by Alex Bennett

DO YOU KNOW WHY YOUR TV IS ABOUT TO FUCK YOU?

Okay, here’s the exam. What does the date February 17, 2009, mean to you? You’ve seen it, but where exactly? How about superimposed over the lower third of your favorite TV show? Now you’ve got it. That’s the day television goes completely digital, and your old reliable analog TV disappears forever. Maybe. Have I lost you yet? Well, here’s what you should know:

In May 1941 the FCC adopted America’s television standard of 525 total scan lines. Those are electron beams that sketch the picture in small lines across the face of the television tube. We weren’t the first country with TV. Germany, for example, had it in the ’30s. Their system was developed to a standard of 625 scan lines. The more lines, the better the definition of the picture. That’s why, if you’ve ever watched TV in Europe, the picture always seems so much better. Why we adopted an inferior system is beyond me, but I’ll bet it had to do with politics and payoffs.

There was another problem with international TV broadcasting: Our system was called NTSC, while other countries could choose between PAL and SECAM. There was no worldwide standard. What a mess. In the U.S., TV made its commercial debut in 1946. The momentous event would have been earlier, but World War II got in the way. Everything was black-and-white and fuzzy, but people would sit around happily watching the old Indian head test pattern just because it was there.

Color came along soon after. The first system to be approved by the FCC was from CBS, which started broadcasting color programs in 1951. Viewing required a TV set with a large whirling color wheel that made it incompatible with black-and-white shows. Archrival RCA’s original system was rejected because it wasn’t ready for prime time. However, its engineers persevered, coming up with, among other things, a black-and-whitecompatible system that coincidently improved on the original set. RCA also reportedly started rumors that the CBS set’s color wheel could come loose and decapitate its viewers. The fight between the two titans was prolonged, but CBS finally threw in the towel due to mounting production problems. RCA’s television network, NBC, launched limited colorcasts in 1954. That was 55 years ago, and one could argue that nothing of significance has changed in the United States since, with the exception of stereo sound.

In the meantime, other countries— notably Japan—had been working on new systems meant to create a TV picture in high definition. Many of them were analog as opposed to being strictly digital. I suppose another explanation is due. Analog is a variable continuous signal. Digital is a series of 0s and 1s basically representing on and off. Digital is said to be more flexible and efficient than analog, and it uses less bandwidth.

Still scratching your head? Never mind. It’s not important to know how digital technology works, just that it exists and that some people are going to get rich from it. In case you haven’t been paying attention, digital has been, over the past few years, slowly replacing analog. That’s why the FCC, which loves to establish standards, eventually mandated a cutoff date for analog television: February 17, 2009. Yes, it’s a Tuesday, which makes no sense at all.

So are you going to benefit from all this? Well, the analog system was ancient, and you will get a better picture with digital. All those crappy shows on your old TV will look better, but they’ll still be crappy shows. The real beneficiaries will be the manufacturers of TV equipment.

If you have an old-fashioned tube set, you must have a converter if you still want to receive a video broadcast signal on it. That will cost around $50—if you get a coupon from the government. On the other hand, if you have cable or satellite, you’re already good to go. If you don’t, maybe it’s time to buy a newfangled digital picture box. The cost of the flat-screen digital TVs is coming down to what tube prices once were. If you look around, you can get into a 32-inch set for around $500.

There will, of course, be some people left out in the digital cold because food comes first. After all, we’re in a recession. Gas costs a bundle, and mac ’n’ cheese is a major staple for some in the working class. How are they supposed to get their entertainment and information?

There might have been a better way. Those old channels could have been kept on the air, but the telecommunications boys have been drooling over them for years. Think of the bucks being spent by millions of people to do the conversion. It’s good for business. Still confused? Then you probably don’t want to hear about the two existing digital systems: 1080i and 720p, not to mention the 1080p, which….

Aw, fuck it! It’s all a big mess.

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Alex Bennett is a longtime HUSTLER contributor. The twotime Emmy winner, who broke into broadcasting at age 14, currently calls Sirius Left 146 his radio home.

by Robert Sheer

AMERICA’S UNREGULATED BANKING SYSTEM ROBS THE POOR TO GIVE TO THE RICH.

Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen.” That image from “The Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd” is out of date these days, since bankers and other thieves who foreclosed on the bereaved widow’s home in Woody Guthrie’s old folk song don’t use fountain pens anymore. Instead, they rely on computerized transactions, online solicitations, international money swaps and all sorts of other secret shenanigans that leave the robbed consumers blindly unaware of who actually assaulted them.

First, a bank hustles them into deceptively low-cost introductory loans, which are then sold in a Ponzi scheme of speculation. When the homeowner’s interest rate inevitably balloons, it’s some other bank the consumer never heard of that lowers the foreclosure ax.

The other thing Guthrie’s tune missed is that only a fool of a stickup man would use a gun, because the criminal penalties are super-high and the loot paltry by comparison. Not so the money to be ripped off from home mortgage foreclosures and credit card hustles— and those robberies are not even classified as punishable crimes.

Sure, loansharking is a crime—a hoodlum loans you money at an exorbitant interest and then busts your kneecaps when you can’t pay up—but that’s because ordinary thugs don’t have a license to steal; banks do. And any time the government makes the slightest move in the direction of cracking down on the banks or stockbrokers who operate these officially sanctioned swindles, their lobbyists go to town and win. Individual states once had reasonable caps on interest rates and sound lending practice standards, but all of that got swept away by a federal government that the financial giants own.

