The nation’s third shutdown in 12 years is once again raising anxiety levels among service members and their families because those in uniform are working without pay. While they would receive back pay once the impasse ends, many military families live paycheck to paycheck.
During previous shutdowns, Congress passed legislation to ensure that troops kept earning their salaries, but time is running out before they miss their first paycheck in less than a week.
I really hope this drives a solid wedge between the authoritarian regime and the military.
The GOP is truly incapable of doing what they want without punching themselves in the dick.
“We’re gonna give tax cuts to billionaires and millionaires! And take away the poor’s healthcare to get it! And we’re gonna send ICE to come kidnap your brown people! Balance this tarriff situation in our favor! The military is coming to kill you left wing protestors!”
“Uh, sir. The first thing caused the govt to shutdown, which means all our ghouls are off payroll… Also the untrained ICE thugs are pissing off police unions. Also the farmers have no more employees. Also they can’t sell their crop because no one’s buying due to those tariffs. Also we have a supermajority and absolutely no one to blame but ourselves for fucking up royally a layup of an economic situation. Also everyone hates us and our own generals don’t respect us and have indicated the military will be there to protect the protestors.”
Nice.
Not American, but what’s this about the military saying they’ll protect protestors? That’s pretty big, thats what toppled Egypt in 2011, the military sided with protestors.
The general headed to Portland said this in an interview in the last 48 hrs. News cycle is insane right now; tough to find.
It was a subdued but a clear statement. Said they’ll follow lawful orders, and they’ll protect Oregonians, which he in a word clarified, the protestors.
I’ll edit this if I find it. I saw it from a content creator who does a good job gathering these clips by being more terminally online than I can manage.
Content creator was Parkrose Permaculture.
Clip of general’s statement is at 2:58.
3:40: “[Those deployed] will be protecting any protestors at the ICE facility.”
Just because I was curious, here is the article that YT video is covering. From The Oregonian
The article is from October 8th, the video clip is “A nine-day-old snippet of testimony in front of Oregon lawmakers.” My curiosity did not extend to digging up the source recording of the full testimony.
I hate how hard it is to find “old news”.
I feel it’s deliberate.
You misunderstand them entirely. They think punching themselves in the dick is a good thing, it’s part of the plan. They are far to fucking stupid to realize the damage until after they’ve done it, and then they’re so embarrassed that they punched themselves in their own dick, they double down and start doing it more, telling people that punching themselves in the dick is cool now and they always meant for it to hurt.
The real fucking crazy part is some people start punching themselves in the dick just to be part of the club.
“Oft evil will shall evil mar” ~King Theoden
fucking up royally a layup of an economic situation.
That’s the thing, though, we have a whole lot of useful idiots among leftists/liberals and of course “centrists” that keep giving an assist to the Confederate Party by trying to claim the economy last fall was not good and was not heading in the right direction.
So you have The Annoying Orange and his apparatchiks saying things like “we have to dig out from the economic disaster the Biden administration left us in” - and a whole lot of people, not just Republicans, believe that load of horseshit.
There are always minorities to blame!!
The divide already exists. It just tends to show up in splits between officers and enlisted men as well as between Army/Navy and Marines/Air Force.
There are plenty of Wesley Clarks and Joe Sestaks and Richard Ojedas and Jim Webbs and Mikie Sherrills and Elissa Slotkins in the Democratic Party. The problem is that these people generally kinda suck (except Sestak, he was honestly pretty cool). They tend to be foreign policy hawks, economic conservatives, and generally more friendly with big business than labor. They run on platforms that emphasize our need to expand an already bloated national security state, to consolidate more power in the Executive Branch, and to further integrate ourselves with our allies (like Israel and Argentina and The Philippines and South Korea) regardless of how fucked up their governments happen to be.
These are the Democrats who look at the Halcyon Liberal Era and think America was at its best when it was fighting multi-front global war against Evil Foreigners.
Active duty and younger vets seem more capable of seeing the bullshit than old vets.
I see a lot of vets against fascism springing up all over protest posts, and they seem to generally be somewhere between mid-20s to 40s.
Older ones, however, seem more rare, or generally just super MAGA.
Just my own anecdotal observations of what algorithms put on my feed
It won’t. Not long term anyways. Most military members voted for the GOP despite the open disrespect trump showed them in his first term.
In lieu of pay, raping and piliging will be over looked.
Good. Fuck em. Everyone should suffer. The TSA and air traffic should also be shut down. Give this shithole what it deserves.
Fuck everyone who has ever voted conservative.
Don’t for forget poor ICE… Poor, loathsome, evil ICE
ICE is separately funded with an absolute fortune. They have nothing to worry about here.
Neo-liberals bear their part of the blame as well.
We can’t criticize trump without people rightly saying that liberals don’t care about workers, either.
They’d rather have fascism than socialism, so that’s what we all get.
The Republican shutdown. It’s not just some amorphous “government” that shut it down. It’s Republicans.
Unless you’re at an airport, where you’re forced to watch a video at TSA checkpoints that shows Christy Noem blaming the shutdown on Democrats.
