Are we all dimwits? We just sit there with goofy looks on our faces while the economy sputters and the president blows what remains of the budget surplus on a tax giveaway to the rich. With nary a peep as the “what me worry?” kid has the gall to make stealing funds from Social Security and Medicare — to pay for a military buildup to fight an enemy that doesn’t exist — sound like fiscal responsibility.
There is method to the president’s madness, as he spelled out in his press conference Friday, proclaiming that the prospect of government red ink is “incredibly positive news” because it will produce “a fiscal straitjacket for Congress.”
Get it? The plan is to bankrupt the national government so we can be reduced to life as it’s lived in Texas, where the rich make out like bandits playing with public funds, as George W. did on that stadium deal, while the rest of the folks scramble. Texas politicians, including three presidents in the past 40 years, always make sure their companies are fed well at the Washington trough, even if it means going to war. Whatever the state of the federal budget, Bush is not going to be tight with the dollar when it comes to a bloated military, because big oil still needs that stick of U.S. military intervention to protect its investments abroad.
Why else do we need a military big enough to fight two wars at once except to protect U.S. investments that stretch from the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf? Think of it as a Social Security program — or more accurately, welfare — for military contractors and energy companies, led by Halliburton, where Dick Cheney hustled his quick millions.
Bush never believed in a progressive federal government, including its programs for seniors, but he had to pretend otherwise to win over moderate voters. Now he blithely offers a recession he helped create and a war that he’s not yet managed to find as a rationale for stealing from seniors: “I’ve said that the only reason we should use Social Security funds is in the case of an economic recession or war.”
That was Friday, but Monday the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said that this year $9 billion must be taken out of Social Security, thanks to Bush’s tax cut and the economic slowdown. What idiocy, to jeopardize the one domestic government program that really works. Seniors were once the poorest people around, and now they’re the most secure, thanks to the guarantee of at least a minimum income and healthcare. If you buy the lie that those programs just benefit seniors, consider the crushing burden on young families back in the good old days, when they struggled to provide for aging parents. Try to launch a career, raise a family and still pay the health costs of mom and dad, and you’ll get the picture.
Unless, of course, your family happens to be super rich like the president’s. For most Americans, Social Security and Medicare are the best family values programs, and it’s mind-boggling that we sit by while a born-rich president who has never known a second of family financial insecurity threatens to pull the safety net out from under the rest of us.
Go figure. Maybe we just find it too hard to follow the money — our money — particularly when all those zeros are tacked on. The federal budget is $1.9 trillion, and the $328 billion that Bush wants to give to the military must just sound like chump change. The big news, much easier to understand, is the sex life of a hick congressman whose name the baby boomers will have forgotten 10 years from now when they are informed that there is no money to cover the health and retirement payments owed them.
By then, the president who conned them will be back at his ranch in Crawford, chuckling about how he really put one over. As an ex-president, he may even get to cut ribbons at the umpteenth test of a missile defense program that will still be as far as ever from working.
Of course, wasting money on the military is a time-honored tradition, but with Bush, it’s truly getting out of hand. Even Rep. Jim Nussle, the Iowa Republican who heads the House Budget Committee, was perplexed by the administration’s asking for a defense hike before Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had even completed his review of what the military requires: “That’s unacceptable if they are planning on getting more,” Nussle said. “We’re not just going to throw money at defense again.”
Sure, he will, and so will most of his colleagues, and Bush knows it. That’s why the president so smugly welcomes the shriveling of the budget surplus as good news, because it means that those nonmilitary things the government is supposed to do but which he never approved of, such as healthcare for the working poor, won’t get done.
With barely more than two weeks left to go in 2012, it is only fitting that Congressional Republicans and Democrats are once again engaged in doing what they do best: playing politics with the economy. The current fight over extending a payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits is just one more installment in the nation’s least favorite reality TV show: Partisan Gridlock.
Both sides more or less agree that it would be a bad idea to raise taxes and cut benefits during a weak economy — the question is what kind of pound of flesh will be extracted in exchange for a deal. Democrats want to pay for the extensions by taxing millionaires. Republicans want to pay for the measures by scooping money out of Obama’s priorities, such as health care reform, while pursuing their own agenda — gutting EPA regulations, getting the Keystone XL pipeline built, making it harder for poor women in Washington D.C. to get an abortion.
