DOWNSIZING THE MIDDLE CLASS IS A RISKY BUSINESS.

by Robert Scheer for HUSTLER Magazine

Poverty is not just for the poor anymore. Ever greater numbers among the 99% being screwed by the top 1%, who control more than 40% of the wealth in this country, should stop pretending to be middle-class and admit that they are on the deep, losing end of America’s fierce class struggle.

We used to think poverty was just for urban ghetto folk who looked, talked and acted differently than the rest of us. No more. Poverty has been democratized, and the poor are everywhere. “Funny, you don’t look poor” is what you might say to your neighbor in that white suburb who is surviving on food stamps and skipping mortgage payments until eviction. But when it comes to poverty, America is now an equal-opportunity society. Sure, folks don’t go around in rags and visibly malnourished.

Thanks to Walmart’s steady supply of Chinese sweatshop-produced clothes and our own government’s vastly expanded food stamp program, poverty is disguised.

In the past ten years, poverty in suburban America has jumped an astounding 53%, twice its rise in urban centers. For the first time in U.S. history, poverty in the suburbs exceeds that of the cities they surround. While the superrich scurry for safety in their fortress enclaves, suburbs across the country feature boarded-up houses with mortgages that are deeply underwater.

Six months before the appearance of an Occupy Wall Street encampment, Joseph E. Stieglitz wrote an article for Vanity Fair— titled “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%”— that provided the movement with its essential manifesto. In a prescient prediction of the protests to come, the Nobel Prize-winning economist issued a warning to the power elite that tends to read Vanity Fair : “Americans have been watching protests against repressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few. Yet in our own democracy, 1% of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income—an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret.”

What they will regret, if they retain a shred of caution born of common sense, is that despite an economic meltdown caused by bankers run wild and requiring massive taxpayer-financed government intervention to avoid another Great Depression, the financial overlords continued to pay themselves enormous bonuses while ordinary folk went bankrupt. Hiding behind the fig leaf of Adam Smith’s freemarket capitalism, they invented gimmicks never before known in the financial world that destroyed the real estate market and turned peoples homes into gambling chips in the Wall Street casino.

Thanks to the Republicans in Congress back in the 1990s and Democratic President Bill Clinton, who became their water boy, the rules of the regulatory road were changed. Swindles called collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps—transactions that would have been judged patently illegal if the Mafia had invented them—were made legal as a matter of federal law. The result was a boom-and-bust cycle that vastly increased the gap between America’s superwealthy and the rest of the nation. In the process, the bedrock of the American Dream—an ever better-off middle class— was demolished.

Even during the Clinton years, which many Americans now think of as good times, the class divide in America was growing with a vengeance. As I document in my book The Great American Stickup, the income of the top 1% increased 10.1% per year under Clinton, while it rose only 2.4% for the other 99% of the population. Things got worse under George W. Bush. Even before the banking meltdown of 2007, the top 1% enjoyed an 11% annual rise in income, while the rest received the crumbs—sharing in a 1% increase. With the imminent collapse of their Ponzi scheme, the bankers were saved. In the meantime, their victims were thrown under the bus.

As libertarian Ron Paul, the Republicans’ only honest Presidential candidate, put it: “The bailouts came from both parties. Guess who they bailed out? The big corporations, the people who were ripping off the people in the derivatives market.… But who got stuck? The middle class got stuck…they lost their jobs, and they lost their houses. If you had money to give out, you should have given it to the people who were losing their homes, not to the banks.”

In his Vanity Fair article, Stieglitz hit the nail on the head: “The top 1% have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99% live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1% eventually do learn. Too late.”

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Before serving almost 30 years as a Los Angeles Times columnist and editor, 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 hardhitting 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.

Scientists tell us that dolphins and porpoises have a complicated language and can actually learn to use an iPad. An octopus can build its own house, birds sing complicated melodies, and parrots can remember as many as a thousand words. Monkeys can be taught sign language, how to drive a car and smoke cigarettes. I’m told that dogs, which possess the intellectual capacity of a three-year-old child, can understand more than 50 words, although from my experience, none of those words include “Don’t shit in the house!”

On the other hand, many humans don’t believe in global climate change, evolution or that President Barack Obama was born in America. They do, however, believe in astrology, angels, virgin birth, a God with a long white beard (whom they should thank when winning an Emmy) and the ability to cure homosexuality through prayer. My question is this: Just how much smarter are we than our animal cousins? From my point of view we humans have very little to be smug about.

