dawnka dubah

The Battle of Blair Mountain took place in August and September of 1921. Just a few months prior to that, on May 31 and June 1, planes were also used to help destroy the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma, a prosperous black neighborhood nicknamed The Black Wall Street. At least 39 people died during the event, which is known as the Tulsa Race Massacre. Hundreds were wounded, and 6,000 black people lost their homes. 

Both of these events were hugely important moments in American history. 

The regional implementation of tuition-free college (as instituted in Tennessee), increasing momentum behind “Medicare-for-all,” and increasing civilian wages would dramatically affect the middle class, and therefore the pool of military recruits. The Pentagon got a head start over the last decade recruiting and retaining a high-caliber team despite nearly full employment. That advantage won’t last forever.

Okay look I don’t want to copy and paste more because the formatting from PDF is garbage but there’s a whole fucking section of this article that talks about how significantly welfare reform fucked over single black mothers and how that made the military a more appealing option for them and I think describing the US military as “an antipoverty and equal opportunity program for women from disadvantaged backgrounds” is fucking ghoulish when it’s in the context of “you can now be denied welfare if your child is more than three months old and you aren’t working.” Actually you know what, fuck the formatting:

A  relatively  unrecognized  factor  is  the  highly  controversial Personal  Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PWORA).In 1996 this law eliminated Aid to Families  with  Dependent  Children(AFDC)—an  entitlement  for  eligible  families—and replaced  it  with Temporary  Assistance  to  Needy  Families(TANF). Under  TANF,  states were allocated block-grant funding to oversee the program. Most recipients were limited to  five  years  of  assistance  over  a  lifetime  and  required  to  work “as  a  condition  of benefits.”Under the new program, mothers with children as young as three months could be denied cash aid if they did not work. States could deny aid to families and children for a variety of reasons.

More than 15 years after launching “America’s Army,” a first-person shooter game aimed at enlisting real world soldiers, the Army is calling for active duty troops and reservists to compete in video gaming tournaments, or esports, in one of its latest recruiting efforts.

The move follows the Army’s failure this year, for the first time in more than a decade, to meet the fiscal year target for bringing in new soldiers as it seeks to expand its ranks to more than 500,000 in the next four years.

The Army is also creating a “functional fitness” team to compete in CrossFit athletic events and is reportedly looking to spruce up recruiting efforts with more bonuses, more recruiters, better furniture and a new slogan to replace “Army Strong.”

For example, in Boston, one of the cities the Army will target, high tech jobs are in demand. Recruiters there will focus on pitching Army jobs in technology fields, such as cyberoperations, Townsend said. They will also try to capitalize on Boston’s connection to military history, such as its role in launching the Revolutionary War.

“We think we can actually be successful in Boston,” he said. “There’s a tradition of service and we need to tap into that.”

“Hey pencil-neck, the Bay Area is for losers - after you graduate from MIT if you sign on this dotted line we’ll let you kill brown people for oil.”

“The youth are not watching broadcast TV,” he said. “They are live-streaming on Hulu or Netflix. They are on social media … on Twitch, they’re on Twitter, they’re on Instagram. We need to be in those spaces, and we’re going to go to those spaces.”

Remember that there is a strong propaganda arm of the US military that invests a lot of effort into convincing young people to join - to the point of harassing them over the phone in some cases.

In addition to that remember that military pay rates are adjusted to stay juuuuuuust slightly better than minimum wage in order to seem like a “ticket out.”

Military recruiting is aided by the high cost of college, low availability of welfare programs, high barriers to immigration, and the carceral state.

I honestly *can’t* blame a lot of the young people who sign up because there are hundreds of people who are professionally responsible for making signing up for military service look like a safe, reasonable, noble, liberating thing to do.

What I *can* do is try to educate young people so here’s what you all should know:

Joining the military is not safe. Even if you join during “peacetime” (which you have likely never experienced; the US has been involved in the War in Afghanistan for 18 years) there is a chance you’ll be deployed to an active base. Your recruiter will tell you “you’ll probably have a desk job” or “you’ll probably never be deployed” or “with your high ASVAB scores you’ll be working behind the lines.” Your recruiter is lying to you.

