Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

“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