We have not a single prominent political figure to the left of your average John Birch Society aficionado speaking out against eternal war and our increasingly predatory national security state. People who oppose those sorts of things are desperately parched. The overwhelming number of Obama supporters glide past these issues as though they don’t exist; once Paul is off stage again, you will not hear a whisper of anti-imperial criticism from them aimed at the president. And that is precisely why those outraged liberals want him off stage again, and want any attention or praise paid his rhetoric in the meanwhile to be seen as beyond the pale.

Barack Obama believes the national security state and the American military empire are good and valuable things. He likes them. He uses them enthusiastically. Ron Paul believes all sorts of weird and unsavory shit, but he doesn’t believe that the national security state and the American military empire are good and valuable things. You don’t want Ron Paul siphoning off liberal/left enthusiasm? Then take those issues away from him and make them your own; they are, after all, progressive bread and butter issues. Can’t, though, can you?

(Obama also used his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance lecture to mount a stirring defense of the Bush doctrine of preemptive war, which makes him not only an imperialist and authoritarian but an enormous asshole as well. And doesn’t say a lot for the Nobel selection committee either. But that’s another story.)

That’s not a good thing. For obvious democratic reasons, one wants the military to identify and empathize with the populations whence they spring. Identifying common experiences is one way to do that, and one experience a lot of military personnel have in common with a lot of civilians is that they’re making crap money and the people signing their paychecks don’t seem to care much about them. Another is that if they lose their jobs, they’re in deep trouble almost instantly.

I ran across a couple of items yesterday that suggest an avenue for amplifying the Occupy protests within the U.S. by involving military personnel. One was a comment by my pal Schmutzie over at his place about a plan announced by Senators Carl Levin and John McCain to inflict some serious Bad upon veterans benefits, and the other was the first truly useful Twitter message I’ve received during my limited relationship with the service.

For whatever reason, congressional Republicans particularly but congressional persons in general like to support our troops by screwing them and, more dramatically, our former troops. Veterans benefits have been under steady assault for decades; once someone is mostly out of uniform and no longer heavily armed, their primary utility is as an occasional prop. The AP story Schmutzie found (in his local newspaper, hurray!) details the latest, and most frenzied in recent memory, example.

Republicans and Democrats alike are signaling a willingness — unheard of at the height of two post-Sept. 11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — to make military retirees pay more for coverage. It’s a reflection of Washington’s newfound embrace of fiscal austerity and the Pentagon’s push to cut health care costs that have skyrocketed from $19 billion in 2001 to $53 billion.

The numbers are daunting for a military focused on building and arming an all-volunteer force for war. The Pentagon is providing health care coverage for 3.3 million active duty personnel and their dependents and 5.5 million retirees, eligible dependents and surviving spouses. Retirees outnumber the active duty, 2.3 million to 1.4 million.

Combined with the billions in retirement pay, it’s no surprise that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta recently said personnel costs have put the Pentagon “on an unsustainable course.”

Possibly there are other expenses that have put the Pentagon on an unsustainable course, as illustrated in the Powerpoint graphic at left excerpted from the country’s Quadrennial Defense Review, but those pale in comparison to the threat posed by the incessant whinging of our veterans. “But I want an education, but I’m sick, but the place where my leg used to be hurts, but I have PTSD, but I need to eat …” Well, wah, wah, wah. Crybabies.

In a rare show of bipartisanship, members of both parties are lining up behind this one. Levin and McCain are the most prominent ones because they’re the chair and ranking member, respectively, of the Senate Armed Services Committee, but a lot of others are squeaking about it as well. Sometimes veterans groups and their congressional supporters manage to forestall or minimize the damage done to veterans and their families at particular moments, but with the economy down, recruiting up and the urgency of Iraq behind us, at least for the moment, it’s a relatively safe time for Congress and the administration to be kicking veterans to the curb.

Which brings me to the second item on today’s agenda. A while back I signed on to follow one among the numerous Twitter feeds claiming to represent the hacker collective, Anonymous. I don’t visit Twitter often and when I do it’s usually to find barrages of stuff from a few of the people I follow drowning out the rest. A few hours before I read the story about Congress going Darwin on veterans, though, I happened upon the Anonymous tweet you see to the left.

The link leads to the full-sized version of the photo displayed rightward. It’s the only photo I’ve seen of someone in the military participating in the protests so one can’t draw any conclusions from it, but the uniform and the Guy Fawkes mask—currently a favored symbol of Anonymous supporters—work well together.

Turning the attention of military personnel from their about-to-be-concluded work of occupying Iraq on behalf of sociopaths and profiteers to the more useful work of occupying Wall Street and the other Occupy sites in solidarity with their fellow citizens could dramatically increase the degree to which the protests are taken seriously by policy makers and the larger public.

There is a vast stand of common ground: Among the many stories representing the 99%, few are more expressive of the contempt our rulers feel toward us than the one about the soldier whose family is living off food stamps while he or she is overseas occupying some hapless land and killing the people who live there on behalf of the 1% and the political class who represent it, and who is discarded and scorned by the same classes when his utility is ended. And for women, things are worse: In addition to all the other drawbacks, the risk of sexual assault is much higher than in the civilian population.

That’s on the harshest end, but service members who don’t go overseas struggle with the same issues of pay while they’re in the service and the continual assaults on their benefits once they’re out. As with most workers, they’re valued much more in the abstract—the work ethic of the common man, the sacrifice of the soldier—than in the concrete.

Reach out, organize, occupy. And spike the guns in advance.

After that, we learn … nothing. A Marketplace correspondent turns in a report featuring a few seconds of the protesters chanting something, presents two consultants who oppose the idea and nobody, from the protests or elsewhere, who supports it, and then closes with this:

“The Robin Hood tax has its own website as well as a Facebook page and Twitter account. But despite its populist appeal, few economists think it will happen in the U.S. any time soon.

In New York, I’m Heidi Moore for Marketplace.”

Journalists! As Samuel Clemens may or may not have said, “If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed. If you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed.”