A FRONTLINE ACTIVIST AND AUTHOR EXPLAINS WHY WE’RE NOW PAYING THE PRICE FOR AN OVERRELIANCE ON FOSSIL FUELS AND EASILY OBTAINABLE CREDIT—BUT THERE IS HOPE FOR THE FUTURE.

Richard Heinberg Interviewed by Mark Johnson

Gasoline prices are spiraling, nations are fighting over oil, economies are collapsing and protesters are taking to the street in cities around the world. Coincidence? Not on your life.

In his new book The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality, Richard Heinberg connects the dots, revealing what the smart money already knows: You can’t have unlimited growth without cheap energy and easy credit. And both of those are drying up. Prepare to live differently.

Heinberg—an energy expert and educator who has written ten books—leads an ongoing campaign to transition the U.S. economy away from fossil fuels. He is also Senior Fellow-in-Residence at the Post Carbon Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to building sustainable communities.

HUSTLER: Is the current economic recovery real?

RICHARD HEINBERG: We have managed to produce a technical recovery over the past couple of years through enormous amounts of government intervention. We’ve bought ourselves some time, but it came with a big price tag—several trillion dollars if you total it all up in stimulus spending and bailouts for the banks.

The problem is it’s all temporary. It wasn’t an ordinary recession, and this isn’t a standard recovery.We’re not shifting back into a normal growth mode where we can expect declining unemployment, increased productivity, higher profits and increased return on investments. We are in the early stages of a much longer-term economic shift that is going to look like the Great Depression, only worse and longer-lasting.

Twenty-twelve could be a key year. In 2008, the mother of all debt bubbles burst. That crisis was papered over with bailouts that enabled the banks to hide trillions in toxic assets. It’s only a matter of time before those toxic assets get to market. When that happens, much of the financial industry will be revealed to be insolvent.

The Europeans are also going to extraordinary lengths to contain their debt crisis, but there’s not much they can do. When the European bubble bursts, it’s going to infect us. U.S. banks own European bonds and have interlocking investments with European banks. There’s no way you can keep that sort of thing contained.

The global economy is imploding, and we’re running out of oil at the same time. What’s the connection?

Cheap energy fed economic growth during the 20th century, and the era of cheap energy is coming to an end. There are all kinds of unconventional fossil fuels out there being touted as the next great energy source, but all of them are very lowgrade substitutes. They have a much lower energy return on the energy we invest getting them out of the ground and processing them.

The entire economy depends on energy. If oil becomes too expensive or the oil flow is shut off, the economy goes into a tailspin. We’ve seen this repeatedly over the past several decades. In 2008, we saw the oil price spike up to almost $150 a barrel, and almost immediately the global economy crashed. The housing bubble burst at the same time. Where did it start? In suburban areas where people were spending a large portion of their paycheck to fill up the tank in their SUV.

By September 2008, we were seeing the collapse of Lehman Bros. and the near-collapse of the entire Wall Street banking industry. As energy gets costlier and more scarce, the entire economy has to contract and adapt in response. Wall Street has its way of making the problem worse by spinning out debt on the basis of expectation of future profits. Even if we didn’t have the problem of peak oil, we would be facing a financial crisis as a result of overreliance on debt and unrealistic growth. But combine those two things—limits to cheap energy and limits to debt—and you have a historic challenge to civilization itself. We’re looking at a whole generation of social, economic and political chaos.

Go ahead and lay the blame. Whose fault is it?

It’s everybody’s fault in that we all got hooked on economic growth and cheap energy. We’ve all participated in the consumer bonanza. But some of us have profited from this situation more than others.

The government commission that was appointed to analyze the financial crash of 2008 came to the conclusion that there was criminal behavior on the part of executives at several institutions, including Goldman Sachs. So far no one has been prosecuted. Clearly that is a political failure. People should be in prison as a result of what was done.

Every politician wants to promise more economic growth. Can you imagine being a politician—either Democrat or Republican— and having to stand up before your constituents and say, “Well, this is it folks. We’re going to have to tighten our belts and do with less because we’ve reached the end of economic growth”? The electorate is going to vote for someone who promises more, cheaper and faster even if it can’t be delivered. All these bailouts are aimed at salvaging economic growth.

Is it a losing game?

It’s inevitable that we will get rid of the growth ideology, not because we suddenly all wise up, but just because it becomes impossible to maintain growth. The growth we’re hooked on is not something that’s been going on for centuries or millennia. It’s only been happening for a few decades. The normal condition is very slow growth, stasis or occasional contraction.

We’ve gotten to a point in history where economic growth as we’ve known it is probably finished. We should have known this point would arrive because you can’t grow anything forever on a finite planet. In fact, we were warned back in the early 1970s by a best-selling report called The Limits to Growth, which told us that growth would come to an end sometime in the early part of the 21st century.

After that report, it ought to have been clear to policymakers that nations should be making plans for an eventual end to economic growth. But as far as I can tell, no such Plan B exists. That is a catastrophic failure on the part of our political system. Since about 1980, most of America’s economic growth has been based on increasing debt. Debt has grown faster than gross domestic product in almost every year. Now we’ve reached the limits to what we can do not only with cheap energy but also with debt. At this point the only thing we can do is hunker down, get back to basics and learn how to live in an economy that’s not growing.

What does that mean on the individual level?

The first thing to do is get out of debt. Debt becomes more and more of a trap in this kind of a situation. If you’re going into debt, you’re assuming your economic circumstances are going to be better a few years down the line. That’s an unrealistic assumption at this point in time for almost anyone to make. This is a good time to be paying off debts, reducing consumption and learning how to be more self-sufficient.

Advertising has deliberately stoked human wants and desires in order to create opportunity for economic growth. We have to find ways of satisfying our innate desire for novelty that don’t express themselves through taking the credit card to the mall and maxing it out. Learning to satisfy those urges by doing things that actually improve our survival prospects. Learning how to grow food and preserve food, getting chickens for the backyard and learning how to take care of them are activities that are actually very pleasurable and can be quite absorbing. But they actually improve our survival prospects rather than diminish them, which is what happens when we go shopping.

The challenge that’s facing us is one that is best faced in a cooperative and collective way. The tendency is to go out and become a survivalist and stockpile ammunition and gold, but I don’t think that’s going to get anyone very far under the conditions that are developing. The best we can do is try to work together within our communities to build trust because trust is going to be our most important currency. That will mean sharing more, volunteering more, figuring out what are the needs within our communities and how we can work together to fill those needs. These are the kinds of things that people do in hard times. If you look back at how people survived the Great Depression, for example, they did exactly these kinds of things. It’s human instinct to pull back and regroup.

What would a post-growth economy look like?

It looks a lot like an ecosystem. In an ecosystem, the total amount of energy and materials flowing through is pretty much the same from year to year, and yet an ecosystem is a dynamic thing. Some species are expanding in numbers, others are declining, and there’s general competition for the available energy and nutrients.

A post-growth economy is going to be dynamic. What makes it different from our current economy is that there will be no realistic expectation of living off of returns on investments. In a growing economy, credit and debt become central features, and a large class of people is able to live off investments and unearned income. In a nongrowing economy, everybody’s going to have to pull his own weight.

Corporations were a signal feature of the growth era of economic history. I’m not sure that they’re very well adapted to the post-growth era. I foresee cooperatives and guilds and individual producers competing and cooperating in various ways to make the economy go. A nongrowing economy looks and feels much healthier because everyone is playing by the same rules.

What are the first things you would do to fix the current economic system?

The first would be to get rid of gross domestic product as a measure and target for economic performance. We have to begin to see quality of life as our main goal. The second would be to provide the basics for everyone. I’m talking about food, shelter, basic medical care, education, family planning. Having access to those basics will give us a platform of social stability to enable us to deal with the whole range of challenges coming at us.

A lot of people will read this and think, This guy is a socialist.

Socialism was a utopian program. I’m talking about the needed immediate response to an almost-wartime situation. In times of war, governments resort to extraordinary economic measures—like rationing fuel and food—to make sure that there’s a platform of social stability to support the extraordinary effort that the entire society is undertaking.

We have to seriously begin to deal with the limits of the natural world: limited oil, topsoil and fresh water. We have to undertake a fundamental reorganization of our economy and patterns of consumption so that we live within those limits. That means reforming our transport system, our food system and just about everything else.

It may be possible to persuade at least local policymakers that these kinds of efforts are in everyone’s best interests, but it is going to be a battle for economic space. I think those of us who understand what’s at stake are going to have to roll up our shirtsleeves and get into that fight. I don’t see any other way around it.

Is the Occupy movement a step in the right direction?

One of my concerns with the Occupy movement has been that it is almost inevitably focused around questions of distribution of wealth. That’s perfectly legitimate, but that’s not the essence of the crisis that we’re facing. We’re facing the end of an entire economic paradigm, and coming to terms with that is really going to require a change—not just in Washington, D.C., but in every household around the country.

I think we’ve only seen the beginning of the Occupy movement. I would call it a global end-ofgrowth uprising because the Occupy movement is just our domestic version of what’s been going on in many countries around the world.

