from HUSTLER Magazine January 2011

He poses as a journalist and a publisher. In reality, Andrew (not so) Breitbart is a rightwing propagandist intent on bringing down the Obama Administration while advancing Republican objectives. Possessing a black belt in lying, this refugee from Hell’s Internet will stoop to any trick or act of duplicity. That includes, most certainly, race-baiting.

Breitbart, a keynote speaker at the first National Tea Party Convention and a selfconfessed bitch of conservative blogger Matt Drudge, first came to our attention as a result of the ACORN scandal.You remember ACORN, right?

That grassroots organization helped the poor and disenfranchised with healthcare, affordable housing, voter registration and other social concerns. Back in 2009 James O’Keefe posing as a pimp (sort of) visited eight ACORN offices with an undercover camera and an accomplice named Hannah Giles, who played the role of a hooker (sort of). O’Keefe’s footage wound up on Fox News Channel, which presented it as proof that ACORN staffers were willing to help individuals set up a prostitution ring. Due to the controversy, ACORN lost funding and eventually closed all of its offices.

One problem with the above: It was all precipitated by lies, largely the result of trick editing. (ACORN has since been exonerated by the U.S. Government Accountability Office and the attorneys general of California and Kings County, New York.) Guess who put O’Keefe up to stinging ACORN? Andrew Breitbart. Because of him, a noble institution went down the tubes.

Shirley Sherrod was the target of a similar sham. Once again, Breitbart in an alleged collaboration with Fox News released a highly doctored tape. This one seemingly revealed a federal employee using her position to discriminate against whites. As with ACORN, that charge has since been proven completely false.

So you must ask yourself: What kind of person is so lacking in morals and ethics that he would ruin a person’s life with lies and distortions?

Breitfart, as some refer to him, got his start as a suck-up to Matt Drudge, who also treats the truth as if it were Silly Putty something to be molded any which way you choose. What Breitbart did for Drudge isn’t entirely clear because the former protegé refuses to talk about it. We’re guessing it had to do with Drudge’s laundry and housekeeping. (We wouldn’t want to talk about that either.)

Breitbart worked with Drudge for the better part of ten years. Then, with his brain sufficiently addled by Drudge’s upside-down, reversed-mirror politics, he parted ways with his mentor. Afraid to go solo, Breitbart coproduced a documentary about the suicide of Clinton Administration appointee Vince Foster.The account was so inept, the History Channel never ran it. Then he coauthored Hollywood, Interrupted , a book you can buy on Amazon for $1.99.

Finally, after an apparent failed interlude with Arianna Huffington, Breitbart found the courage to go it alone. He launched Breitbart.com, then the Web sites Big Hollywood, Big Government and Big Journalism—all, in Breitbart’s own words, aimed at bringing down the “institutional left.” Meanwhile, Breitbart.com comes across as an attention deficit disorder schematic. (The Web mogul has reportedly been diagnosed with ADD.) Since the site is successful, it’s fair to say Breitbart has, in effect, crawled up his own ass and built a cathedral.

Breitbart thinks he’s intelligent because he has a talent for hurting people with falsehoods and half-truths. Too bad there’s no test that considers lying to be a valid measure of intelligence. If there were, we admit, Breitbart would be an off-the-charts genius. Since there isn’t, we see only a sick and confused ego rampaging through the media and blogosphere like a bull (with mad cow disease) in a china shop. Discredited by the public at large, Breitbart faces at least one lawsuit for libel (from Shirley Sherrod), with more to follow we suspect. (Those ACORN people are plenty mad.)

Message to Andrew Breitbart: Remember all those teachers and classmates who told you what a pathetic loser you were back in school? The ones you have spent your whole life trying to prove wrong? They were right! You are a loser, Andrew. Mrs. Sherrod should have little difficulty in proving malice for what you did.And that could cost you a fortune.That very fragile house of cards you’ve built may come tumbling down on you and your family.

Like your right-wing minions, you seem to believe the truth is malleable. You cannot say black is white, or up is down, or sweet is sour. Well, you can say it, but you’d be wrong. And when you slander people, there are legal consequences.

You’ve dug a deep shithole for yourself, Andy boy, and now you’ll have to try climbing out of it. Too bad your Republican friends have pulled up the ladder and turned their backs on you. They see the writing on the wall, and by now so should you.

Finally, Mr. Breitbart, here’s a lesson on libel law: You, sir, are an Asshole.We can say that without fear of contradiction or legal

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by Alex Bennet
from HUSTLER Magazine January 2011

AT HIS BEST THE CROONER HAS NO CONTENDERS.

For around a year or so I have been obsessed with Frank Sinatra. It started when I programmed him into my iPod. I would put it on shuffle, and as it played I would click past my other choices, past Amy Winehouse and Elvis Costello, until I reached a Sinatra track. Finally saying, “Fuck shuffle!,” I just played nothing but Sinatra.

There’s something about the singer that never gets boring. Listening to him at his prime—the ’50s and ’60s—he’s utterly amazing. Sinatra may have had the most perfect voice ever. The interpretation, the control, his use of the voice as an instrument and the absolute attention to craft are unbelievable.

You’d think having all that talent would have made Sinatra’s life complete bliss. However, in reading about the man, you discover he was absolutely miserable most of his life. Perhaps it was that pain that made him amazing. You take the bad because it influences the good.

The early Sinatra—the late ’30s and ’40s—is quite uninteresting. Sure, the voice was pure, but it wasn’t until the 1950s— after his career took a dive—that he became great. He was dropped by both his movie studio and his record company, divorced his wife Nancy and married actress Ava Gardner. He even ruptured his vocal cords, temporarily rendering him unable to sing. Worst of all, he lost his confidence. I recently saw him in a 1950 Bob Hope TV special, and he came across as a real honest-to-goodness, washed-up has-been.