Public polling seems to indicate that the voters generally favor taxing millionaires more than they do the Republican policy riders. That would seemingly put President Obama and Congressional Democrats in a strong position. And on the surface, so far, it would appear that Obama has been playing his hand well — tightening his rhetoric on inequality, threatening to veto any bill that attempts to jam through the Keystone pipeline as part of a deal. But his actual position is weaker than it seems. The truth is that neither Republicans nor Democrats have the votes to pass their own dream legislation, so a compromise is inevitable. And that compromise, by definition, will include things that Democrats don’t like. Republicans won’t get all of their policy riders, but they’ll get something.
Obama has no real choice, because standing pat is not an option. Politically, Obama might gain by making the entirely reasonable argument that dogmatic obstruction by Republicans pursuing ideological goals doesn’t serve the country’s pressing needs. But if the payroll tax cut expires and longterm unemployment benefits aren’t extended, millions of Americans who are already struggling will take another hit. And that simply isn’t acceptable.
How exactly we will get to the endgame is impossible for anyone who is not privy to the negotiations that are undoubtedly going on between Congressional leaders right now to say. But the general outline, after a year of government shutdown and debt ceiling fights, is all too familiar. Mitch McConnell, Harry Reid, and John Boehner will continue to say mean things about each other. A series of futile votes will be held, supposedly to demonstrate what each side already knows — that neither party has the power to ram through its agenda. Tension will build — but the postponing of a vote on the “omnibus” spending bill necessary to keep the government operating past Friday adds the necessary deadline frisson to force some kind of resolution.
There will be a deal before Christmas. But how will we decide who “wins” at the end? Easy — just keep a close eye on how the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefit extensions are paid for. Most of the GOP policy riders will fall by the wayside; the true battle is whether the extensions get paid for at all, or whether funding comes from carve-outs out of Obama’s agenda. If there’s any kind of tax increase at all on the wealthy, that would be a win for Democrats, but don’t hold your breath. Because even if politically, Obama has a strong hand, pragmatically he doesn’t. There are more than enough Republicans willing to let the interests of working and middle class Americans take a hit if it means holding the line against higher taxes on the richest Americans. And if economic growth slows in 2012 as a result, that’s a bonus for the GOP, because the incumbent party gets the ultimate responsibility for that quagmire.
The advice from here? Turn off CSPAN and go do your Christmas shopping. This reality show needs to be cancelled.
Mervin Sealy from Hickory, North Carolina, takes part in a protest rally outside the Capitol Building in Washington, October 5, 2011. (Credit: Jason Reed / Reuters)
On Monday, the Dow Jones industrial average fell 300 points, a plunge immediately blamed on the supercommittee’s failure to agree on a debt reduction deal. If this is true, investors were displaying a remarkable lack of attention to current events. Is there anyone on Wall Street or in Washington, D.C., or anywhere else who expected the supercommittee to succeed? Failure should already have been “priced in” by the markets. As anticlimaxes go, the only surprising thing about the supercommittee’s impotence is that anyone was surprised by it.
The most obvious proof that investors aren’t really alarmed by the prospect that partisan political gridlock will continue as least until the end of 2012 comes from the bond market. U.S. Treasury yields fell again, probably because investors who are continuing to be spooked by Europe’s sovereign debt woes are looking once again for the safest place to put their money. Despite all its faults, the U.S. economy is still growing faster than Europe’s, and the prospect that we will default on our debts still seems to be much lower than the chances that Europe won’t fix its own mess.
But that’s not to say that there won’t be economic fallout from this not-so-epic fail. If no action is taken by the end of the year, both payroll tax cuts and extended unemployment benefits will expire for millions of beleaguered Americans. That’s the definition of anti-stimulus, hitting American consumers directly in the pocketbook. Tuesday’s unexpected downward revision of the third quarter GDP growth estimate from 2.5 to 2.0 percent — a definite wet blanket stifling the more optimistic perceptions of the economy that had been percolating in recent months — emphasizes the risk. According to various estimates, the expiration of the payroll tax cut and extended unemployment benefits will together cut another 1 percent or so off of GDP growth. That will put the U.S. economy back perilously near a full standstill.
