1. Paul Street, “Obama’s Violin,” Z Magazine, May 2009.
2. However with the deep recession of 2008–2011 and no sign of major recovery in sight, the Social Security fund’s surplus was shrinking; see Justin Fox’s report, 9 April 2009: time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1890542,00.html.
3. Bill Quigley, “Corporations Profit from Permanent War,” 28 May 2010, ZNet Daily Commentary.
4. See various issues of The Defense Monitor, newsletter of the Center for Defense Information, vol. 39.
5. New York Times, 22 August 2010; Bill Quigley, “Corporations Profit from Permanent War, ” 28 May 2010, ZNet Daily Commentary.
6. Winslow Wheeler, “Nightmare Budget Scenarios at the Pentagon,” Defense Monitor, April/May/June 2010.
7. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Business Enterprise (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932), 217.
8. Gareth Smyth and Thomas Catan, “UN Auditors Attack US Occupiers over Spending of Iraq’s Oil Revenues,” Financial Times, 22 June 2004; James Surowiecki, “Army Inc.,” New Yorker, 12 January 2004; David R. Baker, “Rebuilding Iraq a Lucrative Job,” San Francisco Chronicle, 21 March 2004; New York Times, 26 July 2007.
9. David Armstrong, “Dick Cheney’s Song of America: Drafting a Plan for Global Dominance,” Harper’s Magazine, October 2002. The plan went through several drafts with titles like Defense Planning Guidance for the 1994–1999 Fiscal Years and Defense Planning Guidance for the 2004–2009 Fiscal Years.
10. See Catherine Lutz (ed.), The Bases of Empire (NYU Press, 2009).
11. Washington Post, 4 May 2010.
12. Rachel Stohl and Rhea Myerscough, “In the Name of Fighting Terr orism, The United States Is Still Arming the World,” Defense Monitor, September/October 2006; also http://useconomy.about.com/od/usfederalbudget/p/military_budget.htm.
13. New York Times, 23 April 2010.
14. See John Lasker, “US Space Weapon Now Circling the Globe,” Toward Freedom, 27 May 2010, http://towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/1980/1/.
15. The quoted phrases are from “No Place for Jingoism,” New York Times, editorial, 4 July 2010.
16. Mark Landler, reporting in New York Times, 23 April 2010.
17. For evidence in support of this see Michael Parenti, Against Empire (City Lights, 1995); Michael Parenti, Inventing Reality, 2nd ed. (Wadsworth/Thomson, 1993); and the writings of James Petras, William Blum, and various others.
18. Carl Boggs and Tom Pollard, The Hollywood War Machine: US Militarism and Popular Culture (Paradigm, 2006); and Nick Turse, The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives (Holt, 2009).
19. Andrew Alexander, “The Soviet Threat Was a Myth,” www.buzzle.com, 18 April 2002.
20. On the destruction of Yugoslavia, see Chapter 9.
21. San Francisco Chronicle editorial, 15 February 1998.
22. Robert Scheer, “An Illusion of Terror,” San Francisco Chronicle, 12 January 2005.
23. Robert Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2005).
24. See the discussion in Michael Parenti, Superpatriotism (City Lights, 2004), 145–150.