HOW OUR COUNTRY WAS BETRAYED BY THREE PRESIDENTS

by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman for HUSTLER Magazine

The not-so-slow death of our nation by betrayal, bankruptcy and despair has not happened by accident. Three treasonous backstabs by Republicans Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan (in cahoots with George H.W. Bush) and George W. Bush have poisoned our body politic and bled us into chaos. The first act of treason came in 1968 as the Vietnam War reached a critical turning point. Democratic President Lyndon Baines Johnson was desperate for a truce between North and South Vietnam. His Vice President, Hubert Humphrey, was in a tight Presidential race against Richard Nixon. With demonstrators in the streets, Humphrey needed a cease-fire to get himself into the White House.

Johnson had it all but wrapped up. With a combination of gentle and iron-fisted persuasion, he forced the leaders of South Vietnam into an all-but-final agreement with the North. A truce was imminent, and Humphrey’s election seemed assured. But at the last minute the South Vietnamese pulled out.

In his 1983 book The Price of Power, Seymour Hersh revealed that Henry Kissinger—then LBJ’s adviser on Vietnam peace talks—secretly alerted Nixon’s staff that a cease-fire was looming. According to Hersh, Nixon “was able to get a series of messages to the [President Nguyen Van] Thieu government, making it clear that a Nixon presidency would have different [more favorable] views on the peace negotiations,” hence South Vietnam’s abrupt withdrawal from the Paris peace talks.

Johnson was livid. He even called the Republican Senate Minority Leader, Everett Dirksen, to complain that “they oughtn’t be doing this. This is treason.” “I know,” Dirksen feebly replied.

Johnson blasted Nixon about this on November 3, 1968, just prior to Election Day. As Robert Parry of ConsortiumNews.com has written, “When Johnson confronted Nixon with evidence of the peace-talk sabotage, Nixon insisted on his innocence but acknowledged that he knew what was at stake.”

Said Nixon: “I would never do anything to encourage…Saigon not to come to the table. … Good God, we’ve got to get them to Paris or you can’t have peace.”

With the war still raging, Nixon claimed a narrow victory over Humphrey. He then named Kissinger as his National Security Advisor.

During Nixon’s first term, more than 20,000 U.S. troops died in Vietnam. More than 100,000 were wounded. More than a million Vietnamese were killed. But in 1973, Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the same settlement in 1972 he’d helped sabotage four years earlier.

According to Parry, Johnson wanted to go public in 1968 with Nixon’s treason. But Clark Clifford, an architect of the CIA and a pillar of the Washington establishment, dissuaded him. In particular, Clifford told LBJ (in a taped conversation) that “some elements of the story are so shocking in their nature that I’m wondering whether it would be good for the country to disclose the story and then possibly have a certain individual [Nixon] elected. It could cast his whole administration under such doubt that I think it would be inimical to our country’s interests.”

In other words, Clifford told LBJ that the country couldn’t handle the reality that its President was a certifiable traitor eligible for the death penalty. Fittingly, Clifford’s upper-crust career ended in disgrace thanks to his entanglement with the crooked Bank of Credit and Commerce, which financed the terrorist group al-Qaeda.

Tormented by the disastrous war that destroyed his Presidency, Johnson died just four years after leaving the White House. Nixon was reelected in 1972, again with a host of dirty dealings, then became the first U.S. President to resign in disgrace. But along the way, Nixon trained a new generation of dirty tricksters that included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, William Casey and George H.W. Bush.

It was this Bush who engineered a second act of treason that put Ronald Reagan into the Oval Office with him as Vice President. What became known as “the October surprise” began in 1979 when Iranian revolutionaries seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took 52 American hostages, holding them deep into this country’s 1980 Presidential campaign. As Election Day neared, incumbent President Jimmy Carter announced he had a deal to bring them home.

Suddenly, however, the deal evaporated. The 52 Americans remained in Iran, and Reagan overcame unfavorable preelection polls to win a landslide victory. “Coincidentally” the hostages were released on January 20, 1981, as Reagan was being sworn in.

Very quickly a wide range of credible sources claimed the GOP had pulled off another game-changing act of treason. Gary Sick, a member of the National Security Council under Presidents Ford and Carter, wrote in the New York Times that the Reagan campaign had illegally interfered with Carter’s negotiations to bring the hostages home.

Sick’s devastating allegations were confirmed by Abholhassan Bani-Sadr, who was elected president of Iran during the hostage crisis. In his book My Turn to Speak: Iran, the Revolution and Secret Deals With the U.S., Bani-Sadr said ex-CIA Director George H.W. Bush and future CIA Director William Casey conspired with Iranian leaders to sabotage President Carter’s attempts to free the hostages.

