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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
It is becoming clear that the bailout measures of late 2008 may have consequences at least as grave for an open society as the response to 9/11 in 2001. Many members of Congress felt coerced into voting against their inclinations, and the normal procedures for orderly consideration of a bill were dispensed with.
The excuse for bypassing normal legislative procedures was the existence of an emergency. But one of the most reprehensible features of the legislation, that it allowed Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to permit bailed-out institutions to use public money for exorbitant salaries and bonuses, was inserted by Paulson after the immediate crisis had passed.
[1] WCAX, Burlington, Vermont -December 22, 2008, Cf. CNBC, October 30, 2008: “‘You can get paid $30 million under this program,’ says Michael Kesner, who heads Deloitte Consulting's executive compensation practice. ‘There's no limit on what you can get paid.’”
[2] John Dunbar, AP, October 25, 2007.
[3] David Hirst, “Fox joins battle cry for details of US bail-out,” BusinessDay, December 24, 2008,
[6] Rep. Brad Sherman, in the House, 8:07 EST PM, October 2, 2008. Rep. Sherman later issued the following clarification: “I have no reason to think that any of the leaders in Congress who were involved in negotiating with the Bush Administration regarding the bailout bill ever mentioned the possibility of martial law – again, that was just an example of extreme and deliberately hyperbolic comments being passed around by members not directly involved in the negotiations.” Cf. Rep. Sherman on Alex Jones show.
[7] Army Regulation 500-3, Emergency Employment of Army And Other Resources, Army Continuity Of Operations (COOP) Program, emphasis added. Cf. Tom Burghardt, “Militarizing the ‘Homeland’ in Response to the Economic and Political Crisis: NORTHCOM's Joint Task Force-Civil Support,” GlobalResearch, October 11, 2008.
[8] Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 183-87; cf. James Mann, The Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet (New York: Viking, 2004), 138-45.
[9] Scott, The Road to 9/11, 183-87.
[10] Ritt Goldstein, “Foundations are in place for martial law in the US,” Sydney Morning Herald, July 27 2002.
[11] Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11, 240-41.
[12] Scott, The Road to 9/11, 60-61.
[13] Robert Parry, “Henry Kissinger, Eminence Noire,” ConsortiumNews, December 28, 2008: “Kissinger, … – while serving as a peace-talk adviser to the Johnson administration – made obstruction of the peace talks possible by secretly contacting people working for Nixon, according to Seymour Hersh's 1983 book, The Price of Power [p. 21].
[14] Hersh, Price of Power, 18. Cf. Jim Hougan, Spooks: The Haunting of America (New York: William Morrow, 1978), 435: “Kissinger, married to a former Rockefeller aide, owner of a Georgetown mansion whose purchase was enabled only by Rockefeller gifts and loans, was always the protégé of his patron, Nelson R[ockefeller], even when he wasn't directly employed by him.”
[15] Scott, The Road to 9/11, 93-118.
[16] Scott, The Road to 9/11, 82-87, 91, 104-05.
[17] “Brigade homeland tours start Oct. 1,” Army Times, September 30, 2008. Cf. Michel Chossudovsky, “Pre-election Militarization of the North American Homeland, US Combat Troops in Iraq repatriated to ‘help with civil unrest,‘”GlobalResearch, September 26, 2008.
[18] Agence France-Presse, December 17, 2008.
[20] Remarks Of Sen. Patrick Leahy, National Defense Authorization Act For Fiscal Year 2007 Conference Report, Congressional Record, September 29, 2006.
[21] Eliot Spitzer, “Predatory Lenders' Partner in Crime: How the Bush Administration Stopped the States From Stepping In to Help Consumers,” Washington Post, February 14, 2008; A25. Three months earlier, on November 8, 2007, Governor Spitzer and New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo had published a joint letter to Congress, “calling for continued federal action to combat subprime lending practices.”
[22] David Johnston and Philip Shenon, “U.S. Defends Tough Tactics on Spitzer,” New York Times, March 21, 2008.
[23] “Why Eliot Spitzer was assassinated: The predatory lending industry had a partner in the White House,” Brasscheck TV, March 2008.
[24] Greg Palast, “Eliot's Mess: The $200 billion bail-out for predator banks and Spitzer charges are intimately linked,” Air America Radio's Clout, March 14, 2008.
[25] Without suggesting that the scandal was in any way centrally orchestrated or directed, it can be argued that the scandal was permitted to drag on so long because it was allowing profits from the illegal drug traffic to recapitalize the American economy and strengthen the beleaguered U.S. dollar.
