Larry Flynt is celebrating dual milestones. Now 70, he heads a business empire that’s larger and more profitable than ever. He’s also celebrating the 25-year anniversary of an unlikely Supreme Court victory. Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, Flynt’s epic legal battle against evangelist Jerry Falwell, started out as a tasteless joke about the preacher losing his virginity with his own mother and ended up as a historical landmark that significantly bolstered our First Amendment right to free speech.

Flynt sat down with longtime friend Robert Scheer, one of the country’s foremost progressive voices, for an honest conversation about the lofty principles of Constitutional rights and the gutter realities of being a multimillionaire smut peddler.

ROBERT SCHEER: You once told me HUSTLER is the best magazine you could read with one hand. In your office you have a book of Helmut Newton’s photographs: classy, beautiful erotica. In the magazine you’ve got cum-shots.

LARRY FLYNT: You know something? Helmut Newton loved HUSTLER; it was his favorite magazine. People that love smut like it hard, and they like it unapologetic. If you’re a connoisseur of pornography, you really don’t like it camouflaged with a lot of aesthetics; you like it in your face. You’re one of the few people I know who define pornography very objectively when it’s really very subjective. It exists in various forms.

We all know that the old masters, Picasso or Rembrandt, had a penchant for doing nudes—for doing porn basically. When writers like James Joyce came along, they were in a league of their own. They made the desire for pornography more acceptable. Eventually there came a time when it was available to the masses. The genie was out of the bottle, and there was no way of putting it back in. It got very unfiltered and very unsophisticated. So, many of the people who appreciated very good pornography were extremely critical of the crudeness in a lot of it. But that’s the marketplace.

When you started out, you just wanted to make a buck, right?

And have fun while I was doing it.

You were the primitive capitalist. You weren’t some great artist painting beautiful naked women.

No. But if I was selling peanut butter, I’d sell it with the same enthusiasm.

You sometimes talk about yourself as just a smut peddler. I remember when people criticized you about being a bottom-feeder, you said, “Yeah, but look what I found at the bottom.” But you’ve had an evolution. You’re a true believer now in the First Amendment argument.

I didn’t have to evolve on the First Amendment. I’ve always believed in it.

But did you understand it? Did you understand its power?

No. I don’t think any of us understands the overwhelming significance of the First Amendment. Without free expression or the right to assemble, we wouldn’t even be a nation. The Second Amendment wouldn’t even be important. All others come after the First Amendment.

So you start HUSTLER in 1974, and your life takes off. Then in 1978 you have this horrendous experience of being shot. One response could be a lower profile. Take the money and run. But you became a crusader.

I never slowed down. All through the ’70s, ’80s and some of the ’90s we were putting out censorship brush fires all over the country. Prosecutors wanted to prosecute me everywhere, and I always showed up to accommodate them. I think I finally just wore them out.

The People vs. Larry Flynt is the popular record of your First Amendment fight. It’s a brilliant piece of moviemaking, but is it accurate?

It’s extremely accurate. Some of it is very embarrassing, but the director, Milos Forman, knew what he had to focus on: the most bizarre, outrageous and controversial parts of my life, because that gets the money. All of that is true, but there was a lot left out of the movie that I would like to have seen in there.

In the beginning you’re just a redneck who wants to make a buck. You’ve got strip clubs, and you need a way of publicizing them. So you put out this magazine. Then you run up against hypocrites like Charles Keating— who landed in the middle of the savings-and loan scandal—and Jerry Falwell. That confrontation took you to our highest court. How important is the legacy of that Supreme Court decision 25 years ago?

Go back to the ’70s and get some tapes from Johnny Carson’s monologue, and you’ll realize how bland and tame they are; no comparison at all to Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart. You can see the evolution that took place with my case. I was talking to Rodney Smolla, who wrote Jerry Falwell v. Larry Flynt: The First Amendment on Trial, the book about the Supreme Court case. He says people are not really aware of the full impact that case had because the lawyers for NBC, CBS and all the rest of them are standing behind people like Letterman, Leno and Stewart saying you can do this because of this case. Garry Trudeau, in an interview with Ted Koppel, talked about all the trouble that his comic Doonesbury got into with politicians—Bush the lapdog and things like that. He said he was really worried that he was going to be facing serious litigation. And he said, “Then I got a get-out-of-jail-free card.” And Koppel said, “Who was that from?” And he said, “Larry Flynt.”

That case just stopped it all right there. You can no longer sue someone because they hurt your feelings or your wife’s feelings or your dog’s feelings or whatever; you have to prove libel. If you can’t prove libel, it’s not going to fly. That was a huge thing in that case. The second component that made it so significant was that for the first time in the history of our nation, over 200 years, parody was made protected speech. If it’s not a serious piece of literary work, it cannot be taken as such. It must be treated as a parody.

I remember you once mentioned that you thought the infamous June 1978 meat grinder cover was parody; that you were putting down the idea of women being meat in a meat grinder.

It was a satirical-spoof parody, not done in the best taste, but that’s what it represented as far as I was concerned. I think as a heterosexual male about women. I love women. I adore them. I worship them. They’re my whole life. If there’s anything that brightens up my day, it’s a beautiful woman.

Do you think you empower women by the way they are depicted in HUSTLER?