Then Sinatra garnered 1953’s best supporting actor Academy Award for his performance in From Here to Eternity. With the confidence of that win, he came back better than ever. The pain had added something to his abilities. The boy was now a man. It was one brilliant album after another. This was his “golden age.” It was perfection, and for no small reason. The man strove for it. He wanted to be the best there ever was.

With a few exceptions, really famous performers today don’t have that devotion to craft. They aren’t trying to be the best there is. They settle for popularity and tons of cash. Take Amy Winehouse. At her best she’s remarkable, very reminiscent of Billie Holiday. But she seems to have no respect for her talents. Not giving a shit, she’s letting it all fall apart. In the end this attitude may wind up killing her.

Very few performers can hold on to those powers as long as Frank did. In their heyday the Rolling Stones were the best rock ’n’ roll band ever. In them I heard that same perfection you find in Sinatra. But he retained it for 25 years; the Stones couldn’t.

Sinatra’s career spanned longer than six decades, although his final 15 years saw a pathetic loss of his powers. Woody Allen once said that by the time he finally got to meet his idol, Groucho Marx, the man had suffered three heart attacks. By then, Allen said, “There was nothing left.” It was depressing, he elaborated, to see that no matter how much talent you have, one day it will be taken away from you.

I remember feeling that way the one time I actually saw Sinatra perform live. It was in May 1992, six years before he died. My acquaintance, comedian Tom Dreesen, was in the San Francisco Bay area opening for Sinatra at the Circle Star Theater, so he invited me to see the great man at work. I was supposed to meet him that night, but no such luck. Tom told me Sinatra’s best friend Jilly Rizzo had died that day, and the grieving singer wasn’t seeing anyone, although he forced himself to do the concert. But the figure onstage was depressing. I remember thinking that when the light hit him just right and he hit a note on target, I was seeing the old Sinatra. But mostly I was just seeing the old Sinatra.

At one point I thought Frank was staring at me as he sang. Then I realized I was sitting behind one of the teleprompters that surrounded the stage, and he was reading from it. “She gets too hungry for dinner at 8, Jack,” he sang. On the teleprompter I saw the word Jack had been inserted in an effort to evoke his past hipness.

On my iPod I once had a bootleg of a Sinatra concert recorded in Milan, Italy, in 1986. When you hear him sing the first lines of “Night and Day,” he’s off-key. There’s nothing left of him. Historically, it is known as the worst concert he ever gave. I have deleted it from my playlist.

Today’s entertainers should learn from Frank Sinatra: Strive for perfection. That would be the one true

Alex Bennett is a longtime HUSTLER contributor. The two-time Emmy winner, who broke into broadcasting as a teenager, can be heard on Sirius Left. 146 (9 a.m. to noon ET) and XM America Left 167 (midnight to 3 a.m. ET).

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by Nat Hentoff
from HUSTLER Magazine January 2011

OUR NEWEST SUPREME COURT JUSTICE MAY BE A WOLF IN SHEEP’S CLOTHING.

As soon as a President nominates anybody to the Supreme Court, I start my research into that person hard and deep. I wholly agree with the late Chief Justice Earl Warren that “the preservation of our [individual] civil liberties [is] the most fundamental and important of all our governmental problems. … If we ever permit those liberties to be destroyed, there will be nothing left in our system worthy of preservation.”

Elena Kagan, former dean of Harvard Law School, is now one of the nine potentates whose decisions—or refusal to review Constitutional rulings by lower courts—will affect millions of us for years to come.The common synonym for the John Roberts Court she joins is “conservative.” So, as has often occurred, when there’s a 5-4 decision, will Elena Kagan be a champion of the Bill of Rights or a soul sister of Antonin Scalia?

How much do you know about the Court’s newest member? Kagan’s Senate confirmation hearings were customarily shallow, and the press in all its forms did very little digging of its own. Worse yet, as weekly national columnist and radio commentator John Whitehead accurately observed: “The average American…lacks even a rudimentary knowledge of the Constitution or Bill of Rights. … Martial law…may be one terrorist attack away.”

Think of what remnants of the Bill of Rights would have been blown to bits if the would-be Times Square car bomber had been successful.

In 2009, arguing on a case before the Supreme Court, Elena Kagan actually said:“Whether a given category of speech enjoys First Amendment protection depends upon a categorical balancing of the value of speech against its societal costs.” In all the writings of James Madison, the Father of the First Amendment, you’ll never find such broad and vague censorship of free speech. Who has this power to cripple free speech? The High Court on which Kagan now sits!

And dig this Kagan disemboweling of our rule of law. It never came up in the confirmation hearings or in the press—except from Harvey Silverglate in the Boston Phoenix. A Constitutional lawyer I’ve been learning from for years, Silverglate is coauthor of The Shadow University, the book that first exposed collegiate administrators’ ruthless attacks on the free speech of free-thinking students and professors on campuses nationwide. These “speech codes” have since been regularly exposed and shamed by FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), which Silverglate cofounded. (I’m on its Advisory Committee.)

Silverglate tells of two black men in Iowa who were caged for 25 years before they learned that the key testimony against them had been beaten out of the so-called witnesses. And to make sure the defendants would be convicted, the prosecution had lawlessly withheld exculpatory evidence favorable to them.

At long last the case reached the Iowa Supreme Court, which threw out one defendant’s conviction and cut the other’s sentence to time served. Naturally, citing the rawly clear violations of their Constitutional rights and the government’s theft of all those years of their lives, these Americans betrayed by our legal system sued for damages.

Their case ultimately reached the Supreme Court of the United States, where a crucial question focused on the accountability of the prosecutors who so cruelly violated the defendants’ Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial. In a friend-of-the-court brief, Elena Kagan—then Obama’s Solicitor General (the President’s representative in matters before the Supreme Court)—insisted that there be “absolute immunity” for those lawless prosecutors!

Kagan told the Justices, who are now her colleagues, that making those Iowa prosecutors accountable for this blatant false imprisonment (my words, not hers) would result in “untold social costs.” Like what? Preventing the conviction of the innocent?