If it seems strange to be bemoaning a debt-reduction committee’s failure to extend a payroll tax cut and a social safety net benefit, both of which would obviously increase the deficit, well then, consider this: The biggest roadblock to getting a deal cut was Republican insistence on keeping all the Bush tax cuts in place. Indeed, the final GOP proposal actually pushed for lowering the maximum tax rate on the wealthy even further. But the long-term negative deficit reduction implications of keeping the Bush tax cuts in place for the wealthy dwarf the budgetary impact of the short-term measures that would help middle- and working-class Americans.
Tax cuts for the wealthy don’t give you as much stimulus bang-for-your buck (the rich are more likely to save their windfalls rather than spend them). So what this means is that the real impact of the supercommittee’s failure is that instead of providing short-term help to people who most need it, which would spur economic growth, Republicans have stood by their determination to keep tax cuts in place that will do the most long-term budget damage, while benefiting the people who least need it.
There’s no reason to be surprised by this outcome. But we can still get hopping mad about it, if we want to.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nev. gestures during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington on Thursday, Sept. 22, 2011, to discuss FEMA funding and the Continuing Resolution to fund the government. (AP Photo/Harry Hamburg) (Credit: AP/Harry Hamburg)
The Democratic-led Senate blocked a House-passed bill on Friday that would provide disaster aid and keep government agencies open, escalating the parties’ latest showdown over spending and highlighting the raw partisan rift that has festered all year.
In a tit-for-tat battle, the Senate first used a near party-line vote of 59-36 to derail the measure from the Republican-run House. The House bill would fund federal agencies and provide $3.7 billion in disaster assistance, partly paying for that aid with cuts in two loan programs that finance technological development.
Then, Senate Republicans refused to let the chamber vote on a compromise offered by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., that was similar to the House version but lacked the loan program cuts. A vote on Reid’s measure was set for Monday afternoon, but Republicans seemed likely to prevail because Democrats would need 60 votes to win — exceeding the 53 votes they have.
The basic dispute pitted GOP objections that the bill’s emergency spending was too costly against Democratic complaints that cutting the energy loan programs would stifle the economy and cost jobs.
The fresh round of brinksmanship came with lawmakers facing two deadlines. Obama administration officials have warned that the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s fund for disaster victims could run out of money early next week, even as claims from Hurricane Irene and other recent disasters continue to arrive at government offices. And Congress has completed none of the 12 annual spending bills for the federal fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, meaning agencies would have to close their doors without fresh funding.
“The government’s not shutting down. I spoke to Mr. Fugate myself,” Reid said, referring to FEMA director Craig Fugate. “FEMA is not running out of money. We’ll come here Monday, reasonable heads will prevail.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said Democrats were ignoring the government’s budget problems.
“What’s at stake is whether we’re going to add to the debt or not,” McConnell said.
The measure the House passed early Friday would temporarily prevent a federal shutdown by financing government agencies from the Oct. 1 start of the new fiscal year through Nov. 18. It was approved by a near party-line 219-203 vote.
The Senate version, approved last week with the support of 10 GOP senators, provided $6.9 billion in disaster aid and no cuts to help pay for it.
White House spokesman Jay Carney faulted House Republicans for the deadlock on Friday, saying they had passed legislation knowing it would die in the Senate, just as they had during last month’s fight over extending the federal debt limit.
“The fever hasn’t broken — the behavior that we saw this summer that really repelled Americans continues,” Carney said.
A spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, blamed Democrats, saying the House-passed bill had enough money for the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the short term and that Congress could provide more money later.
“The Senate Democratic leadership is essentially threatening to delay FEMA money that families need right now for a partisan gain,” said the spokesman, Michael Steel.
It was unclear how the standoff would be resolved. The House and Senate had both planned to take next week off, but neither seemed likely to risk accusations of ignoring the thousands of Americans victimized by natural calamities or of allowing the government to shut its doors.
“We’re establishing priorities,” said Rep. David Dreier, R-Calif. “We have a priority, that being dealing with our fellow Americans.”
