By Jack Burns
In October, the Pentagon recalled millions in reenlistment bonuses it paid to Gulf War veterans. The decades-old bonuses were paid to U.S. soldiers who would reenlist for the Iraq and Afghanistan war efforts. Understandably, many veterans felt betrayed upon learning they’d have to repay what they’d considered money owed to them for signing up to fight again. One of the reasons many potential servicemen join the armed forces, in the first place, is the promise of future educational benefits. Now, it seems, the government is at it again, and it appears many reservists are finding out the hard way that what they’ve been promised, they may never receive.
According to Task and Purpose, an “obscure deployment code, a measure the Pentagon created in 2014 to scale back spending on benefits,” deployed reservists have been prevented from earning credit towards their GI Bill educational benefits. In other words, the soldiers’ deployments won’t get them any educational benefits when they get home. “By law, reservists involuntarily mobilized under Title 10, section 12304b, do not receive credit for the GI Bill while they are activated,” Task and Purpose reported.
Marine Sgt. William Hubbard, currently deployed overseas in Honduras, isn’t just any reservist. He’s also a soldiers’ advocate and serves in his civilian role as the Vice President of Government Affairs at Student Veterans of America, a national veterans advocacy group focusing on education policy. Hubbard said, fellow Marines in Honduras are stunned as the word has slowly spread through the ranks. Most incorrectly believed they would receive seven to nine months’ worth of credit for GI Bill benefits, including Hubbard, a benefits legislation expert, Task and Purpose writes.
Hubbard said, “Reservists serve their country like any other component, and they have to balance civilian employment, education and the military…And to say they don’t rate the full benefit? It doesn’t add up.”
Under Title 10, section 12304b, at least 1,780 reservists have been deployed and will not receive GI Bill benefits for their service time overseas. A Marine reservist from Cleveland, Ohio, Sgt. Mark Wong, said he was frustrated after learning his service to his country did not deliver full benefits. He said, “Once I heard about the exemption, it blew my mind. We work the same hours as active duty people doing the same job. The government is saying our sacrifice isn’t worth as much as it is for those on active duty. But we leave behind families and our civilian careers too.”
Wong needed those benefits in his civilian role in criminal justice, explaining he’d planned on getting an advanced law degree to further his career and earn bonuses.
Hubbard, too, like Wong, had planned on earning an advanced degree, desiring to get an MBA. Now he says, “At this point, I have to take a step back to assess the financial viability. This would make the difference between doing it or not…Now I have to decide between starting a family or my education, and not both.”
Apparently, the Pentagon is attempting to tighten up its defense spending. According to Task and Purpose, the Pentagon’s 2017 budget called for doubling reserve mobilizations, in part to ease the strain of operations across the globe, from the fight against the Islamic State group to ramped-up deployments in Europe in the face of growing Russian aggression.
Some members of Congress are aware of the problem and have introduced bills to re-institute the stripped benefits. According to Task and Purpose, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., proposed the National Guard 12304b Benefits Parity Act in May. The bill would grant GI Bill benefits to reservists along with health care and retirement benefits, according to Michael Dale-Stein, a spokesman for Franken. But it has not moved from the Senate’s Armed Services Committee since its introduction.
Franken reportedly issued the following statement to Stars and Stripes, “The men and women who serve our country lay everything on the line to protect us, and in return, they deserve access to the support and benefits that they’ve rightfully earned…But unfortunately, too many members of the National Guard in both Minnesota and across the country who served on active duty came home and couldn’t get important health care and education support.”
We at the Free Thought Project find the Pentagon’s demand of veterans repaying signing bonuses and deployment codes which deny GI Bill educational benefits to deployed reservists, quite incredulous. It’s even more astounding when one considers the recent revelation the Pentagon itself cannot account for 6.5 trillion dollars in missing taxpayer funds for which it was entrusted.
It’s one thing to misplace a few thousand, or even a few hundred thousand dollars, but when 6.5 trillion goes missing, and you ask your veterans to repay their signing bonuses, you’ve just stooped to a new low, and transformed yourself into a five-sided bucket of scum, no longer worthy of the respect your organization once enjoyed.
The Pentagon’s financial accountability problems go way back, even to just before 9/11/01, when then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said 2.3 million Pentagon funds went missing. More recently, lawmakers on Capitol Hill have decided to apply proverbial screws to the Pentagon.
