veterans | Ronald Thomas West

email header of Senator Tester’s “Veterans Newsletter”

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again—it’s an honor to serve veterans in Montana and across the country every day as Chairman of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee.

Since taking the gavel last January, my top priority has been addressing toxic exposure in a comprehensive way. And in a way our veterans deserve.

Over the past few years we’ve made great strides in addressing military toxic exposures—from the Blue Water Navy Vietnam Veterans Act to the Fair Care for Vietnam Veterans Act, these historic laws continue to provide long-overdue benefits and care to tens of thousands of veterans suffering as a result of their exposure.

But, our work for the men and women who’ve sacrificed so much is far from over.

That why I’m proud to announce we’re moving the needle once again for toxic-exposed veterans with the introduction of my Health Care for Burn Pit Veterans Act—bipartisan legislation to offer Post-9/11 combat veterans, including those suffering from conditions caused by toxic exposures, access to VA health care.

Right now, nearly one-third of the 3.5 million Post-9/11 combat veterans exposed to toxic substances are not able to access VA care—and that’s a serious problem. Without action, more veterans will pay the ultimate price while waiting for the treatment they need. That’s why this bill is so critical.

The good news is, back in Washington we’re working hard to keep up our end of the bargain. Just last week, my Committee unanimously passed the bipartisan Health Care for Burn Pit Veterans Act.

This kind of swift, bipartisan action is a testament to what can be accomplished when results are prioritized over politics. And I’m proud the Committee is doing its part to connect a generation of burn pit veterans with the care they need—care they can’t wait for any longer.

While this a great start—it’s only our first step in our three-step approach to deliver for all generations of veterans suffering from the conditions related to toxic exposure. This bipartisan solution is consistent with my COST of War Act, and is a priority that can garner the support it needs from across the aisle to make it to the President’s desk.

I’m committed to seeing this process through, and will continue waging this effort until we deliver quality health care and benefits to the folks who’ve earned it.

We started this fight, and together we’re going to finish it.

Or so says the mail in my box from my (nominal) USA senator from Montana. I’ve kept up a legal residence address in Montana over these past going on 15 years exile, so I suppose I could have voted if I wished to, but I see no point because the USA is a corporate-captured oligarchy. No matter which way you vote, it is a self-deceit, it is the lobbyists’ money in DC buy the lot of politicians. Senator Tester’s lip-service opposing “Citizens United” granting corporations equal rights to citizens notwithstanding, it’s colossal corporate amounts of money own us. Especially the unaccountable ‘dark money’ invested in elections by practically anyone with wealth & power, notably corporate proxy billionaires that amount to American oligarchs; Soros, the Koch brothers, Gates & too many more to count, ad nausea.) [1]

My reply to Senator Tester:

Dear Senator Tester

It’s good someone is attempting [to] bring the level of care to the veterans’ community to point of what’s fair and right. Now, how about considering the cost of the toxic exposure at its root; maintaining empire? At this point in our American history, how can it not be clear our veterans have been cannon fodder for Dow-DuPont, Northrop-Grumman, Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, General Dynamics, Chevron and too many more recipients of what amount to profiteering contracts; pushing armaments sales and/or geopolitical posturing/positioning at the price of not only the lives, blood and health of our soldiers but the colossal and horrific price we have put on humanity elsewhere while sacrificing immense good will towards ourselves to point of our being increasingly hated around the world as a matter of fact and expectation. As a USA veteran of our foreign wars, I want [to see] an ‘End the Toxic Exposure to American Corporate Profiteering Empire Act.’

Thank you and sincerely

Ron West
http://www.ronaldthomaswest.com

I waited all week for the reply I very much doubted would be forthcoming; from the man who swears by his loyalty to American veterans but lacks the insights and/or balls to take on the policies that basically serve as a wrecking-ball for the USA soldiers’ lives and health; in relation to the USA’s imperial behavior abroad causing immense damage to other nations peoples’ lives, health & livelihoods, and not least, the hit-job on international law that attends this USA policy of ‘exceptionalism’ that is the 21st Century’s heir to the policy of ‘Manifest Destiny.’ This policy had ruthlessly over-run North America’s indigenous nations by force of arms with attending and very much self-serving ‘color of law’ cancelling treaties as might be convenient at any given moment. There is nothing new in what we’re looking at today except for the scale & lethality have grown immensely. It’s a mentality, a mindset, a meme.