According to what Bani-Sadr told author Barbara Honegger— a former Reagan-Bush campaign staffer and GOP White House a n a l y s t — t h e Iranians “made a deal with Reagan that the hostages should not be released until after Reagan became President. So then, in return, Reagan would give them arms. We have published documents which show that U.S. arms were shipped, via Israel, in March [1981], about two months after Reagan became President.”

Sergei V. Stepashin, a high-ranking Russian official, made the same claims and—according to reporter Robert Parry—released corroborating files to the U.S. Congress documenting the treason. (It was Parry who broke the Iran-Contra story for Newsweek and the AP.)

Arms dealer and CIA contract employee Richard Brenneke testified that he had flown Reagan’s campaign director, William Casey, to Paris for a series of secret meetings with the Iranians while Carter was also negotiating with them. Brenneke said Casey did the deal to keep the hostages captive until Reagan was sworn in.

Brenneke’s assertions were tested in court when he was found not guilty after being charged with perjury. Jury foreman Mark Kristoff said in an interview, “We were convinced that, yes, there was a meeting, and he [Brenneke] was there, and the other people listed in the indictment were there. … There never was a guilty vote. … It was 100%.”

Ari Ben-Menashe, purportedly an Israeli intelligence agent, swore under oath before Congress that he saw Bush in Paris over the weekend of October 18-19, 1980. Ben- Menashe told Congress that Bush and Casey were in a hotel and headed into negotiations with radical Iranian cleric Mehdi Karroubi. Parry points out in his book Trick or Treason that the late Yasser Arafat—head of the Palestine Liberation Organization—disclosed to President Carter that Republicans seeking help in arranging the logistics of the October surprise arms-for-hostages deal had contacted the PLO in 1980. Alexandre de Marenches, former chief of French intelligence, confided to his biographer that the French secret service had aided Casey in meeting with the Iranians in Paris in 1980.

It is legally treasonous for private citizens to interfere with official negotiations between the U.S. government and a foreign power. Thus, Reagan’s sabotage of Carter’s attempts to bring the embassy hostages home from Tehran—like Nixon’s sabotage of LBJ’s Vietnam peace talks—clearly qualifies as a capital crime.

George W. Bush threw his hat in the ring of “aiding and abetting the enemy” by illegally outing a covert CIA agent in 2003. The felony came as part of the cover-up of the lies he’d employed to suck America into an illegal war.

In the wake of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, Bush declared he would bring al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden to justice. Not long after that, however, Bush all but abandoned the search for Bin Laden. Instead, he told the American public, war was needed to rid Iraq’s U.S.-sponsored dictator, Saddam Hussein, of “weapons of mass destruction.”

Hussein had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. In fact, he was Bin Laden’s sworn enemy. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has since confirmed that Bush knew full well Hussein had no such WMDs. In his recent autobiography, Rumsfeld reveals that Bush’s real reason for going after the Iraqi dictator was to settle a deep psychological score with his father, George H.W. Bush.

Among other things, the younger Bush ordered Secretary of State Colin Powell to lay out before the United Nations a series of blatant falsehoods meant to win support for a U.S. invasion of Iraq. The key lie was a fabricated scenario in which Hussein supposedly tried to obtain uranium for nuclear weapons from an African country. As Bush put it in his infamous 2003 State of the Union address: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

That White House lie led to a horrific war that has cost the lives of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis—not to mention a trillion or more U.S. dollars. The lie was accompanied by an impeachable felony—a blatantly illegal betrayal of a CIA agent.

On July 6, 2003—almost six months after Bush’s deceitful State of the Union address— former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV wrote a New York Times op-ed refuting Bush’s cover story for the Iraq War. In “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” Wilson—who had been sent to Niger by the CIA to investigate the supposed British claims—said he had “little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.”

Wilson contradicted Bush’s claim that Hussein had obtained yellowcake uranium from Niger to build a radioactive weapon. As Wilson put it, “Selling uranium would require the approval of the minister of mines, the prime minister and probably the president. In short, there’s simply too much oversight over too small an industry for a sale to have transpired.” To cover the lie he had told to get the United States into war, Bush decided to discredit and destabilize Wilson—by putting the life of the diplomat’s wife, covert CIA officer Valerie Plame, in jeopardy. But as stipulated by the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 (passed while Bush’s father was Vice President), it is a felony to identify an undercover CIA agent.