House passage represented a reversal from an embarrassing setback the chamber dealt its Republican leaders on Wednesday. On that day, the House rejected a nearly identical measure, shot down by Democrats complaining its disaster aid was too stingy and conservative Republicans upset that its overall spending was too extravagant.
The bill the House approved Friday morning contained just one change — an additional $100 million in savings from cutting a second Energy Department loan program, this one aimed at sparking new energy technologies.
That is the same program that financed a $528 million federal loan to Solyndra Inc., the California solar panel maker that won praise from President Barack Obama but has since gone bankrupt and laid off its 1,100 workers. The Obama administration had praised Solyndra as a model for green energy companies, but now Congress is investigating the circumstances under which the government approved the loan.
The gridlock over the spending bill was the third time this year the two parties have clashed over legislation whose passage both sides considered crucial.
In April with just hours to spare, the two sides reached agreement on a bill that averted a federal shutdown and provided money for government agencies through September. Then this summer, they battled for weeks before finally approving legislation extending the government’s borrowing authority and narrowly preventing a historic federal default.
Against a backdrop of the 2012 presidential and congressional elections and angst over the country’s dismal job market, this year’s clashes have been intensified by the infusion of dozens of tea party Republicans who often show little inclination to compromise.
Wednesday’s defeat of the spending bill was only the most recent time they have made life difficult for Boehner. And it underscored the challenges ahead this fall as Congress tackles efforts to fix the economy, create jobs and try to control the $14 trillion national debt.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nev. gestures during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington on Thursday, Sept. 22, 2011, to discuss FEMA funding and the Continuing Resolution to fund the government. (AP Photo/Harry Hamburg) (Credit: AP)
With the economy sputtering, the warring factions of Congress have lurched toward gridlock over the usually noncontroversial process of approving disaster aid and keeping the government from shutting down.
The GOP-dominated House early Friday muscled through a $3.7 billion disaster aid measure along with a stopgap spending bill to keep the government running past next Friday. The narrow 219-203 tally reversed an embarrassing loss for House GOP leaders that came Wednesday at the hands of rebellious tea party Republicans.
Even before the House vote, however, the leader of the Senate promised that majority Democrats will scuttle the measure as soon as it reaches the chamber on Friday. Democrats there want a much larger infusion of disaster aid and they’re angry over cuts totaling $1.6 trillion from clean energy programs — and the strong-arm tactics being tried by the House.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said the House plan “is not an honest effort at compromise. … It will be rejected by the Senate.”
The combination of events promises to push the partisan war into the weekend and could increase the chances that the government’s main disaster aid account at the Federal Emergency Management Agency might run dry early next week.
More broadly, the renewed partisanship over what should be routine moves to help disaster victims and prevent a government shutdown sends a discouraging sign as a bitterly divided Washington looks ahead to more significant debates on President Barack Obama’s jobs plan and efforts by a congressional supercommittee to slash deficits.
Thursday’s maneuvering started as Republicans controlling the House moved to resurrect the disaster aid package after an embarrassing loss on Wednesday.
Instead of reaching out to Democrats, House GOP leaders looked to persuade wayward tea party Republicans to change their votes and help approve the assistance — and try to force Senate Democrats into a corner with little choice but to accept cuts to clean energy programs they favor. One sweetener for conservatives was to add $100 million in savings from a program that financed a federal loan to the now-bankrupt solar panel maker Solyndra Inc.
Republicans had hoped that once the House passed the measure, Senate Democrats would have had little choice but to accept it, especially with lawmakers eager to escape Washington for a weeklong recess. The move instead infuriated Democrats, who felt GOP leaders were trying to “jam” them into accepting the GOP bill.
“We’re fed up with this,” said Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the Democratic Whip. “They know what it takes for us to extend (stopgap funding) and keep the government in business. And this brinksmanship … we’re sick of it.”
Unless Congress acts by midnight next Friday, much of the government will shut down. More immediate is the threat that the government’s main disaster aid account will run out of money early next week.
“The Senate should pass this bill immediately, and the president should sign it, because any political games will delay FEMA money that suffering American families desperately need,” said Michael Steel, spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio.
The battling came as the stock market absorbed heavy losses and pessimism about the economy deepened. The arguing was reminiscent of the poisonous atmosphere of this summer rather than lawmakers’ more recent promises to work together to find common ground where possible.
