Military

Did Koch Industries Write The Budget Deal?

Dave Johnson — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 10:28:09 -0400

Did Koch Industries write the budget deal? Or is it just a coincidence that so many of the the things Republicans demanded -- and got -- just happen to line up with the financial interests of the billionaires who fund the Tea Party and much of the “conservative movement?” Cutting money for the EPA, alternative energy efficiency, high-speed rail, efforts to fight climate change -- even prohibiting NOAA from creating a Climate Service ... it reads like an oil tycoon's wish list.

Before you read this, remember that they just finishing pushing through another huge tax cut for the rich. Always remember that tax cut deal any time you hear about "deficits" -- which were caused by tax cuts for the rich and increases in military spending. And before reading about the cuts below you should know that this buget “cut” deal increased the military budget by another $5 billion. From Talking Points Memo,

One of the hardest hit institutions is the Environmental Protection Agency, whose power Republicans have sought to curtail in recent years through a variety of legislative means. The agency will receive $1.6 billion less in funding than current levels, a 16 percent drop, including a $49 million reduction in climate change programs ...

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration also saw a $142 million reduction in funding and is prohibited from creating a Climate Service.

In addition … programs aimed at boosting energy efficiency for power plants and transportation also were major targets. Energy efficiency and renewable energy were cut by $438 million while fossil energy R&D was reduced by $226 ... Funding for high speed rail, all $2.9 billion of it, was zeroed out entirely. …

Get it? What we just went through was "You stop that energy efficiency and climate change stuff, or we will shut down the whole government." The EPA is cut 16%. And just who benefits from these cuts, which do serious damage to the country? I'll let you guess (hint -- read the title of this post.)

I wonder what this budget will do to real estate prices in coastal areas - the areas that are threatened by rising seas?

WHOSE Priorities?

And what about our country’s priorities? Actually, really just the priorities of the parties in the budget talks ... just as with the "deficit commission" there weren't any low-income people, teachers, construction workers, unemployed, police officers, etc. in that room. I mean, cutting AIDS prevention, childrens' health programs, science research, education, flu prevention, safe drinking water, police?

Did I mention the tax cuts for the wealthy and another $5 billion increase in military?

… just over $1 billion in cuts to programs preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS and other diseases, $600 million cuts to community health care centers, and $78 million to research on health care costs. Funding for health co-ops created under the Democrats' health care law was zeroed out.

… National Science Foundation saw a $43 million cut in its research funding from its current levels but a major $444 million cut from the President's initial request. …

Defense was not cut from current levels, instead increasing by $5 billion. FEMA first responder funding was cut by $786 million. Contributions to the U.N. and international organizations were cut by $377 million.

In addition, from AP,

$468 million from several education programs ...

$276 million from pandemic flu prevention programs, as requested by Obama.

$1 billion from Environmental Protection Agency clean and safe drinking water projects.

$1 billion from an account for prevention of AIDS, tuberculosis and other diseases.

$600 million from community health centers.

$578 million from the Army Corps of Engineers.

$504 million from food aid to poor mothers and their infants.

$414 million from grants to state and local police departments.

$3.5 billion in unused Children's Health Insurance Program funds.

$500 million from eliminating summer school Pell Grants for college students from low-income families.

How about these for killing JOBS and the economy?

Did I mention the tax cuts for the wealthy and another $5 billion increase in military?

$946 million from construction and repair of federal buildings.

$350 million from Labor Department programs, including grants for community service jobs for senior citizens.

$2.5 billion in leftover highway money unavailable under current budget caps.

Did I mention the tax cuts for the wealthy and another $5 billion increase in military? In case I didn't mention it, they just passed another huge tax cuts for the rich, and this budget "cut" includes another $5 billion in spending on military.

Update: See the full list here.

It's About Jobs, Not Deficits

Dave Johnson — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 12:15:59 -0500

What is the matter with people in Washington and New York? There is obviously a jobs emergency and they're talking about deficits -- and in the middle of a frenzy of worrying about deficits they are talking about cutting taxes for the rich! ?? And, to make matters even worse, at the same time as millions are out of work with unemployment checks ending, there is an unbelievable amount of work that needs to be done modernizing our infrastructure, retrofitting homes and buildings to be energy efficient, and reviving our manufacturing base.

