Unless Congress acts before January 1, sequestration will kick in and the defense budget will be slashed some $50 billion across the board—the first stage of cutbacks which could total $1 trillion over the next decade. That is certain to have a severe impact not only on Defense Department employees, civilians, and military, but also on the defense contractors that produce the vehicles, aircraft, ships, missiles, ammunition, and everything else needed to equip the armed forces.
Under the 1989 WARN Act (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification) companies with more than 100 employees are obligated to give 60-days notice of mass layoffs and plant closings. Lockheed Martin threatened to send out those notices on November 2, four days before the election–and with many of them arriving in swing states such as Virginia. That would not be good for President Obama’s reelection chances so his Office of Management and Budget has alternatively bullied and bribed the defense contractors not to send out the layoff notices–the demands of the law notwithstanding.
To follow up on Alana’s post yesterday, the latest news is that OMB has promised to pay severance costs for contractors if sequestration occurs—as long as they don’t send layoff notices in advance. This is about as flagrant an act of political manipulation—putting the demands of the president’s reelection campaign ahead of the demands of the law—as one can possibly imagine and it should be greeted with more public notice, and press outrage, than has been the case to date.
If only the Obama administration devoted a tenth as much energy to preventing sequestration as it does to preventing an immediate political hit from sequestration.
This should be an impeachable offense. Clear violation of oath to faithfully execute the laws.
This is outrageous. Someone want to explain to me where it states Obama can do this?? Where are the Republicans?! They should be loud and out in public. This has got to be stopped. My tax dollars helping BHO get re-elected is abhorent to me!!
Against sequestration but in favor of reducing the $ allocation to defense. There is so much overcharge and cheating to start with like most Gvt related business. nThe mass media will support anything the Pr. asks for including eliminating the whole DD.
The first question is why did Lockheed THREATEN to send out layoff notices on November 2 instead of simply doing so? n nThis cozy relationship between military contractors and the Pentagon demonstrates the pervasive corruption that had us building a $62 billion GE/Rolls Royce jet engine for the F-35 even after they lost the design contest to Pratt & Whitney. The Pentagon denies they wanted the engine and blames Congress – but the engineering did not take place in the Congress. A backup engine for chrissakes! n nWe are spending $700 Billion a year on our military, so the $50 billion sequestration will not be missed, except from our rising debt.
Imagine if Disney decided that they wanted not to have any Blacks (or Jews or whomever) in Disneyland and got all its vendors to agree not to hire anyone who was Black – promising to indemnify them from any discrimination lawsuits, got the local police departments to agree to go beat up Black motorists and generally be obnoxious racists, again agreeing to indemnify the local municipalities for the lawsuits, etc, etc, etc. And assume this is all documented, published on the web with documents similar to the one that Alana found. n nAbsolutely everyone involved in this would go to jail. The US Attorney would be involved very quickly (possibly along with the FL authorities) and the only difference here is that the authorities are part of the actual conspiracy which is what makes this messy. But there are two other points here. n nFirst, a basic point of contract law is that any contract that is in violation of public policy is null and void. If A hires B to go kill C and B decides not to, A can't drag him into court and demand the court order B to do so. If the government doesn't honor this promise, the defense contractors are out of luck because they can't sue to enforce a contract that itself is in violation of the law. n nSecond, even if they are paid, they are being paid (or reimbersed) for committing an illegal act. That makes this a False Claim under the Federal False Claim Act — and some intrepid legal group (e.g. "Citizens United") could bring a private suit to recover this fraudulently paid money – and get somewhere between 15% and 25% of it for themselves. n nA nice chunk of change to do whatever one wants to with — and how many unemployed lawyers are out there right now? n nAnd the even larger question — if sequestration is because of budget issues, and all of this started because of the shortage of funds, where will the money to pay for the fines to come from????