Jones writes: "A friend of mine, a Vietnam vet, told me about a veteran of
the Iraq War who, when some civilian said, 'Thank you for your service,'
replied: 'I didn't serve, I was used.' That got me thinking about the many
ways today's veterans are used, conned, and exploited by big gamers right
here at home."
Veteran Marine Joseph Lohman shows concern over government shutdown by
holding an American flag upside down. (photo: Charlie Nye/AP)
I Didn't Serve, I Was Used
By Ann Jones, TomDispatch
25 August 16
________________________________________
America has been committed to supporting the veterans of its wars since long
before it had "United States of" in front of it. "It was a fearful sight to
see them thus frying in the fire... horrible was the stink and scent
thereof," William Bradford wrote after soldiers of the Massachusetts Bay
Colony massacred a village of native Pequots. Later, the Pilgrims gave
thanks to their veterans by passing a law to support wounded soldiers of the
campaign. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) traces its spiritual
roots to this ur-moment in 1636.
Today, citizens of the United States directly bear the burden of more than
150 years of warfare. As of May 2016, the VA was still paying benefits to
one dependent of a Civil War (1861-1865) veteran, 88 dependents of
Spanish-American War (1898-1902) veterans, nine dependents of veterans of
the military campaign along the Mexican border early in the twentieth
century, thousands of dependents of World War I (1917-1918) veterans,
hundreds of thousands of World War II (1941-1945) veterans and dependents,
hundreds of thousands of Korean War (1950-1953) veterans and dependents,
around 1.8 million Vietnam War-era (1964-1975) veterans and dependents, and
millions of veterans and dependents of the Gulf War (1990-1991) and of the
ongoing War on Terror campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere (2001 to
the present).
When President Abraham Lincoln took office in 1861, there were an estimated
80,000 veterans living in the United States. By 1865, the final year of the
Civil War, there were so many more veterans in need of assistance that
Lincoln called on Congress "to care for him who shall have borne the battle,
and for his widow and his orphan." Lincoln didn't live to see the end of
that war and probably couldn't have imagined we'd still be paying the direct
costs of his request in 2016. Franklin D. Roosevelt didn't live to see the
end of the war he presided over either, but according to VA projections,
13,000 World War II veterans -- to say nothing of their dependents -- will
be receiving benefits as late as 2034.
Given that the U.S. was still paying benefits to a dependent of an American
Revolutionary veteran in the 1910s and to a Civil War widow as late as the
2000s, it's anyone's guess how long Americans will be paying the price of
the dependents of all the veterans whose hearts were touched by fire in
post-9/11 wars. In 150 years, will some writer be tallying up the number of
widows and children still collecting on the wars, interventions, attacks,
and raids in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan, Yemen, and
elsewhere? Will these conflicts be as dimly remembered as the campaign
against Pancho Villa along the Mexican border in the 1910s? Or will they
still be fresh in the minds of Americans as a never-ending intergenerational
campaign sees grandparents, parents, children, and grandchildren fighting
for elusive victories in the greater Middle East?
Today, TomDispatch regular Ann Jones, author of the highly praised They Were
Soldiers: How The Wounded Return from America's Wars -- The Untold Story,
takes up the questions of what and how we will pay (in every sense of the
word) for the veterans of our current wars. In an adapted version of the
keynote address she recently gave to the annual convention of Veterans for
Peace, Jones takes aim at schemes seeking to use veterans for corporate
interests and dismantle the VA system in the name of privatized profits.
Caring for veterans is a burden whose long-term costs have rarely been
considered in the context of America's penchant for ceaseless warfare, but
the costs of not properly caring for them, as Jones makes perfectly clear,
may be even more dire.
-Nick Turse, TomDispatch
________________________________________
How Veterans Are Losing the War at Home
Making America Pain-Free for Plutocrats and Big Pharma, But Not Vets
friend of mine, a Vietnam vet, told me about a veteran of the Iraq War who,
when some civilian said, "Thank you for your service," replied: "I didn't
serve, I was used." That got me thinking about the many ways today's
veterans are used, conned, and exploited by big gamers right here at home.
Near the end of his invaluable book cataloguing the long, slow disaster of
America's War for the Greater Middle East, historian Andrew Bacevich writes:
"Some individuals and institutions actually benefit from an armed conflict
that drags on and on. Those benefits are immediate and tangible. They come
in the form of profits, jobs, and campaign contributions. For the
military-industrial complex and its beneficiaries, perpetual war is not
necessarily bad news."
Bacevich is certainly right about war profiteers, but I believe we haven't
yet fully wrapped our minds around what that truly means. This is what we
have yet to take in: today, the U.S. is the most unequal country in the
developed world, and the wealth of the plutocrats on top is now so great
that, when they invest it in politics, it's likely that no elected
government can stop them or the lucrative wars and "free markets" they
exploit.
