Notes

Epigraph

1. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), Book III, chapter 4, p. 418.

Foreword by Marcus Raskin

1. Noam Chomsky, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” in The Essential Chomsky, ed. Anthony Arnove (New York: The New Press, 2008), p. 40.

2. Noam Chomsky, On Power and Ideology: The Managua Lectures (Boston: South End Press, 1987), p. 140. (A new edition of this work is forthcoming in 2015 from Haymarket Books.)

3. Samuel Arthur Jones, Thoreau’s Incarceration, As Told by His Jailer (Berkeley Heights, NJ: Oriole Press, 1962), p. 18. Samuel Arthur Jones and George Hendrick, Thoreau Amongst Friends and Philistines, and Other Thoreauviana (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1982), pp. xxvi and 241.

4. See Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944–1954 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991).

5. Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Political Economy of Human Rights, Volume I: The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (Boston: South End Press, 1979), p. 100. (A new edition of this work is forthcoming in 2014 from Haymarket Books.)

6. Noam Chomsky, “Foreign Policy and the Intelligentsia,” in The Essential Chomsky, p. 167.

7. See Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943–1945 (New York: Random House, 1968); Joyce Kolko and Gabriel Kolko, The Limits of Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1945–1954 (New York: Harper & Row, 1972); Denna Frank Fleming, The Cold War and Its Origins, 1917–1960 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961); and Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter, Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977).

8. Chomsky, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” in The Essential Chomsky, pp. 39–62.

9. See V. G. Kiernan, America: The New Imperialism; From White Settlement to World Hegemony (London: Zed, 1978); Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963); Richard Warner Van Alstyne, The Rising American Empire (New York: Norton, 1974); William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 2nd ed. (New York: Dell, 1972); and William Appleman Williams, The Contours of American History (New York: Norton, 1988).

One: Knowledge and Power: Intellectuals and the Welfare-Warfare State

1. The quotes are from various essays collected in Carl Resek, ed., War and the Intellectuals (New York: Harper, 1964).

2. In Richard M. Feffer, ed., No More Vietnams? The War and the Future of American Foreign Policy (New York: Harper, 1968). [Thomson’s italics.] The phrase “technocracy’s own Bolsheviks” would perhaps be more apt, given the actual role of Mao in opposing the party bureaucracy and in the conflict of “red” and “expert,” particularly in the past few years. There is a substantial literature on the latter topic. See, for example, Benjamin Schwartz, “The Reign of Virtue: Some Broad Perspectives on Leader and Party in the Cultural Revolution,” China Quarterly, July 1968. He stresses Mao’s opposition to the “technocratic element” and his attempt to realize “the concept of the masses as active and total participants in the whole political process” under the guidance of an “ethical elite” that acts as a “moralizing agency” in the society, “transform[ing] the people below them through the power of example, education and proper policy.” I return to this matter briefly below.

3. John K. Galbraith, The New Industrial State (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1967).

4. Barrington Moore Jr., “Revolution in America?,” New York Review of Books, January 30, 1969.

5. Barrington Moore Jr., “Thoughts on Violence and Democracy,” Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science 29, no. 1 (1968); Robert H. Connery, ed., Urban Riots: Violence and Social Change (New York: Vintage Books, 1969).

6. Melvin Laird, A House Divided: America’s Strategy Gap (Washington, DC: Henry Regnery, 1962). Not surprisingly, he concludes: “Step one of a military strategy of initiative should be the credible announcement of our determination to strike first if necessary to protect our vital interests.” Only in this way can we exercise our “moral responsibility to use our power constructively to prevent Communism from destroying the heritage of our world civilization.” See I. F. Stone’s Weekly, December 30, 1968, for additional quotations from this amazing document. Compare New York Times military expert Hanson Baldwin, who urges that in the post-Vietnam era we be prepared to “escalate technologically rather than with manpower” when we find it difficult to “bolster governments under attack and secure them against creeping Communism”: “Such escalation might involve the use of exotic new conventional weapons, or the utilization under carefully restricted conditions, where targets and geography are favorable, of small nuclear devices for defensive purposes” (New York Times Magazine, June 9, 1968). Particularly interesting is the concept of “defensive purposes”—as we bolster a weak government against creeping Communism. As far as I know, this is the only country where the minister of war has spoken in favor of a possible preventive war and the leading military expert of the press has advocated first use of nuclear weapons.

7. For some discussion, see my American Power and the New Mandarins (New York: Pantheon, 1969), particularly chapter 3, “The Logic of Withdrawal.” (The book was republished by The New Press in 2002.)

8. Moore Jr., “Revolution in America?”

9. In a number of respects. For example, a war that demands a shift of government spending to boots and bullets fails to benefit the technologically advanced segments of the economy, a fact that has been noted by many. Compare, for example, Michael Kidron, Western Capitalism since the War (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1968), who comments on “the technologically-regressive impact of the Vietnam war with its reversion to relatively labor-intensive products.”