Is there a brain disease running loose that they aren't telling us about? Or is this really just corruption?

The Reagan/Bush debt and deficits are the fad subject of concern among our elites. The New York Times has a wonderful interactive "You Fix The Budget" deficit chart, where you can try different options (but only the ones the Times offers, few of the right ones that would work) to see how they lower future deficits. (Hint: the borrowing was caused by huge tax cuts for the rich and huge increases in military spending. Returning to pre-Reagan tax levels and pre-Soviet Union military spending are not options in the NY Times deficit game.)

Here's the thing. In New York and Washington the people in charge apparently don't know that unemployment in the country is 9.6%! Nine. Point. Six. Percent. That's only the official rate! And if you are not in New York or Washington you know that things are a lot worse than the "official" rate. If you are not in New York or Washington you know there are boarded-up houses, empty storefronts, and "For Lease" signs in front of every third or fourth office building. You know that people have used up their savings, moved in with friends and parents and go to the food bank. Americans are doing things people here never thought they would ever have to do.

In Washington and New York -- the cities that get the bank bailouts and military contract money -- they are not talking about the jobless at all. In fact, unemployment benefits are ending, and not being renewed. Instead of addressing the emergency they are talking about cutting our Social Security, making us work even longer (as if you can even get a job when you are over 50), cutting health care, and cutting the few other lifelines We, the People built for ourselves in this country over the decades. Bankers got bailouts and bonuses.

But get this. At the same time as they are in a hysterical frenzy about deficits, the other big discussion in New York and Washington is cutting taxes?

They are in a faint about deficits, and at the same time are talking about cutting taxes, and not talking at all about the emergency all of us as experiencing: jobs, jobs, jobs, JOBS, JOBS. JOBS? In what kind of brain does talk about cutting deficits and cutting taxes happen at the same time as a terrible, terrible jobs emergency is going on, without an epiphany of realization that the entire process has gone completely off the rails?

The country needs jobs and needs its infrastructure modernized. We have work that really, really needs doing. People that really, really need work. Borrowing money is really, really cheap. And investing in a modernized infrastructure makes American business more competitive, which helps us pay off the debt.

Washington and New York people: If you are not talking about jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs and JOBS then you are not talking about anything that matters. It is time for a bold jobs plan. The country needs it. The people need it.

Take Action: On Tuesday organizations will be pushing a congressional click-to-call campaign designed to flood switchboards with demands for a one-year unemployment-benefit extension.
The details: Click to call at www.usaction.org/call Or call toll free to 1-866-606-1189

Also, please visit unemployedworkers.org and sign the Petition: Tell Congress not to cut-off 2 million Americans from unemployment benefits this holiday season.

And: Tell Congress: Don't extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy!

Deficit Cutters - Here's Your First Trillion

Dave Johnson — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 12:25:09 -0400

Today the country is looking for ways to cut spending and borrowing. Yet military spending, the biggest spending item in the budget, is barely part of the discussion -- obviously because of the amount of campaign and lobbying dollars it generates.

The corrupting influence of lobbying money is clear: the fact that the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 has not yet penetrated the bubble around the country's capital. In fact, military spending has soared in recent years:

(Source http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/ Includes DOD, Veterans, Foreign military aid, Foreign economic aid. Does not include military share of debt interest.)

Because of this application of lobbying dollars our military spending vastly surpasses the amount spent by the rest of the world, and dominates our country's budget:

(This is discretionary budget. Source http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/4/6/175138/6287/942/491304)

Now a bipartisan commission is willing to take this on. Commission outlines ways to cut defense spending by $1T over the next decade,

The Sustainable Defense Task Force, a commission of scholars from a broad ideological spectrum appointed by Frank, the House Financial Services Committee chairman, laid out options the government could take that could save as much as $960 billion between 2011 and 2020.

Task force sees Pentagon cuts key to US budget fix,

U.S. lawmakers and watchdog groups on Friday called for a dramatic revamp of the defense budget to reverse widening U.S. deficits, including termination of the $382 billion Lockheed Martin Corp (LMT.N) F-35 fighter.