Among the prime movers in our corporatized politics are undoubtedly the two
billionaire Koch brothers, Charles and David, and their cozy network of
secret donors. It's hard to grasp how rich they really are: they rank fifth
(David) and sixth (Charles) on Business Insider's list of the 50 richest
people in the world, but if you pool their wealth they become by far the
single richest "individual" on the planet. And they have pals. For decades
now they've hosted top-secret gatherings of their richest collaborators that
sometimes also feature dignitaries like Clarence Thomas or the late Antonin
Scalia, two of the Supreme Court Justices who gave them the Citizens United
decision, suffocating American democracy in plutocratic dollars. That
select donor group had reportedly planned to spend at least $889 million on
this year's elections and related political projects, but recent reports
note a scaling back and redirection of resources.
While the contest between Trump and Clinton fills the media, the big money
is evidently going to be aimed at selected states and municipalities to aid
right-wing governors, Senate candidates, congressional representatives, and
in some cities, ominously enough, school board candidates. The Koch brothers
need not openly support the embarrassing Trump, for they've already proved
that, by controlling Congress, they can significantly control the president,
as they have already done in the Obama era.
Yet for all their influence, the Koch name means nothing, pollsters report,
to more than half of the U.S. population. In fact, the brothers Koch largely
stayed under the radar until recent years when their roles as polluters,
campaigners against the environment, and funders of a new politics came into
view. Thanks to Robert Greenwald's film Koch Brothers Exposed and Jane
Mayer's book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the
Rise of the Radical Right, we now know a lot more about them, but not
enough.
They've always been ready to profit off America's wars. Despite their
extreme neo-libertarian goal of demonizing and demolishing government, they
reportedly didn't hesitate to pocket about $170 million as contractors for
George W. Bush's wars. They sold fuel (oil is their principal business) to
the Defense Department, and after they bought Georgia Pacific, maker of
paper products, they supplied that military essential: toilet paper.
But that was small potatoes compared to what happened when soldiers came
home from the wars and fell victim to the profiteering of corporate America.
Dig in to the scams exploiting veterans, and once again you'll run into the
Koch brothers.
Pain Relief: With Thanks from Big Pharma
It's no secret that the VA wasn't ready for the endless, explosive post-9/11
wars. Its hospitals were already full of old vets from earlier wars when
suddenly there arrived young men and women with wounds, both physical and
mental, the doctors had never seen before. The VA enlarged its hospitals,
recruited new staff, and tried to catch up, but it's been running behind
ever since.
It's no wonder veterans' organizations keep after it (as well they should),
demanding more funding and better service. But they have to be careful what
they focus on. If they leave it at that and overlook what's really going on
-- often in plain sight, however disguised in patriotic verbiage -- they can
wind up being marched down a road they didn't choose that leads to a place
they don't want to be.
Even before the post-9/11 vets came home, a phalanx of drug-making
corporations led by Purdue Pharma had already gone to work on the VA. These
Big Pharma corporations (many of which buy equipment from Koch Membrane
Systems) had developed new pain medications -- opioid narcotics like
OxyContin (Purdue), Vicodin, Percocet, Opana (Endo Pharmaceuticals),
Duragesic, and Nucynta (Janssen, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson) -- and
they spotted a prospective marketplace. Early in 2001, Purdue developed a
plan to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars targeting the VA. By the end
of that year, this country was at war, and Big Pharma was looking at a gold
mine.
They recruited doctors, set them up in private "Pain Foundations," and paid
them handsomely to give lectures and interviews, write studies and
textbooks, teach classes in medical schools, and testify before Congress on
the importance of providing our veterans with powerful painkillers. In
2002, the Food and Drug Administration considered restricting the use of
opioids, fearing they might be addictive. They were talked out of it by
experts like Dr. Rollin Gallagher of the American Academy of Pain Medicine
and board member of the American Pain Foundation, both largely funded by the
drug companies. He spoke against restricting OxyContin.
By 2008, congressional legislation had been written -- the Veterans' Mental
Health and Other Care Improvement Act -- directing the VA to develop a plan
to evaluate all patients for pain. When the VA objected to Congress
dictating its medical procedures, Big Pharma launched a "Freedom from Pain"
media blitz, enlisting veterans' organizations to campaign for the bill and
get it passed.
Those painkillers were also dispatched to the war zones where our troops
were physically breaking down under the weight of the equipment they
carried. By 2010, a third of the Army's soldiers were on prescription
medications -- and nearly half of them, 76,500, were on prescription opioids
-- which proved to be highly addictive, despite the assurance of experts
like Rollin Gallagher. In 2007, for instance, "The American Veterans and
Service Members Survival Guide," distributed by the American Pain Foundation
and edited by Gallagher, offered this assurance: "[W]hen used for medical
purposes and under the guidance of a skilled health-care provider, the risk
of addiction from opioid pain medication is very low."
