Colbert King, the author of the 2012 column repeating the late Charles Krauthammer’s 2006 column, is married to Gwendolyn King who is on the board of Lockheed Martin.
Mrs. King was a Founding Partner of The Directors’ Council. She is a director of Lockheed Martin Corporation and Monsanto Company, and ended 12 years of service on the board of Marsh and McLennan Companies in May 2011. She served for six years as director of the National Association of Corporate Directors, from 2004-2010. She is a trustee of the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, PA.
Mrs. King graduated from Howard University and did graduate work at George Washington University. She received honorary doctorates from the University of New Haven and the University of Maryland Baltimore County; the American Black Achievement Award from Johnson Publishing Company; and the Drum Major for Justice Award from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The Washington Business Journal has selected her as an Outstanding Director in 2012.
She is married to Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post columnist Colbert I. King. The couple has endowed a Chair in Public Policy at Howard University.
Lockheed Martin would make more money from escalating international hostility and war almost anywhere they could sell more weapons systems to one or both states at (in military conflict) war. Lockheed Martin does make more money from increased ‘preparedness’ or ‘readiness’ to defeat threats from outside the USA national borders and homeland (domestic or interior) security.
Lockheed Martin owned the only private hotel, in the jurisdiction of its corporate headquarters, for the nearly exclusive use of business associates and employees on business travel to a corporate headquarters that is exempt from county and state hotel taxes.
Who hasn’t heard of Lockheed Martin? This humongous defense contractor does $17 billion in business with the federal government (the most of any corporate entity), is on pace to generate more than $2 billion in profits this year and pays its CEO more than $23 million a year. But how many Montgomery County residents know that Lockheed is begging for a local handout?
That’s right. At a time when class sizes are being increased, union contracts can’t be fully funded and libraries are taking huge hits, Lockheed Martin wants to avoid paying the county $450,000 in annual hotel taxes for its 183-room accommodation in Bethesda. Earlier this year, LM won its argument at the state level, convincing legislators to write into a law an exemption from state hotel taxes for any lodgings “operated solely to support the headquarters, campus, training facility, or conference facility of the corporation that owns the facility, which offers lodging solely for that corporation’s employees, contractors, vendors, or business invitees, and does not offer lodging to the public.” (If you had trouble reading that, it means: If you’re a huge corporation and own your own hotel for use by your own people, it’s no longer considered a hotel.)
Guess how many such facilities exist in Montgomery County? You got it: only Lockheed Martin’s. With the state’s already having acquiesced to this corporate giveaway, it’s the county’s turn: Public hearings are scheduled to be held tomorrow (Sept. 21[, 2010]) on “Expedited Bill 44-10” as a companion to the state bill.
Lockheed Martin wasn't as generous, by collecting local hotel taxes, for the local jurisdictions they picked for corporate HQ sites as they were to the board members, executives and shareholders if public corporations. Amazon may do the same if they pick the former white flint mall site as HQ2. The site has approved zoning for a hotel and commercial office space.
Lockheed Martin was later able to force the withdrawal of a non-binding county council resolution to call for less military spending in addition to having their Center for Leadership Excellence business hotel and conference facility exempted from state but not local hotel taxes. What might Amazon demand from Montgomery County, Md county government if they pick a former mall as a second corporate headquarters instead of reusing the land for mixed residential and commercial uses with more inclusionary zoning that Montgomery County, Md has retreated from, by civic/citizens association massive resistance mirroring past resistance to school integration, since the MPDU law passed around 1975? Racial segregation in housing has become class segregation with intersectionality between race and class that also segregates schools by class of parents.
