Comments on: Discrimination Against Veterans

By: scc

scc — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 04:33:01 +0000

You want to know the truth, I’m a women veteran and I never seen so much anti veteran sentiment comming from a government that you served and protected maybe Senator or Rep Mich- Micheal Bachman is right we need to look who is working for the government and that is senator down to who we have n the Human resource offices. One thibg that is fact and even the Federal Times publshed artticle called snubbing, that veteran prefernce has too many loop holes in it. It is not worth the paper it is written on all these Federal agenices do is go aroubd the lae, they use words like “option” it should be no option it should be veteran first and what i mean is there is 41 speacial authorities, veterans are one those special authorites, the handicap and what i mean the handicap nit by service but by nature, there own families, they are equal to us. this is wrong. We should as vbeerans be priority one inhiring we served our country and we should be able to get a job quicker then someone that stay home, or dodge the draft then some one who lost a limb protecting America. Here is the ironey, when America decided to put a man in the highest, honerable office in the nation, a man and they did 2 already one draft dodged and one got daddy to hide him in others words we call it the rich mans draft dodge. When a nation put these men in this office is should of been a sign toall AMerica to its veteran to its mlitary, America has lost its morals and ethics and they don’t care about us, if they did and if they cared about the sacrfices many gave to protect this great country they would of never put a DRAFT DOGGER AS PRESIDENT. The nation might as well spit on all of us, such disrespect from a nation. Even know veteran have to fight for everything we get, thats why there is groups like the DAV, we pay for these groups to stay alive to fight for us, becuaseo our government won’t, our governmnet gives alot of LIP service. I’m a women veteran where they have lost my medical and military records and because of there incomptence. I have to pay. I have tried for years with a college degree to get a government job and all I seen is civilians hired over me and these are the no brainer gs5 gs6 jobs, that have a good pay. Women veterans are still disrespected the most and still have to go through more bs to get something. But, what I seen women veterans have to fight the most but veterans, all veterans, there is anti sentiment from our own Federal hiring agencies. It seems we have may anti veteran , and anti Americans doing hiring, that should not be in that job. The points and even haveing a husband who is 100 percent disables those points are worthless as the paper there written on, until our politicians demand investigations and audits and hearings and make laws that do not have zilions of loop holes then veteran will be treated like DIrt. When the DAV puts out an articw the VA only hired 30 percent veterans and 8 percent are disabled, there somethinbg wrong with the system. THERE NEEDS TO BE LAWS WHERE ENLISTED VETERANS WITH HR DEGREES HAVE TO BE IN EACH HIRING AGENCY. ther need to be laws thats all ferderal agencys must followw, like when you send out a denial letter the person you hired must be on that letter, that is public information. The Air Force puts the name, the VA and many others want you to do FOIA request,which is wrong. THERE NEEDS TO BE SOMEONE DOING AUDITS ON ALL AGENCIES TO SEE WHO, HOW THEY ARE HIRING TO INVESTIGATE WHY THEY BYPASSED VETERANS.
SEE NOW THEY ARE NOW DENYIGN MY COMPENSATION BECAUSE THEY LOST MY MEDICAL RECORDS AND I HAVE TO WAIT TO THE END OF THE WORLD NDO HEARING, WHEN MY DD214 WVWN SAYS THAT I WAS DENIED AND i’M OWED A PHYSICAL. NOPE, THEN WHEN I TRY TO GET A JOB FROM SAME FOLKS MORE DENIAL. What I learned stay home like the rest, why serve so you can go through the disrespect and the incomptence, and for one thing don’t get hurt. God bless us all and I hope our Government wakes up tommarrow with some ethics and morals.

By: jack simmons

jack simmons — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 02:46:48 +0000

I love our country, and served from 70 to 1990. There was no help when we got out. My wife and I and our son surived on small check and a newspaper job, 7 days a week. Got me a job at a school and wife went to work as a sub. She started to get sick and we went to the emergency room many times. She died about 8 months later with liver cancer. Her miltary doctor never got the sickness wright. When I went to talk to some one at the hospital, I was met with lots of excuses and no real answer. When I called the miltary lawers in the army times, they said it was too late.6 yrs later, with bad credit, son who put my new wife andI in serous debt, cant get a rrmortgage, I’m not meeting their criteria. Tell me what We can do.I amso discouraged. I feel as though the vetren’s affairs let me down. People wasn’t saying no when we transported war heads or guarded important places. I am 60% disabled and my parents are dead. The only family I have is my wife and kids.I now understand what the other vetrens told me. Its mind over matter vets don’t matter and the civilians don’t mind as long as they have lip service. 580 678 0153

By: C.V. Compton Shaw

C.V. Compton Shaw — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 01:11:23 +0000

