War pork: soft and hard
The San Jose Mercury News, under its former Knight-Ridder ownership, distinguished itself above all the mainstream press by its healthy skepticism about the trumped up reasons for invading Iraq during the preliminary Bush-Blair propaganda campaign. Later, it was sold to the McClatchy Company, which peddled it to MediaNews Group. The rapid descent of the once-great paper through the media-corporation shuffle apparently extinguished healthy skepticism.
On this Memorial Day, the Merc intoned that the best way to honor veterans is to keep the Livermore VA Hospital open. Rep. Jerry McNerney, D-Pleasanton, has been on about what an idyllic place the old hospital would be for treating head wounds and psychological trauma of vets returning from the Afghan and Iraq theaters. The hospital isn't in McNerney's district, but hey, its' such a nice, compassionate idea from such a nice fellow, who isn't Richard Pombo.
Incidently, it would add more military pork to the already stuffed barrel in the
Livermore Valley. UC/Bechtel et al/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is designing a new generation of nuclear weapons in Livermore. The lab also has a biosafety level-3 biowarfare lab in Livermore and many other war-pork projects besides. Over the hill near Tracy, the lab is increasing its testing of new generations of bombs and plans to double the amount of plutonium used. The site is already contaminated with depleted uranium. It is also proposing a new biowarfare lab on its bombing site, a biosafety level-4 lab containing the most deadly pathogens known to humanity.
Enter the genius of political propaganda and Presto! soft pork masks hard pork.
Will the Livermore VA be treating US military victims of depleted uranium, one wonders. It would make an interesting juxtaposition: returning soldiers suffering from the effects of depleted uranium a few miles away from the site of design and construction of new nuclear warheads and a few miles more away from a bomb-testing range where the UC/Bechtel et al lab is contaminating ground water with depleted uranium.
But, who cares. It's employment for physicians, nurses and other area healthcare workers in one of the nation's most affluent areas. Surely there are parts of the US where more volunteer soldiers for these doomed imperial adventures come from than the San Francisco Bay Area. And those are the places that need VA hospitals.
McNerney's campaign in Tauscher's district for the VA Livermore hospital is soft war pork for the top of the barrel to hide the rest of it, much of it generated from lies that started a war.
The new Democratic Party majority in Congress was elected to stop the war, but a majority within the party goes on voting with the president's party for it because there is not higher grade of pork than war pork. Both parties meanwhile compete to see how loudly they can sing the virtues of our soldiers and their compassion for the wounded and dead. The strategy, apparently, is to sing these hymns, from the official "Moral Clarity Hymnal," so loudly that the noise will drown out the screams of dying civilians in Iraq, not to mention the victims of Israeli violence. These hymns also drown out the conscience of a Congress that will not stop this war. War pork, soft and hard, has apparently corrupted this government to the point that it is nothing more than a rubber
stamp for defense contractors, whose wealth and political power grow with each day this war continues and Congress withers.
The nation sent a clear signal last November that it no longer wanted a one-party, authoritarian government losing an imperial war for oil. What they got was a bunch of hog butchers. Rep. Jerry "Not-Pombo" McNerney seems to have gone out of his district to fit into the crowd.
The sudden surge to medical pork, setting aside the question of how much of it will go to private corporations, doesn't begin to heal the failure of political will, which was what these Democratic Party bums were elected to have. As the patients flow in and the war goes on, we will hear more and more compassionate utterance from Congress because it feels so good when you aren't doing your job to open your hearts to your own victims.
Let's build a psychiatric clinic for all Americans, where all of us can get a pill that will still our inner dialogues so that we can conform to Reality -- perpetual war for perpetual pork. McNerney and his ilk should propose a bill to develop such medication. They could call it "the Rapture Pill."
Bill Hatch
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5-28-07
Editorial: Honor all veterans by providing best in medical care
Mercury News
http://www.mercurynews.com/opinion/ci_6004879
Memorial Day gives all of us the opportunity to do something we should do every day - honor those who have died in our nation's service.
Memorial Day 2007 is particularly poignant because so many have given their lives of late in Iraq and Afghanistan. One of the best ways we can honor their memory is by embracing our obligations to care for veterans injured in the line of duty.
On that front, the Veterans Affairs Department has its work cut out for it. More than 1.4 million Americans have served in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is estimated that as many as 30 percent will develop post-traumatic stress disorder.
The open-ended nature of our two Middle East wars, not to mention the longer-term war on terror, means the VA must re-evaluate its needs for the next several decades, including a careful re-examination of the notion of closing Livermore's 115-acre VA hospital ...
But the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have gone on far longer and produced far more casualties than expected. The influx of 420,000 PTSD patients will put severe strains on the VA system without a corresponding increase in budget, staff and facilities to meet injured veterans' needs.
The Bay Area is fortunate that the Palo Alto VA Hospital is one of the best equipped in the nation for dealing with PTSD patients. The Livermore and Palo Alto hospitals merged operations in the past decade and now work in conjunction to help treat veterans living in the Bay Area.
Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Walnut Creek, has opposed closing Livermore from the outset. Rep.
Jerry McNerney, D-Pleasanton, has joined with Tauscher in asking VA Secretary James Nicholson to consider whether Livermore's hospital would be an ideal location to expand to meet the needs of PTSD patients...
To its credit, Congress last week approved the largest single increase in veterans health care funding in history, including increased funding to expand PTSD care and calling for mandatory testing of veterans for traumatic brain injury.
On Memorial Day, all Americans should insist that we live up to our responsibility to our nation's veterans by ensuring they have the health care they so richly deserve.