FIRE Def. Sec. Panetta for threat to military retirement

It appears that when the current administration talks about cutting defense, they don't mean cutting endless wars, or corrupt contracts with connected corporations--they want to privatize (which means give to Wall Street) the troops pensions. At least that's what Secretary of Defense Leon Pannetta said recently at National Defense University citing a plan by an advisory board of corporate suits.
 
It would be no surprise if the Republicans proposed this, given their constant schemes to undermine and privatize Social Security, but if Obama and Democrats in Congress embrace and push for this, there would be no surer sign that care more about obeying Wall Street than winning elections.

The ''reform'' would change military retirement from a guaranteed amount based on rank and available immediately when they retire after 20 or 30 years of service to a 401K type plan than wouldn't be available until they are 60. One military group did the math and it would end up costing an E-7 $1.6 MILLION over the course of their retirement, an 85% cut.

This is a classic corporate move on a couple of levels: reducing and/or stealing employees pensions, and by saying currently serving troops would be spared the change is a standard union-busting move--divide and conquer future vs. current employees.

That Obama's Secretary of Defense even mentioned this other than to tear it to shreds destroys one of the things many progressive Democrats took pride in during the Bush years: Republicans give lip service to supporting the troops, but Democrats supported them in ways that mattered most to the troops, with VA funding, strengthening the GI Bill and the like.

That might have been why troops donated to Obama six to one over McCain in 2008 (besides the mistaken impression that he was anti-war).

This shoots that advantage in the face.

Pragmatically,this is not just an insult to the troops, but it will make it even easier for mercenary companies to lure highly trained troops out of the military with their big paydays. That training cost taxpayer money, and the longer they stay in the military, the better return we get on our investment in them. When they join mercenary companies, we end up paying even more for the services of someone we paid to train in the first place.

This is not just my opinion, but when a similar ''reform'' was attempted in the 80's, the Pentagon had to plead to get it reversed because so many people were leaving the military.

If Democrats in Congress and the White House want to cut military spending, fine. Let them do it by ending the wars, and taking our troops off oil reserve hostile takeover and pipeline (and poppy field) protection duty (or at least making the oil company assholes actually pay for the service).

Panetta should publicly apologize for publicly even entertaining this idea. If he does not, the right wing talking point about Democrats not supporting the troops will sadly be true. If he won't apologize and condemn the idea, he should be fired.

Tell Obama, your senators, and you congressman exactly that.

MEME: Separation of corporation and state

Somebody else said this on Democraticunderground.com, and it's the best way to frame a progressive attitude toward business.

Like religion, capitalism will flourish best if it cannot BUY special treatment and privileges from the government.

When you have a state religion, laziness and apathy creep into that religion as posers seeking financial gain and political favor start to fill their ranks. Likewise, with capitalism, when some corporations can rig the rules, the temptation becomes greater and greater to make their profits from gaming the system rather than providing a superior product at a superior price. That's what gives us Halliburtons and Enrons. The first abuses its parasitic relationship with the government to the degree that they can chase off any accountability and whistleblowers. The latter provided essentially no product at all. In the film on Enron, THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM, an investor asks the CFO during a conference call what exactly Enron made or did, and the CFO swore at him and hung up.

If a handful of corporations have a "special relationship" with the state, new, smaller, and more innovative companies have less of a chance of elbowing their way into the market, or even supplanting a whole category of product, as is the case with oil.

One way of doing this is to say you can't be an umpire if you played for one of the teams or will in the future.

We have to stop the revolving door between corporate America and the corridors of power.

We should start at the TOP--once you retire as president, vice president, senator, admiral or general, if you accept any money from anyone, your pension should be cut off.

We give these guys a nice chunk of change for the rest of their lives.

If they want to sit on boards,do speaking engagements, or even lobby for a cause or industry, fine. Let them do it out of the goodness of their heart. But they or their spouse should not be compensated for it in any way.

In the case of someone coming from corporate America, it doesn't seem unreasonable to ban the awarding of any new government contracts to that company for the duration of the elected officials term in office.

This is not anti-capitalism, it is anti-corruption and pro fair competition.

We cannot have a democracy as long as our elected officials trade their government access for financial favors.

This is a pro-market message, that, if the DLC was really just moderate, and not whores whistling and lifting their skirts trying to attract Johns, could get behind.

See the discussion of this on

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PROBLEM: public attention deficit vs. corporate terminator

A serious problem with making any lasting reform is that it is difficult to get the public to pay attention for more than a couple of years to trying to fix a problem, and once fixed after a while they forget the problem that required the solution in the first place--like the followers of the right wing who have forgotten why we needed the New Deal or even unions.

The good side of this is when a society goes off the deep end religiously like Iran now or England under Cromwell, or politically like Stalinist Russia or China during the Cultural Revolution. Most people get tired of "the cause," it's requirements for zeal and sacrifice of liberty or other things.

The downside of this is that we face opponents, corporations, that are designed to accumulate money and power irrespective of the people who tend the "machine." If someone loses interest, they are replaced. The goal is constant, the people change. They are the Terminator, and money and power is Sarah Connor (the rest of us are the extras that get shot along the way).

Democracy is the opposite. We have roughly the same people to work with for long periods of time, but absent some catastrophe, those people don't act together, and even when they do, they dribble away and drift off to other things over time, collecting Hummel figurines or watching Croatian yard darts on ESPN.

It's like we're all holding a door shut, and the terminator is relentlessly ramming against it. When a certain number wander from holding the door, he busts in, kills who he wants, and makes a mess of everything else. We curse, get together, and try to make a new room with a new door we can stand against--until we lose interest.

Right now, the terminators are break dancing in our family room.

In real life, this is the cycle of robber barons and reform.

This wastes a hell of a lot of time, energy, and money that could be used for real progress instead of fighting these same battles over and over again.

What I want to know is how we can build a door we don't have to stand against.

How can we reshape our political structure so that it is as single-mindedly focused on the broader public good (the way corporations are on ass-raping us) and can't be over-whelmed or hijacked during periods of relative political apathy.

I think when we get to the end of this Buzi push to pull us back to feudalism, we will see a period of FDR-like idealism...and then the forgetting will start and the terminator will start ramming the door.

When we get a chance to clean up, this should be part of what we do.