Acclaimed independent filmmaker Kirby Dick tackles the topics mainstream media won’t touch. In 1997 he scored a cult hit with the provocative documentary Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist. Then in 2006, Dick went after the Hollywood censors. His exposé of the Motion Picture Association of America’s secretive movie ratings system, This Film Is Not Yet Rated, grabbed an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary. His most explosive and entertaining work yet, Outrage, skewers the homosexual hypocrites who push the GOP’s anti-gay party line while living a closeted lifestyle.

Interview from HUSTLER Magazine – December 2009

HUSTLER: In Outrage you name names: Florida Governor Charlie Crist, who’s bucking for a GOP Presidential nomination; Larry Craig, who was caught trying to solicit gay sex; and California Congressman David Dreier, whom we outed a couple of years ago.

KIRBY DICK: Crist is the most high-profile one, due to his political prominence right now. But the film also looks at Jim McCrery, recently retired representative from Louisiana. He had been outed by [gay and lesbian publication] The Advocate in the early ’90s, but the mainstream media almost universally avoided the story. I also include a section about former New York Mayor Ed Koch.We talked to a couple of very credible people who had never spoken to the media before, which finally established what everybody already suspected about him. And then there was former U.S. Representative from Virginia Ed Schrock, outed by D.C. blogger Mike Rogers. We looked into a number of other very powerful politicians and were able to get some information on them, but not adequate sourcing. There’s nothing wrong with reporting on rumors, but I wanted this film to be respected.

Right after Outrage was released, Charlie Crist announced that he’s running for the Senate. How do you think your film will affect his chances?

I did not make my film to have an impact on his career. I don’t know that my film should necessarily force the resignation of Charlie Crist. In fact, if he were to be completely honest, I would say that would be so much to his credit and he shouldn’t resign. What I want is for all closeted politicians to tell the truth, especially those voting anti-gay. Part of the problem I saw with the media coverage around Mark Foley and Larry Craig was that they viewed these as isolated incidents, not part of something that was systemic. The issue is big ger than just one politician. I hope the film compels the press to ask hard questions of any politician whom they perceive may be acting hypocritically.

Why won’t the mainstream media cover this?

They’re very happy to report on rumors outing American Idol contestants, but they’re not going to report on the hypocrisy of closeted politicians. In the case of corporate media, they’re reluctant to report on gay sexuality because they don’t want to offend their straight audience. In the case of government- funded media, t h e y d o n ’ t w a n t to offend powerful politicians. Reporters themselves want to cover it. It’s the people higher up the ladder who are making the decision to stay away from it.

That said, the response to Outrage has been phenomenal. It is now starting to cause a discussion within the mainstream media about these policies. National Public Radio reviewer Nathan Lee, for instance, wrote a very positive review about the film online in which he mentioned Larry Craig and Charlie Crist. He had not been told that there was any NPR policy to not name names. But without his approval, NPR pulled the names out of his review.

In response, he pulled his name off the review and then posted a critique in the comment section following the article. NPR then pulled his critique off the comments, claiming they had a policy against writing about the private lives of politicians unless it had an overriding public interest. But of course, it does. These are people who are closeted and voting anti-gay.

You state clearly in your film that this is not about being gay; it’s about hypocrisy.

First of all, if you’re part of the gay community, and you’re having sex within that community, you can’t really expect that community to protect you if you’re passing laws harming the lives of millions of gay and lesbian citizens. And then there’s the issue of transparency and honesty. If you’re passing laws and telling the public that there’s something wrong with being gay and lesbian while secretly being gay yourself, that is corrosive to the body politic. It’s the responsibility of journalists and documentary filmmakers to report on that.

