by Alex Bennett
for HUSTLER Magazine – July 2010

After years of doing talk shows about wars I arose one day to find that all this chatter about God being on our side was getting to me. The constant invoking of a deity prompted me to ask myself a major intellectual question: Is there a God?

I know there is (spoiler alert) no Santa Claus. There is no Easter Bunny or Tooth Fairy. So how come I believe in God? In my case, I realized, it was because I wasn’t taking any chances. If there were a God and I hadn’t believed in Him, I would spend eternity in Hell with George W. Bush and Hitler. But that wasn’t a good enough reason to believe. So my logical and ostensibly divinely created brain finally decided, “There is no God.”

My belief in science is why I can’t wrap my brain around the notion that a sentient being brought about what Bible-thumpers call “Intelligent Design.” If God were such a design genius, why did He create man with a prostate that is wrapped around the urethra so it’s harder to pee as men get older? Good going, God. A few inches either way would have solved that problem.

Meanwhile, there’s never been a war where the name of God wasn’t invoked. Every army in history has believed God was on its side. So how come a God-fearing army loses?

I’m amazed how many people don’t know that Muslims pray to the same God as Christians and Jews. Both sides are fighting each other over who has the covenant of God.

The covenant was handed down from God to Abraham. It was God’s promise to protect His people and allow them to multiply if they, in return, would obey two simple rules: worship Him as the single God (monotheism) and circumcise all males (apparently to correct a defect in his “Intelligent Design”). Muslims, who are also descended from Abraham, believe they are the only true owners of God’s covenant because the Jews broke it when they worshiped the Golden Calf while Moses was out hiking.

European noblemen launched the first crusade to take back the Holy Land from the heathen Muslims. George W. Bush triggered the most recent crusade. I’m sure Bush thought he was doing God’s work. In fact, while President, W. even mentioned the word crusade in one of his speeches. That went over well with the Muslims, escalating their fears and justifying their jihad.

Like it or not, what we have created in the Middle East is a holy war. Two God-fearing peoples have killed hundreds of thousands of innocents in His name. As Edward G. Robinson asked in The Ten Commandments, “Where’s your God now, Moses?”

Then there are the more trivial invocations of God’s name. For example, “In God We Trust” appears on all our nation’s money. Don’t we believe in the separation of Church and State? What does money have to do with God? Oh, yes, I forgot: In the United States, money is God! My bad.

How about those awards ceremonies where the winner runs onstage, grabs the award, looks upward and says, “Thank you, God.” I don’t think God had anything to do with the outcome. It was a combination of talent and the bad judgment of those who did the voting.

Then there’s the baseball player who crosses himself before swinging the bat. Does he really think—with the host of things God must attend to, like all the deaths and natural disasters in the entire universe!—that He has time for a ballplayer’s shitty little turn at bat?

It bothers me when people pray. Most of the time it’s for themselves and not for others. Most praying is simply a selfish act. I admit that even though I now consider myself an atheist, I say a prayer every night. But it’s to send out a good thought, always for other people and very rarely if ever for myself.

There’s nothing wrong with the concept of a loving, all-powerful deity. But when a country gets too invested in the idea that God is a reality, people get hurt. They are misled into thinking someone or something else they can’t even see has power over their lives when the real power is within themselves.

But what if there actually is a man with a beard and a white robe? What will I do when my time is up? Well, if He is the God as advertised, He’ll forgive me and praise me for using the wonderful brain He created, albeit to a wrong conclusion. Then He’ll say, “Come right in, and if you turn left, your friend Bruce David is waiting for you.”

Alex Bennett is a longtime HUSTLER contributor. The two-time Emmy winner, who broke into broadcasting as a teenager, currently calls Sirius Left 146 his radio home.

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Nobody likes this guy—not even his fellow Republicans. Jim Bunning makes Dick Cheney look like the Tooth Fairy. Public-opinion polls show the senator’s approval rating in his home state of Kentucky is as low as 28%, which could explain why he isn’t seeking reelection in 2010. And even the GOP won’t support his efforts.