As long as there’s a woman covered up, a man’s going to want to see her in her birthday suit. That is human nature. That is the attraction. In all of my years of being in business and all the thousands of models that I’ve interviewed, I’ve never had one model ever say to the press or to me personally or to anyone that she felt like she had been coerced or intimidated to be in the magazine. It was always something that she did voluntarily. It was always because they thought they were young, they had great bodies, and they would like to preserve it for posterity’s sake because they realized they would only be young once. That is the general theme of every young woman that’s ever posed for HUSTLER over the years. I know that people, feminists like Gloria Steinem, feel that these women are being exploited. Gloria’s a lot like Reverend Falwell, just selling her take.

One of the arguments about Playboy and magazines like that is they held up an idea of a woman that couldn’t really exist in life—the ultimate objectification. It makes the husband or the boyfriend disappointed with what he has. I remember you telling me that in HUSTLER you aim for the woman-next- door, the woman you would actually see in real life.

She could be short, skinny, whatever. Redheads, blondes, brunettes.

And you were against cosmetic surgery.

Yes, and I still am. But we’ve got a huge problem today. We like to publish women in their natural state, which means their pubes are intact, but 90% of girls that show up today have no pubic hair, and over half of them have had breast implants. So we are really faced with a crisis situation. Either we take what we can get or try to go with something that is not up to our standard.

People used to get arrested for what you do, even just saying or printing the word fuck. Now it’s all out of the bag. Have we gained some freedom? Is this a better way to live? Let it all hang out?

There’s nothing said or written that has not been said or written before. It’s just rearranged. I don’t think it’s that much of a different world. I think there were some true pioneers. It wasn’t Hugh Hefner or Larry Flynt. It was Lenny Bruce. I remember Lenny Bruce saying, “They say that kids are out to repeat what they see imitated, and in that case I’d rather my kids see a porn movie than King of Kings because I don’t want them to kill Christ when he comes back.”

Lenny was scary to the establishment because he was saying things that made the establishment cringe. No one should even utter these words! But we have a First Amendment that guarantees us the right to express ourselves and not have to worry about what kind of words we’re using.

In the case of Falwell and the Moral Majority, he seemed to be riding a wave that was going to get bigger and bigger and sweep aside a lot of progress. Now, after this last election, you even have a Christian conservative like Ralph Reed saying, “We don’t have the people anymore, and we particularly don’t have the young people.” They’re not buying into that Puritanism. They’re not buying into what the Moral Majority wants. So you won at the end of the day. Did Falwell see that coming?

I think that there was one side of him that believed he was going to win; at least he wanted to win. And until the decision was rendered, I thought he was going to. When I sat in that gallery at the Supreme Court and looked over there at him and his family, it looked like a Norman Rockwell painting. The pornographer versus the preacher. I’m dead, and then it wound up being a unanimous decision. In the whole history of our nation there have only been a handful of unanimous decisions to come out of the Supreme Court, and mine was one of them.

After the case was over, I was sitting in my office, and my secretary called me and said, “There’s a Reverend Jerry Falwell in the lobby.” I said, “Send him in.” He comes walking through my office door, and he’s got both hands in the air, and he says, “I surrender.” He comes in and sits down and says, “Look, I know when I’m beaten.” I think he knew he was beaten all along, but he milked it for all he could get.

Did you get the feeling that Falwell was in it as an act, that this was a racket? Or was he a true believer?

I think Reverend Falwell knew what he was selling just like I knew what I was selling. I was selling porn; he was selling religion.

Let me ask you about exposing politicians. At first I thought this was a little weird and contradictory. Here is a guy who wants us to be sexually freer, and yet he’s going after people because they’ve got a mistress. Did you feel that there was something contradictory about your big campaign?

Not at all. I have one vote, only one. But by outing corrupt politicians, I can get rid of some people who shouldn’t be there—not because I’m exposing their sex life but because I’m exposing their hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is the biggest enemy that democracy has. It doesn’t have anything to do with sex or money; it’s the hypocrisy involved.

Take somebody like Bob Livingston. He’s trying to impeach Bill Clinton, and he’s talking about how solid his marriage is, saying he had never strayed from his marriage, never had an affair with a government employee or an intern or a lobbyist. Then we find out he’s doing a lobbyist, a federal judge and an intern in his own office. That guy just reeked of hypocrisy. He was ripe to be exposed.

Like when we exposed Larry Craig, the congressman from Idaho who was doing the footsies in the men’s-room stall. He’d voted against every piece of gay-rights legislation in the last 20 years and was gay himself. He should have been exposed.

What if they’re public citizens, and they’re not being hypocritical?

You have some liberals in both the House and the Senate who don’t profess to be holier-than- thou. They’re not trying to conduct their personal lives differently than the way they conduct their public life. We leave those people alone. I’ve had very compromising information and photographs of some very famous and influential people in this country, and I stopped it from being published because they were private citizens. I could have made a lot of money by publishing the material, but I didn’t do it.

HUSTLER is a pretty tawdry publication. But when people picked it up during the last election, they saw—right next to the smut—statements by Larry Flynt about why we need to vote for Obama, why we need to tax rich people like yourself, why we need to care about people who don’t have so much.

I don’t know how people who are successful can feel that they do not have an obligation to help people who have been less fortunate, especially the young and the elderly or the handicapped. I give a lot of money to charity every year. I don’t do it because it makes me feel better. I do it because I know there’s a need for it. Republicans are mean-spirited. I don’t think they give a damn. At their core they’re racist, and they’re on their way to becoming a minority party because they have no compassion for their fellow people. A nation cannot survive with a bunch of selfish rich people.

What impresses me is that, somehow out of all of this madness, you ended up being a pretty classy guy. The last thing anybody would have expected is that you, smut peddler Larry Flynt, would still be here at 70 years old a respected member of the community, the one who protected our freedoms.

