If Clark is elected President does he have to give up

his Military Retirement benefits? My husband "thinks" Eisenhower had to give up his benefits, but isn't positive. 34 years of Military service would be quite a retirement package, I would think. A lot of money to give up as a sacrifice to his country. :) However, I do believe he's a millionaire now, so the Military Retirement would be a pittance in comparison? Would he have to give up his benefits if elected?

By an army of angry Dean backers intent on framing their candidate as the cheapest of them all!

NOTE: Works both ways, an army of Clarkites will rush to any thread positive about Dean too.


I wish the DU would get wise and create a separate Dem Primary forum.

would I be flamed for asking a fucking question about something hubby and I were wondering about? I was just wondering and since DU members are the smartest on the planet, I thought I would see if anyone knew the answer. :) Now, that being said, I really don't care one way or another, I was just wondering and thought it was a legitimate question. Apparently, I was wrong.

YIKES! DU members are getting testy. MEOW!!!!! Scratch! scratch! MEEEEEEOW! Hiss!

I have on my flame----retardant suit! :7

Clinton: $200,000

Bush: $400,000 (Clinton signed the bill which would not go into effect until there was a change of office)

Clark: Gave up all salary, boards, everything to do this. Note: none of the congressional candidates gave up a dime.

Last year Clark made a little over a million including his retirement of $85,000. His last post at NATO paid between $140-160 thousand.

He's earned them, so if he keeps them, fine; if he has to give them up, I'm sure his $400K/year salary as Presiddent will take the sting out of his loss. :P

was technically still on active duty when he started campaigning...
General officers never retire, they are always subject to recall.
Legend has it Eisenhower resigned his commission before taking the oath of office; he couldn't be both the Commander and Chief and a serving officer.

I don't give a Sh*t about his retirement package. I would be so elated knowing that the dog pooping all over our White House would be done and gone.

it would be like Dingdong the monkey's gone, the wicket monkey's gone, ding dong, the monkey's gone, the wicket monkey's done!

in the defense contractors who he has been whoring for since about 2000?

Wall Street Journal, 9/18/03

IN ANNOUNCING his presidential campaign, Wesley K. Clark promoted himself as the candidate best qualified to prosecute the war on terror. As a businessman, he has applied his military expertise to help a handful of high-tech companies try to profit from the fight Since retiring from a 34-year Army career in 2000, Gen. Clark has become : chairman of a suburban Washington technology-corridor start-up, managing director at an investment firm, a director at four other firms around the country and an advisory-board member for two others. For most, he was hired to help boost the companies' military business. .


That's EXACTLY what Cheney did for Haliburton.


more....

After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Gen. Clark counseled clients on how to pitch commercial technologies to the government for homeland-security applications. One is Acxiom Corp., based in Gen. Clark's hometown of Little Rock, Ark., where he formally launched his campaign yesterday. He joined the board of the Nasdaq-traded company in December 2001, as the company started to market its customer-database software to federal agencies eager to hunt for terrorists by scanning and coordinating the vast cyberspace trove of citizen information.

"He has made efforts at putting us in contact with the right people in Washington ... setting up meetings and participating in some himself," says Acxiom Chief Executive Charles Morgan. "Like all of us around 9/11, he had a lot of patriotic fervor about how we can save our country."


<snip>

While he was originally hired as a consultant by WaveCrest Laboratories LLC, Dulles, Va.,to help find military buyers for its promising new electric motor, Gen. Clark became the company's chairman in April, and has also focused on selling products in the commercial market. But Gen. Clark's knowledge of and ties with, the military and government markets have been a large part of his appeal to potential employers.

Stephens Inc., the large, politically connected Little Rock investment firm, hired him to boost its aerospace business shortly after he gave up his NATO command. He left Stephens last year and opened his own consultancy, Wesley K. Clark & Associates.
While Gen. Clark was at Stephens, the firm also marketed him to clients such as Silicon Energy-in which Stephens held a stake - "as a good person to help us understand the federal procurement process," says Mr. Woolard. The company was trying to enter the government market, and Gen. Clark explained the process "and contacted people at the Navy and Air Force and told them what we had," Mr. Woolard says. (Silicon Energy was acquired earlier this year by Itron Inc., and Gen. Clark no longer advises the firm).

Time Domain Corp., a Huntsville, Ala., advanced wireless-technology company, recruited Gen. Clark to become an adviser in February 2002 through one of its chief operating officers, who had been a colonel under his NATO command during the Bosnia campaign. Gen. Clark has counseled the company on how to answer Pentagon concerns that its low-power radar system might interfere with global positioning and communications systems, as well as to better craft that technology for military use. board of Entrust, at the request of CEO William Conner, who had served with him on a Pentagon advisory panel.
At Entrust, Gen. Clark has provided advice on how to sell to various NATO governments, says David Wagner, Entrust's chief financial officer. He has also helped emphasize the firm's product securing electronic networks for new homeland-security applications.
_________________________________________________________

What a laugh.

Personally I don't have a problem with a principled guy like Clark being a consultant/lobbyist. He is certainly qualified to help our government with information on security/national defense. You excluded the part where people knowledgeable about his lobbying, told how Clark emphasized the importance of protecting people's privacy, with regard to Acxiom.