[26] Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008). Cf. Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, “The three trillion dollar war,” The Times (London), February 23, 2008: “On the eve of war, there were discussions of the likely costs. Larry Lindsey, President Bush's economic adviser and head of the National Economic Council, suggested that they might reach $200 billion. But this estimate was dismissed as ”baloney“ by the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. His deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, suggested that postwar reconstruction could pay for itself through increased oil revenues. Mitch Daniels, the Office of Management and Budget director, and Secretary Rumsfeld estimated the costs in the range of $50 to $60 billion, a portion of which they believed would be financed by other countries. (Adjusting for inflation, in 2007 dollars, they were projecting costs of between $57 and $69 billion.) The tone of the entire administration was cavalier, as if the sums involved were minimal.”
[27] Charles R. Morris, The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash (New York: PublicAffairs, 2008).
[28] Joint Vision 2020; Scott, The Road to 9/11, 20, 24. “Full spectrum dominance” repeated what had been outlined earlier in a predecessor document, Joint Vision 2010 of 2005, but with new emphasis on the statement that “the United States must maintain its overseas presence forces” (Joint Vision 2020, 6). Cf. Joint Vision 2010, 4: “We will remain largely a force that is based in the continental United States.”
[29] Project for the New American Century, Rebuilding America's Defenses; Scott, The Road to 9/11, 23-24, 191-93.
[30] Rebuilding America's Defenses, 51, 75.
[31] “War in Iraq,” BarackObama.com.
[32] See e.g. Andrew Bacevich, Newsweek, December 8, 2008: “In Afghanistan today, the United States and its allies are using the wrong means to pursue the wrong mission. Sending more troops to the region, as incoming president Barack Obama and others have suggested we should, will only turn Operation Enduring Freedom into Operation Enduring Obligation. Afghanistan will be a sinkhole, consuming resources neither the U.S. military nor the U.S. government can afford to waste.” Cf. PBS, Frontline, “The War Briefing,” October 28, 2008.
[33] For the role of the Rhodes-promoted Jameson Raid in instigating the Boer War, see Elizabeth Longford, Jameson's Raid: The Prelude to the Boer War (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982).
[34] Gordon M. Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam (New York: Times Books/Henry Holt, 2008).
[35] John Newman, JFK and Vietnam: Deception, Intrigue, and the Struggle for Power (New York: Warner Books, 1992), 375-77, 434-35, 447; Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War (Ipswich, MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2008), 25-26, 28.
[36] Ofira Seliktar, Failing the Crystal Ball Test: The Carter Administration and the Fundamentalist Revolution in Iran (Westport, CN: Praeger, 2000), 52.
[37] Brzezinski later boasted that his “secret operation was an excellent idea. It drew the Russians into the Afghan trap” (“Les Révélations d'un ancien conseiller de Carter,” interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Le Nouvel Observateur, January 15–21, 1998; French version; quoted at length in Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 35). For my negative assessment of what some have described as the CIA's most successful covert operation, see The Road to 9/11, 114-37.
[38] George Santayana, Life of Reason, Reason in Common Sense (New York: Scribner's, 1905), 284.
[39] Edward Wolff, “The Wealth Divide: The Growing Gap in the United States Between the Rich and the Rest,” Multinational Monitor, May 2003. Cf. Edward Wolff, Top Heavy: The Increasing Inequality of Wealth in America and What Can Be Done About It (New York: New Press, 2002).
[40] Kevin Phillips, Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich (New York: Broadway Books, 2002), 422; quoted in Scott, The Road to 9/11, 3.
[41] Wolff, “The Wealth Divide.”
[42] For McKinley's mercantilist “large policy” as a response to depression, see Philip Sheldon Foner, The Spanish-Cuban-American War and the Birth of American Imperialism, 1895-1902 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972).
[43] Barnett R. Rubin and Ahmed Rashid, “From Great Game to Grand Bargain: Ending Chaos in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” Foreign Affairs, November/December 2008.
[44] Ahmed Rashid, “Obama's huge South Asia headache,” BBC, January 2, 2009.
[45] Cf. Zia Sarhadi, “America's ”good war“ turns into quicksand,” MediaMonitors, January 5, 2009: “Obama's announcement to send 20,000 additional troops to the ‘good war’ in Afghanistan has been greeted by the Taliban with glee. They regard it as an opportunity to attack a ‘bigger army, bigger target and more shiny new weapons to take from the toy soldiers.‘ American generals have talked in terms of 40,000 to 100,000 additional troops, levels that are simply not available. America's killing of hundreds of Afghan civilians in indiscriminate aerial attacks has been the most effective recruiting tool for the Taliban. Even those Afghans not keen on seeing the Taliban back in power are appalled by the level of brutality inflicted on civilians.”
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