Somebody said to me once, “My problem with you is that you’re offensive.” I said, “Well, freedom of speech is only important if it’s offensive. If you’re not going to offend anybody, you don’t need protection of the First Amendment.”

When they were interviewing me in front of the Supreme Court, I said, “If the First Amendment will protect a scumbag like me, it’ll protect everybody.”

If you are the least bit squeamish, don’t read “Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition,” an Open Society Justice Initiative report published by the Open Society Foundations. The OSF was established by philanthropist George Soros, one of the handful of the super rich still guided by a moral compass. Soros was a Hungarian Jewish teenager when Nazi Germany occupied his homeland and is therefore aware of the depravity which can emanate from a society that lays claim to being a high point of human civilization.

After all, the Germans who voted Hitler into power in 1933 were among the world’s most well-educated people, as well as largely being followers of Christian scripture. That so many of them came to equate barbarism with patriotism is a warning sign to those Americans who find assurance in our “values” cloaking our nation’s collective descent into the darker realms. It is an arrogance starkly challenged by the systematic savagery practiced by a widespread network of agents of our government, ostensibly in response to the attacks of 9/11.

But the purpose of the OSF report is not to shock with examples of the most extreme cases from the sinister world of torture into which America sank. It methodically defines the norm in a vast terror operation that the United States has sponsored around the globe.

In this detailed report documenting the U.S. policy of outsourcing interrogation to 54 nations, chosen for their unfettered embrace of torture techniques, you will discover the depths of evil to which the most extreme totalitarian societies might aspire. Indeed, that was the point of the CIA’s “extraordinary-rendition” program initiated after 9/11, capturing suspected terrorists and turning them over to the world’s most brutal torturers without any presumption of innocence and regard for due process.

The techniques go far beyond the beatings and waterboarding celebrated in Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty. Apparently, America’s homegrown torturers didn’t have the proper skill-set to slit penises and dismember body parts. Or perhaps the CIA agents whom Bigelow honors did engage in such sadistic practices, and her script advisers at CIA headquarters objected to revealing the grisly details. In any case, as the Open Society Foundations report proves, CIA officials were often present and certainly had ultimate supervisory power over the torture chambers financed by the world’s most overly hyped democracy.

For our government, condoning barbarism is easily rationalized: We were attacked and have the right to utilize the most heinous of means to attain the end of ensuring our safety. Of course, we know from the testimony of key members of the Senate Intelligence Committee that Bigelow’s film mistakenly implies that torture was pivotal in hunting down Osama bin Laden.

As the OSF report makes clear, information obtained by torture is most often unreliable. Words are spewed in a desperate effort to stop the infliction of pain. One glaring example cited is the tortured detainee who indicated that al-Qaeda operatives had been trained in biological and chemical weapons by the government of Saddam Hussein. The George W. Bush regime used that fabrication to justify the invasion of Iraq even though it was well known that Hussein was a sworn enemy of Bin Laden’s organization.

But what if barbaric techniques occasionally provide accurate information, as torturers have claimed in their defense down through history? It was routine for Europe’s royal despots to justify employing brutal methods at the time our great experiment in republican governance was taking shape. Unlike King George III and other unscrupulous monarchs, our Founding Fathers held basic human rights to be inalienable and accordingly enshrined the right of due process into our Constitution.

Moreover, it is a right that must also be extended to our presumed adversaries. Yet— and this high crime is even more vicious than the assault on the bodies and minds of so many prisoners—the right of the accused to the presumption of innocence until proven guilty in a fair court of law has been obliterated by the leaders of our nation on an unprecedented international scale. Check the OSF report for the details of our depravity and then demand of our leaders that such horrid acts never again be conducted in our name.
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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. He is now editor of TruthDig.com. His latest book is The Great American Stick-Up: Greedy Bankers and the Politicians Who Love Them.

Let me tell you how screwed we are. Better yet, let me once again quote my favorite economist, the late Beatle John Lennon. I’ve frequently cited the words he sang in “Working Class Hero” because they make the most salient point concerning our devastated economy: “A working class hero is something to be/Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV/And you think you’re so clever and classless and free/But you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see.”

He’s singing about you white guys, the peasants who voted for the Republicans in such sufficient numbers that they kept control of the House of Representatives, preventing the Democrats from legislating any but the slight- est increase in a taxation system designed to make the rich richer. The most that President Obama could get passed, even after winning a second term, was an insignificant tax increase on the superrich families earning more than $450,000 a year. That and a lousy 5% increase on the capital-gains profits from gambits that allowed GOP candidate Mitt Romney to pay 14% on his many millions in income while lesser souls were paying upwards of 35% on their hard-earned labor in the real world.

The richest of the rich, like the Koch brothers, bought your vote with hysterical appeals to your most primitive and therefore distorted instinct of self-preservation based on a false notion of one’s own class position. Most white guys who vote Republican are big losers in today’s economy, but they still think of themselves as middle-class winners. They make up a majority of those with underwater mortgages and foreclosed homes, and they are denied once widely available decent-paying jobs with medical coverage. But they still believe that when Uncle Sam invades some country with oil, they will benefit. They won’t.

Want proof? Just Google the “Equity Strategy” reports that Citigroup sent to its richest clients before the great recession hit. Dated October 16, 2005, the first report heralded the new day of the “Plutonomy” that in the United States has replaced the traditional capitalist-based democracy. The USA, the United Kingdom and Canada are now clearly defined as a new form of capitalist political rule—by the rich and for the rich. As the Citigroup report proudly claimed, “the world is dividing into two blocs—the plutonomies, where economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few, and the rest.”

