Travel warning: four days until Trump’s shut-down costs TSA screeners their first paycheck
In four days, federal employees will suffer their first missed paycheck since Trump’s border wall shutdown; it’s hard to say who will be worst hit: the employees who are furloughed will never see that money (but who may have been able to pick up some other work while they were off the job to cover their bills); or the “essential” federal employees who’ve had to show up for work every day without pay, but who will, someday, get a paycheck to cover their forced labor.
In the latter group are 51,739 TSA “officers” (TSA screeners aren’t cops, but they’ve adopted the “officer” honorific in a bid to secure flyers’ obedience while they confiscate their apple-pie filling). Since the shut-down began, TSA officials have insisted that screeners were not staging “sick outs” (for example, to avoid daycare expenses by staying home with their kids) and that the extra waiting time that passengers were suffering through (53 minutes in Laguardia!) was the result of heavier than usual travel.
But after Friday, TSA screeners will have to decide whether they want to stay on the job without pay, and it’s a sure bet that lots of them will stay home, and there’s not much the TSA can do about it. A TSA walkout would cripple the nation’s businesses and strike directly at higher-income Americans (that is, the people who supported Trump as he used racist wall promises to secure the votes needed for a two-trillion-dollar tax giveaway to the wealthy).
What happens next is anyone’s guess. Trump’s probably right that giving in on the wall will lose him any chance of re-election as discouraged racists stay home from the polls (as they had done historically, until Trump gave them something to vote for), and deliver victory to Democrats who have a small but meaningful chance of taxing the shit out of looters and oligarchs. But the patience of looters and oligarchs – with the exception of a few long-term thinkers like Charles Koch – is in notoriously short supply. If Trump loses the racists, he won’t be able to help the billionaires. But if he loses the billionaires, he won’t be able to afford to court the racists.
https://boingboing.net/2019/01/08/racists-vs-billionaires.html
TSA employees cannot continue to work without pay. Nobody can. That’s not politics, that’s simple fact. Even the most die-hard TSA enforcer has to eat and pay their bills.
Which means at some point in the near future the TSA will be unable to perform airport screenings and will declare a shutdown. After that, things can only go two ways:
1. Airports simply stop TSA screenings and waive passengers onto flights as if it was pre-9/11 America.
OR
2. Airports are totally shut down, citing security concerns.
#1 would demonstrate how airport screenings are security theater and utterly worthless, designed to keep us afraid. Airports operated perfectly for 50 years without forcing passengers to take off their shoes or surrender pocket knives & shampoo. Bypassing the scary body scanners & invasive blue gloves because we can’t pay the TSA would remind Americans this is all bullshit.
#2 would be an economic disaster. Average citizens would riot. Americans who commute via air would be forced into unemployment, and the airline industry itself would teeter on the edge of ruin. The brief airport shutdown of 2001 literally drove some regional airlines out of business. The ripple effect would impact hundreds of service industries including catering, hotels, car rental companies… the economic impact would be apocalyptic.
So which will it be?
Prepare for increasing weirdness if this shutdown isn’t resolved very soon.