Our new Supreme Court Justice claimed there should be no penalty for so callously violating the Bill of Rights. There wasn’t a peep of disagreement from her boss—then and now. It’s getting harder and harder to believe that Barack Obama once taught Constitutional law at the University of Chicago.

I’m not surprised. In April 2010 the New York Times reported that during a chat with reporters on Air Force One, Obama had imperiously criticized the Earl Warren Supreme Court for going out of its proper way by decisions that overruled elected officials. This was the Supreme Court that decided to exclude from trials any evidence illegally obtained by investigators (Mapp v. Ohio) and also established the Miranda right of any American arrested to remain silent. And to keep the core of the Constitution functioning, the Warren Court— in New York Times v.Sullivan —nailed down the First Amendment right to criticize public officials.

That is the Supreme Court Obama says went too far. Now he’s comfortable with Elena Kagan on the Roberts Court. He’s also delighted, I expect, that his choice for the Court, during her confirmation hearings, agreed with Obama (as the New York Times reported) that “people suspected of helping to provide material support to terrorists” should be subject to battlefield law— including detention without trial—even if they were not captured in a battle zone.

“Material support”? Talk about a model of broadness and vagueness of incriminating language!

This President has also been insistently advocating his power to imprison terrorism suspects indefinitely if he can’t put them on trial before military commissions or in our federal courts because the evidence against them was extracted by our having tortured them. It’s called “permanent detention.”

If Obama gets the legislation to do that— thereby showing the world again how distorted our rule of law has become under Bush, Cheney and Obama—the President will have a cheerleader on the Roberts Court for his mocking the Declaration of Independence’s insistence that “we have a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” And a decent respect for ourselves.

Nat Hentoff is a historian of the Constitution, a jazz critic and a columnist for the Village Voice and Free Inquiry. His incisive books include The First Freedom: The Tumultuous History of Free Speech in America ; Living the Bill of Rights ; and the forthcoming Is This America?
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by Robert Scheer
from HUSTLER Magazine January 2011

ROBERT RUBIN GIVEN PASS FOR KEY ROLE IN DESTROYING ECONOMY

One of the hallmarks of American power elites—in contrast to those of, say, Japan—is that they never seem to be held accountable for their crimes and incompetence. Instead of committing hara-kiri, they just lay low for a few months and then pretend they had nothing to do with any of it.

So it is that CNN pundit Fareed Zakaria, who suffered no apparent shame or career consequences for initially backing the biggest U.S. foreign-policy blunder since Vietnam—the invasion of Iraq, can be paid to blithely toss softball questions on national television to Robert Rubin, key backer of the most destructive domestic policies in the same time period: the deregulation of the banking industry.

Ah, television “journalism.”

On this particular Sunday, I was trapped on a treadmill in front of an overhead television and unable to turn the thing off in time to avoid this assault on my mental and physical health. As a result I was forced to hear Rubin, Treasury secretary under President Clinton, insist he always favored regulating toxic derivatives and is therefore not at all responsible for the ensuing economic meltdown.

Rubin was responding to the sole critical question from the CNN host, who quoted a question by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman: “Did all the senior members of the [Obama] economics team have to be protégés of Robert Rubin, the apostle of financial deregulation?”

Unfortunately, Zakaria just rolled over when his guest simply lied in response: “First of all,” Rubin said, “I am not the apostle of financial deregulation. Quite the contrary. On derivatives…I developed a deep concern about the systemic problem that was created. When I was back at Goldman Sachs, it was a concern I had…a concern I had when I was in government. And, in fact, when I wrote my book in 2003, I was so concerned about it that I actually included that discussion in there.”

Zakaria ended the show recommending it as his book of the week: “He [Rubin] wrote a great memoir that covered his two distinguished careers, both…on Wall Street and in Washington. … It was written with Jacob Weisberg, a great writer, the [former] editor of Slate, and the two men weave a compelling tale that has many lessons for today.”

To be charitable, I will assume that Zakaria has not actually read that book, which omits any discussion of the radical deregulation legislation that Rubin ushered through Congress and got the President to sign. Clinton is on record stating he got bad advice from Rubin and his handpicked successor, Lawrence Summers, on derivatives regulation: “On derivatives, yeah, I think they were wrong, and I think I was wrong to take [their advice],” Clinton told ABC News in April 2010.

Rubin and Summers were responsible for forcing Brooksley Born out of the Clinton Administration because, as chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, she had the temerity to suggest regulating the mortgage- backed securities that eventually proved to be so toxic. Instead, Rubin and Summers pushed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which Clinton signed into law before his last month in office, categorically exempting those suspect derivatives from any government regulation.

By then, Rubin had moved on to a $15- million-a-year job at Citigroup, which became a prime exploiter of the subprime housing market. As a result of its massive involvement with toxic securities, Citigroup— with Rubin in a leading role until early 2009—had to be bailed out by the federal government with a $45-billion direct investment and a guaranteed Fed protection for $306 billion in potentially toxic assets.

Citigroup, a merger of the old Citicorp and Travelers Group, was made legal only by the Financial Services Modernization Act, which Rubin backed while serving as Treasury secretary.

Then, in one of the most egregious conflicts of interest in U.S. history, Rubin went to work for the new bank, which took advantage of the changes in the law to buy up the infamous subprime lenders, beginning with Associates First Capital. The Economist magazine questioned whether investors would see Citi’s bold new venture “as something smart, such as ‘evolved credit extension,’ or something seamy, such as loan-sharking.”

Rubin was a major proponent of the firm’s seamy expansion into the mortgages that proved to be toxic, and by 2007 Citigroup was the second-largest subprime servicer, after the only slightly more infamous Countrywide.

There is much more, and I haven’t even touched on Rubin’s shameful role in Enron’s shenanigans. Enough said, though, to question not only Fareed Zakaria’s journalism but, far more important, Barack Obama’s leadership in first turning to Rubin as a key campaign adviser and then putting his disciples in charge of the U.S. economy.