Lawmakers on Capitol Hill have introduced legislation to impose penalties on the Pentagon if it fails to meet the legally mandated goal of being ready for a full audit by September 30, 2017, CNN reported.
But here’s a stupid question. Why would it take almost a year for the Pentagon to find out where the money is? Could it be that the missing monies are funding the “moderate rebel” proxy war against Syria’s Bashar al Assad? At any rate, it appears the Pentagon is all too willing to balance its trillion dollar budget shortfalls on the backs of American servicemen, many of whom are not from the same wealthy backgrounds as some of the nation’s congressional members.
Breitbart and 60 Minutes helped expose how lavishly congressmen and congresswomen can live, simply by using certain loopholes regarding how they choose to spend their reelection and PAC campaign funds.
A 60 Minutes investigative report by veteran CBS reporter Steve Kroft and Government Accountability Institute (GAI) President and Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large Peter Schweizer revealed how leadership PAC loopholes allow members of Congress to convert campaign cash into lavish lifestyle upgrades for themselves and their family members. “It’s another example, unfortunately, where the rules that apply to the rest of us, don’t really apply to the members of Congress,” said Schweizer on 60 Minutes. The report, which contained selected material from Schweizer’s forthcoming book Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets, revealed embarrassing and outlandish instances of cronyism and self-enrichment by members of Congress. Despite the fact that funds from leadership PACs are supposed to go to help elect fellow members of one’s own political party, lax campaign laws allow lawmakers to turn their leadership PACs into private slush funds to fund just about anything.
Taken as a whole, the request for veterans to repay enlistment bonuses, the refusal to pay GI Bill benefits for deployed reservists, the decades-old mismanagement of Pentagon funds, and the lavish spending by lawmakers, may lead some to believe the warmongers will not answer to anyone and will extort money from those who most likely cannot afford to pay.
All the while, the very same lawmakers who’ve been sent to Washington to hold accountable government entities (like the Pentagon), are living it up by lavishly spending slush funds meant to help get them reelected. What a jacked up, indulgent, oppressive regime this nation’s government has become! Let’s change it up a bit and demand that when funds go missing in the State Department or in the Pentagon, then all the members of Congress, the Supreme Court justices, the president and his cabinet won’t get their paychecks. Only then will 6.5 trillion dollars not simply vanish from government coffers. That makes more sense than balancing the government’s budget on the backs of soldiers and denying them benefits to which they’ve traditionally been entitled.
Jack Burns writes for TheFreeThoughtProject.com, where this article first appeared.
Image Credit: Pixabay.com
Seems the Khazarian cabal neoziocons are getting desperate for military funding…only a miserly coveting bankster class would even consider this odious retracted fealty.
They do this while Obama continues to send billions of our tax dollars to terrorist nations like Palestine who give huge rewards to the families of terrorists who die committing Jihad. HEADS SHOULD ROLL!
Don’t worry about it… Trump is gonna fix everything… like he promised!! have a nice day & stop worrying.
The Corporation of The United States: Part II
“The article is about how the United States isn’t a federal corporation — not that it’s not a corporation.”
An anonymous commenter posed the questions:
“So since we both agree that the US is in fact a corporation, what are its products exactly? Every corporation provides a product or service. What does it sell/bargain with? What is its collateral? Also, most of all, who are its shareholders because it’s definitely not the American people.”
There were no answers provided. I’d like to answer this for you.
The “People” Are The Products
When you buy something at a grocery store, you scan the bar code at the register to determine how much it costs. Every American “citizen” after 1936 was/is born with a bar code known as a “Social Security Number.” This number – which you never actually consented to obtaining; they just GAVE you one when you were born – ensures the Federal Reserve always makes money off U.S. citizens. The Fed is the private, for-profit central bank that President Woodrow Wilson sold every American citizens’ life to.
The Sixteenth Amendment was ratified on February 3, 1913. The short version reads as follows:
“The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.”
Before this U.S. Constitutional Amendment, there was no such thing as an “income tax” because said tax (as described above) would have violated Article 1, Sec. 2 of the Constitution. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust Company, 157 U.S. 429 (1895), that income tax was a “direct tax”; an unapportioned tax, and thus violate Article I, Sec. 2 of the Constitution. Wilson signed the Revenue Act on October 3, 1913, which for all intents and purposes, created the IRS (despite the lies Wikipedia tells you). The final step in enslaving Americans was President Wilson signing the Federal Reserve Act, and its enactment on December 23, 1913.