The report went on to state: “What are the common drivers of Plutonomy? Disruptive technology-driven productivity gains, creative financial innovation, capitalist-friendly cooperative governments….”

That was written two years before the crash of 2007 ushered in the great recession that wiped out much of the wealth of the middle class. Citigroup was a big player in the financial scams that led to the housing bubble triggering the economic crisis that still haunts us. The Citigroup reports predicted for their most privileged clients exactly what was in store: “We project that the plutonomies…will likely see even more income inequality, disproportionately feeding off a further rise in the profit share in their economies….”

They nailed it. In a March 5, 2006, report titled “Revisiting Plutonomy: The Rich Getting Richer,” Citigroup pronounced: “We think the rich are likely to get even wealthier in the coming years. … Asset booms, a rising profit share and favorable treatment by market-friendly governments have allowed the rich to prosper and become a greater share of the economy in the plutonomy countries.”

Then the crash hit, enabled by the radical deregulation of Wall Street by the market-friendly U.S. government. While the average homeowner was smashed, that same U.S. government bailed out Citigroup, which packaged its toxic mortgage-based securities. The result has been an increase in the wealth of the superrich at the expense of just about everyone else.

In 2011 the net worth of the Forbes 400 increased by $200 billion and now totals over $1.5 trillion. The wealth of the richest 1% of Americans is now equal to the total wealth accumulated over a lifetime by the bottom 90%. It is time to deep-six the word democracy and acknowledge that a plutonomy is what we have become.

What is the crime for which Bradley Manning faces life in prison after being tortured by his own government for two years? The Army private first class is charged with having “aided the enemy” in violation of the Espionage Act. But who is the “enemy” he aided, other than his fellow Americans, who were alerted to the lies of their government thanks to his heroic actions?

Manning’s attorney, David E. Coombs, called the charge “a scary proposition.” He warned that it could be leveled against any whistleblower exposing government wrongdoing. “Right there, you will silence a lot of critics of our government, and that’s what makes our government great—that we foster criticism and through it make changes. This is a very serious charge, not just for my client, but for all of us in America.”

In a rare public statement, Coombs condemned how Manning was treated during his nine months in solitary confinement at the Marine Corps Brig in Quantico, Virginia. “Brad’s treatment at Quantico will forever be etched into our nation’s history as a disgraceful moment in time,” Coombs declared, noting that Manning had been “shackled during limited exercise periods and was at times not allowed his clothing and glasses.” He emphasized, “Not only was it stupid and counterproductive; it was criminal.”

It is the U.S. government that acted criminally in punishing someone who sought to do his duty by exposing government wrongdoing. The charges against Manning stem from his allegedly passing a video and a trove of classified documents to the website WikiLeaks, which not only posted the material but also shared it with the New York Times and two of Europe’s most prestigious newspapers. All of the published reports—the so-called Afghan War Diary and Iraq War logs—contained information that the editors correctly thought the public had a need and right to know.

In performing this public service, the New York Times was protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Part of the Bill of Rights, it stipulates that Congress shall pass no law abridging freedom of the press or free speech, both of which were almost indistinguishable when the Constitution was adopted in 1787.

The “press” that the Founding Fathers referred to was not the huge corporate conglomerates of today but rather anyone who had the paper, ink and glue to post a leaflet on a wall. The Declaration of Independence was just such a broadsheet. It would seem a website like WikiLeaks would be covered by the same safeguards as those pre-Internet leaflets under both free-press and free-speech grounds.

So how can it be that for exercising his fundamental rights, Manning has been imprisoned under harsh conditions designed to psychologically break him? The quick-and-dirty answer is that he is an active-duty soldier and that the military’s rigorous rules trump all others. Nonsense.

Following World War II, the U.S. government definitively demolished that argument when it conducted the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal. It held individual Germans responsible for their atrocious deeds irrespective of the defendants’ claims that they were merely “following orders.”

During his deployment to Iraq, Manning—an Army intelligence analyst—came across evidence of a major U.S. war crime: a video showing his fellow soldiers firing cannons from an attack helicopter, killing a group of Iraqi civilians along with two Iraqi journalists working for Reuters. That was a blatant act of terrorism that our government claims to oppose.

Manning should have been honored for exposing criminal behavior that violated international laws originally promulgated by the United States. The real “crime” that has roused the ire of his superiors—straight up the chain of command to President Barack Obama—has been that Manning revealed the truth to WikiLeaks and the New York Times, as well as Britain’s The Guardian and Germany’s Der Spiegel.

The soldier should have been lauded for leaking State Department and military secrets, not stripped of his right to due process. Accused by his own government of aiding the enemy, he now faces life in prison. The reasoning must be that the free press and the democracy dependent upon it have become the “enemy” that Bradley Manning aided.

re old white men genuinely nuts, or are they just throwing a collective tantrum? What is it about the Barack Obama Presidency that pushes so many of them over the edge? In this past election, white codgers— joined by some younger men who are dumb beyond their years—were exposed as the only major demographic group in the nation that felt deeply threatened by a well-spoken, moderate- to-a-fault, mixed-race President who was clearly brainier, more informed and far better intentioned than his intellectually unhinged and morally adrift Republican opponent.

