Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
“I got older, and I became a Communist,” Graham Platner, the socialist Bernie-endorsed candidate to become Maine’s senator, posted. Platner is also living under Communism.
While his mentor, Sen. Bernie Sanders, is famous for never being able to hold down a paying job for long until he went into politics, Platner, the prep school grad and son of a lawyer and grandson of a famous architect, who claims to be working class, has done even better at making the system work for him.
A month before Platner announced his candidacy, the New York Times stopped by and took a boat tour with him accompanied by photographs of the future Senate candidate in his usual working class drag, gimme cap and t-shirt, harvesting and shucking oysters at his oyster farm.
The paper didn’t ask how that meshed with Platner’s 100% disability rating from the VA.
“I’ve got a couple herniated discs. My shoulder’s a wreck. My knees bother me,” he recently told a reporter about his disability. And apparently he also suffers from PTSD and hearing loss.
None of those problems with his knees, back and shoulders supposedly prevent him from working on an oyster farm even though that kind of work traditionally involves a good deal of lifting and bending. Oysters are generally not found floating at arm’s length in the air.
But they do result in a $4,800 a monthly payment from the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Combining different ‘disabilities’ which are not disabling in and of themselves can get a veteran up to 100%. Those combinations, especially when PTSD is added on to other conditions that are difficult to diagnose or confirm, but easy to fake, can indicate someone gaming the system.
VA disability rates have soared from less than 10% after Vietnam to around 30%. Beginning with the Gulf War, around 40% of veterans receive disability payments. 45% of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have applied for benefits and while these were ugly wars, there were approximately 53,000 soldiers wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan compared to over 300,000 in Vietnam.
PTSD has become the fourth most common type of disability claim and accounts for over 1 million of the veterans on disability. Qualifying requires experiencing “combat events, like engaging in combat with enemy forces, experiencing fear of hostile military or terrorist activity, serving in an imminent danger area, or serving as a drone aircraft crew member”.
There is no way to know the details and the legitimacy of Platner’s disability rating.
But the VA monthly disability payment even for 100% disabled veterans with two parents, a wife and a child (Platner has no known children, both of his parents are well-off) is a little over $4,500. It’s not clear why Platner is receiving significantly more money than this top benefit tier.
Platner originally campaigned as a ‘working-class oysterman’, but he was never working class and his belatedly released financial disclosure shows the only major sale of oysters from his ‘oyster farm’ going to his mother’s restaurant.
“His best customer happens to be his mom,” one description put it. Also apparently the only customer to pay him over $5,000 during the disclosure period. But if that’s true, then how can the Frenchman Bay Oyster Company be a viable business that keeps the Platners going?
The disclosure shows that the Frenchman Bay Oyster Company is paying his wife a salary, but does not mention him. Some have speculated that the terms of his 100% VA disability rating may preclude him from earning a certain percentage over the federal poverty line.
But not however his wife.
Those questions were revived when his Senate campaign put his wife on the payroll for $3,600 a month. Income earned by a spouse does not count against some kinds of VA disability ratings.
But between the two of them, most of their household income appears to be either coming from the government through Platner’s disability payments or through fundraising for Platner’s political campaign which ends up going to the Platner household through his spouse.
The financials of the Frenchman Bay Oyster Company appeared odd from the very beginning.
Platner is a 100% disabled veteran running an oyster company that in theory he should be physically unable to work at, which provides oysters for his mother’s restaurant and a salary for his wife. The purchase of the oyster company was funded by a grant intended for black people.
Graham Platner’s takeover of an existing oyster business was actually funded by a $20,000 grant from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, a Greek billionaire’s nonprofit, that was supposed to be for small businesses owned by “underserved groups” without “access to capital” like “people of color, women, and veterans as well as those in lower-income communities”.
“As a nation we can no longer ignore the economic devastation in black and brown neighborhoods,” the president of the organization managing the grants declared. “For too long, minority-owned businesses have found banks unwilling to make loans to their businesses, regardless of creditworthiness.”
Virtually every other small business that received the grant was either minority-owned or owned by a woman. While Platner was a veteran, he came from a wealthy family and was not poor. And he most certainly isn’t black. Nevertheless his business appears to have been funded by it.
What does Communism look like? It looks a lot like having others pay your way at every step.
It’s not a system that can work for the many. Every Communist regime enslaved millions so that a few hundred of the elite could live in wealth and comfort. These were the actual 1 percent. And there is a reason why the average American Communist and Marxist is wealthy and yet has the same sort of job history outside of politics as the average homeless vagrant.
Every American radical runs for office as ‘working class’ and every one of them, like Bernie Sanders or Rep. Ilhan Omar, figures out how to use politics to become millionaires.
Some call that capitalism. It’s not. It’s Communism. Capitalists make their money from private enterprise. Communists make their money from the government. And that means they take it from you.