10. For a remarkably cynical example, see the comments of Ithiel Pool in Feffer, ed., No More Vietnams?—and for his own interpretations of these remarks, New York Review of Books, letters, February 16, 1969.

11. Peter Kropotkin, The State: Its Historic Role [1896] (London: Freedom Press, 1911).

12. Mikhail Bakunin, The State and Anarchy, cited by Daniel Guèrin in Jeunesse du socialisme libertaire (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1959).

13. Letter to Aleksandr Herzen and Nikolai Ogareff [Ogarev], 1866, cited by Guèrin, Jeunesse du socialisme libertaire.

14. See, for example, the informative essay by Daniel Bell, “Two Roads from Marx,” reprinted in his book The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (New York: Free Press, 1960).

15. Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution, written in prison in 1918.

16. Reprinted in English translation together with The Russian Revolution in a volume edited by Bertram Wolfe: Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution and Leninism or Marxism? (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961). [Luxemburg’s italics.]

17. In 1918, she of course makes no mention of the functionary who later became dictator of the Russian state, realizing these fears to an extreme that no one anticipated.

18. The closing words of Rosa Luxemburg, Leninism or Marxism?

19. In the latter connection, see Michael Rogin’s excellent critique of “The Pluralist Defense of Modern Industrial Society” in contemporary liberal sociology: Michael Paul Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967).

20. For some discussion of both the events and the response see my American Power and the New Mandarins, chapter 1, “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship.”

21. A concise and useful review is presented in George Zaninovich, The Development of Socialist Yugoslavia (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968).

22. William Hinton, Fanshen (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966)—a book that would have appeared many years before had it not been for the scandalous behavior of US customs officials and the Senate Internal Security Committee, who released Hinton’s impounded notes only after a lengthy and costly legal battle.

23. Douglas Pike, Vietcong (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966). As a work of propaganda, this book is of course tainted from the start. But it gains a certain credibility from the fact that it presents a remarkably powerful argument-against-interest, apparently without the author understanding this.

24. For example, the eyewitness accounts of journalist Katsuichi Honda published in the Asahi Shimbun in 1967 and translated into English: The National Liberation Front, in the series Vietnam—A Voice from the Villages, c/o Room 506, Shinwa Building, Sakuraga-oka-4, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo.

25. In this connection, an example of major importance is provided by the Palestinian (later Israeli) Kibbutzim. For analysis and discussion, see Haim Darin-Drabkin, The Other Society (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962). The significance of these cooperative forms has largely been missed by the left for two reasons: first, the social and economic success of the Kibbutzim seems unimportant to the “radical centralizers” who see the move toward socialism as a matter of acquisition of power by a revolutionary vanguard (in the name of . . . , etc.); and second, the matter is complicated by a factor that is irrelevant to the question of the Kibbutz as a social form, namely, the problems of national conflict in the Middle East (it is useful—though again basically irrelevant to the Kibbutz as a social form—to recall that until 1947 the left wing of the Kibbutz movement, a substantial movement, was opposed to the idea of a Jewish state, correctly, in my opinion).

26. One of the “infantile ultra-leftists” discussed by Lenin in his pamphlet of 1920. For a comparison of Lenin’s views before and after the acquisition of state power, see Robert Daniels, “The State and Revolution: A Case Study in the Genesis and Transformation of Communist Ideology,” American Slavic and East European Review, February 1953. He emphasizes Lenin’s “intellectual deviation” to the left “during the year of revolution, 1917.” Arthur Rosenberg’s A History of Bolshevism: From Marx to the First Five-Years’ Plan [1932] (New York: Doubleday 1965), which remains, to my mind, the outstanding study of this topic, presents a more sympathetic view, recognizing Lenin’s political realism while pointing out the basically authoritarian character of his thought. For more on this subject, see Robert Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), and a useful collection edited by Helmut Gruber, International Communism in the era of Lenin: A Documentary History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967); and other sources too numerous to mention.

27. Anton Pannekoek, Lenin as Philosopher, first published in Amsterdam under the pseudonym John Harper as Lenin als Philosoph. Kritische Betrachtung der philosophischen Grundlagen des Leninismus, in Bibliothek der Rätekorrespondenz, No.1, Ausgabe der Gruppe Internationaler Kommunisten, 1938. The date is important for understanding the specific references.

28. Zbigniew Brzezinski, “America in the Technetronic Age,” Encounter, January 1968. A number of citations with similar content are given in Leonard S. Silk, “Business Power, Today and Tomorrow,” Daedalus, Winter 1969. Silk, chairman of the editorial board of Business Week, takes a rather skeptical view of the prospects for transfer of corporate power to a “bureaucracy of technicians,” expecting rather that, useful as the technostructure may be, business will maintain its socially dominant role. The only question of this sort seriously at issue, in this study of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is the relative power of owners, management, and technostructure in control of the corporation. Popular control of economic institutions is of course not discussed.