Bunning, whose intellectual rigor has been compared to cooked spaghetti, made news a few months back with his one-man filibuster to block the Senate from extending unemployment benefits. Never mind that out-ofwork Americans were depending on that money to pay their mortgages and feed their families. Bunning couldn’t have cared less. When asked by a Democrat to drop his opposition, he responded, “Tough shit!” Right! Tough shit for the 1.2 million people whose lives were thrown into turmoil.

The 78-year-old lawmaker, who suffers from delusions of competency, objected to extending government benefits because there wasn’t money in the budget to cover it. Let us explain something to you, Jim: The Senate has passed a lot of bills that ran us into a deficit. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, for starters. How come you weren’t concerned about paying for those boondoggles?! The bill you held up was to help average Americans who’d lost their jobs because of Republican policies. That’s your party, Asshole!

Of course, being a multimillionaire, Bunning has no trouble taking care of his own finances. Aside from the $174,000 he earns annually as a U.S. senator, he also has a side business that brings in serious bucks. We’re talking about the supposed nonprofit Jim Bunning Foundation. This “charity” has apparently raked in $504,000 since 1996, but it has doled out only around 25% of that amount.

Nonetheless, for an hour a week of his time, Bunning has paid himself a total of $180,000. That makes him the charity’s biggest recipient! (Maybe that’s why it’s called the Jim Bunning Foundation.) Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said, “The whole thing is very troubling.”

So were Bunning’s actions during his 2004 reelection campaign. For example, the senator claimed that his opponent looked like “one of Saddam Hussein’s sons” and that he’d sent “little green doctors” to physically abuse Bunning and his wife. (No proof was ever offered.)

Bunning also walled himself off from the press and his constituents, actually hiding at Republican National Committee headquarters during a live debate with his opponent. Since he demanded the participants be in separate locations, the debate was conducted via TV cameras. And get this! Bunning read from a teleprompter! For a live debate! That beats the hell out of Sarah Palin’s writing on her hand, no?

The list of Bunning’s bizarre behavior goes on: In February 2009, at the Republicans’ Hardin County (Kentucky) Lincoln Day Dinner, he predicted that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg would soon be dead of pancreatic cancer. (She’s still alive and kicking.) So weird is Bunning that he even “sent shivers” up Bill Clinton’s spine when the President tried dealing with him, recalls a former White House insider.

Maybe that explains why Time called Bunning one of America’s Five Worst Senators. He “shows little interest in policy unless it involves baseball,” the newsmagazine noted, citing his “lackluster performance.” In 2009, for example, Bunning missed over a week at the start of Congress. In December of that year he missed 21 Senate votes, including the Christmas Eve vote on healthcare. You remember that one, don’t you? Despite strong Republican resistance, it passed along party lines by a two-vote margin.

Remarkably, in his younger years, Bunning was actually a hero to kids who rooted for the Detroit Tigers and, later, the Philadelphia Phillies. (It’s ironic that the Hall of Fame pitcher is famous for his strikeouts both in baseball and in the Senate.) But even die-hard Phillies fans lost faith in Bunning when the team blew a six-game lead with only 12 left to play in the 1964 pennant race. The loss of ten straight games has largely been attributed to starting pitchers Bunning and Chris Short, but mostly Bunning. Among other things, he refused to follow instructions from the team’s manager.

So what does this all say about Bunning other than his being an example of a DNA-sequencing tragedy? You also could label Bunning a sociopath. Anyone willing to let other people suffer needlessly—thanks to his filibuster—is obviously devoid of human feeling. Corrupt is another word that comes to mind. Of course, we believe most lawmakers are corrupt. And the Jim Bunning Foundation sure raises our eyebrows.

Finally, Bunning is as dumb as a rosin bag. Apparently unhappy with press coverage during his last campaign, he told reporters, “Let me explain something: I don’t watch the news, and I don’t read the paper.” Right, Jim. That’s a good formula for staying on top of the issues. But how can you expect favorable coverage from the press when you gave the finger to an ABC reporter? Goodbye, Jim. You won’t be missed—by anyone!

The U.S. Supreme Court decision of January 21, 2010 (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ),allowing corporations to spend endless amounts of money influencing our elections, will change America forever. The election process, already awash in money from the fat cats, will now be swamped by corporate propaganda favoring their chosen candidate. In comparison, contributions from the average citizen will be insignificant. Our democracy has never faced such peril. The playing field has been inexorably tilted in favor of Big Business. Unless something is done about this, the rich will be in control of our country from here on out.

