk of this, but it is inevitable. They are throwing rocks but we have guns. Ours won’t be as nice.
We at least have a semblance of fair elections, but increasingly they are controlled by the top 3% of the wealthy and the politicians that benefit from the payola. And the fact that our Constitution has been construed to make money = speech and corporations = people has made matters worse.
The Fat Cats have their personal vote, but they also control the purse strings that excite the politicians.
Looking at the Egyptian protests it is too soon to tell whether they are going to be ahead or behind when it’s all over. In any gathering of this type the Bell curve tells us that there are some very good people at one end and some very bad people at the other.
Who prevails will dictate (Read More....)
 Today we have a wonderful guest article from Scott Bittle and Jean Johnson. They are the authors of a new book entitled Where Does the Money Go? Rev Ed: Your Guided Tour to the Federal Budget Crisis. What they have to say about Medicare, Social Security and the coming federal government debt crisis should be a huge wake up call for all of us. The truth is that the U.S. government is looking at a sea of red ink for as far as the eye can see, and our politicians are just going about business as usual as if our entire financial system was not about to come crashing down on our heads. I think that all of you are really going to enjoy the tremendous insights that Bittle and Johnson have shared with us in this article....
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Turning the Clock Back Isn't Enough: The Nasty Surprise Awaiting the GOP on Health Care and the Deficit By Scott Bittle and Jean Johnson, Authors of (Read More....)
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