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
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.
Follow Robert Greenwald on Twitter: www.twitter.com/robertgreenwald
Bruce Judson: Restoring Capitalism: Unequal Justice -- Banker Arrests O; Protester Arrests 2,511
Lyle Denniston: A Constitutional Agenda for Occupy Wall Street
Occupy Cal 11/9/11
www.youtube.com
Berkeley police beating Cal students before retreating;)
So, while this article is eye-opening regarding the amount of money paid to individuals in corporate America, taxpayers do not need to be concerned that their tax dollars are paying for those astronomical salaries or lobbying expenses.
W's reign of incompetence was the height of greed, selfishness, entitlement and disregard for the middle class and poor of this nation.
Our government was nearly bankrupted, the middle class lost a decade, the hundreds of thousands of military families have sacrificed, and the only ones to profit were the top 1 %.
It is disgusting.
It is sickening.
There are real people behind our criminal "corporate people" we need to shine a light on who these people really are, it's time to name names...
The real problem is not that they get something different, the real problem is the bribes they take from the insurance companies to keep all of America on a for profit health care system that can never work and drains billions out of the economy to make a few wealthy, while isolating the sickest people (the elderly) on medicare instead of using the excess spent on health insurance by everyone under 65 to support the larger health care needs of the country.
Would it be easier to stomach if the Government owend these companies?
Would these multi billion doallr companies pay corporate taxes if it was owned by the Fed?
What about all of the new technology that comes out of R&D for these companies?
Perhaps we should ask all of these companies to leave town and set up shop in China or Russia?
Perhaps we should end of military all together and tell the world to "come and take it"
If we stop making bullets, will all the world's bad guys go plant flowers instead of land mines?