Download PDF of this full issue: v44n1.pdf (21.8 MB)

Letter to Editor

By Al Donohue

The Buffalo News April-26-2012 printed in the Everybody's Column section.

Pentagon's Control of Veteran's Affairs

The attempt to intimidate the veteran community's opinion regarding the government's military spending won't work. Veterans are not only veterans, who receive health care, disability and educational assistance through the Veterans Administration (which is funded by the Defense Department), they are also citizens, taxpayers and workers. They know that the dead-end and disastrous foreign policy followed by the US government since the end of World War II has served as a justification for the massive military budgets that every year have boosted corporate profits and helped create the $14 trillion federal deficit.

To end this attempted intimidation, Veterans Affairs should be removed from the political and economic control of the Pentagon. To end the existence of this "permanent war economy" with all of the sorrow and waste that accompany it, the profit must be taken out of production for the military. This can be done by nationalizing the corporations that receive those government contracts. Only by taking the profit out of war can we begin to solve our domestic problems, develop a constructive foreign policy and enter into a new historical period.

This letter to the editor was written in response to the never ending propaganda campaign that says "any cuts to the D.O.D. budget will hurt veterans." The reason this line works is that most people believe that when it comes to choosing whether to buy another submarine, airplane or tank, or add more beds and staff at a VA hospital or clinic, the corporations will get the money.

—Al Donohue