Interview by Mark Johnson
for HUSTLER Magazine – June 2011

Investigative journalist and political commentator Webster Griffin Tarpley is used to controversy. Going wherever his research leads him, he has questioned the events of 9/11, challenged the mythologies of Barack Obama and tackled the massive bank fraud at the heart of the economic meltdown. A graduate of Princeton University and a former Fulbright Scholar, Tarpley gained wide notoriety when he went after Bush the First in George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography. More exposés followed, including 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA and Obama: The Postmodern Coup—Making of a Manchurian Candidate.

Tarpley’s latest book, Surviving the Cataclysm: Your Guide Through the Greatest Financial Crisis in Human History, lays out the real causes of our new economic depression and calls for a truly American solution.

HUSTLER: Is there any hope for Obama?

WEBSTER TARPLEY: Obama has been a catastrophic President. First of all, he’s a warmonger. Under Obama we’ve had more combat troops in the field than we ever had under [George W.] Bush. That means Iraq and Afghanistan, now a third war in Pakistan and a possible fourth war with Iran.

Contrary to popular belief, Obama is also a union buster. What he did to the United Auto Workers as part of the Detroit automobile bailout was to loot its union finances and send the money to Wall Street. The UAW was forced to swallow cuts in wages and benefits that degrade its members to the level of nonunion workers. The union also agreed to hand over healthcare assets to the hedge fund hyenas that now own huge stakes of our automakers. Obama’s car czar, Steve Rattner, notes in his new book that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s motto during the negotiations was “Fuck the UAW.” Obama is now using charter schools, merit pay and denial of tenure to bust the teachers’ unions.

My biggest critique of Obama is that he’s a Wall Street puppet. Look at the gaggle he has around him: Tim Geithner and Larry Summers [who recently resigned ] are disciples of Bob Rubin of Goldman Sachs and Citibank. Obama is a representative of the interests of the large Wall Street banks.We hear that he’s a socialist. That’s absolutely absurd. He serves the banks. My criticism of Obama comes from his left. Look at Obama compared to the positive tradition of the Democratic Party. Franklin D. Roosevelt created Social Security, an absolutely successful program. What’s Obama’s relation to that? He wants to destroy it, privatize it. The goal of his Bowles-Simpson Commission is to carry out a wrecking job on Social Security.

The crowning achievement of Lyndon B. Johnson’s career was Medicare. Obama has gutted it with $500 billion in cuts as part of his healthcare bill, which will lead to further rationing of care.

The difference between Obama and Bush is that Bush was an open, brutal reactionary and warmonger, but Obama does it all by deception, by duplicity. That’s why people have difficulty understanding the way he operates.

If the Democrats do not produce a challenger to Obama in the [2012] primaries, the Democratic Party is going to be clinically defunct.

What happened to our economy?

We have a world economic depression, similar to the 1930s but worse. It’s not a normal business-cycle event, not simply a boom and bust. It’s a disintegration of the U.S. and British banking systems and of the dollarbased system that the world has lived under since the 1940s.

Right-wingers like to say the depression was caused by poor people who took out subprime mortgages, and when they defaulted, that brought down the entire Anglo-American banking system. That’s just a fantastic story. Rather, what happened was a panic in the world derivatives market.

Derivatives such as collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps and structured investment vehicles are very complex things, hard for the average person to understand. It’s something like this: If we have the horse Seabiscuit running in the ninth race at Belmont Park one afternoon under the old system, whoever bets on Seabiscuit can either win or lose their money. Those losses are relatively limited.

Now imagine there’s a horse called Subprime running, and Wall Street decides they’re going to bet a quadrillion in derivatives on Subprime in the ninth. Notice, they don’t buy the horse. They don’t even go to the track; they do it through a floating bookie operation. If Subprime loses, that’s going to bring down the New York banking system. You wouldn’t blame poor Subprime; you would say it was criminal for these lunatics to put all those resources on such a shaky vehicle.

Derivatives were illegal in the United States from 1936 until 1982 under the New Deal Commodity Exchange Act. Then there was a process of legalizing them in which Ronald Reagan, Phil Gramm, Alan Greenspan and others were involved. Because of this, by 2007 we had a worldwide bubble of about $1.5 quadrillion in toxic derivatives, compared to a world gross domestic product of about 65 trillion. That is a black hole of bankruptcy and economic destruction. There’s not enough money in the world to bail that out.

Are we in a new Great Depression?

This is a world economic depression. It’s useful to go back and look at 1929 and the years after that. The Great Depression started with the stock panic in October 1929, but that was just the beginning. The second wave was a banking crisis in Europe in 1931.