Before serving 30 years as a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, Robert Scheer spent the late 1960s as Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor in chief of Ramparts magazine. Now editor of TruthDig.com, Scheer has written such hard-hitting books as The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America and his latest, The Great American Stick-Up: Greedy Bankers and the Politicians Who Love Them.

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QUESTION: WHEN IS A CRIME NOT CONSIDERED CRIMINAL? ANSWER: WHEN IT’S HATCHED ON WALL STREET.

By Danny Schechter
for HUSTLER Magazine January 2011

All over Europe and in much of the rest of the world, a new fictional hero has engaged the fascination of millions of readers. His name is Mikael Blomkvist, and he’s the protagonist of the late Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy. These thrillers, set against the background of high financial crimes and misdemeanors, have become global best-sellers, doubtless in part owing to their gripping plots, elaborate mysteries and engaging characters. But their success is also indisputably a by-product of the macroeconomic chicaneries of our era and the human catastrophes they have wrought.

Larsson understood that financial crimes are far from victimless. They have upended millions of people’s lives, even if most of the victims don’t understand how they’ve been shortchanged and who is responsible.

Although the financial crisis that swept the world may have started on Wall Street, it has brought down governments and shredded economic security worldwide, resulting in the loss of millions of jobs and homes as businesses collapse, foreclosures grow, credit tightens and communities are devastated. One estimate of the damage: $197 trillion.

The Pew Economic Policy Group reports the average U.S. household lost $66,000 in stock holdings and $30,000 in real estate values from June 2008 through March 2009 due to the upheaval in world markets. This brings us close to $100,000 per family. Against that backdrop, it’s not hard to see the appeal of Larsson’s hero Blomkvist, whose “contempt for his fellow financial journalists” the author encapsulates with stinging clarity: “A bank director who blows millions on foolhardy speculations should not keep his job. A managing director who plays shell company games should do time…. The job of the financial journalist was to examine the sharks who created interest crises and speculated away the savings of small investors, to scrutinize company boards with the same merciless zeal with which political reporters pursue the tiniest steps out of line of ministers and members of Parliament.”

This is why I identified with Blomkvists’s fictional mission; in some ways it captured my own frustrations in a media world for which “the c-word”— as in financial crime—seems must never be spoken.

The media failed us on the most crucial story of our era. Our newspapers and TV sources contributed to an economic disaster so cynically engineered even billionaire investor Jim Chanos was prompted to ask, “So where are the perp walks? How long does it take before we see any investigations? It boggles the mind that $150 billion is vaporized…there haven’t been any arrests, any indictments, nor any convictions at any major bank or at any of the government-owned financial institutions Fannie, Freddie and AIG.”

I know how hard it is to alarm the public with mere facts. They don’t have the context within which to interpret complicated stories. In 2006 I released the film In Debt We Trust, exposing illegal subprime scams and warning of the coming meltdown. It was well reviewed, but no mainstream TV outlet would air it.

I was dismissed as an alarmist and a “doom and gloomer.” A mass denial of the dangers ahead seemed to be embedded in the euphoria of the very bubble that was bringing in billions for Wall Street’s financial alchemists, who themselves seemed oblivious to the risks and indifferent to the social impact their practices courted.

The media coverage has made a complex reality deliberately complicated, even incomprehensible. The satirical paper The Onion put the financial press in its place regarding the totally obtuse reporting for which financial journalists were justly infamous even before the biggest scoop since 1929 fell into their laps: “JPMORGAN CHASE ACQUIRES BEAR STEARNS IN TEDIOUS-TO-READ NEWS ARTICLE.” The Onion witheringly characterized the coverage as “bogging down the news for anyone who might be remotely interested in grasping what the fuck is going on.”

Yet there were truth-tellers out there who were largely ignored. Investors like Warren Buffett compared the new exotic financial instruments to weapons of mass destruction— financial nuclear bombs.

Even guru of the right Ayn Rand had warned in Atlas Shrugged about greed destroying her beloved free market: “When you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you—when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice—you may know that your society is doomed.”

Doomed or not, in the second year of the Age of Obama the hoped-for economic turnaround has yet to occur. Even as the stock market goes up again, benefitting institutional investors with the capabilities to exploit it, unemployment remains high and loan defaults continue to rise. The best projections forecast a “jobless recovery,” which for millions is no recovery at all. How did we get into this mess? Put ten economists in a room, and you get 20 explanations. Most of them revolve around business mistakes, poor risk models or even psychological problems like delusion and market madness. Few will concede Senator Ted Kaufman (D-Delaware) is right in charging that “fraud and potential criminal conduct were at the heart of the financial crisis.” Missing has been a hard-nosed look at the crisis as a crime story. Former bank examiner William Black understands this. Focusing on looting and CEO fraud, he helped send over 1,000 bankers to prison during the S&L crisis in the 1980s. This time there were neither dogged sleuths nor crime-busting newshounds on the beat.

Even Alan Greenspan has finally admitted in his all-too-polite exchange with a government inquiry that has come to resemble a Princeton seminar, “If you don’t have enforcement, and a lot of that stuff was just plain fraud, you’re not coming to grips with the issue.” Of course, this “maestro” didn’t go into detail on “a lot of that stuff.”

What we are watching is an abstruse debate about banks that are “too big to fail,” not too big to jail.Very little of the discourse speaks in terms of the victims—the millions of families now without breadwinners or homes. Most of the commentary still looks up at CEOs, not down at the people whom they robbed by design, as folk singer Woody Guthrie put it, not with a six-gun but “with a fountain pen.”

When most of us think of crime, we think of gangsters with guns, not banksters with elaborate schemes designed to transfer your wealth to their accounts. Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair—a publication more at home with Groucho Marx than Karl—said of the meltdown: “[This] may well turn out to be the greatest nonviolent crime against humanity in history…never before have so few done so much to so many.”