29. Alfred D. Chandler Jr., “The Role of Business in the United States: A Historical Survey,” Daedelus, Winter 1969.

30. Chandler, “The Role of Business in the United States.” The experience prompted the following remark by Paul Samuelson: “It has been said that the last year was the chemist’s war and that this one is the physicist’s. It might equally be said that this is an economist’s war.” New Republic, September 11, 1944. Cited in Robert Lekachman, The Age of Keynes (New York: Random House, 1966). Perhaps we might regard the Vietnam War as another “economist’s war,” given the role of professional economists in helping maintain domestic stability so that the war might be fought more successfully.

31. Jerome Wiesner, cited in H. L. Nieburg, In the Name of Science (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1966). As Nieburg notes, “as the arms race has slackened [temporarily, as we now know], . . . space and science programs become a new instrument by which the government seeks to maintain a high level of economic activity.”

32. B. Joseph Monsen, “The American Business View,” Daedelus, Winter 1969. For important observations on these matters see Galbraith, The New Industrial State.

33. Quoted by John J. Powers Jr., president of Charles Pfizer and Co., in an address delivered to a conference of the Manufacturing Chemists Association, Inc. on November 21, 1967. Reprinted in the Newsletter of the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) 2, no. 7.

34. New York Times, May 6, 1967. Cited in a perceptive article by Paul Mattick, “The American Economy,” International Socialist Journal, February 1968.

35. For some discussion, see Kidron, Western Capitalism since the War.

36. “A Brazilian View,” in Raymond Vernon, ed., How Latin America Views the American Investor (New York: Praeger, 1966).

37. Nieburg, In the Name of Science. It might be more accurate to say that European capital finds its interest, in a narrow sense, best served by taking the role of junior partner in the American world system.

38. Quoted by Jacques Decornoy in Le Monde hebdomadaire, July 11–17, 1968. The series from which this is taken presents one of the very detailed eyewitness accounts of the Laotian guerrillas, the Pathet-Lao, and their attempts at “nation building” and development. Decornoy observes, in this connection, that “the Americans accuse the North Vietnamese of intervening militarily in the country. But it is they who speak of reducing Laos to zero, while the Pathet-Lao exalts the national culture and national independence.”

39. Claude Julien, L’Empire americain (Paris: Grasset, 1968).

40. On this matter, see Andre Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967), and many other studies.

41. Bertil Svahnstrom, ed., Documents of the World Conference on Vietnam (Stockholm, July 1967).

42. New York Times, Bangkok, January 17, 1969. The writer is a bit naive in suggesting that the choice lies with the Thai. For some discussion of past “choices” for the Thai, see my American Power and the New Mandarins, chapter 1.

43. Cited by Hernando Abaya, The Untold Philippine Story (Quezon City: Malaya Books, 1967).

44. Far East Economic Review, reprinted in Atlas, February 1969.

45. New York Times Economic Survey, January 17, 1969.

46. Marcel Niedergang, in Le Monde hebdomadaire, December 12–18, 1968. Quotes are from the professors of the military college, who have constructed “a manichean vision of the world: the Communist East against the Christian West” in a manner that would delight John Foster Dulles, Dean Rusk, Melvin Laird, and other luminaries.

47. Cited by Akira Iriye, Across the Pacific (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967).

48. Nieburg, In the Name of Science.

49. Nieburg, In the Name of Science.

50. Speech at Millsaps College, Jackson, Mississippi, February 24, 1967. Others offer different justifications for managerial authority. For example, historian William Letwin explains that “no community can do without managers,” those whose role is to make “arbitrary decisions within a private firm,” for “the function of making ultimate arbitrary choices in production cannot be eliminated” (“The Past and Future of American Businessmen,” Daedalus, Winter 1969). Letwin, who finds it “reassuring . . . that today’s managers show the same vigorous appetite for income and wealth that spurred yesterday’s businessmen to bold progress,” fails to point out that on this theory of management, the manager can be replaced by a random number table.

51. “In the United States at the end of the fifties more than nine-tenths of final demand for aircraft and parts was on government, overwhelmingly military, account: as was nearly three-fifths of the demand for non-ferrous metals; over half the demand for chemicals and electronic goods; over one-third of the demand for communication equipment and scientific instruments: and so on down a list of eighteen major industries, one-tenth or more of whose final demand stemmed from government procurement.” Kidron, Western Capitalism since the War. He also quotes an OECD report of 1963 noting that “the direct transfer to the civilian sector of products and techniques developed for military and space purposes is very small . . . [and] that the possibilities of such direct transfer will tend to diminish.”

52. Kidron, Western Capitalism since the War.

53. Nieburg, In the Name of Science.

54. A major thesis of Galbraith’s New Industrial State. A parallel analysis in the political realm is provided by Richard Barnet, with his investigation of the role of the National Security Bureaucracy in foreign policy. See his contribution to No More Vietnams? and his Intervention and Revolution (New York: New American Library, 1969). Without denying the relevance of his analysis, it is proper to add that the goals of this “organization” coincide with those of the great corporations, by and large. Even in earlier stages of imperialism it was not unknown for the flag and gun to precede, rather than follow, the pound, the franc, or the dollar.

