Just over one hundred years ago Eugene Debs gave his Canton, Ohio Speech (06/16/1918) where he said, "The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose—especially their lives."
This was true when he said it and it's still true to this day!
This can be confirmed in more ways than one, the media pundits and politicians controlling the propaganda we use to make our decisions are all much wealthier on average than the majority of the public while veterans, on average, come from lower income areas than the majority of the public.
The people making decisions to ship manufacturing jobs overseas, all come from upper classes; upper classes also make the decisions controlling higher education, including decisions that drive the cost through the roof, and ensure that the vast majority of the public can't afford it. This enables them to rig the economy so a large percentage of the public has little or no economic opportunity enabling recruiters to sign up lower income people.
About 60% of veterans are from areas with below the median household income and a sampling I did of 1% of the American veterans who have died in Afghanistan and Iraq as of 05/22/2015 which shows that they came from communities had just over 10% less than the median household income nationally.
When I checked the number of deaths from the wealthiest forty three communities according to a couple lists found on the internet I found that they only had four veterans that died in Iraq or Afghanistan from 2002 to 2015; compared to about ten for the average community in the United States, based on the population of those communities. The vast majority of people making decisions about wars come from the wealthier cities, whether it was the same forty-three that I checked or not.
This includes many of the highest profile candidates running for office including both Dick Cheney and Joe Biden got 5 draft deferments during Nam each, and they were both leading cheer leaders of the Iraq war and many other military actions. Both Biden's sons got fast tracked into the military for officer commissions, or at least they were supposed to, but, Hunter was discharged because he tested positive for cocaine and this information was kept confidential for a while before it was leaked; and they were never in any danger of combat deaths; although Biden claimed that Beau's cancer was related to burn pits but like many of his other claims this appears to have been discredited.
Yet these are the people calling the shots, and the best reporting is virtually absent from mainstream media which rarely questions the military, and when they do it's generally after it's too late, and they can't hide the fraud that's going on so they report it to save what little credibility they have, at least with people that don't do much other their own research.
The best reporting on this subject is often from much lower profile sources including the following article:
The Military Targets Youth for Recruitment, Especially at Poor Schools 01/22/2019
“As students were coming out of classrooms, [recruiters] would be by the door waiting for them."
Since its inception, the United States military has recruited teenagers to enlist.
During the Revolutionary War, when the military was formally established, young men were encouraged to fight for their country voluntarily. During the Civil War, conscription — essentially mandatory military enrollment for men of a certain age — was implemented, initially targeting men age 21 to 30. The draft was later expanded to include men as young as 18, according to Encyclopedia Britannica, and continued over centuries as a way to maintain a base of military servicepeople. In a statement to Teen Vogue, Lisa M. Ferguson, media relations chief for the U.S. Army Recruiting Command, said, “The Army seeks qualified individuals 17 [to] 34 years old.”
Since the draft ended in 1973, the military has relied on an all-volunteer service and has targeted young people, using strategies that include placing recruiters in schools. This is allowed because the No Child Left Behind Act, signed by President George W. Bush in 2002, requires military recruiters be granted the same access in schools as college recruiters.
The military markets to teenagers, particularly those in poorer school districts, because the armed services need a large population, and the sooner young people join, the more likely they are to stay and build a career. (According to the government, “184,000 personnel must be recruited into the Armed Forces each year to replace those who complete their commitment or retire.”) Modern-day recruiters sell the idea of an experience that often resonates more with poorer students because, for many, service with an honorable discharge can mean a free ride to college, or potentially a path to citizenship. (Only the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Dept. can grant citizenship, but the military can only accelerate the process. If a person doesn't qualify for citizenship, they would still have to complete their service years in the military.)
The majority of today’s teenagers, however, aren’t interested in joining the military: According to a 2017 poll conducted by the Department of Defense, only 14% of respondents age 16 to 24 said it was likely they’d serve in the military in the next few years. ..............