Yet economists, even progressive ones like James Kwak, deeply mired in the labyrinthian world of financial transactions, still don’t believe it. The day the SEC filed a complaint against Goldman Sachs, he wrote on BaselineScenario.com, one of the more critical Web sites covering the collapse of this vast swindle: “One of the things I say now and then that most annoys people is that the financial crisis was not caused by criminal behavior…. My general line is that I’m sure there was some bad behavior that rose to the level of criminal liability—like lying in disclosure documents—but that it wasn’t necessary for the crisis, and we could have had the crisis without any criminal activity at all.” The problem with this thinking is that it defines financial crime too narrowly, only in terms of securities laws concerned primarily with protecting investors.

It doesn’t acknowledge that financial institutions spent nearly a billion dollars underwriting efforts to erode government controls and change rules, regulations and even laws to allow them to get away with whatever enhanced their bottom lines, no matter who got hurt. Their well-documented history of aggressive lobbying and buying up politicians qualifies them as avaricious manipulators, not law-abiding companies. Their legal and moral defenses for this conduct are entirely bogus.

Let’s look at Goldman Sachs. In my film I report that Goldman was accused by Massachusetts authorities of deliberately designing mortgages to fail. They settled the complaint by paying a $60-million fine and wrote it off as a cost of doing business. The SEC later filed civil fraud charges on similar grounds. This was followed by turbulent hearings on the Hill during which Senator Carl Levin (D-Michigan) repeatedly cited an internal correspondence reference to “shitty” deals that Goldman Sachs peddled only to bet against them. The Justice Department, in a separate action, was asked to open a criminal file.Among the allegations: shady accounting schemes. The giant firm has certainly come in for excoriation and ridicule, but none of Goldman’s officers has been convicted of wrongdoing, and they are “lawyered up” to the gills. Leslie Griffith on Reader Supported News writes: “A modern-day financial monarchy, Goldman acts with the impunity once reserved for kings. Controlling legislators. Electing Presidents. Filling the Executive Branch with well-heeled lackeys, manipulating world markets and betting against the welfare of its own clients…the American people. When their equivalent of ‘tax time’ came, they squeezed the peasants for billions of bail-out bucks.”

In their testimony before Congress, Goldman bankers defended themselves by saying all big banks did what they did. A weak alibi at best, it nonetheless seems to be working for them. The assignment of criminal liability is hardly underway. As one lawyer said to Bloomberg News, “In order to proceed criminally in a case, you need to have very clear evidence of lying, cheating and stealing.” In plain English: Don’t get your hopes up. The government has not declared war on Wall Street even after Wall Street declared war on Main Street. The housing bubble was built on a bedrock of fraud linking shady subprime brokers and appraisers to an industry of financial products that were then resold with misrepresented values thanks to the connivance of unethical ratings agencies.

The selling and reselling of assetless asset-backed securities is a central element of the vast fraud, as is the practice of insuring while simultaneously betting against these investments through companies like AIG. We are talking about a criminal enterprise involving tens of thousands of people working in the financial services industry. Martin Wolf of The Financial Times explained that three industries worked together almost like a cabal to perpetuate these schemes. The architects of the FIRE economy (structured around Finance, Insurance and Real Estate), operated in the shadow of bent rules and apathetic regulators. They built a huge infrastructure of collaborators and henchmen called “financial service professionals.”

Writes Wolf: “In between the ultimate borrowers and the risk-takers were loan-originators, designers and packagers of securitized assets, ratings agencies, sales staff, managers of banks and SIVs [Structured Investment Vehicles] and managers of pension—and other—funds.” What chance did some poor homeowner or credit card customer have against this savvy and well-funded phalanx of operatives whose one mission was to separate them from their property and money?

Many knew the people they were selling to could not afford to buy their products. They didn’t care. It was all done deceptively and by design. It was deliberate, engineered in public and hidden in plain sight. At the local level, mortgage companies said they were under pressure from Wall Street to keep selling homes to the poor so the paper could be resold in an atmosphere of trickle-down corruption.

My own investigation led me to produce a new film, Plunder: The Crime of Our Time, out on DVD from Disinfo. (PlunderTheCrimeOfOurTime.com). I also wrote a companion book, The Crime of Our Time (Disinformation Books) with more documentation than you can get into any film of reasonable length. I was surprised when the Wall Street Journal characterized it as an “anti-Wall Street film [that] isn’t just for Michael Moore fans.” The Hollywood Interview blog called it “fascinating and nailbiting, much like All the President’s Men.”

Movie City News elaborated: “Plunder: The Crime of Our Time describes how Wall Street interests greased the skids for just such a collapse, consciously breaking laws they knew government regulators were unlikely to defend. Michael Moore has trod similar ground, but in a more overtly entertaining style…. It’s a sobering documentary, but one that’s too important to ignore…in Schechter’s case, again.”

This crisis can be explained in a way most people will understand, and when the public “gets it” they will get angry and act. It’s the oldest truism: Where there is a will, there’s a way.

———-
News Dissector Danny Schechter, graduate of Cornell University and the London School of Economics, has been a radio news director, local TV news reporter, CNN show producer and Emmy Award-winning ABC News broadcast producer. He is cofounder of Globalvision, an independent film and television production company. He has directed 25 documentaries, including his latest, Plunder: The Crime of Our Time, about the financial crisis as a crime story. He has been honored as a blogger and has written 11 books, including The Crime of Our Time, further detailing his findings regarding financial crime. He has reported from 60 countries. Comments to Dissector@MediaChannel.org.

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by Alex Bennet
from HUSTLER Magazine December 2010

THE FUTURE IS HERE, BUT IS IT THE ONE WE WANTED?

As far back as I can remember, I’ve been obsessed with technology. I bought my first PC before they had hard drives; all it had were two 5-inch floppy disks and virtually no memory at all. I was thrilled. If it was electronic, I reveled in the fact that I was living in the future I had always dreamed of. My Web site went up before most people even knew what the World Wide Web was. I had to learn the code that it took to put a page online. No short-cut programs—just hard code.