Let’s put it this way: If Edward Kennedy, who is for the assault weapons ban, secretly had a collection of assault weapons that he was shooting in his backyard, and some reporter poked his head over the wall and took a photograph, everybody in the country would say it’s a good thing to reveal Edward Kennedy’s hypocrisy. Saying issues surrounding gay sexuality are off limits is a kind of homophobia. The press is very happy to report on straight sexuality; look at the whole Bill Clinton affair. Sure, everybody is entitled to a private sex life. That should go for politicians as well, except when there are issues involving hypocrisy or public policy. Then people should be allowed to investigate.

What if politicians say they are merely representing the majority of their constituents who don’t want pro-gay legislation?

They’re not saying, “We’re voting anti-gay because our constituency is anti-gay.” They’re saying, “Marriage is something that should only be between a man and a woman.” If they said, “Look, I’m just making a political calculation here, but I really don’t believe it,” that would at least be transparency. But they’re not. They’re saying, “I believe this as well.” And that rises to the level of hypocrisy.

You say in your film that there is a conspiracy to keep this stuff hidden, to preserve the Republican closet.

There is a conspiracy, a political “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, but it’s not only Republican. This is a nonpartisan issue. In addition to Ed Koch, the Democratic exmayor of New York, we also looked into rumors of other closeted Democrats who voted anti-gay. D.C. is a very gay town. There are as many gay Republicans in D.C. as there are gay Democrats.

Many people are aware that these people in the closet are voting anti-gay, and they’re doing nothing to tell the truth about it. Party leaders clearly feel that if somebody were to say a powerful party member were closeted, the doublespeak of the party would be exposed. Throughout history, political parties have been successful attacking minorities; it’s sort of a time-honored strategy. It’s abhorrent, and it’s the responsibility of the media to expose the hypocrisy around that strategy. Aside from that, gays and lesbians are a very substantial, wealthy and accomplished part of our society. The GOP loses a lot by alienating that constituency.

You point out in your film that the emotional effect of being in the closet is underestimated. Does anti-gay policy result in part from that personal torment?

Jim McGreevey, the former governor of New Jersey who came out publicly when he resigned, spoke to me about it. He was personally for samesex marriage in 2000, but he came out against it publicly because he was afraid people would think he was gay. That’s one of the examples of how the closet contorts the American political system. Another thing that happens is these politicians have been in the closet for so long, they’re trapped. If they come out, they’re admitting to 20 years of misleading their constituency. So they have to continue to vote and act in that manner, which just continues the damaging effects of being in the closet.

Are some of them truly in denial about their own sexuality and what they are doing?

That may be more true with people Larry Craig’s age, who grew up during the homophobic 1950s. I’ve heard people tell stories about having sex with a politician, and as soon as the sex act was over, he’d say, “You know, you’re going to go to hell for having gay sex.”

There is a thriving gay Republican culture in D.C. and in politics. Some are very accepting of their own homosexuality; they just keep it to themselves. But there’s another group that is very ashamed of it and self-loathing.

Is this kind of political homophobia eventually going to die out?

I certainly hope so. I actually think this is not so much a lingering effect of past attitudes as it is a calculated strategy. The Christian Right, of course, viewed this as an issue within its constituency. I think there was a very cynical calculation by the Republican Party to align itself with this. That decision was made over the last 20 or 30 years. Many in the Republican Party, including George W. Bush, are not homophobic at all, but they chose to vilify gays and lesbians as a way of getting in power and staying in power. In some ways that’s more abhorrent than if George W. Bush actually were homophobic. Demographically, things suggest a brighter future. The younger people are, the more accepting they are of gays and lesbians, and the more they think it’s really a nonissue. That’s hopefully the way everyone will look at it in 50 years. I hope people going into politics now will see my film and realize it could be a mistake politically to be closeted. It’s also very painful on a personal level to live that double life. If they’re wise, they’ll choose to run as openly gay politicians, whether Democrat, Republican or independent.
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You may purchase the hard copy of the December 2009 Issue of HUSTLER Magazine (with free shipping) at HustlerMagazine.com.

You may purchase a digital copy of the December 2009 Issue of HUSTLER Magazine at UnderCoverMags.com.