By that time, here at home, soldiers and vets were dying at astonishing
rates from accidental or deliberate overdoses. Civilian doctors as well had
been persuaded to overprescribe these drugs, so that by 2011 the CDC
announced a national epidemic, affecting more than 12 million Americans. In
May 2012, the Senate Finance Committee finally initiated an investigation
into the perhaps "improper relation" between Big Pharma and the pain
foundations. That investigation is still "ongoing," which means that no
information about it can yet be revealed to the public.
Meanwhile, opioid addicts, both veterans and civilians, were discovering
that heroin was a cheaper and no less effective way to go. Because heroin
is often cut with Fentanyl, a more powerful opioid, however, drug deaths
rose dramatically.
This epidemic of death is in the news almost every day now as hard-hit
cities and states sue the drug makers, but rarely is it traced to its
launching pad: the Big Pharma conspiracy to make big bucks off our country's
wounded soldiers.
It took the VA far too long to extricate itself from medical policies
marketed by Big Pharma and, in effect, prescribed by Congress. It had made
the mistake of turning to the Pharma-funded pain foundations in 2004 to
select its Deputy National Program Director of Pain Management: the
ubiquitous Dr. Gallagher. But when the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency finally
laid down new restrictive rules on opioids in 2014, the VA had to comply.
That's been hard on the thousands of opioid-dependent vets it had
unwittingly hooked, and it's becoming harder as Republicans in Congress move
to privatize the VA and send vets out with vouchers to find their own health
care.
Cute Cards Courtesy of the Koch Brothers
To force the VA to use its drugs, Big Pharma set up dummy foundations and
turned to existing veterans' organizations for support. These days, however,
the Big Money people have found a more efficient way to make their weight
felt. Now, when they need the political clout of a veterans' organization,
they help finance one of their own.
Consider Concerned Veterans for America (CVA). The group's stated mission:
"to preserve the freedom and prosperity we and our families fought and
sacrificed to defend." What patriotic American wouldn't want to get behind
that?
The problem that concerns the group right now is the "divide" between
civilians and soldiers, which exists, its leaders claim, because
responsibility for veterans has been "pushed to the highest levels of
government." That has left veterans isolated from their own communities,
which should be taking care of them.
Concerned Veterans for America proposes (though not quite in so many words)
to close that gap by sacking the VA and giving vets the "freedom" to find
their own health care. The 102-page proposal of CVA's Task Force on "Fixing
Veterans' Health Care" would let VA hospitals treat veterans with
"service-connected health needs" -- let them, that is, sweat the hard stuff
-- while transforming most VA Health Care facilities into an "independent,
non-profit corporation" to be "preserved," if possible, in competition "with
private providers."
All other vets would have the "option to seek private health coverage,"
using funds the VA might have spent on their care, had they chosen it. (How
that would be calculated remains one of many mysteries.) The venerable VA
operates America's largest health care system, with 168 VA Medical Centers
and 1,053 outpatient clinics, providing care to more than 8.9 million vets
each year. Yet under this plan that lame, undernourished but extraordinary
and, in a great many ways, remarkably successful version of single-payer
lifelong socialized medicine for vets would be a goner, perhaps surviving
only in bifurcated form: as an intensive care unit and an insurance office
dispensing funds to free and choosy vets.
Such plans should have marked Concerned Veterans for America as a Koch
brothers' creation even before its front man gave the game away and lost his
job. Like those pain foundation doctors who became self-anointed opioid
experts, veteran Pete Hegseth had made himself an expert on veterans'
affairs, running Concerned Veterans for America and doubling as a talking
head on Fox News. The secretive veterans' organization now carries on
without him, still working to capture -- or perhaps buy -- the hearts and
minds of Congress.
And here's the scary part: they may succeed. Remember that every U.S.
administration, from the Continental Congress on, has regarded the care of
veterans as a sacred trust of government. The notion of privatizing
veterans' care -- by giving each veteran a voucher, like some
underprivileged schoolboy -- was first suggested only eight years ago by
Arizona Senator John McCain, America's most famous veteran-cum-politician.
Most veterans' organizations opposed the idea, citing McCain's long record
of voting against funding the VA. Four years ago, Mitt Romney touted the
same idea and got the same response.
That's about the time that the Koch brothers, and their donor network,
changed their strategy. They had invested an estimated $400 million in the
2012 elections and lost the presidency (though not Congress). So they
turned their attention to the states and localities. Somewhere along the
way, they quietly promoted Concerned Veterans for America and who knows what
other similar organizations and think tanks to peddle their cutthroat
capitalist ideology and enshrine it in the law of the land.