Were he white, Obama would have been embraced as the dream candidate of the moderates who used to make up the base of the Republican Party from Abraham Lincoln through Dwight D. Eisenhower. That base consisted of largely modest and tolerant folks who supported racial integration even in the Deep South, where white Republicans stood for civil rights and opposed the racist Dixiecrats who, back then, controlled the Southern states’ Democratic Party. When Lincoln freed the slaves and Eisenhower sent federal troops to the South to complete the job of guaranteeing equal rights for all Americans, Republicans from coast to coast rallied in support.

But Eisenhower’s Vice President, Richard Nixon, was already hatching a plan to betray the proud Republican record of commitment to full racial equality. What came to be known as Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” involved an about-face on civil rights.

When Lyndon B. Johnson—a Democrat who had represented Texas in the U.S. Senate—became President, he betrayed the Dixiecrats by getting the Voting Rights Act passed. Suddenly, this was not your granddaddy’s South anymore because the descendants of former slaves finally were fully emancipated with a federally guaranteed right to vote. When LBJ signed the historic legislation in 1965, he threw the switch that turned the Deep South from blue to red, thus ensuring that whites below the Mason-Dixon Line would become the last bastion of racist idiocy.

Nixon jumped on that opportunity to champion reactionary madness when he successfully ran for President in 1968. He blatantly appealed to the evil that lurked in the white Southern soul as evidence of a “normal” America as opposed to the Democratic Party’s subversive “hippies” who had rallied around Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and were also labeled as unpatriotic because they opposed the stupidity represented by the Vietnam War.

Nixon was shrewd enough to know that he couldn’t campaign in the South as an avowed racist without alienating the bulk of the nation’s Republican and independent voters beyond the old Confederacy. So he used code language by identifying with the South’s Christian Right.

The Southern Baptist church was a product of the moral deformity of slavery and segregation, and Nixon seized upon the white Baptists’ alienation from the post-Dixiecrats Democratic Party. The result of that unholy alliance was a revamped and indelibly racist Southern GOP, whose central goal was to prevent recently enfranchised black voters from hooking up with moderate whites to form a truly modern New South.

Instead, thanks to the sly endorsement of religious bigotry, the South became the haven of intolerance. But now the cracks are showing. The economy and demographics of the South have profoundly changed. In this past Presidential election, we witnessed a rise in reason when Florida went for Obama, who garnered considerable support from Latinos as well as younger white and female voters.

The times are a-changing, and given the shifting sands of population demographics, even older white males will be forced to become more rational. They cannot secede from the Union, not only because no other nation wants them—they have enough geezers of their own—but because being old means you are expecting those younger folks to carry the load while you struggle to stay alive on government subsidies of an increasingly burdensome aging population.

Don’t get those younger-male, diverse and female voters who carried Election Day for Obama too riled up, or they may cut off your senior benefits—including the God-given right to Medicare-funded Viagra

by Robert Scheer for HUSTLER Magazine

The most sacred principle of American life, honored in our Constitution and throughout our history, is that of privacy—or as Larry Flynt puts it, “the right to be left alone.” But thanks to the information revolution, the government’s assault on privacy is now more pervasive, though largely invisible, than ever under any preexisting totalitarian government.

The tools of intrusion are so varied—beginning with Google searches and Facebook “likes” and extending to cellphone-position locators—that a full accounting of the postwiretap- era intrusion is not possible. But recent data on just one of the snooping techniques involving cellphones mocks the relatively minuscule power of any previous fascist or communist government to spy on its citizens.

Unbounded by the strict restraints that used to govern telephone wiretaps of old, today’s high-tech telecommunication companies are required by law to cooperate with all federal and state surveillance requests. We know just how pervasive that snooping through cellphone data is thanks to Representative Edward J. Markey (D-Massachusetts), co-chair of the Bipartisan Congressional Privacy Caucus, who released the government’s report to the New York Times.

“In the first public accounting of its kind,” the Times stated, “cellphone carriers reported that they responded to a startling 1.3 million demands for subscriber information last year [2011] from law-enforcement agencies seeking text messages, caller locations and other information in the course of investigations.” Because all of this surveillance has been conducted under the cloak of deepest government secrecy, there is no serious accountability as to why our right to privacy is being trampled upon so cavalierly. Indeed, as the Congressional report indicates, millions of us who are not even the target of any investigation are swept up in this surveillance. It’s more convenient for government snoops to make massive data dumps from cell towers, sweeping up all users in their wake rather than just isolating the person or persons suspected of malfeasance. Nor do the previous restraints on wiretapping that required a court order apply to these broad sweeps, which are clearly in violation of our Bill of Rights protections of individual freedom from arbitrary government intrusion.

Wiretapping of the kind you witnessed in old movies, with cops next door listening in on calls, is a thing of the past in the day of the cellphone. In 2011 that only happened 2,732 times, partially because of the inconvenience of needing a strictly governed court order and a surveillance outpost. Why worry about such legal niceties and the technical difficulty of a wiretap when law-enforcement officials can now request a data dump from a tower that happens to link the phone of a single suspect while receiving thousands of other folks’ information. All for the paltry cost of between $50 to $75 an hour they pay the obliging telecom company for the surveillance service.

That cellphone data can tell investigators everything about the life of unsuspecting and unsuspected citizens, from the food they order to the magazines and books they buy—not to mention all of their physical movements. The total totalitarian experience is now eminently affordable.

Technically cellphone carriers are required by federal law to obtain a search warrant, a subpoena or a court order, but that is easily violated in the broad scope of data dumps. In the case of the most rapidly growing intrusion into people’s personal lives, the use of GPS-generated data, there seems to be next to nothing in the way of legal restraint.