Nothing here but innuendo smear stuff...I'm sure some slime balls will eventually muster the guts to accuse Clark directly of some conflicts of interest along these lines, I for one can't wait for it because it would be another example of how Clark deftly handles smear jobs.

sold his influence to defense contractors to get them contracts by hooking them up with folks in the defense departmetn.


Why is it bad for Cheney to do it, but Ok for Clark... corruption is corruption regardless of the letter you put by your name.


Just another example of the double standard for Clark.

Oh and Clark was so very careful about people's info...

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20031013&s=jones

But in mid-September, the furor reignited when a lone privacy advocate uncovered a disturbing document regarding New York-based JetBlue Airways, which has been in talks with the TSA to participate in testing the CAPPS II program. According to the document, JetBlue secretly provided 5 million passenger-name records, involving some 1.5 million passengers, to a Huntsville, Alabama-based defense contractor called Torch Concepts, which government officials say was participating in a military base security program for the Defense Department. One of Torch Concepts' vendors, Little Rock-based Acxiom Corporation, then used the JetBlue data to extrapolate Social Security numbers and other private information on almost half these customers, according to the document, which was a Torch Concepts presentation on passenger risk assessment. The TSA admitted that it helped facilitate the JetBlue relationship with Torch Concepts but claimed that the firm was not a TSA contractor and had nothing to do with the development of CAPPS II. However, TSA officials told The Nation that Acxiom is a subcontractor to Lockheed Martin, the main contractor on the CAPPS II project.

What is interesting about this is that the TSA has repeatedly claimed that its screening system would require access only to the travel itineraries, names, addresses, dates of birth and phone numbers of passengers. The JetBlue scandal shows that passengers could lose control of a great deal more personal information.

"For me it was totally consistent with what I've seen in my research of the privacy practices of the travel industry in the USA," said privacy advocate Edward Hasbrouck, who uncovered the original document and leaked it to Wired News.

A December 2002 Defense Department report on security and privacy, which can be found on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency website (www.darpa.mil.iao/secpriv.pdf), cites the "stunning" amount of data that Acxiom is capable of gathering and suggests that the government may be able to cull data from Acxiom without the firm even knowing about it.

Acxiom, one of the nation's largest data-mining companies, has actively sought federal contracts related to homeland security in the past two years. In December 2001 Acxiom hired Gen. Wesley Clark, now a Democratic presidential candidate, as a lobbyist and board member to help procure government contracts.

Washington-based EPIC earlier this year filed suit in an effort to connect the dots between the CAPPS II program and the TIA program. Now EPIC has filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission alleging that JetBlue and Acxiom violated consumer-protection laws when they disclosed the information to Torch Concepts. EPIC has also filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the Defense Department, the Federal Aviation Administration and the TSA to get to the bottom of the JetBlue imbroglio. Until the TSA, JetBlue, Torch Concepts and Acxiom come clean, there can be no confidence that CAPPS II will make Americans either safe or free.

That Dick can't say he did the same things as Clark in a zillion other instances. I am really shocked you have the audacity to make the comparison.

Your Jet Blue thing doesn't in any way address my point about Clark's position on privacy and the fact that he did bring it up the importance of considering and protecting privacy when using these technologies.

You're on a roll today I notice. Have you noticed I haven't attacked Dean once?

So you have a problem with everyone that ever lobbied for a government contracts is that right?

:eyes:

that sucks. I like Dean. I like Clark. I hate all these people intent on tearing down everyone else.

I haven't the foggiest :)

And they get a lot more lucrative job opportunities that retired generals.

The Presidency is something like $750,000 a year, and he gets a guaranteed pension for that too. He also gets free health care for life, and secret service fo life as well.

I thik he can live without his relatively smaller military pension, which wouldn't come close.

This is double what Clinton was paid.

I thought Clinton was paid $400,000 a year. I knew it doubled for Chimpy.

this is just something i think. but the job of president(commander in chief of the armed forces) is still a civilian job. so clark would still be retired from the military. that makes sense to me. but maybe someone else will post a link to actual information on it.

Angry about EVERYTHING! Attack first, ask questions later. Shoot off his/her mouth and later apologize (or not). As someone noted, TLM is on a roll today. One more person to put on "Ignore."

I find Wesley Clark to be a thoughtful, intelligent person who is not scared of a political brawl but seems to prefer the high road (and that's a good thing); nevetheless, he doesn't run from a fight (e.g., Fox News).

Bake

I'm beginning to think you're correct about the Dean supporters. I've not seen anything like it.

I agree with you on General Clark. He would be an excellent President.

May as well make it official and fly the Clark avatar. I support Wes Clark for President of the United States of America. Thanks, TLM, for the nudge.

And no, I didn't rush over here from a Clark blog, and no, nobody recruited me to "freep" a poll here. I've been around DU for over three years.

Bake

to the Clark Campaign, Bake! :bounce: Nice to have you aboard!

nobody recruited me to "freep" a poll here.

That was pretty low. :( Things are getting so catty around here.

He's had other chances and proven himself more than once. After Vietnam, he could have gone into the private sector like all the other Westpoint grads and made a bundle. After he retired, he refused to work for lucrative weapons firms like most other retired Generals.

Welcome to the Clark side, Baker :)

I can't think of any reason he should BUT the pension and benefits of being an ex-President, including an office and staff and life long Secret Service protection, would more than offset the dollar figure you might lose as a retired Major General.

You don't see ex-Presidents pawning their medals to pay for food.