We’ve created a situation of structural corruption. We’ve removed all sorts of financial regulations. We’ve made it easier for corporations to contribute to political campaigns, and the result is now all three branches of government are complicit in this structural corruption, so there’s no way to alter that situation from within the system. You can’t just vote for the other political party because, in fact, both [major] political parties are now owned by Wall Street. The only way out is a general mass protest, such as the Occupy movement.

As long as economies are growing, people are willing to put up with a lot of political corruption and dysfunction. But once the economy stops growing and people are hurting in their daily lives, they’re willing to put up with a lot less. So if our economy is about to go back into crisis mode, we’re likely to see much more in the way of social unrest. More people will be in the streets with stronger demands. Just as the protesters in other countries have overthrown governments, the same thing will happen in this country.

Governments can only maintain power with the consent of the people. Once that consent is withdrawn, all bets are off.

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For more information, go to PostCarbon.org and EnergyBulletin.net. The End of Growth can be purchased at RichardHeinberg.com.

THE AUTHOR OF THE RIPPLE EFFECT DELIVERS A GRIM WARNING ABOUT THE WORLD’S PRECIOUS RESOURCE

Alex Prud’homme interviewed by Maeve Vanessa Scanlon

At a time when we are concerned about the diminishing reserves of petroleum and other fossil fuels, Alex Prud’homme’s book The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Fresh Water in the Twenty-First Century sheds light on a natural resource that is becoming equally as scarce. In the following exclusive interview, Prud’homme discusses the depletion of our water supply, the potential for worldwide “water wars” and how we can all reduce our own ripple effect.

HUSTLER: First and foremost, what is the “ripple effect”?

ALEX PRUD’HOMME: This is essentially a series of consequences that impact water supply in ways most of us don’t understand. Sometimes those ripples are unintentional effects. Even the simplest things like washing your hands, watering your lawn or powering up your computer can have great ramifications that we’re not aware of. If you wash your hands with antibacterial soap, a chemical in there can survive the treatment process and get into waterways and can negatively impact fish. Same with herbicides that we use on our lawns to get rid of dandelions. There’s a substance [in herbicides] that inhibits the fishes’ ability to ward off disease. It may even be causing “intersex,” meaning that male bass fish are developing eggs through their testes.

That’s science fiction stuff.

It’s really spooky. I was down in Chesapeake Bay, near Washington, D.C., studying this with scientists. It’s really troubling because it turns out that the endocrine system in fish is very similar to that in humans.

Humans can be affected by these substances in the same way as fish?

Scientists are very concerned. There’s the potential that it could be turning humans into intersexes at some point in the future. That’s one set of ripple effects [just from] washing our hands or spraying our lawns to keep the weeds away.

[Editor’s Note: Pharmaceutical companies, hospitals and consumers have legally released into this country’s drinking water more than 271 million pounds of drugs and chemicals, including lithium, nitroglycerin, copper, antibiotics, anticonvulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones. At least 51 million Americans are drinking pharmaceutical- tainted water, and the federal government has chosen to turn a blind eye to this.]

You claim that using electrical power, like turning on a computer, can have a similar ripple effect.

That confuses a lot of people. When you leave a light on, you’re using up a lot of energy. Whether it’s nuclear or ethanol or solar or coal or gas, all of those power sources require lots of water. Every energy source has to run on industrial works or giant cooling towers or processing plants of some sort. Not only do they use lots of water in these processes, but they have to dispose of their waste. Often, this seeps into the water supply. We don’t really think about the impact that getting energy to our homes has on the water supply, so we never connect those dots. But power is a huge water user.

It’s a strange dot to connect.

I started looking at this all across the country and started noticing this pattern. There are so many pressures on our limited water supplies—population, climate change, shifting diets, shifting demographics, all these new ways of using water—that we can no longer afford the luxury of being ignorant. We can no longer stick our heads in the sand and say, “Well, we don’t know the impacts.” Now we do know the impacts, and we have to start paying attention to this and start thinking about water in a new way and value it as a limited resource.

You point out in The Ripple Effect that this is becoming a global issue, but you did most of your research in the United States, right?

It’s already a global issue. I focused on the United States because any story that is local is global now. The pollutants that I found were basically in my backyard in Brooklyn, so I wrote about a giant oil spill that has been leaking into Brooklyn—right in the middle of New York, right in the middle of the most densely populated city in North America.

The Greenpoint oil spill has been leaking millions of gallons of crude oil from processing plants into the Newtown Creek over several decades. For over a century only very few people actually knew about it, and, until Deepwater Horizon [the BP oil rig responsible for the 2010 Gulf of Mexico disaster ], it was the largest oil spill in North America. It was even bigger than the [1989] Exxon Valdez spill, and only part of the spill has been cleaned up since the 1970s. I was shocked to find this.

Have the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Clean Water Act helped with water protection?

It’s been 40 years since the creation of the Clean Water Act, and nothing—or at least nothing more—has been done in terms of this problem. We signed a lot of these rules and regulations in the early 1970s, and—in our typical American way—we said, “Great! Okay, that’s done!”

The EPA and Clean Water Act were really good for their time, but that was almost 40 years ago. The world has changed, but [the laws] haven’t, and that’s a problem. The focus has shifted [in the government], so even the regulations that are good aren’t necessarily being enforced as they should be. This was one of the things that I found most shocking once I started looking at this situation closely. Being humans, we don’t do anything until we have hit a total crisis. But when it comes to water, if you wait for the crisis, we aren’t going to be here anymore. We can’t wait.

Why has the EPA been so ineffective?

The EPA itself has been under fire for a number of years. Its budget has been cut, and it has been highly politicized and highly criticized under everyone since Reagan—especially under the Bush Administration. In 2010, [President Barack] Obama gave the EPA its largest budget, but [recently] he’s been forced to cut it back. And now people like Michele Bachmann and Newt Gingrich are attacking the EPA, saying it’s a job-killing agency. The Republican Congress is attacking it also, trying to defund a lot of their antipollution programs and policies. As well intentioned as the Obama Administration has been on environmental issues in general, the EPA is having a tough time battling these lobbyists and Big Agriculture industries that don’t want to spend money to put in pollution controls.

In your book you mention “water wars.” What are they exactly?

Well, one thing I didn’t realize is that in the United States we don’t have just one set of water laws. The western water laws are based on the Spanish precedent, while the eastern water laws are based on the English precedent. And this has led to all sorts of interesting conflicts. Within that context, some states have their own individual laws and regulations that are unique to just that individual state.

It’s leading to conflicts between neighbors, not just countries, especially in Texas, which has faced such a serious period of drought. In that state, the rights to minerals underground are different from the rights to the land above ground. Essentially, in states like that you can stick a straw into your neighbor’s land and drain their water. It’s perfectly legal. That has led to all sorts of tensions over the years.

T. Boone Pickens is an oil and gas billionaire, and he told me when I went to visit him in Dallas that “the hydrocarbon era is over! Water is the new oil!” Here’s a guy who’s made billions on natural resources, and he understands very well how these things work. He’s focused on water right now. Water can be piped from [aquifers in North America], and then sold to the highest bidder. So he may end up making another billion on water! (Laughs.)

But these “water wars” aren’t just developing in the United States. These controversies over water are global too. Look at China, which has the worst water pollution in the world. Look at the Koreas. The North Koreans have periodically released huge amounts of [polluted] water, which has surged right down a river into South Korea, and it has killed people. Even in Darfur, water has major implications.

It’s very possible that in the coming decades we could have an actual war over water—especially as populations grow and certain parts of the world dry out.

How do we prevent such a crisis?

It begins with the simplest thing: Pay attention to water! Be aware of your own ripple effect. Don’t flush pharmaceuticals down the toilet because—guess what?!—they end up in the water supply. It is much deeper than that though. We have technologies that allow us to use water much more carefully now than before. We can conserve water and be more efficient, so we should be using these new resources and methods. There are dams, desalination methods and sewagewater recycling projects, just to name a few.

Sewage-water recycling? Are you saying we are drinking water that once contained sewage?

(Laughs.) Yes, some people are! This notion of recycling human sewage is very interesting. On the face of it, it’s kind of disgusting. The process is called “ground water replenishment system.” It’s quite amazing. It’s similar to desalination, in that it sucks all the pollutants out of the sewage. [The process] takes all the nasty stuff out of the water, then it pumps the water back into existing natural groundwater supplies. When it comes out of the [recycling] plant, it is so clean, it’s called “ultrapure” water. That means it’s actually cleaner than natural water. They have to add minerals back into it just so it can be used as drinking water.

Where is this sewage recycling being done?

The one I researched is in California. In my research I spoke to someone working at the project in Orange County, and he said to me, “We live in the middle of a desert, and our population is booming. We’re doing this not by choice but out of necessity. We have a growing population, a greater demand for water, and at the same time a rising amount of sewage. So how do we solve these problems with one sort of artful step?” The answer for them was this sewage-recycling project.

What can we do to reduce our own personal ripple?

Today there are all sorts of things like low-flush toilets and low-flow showerheads. We have side-mounted washing machines, which are much more efficient. These methods sound unsexy and basic. But when they are taken in the aggregate, they have this cumulative effect. All the little efficiencies really add up.

