Top Military Recruitment Lies
By Aimee Allison and David Solnit 

Top military recruitment facts

1. Recruiters lie. According the New York Times, nearly one of five United States Army recruiters was under investigation in 2004 for offenses varying from “threats and coercion to false promises that applicants would not be sent to Iraq.” One veteran recruiter told a reporter for the Albany Times Union, “I’ve been recruiting for years, and I don’t know one recruiter who wasn’t dishonest about it. I did it myself.”

2. The military contract guarantees nothing. The Department of Defense’s own enlistment/re-enlistment document states, “Laws and regulations that govern military personnel may change without notice to me. Such changes may affect my status, pay allowances, benefits and responsibilities as a member of the Armed Forces REGARDLESS of the provisions of this enlistment/re-enlistment document” (DD Form4/1, 1998, Sec.9.5b).

3. Advertised signing bonuses are bogus. Bonuses are often thought of as gifts, but they’re not. They’re like loans: If an enlistee leaves the military before his or her agreed term of service, he or she will be forced to repay the bonus. Besides, Army data shows that the top bonus of $20,000 was given to only 6 percent of the 47,7272 enlistees who signed up for active duty.

4. The military won’t make you financially secure. Military members are no strangers to financial strain: 48 percent report having financial difficulty, approximately 33 percent of homeless men in the United States are veterans, and nearly 200,000 veterans are homeless on any given night.

5. Money for college ($71,424 in the bank?). If you expect the military to pay for college, better read the fine print. Among recruits who sign up for the Montgomery GI Bill, 65 percent receive no money for college, and only 15 percent ever receive a college degree. The maximum Montgomery GI Bill benefit is $37,224, and even this 37K is hard to get: To join, you must first put in a nonrefundable $1,200 deposit that has to be paid to the military during the first year of service. To receive the $37K, you must also be an active-duty member who has completed at least a three-year service agreement and is attending a four-year college full time. Benefits are significantly lower if you are going to school part-time or attending a two-year college. If you receive a less than honorable discharge (as one in four do), leave the military early (as one in three do), or later decide not to go to college, the military will keep your deposit and give you nothing. Note: The $71,424 advertised by the Army and $86,000 by the Navy includes benefits from the Amy or Navy College Fund, respectively. Fewer than 10 percent of all recruits earn money from the Army College Fund, which is specifically designed to lure recruits into hard-to-fill positions.

For the rest of the story, click here. 

This fall, Americans are going to witness Bush’s brutal “crackdown” on illegal immigration designed to appease right-wing hardliners.

Bush’s Looming Immigration Crackdown a Painful Exercise in Futility
By Joshua Holland 

This fall, Americans are going to witness a brutal and ham-fisted “crackdown” on illegal immigration by the Bush Administration. It will be a stark and tragic illustration of what happens when a vocal and well-organized minority of hardliners hijacks the country’s legislative process.

The results are entirely predictable – the results of bad public policy are in some ways easier to forecast than good. Here’s what we have to look forward to.

Over the next few months, the feds will launch some well-publicized SWAT team-style immigration raids much like the one earlier this year that Aimee Molloy described in Salon:

…swarms of armed federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement gathered in the blistering cold outside the Michael Bianco Inc. leather goods factory in New Bedford, Mass. At about 8 a.m., as a helicopter circled overhead and police kept watch in Coast Guard boats in the nearby harbor, the agents rushed the building military-style, blocked the exits, and ordered the employees to turn off their sewing machines, where most were busy stitching backpacks and vests for the U.S. military. By evening, 361 workers — mostly from Guatemala and El Salvador — had been taken into custody after they were unable to prove they had legal status to work in the United States. The factory owner and three managers were also arrested and charged in connection with hiring illegal aliens.

They’ll be designed for some nice “tough on immigration” photo-ops, but they will have, at most, a superficial impact on the flow of immigrants into this country — of that we can be as sure as we are that the sun will rise tomorrow.

How can one be so certain? Because the policy does nothing to address the underlying supply of willing foreign workers or the demand for exploitable migrant labor. Anyone who believes that such a policy has even a chance to work must also believe that Prohibition was a success and that Reagan won the “war on drugs” 20 years ago. Attempts to crack down on black markets for things like drugs, prostitution or immigration without addressing the economic factors that drives those markets will simply not work. In such cases, “enforcement only” has a proven track record — it’s perfectly ineffective.

For the rest of the story, click here. 

Phil Spector Jury Deadlocked

After seven days of deliberation, the jury in the murder trial of legendary rock producer Phil Spector said they were unable to reach a consensus. What do you think?

Tina Sumner,
Systems Analyst
“Regardless of whether or not he committed this murder he should be put away for the atrocities he committed against McCartney’s ‘The Long and Winding Road.’”

Chris Hook,
Sports Card Dealer
“Might as well lock him up. Anybody worth recording with is in prison anyway.”

Jerry Morris,
Architectural Draftsman
“It is pretty hard to decide. On the one hand, Spector has a decades-long track record of terrorizing women with guns, and on the other hand, he shot that woman in the face.”

Today’s photo of the day comes from Jena, Louisiana, where tens of thousands of people marched through the town to protest the treatment of the Jena Six. Who says activism is dead?

Today’s video of the day comes from a recent Patti Labelle concert. Ms. Patti WENT OFF on a fan who came to the stage and “disrespected her.” What do you think?