Supercommittee Co-Chair Patty Murray Accepts Award from Defense Industry As She Mulls Cuts To Pentag

[a kennedy]

Now isn't that special.....NOT!!!

When Senator John Kyl, a Republican member of the “supercommittee” charged with reducing the federal deficits by $1.5 trillion over the next decade, threatened to walk out on the panel if cuts to the defense budget were open for discussion, it was big news. Far less attention, almost none, in fact, has been paid to Democratic Senator Patty Murray, a co-chair of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction. But a recent award that the senator from Washington received may say more about the likelihood of cuts to the defense budget than the Arizona Republican’s tough talk. So, perhaps, does Murray's refusal to discuss it.

Last month, Patty Murray was awarded a bronze statuette featuring a little boy with a big smile on his face, running while holding a toy airplane aloft. Presented by the Aerospace Industries Association, a coalition of more than 300 defense and aerospace firms, the “Wings of Liberty Award” was given to Murray “in recognition of her longtime support of the aerospace and defense industry,” reads the organization’s press release. According to Jim Albaugh, the executive vice president of America’s second largest defense contractor, Boeing, and the chairman of AIA’s Board of Governors, “Senator Murray knows the value of the aerospace and defense industry.”

That “value” was clearly evident in an AlterNet analysis of the supercommittee’s financial ties to the defense industry and Murray’s in particular.

While corporations can’t directly donate money to candidates, their political action committees, officials, representatives and the immediate family members of the latter do. All members of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction have received significant contributions from the defense sector since 2007, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. For the Republicans, donations from the industry to their campaign committees and their so-called leadership political action committees (used by politicians to help fund other candidates’ campaigns in order to gain influence in Congress) added up to $321,000. For the Democrats, the collective haul was more than $1 million.

Murray’s individual take in defense industry donations since 2007 is greater than the combined total of the top four supercommittee Republican recipients.

http://www.alternet.org/world/152611/supercommittee_co-chair_patty_murray_accepts_award_from_defense_industry_as_she_mulls_cuts_to_pentagon_budget_/

[xchrom]

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