We have to start adjusting ourselves to this new reality, whether we like it or not. And whether we caused it or not, the fact is that conditions are changing around us. Let’s say you live in a place like Australia, where for years you have record-breaking drought followed by record-breaking floods. You feel like you’ve been biblically cursed or something. (Laughs.) It sounds funny and extreme, and it sounds like the Bible, but this is the kind of thing that is happening.

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For more about The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Fresh Water in the Twenty-First Century and its author, visit AlexPrudhomme.com

THE ONETIME CRIME FIGHTER WAGES WAR WITH BUSH AND RELIGION

Interview by Kimberly Cheng for HUSTLER Magazine

As a Los Angeles County prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi had a perfect record in murder convictions. He is best remembered for the Sharon Tate/ Charles Manson case. Of the 106 felony cases he tried, Bugliosi lost only one. Since leaving public service, he has written 11 books on crime, three of which have topped the New York Times bestsellers list. His first, Helter Skelter—which chronicled every aspect of the Manson Family’s gruesome 1969 killing spree—went on to become the biggest-selling true-crime book in publishing history. Also enjoying critical acclaim, Bugliosi is a threetime recipient of the Edgar award, the highest literary honor devoted exclusively to the crime-and-mystery genre. Outraged by the deaths of U.S. servicemen and civilians during the Iraq War, Bugliosi penned The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. In a startling departure from the subjects of law and government, Bugliosi’s latest book— Divinity of Doubt: The God Question—takes aim at organized religion, specifically the Bible. He stopped by HUSTLER recently to discuss his efforts to indict Bush and why he believes Divinity of Doubt will shake the very foundations of Christianity.

HUSTLER: What has happened since The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder was published in 2008?
VINCENT BUGLIOSI: This project about prosecuting Bush for murder is still very much alive. We have a documentary based on the book that will be going into postproduction very soon, hopefully for the big screen. But much more importantly than the book or the documentary is a 96-page report on every conceivable legal defense that George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice and [Dick] Cheney could possibly raise to a criminal indictment against them.

I don’t want this to be misinterpreted in any way, but you should not be shocked if, within a year, there’s an article saying a criminal grand jury investigation has been launched against George W. Bush. It will not be on a federal level. [President Barack] Obama has already shown he has no courage to do this. He told George Stephanopoulos, “I don’t want to look at the past. I want to look at the future.” What Obama calls looking at the past, I call justice. Every criminal prosecution, without exception, is for past criminal behavior. I mean you can’t prosecute someone for what they might do in the future.

I want to make clear: I have no firm commitment on this. I’m not saying there’s going to be a prosecution. What I’m telling you is I’m making progress, and it’s very much alive. I do not want this guy to get away with murder.

George W. Bush, in my opinion, is responsible for the murder of over 4,500 American soldiers and well over 100,000 innocent Iraqi men, women, children and babies—and he’s enjoying life to the fullest.

You said a grand jury investigation isn’t going to be conducted at the federal level. What does that mean?
Preferably it would be done on a federal level, but [U.S. Attorney General Eric] Holder and Obama are totally out of it. The 50 state attorneys general I’ve contacted aren’t willing to go ahead. If this happens, it will be at a local level. It will be from one of the district attorneys in this country.

If this is taken to a grand jury—and I would probably be the one doing that— almost assuredly after the indictment, this case would go all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. They don’t have the power in their legal arsenal to prevent the indictment, as far as I know. They would have the power to prevent the case from going forward by coming up with some cockamamie legal argument like they did in Bush v. Gore, the [Equal] Protection Clause, which was nonsense and didn’t apply. But they can’t just say we don’t like this case. So this case would be taken under submission, and when the [Supreme] Court issues an opinion—probably the longest opinion in the history of the Court—we’ll already have at least two against us: Justice Antonin Scalia and Justice Clarence Thomas. I can say publicly that they’re disgraces to the legal profession.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito most likely will be against us. It will probably come down to Justice Anthony Kennedy. I guess the nation would be divided at that point. The main thing is getting this guy [George W. Bush] into a courtroom and letting an American jury decide whether he is guilty or not of murder.

Tell us about your new book.
Divinity of Doubt: The God Question is the most explosive, revolutionary book that’s come down, within memory, in the area of God and religion. In my book, I demolish Richard Dawkins, who is the number one atheist in the world—the ayatollah of atheism, according to the L.A. Times. He wrote The God Delusion and sold a million-and-a-half copies.

He’s trying to be serious, and this is what he said: “Since the universe is so extremely complex, for there to be a God, he’d have to be more complex than the universe he created. I find that highly improbable.” That is such a vapid argument. It’s childlike.

You’ve said your book will shake the very foundations of Christianity.
If accepted as true, yes. I’m not the brightest guy in the world, but for whatever reason I seem to see what’s right in front of me in its pristine condition, uninfluenced by reputation or hoopla whereas most people see what they expect to see, what they want to see, what conventional wisdom tells them to see.

Frank Schaeffer, one of the founders of the Religious Right, grew up in a family that was immersed in Christianity, God, etc. His father was a top theologian when he died; [President Ronald] Reagan praised him to the heavens. Frank Schaeffer’s mother was a missionary. Schaeffer himself was a theologian and a preacher. He gave a review of my book, and it’s very telling what he said: “I found myself walking around the house following my wife reading passages to her.” Schaeffer left the Religious Right years ago because he found out something that I’ve been saying for years. They [the Religious Right] are anti- American.

I testified before the House Judiciary Committee for the Bush book. Republicans tried to shut me down, so members of the media came up to me later and asked why. I said, “I’ll tell you why: They’re more Republican than they are American. They pledge allegiance to the Republican Party, not the American flag.”

Divinity of Doubt challenges the concept of free will.
You hear people say all the time that God gives all of us free will. If you challenge them, they say, “It’s in the Bible.” Well, in doing research for this book, I found out that contrary to popular belief, the Bible does not say there’s free will. In fact, it says the precise opposite. Do you recognize the enormous ramifications of this?

If there’s no free will, then a murderer can’t be held accountable because God directed him to do it.
Absolutely. How do you explain God’s punishment of evildoers—not just in our life here, but in the afterlife—if what they did was preordained by God? Romans 11:32 goes so far as to say that God “consigns all men to disobedience.”

Here’s another point in the book: the immortality of the soul. It turns out immortality of the soul was a pure invention of Plato in the 4th century B.C. that Christianity was forced to embrace because without the immortality of the soul, there’s no life after death. The body doesn’t survive, and without life after death there’s no Heaven and Hell. I would pose the rhetorical question: How does Christianity survive without Heaven and Hell? This is what they offer or threaten their followers with.

Is it your position that the Bible is BS?
No. I’m simply saying that if you base what you’re saying—the free will—on the Bible, well, that’s not what the Bible says. I’m not attacking the Bible. I’m attacking Christianity.

But you’re pointing out discrepancies within the Bible.
That raises an interesting point because Judaism and Christianity believe that every word of the Bible is inspired by God. The problem there is, if every word is inspired by God, how can there be so many contradictions? How can he inspire one author of one Bible book to say something that is in direct contradiction with another passage he [God] also supposedly inspired?

I think the Bible is certainly the most important and influential book ever written. It tells the greatest story, fictional or otherwise, ever told. It’s a book of enormous wisdom and profundity, no question about it. On the other hand, the question has to be asked: If what I say is true, how do you keep the doors to these churches—thousands upon thousands around the world—open?

Maybe it’s not a question of what’s logical but what’s comforting. Religion offers comfort.
Of course! I think Petronius, the Roman satirist, said the gods came into the world out of fear, fear of the unknown. People want to believe in this stuff, and I don’t denigrate faith. [Russian author Leo] Tolstoy said it’s the biggest force in nature. It’s lit many candles of warmth throughout the years, softened pangs of fear. But let’s not confuse faith with the object of the faith. They’re not synonymous.

You’re wedded to logic.
That’s right. It’s my only master. The book is based on the evidence. It’s pretty hard to attack it because I give several biblical citations for everything I say.

I eliminate prayer for all intents and purposes. If someone prays for something and they get it, they say, “God answered my prayers.” That means he’s got the power to answer prayers. He’s all-powerful. Well, if he has the power to answer prayers, how can we possibly say he’s all good when we know to a 100% certainty that he nearly always turns down the praying party when that party needs him the most?

Doesn’t that tell us that not only is God not all good, but when we happen to get something as a result of our prayer, it had nothing to do with him? All Jewish and Christian theologians that I know of agree that God either caused or allowed everything to take place. They almost have to say it because if they didn’t, they’re saying God isn’t all-powerful.

The Holocaust, Hurricane Katrina, I don’t know who caused them, but God allowed it.We have catastrophes like 9/11, and people immediately run to their church or synagogue, and they pray for the victims to the entity who either caused or allowed this horror to take place. I don’t understand that.

Maybe it’s because religious people feel they’re playing some role in the healing process. They’re doing their part. It’s partially self-serving.
My view is that Christianity, if it insists, can have its God. But if it has any respect for logic, it’s got to redefine who he is. He can’t be all good and all-powerful at the same time. The Christians’ comeback is that God gives all of us—including Hitler and Stalin—free will. He’s not responsible for how we exercise it. God is supposed to be all good.