And, of course—as the George W. Bush administration established in its manic pursuit of terrorists—any claim that national security is involved gives government agencies full-throated permission to break down the walls around one’s private existence. When telecom companies were sued for cooperating on a massive level with the Bush government in wantonly reading the data of millions of Americans, Congress granted them immunity from lawsuits.

Sprint, the third-largest cellphone carrier, reported that it honors 1,500 data requests a day from federal, state and local police agencies. And since Sprint—like its counterparts— is paid for those searches, company officials are hardly inclined to complain on behalf of their customers, who might not want all of their data turned over.

The leading cellphone carriers have gone along with few complaints. As an AT&T subscriber, I was not thrilled to learn that law-enforcement agencies paid “my” phone company $8.3 million in 2011 to turn over subscriber data. A few of the smaller carriers have resisted. TracFone informed Representative Markey that the company “shares your concerns regarding the unauthorized tracking of wireless phones by law enforcement with little or no judicial oversight, and I assure you that TracFone does not participate in or condone such unauthorized tracking.”

Shouldn’t we all demand our cellphone carriers to endorse that Constitutionally protected standard our government has ruthlessly chosen to shred?

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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.

REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE MITT ROMNEY CAN’T HIDE HIS MOST INSIDIOUS FLIP-FLOP

Mitt Romney is such a liar. The contradictory garbage spewing out of this hack on healthcare has set a new standard for deception even for a power-hungry politician desperate to be President. Whatever you think about healthcare policy—and I for one am opposed to the stated plans of both Barack Obama and his Republican challenger because they do nothing to control costs while forcing consumers to buy coverage at inflated rates—it is Romney’s willingness to outright lie over his flip-flops on this issue that is most troubling in considering whether or not he merits being President.

Mitt thought he could get away with those lies concerning his sorry record as governor of Massachusetts because he had his staff destroy electronic messages and other key information documenting it. “When Mitt Romney left office as Massachusetts governor,” the Wall Street Journal reported, “his aides removed all e-mails from a server computer in the governor’s office, and purchased and carted off hard drives from 17 stateowned personal computers.”

But in June of this year, the newspaper obtained a treasure trove of incriminating evidence that had survived the purge. The Wall Street Journal proceeded to publish a devastating exposé based on e-mails that proved it was Mitt Romney who on the state level pioneered the identical healthcare reforms he now blasts Barack Obama for having signed into federal law. The same provision for an individual mandate requiring everyone to purchase health insurance coverage from private insurers, which is the source of controversy over what Republicans have attempted to denigrate as “socialistic Obamacare,” originated with Mitt Romney.

As the e-mails prove, it was then- Governor Romney who first championed this idea as an alternative to the public option being pushed by U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Massachusetts), which was based on an expansion of the government-sponsored Medicare program to supplement private coverage. Romney’s idea that everyone in Massachusetts be forced to purchase healthcare insurance from private insurance companies came out of the right-wing Heritage Foundation think tank as a way of killing any expansion of a public option.

The e-mails confirm that the Democrats in Massachusetts, led by Kennedy, were cool to the idea of forcing people to buy health insurance from private companies, but Romney pushed it through. Yet when President Obama abandoned the public option and modeled his national healthcare plan on the one Romney had developed for Massachusetts, Mitt denounced it as socialist.

Yes, his deceit is that blatant, as was revealed in the aforementioned Wall Street Journal exposé: “In Massachusetts, Mr. Romney didn’t include an individual mandate in his original proposal, but soon adopted the idea. The e-mails show his aides later came to champion it, even amid uncertainty from some Democrats. At the time, the mandate was a favored policy of the right, with the left instead pushing for government-run insurance programs.

“‘We must have an individual mandate for any plan to work,’ Tim Murphy, Mr. Romney’s health secretary, wrote the governor and several aides on February 16, 2006, in an e-mail analyzing the latest confidential Democratic proposal, which he wrote was ‘unclear’ about that requirement.

That Democratic proposal, obtained by the Journal, didn’t include such a mandate, and instead focused on ‘individual responsibility’ aiming to ‘encourage individuals to buy health insurance, not go uninsured.’”

There you have it. Led by Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrats favored a voluntary plan, leaving it up to the individual to make the decision. Meanwhile, the Republicans—led by Romney—wanted to use the power of the state and the threat of fines to force the individual to sign up. So it was Romney who was the socialist. The only thing he can properly accuse Obama of doing is adopting the Mitt Romney, Republican “socialist” healthcare plan and betraying the legacy of Ted Kennedy.

The requirement that all Americans be required to obtain health insurance—the so-called individual mandate—has, as a result of Mitt’s attack ads, become the defining issue of the 2012 Presidential election. Not because it is the most important substantive issue we face or that lining up behind such a mandate is the only valid choice, but rather because it leaves Mitt Romney exposed as a flagrant liar whose word can never be trusted.

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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.

TAXPAYERS END UP FOOTING THE BILL AFTER CITIGROUP’S HEAD HONCHO SELLS A PREZ ON DEREGULATING THE FINANCIAL INDUSTRY

by Robert Scheer

Some guys have all the luck, particularly when they supply the dice. Take Sanford “Sandy” Weill, the banker who did more than any of his fellow scoundrels to precipitate this country’s financial crisis, but who managed to bail out, richer than ever, before the crash.

