Military Facts For Non-Military Social Workers: Fill & Download for Free

Been there, done that.Woodrow Wilson was a full-blown fascist closely followed in Europe and copied by the likes of Mussolini and Hitler, with his administration (1913–21) credited there as the first fascist regime.Socialists throughout the continent keenly watched Wilson, especially through the war years, as a guide to implementation of fascism or, for non-fascists, as a source of concern. And he did not let them down.The War Industries Board he created provided the very model for fascist corporatism, and Franklin Roosevelt in particular was singled out by Mussolini for his work in directing ship building in his position as assistant secretary of the Navy for having proven his own concept of Dirigisme (a fact Roosevelt was proud to mention to Italian-American audiences when later campaigning for president).His Committee on Public Information stands as the first ministry of propaganda in a western nation.His American Protective League became the prototype for the Gestapo.Wilson, in line with his belief in eugenics and white supremacy, fired all black postal workers, resegregated the military and helped to restart the Ku Klux Klan right in our White House. This paralleled the racial-supremacy policies of National Socialism (or rather Hitlerism, as racial supremacy seems unique to Wilson and Hitler; Franco and Mussolini, for example, did not employ it to nearly the same extent).Prohibition and the Volstead Act passed under Wilson prohibiting the sale of alcoholic beverages.Wilson implemented a compulsory military draft for WWI, with thousands imprisoned (many for life at hard labor—though all were pardoned by his successor, Harding) and seventeen executed when a board (not a court) found their claims for refusing service to be insincere. The individual standing against the government was not to be tolerated.The Palmer Raids after WWI were aimed at shutting down competing socialist opposition, just as the Nazis went after social democrats and communists.The Espionage Act of 1917 made it a crime to interfere with military or government operations, while the Sedition Act of 1918 even to voice criticisms or opinions contrary to government policy.Sigmund Freud even collaborated with a former Wilson administration member to publish a book on Wilson's psychopathology: Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study.All in all, under the Wilson administration, some 175,000 Americans were arrested for violation of the foregoing. By 1920, liberalism had revived in the form of the American Civil Liberties Union to counter the fascist excesses of Wilson, and America proceeded to elect, in Harding and Coolidge, two straight liberal (true sense) presidents.

Guaranteed 100% true!I simply cannot believe the misinformed, cruel, heartless and “I’m so much better than you, let me tell you how to run your life” tone of many of the answers I’ve read (couldn’t make it through all).My guess is when you say “better off without them,” you don’t think they should be replaced by anything. I’d bet most of you with this take on it have the phrase “welfare queens” in your vocabulary.It’s obvious you have no idea how many in the US live. You don’t have the slightest concept that everyone is not as well off as you are. You have no idea how much poverty is hidden behind the faces of the elderly, the late middle aged, mothers, and children.The number is enormous.Don’t blame lack of education, lack of work initiative, stupidity, ignorance, etc. for this.I go to the local community dinner most Wednesday nights. Town pop: 5,428. Many of the people I sit with are very old, upwards of 80. I’m in my 60’s. All of us have undergrad degrees and most of us have grad degrees. Most of us worked ALL our lives in demanding jobs. Most of us raised families.You will find, as we did, that the workplace does not value experienced older workers, no matter how productive. You might want a pension, benefits, health insurance and a living wage. Most of our replacements know that’s a fantasy world.Dinner is free, although most people make an effort to contribute something. I take blood pressures every other week.It’s the only nutritious meal I get every week. Some weeks I go to Foodshare Truck, which is run by the very generous Chase Foundation.What you get at the Food truck is very basic. 70% of the food is root crops. Potatoes are always there. Onions. Beets. Horse carrots. Pepperidge Farm decided to stop supplying the food truck with outdated bread. Cabbage. Once every six months or so, meat is distributed in small amounts. It’s all markdown stuff from local stores. On rare occasions we get crackers or cookies.Great! you say. I should be thankful. I AM thankful to the kind Chase foundation, who have been philanthropists in the CT area for as long as I can remember. What I’m not thankful for is the awful food.For 2 years, I had only molars, and not many of those. My dentist did not take the new plan I subscribed to. After 3 years of having no teeth, he’d heard about my situation from a former colleague. He called me and offered to repair them to at least the edibility stage for whatever I could pay. At the time, I could give him $1,000. The work he did went on for 3 years. It was shoddy, and now I have no upper front teeth.Imagine how much I looked forward to having a dinner of potatoes, beets, onions, and horse carrots (a special very large, tough breed).I did apply for food stamps/EBT benefits in my home town at one point. I’d had a FICA paying job since age 16, with no lapses until I was in my 60’s. I’d never received ANY government assistance, but I was desperate. Yogurt, milk, and things I could eat weren’t on the truck.The evil woman who directed the program in my own town had her own agenda. I brought in proof that I was living on 12,000 a year, of which $6000 went mostly to the town of Newington in property and car taxes. The rest was frivolously spent on gas, utilities, an occasional drive in my ancient car to visit my daughter who’d moved to NYC, as she could