The law reads in part that “whoever, having or having had authorized access to classified information that identifies a covert agent, intentionally discloses any information identifying such covert agent to any individual not authorized to receive classified information, knowing that the information disclosed so identifies such covert agent…shall be…imprisoned not more than ten years.” George H.W. Bush himself stated that any American revealing such info would be committing treason.

After Wilson’s op-ed appeared, senior White House adviser Karl Rove indirectly confirmed for syndicated Washington Post columnist Robert Novak that Plame was a CIA agent. On July 11, Rove did the same for Time magazine’s Matthew Cooper, according to the reporter’s subsequent grand jury testimony. Cooper had previously confirmed hearing about Plame from Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, but that Libby hadn’t mentioned her by name.

In his July 14, 2003, column titled “Mission to Niger,” Novak denounced Ambassador Wilson’s claim that the Bush Administration was manipulating data to sell an unjust war. Novak wrote: “Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction.”

Meanwhile, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan denied that Rove was Novak’s anonymous source. Following an FBI investigation and a grand jury hearing, Libby was convicted of obstruction of justice, making false statements and two counts of perjury. Neither Libby nor Rove was ever indicted for disclosing Plame’s status as a covert CIA agent to Novak. Cheney later publicly excoriated Bush for not protecting Libby. And in 2008 McClellan toured the nation with his tell-all book What Happened , charging that Bush had authorized the unmasking of Plame’s identity. McClellan told CNN that Cheney should be forced to testify under oath about the Plame leak.

In his book Daybreak, David Swanson writes that Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, who prosecuted Libby, had direct evidence—including a handwritten note by Cheney—that both the President and Vice President were involved in the Plame scandal. According to Swanson, Bush’s commutation of Libby’s sentence “directly interfered with the Special Counsel’s ongoing investigation of Plame’s ‘outing’ and therefore constituted obstruction of justice.”

In all, George W. Bush lied to America and the world about weapons of mass destruction he knew were nonexistent. He then feloniously outed a CIA agent, putting her life and the lives of other intelligence agents at risk, an impeachable crime. Next, he abused his Presidential power by covering it all up, another impeachable offense.

Does this constitute treason? If it doesn’t, what does?

Despite knowing about Richard M. Nixon’s 1968 act of treason, Lyndon B. Johnson chose to remain silent. Although the realities of 1980’s October surprise have been widely published, Jimmy Carter has said nothing, and Bill Clinton took no action while he was President. Now Barack Obama has refused to prosecute George W. Bush and his henchmen Cheney and Rove for Plamegate and their treasonous crimes in Iraq. Through it all the United States has been transformed from the world’s most prosperous country to the most debt-ridden. From a nation built on hopeful democratic ideals to one dominated by large corporations that care about nothing but power and profit.

What it will take to reverse the damage remains to be seen—if indeed it’s even possible. But a good start would be to charge those who committed the acts of treason that made this nightmare happen.

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Ohio-based investigative reporters Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, who write columns for FreePress.org, have coauthored a number of books on the George W. Bush era and election theft. For more, visit Fitrakis.org and HarveyWasserman.com.

AMERICA DESPERATELY NEEDS A NEW DEAL FROM THE WHITE HOUSE, BUT DON’T ROLL OUT THE RED CARPET FOR ANOTHER REPUBLICAN.

by Robert Scheer for HUSTLER Magazine

The “lost decade” is the way Harvard economics professor Lawrence Katz refers to the ten-year downslide of the U.S. economy since the election of Republican George W. Bush in November 2000. The road to ruin was paved by Bush, who impoverished the nation by waging two unnecessary trillion dollar wars while cutting taxes for the superrich. Yet, despite the fact that the Republicans created the mess, an all-too-easily-fooled public seems destined to put another one back in the White House.

The worst that can be said about President Barack Obama is that his response to the deep financial crisis he inherited from Bush was to continue the GOP strategy of throwing money at the banks instead of letting them go bankrupt. The banks were saved, but it was their victims—the suckers swindled into phony mortgages—who went bankrupt.

When Obama attempted to help ordinary folks with a relatively small stimulus check and save jobs in the automobile industry, before the last one of them went abroad, the Republicans and their allies among the Wall Street lobbyists branded him a socialist. Instead, we got socialism for the superrich when the Republicans seized control of the House of Representatives and prevented any further help for the foreclosed and unemployed.