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by Nat Hentoff for HUSTLER Magazine – June 2010

In a startling decision on January 21, 2010, Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California ruled that we Americans have no privacy rights in our telephone and e-mail communications whenever the federal government decides to spy on us for national-security reasons.

The judge dismissed a crucial case, Jewel v. NSA, that had been filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation—the leading defender of Americans’ digital rights—on behalf of five AT&T customers. The plaintiffs claimed that the telecommunications mammoth had given the private information on their telephones and emails to the National Security Agency, the government’s nonstop collector and data banker of Americans’ electronic messages.

The EFF has appealed Chief Judge Walker’s disembowelment of these AT&T customers’ Fourth Amendment rights to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and eventually the U.S. Supreme Court will rule. The EFF is not giving up because the aim of this legal action, it explains, is to end “the NSA’s dragnet surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans—and hold accountable the government officials who illegally authorize it.”

At the very top of that accountability list are former President George W. Bush and his mirror like successor in these assaults on our rule of law, Barack Obama, whom I’ve come to describe as President George W. Obama.

During previous hearings on Jewel v. NSA before Chief Judge Walker, he seemed quite sympathetic to the EFF’s argument, but now he has given the Obama Administration a greatly empowering historic authority to learn intimate details of our private lives and everything else. See if you can understand Chief Judge Walker’s slippery reasoning. Although the government obviously cannot deny the NSA’s omnivorous spying on us, the five aggrieved AT&T customers, says the jurist, have no basis to claim “a particularized injury” despite whatever private information about them AT&T has given Big Brother NSA.

According to Chief Judge Walker, these plaintiffs have only a “generalized grievance” against the government, and that’s not the basis for a lawsuit because, he continues, nearly everybody in this country has a telephone and a computer connected to the Internet. Huh? Stunned, the EFF’s senior staff attorney, Kevin Bankston, sums up what this upside-down decision is going to mean for all of us if it is eventually upheld by the High Court: “The alarming upshot of the decision is that, so long as the government spies on all Americans, the courts have no power to review or halt such mass surveillance even when it is flatly illegal and unconstitutional.” This is only one of the reasons my next book’s title will be Is This America?

Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker had already been lavishly shredding our privacy rights. On June 3, 2009, he threw out a series of lawsuits by customers of not only AT&T but also other telecommunications companies charged by irate customers with tuning the NSA into their personal phone calls and e-mails.

At that time, Chief Judge Walker cited a law justifying this mass dismissal of such lawsuits. In 2008 the Democrat-controlled Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act, which declares no “civil action” lawsuit can be filed in any state or federal court against any entity [like AT&T] “for providing assistance to the intelligence community.” Such lawsuits must be automatically dismissed if the U.S. Attorney General verifies that this surveillance was authorized by the government. You got to trust your rulers.

Characteristically, then-Senator Barack Obama of Illinois ardently pledged on the floor that he would filibuster such a glaringly unconstitutional law. But when ultimately tested, Obama voted for it.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is also appealing that thunderclap of a court ruling. Says EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn of the continuing2008 FISA Act: “The retroactive immunity [for the telecommunication companies] takes away Americans’ claims arising out of the First and Fourth Amendments; violates the federal government’s separation of powers as established by the Constitution; and robs innocent telecom customers of their rights without due process of law.”

What recourse do citizens have when their government’s executive branch, along with a complicit Congress, behaves as King George III did against the American colonies? Benjamin Franklin warned of this grim possibility when he told a newly independent America right after the Constitution was signed: “We have a republic—if you can keep it.”

How can we keep it? In a January 8, 1789,letter to Richard Price, Thomas Jefferson wrote:“It is to me a new and consolatory proof that whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government [and] whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.”

Would you say Americans are sufficiently well informed now that the Obama Administration is continuing the privacy-euthanizing legacy of the Bush-Cheney Administration? Will we act to restore our individual rights in this purportedly self-governing republic?