not get hired for a job with a living wage in CT after college.First, she directed me to their “food pantry.” There may be places in the US where people are understanding and kind enough to donate nutritious food to food pantries. At least 50% of the food pantry was boxed stuffing mix, and those ripoff boxes Stop & Shop sells so the people buying them feel they’ve made a good contribution to the community. If you look at the boxes, this is what they contain, usually:A box of stuffing mix!!!Can of tuna or occasionally chicken meat.A single serving box of store brand minestroneTiny can of fruit in soupy sugar syrup.Can of gravyCranberry sauceElbow macaroni, small boxSingle serving size can of store brand corn.Not only are customers unwittingly buying a food supply item in which the box costs more than the food, but the box is more nutritious as well.My genuine thanks to the customers, but the charitable cause you’re helping is really the poor, indigent, elderly, waifish Stop & Shop executives. You pay $10 for $4 worth of mostly non-nutritious food. Please, give your money to a local food pantry or charity directly, not through Stop & Shop.In truth, they are “HELP OUT POOR STOP & SHOP BOXES.”The food pantry allows you one bottle of peanut butter a month, and 2 cans of tuna, which they rarely have. The well off volunteers spritely point out I can have all the stuffing I want!!!! One can of fruit. I have no teeth? Well, fuck me. It must be my fault. I must eat bonbons all day.In fact, I lost my teeth due to a severe KCl deficiency, caused by malnutrition and a hiatal hernia. My mouth was so dry my teeth just crumbled. It took 5 years to figure out I had nearly no potassium and almost no RBC’s in my body. KCl was 1/2 of what it should been; I was so anemic my face was grey and my H & H was 1/6 of the minimum needed for health.The only reason I didn’t die of an arrhythmia or other disorder cause by malnutrition was because I had bronchitis for the sixth time that year and went to a totally incompetent walk in clinic. I have my own insurance. Initially, they found absolutely nothing wrong with me.On my short (10 mile) drive home, they called 3 times….First, to tell me I had pneumonia and atelectasis. Then, to notify me I had critically low electrolyte and RBC levels. The third time they called and demanded I go to the hospital. “For what?” I said. I’d worked in a hospital for decades. I knew what that would entail. “Nothing doing.” Besides, the 2 hour visit exhausted me. The front door looked miles away.The social work waiting room was usually packed to overflowing, with late middle aged men and some women who’d obviously worked all their lives. The feeling of shame and desperation permeated the room.Did the social worker get me EBT entitlements, since I qualified, had paid tens of thousands of dollars over my work life as a nurse in payroll and property taxes? Not on your life!She decided I needed help from a local church which specialized in tithing and parting poor parishioners from their money. The well dressed minister showed up one Saturday morning with a flock of unwilling preteens to help rake the yard and other maintenance. After about ten minutes, he informed me he had found a small shard of glass embedded in the lawn, and therefore he had to leave as I was endangering the safety of his sheep.My income has now dropped to $6K annually. The anxiety it provokes, the sleeplessness, the fears, are unbelievable.At least three qualified town social workers know professionally that I have ONLY enough money to pay taxes on my house, which I paid for 25 years ago. I’m not letting it go without a struggle. It needs work to sell or be livable. I don’t have a fixed address.All of them know that I have been very ill due to malnutrition, and not one has offered to process the paperwork for an EBT card. Imagine what it’s like to maintain your financial records in the trunk of a 14 year old car.I see such greed, self-congratulations, such indifference to human life, such evil, such hate for poor people, that I am aghast. A few years ago I was a well dressed, well groomed woman who taught adjunct fac. at Yale, was an experienced psychiatric nurse, had a newer Volvo, and commanded respect. I didn’t need their help then. My own patients were generally extremely poor, and I did what I could to help them.Never did I think I was end up in the position of beggar to a corrupt, sanctimonious bunch of bureaucrats at the end of my life.You want to know where your tax dollars go? It’s not to me, and not to poor people in general. Even a 3 year old can figure out who gets the huge piece of pie, and who gets nothing.How has my country become such a sop to the military, spending billions on equipment during a time we are not at war.Meanwhile, people are starving.We are going backwards at the speed of light. If anyone knows anything about the history of social security and other government assistance programs, you might remember that high ranking government officials found it distasteful to find elderly women rummaging through trash bins for food, and unattractively dying in the street. This was during FDR’s tenure, in the Depression.These delicate gentlemen found the sight disturbing to their sensibilities.These are comments in a response from another Quoran who made it even more abundantly clear how poorly paid the military is. It’s self explanatory:from: Mary FerrisJust one note about how much the US spends on the military: for the most part, it is for “tech toys” - a classic example is at F-35 Total Costs Climb Past $1.5 Trillion — How High Will They Go? Meanwhile, upwards of 25% of NCOs with families qualify for assistance like SNAP (food stamps) - and if the military member is not stationed at a base with a hospital, Medicaid. And before anyone blames the last administration for this, read up on how military pay has SUCKED for NCOs/junior grade officers since the REVOLUTIONARY WAR (and how things have gotten worse for military members AND veterans since NEWT GINGRICH decided veterans’ benefits were really “entitlements”).