AWARD-WINNING JOURNALIST CHRIS HEDGES WARNS THAT CHINA, RUSSIA AND OTHER MAJOR U.S. TRADE PARTNERS ARE READY TO DUMP THE DOLLAR. IF THAT HAPPENS, AMERICA’S FINANCIAL AND MILITARY DOMINATION WILL END, AND OUR ALREADY-BELEAGUERED ECONOMY WILL FLATLINE.

By Chris Hedges
Reprinted in HUSTLER Magazine December 2009
courtesy of Truthdig.com

THE WEEK OF JUNE 15, 2009, marked the end of the dollar’s reign as the world’s reserve currency. It marked the start of a terrible period of economic and political decline in the United States, and it signaled the last gasp of the American imperium. That’s over. It is not coming back. What is to come will be very, very painful.

Barack Obama and the criminal class on Wall Street—aided by a corporate media that continues to peddle fatuous gossip and trash talk as news while we endure the greatest economic crisis in our history— may have fooled us, but the rest of the world knows we are bankrupt. And these nations are damned if they are going to continue to prop up an inflated dollar and sustain the massive federal budget deficits, swollen to over $2 trillion, that fund America’s imperial expansion in Eurasia and our system of casino capitalism. They have us by the throat. They are about to squeeze.

On June 15 and 16, meetings were held in Yekaterinburg, Russia, among Chinese President Hu Jintao, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and other top officials of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The United States, which asked to attend, was denied admittance. The gathering was, in the words of economist Michael Hudson, “the most important meeting of the 21st century so far.”

The summit was the first formal step by our major trading partners to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. If they succeed, the dollar will dramatically plummet in value, the cost of imports—including oil— will skyrocket, interest rates will climb, and jobs will hemorrhage at a rate that will make the past few months look like boom times. State and federal services will be reduced or shut down for lack of funds. The United States will begin to resemble the Weimar Republic or Zimbabwe.

Endowed by many with the qualities of a savior, Obama will suddenly look pitiful, inept and weak. And the recent rage that has kindled a handful of shootings and hate crimes will engulf vast segments of a disenfranchised and bewildered working and middle class. These people will demand vengeance, radical change, order and moral renewal, which an array of proto-fascists—from the Christian Right to the goons who disseminate hate talk on Fox News—will assure the country they will impose.

I called Hudson, whose article “The Yekaterinburg Turning Point: De-Dollarization and the Ending of America’s Financial-Military Hegemony,” ran in the June 15, 2009, Financial Times. “Yekaterinburg may become known not only as the death place of the czars but of the American empire as well,” Hudson wrote. His article is worth reading, along with John Lanchester’s disturbing exposé of the world’s banking system, “It’s Finished,” which appeared in the May 28, 2009, issue of the London Review of Books.

“This means the end of the dollar,” Hudson told me. “It means China, Russia, India, Pakistan and Iran are forming an official financial and military area to get America out of Eurasia. The balance-of-payments deficit is mainly military in nature. Half of America’s discretionary spending is military. The deficit ends up in the hands of foreign banks, central banks. They don’t have any choice but to recycle the money to buy U.S. government debt. The Asian countries have been financing their own military encirclement. They have been forced to accept dollars that have no chance of being repaid. They are paying for America’s military aggression against them. They want to get rid of this.”

China, as Hudson pointed out, has already struck bilateral trade deals with Brazil and Malaysia to denominate their trade in China’s yuan rather than the dollar, pound or euro. Russia promises to begin trading in the ruble and local currencies. The governor of China’s central bank has openly called for the abandonment of the dollar as reserve currency, suggesting in its place the use of the International Monetary Fund’s Special Drawing Rights.

What the new system will be remains unclear, but the flight from the dollar has clearly begun.