I didn’t see any headlines or demonstrations in the streets when Chief Judge Walker encouraged the National Security Agency to keep tracking what we say on the phone and on the Internet. Did you know about it?

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 Emily Kelley for HUSTLER Magazine – June 2010

Uncertainty continues to reign at California’s public colleges and universities. Many students may drop out—but not because they loathe lectures, writing term papers and boning up for exams.

Tuition-fee hikes ignited campus protests throughout California, including a massive walkout by UCLA students and faculty.

Back in July, hundreds of CSU students gathered outside the chancellor’s office in Long Beach to adamantly voice their disapproval. By late November, UC students were echoing their sentiments.

“We did have several protests which were organized over Facebook and had quite large turnouts,” recalled Jon Seibert, 21, a chemical engineering major at UC San Diego. There were also walkouts, sit-ins and even building takeovers at several other UC campuses, including Berkeley, Santa Cruz and UCLA. But it’s not just higher fees that are angering students and faculty members alike. “It upsets me that tuition is going up,” complained Gina Alessi, 20, a graphic design student at CSU Fullerton, “but at the same time they are cutting classes left and right and mandating furlough days [for faculty and staffers]. Why are we paying more and getting less?”

The answer is simple. CSU, the nation’s largest university system with 23 campuses, was hit by a $584-million budget cut. As for the University of California, state allocations were reduced by $637 million for the 2010-11school year. By increasing tuition, it expects to raise about $505 million to help offset the money lost.

Meanwhile, CSU and UC students have been forced to deal with the downside of the budget cuts. “The number of classes offered has been diminished, and funding for several student associations has been severely cut, “said Seibert, a member of the UC San Diego crew team. “Several of the local crew teams have lost funding, which affects the amount of racing my team will be able to do this year.”

Although students at California’s community colleges have had their tuition fees increased by only $6 per unit, they are also impacted by the budget cuts. “A friend of mine just told me that he tried to pick up classes at three different community colleges and was shocked to learn that all the classes he wanted were filled,” said Anibal Ortiz, 23, a Pierce College communications major who hopes to transfer to CSU Fullerton.

“The way this budget is coming down, some things are already targeted,” added Dr. Joy McCaslin, Pierce’s interim president, in an interview with this reporter. “The state chancellor’s office is asking us to reduce classes and our student services. We’re having to cut programs—we’re not eliminating anything.”But not just students are suffering; so are faculty members. “I think the furlough days have really upset a lot of people,” said Alessi. Under the CSU chancellor’s plan, nearly all of the system’s 47,000 employees will be forced to take two furlough days a month along with a 10% pay cut.

There have not been any recent mass protests, and some students wondered if they’d been effective. “I feel they have opened a lot of eyes to what is happening but are not solving the problem,” said Lorna Brennan, 21, a nursing student at CSU Chico.

Seibert understood why students exercised their right to protest but also acknowledged a grim reality: “The decision [to raise tuition fees] is necessary due to economic conditions, not driven by greed or caused by state finances being squandered on useless earmark projects. The protests were never going to have an effect. The situation is unfortunate, and I doubt many that approved [budget cuts]were happy about it.”

As the old saying goes, it’s always darkest before the dawn. But for cash-strapped California college students, it’s high noon, and the sun isn’t shining.
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Emily Kelley, an award-winning high school journalist from Paso Robles, California, was accepted into CSU Northridge but enrolled at Pierce College to save money. Now a sophomore, she is News Editor of Pierce’s student newspaper, The Roundup, and a blogger at Internships.com.

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You have a reason to be angry. You are being screwed. The bankers get bailed out, but the working class is left to fend for itself at a time when jobs are hard to find. But your anger is misdirected.

You are being lied to. It’s the corporations that have brought this about. They have corrupted both the Republicans and the Democrats. Aside from shipping your jobs overseas, corporations want their taxes reduced as a way of further increasing profits. Reduced tax revenue means less money for schools, hospitals, police, roads and everything else we need to keep our country running. The focus of your anger should be not just the government but also the banks and corporations that are looting taxpayer dollars. Your taxes—the taxes of working Americans—have already been cut by the Obama Administration.

It may indeed be time for a revolution. Just make sure you go after the right people.

