This week, the three military contractors that do the most business with the Pentagon announced their quarterly profits for 2012. Their profits continue to grow while they push Washington, D.C. to protect their budgets at the expense of the rest of us.
This week’s announcement raises a fundamental question: Should people and companies be allowed to make huge profits from war? Even raising this question in today’s environment may seem trite, but we used to have different answers than those that prevail in modern-day Washington, D.C.
There’s the top 1% of wealthy Americans (bankers, oil tycoons, hedge fund managers) and there’s the top 0.01% of wealthy Americans: the military contractor CEOs.
If you’ve been following the War Costs campaign, you already know that these corporations are bad bosses, bad job creators and bad stewards of taxpayer dollars. What you may not know is that the huge amount of money these companies’ CEOs make off of war and your tax dollars places them squarely at the top of the gang of corrupt superrich choking our democracy. These CEOs want you to believe the massive war budget is about security — it’s not. The lobbying they’re doing to keep the war budget intact at the expense of the social safety net is purely about their greed.
In many areas, including yearly CEO salary and in dollars spent corrupting Congress, these companies are far greater offenders than even the big banks like JP Morgan Chase or Bank of America.
The law that created the deficit committee also created a zero-sum game: Any expensive program that escapes the budget knife does so at the expense of cuts to other programs. If the military contractors succeed in keeping the war budget intact, they’ll likely do so at the expense of Social Security and Medicare.
That means money that would go to your Social Security or Medicare benefits will instead go into the hands of people like Lockheed Martin CEO Robert J. Stephens, who last year made $21.9 million, almost totally from taxpayer-funded military contracts. Read the rest of this entry →
On Tuesday, the military contractors behind the “Second To None” campaign pleaded “no comment” to our War Costs campaign’s full-page Politicoad exposing the economic damage caused by massive war budgets. The same day, they announced a press conference and the upcoming launch of a national campaign to scare people about job losses if we cut the war budget. It seems like they had a comment or two after all. But as these companies gather at the National Press Club on Wednesday morning to frighten you into funding their trust funds, remember: military spending costs us jobs compared to other ways of spending the money.
These contractors will undoubtedly try to obscure the fact that every $1 billion of military spending costs anywhere between 3,200 and 11,700 jobs or more when compared to other ways of spending the money. They’ll probably also try to obscure the fact that because the deficit committee has to find spending reductions equaling a certain dollar amount, this is a zero sum game, pitting military spending against the exact kinds of spending that would create more jobs. If the industry is right, and we should be coming at the question of where to cut spending from the perspective of job creation, then we have to cut war spending because other cuts would cost even more jobs.
Reporters should also keep in mind that these folks have a history of fudging jobs numbers when they feel it’s expedient for their profit margins. For example, back when Second-To-None-backer Lockheed Martin was trying to secure additional taxpayer dollars for its F-22 fighter jet in 2009, the contractor grossly inflated the number of jobs sustained by the program. The actual job numbers should have been less than 40 percent of those claimed by Lockheed. When this industry comes at you with jobs numbers, caveat emptor. Read the rest of this entry →
The new deficit commission is holding its first substantive meeting on Tuesday, and the military contractors are 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’ll deploy their favorite (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.
On Tuesday, a campaign called “Second To None,” backed by the largest names in the military contracting industry, is staging a “march to the Hill.” These contractors will be 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 the members. 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. Read the rest of this entry →
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