From: Faith Gay <info@winwithoutwar.org>
Date: Sun, Sep 26, 2021, 10:50 AM
Subject: UPDATE: The House just passed a $776,000,000,000 Pentagon budget 👀
To:
...the amount of money weapons and war corporations have made since 9/11 is genuinely staggering: up to $7 TRILLION has gone directly from taxpayers into their corporate bank accounts.
It's the result of decades and decades of corruption: they've kept HUNDREDS of registered lobbyists on their payroll, spent more than $100 MILLION on lobbying every single year for the last decade, and have hired at least 1,700 (!!) recent former DOD officials — including generals, admirals, and acquisition officials.
It could pay off YET AGAIN: despite a president and Congress that promised a new way forward on how we would fund security in this moment, the House just voted to advance next year's whopping $776 BILLION annual Pentagon budget, even with the growing objections of progressive lawmakers.
Next up is the Senate, but that's where things could get interesting. We've seen this year that a single Senator can grind things to a halt to get what they want. That's why we are pushing tooth and nail for a committed group of Senators to say NO — and we need you with us!
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While they may be the most obvious, direct lobbying and campaign donations aren't actually the biggest tool in military corporations' influence arsenal.
It's what they do with that influence: weapons dealers know lawmakers are loath to oppose projects that create jobs in their district, so they work to intentionally spread production into as many congressional districts and states in the country as possible. That's exactly what Lockheed Martin has done with the F-35 program: claiming the workforce is spread over 46 states, even though there's just a handful of jobs in many.
It helps explain why one-third of all contracts flow to just five major weapons companies — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman — who together received more than $166 billion from those deals in fiscal year 2020 alone. It also explains why these giant corporations' CEOs are able to get away with giving themselves millions in bonuses every year.
It's time for Congress to get a REALITY CHECK on this corporate welfare: half of the people in this country are living paycheck to paycheck, just under 40 million are living in poverty, and over 600,000 are homeless including roughly 40,000 veterans.
It's time that we stop spending money on boondoggles arms lobbyists want, and start spending to improve working peoples' lives and tackle the true threats to human security: poverty, climate crisis, lack of healthcare, and more. With the Senate voting on the budget next, it's game-on to stop it.
More and more, politicians are turning down defense contractor dollars they rightly see as toxic to their electoral success. More and more, organizations who've worked tirelessly on underfunded programs are joining this campaign to get our priorities back in order.
And more and more, activists just like yourself are showing up to fight for the causes they believe in: peace over war, people over profits.
We are closer than we have ever been to turning the tide on rubber-stamped bloated Pentagon budgets, and we can't stop now.
Thank you for working for peace,
Faith, Erica, Amisha, and the Win Without War team
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