As more Americans sour on our 10-year-old national nation-building experiment in Afghanistan, there’s a growing community of policy mandarins, activists and elites uniting to expose the myriad of ways war spending and military contracting have plunged our nation into a jobs crisis.

Since the deficit committee officially failed to produce a plan as of last week, expect the war profiteer spin to hit the fan. Here’s an early warning of what to expect, courtesy of Reuters last week: Failure of a special congressional committee to strike a deficit-reduction deal is expected to unleash desperate lobbying by U.S. arms makers to get lawmakers to block $600 billion in automatic cuts.

Congress departs for the Thanksgiving holiday having left us a gift. With the deficit committee failing to produce a plan to cut the deficit and with across-the-board cuts now the default, there remains a real chance for us to untie the Congressional straightjacket and refocus the national conversation on sustainable and constructive job creation.

The war industry stood back with glee when it released a shoddy study that produced the sought-after deceptive headlines about defense spending, the magic sauce of job creation. There was no balance to these reports, and the War Industry should know, because they funded it!

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.

Leon Panetta becomes Defense Secretary and suddenly he forgets his experience as a professor and environmentalist: military spending costs jobs compared to other ways of spending the money. Still, Panetta pressures Congress to slash other spending that actually creates jobs rather than trimming a bloated war budget that’s strangling our economy.

Yesterday, Panetta defended the Pentagon from the Congressional deficit committee tasked with identifying at least $1.5 trillion in cuts before Christmas. As we’ve detailed, members of this committee are already on the war profiteers’ take, with Sens. Patty Murray and Rob Portman being favorites of military giants like Boeing and Northrop Grumman, for instance.

As Panetta lectures the chorus, and we’re seizing the mantle of responsibility and nuance with our latest video. If Panetta won’t be honest with Congress, we will.