Meet the 0.01 Percent: The War Profiteers, the Super-Elite Kind

November 1, 2011 By in Contractors, Defense Department, Follow the Money, War

Via the Brave New Foundation:

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.

Want to know how much they’re spending for lobbyists?  Read in full here.

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