States slowly started using more universal birth certificate recording methods throughout the 1920s. The Social Security Act of 1935 created the universal bar code for American chattel; during desperate Depression times when Americans would succumb to any government “help.”
The People Are the Collateral
The Federal Reserve, via its interest-collecting arm known as the IRS, is guaranteed access to the paychecks and the money of every single America worker for their entire lives. That is why the United States government gets a blank check to borrow as much money from the Fed as it could ever want. The loans are guaranteed by the lifetime labor of all American “subjects.” In fact, all U.S. workers get anywhere from 16 to 30 percent of their paychecks withheld by the IRS before they even get their checks in their hands.
These unelected, corporate bankers (Jacob Rothschild, Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan, etc.) own America and its people under the guise of a “federal” agency.
The case of Lewis vs. United States, 680 F. 2d 1239, 9th Circuit (1982), ruled that “the regional Federal Reserve banks are not government agencies…but are independent, privately owned and locally controlled corporations.” An unpublished 9th circuit opinion, McKee v. IRS; No. 04-74846; IRS No. 4036-03 (2006), also affirmed that the IRS is not a U.S. government agency. The IRS admitted that tax code was too complicated even for its own agents to understand. The Ninth Circuit ruled that since its too complicated for the IRS to understand, than citizens should not be excepted to understand it either. There has never been an Act of Congress giving the IRS the power to operate in the 50 states…outside of Washington D.C. This violates Title 4 U.S.C. Sec. 72, making the IRS an illegal racketeering entity.
The Corporation of America’s Shareholders
The question is…who benefits from this perpetual, involuntary servitude of Americans? The Federal Reserve prints, values and distributes U.S. dollars unilaterally and in the best interests of its biggest shareholders. So who owns the Fed…and subsequently you?
The Fed wants everyone to believe that it is part of the government, and is not a for-profit institution…and uses wording similar to its tax code. Fed Shareholders consists 100 percent of private, for-profit banks, according to the Centre for Research on Globalization. The Fed does not like to talk about who exactly those bankers are.
The Federal Open Market Committee, which consists of 5 bankers and 7 Presidential appointees, ultimately determine the macro and micro-economic destinies of every U.S. citizen. Americans are the chattel that keep the money printing business going strong.
Most simply accept as fact that 20 percent or more of their labor fruits have to be withheld by these private banksters; who rely on this blind obedience and “patriotism” for the system to work.
We are all employees of a corporation…not citizens of a country. And now its just normal for most.
The United States is a “Federal Corporation”: 28 U.S.C. § 3002(15)
What they never taught you in high school civics class: The United States is a FEDERAL CORPORATION. See 28 U.S.C. Sec. 3002(15); Washington, D.C. is a sovereign city-state, not bound by any laws or treatises that the 50 states in the Union are (just as the City of London is not part of England proper and the Vatican is also a sovereign city-state).
The people believed by most to be representing Americans in D.C. are immune from virtually all laws and treatises of the USA. These corporate CEOs known as “congressmen” and “congresswomen” are representing a corporation known as “United States” which makes most of its profits off a war and prison machine and a fiat paper money system. The only reason this paper “money” has any value at all is because the USA and NATO force OPEC countries to exclusively sell oil with Federal Reserve notes (U.S. dollars). If they do not, they get “Iraq-ed,” “Libya-ed,” and/or “Afghanistan-ed.” The Bank of Israel, aka the “Federal” Reserve (a private corporation), prints and administers this fiat paper “money” worldwide, while the Washington, D.C.-based IMF and World Bank play video game economics with the rest of the world. Corporations are “people with rights.” See Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 50 (2010).
Rev Sam (Retired)
ANGLICAN CHURCH
50/60 MILLION MEMBERS
THE THREE ARTICLES below tells you WHY they feel YOU ARE NOT WORTHY OF ANYTHING BECAUSE THEY ARE THE MASTERS AND WE ARE THE SLAVES TO DO WHAT EVER BIDDING THEY WANT AND WE ARE TO KEEP OUR MOUTHS SHUT >>OUR SO CALLED GOVERNMENT IS ILLEGAL ACCORDING TO THE ACT of 1871 BY OUR TREASONOUS CONGRESS>>>THE MILITARIES OF AMERICA ARE FIGHTING ILLEGAL WARS FOR THE CORPORATIONS HEADED BY THE BIGGEST CORPORATION KNOWN AS THE UNITED STATES >>
These people went into the military on their own. The government lied to them. Get a life sheeple, you have been had