For kids who join the military, there's often a signing bonus: an enlistee can accrue up to $6,000 through the Army's Future Soldiers program, Connell says. “You don’t collect it, luckily, until you go to boot camp, but it’s that kind of incentive that, for someone who is low income, makes [the military] look like a path out of poverty.”
The term “poverty draft” came about in the early 1980s to describe “the belief that the enlisted ranks of the military were made up of young people with limited economic opportunities,” Sojourners reports. Rocio Cordova, program coordinator for the Project on Youth and Non-military Opportunities, describes this phenomenon as a “draft-like system that pushes nonprivileged people into enlisting because they lack access to jobs, income, and educational alternatives in their communities.”
This persists today, with many of those interested in the military saying they are motivated by the chance to attend college. A 2017 Department of Defense poll of young people shows 49% of survey respondents indicated that if they were to join the military, one reason for doing so would be to pay for future education. .......
Many currently serving in the military will eventually have the opportunity to receive financial benefits for college after their service, as many do not graduate college prior to enlisting. A 2017 military demographics report indicates that nearly 66.4% of the total force has earned a high school diploma, GED, or some college as their highest form of education. Although the Department of Defense doesn’t collect information about recruits’ household or family income, it does measure “neighborhood affluence” to determine “how well-off recruits’ neighborhoods were,” which is the closest measure, aside from education level, available on recruits’ class data, according to the fiscal year 2017 Population Representation in the Military Services report. The report indicates that nearly 20% of military members come from neighborhoods with median household incomes of $40,115 or less. (In 2017, the median U.S. household income was $60,336, reports the United States Census Bureau.) Complete article
“As students were coming out of classrooms, [recruiters] would be by the door waiting for them."
Since its inception, the United States military has recruited teenagers to enlist.
During the Revolutionary War, when the military was formally established, young men were encouraged to fight for their country voluntarily. During the Civil War, conscription — essentially mandatory military enrollment for men of a certain age — was implemented, initially targeting men age 21 to 30. The draft was later expanded to include men as young as 18, according to Encyclopedia Britannica, and continued over centuries as a way to maintain a base of military servicepeople. In a statement to Teen Vogue, Lisa M. Ferguson, media relations chief for the U.S. Army Recruiting Command, said, “The Army seeks qualified individuals 17 [to] 34 years old.”
Since the draft ended in 1973, the military has relied on an all-volunteer service and has targeted young people, using strategies that include placing recruiters in schools. This is allowed because the No Child Left Behind Act, signed by President George W. Bush in 2002, requires military recruiters be granted the same access in schools as college recruiters.
The military markets to teenagers, particularly those in poorer school districts, because the armed services need a large population, and the sooner young people join, the more likely they are to stay and build a career. (According to the government, “184,000 personnel must be recruited into the Armed Forces each year to replace those who complete their commitment or retire.”) Modern-day recruiters sell the idea of an experience that often resonates more with poorer students because, for many, service with an honorable discharge can mean a free ride to college, or potentially a path to citizenship. (Only the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Dept. can grant citizenship, but the military can only accelerate the process. If a person doesn't qualify for citizenship, they would still have to complete their service years in the military.)
The majority of today’s teenagers, however, aren’t interested in joining the military: According to a 2017 poll conducted by the Department of Defense, only 14% of respondents age 16 to 24 said it was likely they’d serve in the military in the next few years. ..............
For kids who join the military, there's often a signing bonus: an enlistee can accrue up to $6,000 through the Army's Future Soldiers program, Connell says. “You don’t collect it, luckily, until you go to boot camp, but it’s that kind of incentive that, for someone who is low income, makes [the military] look like a path out of poverty.”
The term “poverty draft” came about in the early 1980s to describe “the belief that the enlisted ranks of the military were made up of young people with limited economic opportunities,” Sojourners reports. Rocio Cordova, program coordinator for the Project on Youth and Non-military Opportunities, describes this phenomenon as a “draft-like system that pushes nonprivileged people into enlisting because they lack access to jobs, income, and educational alternatives in their communities.”