Nor was my interest in technology limited to computers. I remember buying a stereo TV adapter before there was any programming and a DVD player before there were any discs. Yes, I was crazy about tech and walked the walk. Now, however, I’m morphing into the kind of person I once eschewed. I’m becoming a Luddite. The term derives from a group of British weavers in 1811— led by a man named Ned Ludd—who destroyed textile machines in the belief that they would cost jobs. Today the term has come to mean anyone who opposes technology or technological change.

Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, was the ultimate Luddite. In his manifesto he raged against technology, claiming it would erode human freedom. It wasn’t that old Ted didn’t have a point; the problem was that he blew people up. Now locked up in the Supermax prison, Ted can languish for the rest of his life technology-free.

The question I had to ask myself was were these advances a blessing or a curse? Let’s examine some of them.

Cell phones are great. On the one hand, we can take them anywhere, talk on them anytime. On the other hand, we are always at somebody else’s disposal, especially bosses who can now keep us working regardless of where we are.Then there’s the question of quality. How many times have you yelled the phrase “Can you hear me?!” into your phone? The damn thing keeps dropping calls or, worse, the calls start breaking up. I think of the smartphone as a less sophisticated computer that makes lousy phone calls.

Let’s talk about the beloved Internet. It’s the world at your fingertips and an endless repository of information. Right? Wrong! It’s actually a cesspool of misinformation. No one’s out there to vet the material. When I write something here, I have editors who fact-check what I’m saying. Who’s doing that for people writing on the Internet? Pure lies can be disseminated, and you wind up telling a friend “It must be true” because you saw it on the Internet. The biggest beneficiaries of the Internet are scammers and pedophiles.

While we’re on the subject of the Internet, we should talk about communication. In our quest for instant gratification, nothing beats e-mail. You type it, you send it, and someone gets it. No more cramps from pesky handwriting, no stamps to adhere and no mailbox. But e-mail doesn’t have the same impact as a thoughtfully written or typed letter. Even rejection letters seem nicer when they come through the postal system. E-mail just doesn’t transmit emotion very well. Things like love and sarcasm don’t come across unless you use those stupid emoticons like .

Then there’s texting. You have to abbreviate your thoughts: Mk yr spellng shrter. And how do you tell when it’s over?

“See you later.”
“Okay.” “Bye.”
“So long.”
“Are we through?”
“Yes.”
“Thank God.”
“There is no God.”

It’s maddening. I asked somebody why he sends text messages when they’re going to phone numbers that could just as easily be called. The answer was “I don’t have to talk to them.”

The worst may be social networking, which isn’t very social at all. It’s really just a way to avoid human contact. Facebook allows for a couple of sentences, which go out to all your “friends.” (“Hi, everybody. I just jerked off.”) To its credit, however, Facebook also permits the sending of longer private messages to a single individual. Also on the plus side, I have touched base with people I haven’t talked to in years. That, however, is usually a onetime deal. You never communicate with them again—at least until there’s a new Internet craze.

Twitter, on the other hand, just cuts to the chase, only allowing 140 characters per message. It’s the less sociable Facebook.

Two last things: How many times does your high-def cable stutter and freeze? Did that ever happen with your analog TV? And digital audio doesn’t sound better than your old LPs, which had a great dynamic range and weren’t compressed. You think it’s better only because today’s manufacturers have numbed down what you expect from audio.

Sure, I suppose we are in a technologically better age, but have life’s simple pleasures been the tradeoff? Or is it possible to still have both? Well, don’t worry. I’m not off to my mountain cabin to make bombs.

Alex Bennett is a longtime HUSTLER contributor. The two-time Emmy winner, who broke into broadcasting as a teenager, can be heard on Sirius Left. 146 (9 a.m. to noon ET) and XM America Left 167 (midnight to 3 a.m. ET).

by Robert Scheer
from HUSTLER Magazine December 2010

ON ELECTION DAY REMEMBER THAT THE GOP MAJORITY REJECTED EXTENDING UNEMPLOYMENT
CHECKS TO MILLIONS OF CITIZENS THROWN OUT OF WORK BY THE WALL STREET DEBACLE.

The garbage charge of this year’s midterm elections is that Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress are anti-business or, even worse, some kind of socialists. Just the opposite is the case with this President, who—like Bill Clinton before him—has given the Wall Street lobbyists just about everything they had paid for. Those same lobbyists, ingrates that they are, now are pushing for Republican control of Congress because they want to pressure our Democratic President for even greater concessions in the remainder of his term.

That’s what they did to Clinton after his first two years in office, and the tactic worked brilliantly, turning the Arkansas poor boy populist into a submissive water carrier for Wall Street for his next six years in office. It was Clinton who reversed the Depressionera Glass-Steagall Act that prevented highflying investment banks from playing with the federally insured banking deposits of ordinary folk. And when those bankers all too predictably abused their newfound freedom from sensible regulation by designing and marketing the Ponzi scheme of toxic derivatives and credit default swaps, it was Obama who went even further than George W. Bush in bailing them out.

This is a far cry from your grandfather’s Democratic Party, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt responded to the lessons of the Great Depression by corralling Wall Street greed with legislation designed to prevent the big banks from being too big to fail. Ever since Ronald Reagan, the Republicans have talked a good game of ending those New Deal restraints on big finance, but it was Clinton who got it done. That’s what freed Wall Street to run amok, almost sending the entire economic system off the cliff. And it was Obama who kept open the spigot for a federal bailout following George W.’s welfare program to save the bankers from the consequence of their uncontrolled greed.

Faced with that disaster, Bush just threw taxpayer money at Wall Street while asking absolutely nothing in return to help those same taxpayers who were hurting so thanks to Wall Street excess. Obama is now attacked because he got back a few very modest new regulations to prevent a future financial meltdown, and for that sensible protection of the public interest he is being damned.