55. As Galbraith notes: “Goods are what the industrial system supplies.” Thus “management of demand” performs this service; “it provides, in the aggregate, a relentless propaganda on behalf of goods in general” and thus helps “develop the kind of man the goals of the industrial system require—one that reliably spends his income and works reliably because he is always in need of more.”

56. Lekachman, Age of Keynes.

57. “Like 1964’s tax harvest, much of 1965’s improvements would be realized by prosperous corporations and wealthy individuals” (Lekachman, Age of Keynes). The regressive character of the American tax structure is often overlooked. See Gabriel Kolko, Wealth and Power in America: An Analysis of Social Class and Income Distribution (New York: Praeger, 1962). The current report of the Council of Economic Advisers to Congress notes that: “As a share of income, higher taxes are paid by households in the lower income classes than by those with incomes between $6,000 and $15,000. This reflects the heavy tax burden on low-income families from State and local taxes. . . . Federal taxes also contribute to this burden through the social security payroll tax.” The devices for tax avoidance in higher brackets have been discussed at length, the oil-depletion allowance being only the most notorious example.

58. For a reasoned analysis, see Michael Harrington, Toward a Democratic Left (New York: Macmillan, 1968). See also the review by Christopher Lasch in the New York Review of Books, July 11, 1968.

59. Harrington, Toward a Democratic Left.

60. See the contribution to Priscilla Long, ed., The New Left (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1970) by Paul Mattick. For an informative survey, strongly biased against radical hopes, see Adolf Sturmthal, Workers’ Councils: A Study of Workplace Organization on Both Sides of the Iron Curtain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964).

61. See, for example, Adam Ulam, The Unfinished Revolution (New York: Random House, 1960). He suggests that “a vigorous growth of capitalism helps the growth of Marxist socialism among the workers; but, also, a speedy extinction by Marxism of syndicalist and anarchistic feelings among the workers can be a contributing factor to the flourishing development of capitalism! The lesson of Marxism has been absorbed by the worker: he works more efficiently since he accepts the inevitability of industrial labor and its appurtenances; his class hostility does not find expression in sabotage of the industrial and political system that he expects to inherit.” In short, the revolutionary movement can contribute, in striking opposition to its goals, to the creation of a “race of patient and disciplined workers” (Ulam, quoting Arthur Redford).

62. Parts of this statement are reprinted in Mitchell Cohen and Dennis Hale, ed., The New Student Left: An Anthology, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967).

63. New Left Notes, December 11, 1968. It is difficult for me to believe that the author, who knows Harvard well, really thinks of Nathan Pusey as the representative of imperialism on the Harvard campus.

64. Recall George Orwell’s painfully accurate characterization: “Particularly on the Left, political thought is a sort of masturbation fantasy in which the world of fact hardly matters.”

Two: An Exception to the Rules

1. William Quandt, Decade of Decisions: American Policy Toward the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1967-1976 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).

2. Charles W. Yost, “The Arab-Israeli War,” Foreign Affairs, January 1968; Yost takes this to have been “the curtain-raiser to the Six Day War.”

3. John Cooley, Green March, Black September: The Story of the Palestinian Arabs (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 1973).

4. Yahuda Slutzky, Sefer Toldot Hahaganah [The History of the Haganah] (Tel Aviv: Zionist Library, 1972).

Three: The Divine License to Kill

1. Richard Wightman Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (New York: Pantheon, 1985); Robert McAfee Brown, ed., The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr: Selected Essays and Addresses (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986). Quotes drawn from these; or, unless otherwise indicated, reviews or jacket cover comments for these books: David Brion Davis, New York Review of Books, February 13, 1986; Christopher Lasch, In These Times, March 26, 1986; Paul Roazen, New Republic, March 31, 1986. Bundy cited by Davis. Schlesinger, also “Reinhold Niebuhr’s Role in Political Thought,” in Charles W. Kegley and Robert W. Bretall, eds., Reinhold Niebuhr: His Religious, Social, and Political Thought (New York: Macmillan, 1956). Kenneth W. Thompson, Words and Deeds in Foreign Policy, Fifth Annual Morgenthau Memorial Lecture (New York: Council on Religion and International Affairs, 1986).

2. Further references below given in the body of the chapter are, unless otherwise noted, to the two volumes of this work.

3. Reinhold Niebuhr, “The Christian Church in a Secular Age,” 1937, in Brown, ed., The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr; my emphasis.

4. Reinhold Niebuhr, “Optimism, Pessimism, and Religious Faith,” 1940, in Brown, ed., The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr.

5. Sidney Hook, Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx (New York: John Day, 1933).

6. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952), p. 115.

7. See Nathan Miller, The Founding Finaglers (New York: David McKay, 1976).

8. Hans J. Morgenthau, In Defense of the National Interest: A Critical Examination of American Foreign Policy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951).

