Chalmers Johnson looks at that other grand swindle

Chalmers Johnson recently discussed the similarities between the financial crisis that originated on Wall Street, with Washington's indispensible aid, and the awesome size of the aggregated budgets for America's empire. Johnson believes money spent on 'national security' to be "pure waste." He believes this because Americans are neither secure nor well-armed for all of the money spent on the security apparatus. Johnson's conclusion:

Spending hundreds of billions of dollars on present and future wars that have nothing to do with our national security is simply obscene. And yet Congress has been corrupted by the military-industrial complex into believing that, by voting for more defense spending, they are supplying "jobs" for the economy. In fact, they are only diverting scarce resources from the desperately needed rebuilding of the American infrastructure and other crucial spending necessities into utterly wasteful munitions. If we cannot cut back our longstanding, ever increasing military spending in a major way, then the bankruptcy of the United States is inevitable. As the current Wall Street meltdown has demonstrated, that is no longer an abstract possibility but a growing likelihood. We do not have much time left [emphasis added].