Is he insane, stupid or just a clever cynic manipulating the public in pursuit of a buck? We think that Glenn Beck, who hosts a syndicated radio talk show and a televised counterpart on Fox News, is all three. Whatever the case, Beck is certainly an ugly, misshapen blob who spews out hate and misinformation that’s poisoning how Americans think and thereby weakening our country.

Still, we can’t help but pity Beck. There’s good reason for his twisted, corrosive mind-set. The poor guy’s childhood was a nightmare: His parents divorced when he was 13, his mother drowned in a boating accident two years later, and his stepbrother committed suicide. The Internet paints an even worse picture, but we choose not to go there and pray, for Beck’s sake, that the rumors aren’t true.

Considering his background, it’s no wonder that Beck is a mess of putrid contradictions and noxious bile. But a person like that should be given medical and psychological assistance. Instead, he’s been elevated to one of the highest rungs of our consumer-driven society: media star. What is it about Americans that makes so many flock to freaks? And how different is it from the Roman Empire’s bread and circuses?

That figure of speech refers to Roman rulers providing the masses food and entertainment, namely the bloody spectacles that took place in the Colosseum. And while Beck isn’t feeding Christians to the lions, there’s plenty of spectacle on his nightly show, as gleaned from the following quotes:

•“I’m thinking of killing Michael Moore, and I’m wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I could hire somebody to do it…no, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out of him. Is that wrong?” •“The only [Hurricane Katrina victims] we’re seeing on television are the scumbags.” •“You know, we all have our inner demons—I, for one. I can’t speak for you, but I’m on the verge of moral collapse at any time. It can happen by the end of the show.”

And that’s why America watches! We’re waiting to see what Beck will do or say next.We’re waiting to see if he will, in fact, collapse right before our eyes. Or if, given his family history, he’ll commit suicide on camera. It’s a freak show that’s earned Beck a reported $50 million! He has actually made his diagnosed attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder pay off!

The problem is that the Asshole’s loyal viewers believe the outlandish things Beck says. Consider his insane quote that President Obama has “a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture…I believe this guy is a racist.”

There are two things wrong with that statement: Beck has absolutely no evidence to support the claim, and it inflames the gullible who are looking for an excuse—any excuse—to reject this nation’s first African-American President. Rather than discuss the issues intelligently, Beck steers his audience toward their own bigoted preconceptions.

Here’s another Beck bauble: “Al Gore’s not going to be rounding up Jews and exterminating them. It’s the same tactic, however. The goal is different. The goal is globalization. And you must silence all dissenting voices. That’s what Hitler did. That’s what Al Gore, the U.N. and everybody on the global-warming bandwagon [are doing].”

There are a number of problems with the foregoing statement. First, Beck smears Gore by tying him to Hitler, a cheap tactic with no credible backup. Next, he contends that Gore—like the Nazi dictator— is trying to silence dissenting voices. This would only be true if you felt making a strong, forceful argument based on science, facts and logic were somehow unfair because it silenced critics who could not back up their own position with science, facts and logic.

Finally, Beck ties global warming to globalization when the only thing those two notions have in common are the six letters that spell global. Global warming is a worldwide problem that could destroy us all. On the other hand, globalization is an attempt to create a single world government controlled by corporations. That latter idea, by the way, is embraced wholeheartedly by Beck and his fellow rightwingers, who support so-called free trade.

Does Beck see the contradictions in his assertions? He bellows, for example, “I consider myself a libertarian. I’m a conservative, but every day that goes by, I’m fighting for individual rights.” If you’re a libertarian conservative, you oppose regulating corporations even if they are detrimental to individuals. Ipso facto, the two concepts—being a right-wing libertarian and supporting individual rights—are incompatible.

One has to wonder what’s going on inside Beck’s excuse for a brain. It’s easy to imagine a whole lot of screaming, probably between his ego and his logic center. As for his libido, that’s probably curled up in the fetal position, sucking on its thumb. You know the guy is pussywhipped, right?

By Beck’s own admission, his second wife, Tania, rules the roost. Apparently she’s the reason the blowhard became a Mormon: “My wife is, like, hot, and she wouldn’t have sex with me until we got married, and she wouldn’t marry me unless we had a religion.” Of course, Beck already had one: Catholicism. Guess that wasn’t good enough for the missus. Tania had to find something that came with magic underwear for the hubby.

