Lopsided Political Support By Big Aerospace
Keith’s note: Some research from a noted space policy expert: Open Secrets has a lot of data that lets you do a deep dive into who gave what to whom. Check out this chart (larger image). Looking at Big Aerospace – specifically the top 12 NASA contractors and their PAC contributions by party during the recent election cycle – all but SpaceX and Bechtel favor the congressional republicans. Republican-leaning donors are shown in red, Democrat-leaning contributors are shown in blue.
Traditionally PACs focus on incumbents, which makes these numbers even more skewed. Every contractor gave significantly to Sen. Cruz (R-TX) and virtually ignored Sen. Sinema (D-AZ) for example. Oh yes, Sen. Sinema is about to become the Chair of the prime Senate space subcommittee (subcommittee on Aviation and Space, Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation). Big Aerospace gave candidate (and now Senator) Mark Kelly (D-AZ) next to nothing yet many aerospace contributors maxed out when donating to his opponent, incumbent Sen. McSally (R-AZ).
With such a lopsided approach to contributions toward their opponents why should Democrats feel a need to advance the Big Aerospace agenda? Out of ~$12 million in contributions, over $1 million more was given to Republicans than Democrats. Boeing, SAIC and Aerojet Rocketdyne gave 60% (or more) to Republicans. Aerojet Rocketdyne gave 73% more. Other than ULA, only company PAC contributions are included in chis chart – not contributions from employees. ULA doesn’t have a PAC, so employee contributions (73% Republican) were used.
How Big Aerospace Supported Efforts To Undermine Democracy, earlier post
Keith has the reasoning backwards. It’s actually, “why would Big Aerospace have any reason to support Democrats, who don’t support the Big Aerospace agenda of new launch vehicles and humanned exploration, but would rather spend NASA’s budget on global warming research instead?” And then the numbers make perfect sense. Keith’s logic is like Republicans complaining they have no reason to support BLM when the black vote is 90% Democratic — but the reason blacks vote that way is because they know which party is more responsive to them. Grow up.
You have obviously not been paying attention to which party has been the most consistent and vigorous supporter of commercial space in Congress.
Commercial space is an insignificant opportunity for profit to Big Aerospace — SpaceX and Blue Origin are running the old players out of that market. What Big Aerospace cares about are big fat old-space projects like SLS and Orion, along with national security old-space contracts. For the former, the man to pay is Richard Shelby, and for the latter, the GOP in general are the big supporters of national security.
Where’s Blue Origin?
They are really not politically active.
The idea that a person, cause, company or group will naturally donate more to a political party it believes favors its interests is highly suspect when it comes to the military-industrial complex. This also applies to law enforcement. Too much alignment of police, military or defense companies with a particular party should at least be disturbing, or more likely set off alarm bells.
It’s one thing to say that naturally a person who wants to end certain discrimination votes for a party that will carry their flag. It’s a whole other thing to say the defense establishment can also develop a clear party leaning. The simple reason? The latter can lead to a breakdown of civilian, democratic authority over the military and the police.
It’s in the interest of a democratic society to eschew an alignment of military and police with a single party. Before you know it, when a party chosen by “we the people” in a democratic process is not the one aligned with the people with the guns, the next step is the people with the guns decide democracy isn’t that important.
NASA relies on these same big defense companies, for decades now making the same strange bedfellows. Make a deal with the devil and eventually there will be a price to be paid. The fascism in Spain (Franco), Germany, Chile (Pinochet) and many others all learned this the hard way. We see reports for years now about the white supremacist problem in the police and military.
No, this is not about some worker-bees voting for whoever might favor a strong defense, or a better 401K. There is so much more at stake. I for one will never vote just in the interest of what’s good for NASA but bad for democracy. One day don’t be surprised there are a special class of laws against defense companies making ANY political donations, or police making ANY political endorsements, or any organizations inside these doing the same. This otherwise will not end well.
A case in point.
https://www.npr.org/2021/01…