PeteFree.comWhile Members of Congress and the President Receive Massive Amounts of Defense Sector Lobbying Money — Who Does the Dying? — Who Assists the Maimed? — Who Damps the Rage that We Leave in Our Wake?
© 2013 Peter Free
25 February 2013
Citation — to a short and pertinent article
John Knefel, Meet Six Politicians Getting Rich from America's Endless Wars, Truthout (21 February 2013)
Who’s buying whom?
John Knefel’s article starts out:
War is a racket, and perpetual war is a money-printing machine.
Though the defense industry as a whole contributes relatively little to members of Congress compared to, say, the pharmaceutical lobby, it remains an incredibly powerful and influential lobby.
Below are the . . . members of the House whose primary industry donor in the 2012 election cycle was the defense sector.
1. Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-CA): $566,100 in 2012 cycle defense sector donations.
2. CW “Bill” Young (R-FL): $229,760 in 2012 cycle defense sector donations.
3. Charles Albert “Dutch” Ruppersberger III (D-MD): $229,550 in 2012 cycle defense sector donations.
4. Morris “Mo” Brooks (R-AL): $202,020 in 2012 cycle defense sector donations.
5. Adam Smith (D-WA): $201,000 in 2012 cycle defense sector donations.
© 2013 John Knefel, Meet Six Politicians Getting Rich from America's Endless Wars, Truthout (21 February 2013) (paragraphs split and reformatted)
Knefel provides details for each.
His data comes from The Center for Responsive Politics
Which gets its facts from the Federal Elections Commission.
The Center’s mission is to track money in American government. You can see the list of the top 20 defense sector campaign money recipients, here.
Guess who got the biggest bucks
President Obama received $1,129,891 from the defense sector during the 2011-2012 election cycle.
His 2012 presidential election opponent, Republican nominee Mitt Romney, did even better — at $1,362,739.
Do you think we can trust “these guys” to put military lives ahead of their personal political ambitions?
The President and most of Congress have not been in the military. And the few who have seem not to mind sending our troops back much more repeatedly than they ever served.
The moral? — We get the warmongering that large corporations and plutocrats buy us
You can bet this crew of psychologically bribed and beholden Government folk are going to jump at their next opportunity to send troops to some other nastily unnecessary place.
Where plutocratic imperialism is concerned, the price is always paid in someone else’s blood.