The goal, in the words of Russia’s president, is to build a “multipolar world order” that will break the economic and, by extension, military domination by the United States. China is frantically spending its dollar reserves to buy factories and property around the globe so it can unload its U.S. currency. This is why Aluminum Corp. of China made so many major concessions in the failed attempt to salvage its $19.5-billion alliance with the Rio Tinto mining concern in Australia. It desperately needs to shed its dollars.

“China is trying to get rid of all the dollars they can in a trash-for-resource deal,” Hudson said. “They will give the dollars to countries willing to sell off their resources since America refuses to sell any of its high-tech industries, even Unocal, to the yellow peril. It realizes these dollars are going to be worthless pretty quickly.” The architects of this new global exchange realize that if they break the dollar, they also break America’s military domination. Our military spending cannot be sustained without this cycle of heavy borrowing. The official U.S. defense budget for fiscal year 2008 is $623 billion, before we add on things like nuclear research. The next-closest national military budget is China’s, at $65 billion, according to the Central Intelligence Agency.

There are three categories of balance-of payment deficits. America imports more than it exports. This is trade.Wall Street and American corporations buy up foreign companies. This is capital movement. The third and most important balance-of-payment deficit for the past 50 years has been Pentagon spending abroad. It is primarily military spending that has been responsible for the balance-of-payments deficit for the past five decades.

To fund our permanent war economy, we have been flooding the world with dollars. The foreign recipients turn the dollars over to their central banks for local currency. The central banks then have a problem. If a central bank does not spend the money in the United States, then the exchange rate against the dollar will go up. This will penalize exporters. This has allowed America to print money without restraint to buy imports and foreign companies, fund our military expansion and ensure that foreign nations like China continue to buy our Treasury bonds.

This cycle appears now to be over. Once  the dollar cannot flood central banks, and no one buys our treasury bonds, our empire collapses. The profligate spending on the military, some $1 trillion when everything is counted, will be unsustainable. “We will have to finance our own military spending,” Hudson warned, “and the only way to do this will be to sharply cut back wage rates. The class war is back in business. Wall Street understands that. This is why it had Bush and Obama give it $10 trillion in a huge rip-off so it can have enough money to survive.”

The desperate effort to borrow our way out of financial collapse has promoted a level of state intervention unseen since World War II. It has also led us into uncharted territory.

“We have in effect had to declare war to get us out of the hole created by our economic system,” Lanchester wrote in the London Review of Books. “There is no model or precedent for this, and no way to argue that it’s all right really, because under suchand- such a model of capitalism…there is no such model. It isn’t supposed to work like this, and there is no road map for what’s happened.”

The cost of daily living, from buying food to getting medical care, will become difficult for all but a few as the dollar plunges. States and cities will see their pension funds drained and finally shut down. The government will be forced to sell off infrastructure, including roads and transport, to private corporations.

We will be increasingly charged by privatized utilities—think Enron—for what was once regulated and subsidized. Commercial and private real estate will be worth less than half its current value. The negative equity that already plagues 25% of American homes will expand to include nearly all property owners. It will be difficult to borrow and impossible to sell real estate unless we accept massive losses.

There will be block after block of empty stores and boarded-up houses. Foreclosures will be epidemic. There will be long lines at soup kitchens and many, many homeless. Our corporate-controlled media, already banal and trivial, will work overtime to anesthetize us with useless gossip, spectacles, sex, gratuitous violence, fear and tawdry junk politics.

America will be composed of a large dispossessed underclass and a tiny empowered oligarchy that will run a ruthless and brutal system of neo-feudalism from secure compounds. Those who resist will be silenced, many by force. We will pay a terrible price, and we will pay this price soon, for the gross malfeasance of our power elite.

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For more articles by Chris Hedges, whose latest book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and Triumph of Spectacle, go to Truthdig.com.

You may purchase the hard copy of the December 2009 Issue of HUSTLER Magazine (with free shipping) at HustlerMagazine.com.

You may purchase a digital copy of the December 2009 Issue of HUSTLER Magazine at UnderCoverMags.com.

