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
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
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
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.
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