Chalmers Johnson: 'Things that can't go on forever'
This is an excerpt from a two-part interview between Chalmers Johnson, ex-US Navy, consultant for the CIA from 1967-1973, author of Blowback (2000) and The Sorrows of Empire, Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (2004) and Tom Engelhardt.
lemondediplomatique: Chalmers Johnson - What I don't understand is that the current defence budget and the recent Quadrennial Defence Review (which has no strategy in it at all) are just continuations of everything we did before. Make sure that the couple of hundred military golf courses around the world are well groomed, that the Lear jets are ready to fly the admirals and generals to the armed forces' ski resort in Garmisch in the Bavarian Alps or the military's two luxury hotels in downtown Seoul and Tokyo.
What I can't explain is what has happened to Congress. Is it just that they're corrupt? That's certainly part of it. I'm sitting here in California's 50th district. This past December, our congressman Randy Cunningham confessed to the largest single bribery case in the history of the Congress: $2.4m in trinkets - a Rolls Royce, some French antiques - went to him, thanks to his ability as a member of the military subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee to add things secretly to the budget. He was doing this for pals of his running small companies. He was adding things even the Department of Defence said it didn't want. This is bribery and, as somebody said the other day, Congress comes extremely cheap. For $2.4m, these guys got about $175m in contracts. It was an easy deal.
The military is out of control. As part of the executive branch, it's expanded under cover of the national security state. Back when I was a kid, the Pentagon was called the Department of War. Now, it's the Department of Defence, though it palpably has nothing to do with defence. Hasn't for a long time. We even have another department of the government today that's concerned with homeland security. You wonder what on earth do we have that for - and a Dept of Defence, too! The government isn't working right. There's no proper supervision. The founders, the authors of the Constitution, regarded the supreme organ to be Congress. The mystery to me, more than the huge expansion of executive branch powers we've seen since the neoconservatives and George Bush came to power, is: why has Congress failed us so completely? Why are they no longer interested in the way the money is spent? Why does a Pentagon budget like this one produce so little interest? Is it that people have a vested interest in it, that it's going to produce more jobs for them? Read more
lemondediplomatique: Chalmers Johnson - What I don't understand is that the current defence budget and the recent Quadrennial Defence Review (which has no strategy in it at all) are just continuations of everything we did before. Make sure that the couple of hundred military golf courses around the world are well groomed, that the Lear jets are ready to fly the admirals and generals to the armed forces' ski resort in Garmisch in the Bavarian Alps or the military's two luxury hotels in downtown Seoul and Tokyo.
What I can't explain is what has happened to Congress. Is it just that they're corrupt? That's certainly part of it. I'm sitting here in California's 50th district. This past December, our congressman Randy Cunningham confessed to the largest single bribery case in the history of the Congress: $2.4m in trinkets - a Rolls Royce, some French antiques - went to him, thanks to his ability as a member of the military subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee to add things secretly to the budget. He was doing this for pals of his running small companies. He was adding things even the Department of Defence said it didn't want. This is bribery and, as somebody said the other day, Congress comes extremely cheap. For $2.4m, these guys got about $175m in contracts. It was an easy deal.
The military is out of control. As part of the executive branch, it's expanded under cover of the national security state. Back when I was a kid, the Pentagon was called the Department of War. Now, it's the Department of Defence, though it palpably has nothing to do with defence. Hasn't for a long time. We even have another department of the government today that's concerned with homeland security. You wonder what on earth do we have that for - and a Dept of Defence, too! The government isn't working right. There's no proper supervision. The founders, the authors of the Constitution, regarded the supreme organ to be Congress. The mystery to me, more than the huge expansion of executive branch powers we've seen since the neoconservatives and George Bush came to power, is: why has Congress failed us so completely? Why are they no longer interested in the way the money is spent? Why does a Pentagon budget like this one produce so little interest? Is it that people have a vested interest in it, that it's going to produce more jobs for them? Read more
posted by exoplanet at 9:45 PM
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