Our Lefty Military Kristof

[elleng]

As we search for paths out of America’s economic crisis, many suggest business as a paradigm for cutting costs. According to my back-of-the-envelope math, top C.E.O.’s earn as much as $1 a second around the clock, partly by cutting medical benefits for employees. So they must be paragons of efficiency, right?

Actually, I’m not so sure. The business sector is dazzlingly productive, but it also periodically blows up our financial system. Yet if we seek another model, one that emphasizes universal health care and educational opportunity, one that seeks to curb income inequality, we don’t have to turn to Sweden. Rather, look to the United States military.

You see, when our armed forces are not firing missiles, they live by an astonishingly liberal ethos — and it works.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/16/opinion/16kristof.html?_r=1

[RaleighNCDUer]

1. There's a lot of truth in this. I was raised as a brat on military bases in Europe,

and while I am now opposed to the innate colonialism of our overseas network of bases I must say I benefitted greatly from that life. My Dad was a civilian teacher at dependent schools, and from the time I was 7 until I graduated HS, I never attended a segregated school, I never saw my folks worry about medical bills, and while there were distinct class distinctions - the GI kids, the officers' kids, the civvies, and the diplomat kids - we all went to the same schools and rode the same busses, and lived in the same housing areas. The officers' kids had more money than most of us, but it made little difference because nobody could flaunt their wealth by showing off their cars - no kids were allowed licenses until 18, at which time they usually left for college. And that's another thing - an NCO's kid was just as likely as a General's kid to go to college.

I had early training in basic equality.

I literally went into culture shock when I graduated and moved back to the states - and found out that the local HS in the small town where I went to college had only been desegregated for five years. Most of my college classmates, in central Missouri, had attended segregated schools.

Before that, I thought I knew what America was all about. I didn't know anything.

But I still maintain, today's military is NOTHING like the military I grew up with or the military I served in.