Wednesday’s embarrassing 230-195 defeat of the disaster aid bill in the GOP-majority House exposed divisions within the Republican Party that demonstrated the tenuous grip that Boehner has on the chamber. Forty-eight Republicans opposed the measure then, chiefly because it would permit spending at the rate approved in last month’s debt pact between Boehner and Obama, a level that is unpopular with tea party lawmakers.
GOP leaders maneuvered to win a vote on the largely identical measure by arguing to their party members that the alternative was to give Democrats a better deal by adding more disaster aid or decoupling it from $1.5 billion in spending cuts.
“What we voted on yesterday was the best deal Republicans could get and it can only go downhill from here,” said Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y. “So we should try to re-vote again on the same bill we had yesterday, vote on it again, pass it this time, or if not we’ll have to make concessions that would help the Democrats.”
GOP leaders cut those defections in half, to 24, on Friday morning’s tally. Six Democrats from disaster-hit districts voted for the measure.
The vast majority of Democrats opposed the legislation over $1.5 billion in accompanying spending cuts from an Energy Department loan program for help in producing fuel-efficient vehicles.
To those cuts, House leaders added another $100 million in savings from a loan guarantee program for renewable energy projects approved under the 2009 stimulus law. Congress set aside $2.4 billion in case some of the loans went bad, such as a $500 million-plus loan to now-bankrupt Solyndra Inc., a California-based solar panel maker effusively praised by Obama.
Time is running short for disaster victims.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Thursday that the government’s main disaster aid account is “running on fumes” and could be tapped out as early as early next week. She called on Congress to quickly resolve the problem or risk delays in getting disaster projects approved.
“We have stretched this as far as it can go,” Napolitano told The Associated Press as she flew to Joplin, Mo., to view tornado damage. “We are scraping the bottom of the barrel.”
As of Thursday morning, there was just $212 million in the FEMA’s disaster relief fund. The House measure contains $3.7 billion in disaster aid, mostly for the FEMA fund. A rival Senate measure muscled through that chamber last week by Reid — with the help of 10 Republicans — would provide $6.9 billion.
The drama and battling over disaster aid and stopgap spending is unusual. Such measures usually pass routinely since the alternative is shutting down much of the government and denying help to victims of floods, hurricanes and other disasters.
What is more, the House GOP plan won bipartisan support in June when it passed as part of a broader homeland security spending bill. And the $3.7 billion in House aid would provide sufficient help while lawmakers work out a broader spending bill for the 2012 budget year beginning Oct. 1.
Senate Democrats are instead insisting on fully funding most disaster aid programs as part of the stopgap measure, an unusual move.
The current imbroglio illustrates the difficulty lawmakers are sure to have when trying to address tougher problems. The toughest task confronts the so-called supercommittee, which is supposed to come up with at least $1.2 trillion in deficit savings over the coming decade to implement the August budget and debt pact.
The panel had its third public meeting Thursday, again exposing differences between Republicans and Democrats on taxes. The panel has until Thanksgiving to produce legislation — and there’s no sign yet of much progress toward agreement.
Before Thursday night’s eruption, the Senate had had an unusually productive week. For example, it voted Thursday to help American workers who fall victim to foreign competition. The move to renew expired portions of the Trade Adjustment Assistance program, which provides retraining and financial support for workers adversely affected by trade, sets the stage for Obama to submit trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama.
Arizona’s Republican Sen. Jon Kyl wasted little time. A member of the bipartisan congressional “supercommittee” charged with finding $1.5 trillion in deficit reductions, he did his best to forestall even discussion of cuts to the Pentagon’s budget. “When we had our first meeting the chairman asked, ‘Well, what do we think about defense spending?’ and I said, ‘I’m off of the committee if we’re gonna talk about further defense spending [cuts],’” he told the audience at a recent forum sponsored by several conservative think tanks.
The Senate minority whip may be the most outspoken member of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction when it comes to the military budget, but the Democrats currently considering whether to cut the deficit via reductions in defense spending or programs like Medicare and Medicaid have received far more money from Pentagon contractors than Kyl or any of their Republican colleagues on the panel, according to an investigation by Alternet, with assistance from the Brave New Foundation and Salon.com.