There was a time when there were Republicans who put country above party. There was a time when family values and protecting the Constitution meant something. There was a time when personal integrity came before personal agendas.There was a day when Republicans had the balls to force their own president out of office because of his crimes.But those days ended with Nixon’s resignation.That party was replaced by the one that thought it was okay to make a deal with Iran not to release the American hostages until after the election, and who sold them arms in order to secretly fund the Contras to fight the socialist Sandinista government in Nicaragua.My mom was a teacher at an inner city school and my dad was a social worker dealing with people in East L.A., so I had a vague idea about how tough it is for the poor. For that reason, I tended to side with the Democratic party.My opposition to the Viet Nam war also had something to do with which party I supported in 1968 and 1972, although I was too young to vote.When I finally got the right to vote, I was too involved with my career to think much about politics.I didn’t vote for Reagan mostly because he sounded like the cowboy riding the A-bomb through a B-52 bomb chute at the end of Doctor Strangelove instead of a serious presidential candidate.One day, though, I remember hearing a statement from the Reagan administration claiming that ketchup was a vegetable, in order to justify cutting funds for school lunches.And it just blew my mind.In looking up the actual statement today, it turns out my memory of the statement was twisted by the media’s reporting. According to wikipedia, the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service allowed local school lunch administrators to credit a condiment such as pickle relish as a vegetable, this is the same thing as saying ketchup counts as a vegetable in some poor kid’s lunch.For anyone who has ever read the ingredients on a ketchup or relish bottle, this is insane, the kind of spin doctoring right out of Orwell’s “1984.”The callous attitude toward poor children, and the legalistic lying used to cover up their nasty budget cuts pushed me even further away from ever considering a Republican candidate.Fast forward to 2000, and I thought that John McCain was the one Republican with enough integrity to earn my vote. Unfortunately, he was destroyed by dirty tricks during the Republican primary by Karl Rove and the Bush campaign. They used a fake automatic telephone poll asking people "Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain…if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?" (The truth was he had adopted a little girl from Bangladesh.)Dirty Tricks, South Carolina and John McCainThat was the one and probably last time I ever considered a Republican candidate for any office, especially after watching Bush destroy the country in so many ways with the non-response to warnings about 9/11, illegal wars, tax cuts for the rich while cutting social programs, outing a CIA agent to try to discredit a diplomat from exposing the lies used by Bush to start a war, etc.There’s one more problem I have with Republican party and whatever it has become, and that is the lack of individual integrity. As long as a politician votes along party lines, they are good to go.That includes:Guys who hire prostitutes while wearing diapers (really Louisiana, you couldn’t have gotten rid of David Vitter?)Candidates for Senate who have to claim they are not witches (Are you kidding Delaware? You chose a woman who “dabbled in witchcraft?”)Men whose education and ideology matches the witch by talking about how “legitimate” rapes rarely leads to victims getting pregnant (Are you out of your minds, Missouri?)Allow an accused child molester run for Senate (Sweet Home Alabama?)For the Democrats, at least they have the decency to remove politicians who don’t abide by the rules:Sending dick pix to strange women? Bye bye, Weiner.Soliciting bribes in the Windy City? Impeach governor Blagojevich and send him to prison.Take a picture seven years ago with your hands floating over the breasts of a sleeping USO entertaining, regardless of the fact said breasts are protected by over 3/4″ of kevlar body armor and the “victim” never woke up? Go back to comedy, Franken.Isn’t it amazing that these same Republicans who condemned Agent Orange for his racist statements, his attacks on the military service of John McCain, his pussy grabbing remarks, and swore “never” have bent over backwards to give him whatever he wants, or quietly drop out of politics without standing up and fighting for the good of this country?Those are the things that now make it impossible for me to ever vote for a Republican.