Of course, there’s another way of looking at Beck’s conversion: Three days after being baptized, the out-of-work disc jockey entered talk radio for the first time, launching The Glenn Beck Program at a Tampa, Florida, station. Cynics say it was the result of the powerful Mormon Church exerting its influence.

One last thing, Tania: Your husband prayed that Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich would burst into flames. We pray that you kill your husband in his sleep.

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by Robert Scheer
for HUSTLER Magazine – June 2010

So the Democrats lost their much-vaunted“filibuster-proof” majority in the Senate?Well, they’re probably relieved: ScottBrown’s arrival gives them another excuse notto deliver on campaign promises that upsettheir financiers from Wall Street and theFortune 500.

Seriously, the Democrats are not so muchinept or unorganized—as the frequent accusationsfrom frustrated supporters would haveit—as they are simply locked in an impossiblecontradiction: The companies that fund theirpricey TV-ad-driven political campaigns have acompletely different agenda than the actualAmericans who vote for them.

Case in point: The healthcare reform debaclethis past fall highlighted that, when it comesto any progressive legislation that would favorAmericans over corporations, the Democratsare simply unable and unwilling to deliver. Theyfear the bite of Big Business more than thebark of the vox populi. Forget filibusters; this isabout who is paying whom in a form of legitimizedbribery.

Of course, the voters get their punches in.Witness the recent creaming of the President inMassachusetts, where dispirited liberalsallowed Republican Brown to clock the Demswith a stiff right, and the tea bagger triumphantlyentered the Senate. Yet even thoughObama’s opportunistic search for win-win solutionsto our healthcare concerns and our largereconomic problems is leading to a lose-loseoutcome for the President and the country, he isonly digging himself deeper into the “triangulation”hole that Bill Clinton so doggedly pursued.

The two issues that mattered in 2010’s specialelections thus far were the latest “joblessrecovery” and Obama’s plea to save healthcarereform, even though the latter didn’t includeanything really meaningful, such as a publicoption or a major expansion of Medicare.

It is significant that it was the voters ofMassachusetts who have now derailed the Democrats’efforts to revamp the country’s healthcaresystem, for these voters know the subjectwell. The federal proposal is based on theirown state’s model requiring people to obtainhealth insurance without the state doing anythingto effectively control costs through an alternativeto the private insurance corporations.

Lacking a public option, the cost of healthcarein Massachusetts, already the highest inthe nation at the time of the plan’s implementation,has spiraled upward. Services have beencurtailed, and many, particularly younger people,feel they are being forced to sacrifice to payfor a system that doesn’t work.

That the Democrats now blame Massachusettsvoters for spoiling their lock on Congress—even though they hadn’t been able todo much with it—is thus ironic. They sold outthe voters to the healthcare profiteers, whichmakes our healthcare three times as expensiveas any other country with a developed economy.

Too strong a statement? Consider: Last yeara New York Times/CBS poll found 72% ofAmericans “supported a government-administeredinsurance plan—something like Medicarefor those under 65—that would competefor customers with private insurers.” Yet theparty that supposedly speaks for the “little guy”couldn’t even pass such a plan despite wieldingmajorities larger than the Republicans held foreight years of Bush misrule. Hell, even half ofthose identified as Republican said they wouldback such a public plan, as would three out offour independents!

This is similar to how, despite a massiveoutcry, the Democrats have stalled on deliveringany meaningful financial reform more thana year since the megabanks’ gambling drove usinto a severe recession. One out of six Americansis now unemployed or underemployed, yetthe President is only now calling for Congressionalaction to pump up the job market, as henoted in his 2010 State of the Union Address.

Unfortunately, in this speech, Obama alsodoubled down on his pandering, this time to illinformed“deficit hawks” by proposing a federalspending freeze. Never mind that such afreeze would exempt the national security budgets,which have by far the most fat to trim andsuck up the majority of our tax revenue. Thereal problem with this cynical move is that it isterrible economic policy at a time when somany Americans are hurting.