You were raised Catholic?
Yeah. My first confrontation in the area of God and religion was with this monsignor. He was a gray-haired eminence. He’d come into our class maybe once every two weeks, and he’d talk about God, the all good, the all-powerful, the all knowing. I was maybe nine at the most. I said to him, “Monsignor, if God is allpowerful, all good and all knowing, why does he put people on this Earth he already knows are going to end up in Hell?”

He said, “Well, that’s a good question for someone your age, and I have the answer for you. God gives all of us free will. When we come to that fork in the road, it’s up to us to decide. He’s not responsible for whether we take the road that leads to Heaven or the one that leads to Hell.”

I came back with, “Yes, but if you say that he’s all knowing, he already knows what direction we’re going to go in, so I still can’t figure out why he puts people on Earth who he already knows are going to end up in Hell.” The monsignor kind of coughed nervously and said, “We’ll take it up at a later time.”

Can we bait you into discussing the bigger question of whether God exists?
I’m an agnostic. Atheists do not believe in God, and I’m very harsh on atheism. I like to tell people I have someone rather bright on my side. His name is [Albert] Einstein. Einstein was an agnostic. Interestingly enough, [Charles] Darwin was also an agnostic even though most evolutionists are Atheists. I believe that the question of whether or not God exists is an impenetrable mystery beyond human comprehension.

Einstein said, “The problem is too vast for our limited minds.” And I just feel the most responsible and reasonable position to take on the issue of God’s existence is that of agnosticism. I love Gertrude Stein’s great nonliterary articulation. She said: “There ain’t no answer. There ain’t going to be any answer. There never has been an answer.That’s the answer.” And then Clarence Darrow, the great criminal defense attorney in the ’30s, said, “I don’t purport to know what ignorant men are sure of.”

What is your most fervent hope that Divinity of Doubt will accomplish?
I’m always educating people in my books. I lecture to people who are brighter than I am and older than I am. I believe in the Socratic imperative that the truth is more important than anything else. I’m not trying to throw a wrench in anything. I’m just pursuing what I perceive to be the truth. But this book is so revolutionary and stunning that people refuse to accept it. It’s extremely powerful. You will never think about God or religion in the same way ever again.

Interview by Mark Johnson
for HUSTLER Magazine – June 2011

Investigative journalist and political commentator Webster Griffin Tarpley is used to controversy. Going wherever his research leads him, he has questioned the events of 9/11, challenged the mythologies of Barack Obama and tackled the massive bank fraud at the heart of the economic meltdown. A graduate of Princeton University and a former Fulbright Scholar, Tarpley gained wide notoriety when he went after Bush the First in George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography. More exposés followed, including 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA and Obama: The Postmodern Coup—Making of a Manchurian Candidate.

Tarpley’s latest book, Surviving the Cataclysm: Your Guide Through the Greatest Financial Crisis in Human History, lays out the real causes of our new economic depression and calls for a truly American solution.

HUSTLER: Is there any hope for Obama?

WEBSTER TARPLEY: Obama has been a catastrophic President. First of all, he’s a warmonger. Under Obama we’ve had more combat troops in the field than we ever had under [George W.] Bush. That means Iraq and Afghanistan, now a third war in Pakistan and a possible fourth war with Iran.

Contrary to popular belief, Obama is also a union buster. What he did to the United Auto Workers as part of the Detroit automobile bailout was to loot its union finances and send the money to Wall Street. The UAW was forced to swallow cuts in wages and benefits that degrade its members to the level of nonunion workers. The union also agreed to hand over healthcare assets to the hedge fund hyenas that now own huge stakes of our automakers. Obama’s car czar, Steve Rattner, notes in his new book that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s motto during the negotiations was “Fuck the UAW.” Obama is now using charter schools, merit pay and denial of tenure to bust the teachers’ unions.

My biggest critique of Obama is that he’s a Wall Street puppet. Look at the gaggle he has around him: Tim Geithner and Larry Summers [who recently resigned ] are disciples of Bob Rubin of Goldman Sachs and Citibank. Obama is a representative of the interests of the large Wall Street banks.We hear that he’s a socialist. That’s absolutely absurd. He serves the banks. My criticism of Obama comes from his left. Look at Obama compared to the positive tradition of the Democratic Party. Franklin D. Roosevelt created Social Security, an absolutely successful program. What’s Obama’s relation to that? He wants to destroy it, privatize it. The goal of his Bowles-Simpson Commission is to carry out a wrecking job on Social Security.

The crowning achievement of Lyndon B. Johnson’s career was Medicare. Obama has gutted it with $500 billion in cuts as part of his healthcare bill, which will lead to further rationing of care.

The difference between Obama and Bush is that Bush was an open, brutal reactionary and warmonger, but Obama does it all by deception, by duplicity. That’s why people have difficulty understanding the way he operates.

If the Democrats do not produce a challenger to Obama in the [2012] primaries, the Democratic Party is going to be clinically defunct.

What happened to our economy?

We have a world economic depression, similar to the 1930s but worse. It’s not a normal business-cycle event, not simply a boom and bust. It’s a disintegration of the U.S. and British banking systems and of the dollarbased system that the world has lived under since the 1940s.

Right-wingers like to say the depression was caused by poor people who took out subprime mortgages, and when they defaulted, that brought down the entire Anglo-American banking system. That’s just a fantastic story. Rather, what happened was a panic in the world derivatives market.

Derivatives such as collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps and structured investment vehicles are very complex things, hard for the average person to understand. It’s something like this: If we have the horse Seabiscuit running in the ninth race at Belmont Park one afternoon under the old system, whoever bets on Seabiscuit can either win or lose their money. Those losses are relatively limited.

Now imagine there’s a horse called Subprime running, and Wall Street decides they’re going to bet a quadrillion in derivatives on Subprime in the ninth. Notice, they don’t buy the horse. They don’t even go to the track; they do it through a floating bookie operation. If Subprime loses, that’s going to bring down the New York banking system. You wouldn’t blame poor Subprime; you would say it was criminal for these lunatics to put all those resources on such a shaky vehicle.

Derivatives were illegal in the United States from 1936 until 1982 under the New Deal Commodity Exchange Act. Then there was a process of legalizing them in which Ronald Reagan, Phil Gramm, Alan Greenspan and others were involved. Because of this, by 2007 we had a worldwide bubble of about $1.5 quadrillion in toxic derivatives, compared to a world gross domestic product of about 65 trillion. That is a black hole of bankruptcy and economic destruction. There’s not enough money in the world to bail that out.

Are we in a new Great Depression?

This is a world economic depression. It’s useful to go back and look at 1929 and the years after that. The Great Depression started with the stock panic in October 1929, but that was just the beginning. The second wave was a banking crisis in Europe in 1931.

Compare that to the timeframe from 2008 to 2010, and you see that we’re going through something similar. In 2008 we had a banking panic in New York that destroyed the entire U.S. banking system, which was then put on life support through the bailout. In 2010 we had a European banking crisis.

Countries are now on the verge of a new currency war, trying to drive down the price of their currencies. That is also what happened in 1931. The idea is, if you can reduce the value of your currency, your existing debts are less of a burden, and you can export easier. It doesn’t work though because it spreads the depression to the entire world. The question debated now is: Will we have a deflationary crash, like the U.S. in 1932, when commodity and real estate prices plummeted, or will we have a hyperinflationary takeoff? I think we’re likely to have the worst of both: a hyperinflationary depression, meaning a collapse in the dollar’s purchasing power combined with a collapse in overall economic activity—an extreme form of the stagflation we saw in the 1970s. That would mean all kinds of businesses closing, unemployment at 35% and prices going wild. It would happen worldwide; that brings social chaos. If you look at the 1930s, you see the succession: depression, dictatorship, world war. We’re still in the depression phase.

Your opponents would say the free market will fix the crisis.

The notion of a free market is one of the most fantastic fabrications in modern political life. We have never had a free market. Indeed, the whole United States was built on the negation of that. The government acts to promote, foster and facilitate economic development, carried out largely through privately owned companies.

The market never delivered the basic prerequisites of modern life in terms of decent standards of living and decent working conditions. That took mass struggle. You would not have an eight-hour day and a 40-hour week if you waited for somebody to grant that to you. There are reactionaries today who think that child labor laws and the minimum wage are unconstitutional. These people are working for reactionary, superrich interests. The responsibility for our current depression goes to the [free-market theories of] the Chicago School of Milton Friedman and ultimately to the Austrian School of Friedrich August von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises—economic charlatans. Henry Clay, the 19th-century congressman, senator and secretary of state who was praised by Lincoln and JFK, coined the term the “American System” in 1824. He pushed for a protective tariff, a national bank and internal infrastructural improvements. That’s the kind of alternative we need today.

We’re told we have to dump the New Deal and take up the poisonous foreign doctrine of the free market, which is not successful anywhere. The American System is the real basis of life in the United States.

How do you get out of the depression once you’re in it?

The first thing is take steps to stop speculation. Go back to what we had successfully from 1936 to 1982, which is a ban on certain kinds of derivatives. The collateralized debt obligation is in many ways the most destructive; that is what brought down Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch. That should be outlawed.