This persists today, with many of those interested in the military saying they are motivated by the chance to attend college. A 2017 Department of Defense poll of young people shows 49% of survey respondents indicated that if they were to join the military, one reason for doing so would be to pay for future education. .......
Many currently serving in the military will eventually have the opportunity to receive financial benefits for college after their service, as many do not graduate college prior to enlisting. A 2017 military demographics report indicates that nearly 66.4% of the total force has earned a high school diploma, GED, or some college as their highest form of education. Although the Department of Defense doesn’t collect information about recruits’ household or family income, it does measure “neighborhood affluence” to determine “how well-off recruits’ neighborhoods were,” which is the closest measure, aside from education level, available on recruits’ class data, according to the fiscal year 2017 Population Representation in the Military Services report. The report indicates that nearly 20% of military members come from neighborhoods with median household incomes of $40,115 or less. (In 2017, the median U.S. household income was $60,336, reports the United States Census Bureau.) Complete article
The chart for this report doesn't break it down evenly based on whether it's below or above the median U.S. household income, however it clearly appears as if about 60% of recruits appear to come from communities with below average median U.S. household income. The report they cite for income brackets claims that both the lowest income bracket they measure and the highest are under represented; which is true, however the lower one is only slightly underrepresented while higher one is further underrepresented even though it goes much higher, starting at $84,195 going up to anything higher than that. Furthermore, the middle bracket they use is mostly below the median household income, only going about $2,000 above the median income while going about $10,000 below it. Of the one percent from veterans who have died in Afghanistan and Iraq that I sampled, which came to seventy veterans only two of them came from households with a median U.S. household income over $100,000 one just barely above this and the other just barely above $110,000. I also checked the wealthiest communities which had four dead from the entire list of dead, none of which were in that one percent sampling. Additional details on that are below.
The following is another one of the few good articles on the subject from alternative media, ignored by traditional media, of course:
The Military Views Poor Kids as Fodder for Its Forever Wars 01/07/2020
As the United States staggers toward war, it will try to draw troops from the same poor, rural neighborhoods it always has. By Nick Martin
In my high school in rural North Carolina, a plastic table was set up just off to the side of the atrium where we all congregated after lunch every day. Behind that pamphlet-strewn table was a man in the recognizable khaki of a Marine’s service uniform. With a smile that never left his face, he’d reach out a hand and ask about your day. He’d inquire about your classes, whether you played sports, who you rooted for. Then, after maybe two or three minutes of small talk, he’d make his pitch.
It was always the same: fast-tracked citizenship; relief from the financial pressure of attending college; real employment prospects in a recession-era economy that had left many of my classmates’ parents without jobs. He was the flesh-and-blood version of the television propaganda we had already seen a million times over by then. But his pitch, run against a limited set of options, sounded like a good deal. It was supposed to.
That recruiter’s presence at my school was the result of a particularly insidious piece of the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act, signed by George W. Bush, which required that all public schools grant military recruiters “the same access to secondary school students as is provided generally to post secondary educational institutions or to prospective employers.” That table was his equal access.
While the law handed the military a clean reach into American high schools, its recruitment efforts remained selective. Enlistment data paints a complicated portrait of the economic makeup of the military, but what we know about recruitment is more straightforward: The Pentagon views low-income kids as easy targets for its forever wars.
In 2015, a pair of Education Week reporters making use of the Freedom of Information Act reviewed the Army’s presence in Connecticut high schools and found major discrepancies in how the branch targeted middle-class and poor kids. Throughout the entire 2011–2012 school year, Army recruiters visited a higher-income high school—in which only 5 percent of students qualified for free or reduced lunch—just four times. By contrast, at another high school, where nearly half of the students qualified, Army recruiters stopped by more than 40 times before the spring semester’s final bell. .......
