Time to Occupy War Street - Here's Why!!!

Friends,

The Occupy movement is facing a huge range of inequities in our world, among them the huge Military-Industrial Complex that sucks both the spiritual and economic life from the citizenry.  Robert Greenwald has done an excellent job of succinctly presenting the GREED and dizzying influence of the corporate giants that dominate the killing industries.  Read it and then OCCUPY WAR STREET!!!

Peace,

Leonard

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Meet the 0.01 Percent: War Profiteers

By Robert Greenwald

 

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.

Egregious Military Contractor CEO pay

The top 0.01% of earners make at least $9.14 million per year, a rarefied strata of income that includes defense company CEOs and Wall Street bank chieftains alike. But a deeper dive demonstrates how defense companies outpace the big banks’ knack for enriching themselves at the expense of everyone else.

Military Contractor CEO Pay in 2010

• Northrop Grumman CEO Wes Bush: $22.84 million.

• Lockheed Martin CEO Robert Stevens: $21.89 million.

• Boeing CEO James McNerney: $19.4 million.

Just to put that in context, consider how these annual payoffs compare to the people we’re used to thinking of as poster children for the top 1 percent:

Financial Sector CEO Pay in 2010

• JP Morgan Chase CEO James Dimon: $20.81 million.

• Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf: $18.97 million.

• Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan: $1.94 million.

Considering how they stack up to financial sector heads, war industry CEOs aren’t just members of the 1%; they’re the super-elite among them, the one-hundredth of a percent.

Lobbying Domination

Disgusted by the overwhelming corporate influence in Congress? Look no further than the big military contractor companies, whose flagship companies spend enough on lobbying to dwarf even financial sector titans.

War Industry Lobbying Expenditures for 2010

• Lockheed Martin: $12.7 million.
• Northrop Grumman: $15.7 million.
• Boeing: $17.89 million.

Again, just to provide some context, here are the same lobbying totals for some of the most recognized names in the financial sector.

Financial Sector Lobbying in 2010

• JP Morgan Chase:$7.41 million.

• Wells Fargo: $5.43 million.

• Bank of America: $3.98 million.

The war industry gets away with blowing our money on job-killing spending because it can bend Congress to its whim. In the process, the industry is like a vacuum sucking up brain power and engineering resources that could and would establish and grow entirely new wholesome industries. It’s no surprise that Americans confront a 9.1% unemployment rate and an under-employment rate flirting with 20 percent this year.

Want to know where all the money went that could be putting people back to work or keeping U.S. manufacturing industries competitive? The war industry CEOs dumped lobbying cash on Congress and diverted all that wealth to their private bank accounts.

Striking a blow for democracy

The war contractors’ iron grip on the wealth and politics of our country has caught the attention of our friends at Occupy Wall Street, who are targeting war profiteers in its draft list of demands with a call to bring home “all military personnel at all non-essential bases” and to end the “Military Industrial Complex’s goal of perpetual war for profit.”

We’re allies of the Occupy movement, which swells from the 99%’s disgust and dysfunction with our system. A democracy for and of the people that favors the 0.01% at the expense of the 99.99% of us is no democracy at all.

We here at Brave New Foundation and the War Costs campaign have been inspired by the incredible work of the Occupy movement, so we created our latest video to help push this critical piece of their message: war for profit has to end. We’re asking viewers to share our video with their local Occupy groups and organize a guerrilla screening at an Occupy protest in your city.

The Occupy protests have a lot to teach us, and the leaderless movement is at minimum an indictment of our political system. They’ve stopped whispering, and we’ve all started shouting.

Occupy your city and show this video to your community.

Article printed from speakeasy: http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy

URL to article: http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2011/10/27/meet-the-0-01-percent-war-profiteers/

Military Spending is NOT a Jobs Program!!!

Friends,

While people are out occupying Wall Street the people on War Street, which is essentially the same entity, are busy maintaining War Street's Full Spectrum Dominance of the U.S. economy.  As the Senate's Supercommittee meets to figure out just where to cut the war industry, that same industry is waging a slick campaign to derail any "defense" cuts.

Second to None, a slick Website funded by the Aerospace Industries Association, spells out, in no uncertain terms, the economic doom we face should Congress make deep cuts in defense-related spending (lions and tigers and bears, oh my!!!).   

On the other hand, Heidi Garrett-Peltier, assistant research professor at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and co-author of the report “The U.S. Employment Effects of Military and Domestic Spending Priorities: An Updated Analysis,” Garrett-Peltier said on October 26th in testimony to the House Armed Services Committee, “My calculations show that the arms industry’s claims about increased unemployment are vastly exaggerated. A billion dollars spent on military production created about 11,000 jobs, compared to about 17,000 from clean energy, 19,000 from health care, and 29,000 from education.”

Data presented to House Armed Services Committee on October 26th

Miriam Pemberton, a research fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, also testified at the same committee hearing: “This committee needs to get back to the task of figuring out how much we need to spend to keep our country safe, not pushing unlimited military spending as a jobs program.”

To whose voice will the Senate give greater weight - the academics or those who stand to reap huge profits while driving our economy to ruin through the inflationary effect of war spending? We need to keep sending a clear message to the Supercommittee, and indeed every member of Congress - Cut war spending, not human needs!  Click here to send your suggestions to the Supercommittee.

Let's cut through the smoke and mirrors.  Don't let the war profiteers pull the wool over everyone's eyes.  Take action now.

Peace,

Leonard

Click here to read a brief Fact Sheet based on the study cited in this post: WHAT KINDS OF FEDERAL SPENDING CREATE THE MOST GOOD JOBS?

P.S. - Many thanks to the Institute for Public Accuracy for the news release presenting the data used in this blog post.