The Democrats, whose voting base is centered more on those who still have to work for a living than on the country-club set at the heart of Republican power, do have to spread the wealth just a bit. That’s why the Democrats favor healthcare reform and job-stimulus programs, while the Republicans are all heart for rich retired golfers. But the irony is that, in the crunch, the Democrats, despite offering a few morsels for the rest of us, have been better for Big Business than their Republican opponents.

Both major parties are under the control of Wall Street, but the Democrats are the lesser evil because they have to deliver some crumbs to ordinary folks. All you should require as a reason for not voting for a Republican is that the GOP led a filibuster against legislation that would extend unemployment benefits for some of the 8 million people thrown out of work by the Wall Street debacle. Only two Republicans—Maine Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins—voted to support the extension. It seems Republicans—who, under George W. Bush, threw trillions at Wall Street—are suddenly worried about the national debt when it comes to putting food on the table of unemployed workers. The Republicans in Congress voted against every effort to force the banks to help people stay in their homes; at least the Democrats made some effort to put people first.

That was too much for the bankers who want it all. Their attacks on Obama as antibusiness are nothing more than shameful hypocrisy on the part of the corporate lobbyists who know that the Democrats deliver for them even if the right-wing nutjobs on talk radio and television don’t. When the Big Business hotshots complain about Obama, it’s nothing more than their way of upping the ante. The best defense is a good offense, so why not cry foul about a rising national debt whenever the government spends money on anyone but the undeserving rich?

“Play the victim, woe is me” is the cry of such ripoff artists as Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, so maybe no one will notice that your financial banditry turned millions of foreclosed homeowners and unemployed workers into virtual paupers. That’s what’s up with this election: It’s a naked power grab to weaken the Democratic hold over Congress in order to push Obama further into the ungrateful arms of the Wall Street fat cats who want even more.

Before serving 30 years as a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, Robert Scheer spent the late 1960s as Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor in chief of Ramparts magazine. Now editor of TruthDig.com, Scheer has written such hard-hitting books as The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America and his latest, The Great American Stick-Up: Greedy Bankers and the Politicians Who Love Them.

by Nat Hentoff
from HUSTLER Magazine December 2010

OUR PRESIDENT SEEMS INTENT ON TELLING
US WHAT TO EAT AND WHEN TO DIE!

Some of our President’s critics say he is “cold,” but he is so concerned with our cost-efficient well-being that on June 10, 2010, he issued an executive order (not requiring Congressional approval) that inserts into the Obamacare law yet another regulatory committee. Never before has there been anything like this governmental shaping of our lifestyles. As Bob Unruh of WorldNetDaily reported, the new committee will “make recommendations about and establish rules for everything from how people exercise to whether they smoke to the food they eat and the medicines they use. And it specifically requires the committee list the priorities for lifestyle behavior modification that the government will pursue.”

On White House stationery, Obama’s historic executive order is listed as “Establishing the National Prevention, Health Promotion, and Public Health Council.” Among the behavior deciders on this advisory board—a brain trust that 1984 author George Orwell never thought of in his futuristic novel—are the chiefs of the Agriculture, Labor, Health & Human Services, Transportation and Homeland Security departments. Oh, yes, also the director of the National Drug Control Policy.

To indicate how seriously the Obama Administration intends to control how you take care of yourself, Bob Unruh earlier reported a Department of Justice brief to dismiss a lawsuit by the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, which was opposing the Food and Drug Administration’s ban on the interstate sale of raw milk.

Here is the unequivocal statement by our government that the claim by the plaintiffs in this lawsuit “of a ‘fundamental right to their own bodily and physical health, which includes what foods they do and do not choose to consume for themselves and their families’ is…unavailing because plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to obtain any food they wish.” You have been warned by your government.

The Obama regime will tell you what’s good or what’s bad for you to eat and drink. How come the Founders never thought of that? Some of them were not very careful of what they ate or drank.

Are any of us going to be punished for not obeying this unprecedently benevolent government? An answer comes from Constitutional lawyer and former law professor Herb Titus, the 1996 Vice Presidential candidate on the Constitution Party (a/k/a the U.S. Taxpayers Party) ticket: “It’ll be criminalized. Ultimately that’s where it’s headed. That’s what this is designed to do. Ultimately bring everything under the federal umbrella. The only way they can accomplish that is through force.”

Depending, of course, on whether this administration stays in office. The vital list of reasons for voting in the midterm elections— let alone on the 2012 decision for a second Obama term—keeps getting longer and longer.

Consider the Behavior Modification Executive Order’s Section 3G, which basically mandates that the council in charge of our lifestyles will “carry out such other activities as are determined appropriate by the President.” There are no limitations on how our maximum leader can intervene, all by himself, in our personal lives.

And keep in mind this future date, as underlined by WorldNetDaily columnist David Limbaugh (Rush’s quieter younger brother). The “Advisory Group” in this executive order “in consultation with the council, must submit, by March 23, 2011, a ‘national strategy’ to ‘set specific goals and objectives for improving the health of the United States through federally supported prevention.’ ” Who knows what they, or the President alone, will come up with?

Meanwhile, we’re learning a lot more about how the Obamacare law will decide how long some of us—whose continued health, and therefore lives, are too costly for the government to sustain—will live. Not only the elderly are imperiled.

We already know that Obama has appointed Dr. Donald Berwick to the single most powerful healthcare position, the head of Medicare and Medicaid. Dr. Berwick has publicly declared his “love” for Britain’s National Health Service and its rationing of British healthcare and lives. But now the New York Times’ preeminent reporter on all of this, Robert Pear, has discovered that “Dr. Berwick has championed efforts to ‘reduce the total supply of high-technology medical and surgical care.’” They’re too damn expensive to be permitted by a President committed to reduce our deficits.