These programs have a very specific target audience. In 2017, the RAND Corporation reviewed JROTC programs across the country and found that “at public high schools with JROTC programs, 56.6 percent of students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, on average”—nearly 10 percentage points higher than at schools without JROTC. Likewise, the study found that the military program tends to be present at schools with higher minority populations: At schools with JROTC, black students make up 29.4 percent of the school, compared to just 12.1 percent at non-JROTC schools. (Geography is also part of the story here: Between 40 and 65 percent of JROTC programs are clustered in the Southeast, according to the RAND report.) Complete article
As the United States staggers toward war, it will try to draw troops from the same poor, rural neighborhoods it always has. By Nick Martin
In my high school in rural North Carolina, a plastic table was set up just off to the side of the atrium where we all congregated after lunch every day. Behind that pamphlet-strewn table was a man in the recognizable khaki of a Marine’s service uniform. With a smile that never left his face, he’d reach out a hand and ask about your day. He’d inquire about your classes, whether you played sports, who you rooted for. Then, after maybe two or three minutes of small talk, he’d make his pitch.
It was always the same: fast-tracked citizenship; relief from the financial pressure of attending college; real employment prospects in a recession-era economy that had left many of my classmates’ parents without jobs. He was the flesh-and-blood version of the television propaganda we had already seen a million times over by then. But his pitch, run against a limited set of options, sounded like a good deal. It was supposed to.
That recruiter’s presence at my school was the result of a particularly insidious piece of the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act, signed by George W. Bush, which required that all public schools grant military recruiters “the same access to secondary school students as is provided generally to post secondary educational institutions or to prospective employers.” That table was his equal access.
While the law handed the military a clean reach into American high schools, its recruitment efforts remained selective. Enlistment data paints a complicated portrait of the economic makeup of the military, but what we know about recruitment is more straightforward: The Pentagon views low-income kids as easy targets for its forever wars.
In 2015, a pair of Education Week reporters making use of the Freedom of Information Act reviewed the Army’s presence in Connecticut high schools and found major discrepancies in how the branch targeted middle-class and poor kids. Throughout the entire 2011–2012 school year, Army recruiters visited a higher-income high school—in which only 5 percent of students qualified for free or reduced lunch—just four times. By contrast, at another high school, where nearly half of the students qualified, Army recruiters stopped by more than 40 times before the spring semester’s final bell. .......
These programs have a very specific target audience. In 2017, the RAND Corporation reviewed JROTC programs across the country and found that “at public high schools with JROTC programs, 56.6 percent of students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, on average”—nearly 10 percentage points higher than at schools without JROTC. Likewise, the study found that the military program tends to be present at schools with higher minority populations: At schools with JROTC, black students make up 29.4 percent of the school, compared to just 12.1 percent at non-JROTC schools. (Geography is also part of the story here: Between 40 and 65 percent of JROTC programs are clustered in the Southeast, according to the RAND report.) Complete article
The highest recruitment rates are actually in Alaska and the North West, mostly in very rural areas where there are few if any jobs available, however, since they have so few people, the biggest volume of recruits come from the South East, as Nick Martin says.
Another one of the rare articles reporting on recruiting poorer people came from Jonathan Zimmerman who wrote Who fights our wars? Other people’s children 09/20/2017 reviewing how recruiting tactics changed during or after the Vietnam War. He points out that Robert McNamara who oversaw the Vietnam War avoided service by going to college and that Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump all avoided serving through their connections, Trump also got five deferments from the draft like Biden and Cheney. Barack Obama was too young to serve in Vietnam; but there are hundreds if not thousands more politicians that used their connections to avoid serving whether it was in Vietnam or other wars. This is standard operating procedure and it got worse after World War II. John McCain is one of the few politicians that served in Vietnam but the number of politicians serving dropped even more after that, until the Iraq and Afghanistan wars when they started recruiting veterans to run for office, but not just any veterans; the political establishment only recruited veterans to run for office who were willing to support future military actions.