Compare that to the timeframe from 2008 to 2010, and you see that we’re going through something similar. In 2008 we had a banking panic in New York that destroyed the entire U.S. banking system, which was then put on life support through the bailout. In 2010 we had a European banking crisis.

Countries are now on the verge of a new currency war, trying to drive down the price of their currencies. That is also what happened in 1931. The idea is, if you can reduce the value of your currency, your existing debts are less of a burden, and you can export easier. It doesn’t work though because it spreads the depression to the entire world. The question debated now is: Will we have a deflationary crash, like the U.S. in 1932, when commodity and real estate prices plummeted, or will we have a hyperinflationary takeoff? I think we’re likely to have the worst of both: a hyperinflationary depression, meaning a collapse in the dollar’s purchasing power combined with a collapse in overall economic activity—an extreme form of the stagflation we saw in the 1970s. That would mean all kinds of businesses closing, unemployment at 35% and prices going wild. It would happen worldwide; that brings social chaos. If you look at the 1930s, you see the succession: depression, dictatorship, world war. We’re still in the depression phase.

Your opponents would say the free market will fix the crisis.

The notion of a free market is one of the most fantastic fabrications in modern political life. We have never had a free market. Indeed, the whole United States was built on the negation of that. The government acts to promote, foster and facilitate economic development, carried out largely through privately owned companies.

The market never delivered the basic prerequisites of modern life in terms of decent standards of living and decent working conditions. That took mass struggle. You would not have an eight-hour day and a 40-hour week if you waited for somebody to grant that to you. There are reactionaries today who think that child labor laws and the minimum wage are unconstitutional. These people are working for reactionary, superrich interests. The responsibility for our current depression goes to the [free-market theories of] the Chicago School of Milton Friedman and ultimately to the Austrian School of Friedrich August von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises—economic charlatans. Henry Clay, the 19th-century congressman, senator and secretary of state who was praised by Lincoln and JFK, coined the term the “American System” in 1824. He pushed for a protective tariff, a national bank and internal infrastructural improvements. That’s the kind of alternative we need today.

We’re told we have to dump the New Deal and take up the poisonous foreign doctrine of the free market, which is not successful anywhere. The American System is the real basis of life in the United States.

How do you get out of the depression once you’re in it?

The first thing is take steps to stop speculation. Go back to what we had successfully from 1936 to 1982, which is a ban on certain kinds of derivatives. The collateralized debt obligation is in many ways the most destructive; that is what brought down Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch. That should be outlawed.

The other one that should be banned is the credit default swap, which is a bet on whether or not somebody else is going to go bankrupt. That should be illegal for two reasons: At face value it’s gambling, so it should be illegal under the gambling laws. And if you claim that it’s insurance, anybody issuing a credit default swap who is not an insurance company should be shut down because they’re issuing them without registering as an insurance company and without the capital requirements. Derivatives haven’t been outlawed because Obama’s Wall Street cronies, along with the procorporate Congress, will block anything the banks don’t want.

…continue reading in HUSTLER Magazine – June 2011.

“It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system for, if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.” —Henry Ford

Report by Tyler Downey

Financial catastrophe. Double-digit unemployment. Home foreclosures. An everwidening gulf between the extremely rich and the rest of us. Control of government and media in the hands of a select group of elites. Wall Street destroying the middle class. Are these the harsh realities that face Americans today? Absolutely. But they’ve always been offshoots of crony capitalism, which has a long history of wreaking havoc on this country. Whether it was the railroad bubble of 1893, the rampant financial malfeasance of the Roaring Twenties that led to the Great Depression, the dot-com crash of the late 1990s or the current real estate-driven mess we find ourselves in now, Wall Street speculation and corruption have been at the heart of America’s economic crises.

It takes an extremely courageous and patriotic leader to stand up to the Wall Street banking cartels. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was such a man. When he was elected President in 1932, America was beset by the worst financial crisis it had ever known. Despite assurances from the bankers that the Federal Reserve System (formed in 1913) would forever prevent the panics and economic upheaval that had previously struck the country, the Great Depression of the 1930s nearly wiped out the American middle class.

Seeing the damage inflicted by an outof- control Wall Street, FDR took drastic steps to curb the bankers’ influence. “We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering,” he declared during a campaign speech at New York City’s Madison Square Garden in 1936. “They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me— and I welcome their hatred.”

The robber barons certainly didn’t want Roosevelt, a Democrat, reelected. Once FDR took office in 1933, chief counsel Ferdinand Pecora—a former New York City prosecutor—was given the green light to rev up the Senate Banking Committee’s investigation into the practices that had triggered the Stock Market Crash of 1929. Pecora ultimately concluded: “Had there been full disclosure of what was being done in furtherance of these schemes, they could not long have survived the fierce light of publicity and criticism. Legal chicanery and pitch darkness were the banker’s stoutest allies.”