They just told all the Air Traffic Controllers that they’re basically slaves and should work for free…I wouldn’t get on a domestic flight anytime soon.
What, just because they’re literally in control of all 3 branches of the US government and aren’t willing to keep things as they are during Trump’s Tariff Tantrums and horrible economy (people’s healthcare premiums about to skyrocket due to expiring Biden provisions)!?
In a press conference 3 or 4 days ago, Mike Johnson said they were planning on passing a bill to keep the soldiers paid. John Thune corrected him immediately after to say they wouldn’t consider it, and it’s Democrats fault if soldiers don’t get paid because they held up the CR; Mike Johnson nodded along like the yes-man he is.
So there’s where the blame goes.
Not an American but… if you’re a soldier who is part of invading American cities, shame on you. Just following orders wasn’t an excuse then and it isn’t one now. But if you’re doing it and they’re not even paying you… I don’t even know. You might want to have a think about what it is you actually stand for.
There’s about to be so many dodge chargers on used car lots
Dodge charger, Subaru wrx and Dodge ram sales incoming.
WRX is a sweet car! Would love one, but I’m too old for that now.
Lol I’ve heard the Charger and Ram memes a bunch throughout the years, but haven’t seen the WRX on the list. But it made me laugh, because I had a roommate in college who signed up for the Navy and used his signing bonus on a new WRX.
Ha, I added it because a buddy of mine did basically exactly that too, paying over market for it too boot.
So Trump will deploy the millitary against the no kings protests but not pay them… I can see that going well.
We’d be in big trouble if he ever figured out he could pay them directly… But that would be spending his own money and we all know a Trump never pays their debts.
Historically, one of the most effective ways to motivate or change people’s minds is to put their methods and means of making money at risk.
Not paying your military properly is also one of the worst acts that civilian leadership can do that will create a divide in authority with loyalty, discipline, and morale.
Many of the greatest massacres committed by military forces throughout antiquity were caused because their members decided to go AWOL and mutiny because the state and its leadership were unable or unwilling to pay their military members the wealth they were promised.
Good. Fuck the GOP. Do not negotiate. Repeal the small, ugly bill.
Do not negotiate.
Every conflict is merely a prelude to negotiations. The problem is that Democrats genuinely value the institutions of federal government being threatened with defunding, while Republicans only really see these as pain points with which to extort the liberal establishment for more social conservative policy.
Dems are primed to cave over time, particularly when the heavily privatized corporate media is on the side of the Republicans.
That’s definitely been the dynamic in the past, but I think things have finally gotten to the point where Dems are realizing their isn’t much left to lose. Their internal polling and party leadership is telling them to hold fast (arc).
Also, I don’t have the link handy, but there was a KFF poll like last week saying something like 70% of self identified Republicans want the ACA subsidies Dems are fighting for extended. Any way you slice this, it’s a political disaster for the GOP and it’s only going to keep getting worse for them as people’s rent comes due and credit card bills come in and cheap talking points about “extremist terrorist liberal blah blah blah” don’t pay those bills.
Dems are realizing their isn’t much left to lose
The thing to lose is their mega-donors and their future careers as pundits/board members/lobbyists at friendly US Government contracting firms.
70% of self identified Republicans want the ACA subsidies Dems are fighting for extended
Study: Congress literally doesn’t care what you think
Their study took data from nearly 2000 public opinion surveys and compared it to the policies that ended up becoming law. In other words, they compared what the public wanted to what the government actually did. What they found was extremely unsettling: The opinions of 90% of Americans have essentially no impact at all.
American public opinion exists as a bellweather for advertisers and marketing teams. It does not exist to inform public policy but to inform policymakers of what they need to do to reset public opinion (ie, Ban TikTok, greenlight more media consolidation through the FCC, invoke the Espionage Act against whistleblowers, bomb journalists covering a genocide, etc)
Republican politicians are on vacation right now
Its clear they think either democrats will bend the knee and pass the republican agenda without protest, or they can pin enough of the blame on democrats via mainstream media control that they will feel pressured to cave.
Hah. Keep sucking on that spraytanned pedo-mushroom though. I’m sure he’ll hurt all the people you want to hurt, after he’s done hurting you and puting a Qatari airbase in fucking Idaho.
It annoys me when they talk about helping some and not others in this kind of thing. people in other agencies have families to.
Yes, but the military cannot just quit and find another job. They are not told to “go home and wait until a budget is passed.” And they must bear the associated costs of operation that they would typically get reimbursed for.
It’s not that people in other agencies aren’t suffering, it’s that most those in the military would be the first to have problems that both affect the individual and the government’s power.
As another (but silly) counterpoint, the government shutdown affects every citizen, nay, the world itself. Since the USA is such an important world power, the act of shutting down has wide consequences if it goes on long enough. So won’t you think of the billionaires?
Am I the only one that sees a major flaw, and a lot of historical precedent, around the idea of not paying the mercenaries on time?
These dudes joined the strongest gang for a chance to kill people and make some money. And now they’re not getting money.
With how little you need to give a soldier before it thinks it’s doing good, I wonder how long until they start Defending Freedom™ against Americans.
Stay strong Democrats
