A rational person might ask, why is the US government aggressively going after the soldiers themselves, who accepted a bonus to re-enlist and actually served
again in a war, putting themselves in harm's way, in good faith? If there is a problem why are they not addressing it with the local government official who offered the bonuses in error to achieve their own ends?
It is because the soldiers, who faithfully served and kept their end of the deal, are the more vulnerable, and the easiest pockets to pick. They are weak, and not equipped to lawyer up and fight back.
Does the Pentagon really need the money from those soldiers? The bonuses obviously meant a lot to them, and is just a drop in the buck of the Washington war machine.
It is because they can. It is because it is hard to overestimate the petty ruthlessness of some bureaucratic functionary in bullying the weak even though they may have offered up their full devotion to your own cause?
You might be further tempted to wonder why the government does almost nothing to hold the perpetrators of all these massive financial frauds and healthcare abuses we have been seeing for the past twenty year accountable in the same aggressive way, when it might be much more justifiable to do so?
Good question.
Don't worry, it will never come up in all these political discussion having to do with personalities and diversions while the real problems go ignored.
We will be seeing much more of this as time goes forward. The privileged have no honor, and certainly no shame.
It is a symptom of a corporatized system drunk with power and arrogantly audacious, where the citizens and customers are victims, and a ruling elite views themselves and those like them as entitled by their power to consider everyone else as things to be used and then discarded when they are done with them.
Thousands of California soldiers forced to repay enlistment bonuses a decade after going to war
David S. Cloud
Short of troops to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan a decade ago, the California National Guard enticed thousands of soldiers with bonuses of $15,000 or more to reenlist and go to war.
Now the Pentagon is demanding the money back.
Nearly 10,000 soldiers, many of whom served multiple combat tours, have been ordered to repay large enlistment bonuses — and slapped with interest charges, wage garnishments and tax liens if they refuse — after audits revealed widespread overpayments by the California Guard at the height of the wars last decade.
Investigations have determined that lack of oversight allowed for widespread fraud and mismanagement by California Guard officials under pressure to meet enlistment targets.
But soldiers say the military is reneging on 10-year-old agreements and imposing severe financial hardship on veterans whose only mistake was to accept bonuses offered when the Pentagon needed to fill the ranks...
Read the entire story
here.