Pecora uncovered stock offerings at discounted prices to politicians, the selling of bad loans to unsuspecting investors and the fact that J.P. Morgan Jr. and his partners had paid no income taxes in 1931 and 1932. The president of Citigroup was forced to resign. As Ron Chernow explained in a 2009 New York Times article, it was Pecora’s inquiry that paved the way for the legislation that followed.

Franklin D. Roosevelt first ordered the Treasury Department to close all banks that had been reckless with people’s money. There would be no bailout for them. He then signed into law the Banking Act of 1933, better known as the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated investment and commercial banking. No longer could banks speculate with money that customers had deposited into their private accounts.

FDR also pushed legislation making it much harder for banks to repossess family homes and farms. He instituted the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which safeguarded depositors’ accounts and thus restored public confidence in the nation’s banks. FDR introduced regulation into nearly every sector of the economy— energy, labor, trade—to ensure that the middle class was protected from the predations of crony capitalism.

In his 1944 State of the Union address, Roosevelt even proposed an Economic Bill of Rights. “To assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness,” it basically stipulated that no citizen should be denied employment (with a living wage), “a decent home,” “adequate medical care,” “a good education” and social security. It also called for an end to monopolies and cartels. Unfortunately, FDR died before this great goal could be realized, but his bold actions led to an unprecedented 50 years of prosperity for the American middle class.

Of course, Wall Street would fight back. appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united Abetted by massive campaign donations, media consolidation and good old-fashioned corruption, the robber barons have waged a 75-year war on the policies of FDR.

The tide turned in Wall Street’s favor with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. It was his administration that first allowed financiers to write laws that their servants on Capitol Hill enacted. How did the politicians become captives of the ruling class? Since 1990 the financial sector has spent over $2.5 billion on campaign donations alone, not including the astronomical amount spent on lobbying.

This is far and away the most money donated by a single industry—and it’s going to Republicans and Democrats! That’s why it’s impossible to differentiate between Ronald Reagan’s “deregulation” policies and those of Democrat Bill Clinton. Both Presidents were bought and paid for by Wall Street bankers. According to bestselling author Charles Geisst, the culmination of this silent war against the legacy of FDR was the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999. Thanks to Clinton, the robber barons came back in full force, and it took less than ten years to see the result of those efforts.

The Federal Reserve’s record-low interest rates had spawned a colossal real estate bubble. Freed from the regulations of FDR, Wall Street investment firms issued riskier and riskier loans. By 2008 the corrupt system became untenable. Ordinary Americans lost $17 trillion in retirement savings, announced Treasury Department chief economist Alan Krueger. When it all came crashing down, the bankers threatened to destroy the entire financial system if they didn’t get paid off.

Democrat Barack Obama was elected with a mandate to again make government work for the people, not Wall Street. However, his campaign received nearly $40 million in contributions from Wall Street entities. It appears that despite his promises and speeches, Obama is just another politician bought and paid for by the financial industry.

Even after securing his party’s Presidential candidacy in 2008, Obama supported President George W. Bush’s decision to hand over $700 billion of American taxpayer money—with no claw-backs, no oversight and no controls—to bail out Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Bank of America, AIG and other firms. The recipients then spent about $114 million of our tax money in campaign donations in 2008 alone. They also planned to dole out roughly $14 billion in bonuses to executives.

…. Continues in HUSTLER Magazine – May 2011

Let’s get something straight: Julian Assange is a journalist.You can argue that he is not practicing journalism the way you think it should be practiced—releasing classified U.S. State Department documents—but he’s a journalist nonetheless.  And for many of us he’s a hero.

I’m sick and tired of the politicians and political pundits treating this man as if he were a criminal. If Wiki Leaks had existed in 2003 when George W. Bush was ginningup the war in Iraq, America might not be in the horrendous situation it is today, with our troops fighting in three countries(counting Pakistan) and the consequent cost in blood and dollars.

Here’s what I know about censorship: The free flow ofinformation is ultimately less harmful than the impeded flow of information. A democracy cannot exist without totalaccess to the facts.What’s wrong is that a concerned outsider—anAustralian publisher, not our own vaunted mainstreampress—exposed the secret documents. For that, Assange has been hit with dubious criminal charges because hiscondom failed during a sexual encounter.  Give me a break. Julian Assange should not face a prison sentence. We should have a ticker tape parade for him.

