As the budget super-committee convenes, the war industry has begun a huge lobbying effort to protect its taxpayer-paid profits.
he
new deficit commission held its first substantive meeting on 13
September, and the military contractors were out in force to protect
their profits. They'll be working to cash in on hundreds millions of
dollars in campaign donations and lobbying spending, and they will
deploy their favourite (and bogus) "jobs" spin. But members of the
committee should not be fooled. The war industry is interested in one
thing: continuing profits at our expense.
Tuesday morning, a campaign called "
Second to None,"
backed by the largest names in the military contracting industry,
staged a "March to the Hill." These contractors are armed with fresh
talking points and backed by
843 lobbyists (many of whom are former staffers of deficit committee members), along with
deep campaign donation histories with members of Congress. Every bit of this influence will be used to prevail upon the committee
not to call for cuts to military spending in its final report to Congress.
The persuasion effort aimed at committee members will be largely an inside game, so we have launched a counter campaign,
War Costs, launched with
a full-page ad Monday in a Capitol Hill insider publication
to call for cuts to the war budget. But since the contractors' game
beyond the back rooms will be waged using predictable talking points,
committee members should know that the central thrust of the
contractors' case for continued huge war budgets is false.
War spending costs us jobs
compared to other ways of spending the money. For every billion dollars
we spend on war, instead of education, renewable energy technology or
even simple tax cuts for consumption, we lose between 3,200 and 11,700
jobs, at least. War spending is terrible at job creation, period.
Now, keep that several-thousand-jobs cost per $1
billion in mind when you look at the following list. It's the amount in
revenues that each of the top five military contractors made in 2010,
strictly through doing business with the US government, according to
their annual reports:
Lockheed Martin: $38.4 billion (84% of total 2010 revenues)
Northrop Grummon: $32.1 billion (92% of total 2010 revenues)
Boeing: $27.7 billion (43% of total 2010 revenues)
General Dynamics: $23.3 billion (72% of 2010 revenues)
Raytheon: $22.3 billion (88% of total 2010 revenues)
Every one of these corporations was cited for misconduct in 2010 (misconduct varying
from contract fraud to environmental or labour violations). The committee members should remember that when these guys come calling to Capitol Hill, especially since
one
of the instances of misconduct for which Lockheed Martin was cited last
year was a violation of the False Claims Act in an attempt to grab more
US taxpayer dollars. The company paid $2 million to settle the justice department suit.
Between 2007 and the present, these corporations donated $1.4 million to the 12 committee members' campaigns and PACs alone,
according to information compiled from OpenSecrets.org, and they have spent
$210 million in the last 18 months on lobbying.
You can bet they'll spend more, much more, to keep the billions flowing
from our hands into their pockets. What happens in the deficit
committee over the next several weeks will be a test of whether our
representatives can make decisions in the name of the common good, or
whether our government really is up for sale.
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