This should be a litmus test to determine the seriousness and honesty of any deficit cutters. Do they take on the big lobbying interests, or do they take it out on the poor and elderly. We'll see. The record so far is not good.

Save Social Security - 10 Questions for the Deficit Commission

Dave Johnson — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 14:33:01 -0500

It is possible that there is going to be a “deficit commission” to look for ways to reduce our country’s budget deficits. I have some questions for them to ask to help get things started in the right direction:

1) President Reagan increased Social Security taxes, but used that money to cut the very top tax rates that only the wealthiest pay. Now that the money borrowed from Social Security is coming due, which income group is better positioned to pay it back, wealthy people or the elderly to whom this money is owed?

2) President Clinton left office with a huge budget surplus. Then, President Bush gave tax cuts to the wealthy, and his last budget had a $1.4 trillion deficit. How much of this change was because of those tax cuts for the rich?

3) How large was the country’s yearly budget deficit and total debt in the “Eisenhower/Truman” decades when the top tax rate was 90%?

4) Today we have an “infrastructure deficit” – the amount needed to repair our country’s roads, bridges, sewers, etc. – of somewhere upwards of $1.6 trillion. Was our infrastructure kept in good repair before the top tax rates were cut?

5) Concentration of wealth is long recognized as a threat to democracy, and now we are seeing a low-wage, everything-to-the-top economy with the greatest ever concentration of wealth going to a few at the top. Was the problem of wealth concentration increasing or decreasing before the top tax rates were cut?

6) When top rates were high people couldn’t take home vast fortunes in a single year. When it took several years to make a fortune did corporations depend on long-term or short-term thinking? Did the executives of corporations care if the infrastructure and communities their companies depended on were in good shape? Did large corporations fleece customers and exploit employees for quarterly returns as they do now?

7) The military budget is the largest item in our country’s budget. Was the military budget larger or smaller when we faced the cold war threat from the Soviet Empire?

8) Just how big is our military budget, if you add in veterans programs, nukes, intelligence and the military budget’s share of accumulated debt interest? How large is it in relation to all of the rest of the countries in the world, combined?

9) Speaking of debt interest, how much debt interest do we pay on the debt that has added up since we cut tax rates at the top? Who gets all that interest?

10) Some will say that proposals to bring back the tax rates of the Eisenhower administration are “socialist.” What was the name of the organization that accused President Eisenhower of being a Communist?

11) Does the following chart stimulate any ideas about how we might solve the debt problem?

John Scott

John Scott — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 13:25:40 -0400

Retired military officer. Former vice president for a manufacturing firm.

Master of Public Administration

Bachelor of Arts, Economics/Business Administration

U.S. Military Spending Overwhelms the Rest of the World

Bernie Horn — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 12:23:56 -0400

Yesterday, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) issued its annual report on global military spending. Worldwide, governments spent a record $1.46 trillion on their armed forces in 2008. The United States accounted for 42 percent of the global arms spending. When will we realize that’s simply too much?

Every year, SIPRI issues a Yearbook on armaments, disarmament and international security. Here’s the gist of the data on worldwide military spending:

Top 10 Military Spenders in 2008
(in billions of dollars)

1. United States — 607.0
2. China — 84.9
3. France — 65.7
4. United Kingdom — 65.3
5. Russia — 58.6
6. Germany — 46.8
7. Japan — 46.3
8. Italy — 40.6
9. Saudi Arabia — 38.2
10. India — 30.0

The U.S. spent 7 times more than the second-biggest spender, China. Incidentally, that doesn’t make China the second-strongest military—not by a long shot. SIPRI researcher Sam Perlo-Freeman explains that’s because “a lot of other countries have been at this game for a lot longer than China.”

Put another way, the U.S. spent more on its armed forces than the next 14 countries combined.

SIPRI points out that U.S. arms spending increased by 71 percent during the presidency of George W. Bush and as a result, global military spending is 45 percent greater than it was a decade ago. From 2007 to 2008, U.S. military spending increased by 10 percent which helped make global military spending 4 percent higher in 2008 than 2007.

Are all these guns really necessary? Do we need to spend so much more than other nations?