Earlier this year, Weill made another killing by selling his Manhattan penthouse, which he reportedly purchased for $43.7 million in 2007. The listed selling price for the digs was a cool $88 million, far exceeding any residential transaction in America’s priciest real estate market. But don’t worry about Sandy not having a place to stay; after all, he still has that $35-million estate in the wine region of California and other illgotten gains.

This is the banker who hustled and bought a Republican- led Congress and Democratic President Bill Clinton back in the 1990s and in return was gifted with the reversal of Depression- era rules preventing the emergence of too-bigto- fail banks. The biggest one of all was Citigroup, which Weill created and would ultimately become the world’s largest financial conglomerate.

Weill formed what the New York Times termed a “monster bank” based on a Federal Reserve temporary exemption from existing banking law. But to remain a permanent entity, his then-fledgling bank needed the law itself changed. The obstacle to Weill’s greedy ambitions back then was the Glass-Steagall Act, which long had been a barrier between investment and commercial banks. The 1999 reversal of Glass- Steagall that Weill engineered permitted the merger of Travelers Group—a private investment firm that Weill headed—with Citibank, a commercial bank holding the federally insured savings of ordinary folk.

The Republicans had been on a tear to obliterate the sensible rules governing the financial industry ever since Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt put them into place in response to the Great Depression. FDR did so to prevent another economic calamity. For five decades, Democrats resisted the Wall Street lobbyists and their Republican lapdogs. That is, until Sandy Weill got his buddy Clinton to sign off on the Republican-sponsored legislation that upended the sensible restraints on finance capital which had worked splendidly— for consumers, if not bankers—for half a century.

The night before the announcement of the merger, as Wall Street Journal reporter Monica Langley writes in her book Tearing Down the Walls: How Sandy Weill Fought His Way to the Top of the Financial World…and Then Nearly Lost It All, a buoyant Weill suggested to John Reed, his partner in the merger, “We should call Clinton.” Having no trouble getting through to the President on a Sunday night, Weill informed him of the merger, which violated existing law. After hanging up, Weill boasted to Reed, “We just made the President of the United States an insider.”

That Hillary Clinton was gearing up for a Senate race in New York, the capital of high finance, helped make Weill’s case with the President. Also pushing the Wall Street lobbyists’ cause was Robert Rubin, Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, who had been a honcho at Goldman Sachs prior to taking the Cabinet post. The ink was barely dry on the legislation legitimizing the creation of Citigroup when Rubin went to work at Weill’s bank for $15 million a year. That lucrative career move personifies what I call the revolving platinum door between Washington, D.C., and Wall Street, and Weill was a master at spinning it.

At the signing ceremony, where Clinton presented Weill with one of the pens that fine-tuned Glass-Steagall out of existence, the President proclaimed, “Today what we are doing is modernizing the financial services industry, tearing down those antiquated laws and granting banks significant new authority.”

That “modernization” led to a housing bubble that, when punctured by reality, left 50 million Americans with their homes foreclosed or struggling to keep up with underwater mortgages. As of this writing, 46 million Americans have been reduced to poverty, and tens of millions more are part of an unemployed and underemployed labor force that may never recover.

Neither Republican George W. Bush nor Democrat Barack Obama acted to aid those beleaguered victims of Weill’s folly. But thanks to the bailout policy, the banker himself made out like a bandit. Citigroup would have gone under except for the infusion of $45 billion in direct federal aid and the government’s underwriting of $300 billion of the bank’s toxic paper. We ordinary taxpayers are left holding that debt while Sandy Weill gets to toast with the finest bubbly at his winecountry estate.

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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.

At first I thought, Why not a Mormon for President? I know it’s a weird religion, what with those kinky undergarments they wear and the bizarre mumbo jumbo about some guy who claimed he found divine wisdom on some tablets given to him by an angel and then came on like he was the next Moses.

But what’s the big deal? If you’ve ever looked closely at those other, more mainstream religions our past Presidents claimed to believe in, they’re equally absurd. That’s the whole point of religion: invoking some higher power to answer the unanswerable about the purpose of existence when we humans have reached the limits of fact and logic. So claims to divine explanation are, of course, inevitably kooky.

If it were just a matter of crashing the glass ceiling to make the point that a devout Mormon is no less qualified, by virtue of his irrational faith, to be President than is a born-again Christian or a flaming papist, I could see voting for Mitt Romney. But then, as the Republican primaries unfolded, I realized all of this religion stuff is beside the point. Romney, in his pursuit of the ill-gotten gains of enormous wealth accompanied by his unbridled lust for political power, is clearly no more concerned with the moral obligations of his religion than John F.

Kennedy was when he balled those molls supplied by his Mafia buddies. And just like Kennedy, Romney parlayed his old man’s wealth into a successful political career, all the while claiming to be just your ordinary guy working his way up the ladder of life.

The man is a fraud, a Ken doll with a recorded-message greeting instead of a brain. Nothing he says actually reflects thought but rather a sales pitch for the convenience of the moment. Here’s a guy campaigning against Obamacare, which is nothing but a copycat program of the one Romney implemented in Massachusetts when he was the state’s governor.

Not only would Romney gut the improvement in healthcare that Obama brought about, but he also wants to compound that error by undermining Medicare and Medicaid, two programs that offer at least a modicum of cost control. Instead, the candidate and his fellow Republicans would steer consumers completely to the tender mercies of for-profit insurers.

