This is a statement from the anti-war organization of veterans and active-duty service members, March Forward!
As the U.S. government launched hundreds of million-dollar cruise
missiles into Libya, it was seconds away from denying us pay because
there is “not enough money.” With only minutes to spare, negotiators
reached a temporary agreement on the federal budget that avoided a
full-scale shutdown.
The possibility of a government shutdown
first hit the public eye over a week ago when it was announced that the
government had not yet passed a federal 2011 budget. Congress was given
until 11:59 p.m. April 8 to come to an agreement for the year’s federal
spending, and in the 11th hour, Congress scrambled to pass a one-week
emergency budget that would pay federal employees while the agreement
was written, passed and signed into law. While a full government
shutdown seems to have been avoided, the threat of it sent service
members and our families scrambling to figure out how we would
survive—and it revealed how little this government values us.
A
government shutdown would mean that U.S. service members, both at home
and in two war zones, would have received no more than half pay, if any.
The
wives, husbands, children, mothers and fathers of service members would
also have been hugely impacted by this criminal negligence. During any
government shutdown, life insurance and payments in the event of a
service member’s death would not have been paid. Additionally, if a
regular GI salary is barely enough to scrape by, how would we have been
expected to support our families or pay our bills? How would our
children have eaten?
The CIA, Pentagon brass, and congressional
officials themselves would have continued to be paid in full. Along with
them, the weapons contractors at General Electric, General Dynamics and
Raytheon, and their oil tycoon counterparts at Exxon and Halliburton,
would have continued to be paid in full, conducting business as usual.
All
of this comes in the wake of the bloodiest battles, the highest
casualty rates, and the highest suicide rates since the beginning of the
war in Afghanistan 10 years ago. Some will be deploying for their
third, fourth and even fifth time.
This is absolutely
unacceptable; it shows openly the careless nature of a government that
will send us to kill, be maimed or die for a war that the vast majority
of Americans are against. Whether or not a full shutdown occurred, the
fact that this was ever even on the table for discussion shows just how
much this government cares about us—not at all. They will send us over
and over into two quagmires, deny us adequate care when we return, and
then threaten to cut our pay entirely when they cannot figure out who to
cut the most money from to protect the profits of the super-rich.
The
threat of losing our paychecks, in addition to the multitude of other
hardships faced by service members—repeated deployments, substandard
mental health care, and so forth—shows that we must organize for our own
interests. The politicians and generals have proven incapable of
looking out for our lives.
The government tells us that they have
no funds to pay for soldiers, yet they use unlimited funds to send us
to our deaths, to occupy and ruthlessly bomb Iraq and Afghanistan for
$700 million a day. We drive the tanks, we fix the trucks, we ship the
supplies and we give our lives. Maybe it is about time we had a
government that listened to us and acted in our interests. Now is the
time for us to organize and fight.