Since 2007, Democrats on the supercommittee have received more than $1 million in defense industry donations, while contributions to the Republicans added up to only $321,000. Panel co-chair Sen. Patty Murray, for example, has received more defense industry dollars over that period than the combined total of the top four Republican recipients on the supercommittee. Even so, her haul from the Pentagon’s weapons-makers isn’t the largest by a panel Democrat, a distinction held by her colleague from South Carolina, James Clyburn.
An analysis of official government data paints a disturbing picture of big money, cozy relationships and potential influence that, alongside a concerted lobbying effort by the Pentagon and its powerful defense contractors, makes substantial reductions to the Department of Defense’s budget improbable and steeper cuts to entitlement programs, like Medicare and Medicaid, more likely.
(From Brave New Films,”War Costs: Buying the Deficit Committee.” For more information, go to WarCosts.com)
Line in the Sand
A product of the legislation passed to raise the federal debt ceiling this summer, the supercommittee — six members of the House and six from the Senate — must come up with a plan to slash federal deficits by about $1.5 trillion over the next decade, and do so by Nov. 23. If the panel fails or if its proposals are rejected by the full Congress, it will trigger automatic spending cuts across the federal government — a process called sequestration.
At the moment, before the panel makes any decisions, the Department of Defense faces a likely “cut” of around $350 billion in funds over the next decade under a plan proposed by the White House that became part of the debt ceiling agreement. However, as Salon contributor Winslow Wheeler and others have pointed out, those “cuts” are reductions in future spending increases — not actual budget cuts in any normal sense. And this is where the Pentagon has drawn a line in the sand, likely with an eye toward a slightly larger figure that they will “grudgingly” accept.
As part of the Pentagon’s lobbying effort to cap the cuts, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently warned that anything more than a $400 billion reduction would have a “catastrophic effect” on national security. When Sen. John McCain asked Gen. Martin Dempsey, the incoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about a possible $800 billion decrease over 10 years, Dempsey replied, “I haven’t been asked to look at that number. But I have looked and we are looking at $400 [billion] … Based on the difficulty in [achieving] the $400 billion cut, I believe achieving $800 billion would be extraordinarily difficult and very high risk.”
Not to be outdone, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta called $400 billion in cuts reasonable, but said a decrease of $600 billion, his estimate of the Pentagon’s additional loss in the event of sequestration, would lead to “dangerous cuts across the board — defense cuts that I believe would do real damage to our security, our troops and their families, and our military’s ability to protect the nation.”
At the same time that the Pentagon has been waging this scare-offensive, top defense contractors have launched a lobbying campaign, dubbed “Second to None,” in an attempt to mobilize average Americans to pressure their representatives to reject cuts to defense spending. Using twin specters of terrorism and the loss of manufacturing jobs, the campaign is far from subtle.
“American leadership in aerospace and defense is being threatened by forces in Congress and the administration,” the group’s website warns. “The security of our troops, our technological future and our economic stability are all at risk. We must preserve jobs across the nation that keep our nation strong. Join us and act now before it is too late.”
These efforts may, however, be mere window dressings compared with the industry’s most effective (and least acknowledged) everyday lobbying efforts, which are much less transparent than either the current Pentagon and industry campaigns.
Spread the Wealth
For many years, top defense firms have divided work on weapons systems across multiple states in order to exert influence over Congress. The supercommittee is far from immune. As the Associated Press recently reported, the “six Republicans and six Democrats represent states where the biggest military contractors — Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Raytheon Co. and Boeing Co. — build missiles, aircraft, jet fighters and tanks while employing tens of thousands of workers.”
An Alternet analysis of government contract data for the congressional districts of House members on the supercommittee bears this out. California Democrat Xavier Becerra, a senior member of the House Ways and Means Committee, has seen more than $19 million worth of work from Pentagon contracts awarded to his district since 2007. It’s been $53 million for the district of Jeb Hensarling, the Texas Republican who co-chairs the supercommittee. Dave Camp, the Republican from Michigan who heads the House Ways and Means Committee, has seen $59 million worth of work from defense contractors in his district during that same period. For Michigan Republican Fred Upton, the chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, it’s been $156 million in defense contracts for his district over the same years.