The other one that should be banned is the credit default swap, which is a bet on whether or not somebody else is going to go bankrupt. That should be illegal for two reasons: At face value it’s gambling, so it should be illegal under the gambling laws. And if you claim that it’s insurance, anybody issuing a credit default swap who is not an insurance company should be shut down because they’re issuing them without registering as an insurance company and without the capital requirements. Derivatives haven’t been outlawed because Obama’s Wall Street cronies, along with the procorporate Congress, will block anything the banks don’t want.

…continue reading in HUSTLER Magazine – June 2011.

A NOTED COLUMNIST AND AUTHOR DETAILS HOW THE BANKS ARE TURNING YOU IN TO A DEBT SLAVE AND HOW THE AMERICAN PEOPLE CAN TAKE BACK THE POWER OF CREATING MONEY.

from THE Q & A with Ellen Brown interviewed by Mark Johnson
in HUSTLER Magazine – February 2010

In 1933, President Roosevelt summed up the truth about power in America: “A financial element in the large centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.” That financial element was—and still is—the banking system, headed by a private cartel known as the U.S. Federal Reserve. Over the years Roosevelt’s truth has been echoed many times by politicians and scholars trying to break the bankers’ stranglehold. Now, as the Obama Administration continues to bail out the banks, we may be facing the economic endgame. In her eye-opening new book The Web of Debt, attorney Ellen Brown zeros in on the fraudulent core of our imploding economy: Banks have been using accounting tricks to create money out of thin air, charging interest on it and siphoning off the profits. Brown stresses that the only feasible way to rein in the private banking cartel is to set up a competitive system of public banks, owned by the people, that act in the common interest. This would be the first step toward giving We the People back the power to create our own money.

HUSTLER: How is our money currently created?

ELLEN BROWN: All of our money is created as a debt to private banks. We have no actual money in our monetary system except for coins, which are created by the government. Coins compose a tiny fraction of the money supply. The rest is created by banks in the form of loans. That includes paper dollar bills or Federal Reserve Notes, which compose about 3% of the money supply. Federal Reserve Notes are created by the Federal Reserve, a privately owned banking corporation, and lent to the government and to other banks. But 97% of all money exists only in ledgers, not as actual circulating currency.

When I go into a bank and ask for $100,000 to buy a house, where does that money come from?

They will write your mortgage up on one side of their books as an asset to themselves because you will pay them money over time. Then they will write the same sum on the other side of their books as a liability because that amount becomes your account that you write checks on. This is called double-entry bookkeeping. They have created a plus $100,000 and a minus $100,000, which comes out to zero. They’ll say that their books balance. The bookkeeping entries on the liability side are what circulate in the economy as “money.” Money has actually been added to the money supply. And that money creation is at interest, so there is always more money owed back than is put out. The money that banks lend is not from preexisting deposits. It is new money that did not exist until it was lent.
But if I write a check to the mortgage company, someone is taking that out as cash somewhere along the line.

The bank can pay out money because it operates under what’s called a reserve requirement. Banks are supposed to keep 10% of their assets in the form of cash reserves. Let’s say they have $1 million in outstanding loans; they should have $100,000 in actual money that they could pay out immediately.

Long ago, when we were on the gold standard, it was discovered that people came for their gold only 10% of the time. Our reserve requirement still reflects the fact that 90% of the people won’t come for their money. The 10% kept in reserve comes from depositors. This money is not lent out. The banks use it to create loans under the system of “fractional reserve banking.”

Say they start with $10,000 in bank assets. They’re allowed to lend 90% of that, so they lend $9,000. It’ll go into another bank somewhere, and that bank is allowed to lend 90% on top of that and so on. The deposit keeps multiplying until the original $10,000 is turned into accountability and disclosure to the public.

The power to create money is given to Congress in the Constitution.

When does the Fed decide to print more money?

They print money when the banks need it to meet the banks’ cash reserve requirements. Most people think the government prints the money. The government owns the machinery that prints the dollars, but it’s the Federal Reserve that commissions them to print the dollars.

That’s where the deception is. The Fed tells our printers to print it, and the Fed pays the cost of printing. So they get it for pennies on the dollar, then lend it to us at full face value. The income tax was originally set up to pay the interest on the debt incurred to the Federal Reserve. Very little of the interest now actually goes to the Federal Reserve. But when it was first set up, that was the intent of the bankers that got the law passed. The government passed both laws the same year, 1913: the 16th Amendment for the income tax and the Federal Reserve Act.

The Federal Reserve Act initiated the current system of creating money?

That’s when it was formalized, but we’ve had banker-created money all of our formal existence. In 1791, Alexander Hamilton—our first Treasury Secretary—started the first U.S. bank. It was originally 80% privately owned, and then the government sold the other 20%, so it wound up being 100% privately owned. Thomas Jefferson was opposed to the idea. He considered Hamilton’s plan traitorous and unconstitutional. For a hundred years before that, Americans had money issued by the colonial governments. It worked really well. We flourished all through the colonial period at a time when the British were suffering from the ravages of the Industrial Revolution.

The bank of Pennsylvania—in Benjamin Franklin’s province—was the ideal colonial model. Franklin was considered the father of paper money. He raved about it and said it was responsible for the abundance in the colonies. The government would issue a certain amount of money and then lend it to the farmers at 5% interest.

The government would also issue a little extra and spend it on public works, like building roads. Then they had enough money in the system to cover principal and interest as the loan money went out and came back, without having to inflate the system. During that time the Pennsylvania colonists paid no taxes, had no government debt, and there was no price inflation—a brilliant, self-contained, sustainable system.

A major factor that led to the American Revolution was that King George told us we could no longer print new issues of our own money. The worst part was we had to pay our taxes in gold to England. That was why the colonists were so upset about the taxes. It wasn’t just that there was a tax on tea. It was that we had to pay this tax in gold, which we didn’t have. The farmers had to borrow it from the British bankers. The colonists wound up in foreclosure. They were losing their farms. So they just went back to printing their own money because they had to. They needed a money supply. It was an act of rebellion. Tom Paine called this government-issued paper money “a cornerstone of the Revolution.”

Was that money backed by gold or silver?

No. It was backed by the full faith and credit of the government. The system was started in 1691 when the governor of Massachusetts, who didn’t have gold or silver, gave out government receipts to his soldiers, saying, “Go and trade with this; it will be honored for your service to the community.” That worked. The colonies paid for the Revolutionary War with paper money. Unfortunately, it was easily counterfeited. The British were sitting in the harbor with printing presses on ships, madly running their presses.

After the war, even if the government had tried to issue paper dollars, nobody would have accepted them because they were so heavily devalued during the war. So Hamilton resorted to a ruse where he took the gold that the government had—which wasn’t that much—and put it in the bank and started issuing paper bank notes, saying that they were redeemable in gold. That was the so-called gold standard.

The bankers knew people would only come 10% of the time for their gold, so they could issue ten times as many notes as they had gold. Suddenly they had ten times more money. The problem was that the banknotes were lent to the government by private bankers, putting us into this whole debt syndrome we’re in now.

Lincoln also printed “greenbacks” to finance the Civil War. What happened to that idea?

Lincoln tapped into the same cornerstone that had gotten the impoverished colonists through the Revolution: He authorized the government to issue its own paper money. But private bankers sought to eliminate Lincoln’s “greenbacks” since they weren’t under their control. Lincoln was shot, and the bankers pressured Congress to pass the National Banking Act, which allowed them to replace the “greenbacks” with their own privately issued currency.

What would be the most workable reform of the banking system?

We need state-owned banks. With a public, state-owned bank, your profits go back to the community. You don’t have a parasite pulling profits out the way you do with private banks. The whole point of a corporation is to make money for the stockholders and management. If you’re a public entity, you don’t have to worry about profits to your shareholders, and your shareholders and customers don’t have to be nervous about losing their money because you’ve got a huge pool backed by the state. You can create many times your deposits in loans, to fund government projects, helping the community, and all the profits go back to the center—the state bank.

Any sort of public entity can own a bank. A university like UCLA could own a bank. They could take all their revenues, put them in their bank, create many times that sum in loans and build a stadium. The profits from the stadium would go back and pay off the loan.
They could do it interest-free.

Why don’t they?

I don’t think they know they can do it; we’ve been kept in ignorance for so long. In the 1890s, people actually knew the banks were $100,000 or more, distributed among several banks. It’s like a mirror trick. The problem is if you get rid of the first dollar, the whole mirror effect collapses.

Banks need to generate debt to create money?

Yes, essentially all of our money comes from loans. Our current private banking system is a pyramid scheme. Banks have to continually suck new borrowers in because they never put as much money out as they want back. They put out ten; they take back 11. They put out 11; they take back 121/2. So in order to create that extra money, you always have to find somebody else who will borrow. They’re scrambling to find debtors. This is the scheme they use for everything from mortgages to credit cards. Our central bank, the Federal Reserve, authorizes the activity of creating money out of nothing.

Is the Fed part of the private banking system?

The Federal Reserve is not actually federal. It is composed of 12 branches, which are private corporations owned by a consortium of banks. We, the public, do not own one share of stock in the Federal Reserve. Our President appoints the head of the Federal Reserve, but once appointed, he’s pretty much on his own.