Don’t believe for a minute that the long election campaign we just suffered through is going to change any of this. Lending-industry bandits lavishly bankroll both major political parties, and neither is about to punish them for their excesses. Quite the opposite: The only serious regulation of the financial world was wisely enacted in the 1930s during the Great Depression to prevent another meltdown and was repealed with solid bipartisan support during the Clinton Presidency. The banks bought that legislation with more than $300 million in lobbying costs, thus reversing the 60-year-old ban on mergers between banks, insurance companies and stockbrokers.

The first major beneficiary of the new deregulation legislation was Citigroup, which had been attempting an illegal merger with the Travelers Group insurance company. Once the banking giant got the law changed, the merger went through, and Robert Rubin, Clinton’s Secretary of the Treasury, then resigned to head up—yes, you guessed right—Citigroup.

These guys have no shame. Before he went into the government, Rubin made hundreds of millions running Goldman Sachs, which played the mortgage market for all it was worth before sticking others with the cost. Henry Paulson, Rubin’s predecessor at Goldman Sachs, also occupied that position of Secretary of the Treasury, in George W. Bush’s administration. See how nonpartisan these con artists are?

You might be thinking, What, me worry? —that is, if you don’t happen to be one of the tens of millions stuck in foreclosure on their interest-only adjustable mortgage loan or bearing the burden of credit card debt, suckered in by low introductory rates that later expand astronomically. But it will also cost you big-time even if you never took out a lousy loan. That’s because the taxpayers— yeah, you—are left holding the bag, buying out the banks and bailing out their top executives so that they can continue the hustle.

These are the thieves that Scripture warned us against. One of the clearest moral injunctions of the Bible is that usury—which is what these guys routinely practice—is a sin. As is stated in Ezekiel 22:12: “…thou hast taken usury and increase, and thou hast greedily gained of thy neighbors by extortion, and hast forgotten me, saith the Lord God.”

Funny how Christian moralizers pilfer from the Bible to find quotes that confirm their repressive views, but manage to miss anything in that same hallowed tome which smacks of social justice. But according to Ezekiel 22:12, the Lord God will not be as forgiving of our bankers as the politicians who constantly invoke His name.

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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 Thinking Tuna Fish, Playing President: My Close Encounters With Nixon, Carter, Bush I, Reagan and Clinton—And How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W. Bush and his latest, The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America.

Hustler’s Larry Flynt and Girls Gone Wild CEO Joe Francis Ask For Government Bailout Of The Adult Entertainment Industry

As the 2009 AVN Adult Expo opens in Las Vegas this week, Girls Gone Wild CEO Joe Francis and HUSTLER magazine publisher Larry Flynt are petitioning the newly convened 111th Congress to provide a financial bailout for the adult entertainment industry along the lines of what is being sought by the Big Three automakers, a spokesperson for Francis announced today.

Adult industry leaders Flynt and Francis sent a joint request to Congress asking for $5 billion in federal assistance, “Just to see us through hard times,” Francis said. “Congress seems willing to help shore up our nation’s most important businesses, we feel we deserve the same consideration. In difficult economic times, Americans turn to entertainment for relief. More and more, the kind of entertainment they turn to is adult entertainment.”

But according to Flynt the recession has acted like a national cold shower. “People are too depressed to be sexually active,” Flynt says, “This is very unhealthy as a nation. Americans can do without cars and such but they cannot do without sex.”

While not to the degree felt by banks and automakers, the Adult Entertainment industry has been hit by the effects of the economic downturn. DVD sales and rentals have decreased by 22 percent in the past year as viewers turn to the internet for adult entertainment. It is estimated that roughly half of all internet users visit adult sites, with the number of unique visitors to adult websites (including GirlsGoneWild.com and Hustler.com) has grown to more than 75 million per month.

But the “saltpeter” effect remains.

“With all this economic misery and people losing all that money, sex is the farthest thing from their mind,” Flynt says, “It’s time for congress to rejuvenate the sexual appetite of America. The only way they can do this is by supporting the adult industry and doing it quickly.”

“The popularity of adult entertainment in America has grown steadily for the past half century,” Francis says. “Its emergence into the mainstream of popular culture suggests that the US government should actively support the adult industry’s survival and growth, just as it feels the need to support any other industry cherished by the American people.”

Approaching the end of the first decade of the 21st century, we stand at a dark precipice that begs the question: Revolution or slavery? Yet we hesitate to even state this out loud for fear of being whisked off to a secret detention camp built by Halliburton. And therein lies the proof of our desperate situation. Before George W. Bush destroyed habeas corpus, we would not have been reluctant to speak up. Now we cringe. The politicians—Democrats and Republicans alike—have taken away your right to speak. The big corporations have taken away your right to make a fair wage. Together they have taken away your right to privacy. Those who are depending on a new administration to save us should not forget the lessons of history: Rulers must be pushed and prodded at best, deposed at worst. If our new President and Congress do not act dramatically and soon to reverse past trends, the American people will have to force them to do so. It’s that or slavery.

Larry Flynt
Publisher