In fact, the President should be pushing inthe opposite direction: a second major stimuluspackage. The first one helped, especially bypreventing a total meltdown for the middleclass, but as economics brainiacs like PaulKrugman and Robert Reich noted at the time, itwas not large enough.

“The best and fastest way for government toprime the [economy’s] pump is to help statesand locales, which are now doing the opposite,”wrote former Labor Secretary Reich afterObama’s disappointing State of the UnionAddress. “They’re laying off teachers, policeofficers, social workers, healthcare workers andmany more who provide vital public services.”

Funny thing, though: Obama is not thatbeholden to all those middle-class workers andthe small-shop owners they support, despitethe storyline that places them at the heart of themodern Democratic Party. He faces biggerbosses on Wall Street and K Street, and untiltheir stranglehold on D.C. is weakened, it ishard to see when the Democrats can functionas a true party of “hope” and “change.”

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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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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by Robert Scheer
for HUSTLER Magazines – May 2010

What’s up with Barack Obama? I thought this guy had some tough, everyday smarts and, having witnessed life a bit on the mean streets of Chicago, would stand up to the Wall Street big shots who’ve made life so miserable for the little people back in the blue collar communities he once tried to organize. Instead, he got bamboozled by the banking bandits big time and may have fatally sunk his own legacy in the process.

Sure, the President inherited the banking mess rather than helping to create it. That distinction goes to his Republican predecessor George the Second, who fiddled while the financial markets burned. And while the fires raged through the mortgage market, destroying the savings of 15 million families whose homes were suddenly “under water” and in danger of foreclosure, it was Bush who decided to save the bankers and not those they had swindled.

Yet it was Obama who decided to blindly follow Bush’s example and turned to the Democrat toadies of Wall Street who had cooperated in that scam to be his point men on the economy.

One was Timothy Geithner, who was picked by Obama to replace Henry Paulson as Treasury secretary in the obvious but erroneous belief that more of the same— mindlessly throwing money at Wall Street—was the way to go.

Indeed, Geithner was, from jump street, even more enthusiastic than his Republican predecessor in doing just that: In June 2008, while president of the New York Federal Reserve branch, he shocked even Paulson and other GOP bankers in a crisis meeting by proposing they ask “Congress to give the President broad power to guarantee all the debt in the banking system,” according to two participants cited by a New York Times report. Incurring what could be many trillions of dollars in bad debt was too rich for even that crowd. Later, though, in the White House, Geithner was able to maneuver Obama aggressively down that road. The fantasy was that if the banks, who had sunk themselves with high-risk behavior, were made more liquid with government welfare, they, in turn, would bail out beleaguered homeowners.

Of course they did nothing of the sort, as the 15 million families whose homes are under water—real value now falling below the mortgage value—and subject to foreclosure could tell you.

The smoking gun here, the incident that tells you all you need to know about what went wrong with the Geithner plan to help homeowners by bribing the banks, was reported by Joe Nocera in the New York Times back on October 25, 2008, a few weeks before Obama’s victory. An intrepid reporter covering Wall Street, Nocera managed to get in on a conference call of heavyweights at JPMorgan Chase, a bank that was given $25 billion by Bush that it apparently didn’t even need.

“Twenty-five billion dollars is obviously going to help the folks who are struggling more than Chase,” one of the top bankers on the call said, according to the Times, gloating over the fact that his bank was not in as much trouble as some of the others. But JPMorgan Chase was going to take the money and run—not in the direction of helping families stay in their homes but in locking up profits in other distressed banking properties. “What we do think it will help us do is perhaps be a little more active on the acquisition side or opportunistic side for some banks who are still struggling,” the aforementioned banker added.

That strategy, the same as the one employed by Goldman Sachs and the others who got more money from the Feds than they needed, paid off super-big. By the end of Obama’s first year in office the banks reported an all-time record of $145 billion in payouts to their top executives. JPMorgan Chase garnered $11.7 billion but didn’t put it into lowering the terms for distressed homeowners.

As the guy on the call had correctly predicted in what was supposed to be a secret conference call 14 months earlier, “We would think that loan volume will continue to go down as we continue to tighten credit.”