The only leverage Congress really has is to modify or eliminate the Federal Reserve Act. The question is, can this secretive private cartel be trusted with so much unregulated power? It would be cheaper and safer to give the power to create dollars to Congress itself, with full creating money because there was no Federal Reserve. It was obvious that when you went to the bank, they were giving you a bank note supposedly backed by their own gold. You knew that it was privately issued money. Today we’ve been led to believe the government issues the money and that they’re the problem. We’ve been sucked into supporting the banking beast when we could walk away and form our own credit system.

Has this idea of public banking been tested?

It has. One state owns its own bank: North Dakota. It’s also one of only two states that are currently able to meet their budgets. The Bank of North Dakota was set up during a populist movement in 1919. By law, all of the state’s revenues go into its own state-owned bank. These then serve as the deposit base for many times that sum in loans, and the excess profits go back to the state.

They don’t publicly say they’re creating credit out of nothing on their books, but that’s how all banks work; many authorities have said so. North Dakota now has the lowest unemployment rate in the country, it has plenty of money for things like student loans and sustainable energy development, and it’s generally not feeling the pinch of the credit crisis at all.

What’s preventing a system like that from being instituted nationwide?

Corruption and multimillion-dollar salaries. You can’t change the system until it collapses. But that’s the point we’re at now. It has collapsed.

Would a public banking system still be competitive enough on an international scale?

A public banking system could be more competitive than private banks. Banks create credit on their books, and a government bank could do exactly the same thing—without all the toxic assets that are preventing the banks from making loans now, and without having all the profits going out to a parasitic banking elite.

You could set up a public banking system that could start fresh. You could still let the private banks operate. They do that in India. It used to be that the private Indian banks were preferred because they were profit-generating, but now suddenly everybody’s rushing to the public banks because they’re more secure.

Aren’t the people who are making money off the current private banking system going to fight a public system tooth and nail?

Sure, but what can they say if we’re playing by their rules? We just want to join in the game. We could just set up public banks to fund infrastructure, to fund the stimulus program. Let the private banking system alone. Don’t try to prop it up and don’t try to bring it down. Just see which one works better. I’ll place a wager that it’s going to be the public system and that everyone’s going to rush to the public system when they see how well it works.

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WILLIAM A NOTED REPORTER AND AUTHOR TELLS US HOW CORPORATIONS ARE DESTROYING THE AMERICAN ECONOMY AND WHAT WE CAN DO TO FIX IT.

from THE Q & A with William Greider interviewed by Mark Johnson
in HUSTLER Magazine – January 2010

William Greider is one of the experts who warned us ten years ago that our economy was headed into the shredder. A longtime observer of runaway capitalism, Greider has written several books and worked as a reporter for numerous newspapers and magazines, including the Washington Post and Rolling Stone. He is currently national affairs correspondent for The Nation.

During his 40-year career he has crossed paths with the country’s most powerful people. He has examined in detail how and why America went from a thriving democracy to a nation run by bankers. In his latest book—Come Home, America: The Rise and Fall (and Redeeming Promise) of Our Country —Greider maintains that we are at an epic turning point in our history. It is time for people to step up and reclaim their role as true citizens.

HUSTLER: How did you recognize early on that our economy was in deep trouble?

WILLIAM GREIDER: Ten years ago I wrote in my book One World Ready or Not that our [economic] system, despite all of its creative energies, was veering off-balance. The United States was playing buyer of last resort for everybody else. We had our arms wide open and accepted imports from everywhere when no one else would. Our multinational corporations were going into poorer countries, developing production there and shipping parts back into the U.S.
We now import four or five times more than we export. Because our production and jobs have been moving offshore, we don’t have the money to pay for the imports. We borrow the money from the people who are selling us stuff. There’s surplus production every year all around the world. Most countries won’t take it, either because they can’t afford it or because they just won’t let it in. The U.S., because we’re the big-hearted Goliath, says,“We’re for free trade; keep it coming.” The long-term consequences are the U.S. gets deeper and deeper in debt, and American workers suffer stagnant or falling wages because they’re competing with foreign low-wage workers.

Has this policy been pushed by the multinational corporations?

Absolutely. Both Democrats and Republicans have supported this in the belief that if our U.S. multinationals do well in the world, we’ll be okay. But it doesn’t work that way. The multinationals (whether you’re talking about General Electric or Microsoft or whomever) can do very well and actually hurt the United States in the process. As long as it was just T-shirts and cheap shoes, you could say, “That’s not going to make much difference.”

The reality is, we’re now getting some of the most advanced products and technology in the world out of places like China.We’re losing what businesspeople call “value added production.” The process of making a product produces high value added [for the producing country]. Most countries understand that they’ve got to hang on to that really valuable production and the jobs that go with it to maintain a prosperous middle class. Otherwise you sink lower and lower. Twenty years ago I talked to working guys in auto plants, and they told me this was happening to them. Blue-collar people understand this way better than the people who run the country.

How do you bring production back to the United States?

It starts in politics. You get a government and a political party that stands up and says to the American people, “We’re in a deep hole, and it’s getting deeper, and we cannot go on like this.” First, we’ve got to change our approach to the U.S. multinationals. We’re going to say to them, “Look, we’re not handing out tax breaks and other subsidies any longer. You have some obligations to the home country. We want you to be profitable, but you have to include the national interest in your business strategies.” If they don’t, we will reform the corporate income tax so that the companies that do better at retaining the jobs and keeping value added gain in our own home country will get a lower tax rate than companies simply moving it out the door.

How likely is that to happen with Congress in the pocket of Big Business?

Politicians are in line with the most powerful companies and financiers because they support globalization. However, in Congress there’s a growing nucleus of representatives who are mad because their constituents are mad. It’s just a start, but it’s not hopeless. As candidate for President, Barack Obama said that we’re going to stop rewarding the companies that simply move production overseas and start rewarding companies that do the best job of keeping it here in the U.S. with a modest tax incentive.

His idea doesn’t go far enough, but I’m encouraged he’s starting down that road. People should be banging on him right now saying, “Hey, you said this during the campaign. What are you doing about it?” The other thing we’ve got to do is say to the rest of the world, “We’ve been generously supporting the development of the global economy for years, but the whole system is going to come crashing down if the United States taps out. We’re going to put a cap on our trade deficits and gradually reduce it so we can come closer to something like a balanced trading system.”

What’s wrong with trade tariffs?

Nothing. Every country in the world uses them. I’m for a trading system that functions for poor people as well as the wealthy. When I started writing about this 20-plus years ago, a lot of people dismissed me as a fearmonger and a protectionist. Now the facts are so devastating that a lot of people who used to be cheerleaders for free trade are not so anxious to be identified with it.

I would put Obama in that category. He’s willing to acknowledge things are not working in America’s self-interest. But he’s not yet ready to step up and really forcefully address it. [He and his advisers] are blinded by the ideology that the world works better if government gets out of the way and lets business do its thing. That’s not only nonsense, it’s morally wrong. These same businesses siphon off taxpayer money, and the things they promised do not happen. When you ask Americans how they feel about corporations, an overwhelming consensus says corporations have too much power, and the government should get some control over them.

Why doesn’t the government do that?

Because those same corporations are manipulating elected politicians and financing their campaigns. The American people have a deeper understanding of this reality than they’re given credit for. I’m optimistic this is going to change, but it’s got to be bloody. The usual interests will just try to either stomp on people or brush them aside. Somebody ought to stand up and say, “I am proposing an amendment to the Constitution that clarifies once and for all: Corporations do not have the rights of people.” It would give you a fight for people to organize around.

Is our technology going overseas along with our jobs?

Yes. A good example is Boeing, which makes large-body commercial aircraft. They will contract out to scores of other countries: China, Indonesia, Europe, the Middle East, the whole list. They’ll say, “We want you to make the titanium alloy strut that holds up the engines on a 747, and we’ll show you how to make it. We’ll have guys in your plant, your foundry, monitoring you for quality because we can’t screw this up. This has got to work, because otherwise the plane will crash.” The Chinese will take instructions from the Americans, make that part, ship it to Seattle or Wichita, Kansas, where it is then installed in a Boeing assembly line and becomes part of the aircraft. They do that with hundreds of components. The most obvious reason is wages: It’s cheaper. But that’s not even the main motive for Boeing. Boeing wants to sell airplanes to those countries. China especially has a huge air-travel industry. So Boeing buys market share [meaning the ability to sell huge amounts of product in China] by trading away American jobs. I’ve had interviews with Boeing managers and strategists, and they’re pretty upfront about it. They say, “Look, if we don’t do this, they won’t buy our airplanes.”

The reason that we have to fight for both manufacturing and service jobs is because even the high-end technical, professional jobs are now being shipped overseas. Google and Microsoft are competing in China now. They’ve both opened big research centers there. The workers are cheaper, but they’re perfectly good engineers. Hundreds of big-name companies have traded technology to those developing countries in exchange for cheap labor and market access.

How did Singapore, a tiny city-state, get so good at making disc drives invented by IBM and other U.S. companies?

The answer is: IBM taught them, in return for tax subsidies and protection against wage increases [in Singapore].

How do we rein in the banks as well?