Veterans of the War in Vietnam were taxed through both their duty in Vietnam itself and the very low wages that they were paid while in the armed services. Then, upon their return to the USA,they faced very aggressive and pervasive employment discrimination and discrimination in education which is still prevalent and pervasive. Apparently, other veterans of other wars are now experiencing the same. At the same time, those who have not served and/or who would not have to serve in the military, especially in the combat arms, women and others, receive preferential treatment, by law, in employment and education. One of the members of my infantry squad in Vietnam developed severe and disabling PTSD not from the severe combat that he experienced in Vietnam but from the insulting, demeaning, and discriminatory treatment that he received in the USA upon his return.
He died from the same about 15 years ago!
George Washington stated that the willingness of men to serve in our armed forces in a conflict will depend on how well veterans of previous wars are treated. Given the aforementioned severe injustices to veterans, that willingness to serve will not be forth coming.
Given that female fertility (number of births in the USA) is decreasing, the decline of marriage in the USA, the increase of illegitimate births, and the affects of feminism on our society, concomitant with the aforementioned, the military will have increasing difficulty finding the quantity and quality of men will and able to serve in our military.
We had a saying in Vietnam: “What goes around-comes around!”

By: Massimiliano Valentino

Massimiliano Valentino — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 17:08:14 +0000

I can’t understand this.

I’d be proud to have colleagues who served their country working with me, even more hiring them, no matter which war or peace-keeping mission.

By: Dennis Colvin

Dennis Colvin — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 19:39:18 +0000

I can’t say that I’ve actually been discriminated against in the work place, but as a Viet-Nam veteran I was subjected to verbal abuse on the job, when it became known to some that I fought in Viet-Nam. This has happened many times. The problem is, what people think about Viet-Nam vets, and that shows up in what they say to me: “Viet-Nam veterans are drug addicts, losers, and killers of innocent people in Viet-Nam.” Or, they say,” You were pretty dumb for going to Viet-Nam.” This keeps getting repeated, and said, for 40 years now, and I just turned 60. Granted, it’s not said as much now as it used to be, but I still hear it once in a while. It’s not going to go away.

By: Michael Primmer

Michael Primmer — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 17:48:24 +0000

I have been involved with helping veterans and their families for the past few years. In doing so I’ve been with homeless, PTSD, as well as financially straped Veterans. I believe that we as a nation can help, I have been working on putting together a plan, sort of a last resort, to help these veterans in need, as well as their families. When a son,daughter,wife, or husband come home “different’ than when they left we need to HELP. Not a Hand Out, but a Hand UP. We as a group of concerned Americans have formed a 501(c) (3) corporation to do just that. You can check us out at vetaidnational.org or contact me.

By: Dr. Charles W. Heckman

Dr. Charles W. Heckman — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 12:11:17 +0000

