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General News    H3'ed 11/23/11

Top 5 Taxpayer Turkeys Fattening War Industry CEOs

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The first real flight was pegged for 2016, with a program cost of $40 billion to $50 billion. An independent government report found $28 billion of F-35 spending has been a waste. The aircraft's makers, Lockheed Martin, like to point out the myriad of ways their profits could be lowered on the project, and we've demonstrated how money earmarked for Lockheed Martin executives would create more jobs were it spent on education or infrastructure.

Dear F-35, you make the war profiteers' belly warmer than a poor man's glass of whiskey. And for that, Lockheed Martin loves you.

4. Sen. Jon Kyl

There's failing to lead and leading to failure, and the Senate's No. 2 Republican is an expert at both.

You might remember Kyl's knack for making disparaging remarks on the Senate floor that were not intended to be a "factual statement." But what really makes Kyl the stuffing at the Boeing holiday party is his insistence that millionaire war contractors be spared the same economic pain as middle class families.

Despite adhering to an ideology that equates corporations with living human beings, Kyl sees every reason to exempt war contractors from the belt tightening that's being forced upon families across the U.S. While favoring austerity elsewhere, Kyl is doing all he can to stop a 15 percent cut to the war budget.

Even with a 15 percent cut factored in, that would be about half the cuts of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon and less than cuts made by George H. W. Bush, according to Lawrence J. Korb, an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration. Moreover, a 15 percent cut is a child's plate of peas when the war budget has increased by 50 percent since 2001 and will still be $37 billion more in 2021 than it is in 2011.

5. You and me

We enable the war profiteers. We pay for war contractor pensions, their vast network of lobbyists, and the salaries for top executives.

Technically, it's our elected officials who transform our tax dollars into self-perpetuating riches for Lockheed Martin CEO Robert Stevens ($21.89 million salary last year), Northrop Grumman CEO Wes Bush ($22.84 million) and Boeing CEO James McNerney ($19.4 million).

These companies use our tax dollars to further spin the system toward their corporate advantage. In many cases, the war contractors are bigger villains than CEOs at Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase.

Does that make us the war contractors' juiciest turkey?

It makes me mad and that's why I've stopped whispering and started shouting.

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Robert Greenwald is a producer, director and political activist; the founder and president of Brave New Films, a new media company that uses moving images to educate, influence, and empower viewers to take action around issues that matter. Under (more...)
 
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