We know what you’re thinking: Given all the raving lunatics on right-wing radio and TV, why choose a relatively moderate talk show host as Asshole of the Month? The answer is inherent in the question: The fact that Sean Hannity seems moderate only makes him that much more dangerous. After all, everyone knows that Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are assholes. And in truth, Hannity is every bit as loony as they are.

Most recently Hannity renewed his rightwing- crazy credentials by proposing we reinvade Iraq and Kuwait as a way of dealing with rising oil prices. Here’s part of what he said: “Why isn’t Iraq paying us back with oil, and paying every American family and their soldiers that lost loved ones or have injured soldiers—and why didn’t they pay for their own liberation? For the Kuwait oil minister—how short his memory is. You know we have every right to go in there and frankly take all their oil and make them pay for the liberation.”

Tell us that’s not nuts. Haven’t we lost enough blood and treasure to those conflicts already? According to Hannity, Iraqis should be grateful that we invaded their country without cause and killed an estimated 100,000 to 1 million citizens. (Attention, Fox viewers: Iraq had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11.) As for Kuwait, it did indeed repay us for its liberation: about $18 billion. Facts, as you can see, mean nothing to Hannity.

Here are some more examples of Hannity saying black is white:

•“It doesn’t say anywhere in the Constitution this idea of the separation of church and state.” In fact, the First Amendment states: “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” And Article V stipulates: “No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust.”•“[After 9/11, Bush and his team] made it clear that determining the causes of America’s security failures and finding and remedying its weak points would be central to their mission.” Actually, Bush opposed the creation of a special commission to probe the causes of the 9/11 attacks for more than a year, finally caving due to liberal pressure.

One of Hannity’s most outrageous claims, it would seem, involves an organization he works closely with: Freedom Alliance. Hannity insists that every penny of the donations raised at the group’s Freedom Concerts is applied to scholarships for wounded soldiers or children of soldiers killed during wartime. The Freedom Concerts’ Web site claims more than $10 million has been raised for scholarships “in the last several years.” But Melanie Sloan of CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington) says no more than $2.5 million has been donated for such scholarships.

Political commentator Debbie Schlussel (DebbieSchlussel.com) reports that for the year 2008, Freedom Alliance took in almost $9 million in revenues but allocated just over $1 million (12%) in scholarships to wounded soldiers and children of the fallen.

Want to puke over the size of the donations to an individual wounded soldier? Freedom Alliance, which was founded by retired military officer Oliver North in 1990, gave one soldier whose face was blown off and who lost an eye $1,000. Another soldier who lost both legs and his left arm in a roadside bomb incident got a massive $200. Such generosity!

Both Hannity and North (Freedom Alliance’s “honorary chairman”) have been accused of siphoning off money from the “charitable organization.” Schlussel says a Fox insider told her that when Hannity attends a concert, he demands and gets a Gulfstream 5 private jet, a fleet of Cadillac and Lincoln SUVs, as well as several suites of rooms for himself and his family at expensive hotels—all valued at approximately $200,000 per appearance. It’s said that even Ollie North is offended by Hannity’s outof- control greed.“This is the kind of deceptive marketing that the FTC [Federal Trade Commission] looks very dimly at,” Sloan is quoted as saying, according to Politico.com.

One thing is certain: Hannity has hit the big time since being plucked from an obscure radio station in Atlanta by Fox honcho Roger Ailes. The Fox show Hannity was destined to helm, you may remember, was called Hannity & Colmes. Alan Colmes, supposedly there to represent the Left, was a noodge whose true purpose was to be Hannity’s floor mat. That charade continued until 2008, when Colmes departed after 12 years, and Hannity came into his own.

Reported to be raking in more than $20 million a year, Hannity is the go-to guy for wing nuts seeking credibility and softball questions. Nutcakes Sharron Angle and Sarah Palin have made repeated appearances on his TV program. Meanwhile on radio, The Sean Hannity Show is syndicated to over 500 stations nationwide.

All of that power makes this Asshole one of the key players in the right wing’s plan to carve out a segment of America’s population and feed it propaganda instead of facts. Rather than debate the left wing—something they usually lose at— right wingers have decided to create their own separate reality with its own “facts.” In effect, they have balkanized the American people.

John Podesta, President Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff, seems to agree. Addressing a Take Back America conference, he said,“I think when you get so distant from the facts as guys like Limbaugh and Sean Hannity do, yeah, I think that tends to…corrupt the dialogue.” That was back in 2004. God knows Hannity has only gotten more partisan and more dismissive of reality since then.

If you think about it, this corruption of the political dialogue is the real evil of Sean Hannity; it’s even more offensive and ugly than his apparent stealing from the troops and their families as described above. After all, Hannity’s distortion of the truth is really an attack against exactly what makes America great. Fuck Sean Hannity!