Four: “Consent Without Consent”: Reflections on the Theory and Practice of Democracy

1. This chapter is reprinted by permission of Cleveland State Law Review.

2. Jeffrey H. Birnbaum, “As Clinton Is Derided as Flaming Liberal by GOP, His Achievements Look Centrist and Pro-Business,” Wall Street Journal, October 7, 1994, p. A12; Rick Wartzman, “Special Interests, With Backing of GOP, Defeat Numerous White House Efforts,” Wall Street Journal, October 7, 1994, p. A12; and David Broder and Michael Weiskopf, “Finding New Friends on the Hill,” Washington Post National Weekly, October 3–9, 1994.

3. Susan B. Garland and Mary Beth Regan, with Paul Magnusson and John Carey, “Back to the Trenches,” Business Week, September 17, 1995, p. 42.

4. Helene Cooper, “Ron Brown Worked Tirelessly for U.S. Industry But Got Little Support from Business in Return,” Wall Street Journal, April 5, 1996, p. A10.

5. Thomas Ferguson, Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

6. Everett Carl Ladd, “The 1994 Congressional Elections: The Postindustrial Realignment Continues,” Political Sociology 110 (Spring 1995); John Dillin, “Brown Refuses to Endorse Clinton,” Christian Science Monitor, July 14,1992, p. 2; Greer, Margolis, Mitchell, Burns & Associates, Being Heard: Strategic Communications Report and Recommendation, prepared for AFL-CIO, March 21, 1994; and “America, Land of the Shaken,” Business Week, March 11, 1996, p. 64.

7. On the early postwar period, see Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945–60 (Urbana-Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994). On the mid-1980s, see Vicente Navarro, “The 1984 Election and the New Deal,” Social Policy, Spring 1985; Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, “The Myth of America’s Turn to the Right,” Atlantic, May 1986; and Ferguson and Rogers, Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics (New York: Hill & Wang, 1986).

8. Los Angeles Times, November 20, 1994, cited by Doug Henwood in “The Raw Deal,” Nation, December 12,1994, p. 711.

9. Mark N. Vamos, “Portrait of a Skeptical Public,” Business Week, November 20, 1995, p. 138.

10. Alex Carey, Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Propaganda in the US and Australia (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1995); Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise, p. 52 and 177.

11. Jason DeParle, “Class is No Longer a Four-Letter Word,” New York Times Magazine, March 17, 1996, p. 40.

12. Kim Moody, An Injury to All : The Decline of American Unionism (New York: Verso, 1988), p. 147.

13. Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise,, pp. 44–45 and 117.

14. Meg Greenfield, “Back to Class War,” Newsweek, February 12, 1996, p. 84; Editorial, “The Backlash Building against Business,” Business Week, February 18, 1996, p. 102; John Liscio, “Is Inflation Tamed? Don’t Believe It,” Barron’s, April 15, 1996, pp. 10–11.

15. See Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 106; Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Phillips Bradley (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945), vol. 2, chapter 20, p. 161. On John Dewey, see particularly Robert Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).

16. Norman Ware, The Industrial Worker 1840–1860 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1990).

17. James Perry, “Notes From the Field,” Wall Street Journal, February 26, 1996, p. A20.

18. Ferguson, Golden Rule, p. 72.

19. Albert R. Hunt, “Politics and People: The Republicans’ Claiming High Ground,” Wall Street Journal, February 22, 1996, p. A15.

20. Henry Adams, History of the United States of America during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1986), p. 61.

21. “Clinton Warns of Medicaid Plan,” Boston Globe, October 1, 1995, p. 12.

22. Alan Murray, “The Outlook: Deficit Politics; Is the Era Over?” Wall Street Journal, March 4, 1996, p. A1.

23. New York Times/CBS News Poll, New York Times, October 1, 1995, p. 4.

24. Business Week/Harris Executive Poll, Business Week, June 5, 1995, p. 34.

25. Robert Siegel, National Public Radio, All Things Considered, May 12, 1995.

26. Knight-Ridder, “GOP Pollster Never Measured Popularity of ‘Contract,’ Only Slogans,” Chicago Tribune, November 12, 1995, p. 11; Michael Weisskopf and David Maraniss, “Gingrich’s War of Words,” Washington Post (national weekly edition), November 6–12, 1995, p. 6.

27. Michael Dawson, The Consumer Trap: Big Business Marketing and the Frustration of Personal Life in the United States since 1945, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Oregon, August 1995.

28. Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda [1928] (Brooklyn: Ig Publishing, 2004).

29. David S. Fogelsong, America’s Secret War Against Bolshevism: U.S. Intervention in the Russian Civil War, 1917–1920 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), p. 28.

30. Patricia Cayo Sexton, The War on Labor and the Left (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), p. 112; David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 7.