“As you sow, so shall you reap“

In today’s case of messing with Russia, these words could come true.

[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/super-pacs-propublicas-guide-to-the-new-world-of-campaign-finance

Well, let’s offer a not so wonderful view of what’s up with the symbiotic relationship between the USA’s military and the USA’s police forces and I’m not talking about giving police charged with ‘protecting schools’ grenade launchers, machine guns and other inappropriate ‘surplus’ equipment. Rather I’m going to write about the altogether wrong sort of meme involved with creating a collective mentality, germinated in the American military and infused into the American ‘civilian’ police.

We’ll go for this short ride employing simple social psychology principles in combination with demographics. When ‘veterans preference’ is imposed on police hiring as a matter of law, and a society such as ours is one recently put through some considerable stresses, economic and social, resulting in both heightened paranoia and less opportunities at well paying jobs, the civilian police forces will become packed with ‘war on terror’ military veterans. This combined phenomena will translate into many veterans who’ve developed an ‘us versus the enemy’ mentality integrated into America’s police forces in relation to community, particularly when ‘community’ is demographically dissimilar to one’s own, and this mindset manifests when Black communities are policed largely by White officers.

Now, we stir into the mix some more unpleasant facts; in today’s America, conservatism has become poisoned by the religious right. A volunteer military is historically attractive to conservative mentality, more so than other outlooks, and this is what will be fed into the police hiring rosters in by far out of proportion (to larger society) numbers. The religious right is primarily White and has undeniable racist roots in a large segment or subculture. But there is more than significant, underlying elements of racism at issue here.

The soldiers advocate-civil rights group Military Religious Freedom Foundation, has determined that somewhere between 28 and 34% of the United States military is presently “Christian Dominionist” or that is to say hardcore or on the right of the religious right. These people do not respect secular democracy, they do not respect people holding opinion of tolerance or diversity, and they most certainly do not respect a civil rights movement traditionally rooted in the left of the political spectrum.

A simple rule of social psychology would be, with an extreme ‘strict father’ model of conservatism upbringing, extreme even by traditional conservative standards, the religious extremist desiring to exercise ‘authority’ is the prototype personality that will most often gravitate to police employ via ‘veterans preference’ … strengthening the hand of those fascist forces rapidly gaining practical control over American society as a whole. Religious-right sympathetic personalities have already gained control over Congress and the Pentagon and by extension, NATO, and now these patently reactionary, militant forces are taking practical control of America’s streets, the Posse Comitatus Act notwithstanding.

Now, as a matter of consequence, our rapidly militarizing police have integrated, and continue to integrate, those personalities most inclined to view the public they were intended to serve as an opposing or threatening force .. with all of the attending impunity they experienced in a hyper-religious military environment; whether an attitude a woman’s rape ‘must’ve been God’s will’ with little motivation to pursue and solve cases or punish perpetrators (except in case of a Black on White rape, that must be prosecuted in any White supremacist ruled society), men whose military background had been poisoned by theological interpretations on the far right by officers who shoved religious motivation down soldiers throats (officers who believe Muslims are ‘the children of Satan’ as taught by the Assemblies of God, example given), soldiers now moved on to bashing in the heads of protestors because they must be liberal, left, deviants, and certainly it translates to White officers policing Black neighborhoods seeing themselves in circumstance little different to occupying a hostile neighborhood in a war zone; where everyone, including children, are not only a threat, but are in no uncertain terms viewed as ‘the enemy.’

At the end of the day, ’veterans preference’, without safeguard to weed out those tens of thousands of “Christian Dominion” personalities whose primary motive is towards an America to be ruled by those ‘chosen by God’ (their own kind, exclusively, who just happen to be mostly White) in patent violation of our constitution, and with attending attitude of our citizens civil rights be damned, is one more large step on the road to societal disintegration ultimately inviting a severity of control along the lines of Franco’s Spain or Pinochet’s Chile (or worse)

A postscript would be, the USA’s constitutional prohibition of any prerequisite ‘religious test’ to serve in government, would appear to have been turned on its head in present circumstance; whereas any applicant for police work in any federally funded force (now days includes nearly all, if not all, police in the USA) could not be questioned or evaluated per a religious belief devoted to the undermining and ultimate overthrow of the secular democratic principle, opening a most unpleasant panorama-

Senator Tester, Toxic Exposure

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