Then, in 2014, President Obama signed into law the Veterans' Access to Care
Through Choice, Accountability, and Transparency Act. That bill singled out
certain veterans who lived at least 40 miles from a VA hospital or had to
wait 30 days for an appointment and gave them a "choice card," entitling
them to see a private doctor of their own choosing. Though John McCain had
originally designed the bill, it was by then a bipartisan effort, officially
introduced by the Democratic senator who chaired the Senate Committee on
Veterans' Affairs: Bernie Sanders.
Sanders said that, while it was not the bill he would have written, he
thought it was a step toward cutting wait times. With his sponsorship, the
bill passed by a 93-3 vote. And so an idea unthinkable only two years
earlier -- the partial privatization of veteran's health care -- became law.
How could that have happened? At the VA, there was certainly need for
improvement. Its health care system had been consistently underfunded and
wait times for appointments were notoriously long. Then, early in 2014,
personnel at the Phoenix VA in McCain's home state of Arizona were caught
falsifying records to hide the wait-time problem. When that scandal hit the
news, Concerned Veterans for America was quick to exploit the situation and
lead a mass protest. Three weeks later, as heads rolled at the VA, Senator
McCain called a town hall meeting to announce his new bill, with its
"hallmark Choice Card." His website notes that it "received praise... from
veterans' advocacy organizations such as Concerned Veterans for America."
That bill also called for a "commission on care" to explore the
possibilities of "transforming" veterans' health care. Most vets still
haven't heard of this commission and its charge to change their lives, but
many of those who did learn of it were worried by the terminology. After
all, many vets already had a choice through Medicare or private insurance,
and most chose the vet-centered treatment of the VA. They complained only
that it took too long to get an appointment. They wanted more VA care, not
less -- and they wanted it faster.
In any case, those choice cards already handed out have reportedly only
slowed down the process of getting treatment, while the freedom to search
for a private doctor has turned out to be anything but popular.
Nevertheless, the commission on care -- 15 people chosen by President Obama
and the leaders of the House and Senate -- worked for 10 months to produce a
laundry list of "fixes" for the VA and one controversial recommendation.
They called for the VA "across the United States" to establish
"high-performing, integrated community health care networks, to be known as
the VHA Care System."
In other words, instead of funding added staff and speeded-up service, the
commission recommended the creation of an entirely new, more expensive, and
untried system. Then there was the fine print: as in the plan of Concerned
Veterans of America, there would be tightened qualifications, out-of-pocket
costs, and exclusions. In other words, the commission was proposing a
fragmented, complicated, and iffy system, funded in part on the backs of
veterans, and "transformative" in ways ominously different from anything
vets had been promised in the past.
Commissioner Michael Blecker, executive director of the San Francisco-based
veterans' service organization Swords to Plowshares, refused to sign off on
the report. Although he approved of the VA fixes, he saw in that
recommendation for "community networks" the privatizer's big boot in the
door. Yet while Blecker thought the recommendation would serve the private
sector and not the vet, another non-signer took the opposite view. Darin
Selnick, senior veterans' affairs advisor for Concerned Veterans for America
and executive director of CVA's Fixing Veterans Health Care Taskforce,
complained that the commission had focused too much on "fixing the existing
VA" rather than "boldly transforming" veterans' health care into a menu of
"multiple private-sector choice options." The lines were clearly drawn.
Then, last April, Senator McCain made an end run around the commission, a
dash that could only thrill the leaders of Concerned Veterans for America
and their backers. Noting that his choice card legislation was due to
expire, McCain, together with seven other Republican senators (including Ted
Cruz), introduced new legislation: the Care Veterans Deserve Act of 2016.
It's a bill designed to "enhance choice and flexibility in veterans' health
care" by making the problematic choice card "permanently and universally"
available to all disabled and other unspecified veterans. You can see where
the notion came from and where it's going. By May 2016, when Fox News
featured a joint statement by Senator McCain and Pete Hegseth, late of
Concerned Veterans for America, trumpeting the VA Choice Card Program as
"the most significant VA reform in decades," you could also see where this
might end.
As real veterans' organizations wise up to what's going on, they will
undoubtedly stand against the false "freedom" of a Koch brothers-style
"transformation" of the VA system. The rest of us should stand with them.
The plutocrats who corrupted veterans' health care and now want to shut it
down, and the plutocrats who profit from this country's endless wars are one
and the same. And they have bigger plans for us all.