The dismal results of the misplaced trust the United States put in these banks have been reflected in Obama’s falling poll numbers as homeowners, the unemployed and stressed small businesses feel the pain of that tight credit market. Folks have turned against the President who had promised so earnestly to represent the little guy but who sold out so totally to Wall Street.

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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MAY 2010 – HUSTLER Magazine


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by Nat Hentoff

from HUSTLER Magazine – May 2010

Long ago, when I was a student at Northeastern University in Boston, a sociology professor—a white guy from South Africa—glared at us as he handed back our essay exams he had just graded. “You’re just giving me back,” he charged, “only what I said in my lectures! When are you going to start thinking for yourselves?”

Never having heard that from a teacher, I thought it was a helluva good teaching moment, and I was ashamed that I’d left out most of my disagreements with him in my paper. But that therapeutic explosion took place before the virus of “political correctness” had infected—and still does—so many of our colleges and universities. Whether liberal or conservative (a minority among the professoriate), there are professors who insist on the validity of only their views on politics, religion or irreligion, sexual proclivities, patriotism and the very meaning of life. As a member of the advisory board of FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), I get to continually see complaints across the country from out-of-step students and even out-of-step professors who, as Henry David Thoreau put it, always “hear a different drummer.”

They are punished for not being politically correct, sometimes suspended or expelled until FIRE roars in and turns the media spotlight on the school’s administrators or, if necessary, hauls them into court. I keep being surprised at this broken “higher education” system costing everhigher tuition. Before me is a report from FIRE that could have come from Iran, if FIRE had an extension there.

In Minneapolis, the College of Education at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities is mandating that its students achieve “cultural competence” and the necessary “dispositions” to teach their future students politically correct beliefs and values to bring about “social justice.” To graduate from this institution, aspiring teachers must, for example, demonstrate knowledge of their own “white privilege” (if that’s their color) and develop a “cultural identity and intelligence” to ascribe to a “model of intercultural sensitivity.” Meaning: Watch your language so you don’t offend certain groups.

These students, and later the ones they teach, will be judged and graded by how effectively they develop their own stereotypes— only very positive stereotypes—of people on the basis of their color, race, gender, transgender, past oppression, etc. This is affirmative action-style “social justice.” So much for any eventual postracial society or, as Count Basie used to say when he was auditioning musicians, “every tub on its own bottom!” He wanted individual improvisers.

Any student at the “Minnesota College of Exclusionary Education” who deviates from this gospel will be dismissed. Moreover, applicants for admittance to the Twin Cities’ generator of future teachers will themselves be screened to see if they can be subjected to this degree of indoctrination.

In a letter, Adam Kissel—director of FIRE’s Individual Rights Defense Program— reminded University of Minnesota-Twin Cities President Robert H. Bruininks of a U.S. Supreme Court decision that, more than any other, gloriously defines the very essence of Americanism. The 1943 case West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette came about after children of Jehovah’s Witnesses were expelled from that state’s school system for refusing to salute the American flag. Their religion forbade their bowing to any “images.” The kids could return to public school only if they obeyed the Board of Education’s requirement that they be truly patriotic by saluting the Stars and Stripes. ( To them an “image.”) Moreover, if they did not dutifully return to school, their parents could be prosecuted for complicity in their juvenile delinquency.

The thought police at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities don’t seem to grasp the ruling of Justice Robert Jackson, later chief prosecutor at the Nuremburg war crimes trials of the Nazi hierarchy: “Freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much…. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order. If there is any fixed star in our Constitution, it is that [author’s emphasis] no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion.”

The alleged educators at the aforementioned Minnesota university should also be reminded that in Sweezey v. New Hampshire (1957) the Supreme Court declared: “Teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate to gain new maturity and understanding, otherwise our civilization will stagnate and die.” As I have often stressed in this column, far too many students and adults are uneducated in why they are Americans. As Thomas Jefferson reminded all of us in the Constitution: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never has and never will be!” Thanks to Bush-Cheney and now Obama disabling the Constitution—along with politically correct institutions of higher learning— more of us don’t know who and why we are.

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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MAY 2010 – HUSTLER Magazine


Buy this issue – $15.00.
Comes with full length DVD and free shipping!

Buy the digital issue for immediate download – $8.99.
Includes 4 movie clips in the issue!