31. Samuel Huntington, “Vietnam Reappraised,” International Security 6, no. 1 (Summer 1981), p. 14.

32. See Frank Kofksy, Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948 (New York: Macmillan, 1993); Noam Chomsky, Turning the Tide: U.S. Intervention in Central America and the Struggle for Peace, expanded ed. (Boston: South End Press, 1985), a new edition of which is forthcoming in 2015 from Haymarket Books; Noam Chomsky, World Orders, Old and New, expanded edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

33. Eyal Press, “GOP ‘Responsibility’ on US Arms Sales,” Christian Science Monitor, February 23, 1995, p. 19.

34. Gerald K. Haines, The Americanization of Brazil: A Study of U.S. Cold War Diplomacy in the Third World, 1945–1954 (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1989), pp. ix, 121.

35. Stephen Streeter, “Campaigning against Latin American Nationalism: John Moors Cabot in Brazil, 1959–1961,” The Americas 51, no. 2 (October 1994), pp. 193–218, citing a report to the National Security Council, May 21, 1958.

36. John Foster Dulles, Telephone Call to Allen Dulles, “Minutes of telephone conversations of John Foster Dulles and Christian Herter,” June 19, 1958 (Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene, KS).

37. Thomas Carothers, “The Reagan Years: The 1980s,” in Abraham Lowenthal, ed., Exporting Democracy: The United States and Latin America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), pp. 90–122; Thomas Carothers, In the Name of Democracy: U.S. Policy Toward Latin America in the Reagan Years (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991), p. 249.

38. Richard Bernstein, “The U.N. versus the U.S.,” New York Times Magazine, January 22, 1984, p. 18.

39. Abram Sofaer, “The United States and the World Court,” U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Public Affairs, Current Policy, no. 769 (December 1985), statement before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I am indebted to Tayyab Mahmud for bringing this to my attention.

40. Robert Fogelnest, “President’s Column,” The Champion, March 1996, p. 5.

41. Stuart Creighton Miller, Benevolent Assimilation: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899–1903 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 74, 78, and 123.

42. Allen v. Diebold, Inc., 33 F. 3d 674 (United States Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit, decided September 6, 1994).

43. Francis Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy [1755] (New York: August M. Kelley, 1968); Sheldon Gelman, “‘Life’ and ‘Liberty’: Their Original Meaning, Historical Antecedents, and Current Significance in the Debate over Abortion Rights,” Minnesota Law Review 78, no. 585 (February 1994), p. 644, citing Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy, p. 231.

44. See Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1991), p. 245.

45. James G. Wilson, “The Role of Public Opinion in Constitutional Interpretation,” Brigham Young University Law Review 1993, no. 4 (November 1993), p. 1055, quoting John Randolph, Considerations on the Present State of Virginia (1774).

46. Important recent studies include Jennifer Nedelsky, Private Property and the Limits of American Constitutionalism: The Madisonian Framework and Its Legacy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Richard Matthews, If Men Were Angels: James Madison and the Heartless Empire of Reason (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1994); Lance Banning, The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995).

47. Jonathan Elliot, ed., The Debates in the Several State Conventions: On the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, as Recommended by the General Convention at Philadelphia, in 1787, 4 vols. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1907), p. 45.

48. See note 36 above.

49. Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), pp. 513–14. Wood’s thesis is that the enterprise failed and that the “democratic society” that emerged “was not the society the revolutionary leaders had wanted or expected,” grounded in republican virtues and enlightenment (note 44, p. 365). Whether the failure of republicanism led to a triumph of democracy, however, depends very much on how we understand the latter concept, and the events that followed. Many, including even much of the white working class, had a different picture.

50. Gerald Colby and Charlotte Dennett, Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon; Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil (New York: Harper Collins, 1995), p. 15.

51. Sidney Plotkin and William E. Scheurman, Private Interests Public Spending: Balanced-Budget Conservatism and the Fiscal Crisis (Boston: South End Press, 1994), p. 223.

52. Vincent Cable, “The Diminished Nation-State: A Study in the Loss of Economic Power,” Daedalus 124, no. 2 (Spring 1995), citing the UN World Investment Report (1993).

53. Robert Hayes, “U.S. Competitiveness: ‘Resurgence’ versus Reality,” Challenge 39, no. 2 (March/April 1996), pp. 36–44. On the “bloated, top-heavy managerial and supervisory bureaucracies” of US corporations (more than three times as high as Germany and Japan), and the relation of “corporate bloat” to the (also unusual) US “wage squeeze,” see David M. Gordon, Fat and Mean: The Corporate Squeeze of Working Americans and the Myth of Managerial “Downsizing” (New York: Free Press, 1996).

54. Judith H. Dobrzynski, “Getting What They Deserve? No Profit Is No Problem for High-Paid Executives,” New York Times, February 22, 1996. For extensive data, see Lawrence R. Mishel and Jared Berenstein, The State of Working America: 1994–95 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1994).

55. US Department of Commerce, Survey of Current Business, 75, no. 8 (August 1995), pp. 97 and 112.

56. Bernard Wysocki Jr., “Life and Death: Defense or Biotech? For Capital’s Suburbs, Choices Were Fated,” Wall Street Journal, December 12, 1995, pp. Al and A5.