________________________________________
Ann Jones, a TomDispatch regular, is the author most recently of They Were
Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America's Wars -- the Untold Story, a
Dispatch Books original. This piece is adapted from the keynote address she
recently gave to the annual convention of Veterans for Peace. She is a
member of the international advisory board of that organization.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead, and
Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars,
and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Veteran Marine Joseph Lohman shows concern over government shutdown by
holding an American flag upside down. (photo: Charlie Nye/AP)
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176180/http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/17618
0/
I Didn't Serve, I Was Used
By Ann Jones, TomDispatch
25 August 16
America has been committed to supporting the veterans of its wars since long
before it had "United States of" in front of it. "It was a fearful sight to
see them thus frying in the fire... horrible was the stink and scent
thereof," William Bradford wrote after soldiers of the Massachusetts Bay
Colony massacred a village of native Pequots. Later, the Pilgrims gave
thanks to their veterans by passing a law to support wounded soldiers of the
campaign. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) traces its spiritual
roots to this ur-moment in 1636.
Today, citizens of the United States directly bear the burden of more than
150 years of warfare. As of May 2016, the VA was still paying benefits to
one dependent of a Civil War (1861-1865) veteran, 88 dependents of
Spanish-American War (1898-1902) veterans, nine dependents of veterans of
the military campaign along the Mexican border early in the twentieth
century, thousands of dependents of World War I (1917-1918) veterans,
hundreds of thousands of World War II (1941-1945) veterans and dependents,
hundreds of thousands of Korean War (1950-1953) veterans and dependents,
around 1.8 million Vietnam War-era (1964-1975) veterans and dependents, and
millions of veterans and dependents of the Gulf War (1990-1991) and of the
ongoing War on Terror campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere (2001 to
the present).
When President Abraham Lincoln took office in 1861, there were an estimated
80,000 veterans living in the United States. By 1865, the final year of the
Civil War, there were so many more veterans in need of assistance that
Lincoln called on Congress "to care for him who shall have borne the battle,
and for his widow and his orphan." Lincoln didn't live to see the end of
that war and probably couldn't have imagined we'd still be paying the direct
costs of his request in 2016. Franklin D. Roosevelt didn't live to see the
end of the war he presided over either, but according to VA projections,
13,000 World War II veterans -- to say nothing of their dependents -- will
be receiving benefits as late as 2034.
Given that the U.S. was still paying benefits to a dependent of an American
Revolutionary veteran in the 1910s and to a Civil War widow as late as the
2000s, it's anyone's guess how long Americans will be paying the price of
the dependents of all the veterans whose hearts were touched by fire in
post-9/11 wars. In 150 years, will some writer be tallying up the number of
widows and children still collecting on the wars, interventions, attacks,
and raids in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan, Yemen, and
elsewhere? Will these conflicts be as dimly remembered as the campaign
against Pancho Villa along the Mexican border in the 1910s? Or will they
still be fresh in the minds of Americans as a never-ending intergenerational
campaign sees grandparents, parents, children, and grandchildren fighting
for elusive victories in the greater Middle East?
Today, TomDispatch regular Ann Jones, author of the highly praised They Were
Soldiers: How The Wounded Return from America's Wars -- The Untold Story,
takes up the questions of what and how we will pay (in every sense of the
word) for the veterans of our current wars. In an adapted version of the
keynote address she recently gave to the annual convention of Veterans for
Peace, Jones takes aim at schemes seeking to use veterans for corporate
interests and dismantle the VA system in the name of privatized profits.
Caring for veterans is a burden whose long-term costs have rarely been
considered in the context of America's penchant for ceaseless warfare, but
the costs of not properly caring for them, as Jones makes perfectly clear,
may be even more dire.
-Nick Turse, TomDispatch
How Veterans Are Losing the War at Home
Making America Pain-Free for Plutocrats and Big Pharma, But Not Vets
friend of mine, a Vietnam vet, told me about a veteran of the Iraq War who,
when some civilian said, "Thank you for your service," replied: "I didn't
serve, I was used." That got me thinking about the many ways today's
veterans are used, conned, and exploited by big gamers right here at home.
Near the end of his invaluable book cataloguing the long, slow disaster of
America's War for the Greater Middle East, historian Andrew Bacevich writes:
"Some individuals and institutions actually benefit from an armed conflict
that drags on and on. Those benefits are immediate and tangible. They come
in the form of profits, jobs, and campaign contributions. For the
military-industrial complex and its beneficiaries, perpetual war is not
necessarily bad news."
Bacevich is certainly right about war profiteers, but I believe we haven't
yet fully wrapped our minds around what that truly means. This is what we
have yet to take in: today, the U.S. is the most unequal country in the
developed world, and the wealth of the plutocrats on top is now so great
that, when they invest it in politics, it's likely that no elected
government can stop them or the lucrative wars and "free markets" they
exploit.