THE PRESIDENT IS TALKING THE TALK, BUT CAN HE REALLY KEEP WALL STREET IN CHECK?

by Robert Sheer
for HUSTLER MAGAZINE – JANUARY 2010

Are you kidding? Barack Obama wants Wall Street to make nice to Main Street because it’s the right thing to do? Yeah, that’ll work. “The fact is, many of the firms that are now returning to prosperity owe a debt to the American people,” President Obama told banking heavyweights in a September 2009 address on their turf. “It is neither right nor responsible after you’ve recovered with the help of your government to shirk your obligation to the goal of wider recovery, a more stable system and a more broadly shared prosperity.”

Oh, but they will; they will. Who doubts it? The laws haven’t changed, the same passive or overmatched regulators are still on patrol, and short-term profit is still the overriding goal of every trader, stockholder and executive on watch at the even bigger and more dominant financial firms that survived the crash. Now, to be fair, Obama wants to pass some new laws and change the regulatory structure. The questions that remain, of course, are how sincere is he, and what can he get passed through Congress in the face of a blizzard of cash flying down from Wall Street to K Street?

“The reforms I’ve laid out will pass, and these changes will become law,” said Obama, talking tough to the polite-yet-unenthusiastic zillionaires assembled at the historic Federal Hall— the same crew that recklessly destroyed the world economy and then cheerfully let the U.S. government rescue them. “I want everybody here to hear my words: We will not go back to the days of reckless behavior and unchecked excess that was at the heart of this crisis, where too many were motivated only by the appetite for quick kills and bloated bonuses.”

“I can’t tell you how many young people have come up to me in these years and said, ‘I went to Wall Street because of that movie,’” echoed Stone, now making a sequel. Obama, however, is consistent in forever trying to seize the high ground. Thus, he entered the den of wolves to try out moral suasion in a place that has no use for anything but the pursuit of profit. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, he must be agenda-setting rather than hoping the assembled CEOs would rise out of their seats, shaking, to have evangelical conversions—since any American with a bank account, mortgage or credit card already knows from bitter experience how these corporations will screw them at every turn if they are not constantly vigilant.

In fact, the myth of corporate self-regulation is the key to understanding how we got here. Since President Clinton, Congress has been systematically erasing the post-Great Depression financial services laws, like the Glass-Steagall Act, that for seven decades successfully protected American capitalism from its worst excesses. However, after the stunning collapse of several of the world’s biggest banks, and the subsequent unprecedented bailout of these greed centers by the American taxpayer, Obama and Congress have no choice but to save face by passing some kind of financial reforms.

The day of his speech, an Associated Press poll showed that “seven out of ten Americans lack confidence the federal government has taken safeguards to prevent another financial industry meltdown.” Public opinion demands something be done; the devil, of course, will be in the details.

One devilish detail is enforcement. Passing regulatory laws only works if somebody makes sure they are followed. Before the collapse, the few regulators actually sounding alarm bells—such as Brooksley Born—were crushed by more politically powerful players like Democratic Party darling Robert Rubin. Others, from the Federal Reserve to the Securities and Exchange Commission, simply did not do their job, whether out of fear, incompetence, ideological blinkers or corruption.

“Senior regulators who stood idly by for years as financial firms built their houses of cards have been rewarded with even bigger jobs or are jockeying for increased responsibilities,” wrote veteran New York Times finance reporter and former stockbroker Gretchen Morgenson in a September 13, 2009, column. “Those in the public sector ask us to believe that regulators who snoozed during the credit bubble will be alert to emerging problems on their beats when the next mania begins. That’s asking a lot, isn’t it?”

Indeed, it is. Yet denial of the depth of the problems this crushing economic debacle has exposed is fueled by gushing pipelines of cash that run straight from New York City to Washington, D.C. Until we can reclaim our democracy from the legal corruption of corporate campaign donations, it is unlikely that any systematic reforms can succeed.