After serving two tours in Vietnam as an Air Force pilot, I returned to the United States, where I was awarded a master’s degree and airline transport pilot license. My graduate record examination scores had placed me int he upper 1% of graduate school applicants in biology. Because I saw further education and employment opportunities closed to me due to my service in Vietnam, I returned to Southeast Asia and flew in the Cambodian airlift during the final months of the war. In addition to veterans, including the MIAs, the U.S. government betrayed our Southeast Asian allies, and I saw a little of the misery created by American perfidy. My experiences were reported in my book, The Phnom Penh Airlift, published by McFarlane.
With the small amount of money I had saved, I was able to support myself through a doctoral program in Germany. I performed my doctoral research on rice field ecology in Thailand and earned my Doktor der Naturwissenschaften degree in 1979. My dissertation was published in English as a book. Only by working for foreign and international organizations was I able to continue my career. I worked for many years in Germany and Brazil and participated in a series of international programs. To date, I have authored a total of 8 books and 65 shorter publications in scientific journal and books. After being discriminated against every time I employed for anything the the United States, I began filing lawsuits. I then learned just how many similarities there are between the first five years of the Holocaust in Germany (1933 to 1938) and the treatment of veterans in the United States. The key to both was excluding the groups targetted for destruction from employment in the civil service and with universities. Subtle and direct defamation campaigns in the press were also essential parts of these deadly programs.
In 1998, I returned to my native country only because the United States Forest Service was forced to offer me a settlement agreement after two of its employees offered me $20,000 to withdraw from a federal civil service selection in Alaska. I was blocking the hiring list for a much less qualified non-veteran the agency intended to hire. During my first five months working for that agency in Olympia, Washington, I submitted double the number of manuscripts for publication as the agency average and completed two large reports and other projects requiring an average of 61 working hours per week, for which I received no overtime pay. I was then fired one day before the end of the probationary year, obviously because of my whistleblowing about the $20,000 bribe offer. Forest Service personnel let Washington State agencies know over the telephone that I should not be hired. In 2003, they did the same to prevent me from being hired by the Department of the Interior. Washington State alone spent more than $55,000 on legal costs to get some of its corrupt judges to keep my complaint from coming before a jury. In 2001, Washington had become the first state to declare veterans’ preference unconstitutional. Although the U.S. Department of Justice refuses to release its own legal costs for fighting several of my lawsuits, it is clear that the Federal Government and three states have spent more than a million dollars of legal and appeal costs just to keep me from ever working in my own country because I fought in Vietnam. I further learned from appeals against the Department of the Interior that the U.S. Geological Survey regularly hires supervisory scientists at the level of full professor for positions paying as much as $149,000 per year who have never even earned a master’s degree. Most of those it hires have authored no scientific publications whatsoever and have no other qualifications for the jobs other than working for many years at lower level civil service jobs without accomplishing anything. A deposition I submitted to the Merit System Protection Board from a vice-provost at a major university affirmed that most of the non-veterans being hired by the Department of the Interior as supervisory scientists would not even be considered for any jobs in science at any university or non-government research institution in the United States. The Merit System Protection Board refused to accept this into my appeal file. The whole system in corrupt. The Department of Labor is supposed to prevent discrimination against veterans but undertakes nothing in response to more than 999 of every 1000 complaints filed by veterans. The Special Counsel, who may soon be indicted for obstruction of justice in another matter, ignored more than 6000 complaints from whistleblowers and veterans since 2002. On its website, my case is one of the only ones it claims to have favorably settled for a veteran. That favorable settlement has already resulted in my being blacklisted for nine years. I have completed four appeals before the Merit System Protection Board since 1999, and all have been decided through fraud by the administrative judge to maintain this agency’s record of never once having provided relief for a veteran in any appeal since 1994. Am I wrong to classify what is happening to veterans as a Holocaust? With 225,000 or more veteran sleeping on the streets each night, 700,000 veterans reported as unemployed each month, and millions more living at or below the poverty level with enough gaps in the medical care available to them to bring about an early death, how else could this situation be defined? When are we going to have our NÃ¼remberg trails and sentence the criminals who are bringing about the premature deaths of so many of our veterans?

By: Tom

Tom — Thu, 22 May 2008 22:34:16 +0000

Recently I had a run in with the law. My attorney was able to plead down my case. However the end result was because the DA’s office thought I was a crazed killer from Vietnam, I should receive a harsh penality. So a spoken word caused me thousand in fines. Douable than others who was sentenced but was not a Veteran. Oh yea, I never served in Vietnam and never fired my weapon in anger and never ever killed anyone. But that made no difference in Habersham County Georgia.

By: Dan

Dan — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 20:43:12 +0000

That military scholarship program at U of I is history. They are capping veteran assistance at 40% now – just read it on a web site.

They must just really not like veterans for some reason. Don’t get this one.

By: Dan

Dan — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 22:58:48 +0000

According to the Champaign News-Gazette, Avijit Ghosh, the disgraced former dean of the College of Business at University of Illinois in Champaign, got a new job at U of I courtesy of his old friend Joseph White. Ghosh headed up the presidential search committee that got White his job as President of U of I. This is not a Starbucks barista salary â€“ Ghosh gets 339 thousand bucks per year â€“ a decent return on investment for masterminding the veteran scholarship scandal and betraying the public trust. The new job Ghosh gets lets him run technology, economic development and a venture capital company for Springfield, UIC and Champaign campuses. Not a bad gig for someone with a degree in GEOGRAPHY. Sort of like nominating a plumber to run Citibank.

Give me a double shot corruption espresso this morning. On second thought, maybe President White should recommend Ghosh for a patronage job in the 11th ward. Ghosh has the skills.

The timing could not be better for Ghosh, who has been interviewing without success for jobs around the world. He recently interviewed at Western Michigan University, did not get it, and went to India while the Illinois Inspector General continued its investigation of discrimination against veterans. Good thing Ghosh landed in India, too, since those jarheads Ghosh does not think are smart enough for University of Illinois do not vacation in India very often.

Ghosh is fortunate to get 339K of taxpayer-funded salary, but I doubt luck had much to do with it. It pays to have friends in high places like University of Illinois President Joseph White who got help from Ghosh when he headed up the presidential search committee. So while Ghosh continues interviewing for jobs outside University of Illinois, it is comforting for Illinois taxpayers to know that Joseph White subscribes to the Daley-Stroger-Ryan rules of political patronage. Loyalty has its rewards. We should all be so lucky.

Discriminate against veterans, rig admissions standards to kick them out, get caught, and then find a new job courtesy of a friend you helped get a job. Maybe the Inspector General should give President White a call next.

What a priceless lesson in ethics from the ivory tower.