Among the prime movers in our corporatized politics are undoubtedly the two
billionaire Koch brothers, Charles and David, and their cozy network of
secret donors. It's hard to grasp how rich they really are: they rank fifth
(David) and sixth (Charles) on Business Insider's list of the 50 richest
people in the world, but if you pool their wealth they become by far the
single richest "individual" on the planet. And they have pals. For decades
now they've hosted top-secret gatherings of their richest collaborators that
sometimes also feature dignitaries like Clarence Thomas or the late Antonin
Scalia, two of the Supreme Court Justices who gave them the Citizens United
decision, suffocating American democracy in plutocratic dollars. That select
donor group had reportedly planned to spend at least $889 million on this
year's elections and related political projects, but recent reports note a
scaling back and redirection of resources.
While the contest between Trump and Clinton fills the media, the big money
is evidently going to be aimed at selected states and municipalities to aid
right-wing governors, Senate candidates, congressional representatives, and
in some cities, ominously enough, school board candidates. The Koch brothers
need not openly support the embarrassing Trump, for they've already proved
that, by controlling Congress, they can significantly control the president,
as they have already done in the Obama era.
Yet for all their influence, the Koch name means nothing, pollsters report,
to more than half of the U.S. population. In fact, the brothers Koch largely
stayed under the radar until recent years when their roles as polluters,
campaigners against the environment, and funders of a new politics came into
view. Thanks to Robert Greenwald's film Koch Brothers Exposed and Jane
Mayer's book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the
Rise of the Radical Right, we now know a lot more about them, but not
enough.
They've always been ready to profit off America's wars. Despite their
extreme neo-libertarian goal of demonizing and demolishing government, they
reportedly didn't hesitate to pocket about $170 million as contractors for
George W. Bush's wars. They sold fuel (oil is their principal business) to
the Defense Department, and after they bought Georgia Pacific, maker of
paper products, they supplied that military essential: toilet paper.
But that was small potatoes compared to what happened when soldiers came
home from the wars and fell victim to the profiteering of corporate America.
Dig in to the scams exploiting veterans, and once again you'll run into the
Koch brothers.
Pain Relief: With Thanks from Big Pharma
It's no secret that the VA wasn't ready for the endless, explosive post-9/11
wars. Its hospitals were already full of old vets from earlier wars when
suddenly there arrived young men and women with wounds, both physical and
mental, the doctors had never seen before. The VA enlarged its hospitals,
recruited new staff, and tried to catch up, but it's been running behind
ever since.
It's no wonder veterans' organizations keep after it (as well they should),
demanding more funding and better service. But they have to be careful what
they focus on. If they leave it at that and overlook what's really going on
-- often in plain sight, however disguised in patriotic verbiage -- they can
wind up being marched down a road they didn't choose that leads to a place
they don't want to be.
Even before the post-9/11 vets came home, a phalanx of drug-making
corporations led by Purdue Pharma had already gone to work on the VA. These
Big Pharma corporations (many of which buy equipment from Koch Membrane
Systems) had developed new pain medications -- opioid narcotics like
OxyContin (Purdue), Vicodin, Percocet, Opana (Endo Pharmaceuticals),
Duragesic, and Nucynta (Janssen, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson) -- and
they spotted a prospective marketplace. Early in 2001, Purdue developed a
plan to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars targeting the VA. By the end
of that year, this country was at war, and Big Pharma was looking at a gold
mine.
They recruited doctors, set them up in private "Pain Foundations," and paid
them handsomely to give lectures and interviews, write studies and
textbooks, teach classes in medical schools, and testify before Congress on
the importance of providing our veterans with powerful painkillers. In 2002,
the Food and Drug Administration considered restricting the use of opioids,
fearing they might be addictive. They were talked out of it by experts like
Dr. Rollin Gallagher of the American Academy of Pain Medicine and board
member of the American Pain Foundation, both largely funded by the drug
companies. He spoke against restricting OxyContin.
By 2008, congressional legislation had been written -- the Veterans' Mental
Health and Other Care Improvement Act -- directing the VA to develop a plan
to evaluate all patients for pain. When the VA objected to Congress
dictating its medical procedures, Big Pharma launched a "Freedom from Pain"
media blitz, enlisting veterans' organizations to campaign for the bill and
get it passed.
Those painkillers were also dispatched to the war zones where our troops
were physically breaking down under the weight of the equipment they
carried. By 2010, a third of the Army's soldiers were on prescription
medications -- and nearly half of them, 76,500, were on prescription opioids
-- which proved to be highly addictive, despite the assurance of experts
like Rollin Gallagher. In 2007, for instance, "The American Veterans and
Service Members Survival Guide," distributed by the American Pain Foundation
and edited by Gallagher, offered this assurance: "[W]hen used for medical
purposes and under the guidance of a skilled health-care provider, the risk
of addiction from opioid pain medication is very low."