Joining the military doesn’t give you a lot of opportunities to learn job skills. You are likely going to learn one specific job that will not be widely applicable outside of the military. You are also not likely to have any choice about what that job will be. Your recruiter will tell you that you will be able to choose your field and have an exciting job that you can either make a career out of in the armed forces or can convert into a high-paying civilian job once your enlistment is over. Your recruiter is lying to you.

Joining the military won’t grant you financial security. Your pay when you enlist is $1733 a month, which is the equivalent of working 40 hours a week for just under $11 an hour except that your employer can also tell you to move to a different state and leave your family behind. Your recruiter will bring up sign on bonuses, your recruiter may mention $40000 bonuses. That’s for signing up for six years of infantry. Forty thousand dollars is the cost of a nice truck; it is not an equal exchange for six years as cannon fodder. It is specifically to entice footsoldiers under 26 years old to join up because they don’t know enough to realize that money won’t last and won’t be worth it, and you will probably not qualify for the bonuses that it takes to get to 40k. Your recruiter is lying to you.

All of that is aside from the fact that by joining the military you’re agreeing to kill strangers you’ve never met who might have nothing to do with the conflict between your government and their government.

But look, you don’t have to listen to me.

Listen to these guys who used to be in the military: https://soundcloud.com/eyesleft

Military recruiting (please keep in mind this is from the Navy point of view) is not helped from high barriers to immigration. We pretty much got told to not waste any time on anyone who isn’t a citizen because the programs for gaining citizenship through military service were almost impossible to get to approve anyone.

The “one specific job that isn’t widely applicable to the outside world” is true, but only because congress has fucked us. If you get trained, for example, to drive transport trucks through hostile areas, you don’t also get a civilian certification to drive transport trucks on the freeway. I have thousands of logged hours doing maintenance on electrical gear and nuclear reactors, but I don’t have any certifications or licenses that would let me do the same or lesser work as a civilian. There was a push a while back to give us dual certifications to make it easier when we get back home, but it never gained enough traction to be of any use.

You get your job assignment at MEPS months before going to boot camp so you know what your job is going to be (exceptions for the apprenticeship programs, which are flaming dumpster fires that need to be avoided at all costs). The other branchs from what I was told also let you know at least what category of job you’re getting. Again, with a rare exception, the training you get doesn’t give you civilian certifications and you’ll have to retrain and do your work experience all over again after you get out.

You get told about any bonuses you qualify for and it’s written into your contract, so at MEPS there’s no way to lie about it, but some things can be inflated in order to get people to go to MEPS in the first place. On paper, the money will seem worth it, because not only are you getting like $11 an hour, but all of your food and housing is paid for as well. With nothing but a cell phone bill to worry about it can be a lot of money to save or send home. HOWEVER: you’re not working a 40 hour work week. I slept at work about three days a week and worked a solid 100 hours a week on average, and that was when I WASN’T deployed. Being deployed means you LIVE at work for 6-10 months.

The majority of people who I put into the Navy fell into 2 categories (in the Midwest, things might be different on the coasts but not by too much in these regards)

1. They wanted to be part of something bigger. They wanted to BELONG. They wanted their life to have meaning, and to make a difference. They wanted to do something important with their lives. Most of these people put little to no thought in the trees, they only saw the forest.

2. They wanted to get away. They wanted to start over. They wanted a chance to do something different. They were tired of the struggle and wanted help. These were the people most influenced by money and training and health care and being made to move around the country.

3. MERICA! I got very few of the die hard types. Most of the ones I did were completely and totally unqualified to join up, either morally (via police records) or mentally (so dumb they couldn’t get a 35/100 on a test based off of 10th grade math and English).

I hated being a recruiter. It was soul crushing and stupidly demoralizing. I spent just over two years doing it and it’s part of why I didn’t re-enlist. Lying wasn’t really something we did (it can and does happen, but not as often as you’d think because everything is online and everything can be fact checked so recruiters that did got put down hard for doing it) but the tactics and training we got to recruit pretty much made us use psychological tricks to make people like us (and the military) more while glossing over and deflecting anything morally bad.

Advertising did that!

