Keeping a Check on Government Spending? Forget It!

Politics may produce ironies that are just too precious to miss. Switzerland is currently under the spell of such an irony. The current Minister for Defence is a member of the fascist Swiss People’s Party (SVP), a right wing party with militantly pro military tendencies. It is extremely funny that he exposed a scandal in military spending of the first degree, if by accident.

The story came to light over a spending request issued by the Department for Defence to parliament to destroy and build back a system of defensive bunkers no longer needed by the military. Parliament was startled that they should spend a billion Swiss Francs (about 800 million dollars) on the destruction of a bunker system they had never approved for building in the first place.

The Head of the Commission for Military Spending of the Nationalrat (equals about Congress) stated that her commission had no idea about the building of the system and had not been informed at any point about it. Her comments were immediately attacked by the fascists as typical for a socialist; she is a member of the Socialist Party (SP).

Later, the Head of the Commission for Military Spending of the Ständerat (equals about the Senate) made a similar statement, adding that it looks like the military leadership went out of their way to conceal the spending inside other projects. His comments were greeted with a stunned silence, as he is a member of the fascist party SVP.

15 years after the end of the cold war, military block heads went on a spending spree. They erected a system of secret bunkers along the Swiss borders and in strategic positions in the mountains. The exact extent of the spending spree and the locations are unknown as the information is (still) classified as secret. But the fireworks went off all the same.

The cost of building the system is estimated by the fascist Minister of Defence at about one billion Swiss Francs; this probably means that it cost at least three times as much. Now a further billion goes down the drain to destroy the system. And the last bunker in the system was built in 2003. What a way to throw away hard earned tax money.

In Switzerland as a democracy, the military is under strict control of parliament; or it should be by what it says in the constitution. Switzerland doesn’t have a general, a general will only be appointed in the case of war and the general is chosen and appointment by vote in parliament. It is obvious that military personnel has no need of being able to read, otherwise the heads of the military would have read at one point or other the acts of the constitution of Switzerland.

As is, the military in Switzerland, as in any other country (with maybe the exception of Turkey) is the arch-enemy of democracy. If these little Stalins were able to bamboozle the democratic institutions in the only democracy of the world, what do you think they are doing in pseudo-democracies like Britain, France, and the United States?