US Workers Starved Into Service

[Joanne98]

by Sandy LeonVest

It was only a matter of time before the nation’s skyrocketing unemployment translated into new recruits for the most powerful military force in the world.
With the official US unemployment rate at 10 percent and climbing (that’s more than 15 million people struggling to put food on the table) and nearly double that number if you include part-time wage-earners who need full-time jobs, never mind all of those ‘discouraged workers,’ it’s little wonder that so many of the nation’s jobless are flocking into its military recruitment offices.

After all, what better way for an unemployed American worker to survive the Great Recession of 2009 than in the ‘service’ of his or her country?

Americans have a long history of consuming and/or killing their way out of crisis. And it isn’t looking as if that model will be up for reassessment anytime soon. The parameters of what we like to call the “national conversation” are as narrow as ever, and they are not widening under the current leadership. So far at least, even Obama’s ‘Clean Energy Economy’ has failed to deliver enough ‘green jobs’ (or any other color jobs for that matter) to begin the process of meaningful transition. With the season of consuming just around the corner, many Americans – especially those in blue collar jobs like construction, manufacturing and retail service – are staring into the economic abyss.

It is hardly surprising in such an environment that a young person with dismal employment prospects and plummeting self esteem would be easily seduced by an ad that promises “more than $49,000 in GI Bill Benefits” as does the US military’s current promo. The same ad promises that young recruits can “connect with military and veteran-friendly schools that offer VA approved education programs,” or “get information” about high-paying degrees like Criminal Justice, IT and Legal Studies.

So, when the Pentagon announced on October 13, 2009 that the military had met all of its recruitment goals for the first time since 1973, and that this just happened to coincide with the highest national unemployment rate since the government started keeping track in 1976, it wasn’t surprising that the news was met with a Big National Yawn.

The Few, the Proud, the Desperate

It’s hard not to wonder what would happen if, instead of dutifully reading from the Pentagon’s script on October 13, the media had done their job and informed the public about the real nature of the ‘service’ that potential enlistees were signing up for. Maybe if they had, those recruitment officers would not have been quite so busy recruiting – and stealing the lives of – unsuspecting young people in desperate need of employment.

Maybe those eager masses of young men and women wouldn’t have been so hot to sign up if, for instance, they understood that anyone enlisting in the military right now – whatever branch – is required to sign a document that states: "Laws and regulations that govern military personnel may change without notice to me. Such changes may affect my status, pay allowances, benefits and responsibilities as a member of the Armed Forces REGARDLESS of the provisions of this enlistment/re-enlistment document.” (DD Form4/1, 1998, Sec.9.5b).

In their book Army of None, published in 2007, Aimee Allison and David Solnit advise those who expect the military to pay for their college to “read the fine print.” The authors point out that only a fraction of recruits who signed up for the Montgomery GI Bill received a dime, and that 65 percent “received no money at all for college.” If you receive a less than honorable discharge (as one in four do), leave the military early (as one in three do), or later decide not to go to college, “the military will keep your deposit and give you nothing.”

And when it comes to those signing bonuses, maybe if potential recruits understood that they will be forced to repay the money if he or she leaves the military before the agreed term of service (that’s eight years for first time enlistees), perhaps they would reconsider signing away life and limb to get it. If those same applicants understood the army data from 2007 revealing that the top bonus of $20,000 was given to only 6 percent of enlistees who signed up for active duty, they might have figured out another way to survive the recession. They might be further divested of their illusions if they knew that military statistics show that 48 percent of enlistees report having “financial difficulty” and that some 33 percent of homeless men in the US are veterans, with nearly 200,000 veterans homeless on any given night.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/10/23-6

[thunder rising]

1. Starvation ... it's better than a draft any day!! Hey, look it's a "volunteer Army"

[thunder rising]

2. I'm going to add that I thinking that moral will be going lower. Economic "draftees" are not happy

with the choice that the banksters has given them. They are desperate, not committed. They did not choose to serve they were herded like so many buffalo over the cliffs. They are certainly on a survival mission.

[izquierdista]

4. Look on the bright side

When they return to the private sector and have to deal with bankers and Wall Street, they will have been trained how to use lethal weapons.

[thunder rising]

5. And that is a problem as well. Corps look at vet status as a negative. I had to get it off my resume

[Deja Q]

6. "There's always a choice".

And, like it or not, I know plenty on the left who use the very same words in the very same order... might have been easier just to type "the very same phrase", but that's not quite as much fun...

[Captain Hilts]

3. It's an economic draft in which health insurance for your family is used for recruiting. Sad. Unfair