The House’s third-ranking Democrat and a veteran of the powerful Appropriations Committee, James Clyburn, has seen almost $1.8 billion go to defense contractors like General Dynamics, ITT and BAE Systems, in his district. And for Maryland’s Chris Van Hollen, the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, an astounding $8.8 billion in Pentagon contracts, including deals with defense giants Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems and General Dynamics, have gone to his district since 2007.
In the Senate, Democrats Patty Murray of Washington state, the supercommittee co-chair and a founding co-chair of the Senate Aerospace Caucus; John Kerry of Massachusetts, a former presidential candidate and current member of the Finance Committee; and Montana’s Max Baucus, who chairs the Finance Committee, all have defense interests in their states, although some are far more powerful than others. Since 2007, Montana has seen a modest $1.2 billion in defense contracting work. Not so for Washington state which has reaped $26.5 billion in defense deals, while contracts in Massachusetts, to companies including Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, BAE Systems, L-3 Communications and Textron, among many others, added up to an eye-popping $56.6 billion over the same years.
On the other side of the aisle, Ohio’s freshman Republican Sen. Rob Portman represents a state whose defense contracting take since 2007 was nearly $30 billion. In John Kyl’s Arizona, deals with massive weapons-makers like Lockheed, Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics, BAE Systems and Honeywell, to name a few, have pushed total Pentagon dollars spent there to $55 billion in those same years. While Pennsylvania, which elected supercommittee member Pat Toomey to the Senate last year, bested them all with $57 billion in deals for defense work, including major Defense Department contracts with Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman, since 2007.
The money, however, doesn’t just flow one way. While corporations can’t directly donate funds to candidates, their political action committees, officials and representatives (as well as immediate family members of the latter) do. According to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, all members of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction have received significant contributions from the defense sector since 2007. But during the 2010 election cycle, half of the Republicans on the panel — John Kyl, Pat Toomey and Rob Portman — received no donations from either of the two largest defense contractors, Lockheed Martin and Boeing. (These firms reaped approximately $28 billion and $18 billion in contracts, respectively, from the Pentagon that year.) Of the six Democrats on the supercommittee, only Kerry received no contributions from one of the two defense giants
No member of the supercommittee, and no lawmaker in all of Washington, D.C., received more donations from Boeing than co-chair Patty Murray. Of the $3.2 million that the missile-maker dispersed to lawmakers in 2009-2010, the Washington Democrat received $85,860. That sum was $20,000 more than was donated to the next two largest congressional recipients of Boeing money combined, according to data from the Sunlight Foundation.
An analysis by Alternet further found that more than one-third of Murray’s top 100 donors during the 2010 cycle were defense contractors that collectively signed $57.5 billion worth of deals with the Pentagon last year.
Just last week, the Aerospace Industries Association, the coalition of more than 300 defense and aerospace firms behind the Second to None campaign, presented Murray with their Wings of Liberty Award “in recognition of her longtime support of the aerospace and defense industry,” according to their press release. “Senator Murray knows the value of the aerospace and defense industry,” said Jim Albaugh, Boeing’s executive vice president and the chairman of AIA’s Board of Governors to mark the occasion.
“Value” is the operative word.
Since 2007, Murray’s haul in defense industry donations is greater than the combined total of the top four Republican recipients (Camp, Portman, Upton and Hensarling) on the supercommittee. Yet even she doesn’t top House veteran James Clyburn. Over that same period, the South Carolina Democrat received more than $311,000 in defense industry donations, including $141,000 during the 2010 election cycle. The Alternet analysis also found that 13 of Clyburn’s top 20 donors during the 2010 election cycle were defense contractors who were collectively awarded more than $23 billion in contracts from the Pentagon in 2010.
