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 of 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.
The persuasion effort aimed at committee members will be largely an inside game, so our War Costs campaign went on offense yesterday with a full-page ad in a Capitol Hill insider publication to call for cuts to the war budget. (Please join our efforts by joining War Costs on Facebook.) 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 give lose between 3,200 and 11,700 jobs, at least. War spending is terrible at job creation, period.
- Lockheed Martin: $38.4 billion (84 percent of total 2010 revenues)
- Northrop Grummon: $32.1 billion (92 percent of total 2010 revenues)
- Boeing: $27.7 billion (43 percent of total 2010 revenues)
- General Dynamics: $23.3 billion (72 percent of 2010 revenues)
- Raytheon: $22.3 billion (88 percent of total 2010 revenues)
Nor are these companies averse to spending money to make even more money. Between 2007 and today, they donated $1.4 million to the committee members' campaigns and PACs (according to information compiled from OpenSecrets.org), and they've 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 and 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 for sale.
- Senator Patty Murray (D-Wash.): (202) 224-2621
- U.S. Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas): (202) 225-3484