By that time, here at home, soldiers and vets were dying at astonishing
rates from accidental or deliberate overdoses. Civilian doctors as well had
been persuaded to overprescribe these drugs, so that by 2011 the CDC
announced a national epidemic, affecting more than 12 million Americans. In
May 2012, the Senate Finance Committee finally initiated an investigation
into the perhaps "improper relation" between Big Pharma and the pain
foundations. That investigation is still "ongoing," which means that no
information about it can yet be revealed to the public.
Meanwhile, opioid addicts, both veterans and civilians, were discovering
that heroin was a cheaper and no less effective way to go. Because heroin is
often cut with Fentanyl, a more powerful opioid, however, drug deaths rose
dramatically.
This epidemic of death is in the news almost every day now as hard-hit
cities and states sue the drug makers, but rarely is it traced to its
launching pad: the Big Pharma conspiracy to make big bucks off our country's
wounded soldiers.
It took the VA far too long to extricate itself from medical policies
marketed by Big Pharma and, in effect, prescribed by Congress. It had made
the mistake of turning to the Pharma-funded pain foundations in 2004 to
select its Deputy National Program Director of Pain Management: the
ubiquitous Dr. Gallagher. But when the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency finally
laid down new restrictive rules on opioids in 2014, the VA had to comply.
That's been hard on the thousands of opioid-dependent vets it had
unwittingly hooked, and it's becoming harder as Republicans in Congress move
to privatize the VA and send vets out with vouchers to find their own health
care.
Cute Cards Courtesy of the Koch Brothers
To force the VA to use its drugs, Big Pharma set up dummy foundations and
turned to existing veterans' organizations for support. These days, however,
the Big Money people have found a more efficient way to make their weight
felt. Now, when they need the political clout of a veterans' organization,
they help finance one of their own.
Consider Concerned Veterans for America (CVA). The group's stated mission:
"to preserve the freedom and prosperity we and our families fought and
sacrificed to defend." What patriotic American wouldn't want to get behind
that?
The problem that concerns the group right now is the "divide" between
civilians and soldiers, which exists, its leaders claim, because
responsibility for veterans has been "pushed to the highest levels of
government." That has left veterans isolated from their own communities,
which should be taking care of them.
Concerned Veterans for America proposes (though not quite in so many words)
to close that gap by sacking the VA and giving vets the "freedom" to find
their own health care. The 102-page proposal of CVA's Task Force on "Fixing
Veterans' Health Care" would let VA hospitals treat veterans with
"service-connected health needs" -- let them, that is, sweat the hard stuff
-- while transforming most VA Health Care facilities into an "independent,
non-profit corporation" to be "preserved," if possible, in competition "with
private providers."
All other vets would have the "option to seek private health coverage,"
using funds the VA might have spent on their care, had they chosen it. (How
that would be calculated remains one of many mysteries.) The venerable VA
operates America's largest health care system, with 168 VA Medical Centers
and 1,053 outpatient clinics, providing care to more than 8.9 million vets
each year. Yet under this plan that lame, undernourished but extraordinary
and, in a great many ways, remarkably successful version of single-payer
lifelong socialized medicine for vets would be a goner, perhaps surviving
only in bifurcated form: as an intensive care unit and an insurance office
dispensing funds to free and choosy vets.
Such plans should have marked Concerned Veterans for America as a Koch
brothers' creation even before its front man gave the game away and lost his
job. Like those pain foundation doctors who became self-anointed opioid
experts, veteran Pete Hegseth had made himself an expert on veterans'
affairs, running Concerned Veterans for America and doubling as a talking
head on Fox News. The secretive veterans' organization now carries on
without him, still working to capture -- or perhaps buy -- the hearts and
minds of Congress.
And here's the scary part: they may succeed. Remember that every U.S.
administration, from the Continental Congress on, has regarded the care of
veterans as a sacred trust of government. The notion of privatizing
veterans' care -- by giving each veteran a voucher, like some
underprivileged schoolboy -- was first suggested only eight years ago by
Arizona Senator John McCain, America's most famous veteran-cum-politician.
Most veterans' organizations opposed the idea, citing McCain's long record
of voting against funding the VA. Four years ago, Mitt Romney touted the
same idea and got the same response.
That's about the time that the Koch brothers, and their donor network,
changed their strategy. They had invested an estimated $400 million in the
2012 elections and lost the presidency (though not Congress). So they turned
their attention to the states and localities. Somewhere along the way, they
quietly promoted Concerned Veterans for America and who knows what other
similar organizations and think tanks to peddle their cutthroat capitalist
ideology and enshrine it in the law of the land.