President Obama and his Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, seem to think so. They proposed a marginal increase in the 2010 military budget and Congress approved. But incredibly, right-wingers attacked the Obama-Gates military increase as a budget cut. They argued that the Obama-Gates plan’s modest cuts in a few weapons programs was going to endanger America’s security.

For example, Republican Sen. James Inhofe, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, thundered:

President Obama is disarming America. Never before has a president so ravaged the military at a time of war.

Can we bring some sanity back to the debate over guns versus butter? The Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) thinks so. The Progressive Caucus proposed a substitute budget which would have spent $479 billion on defense in FY2010, a $69 billion cut from the President's legislation. This proposal is modest—it’s about a 13 percent reduction in spending.

And every bit of the CPC military budget cut is sensible:

• Savings from a safe, orderly disengagement from Iraq.
• Cuts in outdated and unneeded weapons systems, including ballistic missile defense (so-called Star Wars), reduce our nuclear arsenal, cut off the F/A 22 Raptor, the DDG 1000 Zumwalt Class Destroyer, the SSN-774 Virginia Class Submarines, the V-22 Osprey, the C-130J transport plane, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, space-based offensive weapons, and more.
• Implementation of the Government Accountability Office’s recommendations to reduce waste, fraud and abuse in Pentagon procedures.

A government budget is a statement of priorities. Sadly, the current military budget reflects poorly on our nation’s values. We should be investing in our people and our infrastructure. We should be using our limited tax revenues to pay for services that America desperately needs—like health care, energy, a clean environment, education, housing, and a secure retirement for all. We’re not going to be able to afford our commonsense progressive priorities until we get serious about cutting excessive military spending.

The writer is a Senior Fellow at Campaign for America’s Future and author of the book, “Framing the Future: How Progressive Values Can Win Elections and Influence People”.

Daniel McLeod

Daniel McLeod — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 12:48:02 -0400

Daniel McLeod, Outreach Coordinator, has worked in the global justice movement, peace, and labor organizing. He is also a mental health counselor and a freelance writer with a bachelors degree from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in Communication & Sociology.

Military Officers Believe Military Has Been Diminished By Iraq War

Alexander Sewell — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400

A poll of 3,400 military officers found that 60 percent say the U.S. military is weaker today than it was five years ago, and nearly 90 percent say the Iraq war has “stretched the U.S. military dangerously thin.”

Kristol Pandering Again

Timothy Gatto — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 08:27:28 -0400

William Kristol must believe that he is extraordinarily sanguine and the rest of us extraordinarily stupid when he wrote his column in the New York Times today. The column entitled “Someone Else’s Alex” was in response to a Move-On.org ad that showed a mother with a one-year old baby named Alex. and saying that her son would not be available for Senator John McCain’s 100 Year War in Iraq.

According to Kristol;
“I’m not persuaded. Having slandered a distinguished general officer, MoveOn has now moved on to express contempt for all who might choose to serve their country in uniform.”

Kristol goes on to defend McCain and insists that Alex would only be 9 years old after John McCain finishes his second tour. He also defends McCain’s statements about a prolonged occupation in Iraq citing the long presence that the US has had in Japan, Germany, Korea and Kuwait.

Just yesterday I had a conversation with my brother’s nephew-in-law who asked me about the Army. He’s 20 years old and since he was asking, I remembered the Army policy of giving two thousand dollars to any retiree that was responsible for an enlistment of anyone outside the family. Since this young man was outside my family I mulled it over. You see. I’m a former Army Recruiter and this young man was not my immediate family member. I tossed the idea back and forth in my head and then looked at him.

“Did you ever hear of stop-loss?” I asked.
No, he did not. I explained to him how the Army could keep you beyond your original enlistment if it met the needs of the Army.
“Do you know that some of the guys in Iraq are spending their third or fourth tour in Iraq?”
Again, he did not, so I explained how some of the guys in the Army only spend about 12 months home before they rotate out again to a combat zone.
“What’s that doing to their families?” He asked me.
“Well it’s causing a lot of hardship and in this country about 200 veterans take their own life every week according to a story on CBS.”
“That’s cold!” He said before he walked off shaking his head.

So much for my $2,000.00 bonus, I guess he won’t enlist. Still, according to Kristol; everything is just rosy for our all-volunteer Army.