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The HUSTLER January 2010 Issue  can be purchased with free shipping at HustlerMagazine.com. 

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.

Asshole of the Month from HUSTLER MAGAZINE September 2009

Representative Jane Harman (DCalifornia) should admit she’s a whore and take a job at the Moonlite BunnyRanch. Of course, we expect she’d only give blowjobs to Israelis and Alberto Gonzales. And, okay, maybe a few Republicans.

 Think we’re being unfair? Then what do you make of this? In a 2005 wiretap, Harman was heard allegedly promising to use her influence to reduce espionage-related charges against two Israeli agents, provided the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) lobbied to get her appointed chair of the House Intelligence Committee.

Well, what was a poor girl to do? (Although estimated to be the second-richest member of Congress, Harman is, alas, morally bankrupt.) Speaker Nancy Pelosi had already passed her over for the Intelligence Committee post. So who wouldn’t contemplate treason to secure that position? (It sure looks like treason to us. Based on the tape, Harman was allegedly conspiring with a foreign government to subvert our justice system.)

Why is all this only coming out now? Back in 2006, then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales apparently ordered the FBI to kill the investigation because he needed Harman’s support for the illegal, warrantless National Security Agency surveillance program being pushed through Congress. Delicious irony, no? Harman ultimately backed the kind of activity that resulted in her undoing.

 But it gets better. Harman went ballistic when she learned her own phone had been tapped, calling it  “an abuse of power. “ Confused? Let us explain: Wiretapping is only wrong when she’s under surveillance. Seems very Republican, doesn’t it? 

“[I’m] the best Republican in the Democratic Party, “ Harman proclaimed during her failed 1998 race for California governor. We’ll take the lawmaker at her word. She voted with the GOP to restrict rules on personal bankruptcy (a knife aimed at the heart of the middle class). She supported the Iraq War. She sponsored the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007, which imposed unconstitutional limitations on free speech. As head of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing and Terrorism Risk Assessment, Harman must have known about clandestine activities, including torture. Worse, in 2004 she apparently tried pressuring the New York Times into deep-sixing the story that exposed the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping. 

“I believe the program is essential to U.S. national security, “ she said back then,  “and that its disclosure has damaged critical intelligence capabilities. “ Harman went on to call whistleblowers  “despicable “ and argued for  “limits on press immunity. “ Harman, you pathetic bitch. If it’s abuse of power when the government spies on you, then it’s abuse of power when the rest of us are spied on. Of course, in your case, you actually do seem to be committing an indictable offense. On the other hand, most Americans subjected to illegal surveillance hadn’t committed a criminal act.

Then there’s the press. You’ve argued it has too much immunity when it exposes the truth. But full immunity for the telecommunications companies that cooperated with the government’s illegal snooping on their customers is perfectly okay, right? You did vote to grant them retroactive immunity. So you’re against an unfettered press and for a repressive, Stalinist government that spies on its own people— as long as it isn’t you.

We should also note that Harman’s attempt to suppress the story of the Bush Administration’s illegal wiretapping just before the hotly contested 2004 Presidential election was certain to benefit the incumbents, not her own party. She betrayed both her fellow Democrats and her country with that single act alone.

Hopefully, the government will prosecute Harman (who has denied any wrongdoing regarding her tape-recorded conversation) and put her in jail. If not, she’s likely to run for governor of California again unless Barbara Boxer or Dianne Feinstein beats her to the punch. But this egomaniacal little cocksucker won’t be satisfied with the governorship. In truth, we’ve heard she actually has her eye on the Presidency.

Apparently, one of Harman’s chief supporters is pro-Israeli billionaire Haim Saban. A Democratic Party benefactor, Saban was allegedly working with AIPAC when he threatened to withhold political funding to Pelosi if she didn’t nominate Harman for the Intelligence Committee chair. Should Harman ever become President, she’d owe her allegiance to the Israeli lobby. God help us.

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