h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I have just been reading an article in the New York Times.
It hits really close to home.
It is about recruits and military personnel in training, even at Officer's Academies, who are rooked into buying off-kilter insurance and investment plans at inflated premiums. This would be bad enough if the agents for these plans wore suits and ties and accosted the military personnel off-duty and off-base. That is not the case, though. These agents are on-base during duty hours, in some cases wearing uniforms, since many of them are retired military, holding "classes" in financial responsibility or veteran's benefits.
At the end of these classes, the victims are handed a pile of papers, including genuine military allotment documents, and a pen, and told where to sign.

It would be a sad and disgusting thing if this were a recent development. But it isn't. This scam has been going on since the early sixties.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/20/business/20military.html?th

I was aware of various "debatably legal" activities on base when I was at Ft. Benning in 1980. Some of them involved haircuts given by retired personnel at inflated rates in barber shops on the very military reservation itself. Others involved cab drivers on and off base, some of whom were active duty personnel, including one Sergeant I knew that I submitted an affadavit about during a CID investigation.

There were active duty personnel selling pot on base, sometimes within the sight of and with the complicity of on-duty guards.

Ft. Hood, which I live very close to, has hundreds of finance companies, furniture and entertainment center rental firms, used and new car dealerships, and "surplus" military equipment stores that will buy slightly used issue materiel and then sell it back to soldiers who need to account for missing issue.

Disgusting.

It does no good to accept volunteers into the military if you are not going to include in their training a bit of "growing up" and a sense of "responsibility". I have always been disgusted at how people who have just been through Basic Training or Boot Camp, can emerge with a sense of how to dissassemble a weapon in the dark, but they can't see that signing their name to a loan agreement that they can't even read with basic comprehension is not a good idea.

It does no good to train officers if they can't be taught to assert responsibility for their men and women to the point of being a parental sort of figure who tries to inculcate thoughtfulness, wariness and a willingness to suss things out before giving in to the blandishments of strangers.

Now, it has been said that the very sort of individual who will sign up for volunteer military duty in the first place, giving in to the promises and noises of a recruiting sergeant, is not very likely to change his/her spots after spending several months being taught to follow commands and to act without thinking... I suppose there is some truth to that. And if their officers are that sort, also, only better educated, then we have a system ripe for abuse, which is what it gets.

I find it hard to articulate my feelings for people who allow other people to fleece the unwitting.
To go onto a military training base and to substitute a geniune training class with a sales pitch disguised as benefit education... to stand in front of young men and women who are in the midst of the most gruelingly intense brainwashing experience of their lives...
and to take those minds that have been turned to the purpose of service to their country, no matter how misquided that ultimately might be...
and to coldly rip them off with the assistance of retired and active duty officers and payroll personnel...
is to prove once more that the enemy is more likely to be right in front of you than somewhere overseas.

That the Pentagon and the Congress have been made aware of these abuses over and over again and refuse to engage in decisive action is absolutely disgusting. Complicity in criminal behavior at the highest level proves that even though the draft is long over, the collection of fodder continues. The impressionable and, yes, gullible, among our youth, should not be subjected to the insidious practices of retired personnel who probably weren't that shiny clean when they were in.
Sgt. Bilko might have been funny on the tube, but in reality he's a thief and a debilitator of needed morale.

And in a time of war, practices that are egregious and odious under peacetime conditions should become treasonous.
If the government is going to spend millions of dollars tracking down subsersives and terrorists, it needs to spend a little of that keeping scum off the military bases and jail them or execute them.

Disturbing and informative
*sigh*