“But it is surely relevant to point out that the United States has an all-volunteer Army. Alex won’t be drafted, and his mommy can’t enlist him. He can decide when he’s an adult whether he wants to serve. And, of course, McCain supports the volunteer army.”

One must come to realize sooner or later, that some former service members, even former recruiters won’t be helping to meet the Army’s enlistment objectives anytime soon. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that the Army in this day and age is not the “Deal of the Century”. They might make a young person “Army Strong”, but they could just as easily make a young person “Army Dead” too. The sad fact is that as soon as they are medi-vaced to Germany, if they die, once in the air, they are no longer counted as a fatality of the war, since they didn’t die in Iraq. We don’t want to advertise the real number of deaths, do we?

So Kristol, defend your candidate and your all-volunteer Army as much as you wish. You have your opinion and I have mine. The facts are very simple in this matter, I know what’s going on and you just don’t care. These kids are just cannon-fodder to you chicken-hawks anyway, right? I wonder how many of your offspring served in the military. Go on and attack Move-On, I don’t care for them too much anyway. I will say this though, this time they happen to be right on the money.

How to Kill An Army: A Scenario

Sara Robinson — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 01:04:03 -0400

John McCain, who from the early 1980s worked hard to establish himself the one of the Senate's shining champions of Vietnam veterans' issues, completed his betrayal of the Iraq-era troops today. Brandon Friedman of vetvoice.com has the details:

Yesterday VoteVets.org delivered a petition with 30,000 signatures to the office of Senator John McCain. Through that petition, we asked him to support Senator Jim Webb's new GI Bill. And less than 24 hours later, we have an answer:

"Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, seemed to give a thumbs down to bipartisan legislation that would greatly expand educational benefits for members of the military returning from Iraq and Afghanistan under the GI Bill...."

The reason for McCain's refusal to support the bill is about the most disturbing rationale one could imagine....Officials in charge of Pentagon personnel worry that a more generous and expansive GI Bill would create an incentive for troops to get out of the military and go to college.

Friedman observes that McCain's no-college-for-grunts position essentially says to the troops: "Thanks for your service and your three combat tours in five years. Now get back to work."

Jim Webb has been trying to update the GI Bill to restore its original intention -- which was to reward returning vets for their service by giving them a full education, lifetime health care, and the foundations on which to build a comfortable and successful civilian life. But, says Friedman, the Cons have apparently abandoned that noble goal. And in doing so, they're unveiling an entirely different vision of our troops' future relationship to the rest of America.

McCain makes it clear that he wants to make the GI Bill so weak and useless that troops will have no choice but to stay in the military for life. Friedman argues persuasively that this is not only a breach of a sacred trust Americans have upheld with their troops for over 60 years; it's also a slap in the face to military recruiters, who ask families to give up their children to the war machine -- and now have nothing compelling to offer them in return. And in the long run, it ensures that the military will become the career of last resort for those who have no other options.

Reading this, it strikes me that, as usual, the conservatives aren't being nearly careful enough about what they wish for. In fact, it's not hard at all to imagine a scenario in which this new relationship to our military—which forsakes the last vestiges of America's traditional civilian militias and creates a new class of involuntarily indentured permanent soldiers—creates far-flung changes that may undermine the stability of our democracy.

How We Got Here
The GI Bill is recent -- but the deal it represents is as old as history. It's one of the great recurring patterns: in most times and places, the best way for a young man full of brains and ambition but short on money and connections to move up in the world was to join the military and distinguish himself. (The other typical mobility paths were to become a teacher, scholar, or priest.) It was a huge risk: the odds of becoming a combat hero and rising to the officers' ranks were slim compared to those of coming home crippled—or not coming home at all. But the potential upside was equally enormous. If you wanted to get off the farm, marry well, and launch yourself into the ownership class, becoming a war hero has usually been your best way out.

With the GI Bill, America democratized this ancient deal. It guaranteed that same shot at a solid middle-class life to everyone who signed up and did their tour, regardless of what their service entailed (and, in doing so, also somewhat reduced the incentive for ambitious soldiers to secure their civilian futures by instigating unnecessary battles. Combat hero or clerk typist, you were part of the effort, and you'd still get yours.). In a country that had usually resisted the very idea of raising a standing army, the GI Bill fostered the new post-war military industrial complex by normalizing military service. It was the deal that allowed families to send their sons (and later, their daughters) off in the belief that the military would open the doors to a better life. It was also the sugar that—for a while, anyway—took some of the bitterness off of universal conscription.

