Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (62 page)

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Authors: Chalmers Johnson

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52
. Matt Kelley and Jim Drinkard, “Contractor Spends Big on Key Lawmakers,”
USA Today,
November 20, 2005.

53
. Dean Calbreath, “The Power of Persuasion: Poway Businessman Brent Wilkes Funneled Campaign Donations to Key Lawmakers as He Tried to Build a Defense Empire,”
San Diego Union-Tribune,
February 5, 2006.

54
. Wes Allison and Anita Kumar, “Fla. Senators Get Funds for Military Companies, Many of Them Donors,”
St. Petersburg Times
(FL), March 11, 2006.

55
. Moyers, “Restoring the Public Trust.”

56
. Ibid. Also see Larry Margasak and Sharon Theimer, Associated Press, “Dollar Trail from D.C. to Islands,”
CBS News,
May 3, 2005; Rep. George Miller (Democrat from California), “New Developments—Abramoff, DeLay, and the Northern Mariana Islands,” May 6, 2005,
http://www.house.gov/georgemiller/marianasupdate.html
; Dennis Cook, Associated Press, “Controversial Lobbyist Had Close Contact with Bush Team,”
USA Today,
May 6, 2005,
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-05-06-abramoff-bush_x.htm
; Eamon Javers, “Op-Eds for Sale,”
Business Week,
December 15, 2005; Byron York, “Hillary, Saipan, Sweatshops, Campaign Cash—and Abramoff,”
National Review,
March 10, 2006.

57
. Ken Silverstein, “The Great American Pork Barrel,”
Harper’s Magazine,
July 2005,
http://www.harpers.org/TheGreatAmericanPorkBarrel.html.

58
. Ibid.

59
. Quoted by David Wood, Newhouse News Service, “Pentagon’s ’Black’ Budgets Ripe for Corruption,”
San Diego Union-Tribune,
December 2, 2005. Also see Dan Morgan, “Classified Spending On the Rise,”
Washington Post,
August 27, 2003; Drew Brown, “Classified Military Spending Reaches Highest Level Since Cold War,” Knight Ridder Newspapers, May 19, 2006.

60
. Moyers, “Inside the Pentagon.” See also William D. Hartung, “Dick Cheney and the Power of the Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone,” in
How Much Are You Making on the War, Daddy? A Quick and Dirty Guide to War Profiteering in the Bush Administration
(New York: Nation Books, 2004), pp. 23-43.

61
. Winslow T. Wheeler, “How Congress Sacrifices Readiness for Pork,”
Counter-punch,
January 24, 2006; Emanuel Pastreich, “Rebels Within the U.S. Federal System,” Center for Defense Information, January 10, 2006.

62
. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2004.

63
. Center for Defense Information, “Fiscal Year 2001 Add-Ons: Congress’s Unrequested Spending for the Pentagon,” July 28, 2000,
http://cdi.org/issues/budget/add-onsOl.html
; Center for Defense Information, “Fiscal Year 2002 Add-Ons,” January 16, 2002,
http://www.cdi.org/issues/budget/add-ons02-pr.cfm
.

64
. Editorial, “Kabuki Congress,”
New York Times,
March 6, 2006. See also Editorial, “The Death of the Intelligence Panel,”
New York Times,
March 9, 2006.

65
. Brian Foley, “Playing with Fire: Congress and Executive Power,”
Jurist,
January 9, 2006,
http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/forumy/2006/01/playing-with-fire-congress-and.php.

66
. McCoy, “McCain Ban Won’t Work.”

67
. Quoted by Eric Schmitt, “Senate Approves Limiting Rights of U.S. Detainees,”
New York Times,
November 11, 2005.

68
. Foley, “Playing with Fire.”

69
. Quoted by Woods, “All the President’s Power.”

70
. Bob Herbert, “The Torturers Win,”
New York Times,
February 20, 2006.

71
. Anatol Lieven, “Decadent America Must Give Up Imperial Ambitions,”
Financial Times,
November 29, 2005.

72
. Louis Uchitelle, “U.S. and Trade Partners Maintain Unhealthy Long-Term Relationship,” New
York Times,
September 18, 2004; Christopher Swann,”U.S. Deficit Data Fuel Anxieties on Dollar,”
Financial Times,
March 15, 2006.

73
. Martin Crutsinger, “U.S. Trade Deficit Hits All-Time High,” Associated Press, February 10, 2006.

74
. Keith Bradsher, “China Passes Japan in Foreign Exchange Reserves,”
New York Times,
March 29, 2006.

75
. Marshall Auerback, “What Could Go Wrong in 2005?” TomDispatch.com, January 22, 2005, http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2141.

76
. See the discussion by Doug Dowd, “U.S. Military Expenditures: Beneficial or Harmful? Or, Who Benefits and Who Pays?”
State of Nature,
Winter 2006,
http://www.stateofnature.org/milex.html
. See also Robert B. Reich, “John Maynard Keynes: His Radical Idea that Governments Should Spend Money They Don’t Have May Have Saved Capitalism,”
Time,
March 29, 1999,
http://www.time.com/time/timelOO/scientist/profile/keynes.html
.

