If we are honest, the Veteran’s story is a story of poverty.  From the old draft where the affluent or even well off mostly avoided service with college deferments or straight draft dodging to today’s volunteer army where “volunteering” is an illusion and the enlisted ranks are filled by the “socio-economic” draft where private market forces entice the most distressed to seriously consider the military as an option and we cheer their service but we hate who they really are.

This systemic perversion hits home upon exit when one is faced with bad policy compounded with a  glaring lack of resources available to our Veteran community.  This bad policy compounded with  unresponsive bureaucratic monstrosities has politicians and their masters exchanging platitudes and clichés for any real action or discussion about our heros most in need.

What if the Veteran’s story was rooted in the demographic they mostly represent.  The working class and poor, two groups that have been under immense pressure not only from declining opportunities but by a system that has declared war on the less privileged.  This is the demographic of the enlisted solider, the war on the the poor and working class is their story.  Maybe to save our Veterans, we need a war on their circumstances not on them and their families.

Read Mary O’Hara’s article in the Guardian about a US law  professor’s book the “The Poverty Industry”, where “Daniel L Hatcher lifts the lid on how federal aid is syphoned away from impoverished people by private companies and cash-strapped public administrations.”

In his book Hatcher “exposes a largely unrecognised yet deeply disturbing additional dimension to the issue: the vast scale of disadvantaged people being fleeced for profit. In this meticulously researched book Hatcher, who has represented vulnerable people in court for years, including children in foster care, lifts the lid on a system that rather than helping the needy, systematically turns them into “a source of revenue”.”

“His summary of what he has coined the “poverty industry” is: “the private sector partnering with the state and local governments to use the vulnerable as a resource for extracting funds … strip-mining billions in federal aid and other funds from impoverished families, abused and neglected children, the disabled and elderly poor”.”

Read more:  Mary O’Hara on Daniel Hatcher’s Book “The Poverty Industry” – Sean Kiernan