Generous GI benefits became even more important in the aftermath of Vietnam, as the country abandoned the draft in favor of an all-volunteer army. The country's war hawks approved of this move: The Vietnam-era draft had touched every family in America, regardless of class; and it was the middle and upper-middle classes' unwillingness to consent to that sacrifice that had so forcefully politicized the war. A military comprising troops who'd voluntarily agreed to be there would not only be easier to discipline and manage; they'd be much easier to deploy without creating major political upheavals.

The brass also knew from the start that going all-volunteer would increase the class divisions in the military. The bulk of those new recruits—both non-coms and officers—would be kids from working-class families looking for a shot at college. As the conservatives cut back on government-backed college grants and loans, the GI Bill and ROTC would step up to become the country's new college-aid programs. Given that this realignment happened alongside the re-tooling of a new high-tech military that required an extremely skilled and disciplined corps to function, this new model wouldn't work—couldn't work—unless the benefits and working conditions were good enough to attract a huge flow of smart, stable, high-quality volunteers.

Predictably, the number of volunteers has fallen off markedly in the Bush era, as the war has dramatically raised the risks associated with service, and the promised benefits have vanished. Working-class kids may not have many prospects left; but they can do the math, and they're staying away in droves. To keep the warm bodies coming, the military has begun to compromise on quality. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the number of new recruits coming in on conduct waivers is up. So is the number of convicted felons, gang members, avowed racists, and people with substance abuse problems. The military is increasingly turning a blind eye to solider misconduct, because it can't afford to lose the boots—so racist activity, rape, and other criminal acts are going largely unpunished.

Maybe McCain figures that this new crop of kids isn't all that interested in college anyway. Maybe he's decided that down here, with the bottom of the barrel coming into sight, we're getting the kids for whom the military isn't a ticket to college, or a way out of anything. It's just a better alternative than a lifetime of unemployment—or worse, cycling in and out of jail. And maybe he's being a realist about that. It's certainly where we seem to be headed.

But we don't have to go there. And if we think this all the way through, we'll do whatever it takes not to go there. Because if McCain is serious about stripping away the barest promise of benefits and turning America's high-tech army into a dumping ground for the country's undereducated, pre-criminal, behaviorally unstable, and economically desperate—then there's another possible future looming, and it's the stuff of our worst nightmares.

What Lies Ahead
What follows is a scenario—a little concatenation of what-if stories about what could happen if America breaks its historical pact of guaranteeing education, health care, and a middle-class future to its service men and women. It's not a prediction. It's just a look at some of the ways McCain's new view of what we owe our troops could play out if we don't change course.

Inside the military: As kids with any kind of prospects at all flee from recruiters who have nothing left to offer them, the sliding standards of the past few years become a fast tumble to the bottom. Soon, America's military is nothing more than the employer of last resort. It's society's dumping ground for people with inadequate education, drug problems, criminal records, and unaddressed behavior issues—people who can't even hold down McJobs, and for whom going to war and getting shot at is a marginally better choice to going to jail and getting knifed.

What happens from here is a scene from The Dirty Dozen—or the last years of Vietnam —writ large. Faced with battalions of armed misfits—including a large number of sociopaths for whom punishment is meaningless—officers can't hold down the fort. The result is anarchy, followed by the rise of internal drug-running gangs, racist militias, God squads of fundamentalist holy warriors, and other assorted warlords. (Some of these have close ties to existing civilian organizations such as prison gangs, white supremacist militias, and far-right dominionist groups—as if any of these groups need to have their own government-trained army units.) Unit cohesion fails as these groups go freelance and compete for control of military resources. Fragging becomes common; and good officers become much harder to find. (Anybody with a college education will find something better and safer to do.) The goal of teaching them useful civilian life-skills is quickly abandoned.