The result of Republican power from the time of Bush has allowed 1% percent of the population to control 40% of this country’s wealth. In the past decade of greed run wild, the income of that 1% rose 18%, while that of the middle class declined. The total worth of the average American has been cut in half thanks to the banking/housing meltdown; an all-time-record 46.2 million people—including 22% of America’s children—are living below the government’s official poverty level ($22,350 for a family of four); and good jobs are going, going, gone.

“This is truly a lost decade,” Professor Katz told the New York Times. “We think of America as a place where every generation is doing better, but we’re looking at a period when the median family is in worse shape than it was in the late 1990s.”

Nor will it get better in the foreseeable future. The Federal Reserve estimates that the housing crisis that is at the root of the meltdown will go unabated for years to come. With 50 million Americans losing their homes, you can’t expect consumer confidence—now at record lows—to be restored; and since those consumers account for 70% of economic activity, forget the job situation improving anytime soon.

Yet dumb and dumber American voters look set to restore full power to the Republicans, who favor welfare for the superrich and Big Business. What voters can’t seem to grasp is that the days are over when the average Joe could legitimately hook his future to the prosperity of large corporations.

Those companies are called multinational for a reason: The bulk of their profits are sheltered abroad. Take GE, that old American-as-apple-pie company that had Ronald Reagan as a shill before Big Business needed him to run for President in 1980. Now two-thirds of GE’s workforce is abroad, along with 82% of the company’s profits. In addition, GE has paid no U.S. taxes for the past three years.

The multinational corporations are awash in cash, sitting on at least $2 trillion in funds they refuse to invest in creating jobs. Meanwhile, the big banks that were bailed out by the Federal Reserve—which took trillions of dollars of toxic mortgages off their books—refuse to make loans to deserving small businesses and creditable would-be home buyers.

The investments the multinational corporations do make are abroad, where they send the good-paying jobs that once were the basis of America’s economic leadership of the world. In September, Citigroup—the bankrupted banking giant bailed out by the American taxpayers—held its board of directors meeting, not in Chicago or Los Angeles, but in Singapore. Apparently, Citigroup chose that location because 30% of its profits are now derived from the Asian market, where the bank expanded using U.S. taxpayer dollars.

As the Wall Street Journal reported, “Citi’s business in Asia will likely help it as the West slows down.” But the West that they are ignoring, in case you didn’t happen to notice, is where the U.S. taxpayers who bailed out the bank happen to live and try to find work. Citigroup and other financial institutions were made whole by Republican-inspired bailouts, but fully 25 million Americans who are looking can’t find full-time work.

The only Republican candidate who can make any kind of claim to a record of job creation is Texas Governor Rick Perry. But when you realize that Texas leads the nation in the number of workers earning the minimum wage or less, you learn all you need to know about the GOP’s view of job creation. Republican politicians always make it a point to pin a little American flag on their jacket lapel, but they are false patriots conspiring to ship the American Dream abroad.

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Before serving almost 30 years as a Los Angeles Times columnist and editor, 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.

It started when a bunch of college kids, responding to a tweet, descended on Wall Street. They stayed, and the crowd grew. Now there are thousands of them, and they’re not just in New York City anymore. Nor is the movement still limited to undergrads. In a nation where 1% of the population controls almost half of the wealth, these protesters have chosen to call themselves the 99 Percent. They are the working class, the poor, the disenfranchised. They represent everyone excluded from a political process that has been hijacked by corporations and multimillionaires. The 99 Percent want their government back. This looks and feels like something different. It feels organic. It reminds me of the 1960s’ antiwar movement. A long-simmering undercurrent of unrest in our country is now bubbling to the surface. Our politicians ignore this movement at their peril.

As Bob Dylan said, “The times they are a-changin’.”

Larry Flynt was awestruck after seeing his name on the American National Tree for the first time during a recent visit to the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. As a courageous defender of the First Amendment, Flynt has been honored with a plaque on the monument, which pays tribute to 100 Americans—both famous and obscure—whose actions have helped safeguard the U.S. Constitution. We sat down with Larry to discuss his thoughts on being part of such select company and why freedom of speech is so important.

HUSTLER: How did it feel to see your name on the American National Tree?
LARRY FLYNT: It was pretty exciting. I had heard that it was there, but I didn’t realize what a big deal it was, so I never gave it that much thought. Sidney Poitier, the actor who’s a friend of mine, had told me four or five years ago that it was there. I was in Philadelphia on my [One Nation Under Sex ] book tour, so I thought I’d go to the Constitution Center and take a look. It was really kind of a strange experience because the curator didn’t charge us the cover charge, and everyone was fussing over us the whole time. I couldn’t quite understand what this was about until the curator took me to the very middle of the Constitution Center, where they had this exhibit called the American National Tree.

