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While the armed forces carry out the mission of US imperialism, millions of working people sit at the heart of that machine, drawn to become soldiers by the promise of economic stability. A Left looking to rebuild links with the working class can’t avoid them.
Conservatives have long worked to dismantle the American welfare state. They’ve been so successful that some are even turning their sights on a formerly sacrosanct group: combat veterans returned from war.
Republicans and centrist Democrats love to pour money into more and more wars. But when it comes to providing public health care for the soldiers they put in harm’s way, they try to privatize and starve vets’ programs. We have to stop them.
British politicians increasingly seek to silence criticism of wars abroad by emphasizing the need to “respect our boys.” But, veteran Joe Glenton tells Jacobin, many recruits who’ve seen the British army from the inside aren’t happy about being used to launder its image.
Military veterans like the great labor leader Tony Mazzocchi have played a central role in US labor battles in the past. And if the union movement is to rebuild itself, working-class veterans will have to play an important role today too.
Congress desperately needs more representatives from working-class backgrounds, including those who are military veterans. Unfortunately, most veterans currently serving in Congress are foreign policy hawks who want to keep the war machine running.
Taking a page from the charter school lobby’s playbook, profiteers and ideologues are trying to dismantle America’s best health care system, the Department of Veterans Affairs.
It’s fashionable to say that black veterans got no real benefits from the GI Bill. In truth, for many, the GI Bill was a rare positive experience with government that contrasted sharply with the indignities of Jim Crow.
Amid the debt ceiling debate, House Republicans are pushing for cuts to the Veterans Administration, and corporate Democrats are continuing to support privatizing the agency’s socialized medicine. Both are an attack on working-class veterans.
Former Army Ranger Rory Fanning on why he and so many other veterans stand with Colin Kaepernick and against police murder.
How Rory Fanning went from Army Ranger to war resister.
The American Legion was created not as a space for former soldiers to meet and swap stories, but to bring together shock troops of the counter-revolution — an authoritarian mass movement of combat veterans.
We don’t need melodramatic hyperbole from New Leftists telling us to campaign for Joe Biden. We need to build a democratic-socialist movement that is the only real hope for the planet’s future.
Amazon is posing as a friend to veterans who need jobs when they return home from military service — while mistreating those veterans just as brutally as any other Amazon worker.
Joe Biden touted himself as friend of veterans while on the campaign trail. But now he’s overseeing the continued privatization of the VA and backing nominees that brag about being venture capitalists.
How a troubled army recruit from a privileged background became an angry advocate for veterans health care privatization.
Demilitarizing police is an urgent demand in this moment. But with the police force and army so entwined — both in terms of personnel and weaponry — demilitarization won’t be easy.
The American military has long been fertile ground for the far right. To weaken the radical right’s power, we need to dismantle the warfare state — and build in its place a humane welfare state that provides for all.
The GI Bill is proof: if people have access to education and the means to live, they’ll create meaningful art.
Bowe Bergdahl’s case shows how military veterans’ antiwar actions are depoliticized by chalking them up to mental illness.