In the name of American foreign policy, these troops are exported to other countries, where they set up operations abroad -- thus bringing America's worst authoritarians to the the world's least stable corners, and giving them a prime government-subsidized opportunity to go global.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch: Of course, the intended goal of this system is to keep recruits inside it until they're too old to do much damage. Once they do get out, though, the results look like another movie —and this time, it's The Godfather.

Since these veterans have no connection to the larger culture—and no way of getting the education that will outfit them for anything else besides war—they have every incentive to organize themselves into civilian subsidiaries of the military gangs that sustained them. They get jobs as mercenaries, working abroad for private armies and cartels. Or they come home, and set up local outposts of this emerging global Mafia. Soon, city and state governments are dealing with a far bigger gang problem than they've ever seen before, and are completely unprepared to confront. Turf battles—or holy wars—erupt between the race- and religion-based gangs. In some towns, the gangs muscle out small businesses, start up extortion rackets, run their own candidates, and seize control of local politics. They also infiltrate whatever legitimate institutions will have them—just as the Mafia took over unions and the construction trades on the East Coast so long ago. Modern prison gangs are small mom-and-pop operations compared to the vast global criminal network that could arise in time.

This sounds far-fetched, but it's the historical way of armies gone bad. When you have combat-hardened warriors who have no place in the civilian world—and governments that feel no further responsibility to the troops that risked their lives to defend them—they will make a place for themselves. And that place will usually be well beyond the reach of government.

The Citizens Respond: There are several ways Americans might respond to the broken-down military that results from the boneheaded decision to abandon the covenant represented by the GI Bill. Let's look at the best case, the worst case, and the most likely case.

The best case is that Americans quickly realize that the military culture is fusing with the prison-based gang culture, and that the combined forces are threatening the foundations of the country. Driving this case is the fact is that we don't generally fund government programs that only benefit people without political power. (That's why it's so important that even the rich get Social Security, and why the upper classes need to keep their kids in public schools.) As long as the most politically influential people see that these things benefit them, they'll support them. As soon as these programs look like they're just for the lower classes, the political will to sustain them vanishes.

Turning the military into a dumping ground for the unwanted underclass (not to mention a vast channel through which taxpayer dollars are funneled to organized crime) devalues it socially and politically. Nice people won't send their kids there, any more than they'd voluntarily send them to prison for three or four years. Nobody with any brains will want to become an officer, either. And when the blowback from this long-term neglect begins washing up on the tree-lined streets of America's suburbs, there could be strong political pressure to defund the military, reform it, or abolish a standing army entirely.

The worst case is that we don't act in time, and the gangs simply take over. The government is overwhelmed, or corrupted. Democracy fails, along with domestic order. Security is in the hands of local strongmen. If that's the way it goes, the story begins to look like something out of Mad Max, and it will take nothing short of a violent patriot uprising to eliminate the gangs and take back the country. (And the bad news is: They have all the weapons, and know how to use them.)

This scenario is scary. And it should be. Worst-case scenarios aren't fun for me to write, not least because they can so easily become grim and over-the-top. What I find most frightening about this one is that you don't have to be a futurist to see its plausibility; you just have to have read some history. Broken-down armies that come home and take it out on the home folks are as common as dirt. They're stock characters in the stories where revolutions begin, and empires end. But we need to be aware that this could very easily happen to us—and blowing off our commitment to the troops the first tangible step down that road.

The most likely case is that we come to our senses in time, and realize that the GI Bill is not entitlement, not a privilege, and not a handout. It's what we owe our troops for their service. It's fulfilling our basic obligation to return them safely and sanely to civilian life, and to give them a fair stake in the country's free and democratic future. And, as long as we choose to maintain a standing army and act as an empire, it's an essential investment in our own domestic peace, security, and political stability that we cannot afford to scrimp on. If we think the price is too high, then we should reconsider whether we want to be an empire. But as long as we commission soldiers, defaulting on this debt is not an option.

No one who is willing to tear up that ancient contract between a nation and its veterans, and thus consign our nation's defense to people so dangerously incompetent that Wal-Mart won't even hire them, should ever be this country's commander-in-chief. And McCain, of all people, should understand that better than anyone. It's a shame that, after all these years building his career on the backs of veterans, he still doesn't understand what's at stake.