57. Peter Applebome, “A Suburban Eden Where the Right Rules, with Conservatism Flowering among the Malls,” New York Times, August 1, 1994.

58. Joseph S. Nye and William A. Owens, “America’s Information Edge,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 1966, p. 20.

59. Larry W. Schwartz, “Route 128 May Be the Road to a Free-Market Economy,” Boston Globe, March 22, 1996, p. 23, adapted from his article “Venture Abroad: Developing Countries Need Venture Capital Strategies,” Foreign Affairs, November/December 1994, pp. 15–18, adding Boston’s Route 128.

60. John Cassidy, “Who Killed the Middle Class?,” New Yorker, October 16, 1995, pp. 113–24

61. Winfried Ruigrok and Rob van Tulder, The Logic of International Restructuring: The Management of Dependencies in Rival Industrial Complexes (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 217 and 221–22.

Five: Simple Truths, Hard Problems: Some Thoughts on Terror, Justice, and Self-Defense

1. For sources, see my New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1999); A New Generation Draws the Line: Humanitarian Intervention and the “Responsibility to Protect” Today, expanded ed. (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2012); and Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance, 2nd ed. (New York: Metropolitan/Owl, 2004). In this chapter, I will keep to citations not easy to locate in fairly standard work, or in recent books of mine, including these.

2. Elizabeth Becker, “Kissinger Tapes Describe Crises, War and Stark Photos of Abuse,” New York Times, May 27, 2004.

3. Telford Taylor, Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy (New York: Times Books, 1970).

4. Edward Alden, “Dismay at Attempt to Find Legal Justification for Torture,” Financial Times, June 10, 2004.

5. Justice Richard Goldstone, “Kosovo: An Assessment in the Context of International Law,” Nineteenth Annual Morgenthau Memorial Lecture, Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, May 12, 2000.

6. Michael Georgy, “Iraqis want Saddam’s Old U.S. Friends on Trial,” Reuters, January 20, 2004.

7. On this and other such operations, based in part on unpublished investigations of Newsweek Saigon bureau chief Kevin Buckley, see Chomsky and Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1979).

8. Arnon Regular, Ha’aretz, May 24, 2003, based on minutes of a meeting between Bush and his hand-picked Palestinian Prime Minister, Mahmoud Abbas, provided by Abbas. See also Howard Fineman, “Bush and God,” Newsweek, March 10, 2003, with a cover story on the beliefs and direct line to God of the man with his finger on the button. Also the PBS documentary, “The Jesus Factor,” Frontline, April 29, 2004, dir. Raney Aronson, on the “religious ideals” that Bush has brought to the White House, “relevant to the Bush messianic mission to graft democracy onto the rest of the world”; Sam Allis, “A Timely Look at How Faith Informs Bush Presidency,” Boston Globe, February 29, 2004. White House aides report concern over Bush’s “increasingly erratic behavior” as he “declares his decisions to be ‘God’s will’”; Doug Thompson, Capitol Hill Blue, June 4, 2004.

9. Gordon S. Wood, “‘Freedom Just Around the Corner’: Rogue Nation,” New York Times Book Review, March 28, 2004; Thomas Bailey, A Diplomatic History of the American People (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1969).

10. Historians Thomas Pakenham and David Edwards, cited by Clifford Longley, “The Religious Roots of American Imperialism,” Global Dialogue 5, nos. 1–2 (Winter/Spring 2003).

11. Cited by Pier Francesco Asso, “The ‘Home Bias’ Approach in the History of Economic Thought: Issues on Financial Globalization from Adam Smith to John Maynard Keynes,” in Jochen Lorentzen and Marcello de Cecco, eds., Markets and Authorities: Global Finance and Human Choice (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2002).

12. “Iraq: Another Intifada in the Making” and “The Mood on the Iraqi Streets: Bloodier and Sadder,” Economist, April 15, 2004.

13. Walter Pincus, “Skepticism About U.S. Deep, Iraq Poll Shows: Motive for Invasion Is Focus of Doubts,” Washington Post, November 12, 2003. Richard Burkholder, “Gallup Poll of Baghdad: Gauging U.S. Intent,” October 28, 2003. Available online at www.gallup.com/poll/9595/gallup-poll-baghdad-gauging-us-intent.aspx.

14. Anton La Guardia, “Handover Still on Course as UN Waits for New Leader to Emerge,” Daily Telegraph, May 18, 2004.

15. Carla Anne Robbins, “Negroponte Has Tricky Mission: Modern Proconsul,” Wall Street Journal, April 27, 2004.

16. Envío (UCA, Jesuit University, Managua), November 2003.

17. Martha Crenshaw, “America at War,” Current History, December 2001.

18. See, inter alia, my Pirates and Emperors, Old and New: International Terrorism in the Real World, updated ed. (Cambridge: South End Press, 2002). (A new edition of this work is forthcoming in 2014 from Haymarket Books.) For review of the first phase of the “war on terror,” see Alexander George, ed., Western State Terrorism (Cambridge: Polity/Blackwell, 1991).

