Portside

The VA is unprepared for a flood of claims from veterans disabled by toxic exposure.

Not content with trying to gut welfare state programs that benefit millions of non-veterans, these conservatives are now targeting former soldiers, who are often poor or working class, and similarly dependent on publicly funded services.

A military is, of course, innately hierarchical, authoritarian, and adversarial, and war, by definition, is terror. There is an inheritance of violence in our increasingly militarized land that ought to concern us all, too.

Maybe this time we can finally ask whether trying to prop up a dying empire actually makes us -- or indeed the world -- any safer. This is the best chance in a generation to start that conversation.

“At no point in history,” the report notes, “has a greater share of veterans been denied basic services intended to care and compensate for service-related injuries. (See https://www.swords-to-plowshares.org/2016/03/30/Underserved/)

But, on this D-Day anniversary, Donald Trump is rolling out a program, favored by his right-wing backers, that directly attacks public provision of veterans’ healthcare.

As Louis Celli, a top staffer for the American Legion, told the Associate Press, a merger would siphon off funds from VHA hospitals and clinics and eventually shift costs directly to veterans, through co-pay and other possible fee increases.

“Some in Congress want to underfund the VA so they can say that government doesn’t work,” says Dusten Retcher, a 29-year old Air Force veteran, who processes veterans’ benefit claims in Minneapolis. “Then they want to turn it over to the private market.”