National Guard Troops, within a controlled area surrounded by Hurricane Wire Topped Fencing, can go in a Large Group to 'visit' a sitting Congresswomen to 'speak to her' about what they consider a verbal slight.
White Farmers can be denied equal justice under the law because of the color of their skin and are refused access to Public Tax Funds but are Denied their right to confront those Legislators who proposed and passed the Law by keeping them out with that same Hurricane Wire Topped Fencing...and the same National Guards.
This appears to be nothing short of a Military Coup d'état.
Threat of ruin.
It is the same for police, and why police defended BLM rioters. The police force has been completely nationalized via unions. Police forces prefer to shuffle people around and not hire locally. Same with teachers. While they claim that these groups are "underpaid" they are some of the highest paid people in the country when you compare to the average salary (same with any federal employee). If you count benefits, retirement, overtime, ect police pull in 80-90k in a smaller city and 200k in places like NY.
If they get fired they get black listed nationally. They will never work as a cop or even a security guard again, and with their skill set and experience they do not have much else they can fall back on without starting over. The guard will be there to defend the oligarchs to the end, because they are always the first to be paid.
This is exactly right.
And not only that, but this same state of affairs brought back the Nuremberg defense: “I was just following orders, so you can’t say I did anything wrong.”
It’s really important to remember that the military doesn’t have unions. There is very little organized advocacy. There are a few lobbying organizations that either lobby Congress or work with state legislatures, but they’re worse than useless. When the DoD tried to kill the AAFES mafia a few years ago, the Sergeants’ Association kept it alive. (AAFES is the worst fucking thing on the planet)
There’s one exception to this. A small subset of the National Guard are employed as full-time technicians under the GS pay scale. It’s fucked up, a total conflict of interest, but they are allowed to have unions. Nobody else does though, and GS rules don’t apply during activation or when under an order status (such as the troops in DC).
The military does have the same implicit threat over its people, in being able to effectively ensure they can’t work again if they get court martialled. But it doesn’t work quite the same as it does for the police force.
Money is also different for the National Guard. Unless you do a full twenty on AGR (active guard reserve) status, you don’t get a full pension. It’s pro-rated based on the number of “points” you get each year: minimum service is 50 points, a full year of orders is 365 points. It also doesn’t pay out until you’re 60, minus day-for-day any time you spent on an official deployment. So, spend two years deployed, collect your pension at 58. Figure that most people come in at 18 or 22, there’s a good twenty years there where most Guard members have to have a second career. If anyone is curious, the calculators are online and you can do the math on what a “Guard baby” (twenty years of standard 2-weekends-a-month-2-weeks-a-year status) retirement would look like. Bottom line, (most of) the Guard is not institutionally dependent on pensions the same way active duty is.
Based on statements put out by the NG General, it sounds like everyone in DC is a volunteer. I’d love to know what’s going on with this, but curiously, nobody in the press or Congress on either side seems interested in asking these very simple questions. There are likely monetary reasons for that
I doubt very many of the E-4s stuck eating uncooked meat wanted to go to DC to bust right-wing terrorists. This was probably advertised as a short-term TDY for generic security purposes. But it’s orders, and there is a subset of the Guard that depends on a few weeks/months of orders to supplement their personal income. Like, they work for the post office making shit money and the Guard is the way they pay for a car or baby formula. Sometimes that’s their own fault for setting up their life that way, other times, it’s out of their control. Like because you lost your job to COVID lockdowns.
On a typical set of orders, you get per diem. In DC, lodging is $258/day and meals are $77. That’s why people signed up. TDYs to DC are one of the biggest money makers in the entire DoD and everybody knows it. If they offer you orders to DC, you fucking take them. Now I’ve heard around here (but cannot independently confirm) that these troops are not getting per diem. It would make sense to me; there was “government provided lodging” in the form of that parking garage, and “government provided meals” in regards to the catering contract, which would let Guard Bureau off the hook for paying them per diem directly.
That’s why they’re complaining about the food. They can’t buy their own meals, or at least, not without impacting personal finances. I guarantee you this is crushing morale and will make it almost impossible to get volunteers to stay. They’ll have to be extended without their consent, and this will cause internal shitstorms that will never be observed in the public sphere.
I can’t say with any certainty what the National Guard would or wouldn’t do. I hope they wouldn’t take orders to fire on their neighbors. I am also not justifying anything. The Guam troops doing what they did is disturbing. But I offer the above because it’s really important to understand the motivations and realities of your average National Guard troop varies wildly from your average cop.