I keep seeing facebook and TV ads wanting me to donate money to Wounded Warriors or USO or other like organizations who say they will use the money to help returning veterans. I don't send them any money although they have their hearts in the right place. (The legitimate ones anyway.) My reasoning is that the federal government and the profit from war corporations should be shouldering this burden. Think about it. The big defense contractors urge war, profit from it, and they don't pay taxes at anywhere near a fair rate. So, what is a returning soldier with problems face? Having to go to charity for help, instead of Corporate America and the rich paying a fair tax to help them through the veterans administration. And the American public just soaks it up when these veterans help organizations ask for money. It is another way of subsidizing the rich.
Here is a petition about APD that has been started at the
White House "We the People" website. I usually think these are pretty meaningless exercises, but maybe it will catch someones eye in the daily political briefing.
3 comments:
Wounded Warriors has received some bad press lately - one of those things where there's too much overhead or something. I can't recall the details.
There are a couple charity watch web sites, but I don't know if there's a web site that watches charity watch web sites.
Someone from the one run by the Philanthropic association, which I think is called charitywatch, was interviewed on NPR awhile back so I assume they're legitimate.
All I can say for sure is don't send money to me. I'll be down at El Paisa in ten minutes.
Just for anyone's info - if you use the Firefox browser there's an "add-on" that blocks ads, even on Facebook. Add-ons can be found by clicking on "Tools" at the top of the browser. This one is called Ad Block Plus.
Apparently the people who developed it keep track of all the ads that get placed on the internet and keep adding them to the program, and the program won't let the browser display them. New ads are included in updates, and mine is set to update itself automatically.
When I go to a web site that has an ad or ads, there's a blank space where an ad would be.
There's some debate about it. Some people think it's wrong, because ads are what pay for the internet. Older purists respond by recounting the days when the internet was totally non commercial.
I can see both sides of it, but the purist in me sees advertising as evil incarnate, because ads are meant to get you to buy something you wouldn't have otherwise bought. They don't care how they accomplish it, whether you can afford it, whether the money would be better spent on food for your children, none of that. Like much of Capitalism, the most money is extracted from the people with the lowest sales resistance.
Such people are the bread and butter of sales people. Sales people don't even want to talk to someone who expects to test drive four or five cars before buying one, or wants to look at more than a couple houses before deciding whether to spend $150,000 so they can make their few thousand. It's not worth their time.
In other words, I don't have that much of a problem with Ad Block.
Neither do I have all that much problem with advertising people, really. They're playing by the rules and they didn't pick the system. I admire them, in fact. They have their finger on the pulse of the nation like no one else. I like to watch as ads on TV change in tone and tenor as the mood of the country changes. Ads are different, for example, when Republicans are in power and when Democrats are in power. As people adjust their psyches, Madison Avenue adjusts their ads.
SFC Phillip Ramirez sued his employer, CYFD, as a state employee for firing him for having combat-related PTSD. He won at trial but Susan Martinez has been fighting him every step of the way. She has funded the state's contract attorney for her entire governership against SFC Martinez. Why aren't any veterans groups helping him?
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