Then, in 2014, President Obama signed into law the Veterans' Access to Care
Through Choice, Accountability, and Transparency Act. That bill singled out
certain veterans who lived at least 40 miles from a VA hospital or had to
wait 30 days for an appointment and gave them a "choice card," entitling
them to see a private doctor of their own choosing. Though John McCain had
originally designed the bill, it was by then a bipartisan effort, officially
introduced by the Democratic senator who chaired the Senate Committee on
Veterans' Affairs: Bernie Sanders.
Sanders said that, while it was not the bill he would have written, he
thought it was a step toward cutting wait times. With his sponsorship, the
bill passed by a 93-3 vote. And so an idea unthinkable only two years
earlier -- the partial privatization of veteran's health care -- became law.
How could that have happened? At the VA, there was certainly need for
improvement. Its health care system had been consistently underfunded and
wait times for appointments were notoriously long. Then, early in 2014,
personnel at the Phoenix VA in McCain's home state of Arizona were caught
falsifying records to hide the wait-time problem. When that scandal hit the
news, Concerned Veterans for America was quick to exploit the situation and
lead a mass protest. Three weeks later, as heads rolled at the VA, Senator
McCain called a town hall meeting to announce his new bill, with its
"hallmark Choice Card." His website notes that it "received praise... from
veterans' advocacy organizations such as Concerned Veterans for America."
That bill also called for a "commission on care" to explore the
possibilities of "transforming" veterans' health care. Most vets still
haven't heard of this commission and its charge to change their lives, but
many of those who did learn of it were worried by the terminology. After
all, many vets already had a choice through Medicare or private insurance,
and most chose the vet-centered treatment of the VA. They complained only
that it took too long to get an appointment. They wanted more VA care, not
less -- and they wanted it faster.
In any case, those choice cards already handed out have reportedly only
slowed down the process of getting treatment, while the freedom to search
for a private doctor has turned out to be anything but popular.
Nevertheless, the commission on care -- 15 people chosen by President Obama
and the leaders of the House and Senate -- worked for 10 months to produce a
laundry list of "fixes" for the VA and one controversial recommendation.
They called for the VA "across the United States" to establish
"high-performing, integrated community health care networks, to be known as
the VHA Care System."
In other words, instead of funding added staff and speeded-up service, the
commission recommended the creation of an entirely new, more expensive, and
untried system. Then there was the fine print: as in the plan of Concerned
Veterans of America, there would be tightened qualifications, out-of-pocket
costs, and exclusions. In other words, the commission was proposing a
fragmented, complicated, and iffy system, funded in part on the backs of
veterans, and "transformative" in ways ominously different from anything
vets had been promised in the past.
Commissioner Michael Blecker, executive director of the San Francisco-based
veterans' service organization Swords to Plowshares, refused to sign off on
the report. Although he approved of the VA fixes, he saw in that
recommendation for "community networks" the privatizer's big boot in the
door. Yet while Blecker thought the recommendation would serve the private
sector and not the vet, another non-signer took the opposite view. Darin
Selnick, senior veterans' affairs advisor for Concerned Veterans for America
and executive director of CVA's Fixing Veterans Health Care Taskforce,
complained that the commission had focused too much on "fixing the existing
VA" rather than "boldly transforming" veterans' health care into a menu of
"multiple private-sector choice options." The lines were clearly drawn.
Then, last April, Senator McCain made an end run around the commission, a
dash that could only thrill the leaders of Concerned Veterans for America
and their backers. Noting that his choice card legislation was due to
expire, McCain, together with seven other Republican senators (including Ted
Cruz), introduced new legislation: the Care Veterans Deserve Act of 2016.
It's a bill designed to "enhance choice and flexibility in veterans' health
care" by making the problematic choice card "permanently and universally"
available to all disabled and other unspecified veterans. You can see where
the notion came from and where it's going. By May 2016, when Fox News
featured a joint statement by Senator McCain and Pete Hegseth, late of
Concerned Veterans for America, trumpeting the VA Choice Card Program as
"the most significant VA reform in decades," you could also see where this
might end.
As real veterans' organizations wise up to what's going on, they will
undoubtedly stand against the false "freedom" of a Koch brothers-style
"transformation" of the VA system. The rest of us should stand with them.
The plutocrats who corrupted veterans' health care and now want to shut it
down, and the plutocrats who profit from this country's endless wars are one
and the same. And they have bigger plans for us all.
Ann Jones, a TomDispatch regular, is the author most recently of They Were
Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America's Wars -- the Untold Story, a
Dispatch Books original. This piece is adapted from the keynote address she
recently gave to the annual convention of Veterans for Peace. She is a
member of the international advisory board of that organization.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead, and
Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars,
and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
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