The VA Advisory Committe Plans Schedule of Meetings for Gulf War Veterans

by Denise Nichols,

The VA's Advisory Committee is tenatively planning the following schedule of meetings.  Until they place on the VA Advisory Committee website this is their plan.

• January 14-15, 2009  Puget Sound, WA
• February 18-19, 2009  Atlanta,GA
• March 18-19,2009  Waco Texas

The chairman did say that the committee would travel as a whole body not sub groups of the committee. This is your chances veterans of the Gulf War that are ill and have trouble with claims and getting health care to speak up and be heard!
 
It is highly encouraged that you write up a 2 pager to submit.  It should include your personal details, name, rank, unit, where you served, when you got ill, where you have gone to get care and your experience with getting diagnosed and appropriate care, and also when you submitted your claim and problems with your claim approval.  You should include suggestions of what you think would help gulf war veterans.

1. Akaka Requests Review Of War-Zone Toxins. 
2. VA, Army Attempt To Curtail Rising Suicide Rate.  
3. DeBakey VAMC Providing Assistance To Vision-Impaired Veterans.  
4. VA, Defense Decide To Move EMR Systems To SOA Architecture.  
5. Sites For VA, LSU Hospitals Announced.  
6. New Clinics Opening In Attempt To Ease Congestion At Portland VAMC.  
7. VA Black Hills Completes Preliminary Health Care Needs Assessment.  
8. VA Clinic In Massachusetts Recognized As One Of Nation's Best.  
9. US Government Sues Insurance Company Over Veteran's Care Reimbursement.  
10. Veterans Clinic At Camp Grafton In North Dakota Said To Be A Possibility.

            The Lockheed Martin Space Systems Co., Space and Strategic Missiles, Sunnyvale, Calif., is being awarded $720,086,268 modification (PZ0001) to previously awarded cost-plus-incentive-fee, cost-plus-fixed-fee contract (N00030-08-C-0100) to provide TRIDENT II(D5) and TRIDENT I (C4) missile subsystem. Specific tasks may include:

Missile body, re-entry body, D5 instrumentation systems and support equipment production (D5 only); D5 Production Continuity Hardware (D5 only); Procurement of components and requalification activities in support of D5 life extension requirements; Critical components in support of D5 life extension requirements; Field Processing; Engineering and operational support services; Training material development and maintenance; Trainer design and operational support; Spares and integrated logistics support; Flight Test Analysis and Range Support; Safety Assurance including Nuclear Weapon Security (NWS); Missile and support equipment repair; Flight Test Planning and Flight Test Data Acquisition and Processing (D5 only); Development, production and installation of SPALTs/PADs/Sers [Special Projects Alterations, POMF (POLARIS Missile Facility) Alteration Documents, and Support Equipment Requirements]; Develop and produce an Alteration Release Assembly; Develop an Enhanced Telemetry System; Technical services in support of the C4/D5 Ballast System and Test Instrumentation Mast program; Technical services in support of all requirements associated with TRIDENT I(C4) related to asset dispositions and disposal. In addition to TRIDENT II (D5), and TRIDENT I (C4) missile subsystem requirements, there is also a requirement to: Provide storage and maintenance for the Tomahawk Land Attack Missile, Nuclear (TLAM-N) at the Strategic Weapons Facilities; Perform processing and provide technical services in support of the SSGN Attack Weapon System (AWS) at SWFLANT; Provide TRIDENT SWS Missile Training; Develop technology applicable to global strike objectives that integrates with existing TRIDENT missile and/or the platform, and the missile processing and TRIDENT operations infrastructure; Provide Options for Flight Test Data Acquisition and Analysis for the Air Force and the Missile Defense Agency. Work will be performed in California (42 percent); Georgia (11 percent); Utah (16 percent); Florida (9 percent); Washington (8 percent); Virginia (3 percent); Tennessee (2 percent); New Jersey (1 percent); Massachusetts
(1 percent); Illinois (1 percent); Maryland (1 percent); other (5 percent), and work is expected to be completed September 2012. Contract funds in the amount of $285,470,128 will expire at the end of the current fiscal year. The Navy's Strategic Systems Programs, Arlington, Va., is the contracting activity.

PRICE FIXING DRIVES FOOD COSTS THRU THE ROOF

BLAMING BIOFUELS A SCAM

By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER

The food industry has been loading DC with payoff dollars.  Price fixing in the food sector, retail, wholesale and packaged foods, while farms get almost nothing, has brought near starvation to millions of Americans.  Neither the "radio robots" and their daily instructions from the Kremlin in DC nor the Democratic Congress seems to notice.  The money is spread into that many pockets.

A year ago, thieves and speculators drove the price of oil, corn, wheat, edibile oils, soybeans, rice and other key products thru the roof.  As the markets collapsed, oil came down but gas stayed up.  Oil companies raked in billions and America's banks emptied.  Now the $20 dollar per bushel wheat that drove flour prices from .69 to 2.69 for 5 pounds is back where it was before.  Flour is still 2.69 and profits are thru the roof for food companies and retail stores, all involved in a huge price fixing scam that is killing middle class Americans.

Record profits from selling bread, cheese, eggs, milk, meat, produce, canned goods, pet food, soap and everything else at the prices that should be shocking you when you go to the store aren't noticed in DC.  Neither our current president or his father had ever shopped for food in their lives.  No, I'm not kidding.  George and his boy "W" had never seen food unless it was carried to them on a plate.  However, the problem isn't just them.  People who should know better from both parties are taking the money and looking the other way.

Who do they blame?  The thieves claim "biofuels" are the problem, the biodiesel and ethanol that doesn't exist, that nobody can buy and no vehicle can burn,  produced in plants that don't exist, made from "biomass" that should have little or no effect on food prices.  Scam, nothing but scam.