Military recruitment ads have been making promises about the glamorous and profitable jobs you’ll be doing for years; pre-show recruitment bullshit is actually part of why i had to stop going to the movies. (I’m not going to link to any of the “look at all these cool jobs on flight decks or in control towers or in intelligence” ads but we’re all familiar with the genre, right?)

The lack of reciprocity between civilian and military certifications does suck, but that wasn’t specifically what I was talking about. Part of it is that your certifications won’t match up but a bigger part of that is that a lot of the people they’re feeding this dream to are infantry. They wouldn’t end up working on electronics anyway.

I know a guy who went in as a plumber with a DUI and hopes of coming out with a clean record and time with the Army Corps of Engineers so that he could maybe end up working in construction as a commercial plumber.

Ranger school sure as fuck didn’t help him with that and now he’s been in for ten years and could probably kill someone from an impressive distance but he’s basically never worked with PEX piping and is a decade behind where he would be if he’d stayed in the civilian population so he stays in because he doesn’t know what else he’d do.

Plumber to ranger to career.

High school student to Infantry to cop.

High school to infantry to self-employed, self-trained machinist.

High school to loadmaster to packing up boxes in a warehouse to loadmaster again because he got laid off and couldn’t find anything else.

Dog trainer to MP to dump truck driver.

High school to infantry to failing out of an English Lit program and working as a stocker at Target.

I don’t think anyone around my age who I know has been military has had job skills that have translated to the kind of work they want to do after the military.

I’m glad that they’re apparently not putting effort into using immigration as a recruitment tool, PLEASE give me more info on that if you can because I see “it’s a pathway to immigration” being used as a defense of the military all the time.

With the recruiter lying - look, I think this is actually a sunk cost thing. They can’t lie about your signing bonus once you’re standing there with the papers but they can lie about it to get you to go take the test, they can lie about what job options you have before you qualify.

When I tried to sign up it took something like eight visits back and forth to the recruitment office for “oh we forgot to give you this paper” or “oh, we actually need your social security card” and so on on top of a trip to MEPS and back to the recruiter’s office before I was told I didn’t qualify.

Every time I went back it was more talk about bonuses or benefits or some other thing that I (as a suicidally depressed teenager who didn’t know how else to get out of my parents house) thought sounded great. When I first walked in I was kind of resigned - “I guess this is what I’ve got to do if I want to get out” - but by the time I was told I wouldn’t make the cut I was devastated (and ready to defend the recruiter who DID specifically lie to me; I didn’t qualify because I have bad, uncontrolled asthma which my recruiter told me to leave off the forms and that it wouldn’t matter in the medical test. The only reason the process stopped there was because someone else in the office overheard him telling me to lie about it). If they had told me right then “well, we might have to strike the bonuses but we can probably get you in on a medical waiver” I might have done it. By then I wanted it. They structure it to make you want to join up.

When I finished my ASVAB and a dude with a shitload of ribbons on his uniform asked my score and looked impressed and said I could do anything I wanted. He asked what branch I was signing on with and when I said his branch he said “damn straight, glad to have you” and that feeling was like heroin. They liked me, they thought I’d do well, I was smart and they wanted me on their team. Everyone in the recruiter’s office was always glad to see me. They always listened. They made me feel like I really belonged there.

That’s lovebombing, my dudes, and it is a straight-up cult recruitment tactic.

——————

I get *why* people join up. I tried to join up for some of the same reasons (I’m a clear part of group 2 on your list).

But the leverage that gets applied - well, you know. You’re saying it.

hey so uhhh here’s an important update on what’s apparently happening at the border, especially with the use of the old japanese internment camps

all i can say is i’m sickened by this mess, by the atrocities committed against innocent people. and now there will be no surveillance. no one will be able to see what happens to these people. the UN, the media, and any other human rights organizations cannot get into these facilities, either, in order to stop what’s happening. by the way, coast guard members were apparently aiding in this process as well. so now it’s only a matter of time before it becomes a military movement.

no one gets in. no one gets out.

so when are we going to call this what it is? it’s fascism. it’s genocide. and if we don’t stop it now, it’s going to be disastrous.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-conditions-idUSKBN1K82X1