Obama should be using the government’s power to say, “Until we get out of this crisis, we’re in charge. We’re keeping you afloat with our loans. That gives us the power, and if we have to, we’ll pass a law to direct you and your behavior and cut out all the bullshit and get this credit system working again so that we can get a real economic recovery.” The banks are in trouble because they still have these huge portfolios of rotten assets. Nothing has happened to change that. The bankers know that if they do get back in trouble, the government has to come and save them again. It’s a one-way bet for them: Heads we win, and tails you lose.

How do you get out of this quickly rather than dragging it on for years?

You get these bad assets out of the banks so they can begin lending again. They didn’t do that because the bankers said, “Well, if the economy comes back, this stuff is going to be worth a lot of money again, and we don’t want to sell it cheap.” At that point, if the government had the balls, they would have grabbed these bankers by the collar and said, “You’re going to sell this stuff or we’re cutting off your water right now.” The government has them in a life-and-death situation, and Obama won’t use that.

How do we force politicians to keep their promises?

People have to create their own power and their own communication. That’s what the Internet is about. Ordinary Americans are learning to use these technologies for their own purposes. It means communicating with people they don’t even know, who may be on the other side of an issue, and spreading the word. Out of that can come organizations independent of both political parties. They have to be able to mobilize lots of people to do a jujitsu on the system. Jujitsu is when the little guy flips a big guy on his back. People can do that in the electoral arena if they’ve got the nerve.

The Democratic Party is supported by all kinds of groups—unions, environmentalists, consumer advocates, civil rights activists. But what these groups haven’t been able to do is punish the Democratic Party when it sells them out. They have to say, “You’re screwing us. We’re going to make a list of senators or House members [who are working against us].

Instead of handing over our money, we’re going to take some of it and run our own candidates against Democratic incumbents.” You can do that with a minor percentage of the vote if you’re willing to take on the big party and say we’ve had enough.

One guy I know is warning the Democrats that they’re going to have a political train wreck in the Congressional elections if they go ahead with the idea of taxing health benefits. One of the guys talking this up is Max Baucus, senator from Montana and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. Must be a Republican, right? No, he’s a Democrat! His position goes against what Obama said during the campaign. It goes against basic fairness.

Anybody in a union knows they traded wage increases for better benefits. Along comes the government and pretends they’re getting this stuff for free.We have to say to the Democratic Party, “Don’t go down that road. If you do, you’re going to wind up where you did in 1994, when the Republicans took back the House of Representatives after 50 years.”

Ordinary people, both nonunion and union, can begin to provoke this. They can say to the unions [and other groups], “You come around and ask for money every year, but you won’t threaten the Democrats or members of Congress with retribution when they sell you out.” Nothing moves opinion in the Congress more reliably than members seeing a couple of their colleagues cut down out of the blue by something they didn’t take seriously.

People are always screaming about how influential the NRA [National Rifle Association] is. The NRA is influential because they play hardball. Every member of Congress, whether they’re far left or far right, understands that. The NRA will not forget when they’re crossed, and they’re effective. You don’t have to be a political party, you don’t have to be a labor union to play that kind of politics. I envision lots of what I call “independent formations.” Not political parties, not issue groups. They’re people together exercising their rights as citizens. It’s like guerrilla warfare. Guerrilla warfare works not because the fighters are bigger or stronger, but because they pick their spots. They’re willing to shoot for the kneecaps.

What can the average person do in terms of forcing change?

Above all, trust your guts. Have faith in your basic convictions and tune out the propaganda that’s meant to manipulate your mind. I have a lot of faith in the capacity of Americans, regardless of their status, to think for themselves. They’ve been pushed around for so many years. Yes, they’re cynical; they don’t know who to trust; and so forth. The first step is for them to uncover that good stuff in themselves. As they do that, they don’t have to ask me or anyone else what to do. They’ll figure that out for themselves. I believe that deeply.
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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.

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As an assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration, Paul Craig Roberts had a front-row seat to observe Wall Street greed and Federal Reserve mistakes imperil the economy. Long before George W. Bush left office, Roberts decried the Iraq War, the neocon hijacking of legitimate conservatism and the looting of America’s wealth.  

HUSTLER: What happened to our economy?  

PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS: Most people don’t realize that the current economic crisis has several dimensions. It’s not just the result of bad mortgages. It’s also the result of a bad interest-rate policy, deregulation of the banks and a ballooning trade deficit that could end up destroying the value of the dollar. 

The government’s explanation is that the big banks and insurance giants like AIG were threatened when the housing bubble burst. Interest payments from risky mortgages stopped flowing in, sucking the value out of the whole system of derivatives and credit swaps that the banks use to make money off of mortgages. Bank assets took a huge hit. AIG, which had backed risky investments without making sure it had enough reserves to cover them, couldn’t make good on its obligations.

There are two key aspects of the banking crisis that the government doesn’t like to talk about. One is former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s low-interest-rate policy. Greenspan made borrowing money cheap to boost construction and real estate jobs in an attempt to mask job losses in other sectors, such as manufacturing and high-tech. As American corporations moved production for the American market to China and elsewhere, Greenspan hid the job loss by creating a real estate bubble. This enabled CEOs and shareholders to reap large gains by laying off American workers and replacing them with lower-paid workers overseas. Executives got huge bonuses for this kind of downsizing.  

The second key aspect is the deregulation of the financial system. Over the past decade, rules and operating guidelines have been gradually loosened or scrapped altogether.  During the Great Depression the Roosevelt Administration moved to regulate the financial system and segregate commercial from investment banking. The Glass-Steagall Act, passed in 1933, placed limits on how many different functions a bank could engage in. In 1999, Glass-Steagall was repealed. With that vote, Congress started us on the road to disaster. 

To make matters worse, Hank Paulson—CEO of Goldman Sachs and later President George W. Bush’s Treasury secretary—convinced the Securities and Exchange Commission to scrap rules for investment banks, meaning the SEC couldn’t regulate how these huge holders of equity handled their cash. Banks and financial companies were given more freedom than ever, based on the ideology that free markets regulate themselves. 

Because of deregulation, financial institutions could leverage debt to new heights, meaning they repackaged debt into products they could trade and use to generate capital. AIG, for example, had only $1 of real equity for every $33 of obligation. The moment the market turned, this leveraged debt became unsustainable. By overleveraging debt, the investment banks destroyed themselves. This is how Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch collapsed. 

How does the U.S. trade deficit play into this? 

The U.S. currently pays over $50 billion a month more on imports than it makes on exports. This is a massive trade deficit that cannot be closed, because American corporations have moved so much production for the American market to other countries.

When production for U.S. markets is moved offshore, a big chunk goods and services produced—is transferred to some other country along with the American jobs. That causes a plunge in personal and     national income. There is less tax revenue for cities, states and the federal government. CEOs and shareholders benefit by cutting labor costs, but everyone else suffers.

The trade deficit also endangers the U.S. dollar’s role as world reserve currency, which is the currency countries use for international transactions. The benefit of being the reserve currency country means that you can pay your international bills in your own currency. If the U.S. doesn’t have enough money from exports to pay for imports, it can just print more money.

Today the combination of large trade deficits and massive government budget deficits makes the dollar unattractive. The world is awash in dollars, and other countries are not happy to acquire the several trillion dollars more in ever-riskier U.S. Treasury bonds that are necessary to finance our annual multitrillion-dollar budget deficits. Treasury bonds are basically government IOUs. China is America’s largest creditor country, since it holds more U.S. debt in the form of U.S.

Treasury bonds than any other nation. Recently, both the premier of China and the head of China’s central bank expressed concerns about China’s investment in dollar assets. When your banker begins to look at you suspiciously, your troubles are beginning.

What would happen if China and the rest of the world dumped the dollar?

 If the U.S. dollar loses the reserve currency role, the current crisis will be magnified many times over. The U.S. will not be able to pay for its imports, and the rest of the world will be faced with the failure of the international payments system. The dollar collapse would affect the whole world’s ability to shore up local economies, including World Bank loans and measures used by the International Monetary Fund. It  would also devastate America’s ability to influence foreign governments. 

It has become impossible to finance the multitrillion- dollar U.S. budget deficits resulting from bailouts, stimulus packages and unaffordable wars. Americans have lost wealth from real estate and stock market declines. Many are losing their jobs, and most are deep in debt with mortgages, credit cards and car payments. Americans cannot provide the trillions of dollars needed to make Treasury bond auctions successful in the U.S. market.

In the past, America’s trade partners have financed our government’s budget by buying our debt, thanks to their trade surpluses with the U.S.—meaning that they sold us more than we sold them, so they could afford to invest in our debt, packaged as Treasury bonds. But now the budget deficits are much larger than can be balanced out by the trade surpluses of America’s creditors. Even if our creditors were still willing, they simply cannot absorb the supply of bonds necessary to finance the U.S. budget deficit.

Is there any way to pay this off? 

There are only two ways of financing U.S. budget deficits. One is if investors flee from further stock market declines into supposedly safe Treasury bonds, pushing up their value. That would forestall a budget catastrophe, but the desertion of equities for Treasurys could cause a costly wave of corporate bankruptcies. The other way is for the Federal Reserve to purchase the Treasury bonds that cannot be sold at the quarterly auctions. This is called monetizing the debt or printing money. The Federal Reserve purchases the Treasury bonds from the U.S. Treasury. The money supply— meaning the amount of cash in circulation—grows by the amount of the Federal Reserve’s bond purchase. Currently the U.S. money supply is about $1.4 trillion. If the 2009 and 2010 budget deficits are monetized, the money supply will have tripled in two years. Inflation—perhaps hyperinflation—would break out, and foreigners would dump their dollar holdings and the dollar as reserve currency. The greatest economic crisis in American history would occur. 