No Gloom, No Doom
According to Winslow Wheeler, who worked on national security issues on Capitol Hill for 31 years, the popularly cited “doomsday” cuts of around $850 billion to military budgets mentioned in regard to sequestration are likely underestimates. In reality, the mandatory reductions would probably wipe out close to $1 trillion in projected Pentagon spending over the next 10 years. This, however, would be far from catastrophic, according to Wheeler. Citing analysis by Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, Wheeler wrote last month at the Huffington Post:
[T]he “doomsday mechanism” would reduce the Pentagon’s “base” (non-war) budget to about $472 billion, the approximate level of the base [Department of Defense] budget in 2007. I do not recall anyone declaring our national security being “imperiled” at that spending level in 2007. In fact, that level of spending for the “base” (non-war) Pentagon budget was a sixteen year high…
Both Harrison’s and Wheeler’s analyses suggest that industry warnings about defense plants being shuttered are more scare tactic than reality. In addition to continued high levels of U.S. defense spending even in the event of sequestration, the Pentagon has, for the last year, also taken substantive countermeasures to shield its key contractors from future financial peril, including trips to Wall Street to lobby investors to bolster weapons-makers and brokering deals with Persian Gulf states to keep assembly lines active and coffers full.
Wheeler, however, believes there is no realistic chance of any substantive cuts even if the deficit panel flops and sequestration ensues. In his Salon piece, the Pentagon budget expert wrote, “the supercommittee is bound to fail … when the committee fails, the defense cuts envisioned by the supposedly automatic trigger mechanism will not occur. That will be for the simple reason that almost no one wants that to happen.”
There’s good reason to believe Wheeler. In an economic and electoral environment in which creating and preserving jobs now dominates the political discourse, big defense firms have the power to punish elected representatives by moving existing jobs to, or locating future projects in, states where lawmakers are willing to more readily play ball with them. Given that, is Patty Murray ready to risk the jobs of 30,000 Boeing workers building refueling aircraft for the Air Force in Everett, Wash.? Or will Texas’ Jeb Hensarling look past the 1,100 Textron workers in Amarillo working on the V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft? Or will Rob Portman be willing to go back on his promise to “fight to support Ohio jobs that are integral to our national security,” specifically those at the General Dynamics tank-manufacturing plant in Lima, Ohio, and the General Electric aircraft engine factory in the Cincinnati suburb of Evendale?
Which Side Are You On?
There’s little reason to believe that Jon Kyl will need to make good on his threat to walk out on the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction. While he may be the most vocal member when it comes to protecting the Pentagon budget, he sits across the aisle from panel members with markedly deeper ties and tighter financial bonds to the defense industry.
This year, the National Labor Relations Board, an independent government agency established to protect workers’ rights, filed a complaint alleging Boeing violated labor law by opening a new $750 million manufacturing plant for commercial airliners in James Clyburn’s South Carolina in order to punish Boeing workers in Patty Murray’s Washington State for repeated strikes. In the immediate wake of Boeing’s decision to set up shop in South Carolina, a spokesperson for Murray said, “She won’t be as inclined to work for anything not Washington state-related for this company,” but the Boeing-funded senator has thus far refused to even weigh in on the NLRB ruling. The Boeing-supported Clyburn, for his part, contends the weapons-maker has done nothing wrong.
After a meeting earlier this year with Boeing’s chief executive officer, Jim McNerney, Clyburn defended the defense giant’s decision to relocate its operations to South Carolina, but hedged his bets. “I am pro-business. I am pro-union. I am not anti-business. I am not anti-union,” he said.
A real reining-in of defense spending by the supercommittee would mean markedly more than $1 trillion in cuts over the next 10 years. Even the supposed “doom” of sequestration would still leave the industry sitting as pretty as it was in a boom year like 2007. The likelihood of either coming to pass is, however, astonishingly slim. With deep pockets, easy access to lawmakers, and the power of manufacturing jobs as an ace in the hole, defense contractors are well-positioned to fend off even modest reductions to future Pentagon budget increases.
In regard to Boeing’s move east and the fight between the weapons-maker and union workers, Clyburn wanted to have it both ways. He won’t have that luxury this fall, even if both supercommittee recommendations and sequestration ultimately fail. Before Thanksgiving, Clyburn and his supercommittee colleagues will be forced to make a clear decision for cuts to programs like Medicare and Medicaid or the type of budgets that have resulted in nearly $8 trillion in national security spending since 2001.
Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com and the winner of a 2009 Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction as well as a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, In These Times, and regularly at TomDispatch.
This story is a joint investigative project of Salon, AlterNet, and Brave New Foundation. More Nick Turse
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