Polk County Veterans Council

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The Next Polk County Veterans Council meeting will be:

When: Feb 14, at 5:30 hours
Where: CPS Investment Advisors (look for blue & white sign out front)
                1509 S. Florida Ave
                Lakeland, FL 33803
                (one block south from Allen & CO)
Know this is Valentines Day—meeting will be no longer that 1 hour.
Have several key matters to discuss and decide:
·         History Fair judges and awards
·         Armed Forces Day
·         Memorial Day

See you all then

Gary E. Clark
Colonel USAF(Ret)
Chairman
Polk County Veterans Council

PCVC Chairman - Gary Clark, Col. USAF Ret. (E-Mail)

Vice Chairman - Don Selvage, Col. USMC Ret. (E-Mail)

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Saturday, January 21, 2012

VA Providing Credit Monitoring to Misidentified Veterans

WASHINGTON – The Department of Veterans Affairs is offering free credit monitoring to more than 2,200 Veterans whose personal information, including social security numbers, was posted on Ancestry.com following the mistaken release of data through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

“VA places the highest priority upon safeguarding the personal information of our Veterans,” said Jerry L. Davis, VA’s chief information security officer. “When lapses occur, we will immediately take prompt remedial action, such as notification.”

The family history website, which provides access to genealogical and historical information, had requested information from VA about deceased Veterans. Under FOIA, VA is obligated to release requested records upon written request unless they may be withheld. Therefore, VA provided the website with the data on March 18, 2011.

On Dec. 13, 2011, after the information had been posted on the history website, VA learned that it included data about some living Veterans because some of the death reports provided to the website were inaccurate.

“Fortunately, no personal health information was included in this data release,” Davis said. “Ancestry.com has worked with us and immediately removed all the information that we had supplied them.”

There is no indication personally identifiable information of any Veteran has been misused. However, VA is still notifying all potentially affected Veterans so they can be vigilant and take steps to protect against identity theft. VA is also offering credit monitoring for one year at no charge to every Veteran whose name was mistakenly released and posted on the history website.

FOIA requires federal agencies to disclose requested records unless they may be withheld under specific statutory exemptions. Under FOIA, VA was obligated to provide the website with the name, social security number, date of birth, date of death, military branch assignments, and the dates of entry on active duty and release from active duty for deceased Veterans.

VA has launched an effort to determine why information about living Veterans was included in a database about deceased Veterans. The error did not affect the VA benefits of any Veteran. VA is committed to protecting Veterans’ personal information and to improving information processing to avoid erroneous data.

Veterans who believe they may have been affected by this incident who have not been notified by VA may verify whether their information was involved by writing to: Department of Veterans Affairs, OIT Privacy Officer (005R1A), 810 Vermont Ave., NW Washington DC 20420, (Attn: Garnett Best).

Affected Veterans can request a free credit report for one year from one or more of the three national credit bureaus by calling 1-877-322-8228 or by visiting http://www.annualcreditreport.com.

Information about this and other protections, including placing a “fraud alert” on credit accounts, is available by calling the Federal Trade Commission at its toll free number, 1-877-438-4338, or by visiting its website, http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/microsites/idtheft/index.html

http://www.va.gov/opa/pressrel/pressrelease.cfm?id=2250

21 jan 12 @ 6:36 pm Comments

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Civilizations Decline When They Trade Defense For Dependence

By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON Posted 01/13/2012 06:11 PM ET

President Obama just ordered massive cutbacks in defense spending, eventually to total some $500 billion. There is plenty of fat in a Pentagon budget that grew after 9/11, but such slashing goes way too far.Fairly or not, the cuts will only cement a now familiar stereotype of Obama's desire to retrench on the world scene. They follow symbolic apologies for purported past American sins, bowing to foreign royals and outreach to the likes of Iran and Syria.

Abroad, such perceptions can matter as much as reality, as our rivals begin hoping that Obama is as dubious about America's historically exceptional world role as are they.In contrast, a robust military keeps the peace by deterring aggressors through the appearance of overwhelming force. We often forget that the appearance of strength in peace is almost as important as the reality of strength in war.When wars end, we scale back (think 1919 or 1946) — only to kick ourselves once tensions arise again out of nowhere, and we must scramble to catch up and rearm for an unimagined World War II or Cold War.

America's armed forces spend about 80% of their budgets not on bullets and bombs but on training and compensating soldiers. Often, they do a far better job shaping the minds and character of our youth than do our colleges. Somehow the military can take an 18-year old and teach him to park a $100 million fighter across a carrier deck, but our colleges cannot ensure that his civilian counterpart will show up regularly for classes.

Young Americans leave the service debt-free and with skills. Too many of our college students pile up debt and become increasingly angry that by their mid-20s they still have received neither competitive skills nor real education.The reason our deficit is more than $1 trillion is not just that we have multimillion-dollar jet fighters or tens of thousands of Marines. Defense outlay currently represents only about 20% of federal budget expenditures and is below 5% of our gross national product. Those percentages are roughly average costs for recent years — despite an ongoing deployment in Afghanistan.In contrast, over the last three years we have borrowed a record near-$5 trillion for vast unfunded entitlements — from a spiraling Social Security and Medicare to expanding the food stamp program to include one-seventh of America.

Yet many Americans would probably prefer a new frigate manned by highly trained youth to discourage our enemies, rather than another Solyndra-like investment or a near-$1 trillion stimulus aimed at creating "shovel-ready" jobs.

Unfortunately, defense cuts don't occur in isolation. They feed a syndrome best typified by an insolvent and largely defenseless socialist Europe. The more that prosperous societies cut defense to expand social programs, the more the resulting dependency leads to even less defense and ever more benefits.

Once the state promises to take care of the citizen, the citizen believes that more subsidies are still never enough.

And once voters believe that defense spending is an impediment to greater entitlements, the fewer impediments they will pay for. The net result is something like the squabbling, soon-to-collapse European Union: trillions in unfunded entitlement liabilities, and an inability to defend itself.Many of the new cuts are aimed at the traditional ground forces, given that we are in a high-tech age of missiles, sophisticated drones and counterinsurgency missions. But the nature of war is neither static nor predictable.

After World War II, Harry Truman wanted to do away with the Marines — and then was glad he had not when they largely saved the reputation of the U.S. military during the unforeseen disaster in Korea in December 1950.After the Gulf War of 1990-91, we cut back on our ground forces, only to build them back up so that the Marines could deal with enemies in awful places like Anbar Province in Iraq.

The decline of civilizations of the past — fourth-century-B.C. Athens, fifth-century-A.D. Rome, 15th-century Byzantium, or 1930s Western Europe — was not caused by their spending too much money on defense or not spending enough on public entitlements. Rather, their expanding governments redistributed more borrowed money, while a dependent citizenry wanted even fewer soldiers to guarantee ever more handouts.

History's bleak lesson is that those societies with self-reliant citizens who defend themselves and their interests prosper; those who grow dependent cut back their defenses — and waste away.

• Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford
University, and the author of the just-released "The End of Sparta."

Gary E. Clark

Colonel USAF(Ret)

Chairman

Polk County Veterans Council

17 jan 12 @ 8:37 pm Comments

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