PENTAGON TARGETS AFRICAN-AMERICAN AND HISPANIC KIDS TO FIGHT ITS WARS

By Sherwood Ross

If African-Americans are overrepresented in the armed forces it is likely because of the military’s practice of “strategically targeting low-income youth and students of color,” the ACLU has found.

Result: While African-Americans make up only 16% of the same-age civilian population, in 2006 they represented about 22% of enlisted Army personnel.

Even though enlistment under law is supposed to be voluntary, the Pentagon’s racial targeting “in combination with exaggerated promises of financial rewards for enlistment, undermines the voluntariness of their enlistment,” ACLU said in a 46-page report, “Soldiers of Misfortune.”

Can it be accidental that 54% of the participants in JROTC programs are African-American and Latino students?   In the Los Angeles Unified School District, the 30 JROTC programs enrolling 4,754 students “are located in the most economically depressed communities in the city,” according to the Coalition Against Militarism in Our Schools.

Nationally, JROTC programs are offered in 18% of high schools. They have enrolled  273,000 “cadets,” of whom 45% typically enlist. According to the National Priorities Project, of the top 50 high schools ranked by the number of Black recruits, 94% have a JROTC program; similarly, for the top 50 high schools ranked by number of Hispanic recruits, 86% have JROTC.

“NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND”

“TROJAN HORSE” FOR PENTAGON RECRUITERS

By Sherwood Ross

The Pentagon has used the No Child Left Behind Act as a Trojan Horse to propagandize vulnerable teenage students, invade their privacy, harass them, and get them to enlist.  Passage of the NCLB in 2001 has given Pentagon recruiters “unprecedented access to public high schools and to students’ personal information” and has “changed the landscape of military recruitment in public high schools across the U.S.,” the American Civil Liberties Union(ACLU) charges.

Section 9528 of NCLB not only permits recruiters to obtain students’ personal information without prior parental consent but guarantees them access to public high schools without parental consent, ACLU says.

As such, NCLB violates Article 3 of the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, a treaty ratified by the Senate.  “Recruiters use the lists of students’ names and contact information provided pursuant to the NCLB to cold-call students for hours each day,” ACLU has found, adding the military is targeting “poor students and students of color.”  School districts that want to get Federal funds under Section 9528 of NCLB must provide recruiters with student information such as names, addresses, and phone numbers.

U.S. SUFFERING “MORAL MELTDOWN” DESPITE PROTESTS IT ACTS JUSTLY

By Sherwood Ross

Despite false protestations that it goes to war only for a just cause, the United States has been acting immorally for some time and “is in the throes of a moral meltdown,” a prominent legal authority writes in a 2008 book of essays.

“What should one call it but immoral when a country tortures people; when it kidnaps them off the street…when it causes the deaths of tens of thousands of persons by artillery, bombings, (and) missiles…for a cause nearly all think a great mistake and one caused by lies…?” asked Lawrence Velvel, dean of the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover.

“What should one call it but immoral---and even worse than the Germans under the Nazis---when American citizens, unlike the Germans of the 1930s and 1940s, could speak against the criminals, and vote to throw them out, without fear of being hung from lamp posts or meat hooks, yet instead speak in favor of the criminals and vote to keep them in office?” Velvel wrote.

SHALL WE HIRE A MONUMENT ENGRAVER TO GO TO ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY AND ADD THE MISSING  WORDS ? 

A MESSAGE FROM AN APPALLED  OBSERVER

by Ron the Appalled Observer

Today I went to visit the new World War II Memorial in Washington, DC.  I got an unexpected history lesson. Because I'm a baby boomer,I was one of the youngest in the crowd.  Most were the age of my parents, Veterans of 'the greatest war,' with their families.  It was a beautiful day, and people were smiling and happy to be there.  Hundreds of us milled around the memorial, reading the inspiring words of Eisenhower and Truman that are engraved there.

On the Pacific side of the memorial, a group of us gathered to read the words President Roosevelt used to announce the attack on Pearl Harbor: Yesterday, December 7, 1941-- a date which will live in infamy--the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked.

One elderly woman read the words aloud 'With confidence in our armed forces, with the abounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph.' But as she read, she suddenly turned angry. 'Wait a minute,' she said, 'they left out the end of the quote.  They left out the most important part. Roosevelt ended the message with 'so help us God.' 

NAZI BUNKERS

Just In! See the 5 photographs

Three Nazi bunkers on a beach have been uncovered by violent storms off the Danish coast, providing a store of material for history buffs and military archaeologists.  The bunkers were found in practically the same condition as they were on the day the last Nazi soldiers left them, down to the tobacco in one trooper's pipe and a half-finished bottle of schnapps.

This bunker was entombed under the sand dunes until a violent storm swept away the sands three months ago.

The bunkers had not been touched since the war.
 
The bunkers were three of 7,000 built by the Germans as part of Hitler's 'Atlantic Wall' from Norway to the south of France .  But while the vast majority were almost immediately looted or destroyed, these three were entombed under the sand dunes of a remote beach near the town of Houvig since 1945.  They were uncovered only because recent storms sent giant waves cascading over them, sweeping away the sand and exposing glimpses of the cement and iron structures.

" The Tribute Lady " 

My name is Susan D. Wiseman, " I'm just one mom, of one soldier, from one family who's lost a loved one to war (My cousin SP4 Guy Lamar Mears, Jr. KIA - Vietnam)... just doing what I can to show my support for our son, SPC David Dale, who returned wounded from IRAQ in May 'o7, and, to all our troops and, this GREAT NATION!" ... through sharing "My Gift of Song".