But some of the best reporting on how the political establishment starts all the wars but the working class fights them all goes much further back to times where most people have forgotten, thanks to a virtual black out from traditional media and the education system teaching about anti-war activists like Eugene Debs and his speech from Canton Ohio is still among the best:
Canton, Ohio Speech 06/16/1918
Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. In the Middle Ages when the feudal lords who inhabited the castles whose towers may still be seen along the Rhine concluded to enlarge their domains, to increase their power, their prestige and their wealth they declared war upon one another. But they themselves did not go to war any more than the modern feudal lords, the barons of Wall Street go to war. The feudal barons of the Middle Ages, the economic predecessors of the capitalists of our day, declared all wars. And their miserable serfs fought all the battles. The poor, ignorant serfs had been taught to revere their masters; to believe that when their masters declared war upon one another, it was their patriotic duty to fall upon one another and to cut one another’s throats for the profit and glory of the lords and barons who held them in contempt. And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose—especially their lives.
They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people.
And here let me emphasize the fact—and it cannot be repeated too often—that the working class who fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish the corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace.
That is their motto and we object on the part of the awakening workers of this nation.
If war is right let it be declared by the people. You who have your lives to lose, you certainly above all others have the right to decide the momentous issue of war or peace. Complete article
Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. In the Middle Ages when the feudal lords who inhabited the castles whose towers may still be seen along the Rhine concluded to enlarge their domains, to increase their power, their prestige and their wealth they declared war upon one another. But they themselves did not go to war any more than the modern feudal lords, the barons of Wall Street go to war. The feudal barons of the Middle Ages, the economic predecessors of the capitalists of our day, declared all wars. And their miserable serfs fought all the battles. The poor, ignorant serfs had been taught to revere their masters; to believe that when their masters declared war upon one another, it was their patriotic duty to fall upon one another and to cut one another’s throats for the profit and glory of the lords and barons who held them in contempt. And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose—especially their lives.
They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people.
And here let me emphasize the fact—and it cannot be repeated too often—that the working class who fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish the corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace.
Yours not to reason why;
Yours but to do and die.
That is their motto and we object on the part of the awakening workers of this nation.
If war is right let it be declared by the people. You who have your lives to lose, you certainly above all others have the right to decide the momentous issue of war or peace. Complete article
Debs also addressed the lies they were told about Russia at that time, which was before he could have known about how tyrannical Vladimir Lenin, and later Stalin would turn out to be. If the United States hadn't opposed the revolution so much from the beginning, supporting the Czar, they might have enabled Vladimir Kerensky to stay in power instead of allowing Lenin to take over in the first place; however, they were too busy fighting the war. But if they hasn't been supporting one empire or another, they could have stayed out of the war, since contrary to claims by Woodrow Wilson neither side was defending Democracy; and after the war was over Woodrow Wilson seemed to have lost interest in the rhetoric to stand up for Democratic principles that he used to motivate his recruits.
He even remained silent, at best, about several domestic efforts to improve democracy at home and supported the Espionage Act which actually suppressed democracy, while he was claiming to fight a war to defend it. This was followed by purges and riots after the war carried out by the American Protection League and other vigilante organizations as well as the Palmer Raids, which are hardly taught at all in school, and only those that take the initiative to look it up themselves later learn about this along with an enormous amount of additional history the government and education system don't remind us of.
People who do check with more reliable alternative media or history sources are routinely referred to as radicals and often demonized with emotional appeals. If we do a good job checking our facts they can't debunk us using other methods, since our facts will check out far more than theirs.
