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Paul Jay
Now, you're talking about the ballot box stuff, not the recent stuff?
Larry Wilkerson
Yeah, I'm talking about the ballot box.
Paul Jay
Yeah, I misspoke, I think, when I said the NSA, because we don't know the NSA has anything to do with the recent stuff, but somebody supposedly tells Pompeo that it happened and it's the Russians, and then Trump says it's the Chinese. But who is telling Pompeo, it must be American intelligence services? But why would they want it to go public?
Larry Wilkerson
Well, one wonders.
Pompeo is a former director of the CIA. Pompeo, no doubt, still has some contacts at that agency. And I wouldn't say they were the most trustworthy or reputable contacts either, knowing Pompeo's character. And he has other reasons for saying what he's saying. I should have not been so naive with George Bush and Dick Cheney, my deputy, Richard [Lee] Armitage, was already calling them the Gestapo, the Nazis. I should have been a lot more alert to the fact that the war was being pulled over my boss's eyes with regard to Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction and so forth. There are a lot of other things impacting him at that time. And it was true what he was saying, that the war never ended and that we needed to end it we just didn't need to end it when we did because it was not opportune to do so. But there
are a lot of other things, a lot more complex things than people like to say about those circumstances. And I suspect there's a lot more complexity about what's happening today.
But there's a reason one would go after China and another would go after Russia because we need them both. Russia is not enough. Russia simply not enough to keep the military-industrial complex and all of its spinoffs, from universities to think tanks, you name it. Eisenhower was right, it's in every office building, it's in every state, it's in every home, and he was right. That's where this influence is now. So to keep this alive, you've got to have a lot more than the Russians.
That's the reason you see now this competition between Beijing and Moscow, not amongst their players, but us to make either or both of them, preferably the latter, our new threat because that's the only way we can justify a trillion and a half dollars every year for national security.
Paul Jay
And a new trillion dollars to modernize the nuclear weapons fleet.
Larry Wilkerson
I would say 1.2 to a couple of really read in people the other day, 1.2 trillion for the next 10 to 15 years to modernize, securitize, the modern nuclear weapons complex. They looked at me and said, "Are you kidding? You're behind. It's two now. It's working on two and a half,". I said, "Are these cost overruns or what?" "No, it's just low balling the original estimate,".
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