77
. Wikipedia, “Permanent Arms Economy,” February 10, 2006,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_arms_economy
.

78
. Andrew Gumbel, “How the War Machine Is Driving the U.S. Economy,”
Independent,
January 6, 2004.

79
. Wikipedia, “Military Keynesianism,” February 5, 2006,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Keynesianism
; Michael Kidron, “A Permanent Arms Economy,”
International Socialism
1, no. 28 (Spring 1967),
http://www.marxists.org/archive/kidron/works/1967/xx/permarms.htm
.

80
. Ronald Steel,
Temptations of a Superpower
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 61.

81
. See John L. Boies,
Buying for Armageddon: Business, Society, and Military Spending Since the Cuban Missile Crisis
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994).

82
. Gumbel, “War Machine”; Fred Kaplan, “The Military’s Bloated Budget,”
Slate,
September 12, 2003.

83
. Jonathan Karp, “Pet Projects Prevail in U.S. Military-Spending Boom,”
Wall Street journal,
June 16, 2006.

84
. Jeff Bliss, “U.S. War Spending to Rise 44% to $9.8 Billion a Month, Report Says,”
Bloomberg.com
, March 17, 2006,
http://truthout.org/docs_2006/printer_031706B.shtml
.

85
. Winslow T. Wheeler, “A Tutorial on How to Find the Real Numbers: Just How Big Is the Defense Budget?”
Counterpunch,
January 19, 2006.

86
. Robert Higgs, “The Defense Budget Is Bigger than You Think,” The Independent Institute, January 18, 2004,
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1253.80
; Doug Dowd, “U.S. Military Expenditures”; Walter Adams and James W. Brock,
The Bigness Complex: Industry, Labor, and Government in the American Economy,
2nd ed. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004).

87
. Ann Scott Tyson, “Defense Spending Is Overstated, GAO Report Says,”
Washington Post,
September 22, 2005.

88
. Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz, “The Economic Costs of the Iraq War: An Appraisal Three Years After the Beginning of the Conflict,” National Bureau of Economic Research (Working Paper 12054, February 2006),
http://www.gsb.columbia.edu/faculty/jstiglitz/download/2006_Cost_of_War_in_Iraq_NBER.pdf
.

Acknowledgments

Sheila K. Johnson, who has her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, spent endless hours in conversation with me about this book, and she carefully edited my first draft. As my wife of forty-nine years, she obviously knows where I’m coming from.

Tom Engelhardt is the founder and editor of
TomDispatch.com,
‘a regular antidote to the mainstream media’ and a project of the Nation Institute. He is also the editor of all three books of the Blowback Trilogy—
Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire,
and
Nemesis
—for Metropolitan Books. I am indebted to him for his intelligence, integrity, and support for the American Empire Project, which he helped create.

Sandra Dijkstra, my literary agent, and her assistant Taryn Fagerness have worked miracles in having my books published in over a dozen languages around the world.

The poet John Shreffler, of Brookline, Massachusetts, dedicated to me his conception of the arrival of Nemesis in the United States.

Several close friends have helped me with comments, articles, suggestions, and conversations about this book. They are Dr. Kozy Amemiya, one of our country’s pioneer researchers on Okinawa, and her husband, Thomas Royden, avocado and palm grower; Dr. Barry Keehn of Los Angeles, an equally talented psychologist and political scientist; Drs. Maricler and Alfredo Antognini, exiles from the ‘dirty war’ in Argentina and major contributors to the world of painting; Dr. Patrick Lloyd Hatcher, lieutenant colonel U.S. Army (ret.) and a longtime colleague; Professor Yoshihiko Nakamoto of Shizuoka University, Japan. My geriatric cat, Mof, a Russian blue, helps keep me cheerful.

Index

Entries in
italics
refer to tables

ABC News
,
250

Abramoff, Jack,
262
–63

Abu Ghraib,
8
–9,
22
–24,
33
–35,
37
,
40
–46,
124
,
181
,
246
,
259
,
260
,
269

Ackerman, Spencer,
101
–2

acquisitions and cross-servicing agreements (ACSAs),
145

Actium, battle of (31 BC),
68

Adak, Alaska,
223

Adams, Gordon,
264

Adams, John,
59

Adams, John Quincy,
59

ADCS Inc.,
260

Addington, David S.,
251

Aeneid
(Virgil),
57

Aero Contractors Ltd.,
128

Aeroplane Spotter
(newspaper),
126

Afghanistan,
5
,
7
–9,
19
,
21
,
23
–25,
29
–32,
35
–38,
41
,
45
,
71
,
76
,
94
,
100
,
104
,
110
–20,
123
–24,
128
,
140
,
143
,
151
–52,
191
,
276
–78