The following are some additional related articles:
Children Living In Low-Income Neighborhoods Less Likely To Graduate High School: Study 10/04/2011
U.S. Wars Abroad Increase Inequality at Home 10/05/2018
Rich Man’s War, Poor Man’s Fight? 2013
Eugene V.Debs Canton, Ohio Speech 06/16/1918
For the sample of one percent of veterans killed in Iraq I used the first seventy names in this list The names of the 6,828 American veterans who have died in Afghanistan and Iraq 05/25/2019
These seventy are listed hear along with some statistics on crime rates as well. Deceased Veterans by Median Income 70: 3,861,542 70 avg: $55,164.88571 The vast majority of recruits come from rural areas, which also have much lower rates of violent crime, so it's to be expected that they come from less violence areas which most of them do. However, fifteen of the seventy that come from cities with above average crime and murder rates are often much higher than average, while many of those below are only moderately below, with the exception of some towns that are mostly very small that have few if any murders. The difference in crime rates between rural areas and cities is a different subject; however, if we can spend billions of dollars fighting wars based on lies we can spend the money we need on education and other social programs that will greatly reduce violence in these abandoned inner cites, also ignored by the media.
Income and Poverty in the United States: 2017 Median household income was $61,372 in 2017
While checking other statistics the highest median U.S. household income bracket that I found was Weston Massachusetts with a median U.S. household income over $200,000. There are practically no veterans from wealthy neighborhoods with a median U.S. household income above $120,000 at risk of dying in wars, yet the people in this income bracket are the ones that make the vast majority of decisions about war, including creating the propaganda to deceive the public into fighting them in the first place. I checked the page for anyone from Weston or These are the top 10 richest places in the US 03/19/2018 and What are the richest towns in America? Here's the top 34 to find forty three of the wealthiest communities in the country to use for this sampling. the four communities that lost one veterans a piece to the Iraq War were Los Altos Hills, California; Chevy Chase, Maryland; Fairfax Station, Virginia; and Lake Forest, Illinois. For some reason these two lists of the top 10 or 34 richest places in the country only have two cities in common and neither of them included Weston, which should have made the top 34, so there's no guarantee that they really are the richest; but the population and death of veterans or lack of them came from sources that appear to be more reliable, so the statistics should be credible, since they're based on population, not whether or not they rank in the top 43. These are the cities and their populations used for this sample:
Atherton, California 6,914
Cherry Hills Village, Colorado 6,644
Scarsdale, New York 18,079
Short Hills, New Jersey 12,771
Hillsborough, California 11,486
Old Greenwich, Connecticut 6,860
Bronxville, New York 6,547
Highland Park, Texas 9,208
Los Altos Hills, California 8,580
Great Falls, Virginia 15,427
Travilah, Maryland 7,442
Wolf Trap, Virginia 16,131
Winnetka, Illinois 12,480
Belvedere, California 2,126
Greenville (Westchester County), New York 7,116
University Park, Texas 25,201
Darien, Connecticut 21,887
Clyde Hill, Washington 3,318
East Hills, New York 7,238
Floris, Virginia 8,375
Upper Montclair, New Jersey 39,227
Belmont, Virginia 6,563
Bellaire, Texas 18,797
Flower Hill, New York 4,869
Highlands-Baywood Park, California 4,027
Fort Hunt, Virginia 16,045
Dranesville, Virginia 11,921
Coto de Caza, California 14,799
Fulshear, Texas 10,044
Brambleton, Virginia 2010 9,845 / 2017 19,876 (This city doubled it's population in a short time; for the sake of comparison I used the lower 2010 figure, which was closer to the time of most fighting, especially since the sampling I took only goes up to 2015.)
Chevy Chase, Maryland 9,381
Broadlands, Virginia 13,872
Dellwood, Minnesota 1,100
Hinsdale, Illinois 17,705
Fairfax Station, Virginia 12,030
Franklin Farm, Virginia 19,288
Lake Forest, Illinois 19,375
North Barrington, Illinois 2,997
Woodbury, New York 8,907
Clarkson Valley, Missouri 2,613
Town and Country, Missouri 11,115
Deer Park, Illinois 3,658
Weston Massachusetts 11,261
Total: 483,269
Austin 12 total 1 for every 65,865.83333
USA 1 for every 47,920
1 for every 120,817 Difference 2.52/0.397
Dallas: 42 Austin: 12
When you tally up the 25 richest cities in America, California has eight 05/19/2019
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