Tea at Trianon: American Troops Go Unpaid

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, November 2, 2023

American Troops Go Unpaid

From The Federalist:

On Friday, Military.com reported that the military has failed to compensate roughly 9,000 National Guardsmen “the bonuses they were promised for signing up” to serve, with some payments having “been missing for years.” According to the report, the Guard is also “tracking an additional 3,900 soldiers who completed their service and left the military without getting any bonus payment, though some may have lost eligibility.”
As noted by the outlet, these bonuses, which can total as high as $20,000, are divvied up over the course of soldiers’ enlistment contracts, with the first half to be distributed after an enlistee completes initial service training. Meanwhile, the second half is “disbursed halfway through soldiers’ first contracts.”

Guard officials claim the usual waiting period to receive the first bonus is six months, although enlistees and their families have indicated “it can take years” to receive the payments.

“I was really relying on this money to help with moving into a new place with my wife,” one soldier told Military.com. “I did my end of things, and this is a really bad introduction to the Army, not taking care of people.”

The main cause of the issue appears to stem from understaffing and mismanagement of a “payment-processing system that has faced multiple long-term catastrophic outages.” According to the outlet, the system’s routine failures have resulted in staffers having to “repeatedly track and process payments manually” for years, prompting delays in payments to Guardsmen.

Despite honorably serving their country, these soldiers’ financial plights are at the bottom of the Biden Pentagon’s to-do list. A day before Military.com dropped its bombshell report, the Defense Department announced it was shipping another multi-million-dollar aid package to Ukraine. Totaling $150 million, the package includes an array of weapons, ammunition, and defense capabilities purportedly aimed at helping Kyiv continue its fight against Moscow.

While Congress and the Biden administration committed more than $113 billion in U.S. taxpayer dollars to Ukraine in 2022 alone, that hasn’t stopped the White House from bullying Congress into authorizing even more aid for the Eastern European nation. A little over a week ago, the Biden administration proposed a $105 billion spending package that would force Congress to ship billions more to Ukraine as a package deal with U.S. aid to Israel. In essence, the Biden administration is using Hamas’ attack on Israel to coerce House Republicans into dumping more money into Kyiv’s coffers.

It’s not just subsidizing Ukraine that takes priority over paying U.S. service members, however. The Pentagon is also busy at work bankrolling abortions for its female employees. In February, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced the agency would financially cover abortion-related travel expenses for service members and their dependents. This prompted Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville to launch a protest of the policy the following month. Using his position on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Tuberville has been slow-walking military promotions requiring Senate confirmation. (Read more.)