What is most outrageously hypocritical about Romney is that while he babbles on about wasteful spending, he will not close the spending spigot that started spewing red ink after budget-balancing President Bill Clinton left office. That red ink is the direct result of the wild increase in military spending after 9/11 which George W. Bush refused to pay for by increasing taxes on the rich and instead cut them sharply. That and bailing out the banks—which caused the financial crisis—are the main sources of the run-up of the national debt.

Romney wants to do more of the same. He says we need to spend even more money on the military because the Communist government in China is a threat. What a joke! Bain Capital, the company that Romney cofounded, has been supplying those red tyrants with surveillance equipment to better monitor their citizenry.

The dire state of the U.S. economy is the result of two basic scams pulled off by the top multinational corporations, and Romney is complicit in both. The shortterm crisis was kicked off by the radical deregulation of the financial industry that allowed the formerly privately held investment banking partnerships screwing around with their own money to merge with the commercial banks that were holding the deposits of ordinary folks. It was a prescription for greed run wild until the phony securities packages exploded and the taxpayers were left holding the bag, while lots of those ordinary folks lost everything. Not only did Romney enthusiastically support that deregulation scam, but now—even after it hit the fan—he still prattles on about how we have too many regulations.

The other issue concerns the shipping of those once good-paying American jobs abroad. Not only has Romney invested in companies that do just that, but his Presidential campaign platform calls for rewarding those companies for abandoning America by ending all taxes on foreign profits.

Face it, Mitt Romney is about nothing but power and money, and the vulture-capital hedge fund named Bain Capital that enriched him is a classic tale of ripping apart vulnerable businesses and their loyal employees to make a big buck on the margin of the ensuing grief. You don’t want this guy to be the CEO of your entire country.

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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.

UNRESTRICTED CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS HAVE MADE NATIONAL ELECTIONS A SHAM.

by Robert Scheer

All of my life, I have been hearing how it is my patriotic duty to vote in national elections, and I have dutifully gone along. Not just with voting but also devoting a good chunk of my professional career to interviewing the candidates and writing for major news organizations about their prospects for winning and qualifications for governing, as if those elections really mattered. Suddenly, I no longer feel like going along with what has become an all-too-obvious fraud.

The power of the superrich to buy our elections with their tens of millions in campaign contributions has become so blatant that it makes a mockery of the representative democracy about which we used to be able to proudly boast. For that fatal subversion of the system enshrined in our Constitution, you can thank a Republican packed Supreme Court that, with its Citizens United and other infamous decisions, has destroyed any prospect for an honest expression of the popular will.

As a result, the 2012 Presidential election will hinge on which party’s Super PACs get the most generous bribes from billionaires. The Republicans, long favored by the fat cats, are the main beneficiaries of the new laws. The GOP’s drawn-out primary campaign ended up having nothing to do with the plausibility of the political positions advanced by the various candidates and everything to do with which candidate’s Super PAC could draw the biggest checks from the superrich.

Take Newt Gingrich. Without the pro- Gingrich Super PAC stoked with two “gifts” totaling $21 million from billionaire Las Vegas casino and hotel magnate Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Gingrich would not have existed as a credible candidate. The Adelsons are big supporters of Israel, and soon after that contribution, Gingrich said that as President he would support an Israeli strike on Iran even if it involved the use of nuclear weapons. But the foreign-policy fire sale is chicken feed compared to the domestic tax breaks and hobbling of environmental and banking regulations that most of the superrich donors are after.

Gingrich received another $1 million from Harold Simmons, the billionaire corporate raider who hedged his bet by also giving $7 million to another Super PAC called American Crossroads run by GOP kingmaker Karl Rove. Simmons owns industrial companies accused in the past of lead contamination and uranium emissions. But he makes money both ways, having been blessed by his friends in the government with mega-contracts to clean up hazardous waste sites, including waste created by his own companies.

Simmons claims to be a small-government conservative, but what he really wants is government to work for his interests at the expense of the folks who can’t pony up the big bucks. Toward that end, he had already given $14 million to various Republican Super PACs even before March of this election year.

The biggest beneficiary from the superrich has been Mitt Romney, and top executives from Bain Capital—the hedge fund he once ran—have been generous in support. Julian H. Robertson Jr., considered by the New York Times to be “one of the godfathers of the hedge fund industry,” is another megabucks backer of the pro-Romney Super PAC.

Hedge funds have been at the center of the rot of our economy; they are unregulated and, as Romney’s own tax returns demonstrate, pay a lower percentage in taxes than many ordinary income earners. No matter who wins on the Republican side, don’t expect any serious regulation of hedge fund greed or other accountability.

But the picture on the Democratic Obama side may turn out to be just as corrupt. It wasn’t until February 2012 that the President decided to accept Super PAC funding, previously calling it an assault on democracy. In his State of the Union speech two years ago, Obama called out the Supreme Court justices sitting before him over their decision to free special interests from campaign spending limits. “I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests,” Obama declared then. “They should be decided by the American people.”

But as the GOP billionaires’ fund-raising steamroller threatened to flatten his 2012 reelection prospects, Obama turned the other cheek. He turned to the Wall Street crowd and asked them to hedge their political bets by backing him and not just his Republican opponents.

That is a deal Wall Street will accept because it means the fix is in. Without limits on how much the superrich can spend, they can buy both parties and remove any risk that their unbridled appetite for greed will ever be checked.

Hopefully I will be proven wrong, and an irate public—outraged by this unprecedented excess of political corruption—will rise up and find the will to throw the money changers out of their temples. But don’t count on it. These days, because of the treachery of the GOP-appointed Supreme Court, the charade of what passes for our democracy is reduced to one dollar, one vote.

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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.