I am alive to write this because quadruple bypasses were invented and perfected in time for me to have one 16 years ago, when my cardiologist said that my life was “hanging by a thread.” Many of us, of all ages, are still here because of continually invented high-technology medical and surgical care. And many more lives can be saved in the years ahead, unless Obama and Dr. Berwick manage to cut off more and more of the expensive research these advances require.

As for those of us who may need intervention at what could be the final chapter of our lives, Dr. Berwick wants to “reduce the use of unwanted and ineffective medical procedures at the end of life.” Your own doctor will not decide if they’re unwanted or ineffective; Dr. Berwick and his regulators will. Neither he nor they will have actually seen you.

Remember the fiery debate on whether Obamacare would result in “death panels”? They won’t be called that, but in addition to Dr. Berwick, there will be scores of bureaucrats on Obama’s regulatory commissions to rule on which American lives are no longer worth living. An accurate Obama campaign promise should have been “Death you can believe in!”

Nat Hentoff is a historian of the Constitution, a jazz critic and a columnist for the Village Voice and Free Inquiry. His incisive books include The First Freedom: The Tumultuous History of Free Speech in America ; Living the Bill of Rights ; and the forthcoming Is This America?

from HUSTLER Magazine December 2010

The former Chairman and CEO of Hewlett- Packard should be the poster child for the term failing upward. Carly Fiorina did such a horrible job at HP that the company was willing to pay out her $42-million golden parachute rather than keep her around.

The online business magazine Condé Nast Portfolio listed Fiorina as one of “The 20 Worst American CEOs of All Time.” The Wall Street Journal said “[HP’s board members] lost faith in Carly…it is difficult to find anyone involved with HP today—board member, shareholder, employee, customer, analysts—who isn’t happy that Ms. Fiorina is gone.”

The Associated Press quoted Jeffrey Sonnenfeld of Yale University School of Management, who described Fiorina’s tenure as “a reign of terror and poor performance.” The Los Angeles Times added, “She axed tens of thousands of jobs, killed HP’s beloved profit-sharing plan, and in the eyes of her many passionate critics, exorcised the benevolent ghosts of company founders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard.” With “flowery” assessments like that, it shouldn’t be a big surprise that Fiorina has been largely unemployable since leaving HP—unless you count her consultancy for John McCain during his 2008 Presidential bid.

Unable to get a decent job in the business community, Carly is now exploring the world of politics. Using the same intellectual acuity she displayed at HP, Fiorina thinks she has a shot at unseating Senator Barbara Boxer (D-California). One of the best lawmakers on Capitol Hill, Boxer is always fighting for the little guy. Fiorina, on the other hand, fights for Big Business at the expense of the little guy. Want proof? “In the course of my time there [at HP], we laid off over 30,000 people,” this Prada-wearing, fish-faced Asshole told InformationWeek magazine.

“I know why they [jobs] leave [our country],” Fiorina continued. So do we: People like her send them to China, where labor costs are 60 cents an hour. Thanks for helping kill our manufacturing base, Carly.

We are aware that screwing workers is not why she got fired from HP. (The company was just fine with that.) It was because of her HP-Compaq merger, which is credited with devaluing HP stock by over 50%. The day after she was dismissed, that same stock rose a dramatic 6.9%. This would be humiliating to anyone other than Fiorina, who is obviously shameless.

Like a fly chasing a pig, Fiorina’s incompetence has followed her into the political arena. After appearing at window-maker Anlin Industries in Clovis, California, she released this statement: “It’s clear that the $862 billion [stimulus] plan has stimulated nothing but growth in the size and scope of government.” However, Anlin’s Web site states the manufacturer was, in fact, helped by the stimulus plan, which allowed homeowners to recover up to 30% of the cost for window replacements.

Okay, you ask: If Fiorina is so bad, where is she getting the money to finance her campaign? Someone must believe in her. Well, remember that $42 million Hewlett-Packard forked over? That wasn’t all the ex-CEO walked off with. Despite costing stockholders a bundle, she earned a total of almost $100 million during her stint with the company. Now she’s using that money to produce and buy TV advertising. So it’s Carly Fiorina who believes in Carly Fiorina.

We, on the other hand, find it easier to believe in the tooth fairy. For example, why vote for a politician who has, herself, rarely been politically active (prior to now)? Fiorina has voted in only a third of all elections since 2000 and has no voting record prior to moving to California in 1999. Beyond that, she is anti-choice, believes marriage should solely involve a man and a woman, opposes the legalization of marijuana, supports the death penalty, wants to cut taxes for the rich and the giant corporations and is against extending unemployment benefits.

Fiorina’s reason for slashing unemployment benefits is tied to her belief that government should reduce spending. That sounds good until you realize it involves cutting funds that would otherwise go to states for schools, hospitals, roads and social programs that poor people depend on. Like we said, Fiorina is against the little guy and for the super- rich, which means she’s for people like herself.

But here’s the absolute worst of Fiorina’s political positions: She is against more rigorous government regulation of Wall Street—despite the fact that it was the deregulation of the financial industry that caused America’s current economic meltdown. If, by some strange perverted act of Satan, she should win Boxer’s U.S. Senate seat, her position on that single issue could help usher in another economic calamity.

How ironic that a person who can’t get work in the business sector—given her piss-poor record— now wants to be supported by American taxpayers even as she puts the screws to us. Fuck you, Carly!

The GOP strategy for winning in November is to blame the Obama Administration for the mess made by George W. Bush: the devastated economy and two wars. Should the Republicans succeed in hoodwinking the American people, the Democrats could lose the House and possibly even the Senate. Because of GOP partisanship, that will result in a Congressional gridlock this nation has never seen before.

Check the facts: The Republicans spent us into near-bankruptcy while lowering taxes for the rich. They also lied us into wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, costing American lives and trillions of dollars. Given the foregoing, I think President Obama deserves a chance to fulfill his agenda. Please consider that when voting for your representatives this November

Larry Flynt

Publisher