19. Stephen Zunes, “U.S. Policy towards Syria and the Triumph of Neoconservatism,” Middle East Policy 11, no. 1 (Spring 2004).

20. The Independent International Commission on Kosovo, The Kosovo Report: Conflict, International Response, Lessons Learned (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

21. Goldstone, “Kosovo.”

22. For review, see my New Military Humanism.

23. For details, see my A New Generation Draws the Line, which also reviews how NATO instantly overturned the Security Council resolution it had initiated. Goldstone, “Kosovo,” recognizes that the resolution was a compromise, but does not go into the matter, which aroused no interest in the West.

24. The only detailed reviews I know of are in my books cited in the two preceding notes, with some additions from the later British parliamentary inquiry in my Hegemony or Survival.

25. Nicholas J. Wheeler, Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention and International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

26. Carsten Stahn, “Enforcement of the Collective Will after Iraq,” American Journal of International Law 97, no. 4 (Symposium, “Future Implications of the Iraq Conflict”) (October 2003), pp. 804–23. For more on these matters, including Michael Glennon’s influential ideas and his rejection of other moral truisms, see my article and several others in Review of International Studies 29, no. 4 (October 2003), and my Hegemony or Survival.

27. See H. Bruce Franklin, War Stars: The Super Weapon and the American Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

Chapter Six: Human Intelligence and the Environment

1. Ernst Mayr, “Can SETI Succeed? Not Likely,” Bioastronomy News 7, no. 3 (1995). Carl Sagan, “The Abundance of Life-Bearing Planets,” Bioastronomy News 7, no. 4 (1995). See also Ernst Mayr, “Does It Pay to Acquire High Intelligence?” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, no. 37 (Spring 1994).

2. United Nations Climate Change Conference, December 7–18, 2009, Copenhagen, Denmark.

3. George Monbiot, “If You Want to Know Who’s to Blame for Copenhagen, Look to the US Senate,” Guardian, December 21, 2009.

4. Edmund L. Andrews, “Greenspan Concedes Error on Regulation,” New York Times, October 23, 2008, p. B1.

5. E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime: A Novel (New York: Random House, 1975).

6. See Richard B. Du Boff, Accumulation and Power: An Economic History of the United States (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1989).

7. “Exchange of Rail Know-How Between the United States and Spain,” SpanishRailwayNews.com, December 7, 2011.

8. Leslie Kaufman, “Among Weathercasters, Doubt on Warming,” New York Times, March 29, 2010, p. A1.

9. David Chandler, “Climate Change Odds Much Worse than Thought,” MIT News, May 19, 2009. See also the reports of the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (http://globalchange.mit.edu).

Seven: Can Civilization Survive Really Existing Capitalism?

1. See John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, The Endless Crisis: How Monopoly-Finance Capital Produces Stagnation and Upheaval from the U.S.A. to China (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012).

2. Editors, “Why Should Taxpayers Give Big Banks $83 Billion a Year?” Bloomberg View, February 20, 2013. Citing Kenichi Ueda and Beatrice Weder di Mauro, “Quantifying Structural Subsidy Values for Systemically Important Financial Institutions,” IMF Working Paper, WP/12/128 (2012).

3. Martin Wolf, “Comment on Andrew G. Haldane, ‘Control Rights (And Wrongs),’” Wincott Annual Memorial Lecture, October 24, 2011.

4. See, among other works, Gar Alperovitz, America beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty, and Our Democracy (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2004).

5. John Dewey, “Education vs. Trade-Training—Dr. Dewey’s Reply,” New Republic 3, no. 28 (1915), p. 42.

6. Quoted in Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, p. 440.

7. Kelly Sims Gallagher, “Why and How Governments Support Renewable Energy,” Daedalus 142, no. 1 (Winter 2013), pp. 59–77.

8. Jon A. Krosnick and Bo MacInnis, “Does the American Public Support Legislation to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions?” Daedalus 142, no. 1 (Winter 2013), pp. 26–39.

9. Steve Horn, “Three States Pushing ALEC Bill to Require Teaching Climate Change Denial in Schools,” DeSmogBlog, January 31, 2013.

10. Bill Dedman, “Leaked: A Plan to Teach Climate Change Skepticism in Schools,” NBC News, February 15, 2012. Brendan DeMelle, “Heartland Institute Exposed: Internal Documents Unmask Heart of Climate Denial Machine,” DeSmogBlog, February 14, 2012.

11. Suzanne Goldenberg, “Secret Funding Helped Build Vast Network of Climate Denial Thinktanks,” Guardian, February 14, 2013.

12. Grace Wyler, “Bobby Jindal: The GOP ‘Must Stop Being The Stupid Party,’” Business Insider, January 25, 2013.

13. Science, January 18, 2013.

14. Richard A. Kerr, “Soot Is Warming the World Even More Than Thought,” Science, January 25, 2013.

15. Dean Baker, The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer (Washington, DC: Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2006).