Tell us about the exhibit.
It was an electronic monument with the inscription “This monument is dedicated to 100 people who advanced and protected the Constitution of the United States of America.” And if you press a button where your name is, a big video explodes— one foot by two foot wide—and it has pictures of you. It also has a bio spelling out the different reasons why you were selected to be on the tree. Well, selected is really not the process because I asked the curator, “Who decides who the 100 names are?”

He said, “It’s done by scholars and several universities around the country. You can only put one name on once a year, and consequently one name gets taken off. But you don’t ever have to worry about your name coming off.”

Were you included in the first 100 honorees when the Constitution Center opened in 2003?
Yes, and I was really overwhelmed about it because it’s such a significant part of history. You’re right in the center of where it all happened. I said to the curator, “Why are you guys making such a big deal of me being here?” He said, “Well, Mr. Flynt, most of those people up there are dead. So they’re not gonna come. But you’re alive.” It was a very moving experience. I would have gone there and visited much sooner if I’d known the extent of the display.

Who are you next to on the tree?
Katharine Graham, who was the owner of the Washington Post , for her role in Watergate. And Frederick Douglass, the first black man invited to the White House, who was an author and advocate for civil rights. I’m right between those two.

Is the tree part of a larger exhibit?
Yes. There’s a room where the Constitution was drafted. The center has life-size bronzes of George Washington, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, three of our Founding Fathers. These bronzes are just so realistic, it’s unbelievable. You get this humbling feeling as you go through the center and realize all the history that took place there. It’s overwhelming.

The tree is located right in the heart of Constitution Center. It is the main display. You would have thought the Founding Fathers— the drafters of the Constitution—would have been front and center in the exhibit, but they aren’t. They’re in a side room. I’m not questioning why the Constitution Center did it, but the tree was right there, a living, breathing, interactive piece of history.

Why is protecting the First Amendment so important to you?
Without the First Amendment, nothing else is of any importance at all. If the First Amendment goes, we lose everything. Not just freedom of speech but freedom of religion. It’s the cornerstone of our whole democracy, and it’s withstood the test of time in many court cases down through the years. That’s why I’ve been proud to be a part of upholding the First Amendment. Many people don’t understand that freedom of speech is not the freedom for the thought you love. It’s the freedom for the thought you hate the most. We pay a price to live in a free society, and that price is toleration. We have to tolerate things that we don’t necessarily like so we can be free. And that’s what most Americans don’t understand.

If you go out and take a poll and ask people, “Do you believe in free speech,” 98% of them will say they do. Then ask them, “How about pornography? How about flag burning? How about hate speech?” All of a sudden your almost 100% support falls to below 50% because everybody has their own vision of what the First Amendment is supposed to be, what kind of speech it’s supposed to protect. That’s why it really needs to be protected because the courts and individuals throughout history and even today are attempting to compromise the First Amendment every chance they get.

Are these limitations to the First Amendment the most pressing free speech issue in America right now?
We had a former Supreme Court justice who said the First Amendment is not absolute. You can’t scream “Fire!” in a crowded theater. Well, I happen to think he’s wrong. I think you can scream “Fire!” in a crowded theater. If anyone is hurt as a result of your doing that, then that’s the crime you should be prosecuted for. I’m an absolutist. I’m a purist when it comes to the First Amendment. I just don’t think we should compromise it in any way.

But compromise is just part of it. There’s also outright abuse. If certain political leaders had their way about it, there wouldn’t be a First Amendment. You would just shut up and do things their way. That’s the way they play the game.

You’re known for pushing the envelope and taking risks. Are there aspects of free speech even you wouldn’t touch?
Of course there are. I would never exploit children because you’re violating the rights of someone not old enough to speak for themselves. But I think that’s a crime totally separate from the First Amendment.

A lot of people try to put everybody on a guilt trip about the First Amendment by saying, for example, hate speech violates the rights of others. Well, there are laws to protect the rights of others. The First Amendment should not be caught in a web because it’s purely free speech.

You’ve obviously accomplished much in your life. Is there anything you haven’t done and want to do?
Accomplishing what I did in Philadelphia—it’s difficult to outdo that. It’s almost the equivalent to being honored on Mount Rushmore.

What do you want your legacy to be?
Being remembered as someone who fought to expand the parameters of free speech in a good way. I think that would be a great legacy.