What should the government be doing to prevent that from happening?

The most important task is not to bail out the banks or to restore bank lending. It is to save the dollar as reserve currency. This requires large reductions in U.S. budget and trade deficits.

We have to stop importing more than we export. To do that, we have to adopt measures that will make it financially sensible for companies to act in America’s interest. 

The trade deficit could be reduced over time by changing the corporate tax system and taxing corporations according to whether the economic benefits from production—known as value added—occurs in the U.S. or abroad. A low tax rate could be imposed if value added occurs in the U.S., and a high one if production

is offshored. Companies would migrate back to the lower tax rate, which would bring jobs and GDP back to America and reduce imports by the amount of production that returns to the U.S.

The budget deficit could be reduced by ending the pointless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and by cutting the U.S. military budget, which is larger than the GDP of some of the countries we are defending ourselves against. The deficit would also be stemmed if we nationalized the banks instead of bailing them out. The U.S. can no longer afford an empire with which to dominate the world.

The U.S. no longer has hundreds of billions annually to hand over to the military industry. Those dollars have to be borrowed, and that undermines the U.S. economy.

Russian presidents have asked for accommodation with Washington, but Washington keeps pursuing aggressive policies toward Russia, putting missile bases in Poland and radar sites in the Czech Republic while attempting to install NATO in former constituent parts of the Soviet Union.

This is madness. When the Romans realized that they were overextended relative to their resources, they pulled back their imperial frontiers. The U.S. has so far refused to bring its imperial pretensions in line with its resources.

Why doesn’t Obama do what FDR did to end the Great Depression?

FDR was faced with a potential contraction of the money supply from bank failures. It is this 1930s problem upon which U.S. policy is currently focused. However, Obama is faced with greater problems than FDR because the government budget deficits could sink the dollar and remove the dollar from its reserve currency role. In the 1930s the U.S. economy was not dependent on imports, and the dollar’s exchange value was not jeopardized by oversupply—meaning there wasn’t an excess supply of dollars to dilute the dollar’s value. FDR had no difficulty keeping the trade balance manageable, but Obama might. 

The greatest problem with Obama’s bailouts is that they are being financed by issuing more U.S. Treasury debt, which taxpayers will end up having to pay. Interest will have to be paid on the trillions of borrowed dollars, and this will divert tax revenues from other uses. If the Treasury nationalized the banks, the U.S. government would not have to issue trillions of dollars in new Treasury debt to pay for bailouts and interest.

If government budget deficits are monetized, there’s a real risk of hyperinflation. Since hyperinflation means that the value of the dollar plummets, it could make it impossible for the U.S. to import energy, manufactured goods and advanced technology products. With energy disruptions would come supply disruptions to grocery stores and disrupted heating and electricity supplies. America would quickly learn what it is like to be a Third World country.

Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal is universally recognized as a national treasure. Born in West Point, New York, and raised in Washington, D.C., he began his literary career at the age of 19, producing a string of acclaimed novels, notably The City and the Pillar, Myra Breckenridge and Lincoln. Vidal became known for his frank views on sex and America’s moral hypocrisy. Reflecting his own reputation, he has said sex is a continuum, with everyone prone to varying degrees of preference. In addition, Vidal has also relied on his wit and intellect to skewer the political establishment while exposing the nature of power and ambition. Now 82, America’s premier man of letters has railed against the crimes of the Bush Administration and the neocon takeover of the U.S. in such recent best-sellers as Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta and Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia. The venerable wordsmith’s latest book is The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal.

HUSTLER: Over the years you’ve delivered your own annual State of the Union address to counter the President’s. What is the state of the Union in 2008?

GORE VIDAL: Not good. I’ve never seen it so messed up as it is now. The haves and have-nots are divided in a way that they’ve never been before in my lifetime, and I can remember the 1920s and the ’30s. There were rich people then, but there was never such a division. And I noticed that even the dumb-dumb press has picked up on class. I’ve never seen that word used in an American election. Even they’ve got it.

Are you still a committed Democrat?
Yes. I really believe, quite firmly—and with each passing day more strongly—that the Republican Party must be removed from the United States of America. It is not a political party in any usual sense; it is a mind-set of like-minded people who don’t like blacks, don’t like Jews, don’t like this, don’t like that. But they only express such among the racquet crowd or when they’re playing squash. I’ve always known that since I belonged to that class, but I’ve never seen them as totally unsound as they are now. I listen to [John] McCain whenever he’s on. [He is] as ridiculous a figure as has ever been proposed for President; he knows nothing. He’s sort of George W. Bush writ large, perhaps even smaller. Every time that goon starts to talk about radical Islam, it’s as if he’s talking about Hitler. Everything he says about the Islamo-terrorists is pure nonsense. I believe that the Republican Party in America is everything that McCain says the Muslims are. It’s a killer party constantly at war.

So the Republican Party doesn’t believe in democracy?
They never did. They believe in money, order, keeping the lower orders down.

It seems that no matter how many truths are presented, the Republicans will maintain the same old lie and get away with it.
Well, this is the era of [Karl] Rove. He may be gone from the White House, but they’re still playing by his book. You don’t have to teach Americans how to lie; they seem to be born knowing it, but lying has now become a major art form. It used to be creative writing. And you see, the thing about this country and the way publicity is manipulated, there is no lie that you can tell that you will ever be called on. It’s really a very unpleasant country. And I think that’s more and more obvious to more and more people.

For a lot of people, politicians like George W. Bush and John McCain embody the tough-guy/cowboy approach that is part of American mythology.
But [the people] have no knowledge of history. What have they got to measure anything against? [There was] the constant lie about Saddam Hussein being part of al Qaeda and [that] he bombed New York! That is a tragic story because he was a great frontman for us in that part of the world.

Who was responsible for 9/11?
American foreign policy, I suppose. They ticked off Osama bin Laden. I tend to believe his many comments on the subject, trying to get credit for it and so on. He’s the usual pig when it comes to PR. And I quite believe him [when he says], “Get your troops out of the Holy Land.” Americans can’t conceive of “holy land.” I mean for all the dumb religion Americans wallow in, they’re not religious at all. It was fascinating watching His Holiness here. I watched the whole thing on television. He’s a dicey person, but he’s Pope. He’s authority; Americans were just coming in their pants. Here was the Vicar of Christ on Earth, the heir of Peter, and oh boy, he’s a good actor too, and he learned a lot from his predecessor. You saw a people dying for authority, just dying to be told what to do. Except they don’t know what to do. Lose weight, I guess, is the only thing that’s really in their heads.

Are Americans aware they’re being lied to?
They pick up a lot. You should run for office sometime. I spent a couple of years on my first campaign for the House in Upstate New York and then a year and a half on the race for the Senate here [in California]. I got half a million votes saying exactly whatever popped into my mind. It worked perfectly well. As long as you don’t deliberately bore them, I think Americans will pay attention. They have their likes and dislikes, and it’s hard to generalize the population. Mr. Rove knew how to do it, but he worked very narrowly. He was thinking about elections; he was not thinking about what the people want. “Was this a good move or a bad move for America?” None of that, [but rather]: “Will my candidate win and by how many votes?” Rove had a kind of genius for our darkest natures. He knew how to play them.

 Why do so many Americans fall for that kind of manipulation?
Have you seen the educational system? Have you seen the media? [There’s] no education that any proper country would recognize as being education; they don’t know any history. Why do you think I’ve been teaching them history for 40 or 50 years now? This was not my dream. This should have been done by the schools, but the schools don’t do it.

And the media doesn’t do it. Worse, it mistakes fiction for nonfiction.

It seems like the corporate media has the same agenda as the corporations that control our politicians.
What’s the surprise there? What’s a corporation to do? Ever since the 14th Amendment, they’re allowed to be entities like human beings. They can sue in the courts as though they were individuals who have been outraged, libeled. And, of course, they’re mostly hoods.

You used to appear frequently on TV. Why haven’t we seen Gore Vidal lately?
They know that I’m bad news ’cause I say awfully shocking things.

Are you concerned about the Democratic Party moving even farther to the right because of its strong corporate ties?
Well, how could they not be? This is the United States. You’re asking corporations to stay out of politics? That’s how they make their living.

The United States has been hollowed out intentionally and is now broke. None of this is an accident, is it? That’s a little too conspiratorial for me. I’ve known low-class families like George W. Bush’s. They’re just from the gutter with aspirations for the stars. But the whole story about him and his family is told in that weeping jag that his father had on television when Jeb [Bush] was retiring from politics. [Jeb] was supposed to be the President. And the other one just skipped out of line and rushed at it and took it. And apparently [George W.] really is offended that his parents don’t like him as much as they like Jeb. They’re wistful about Jeb, what he might have done. I have no great respect for the old man. They are not bright bulbs from the Christmas tree of the American dream. They’re the ones that sputter and make that awful sound when they’re about to go out. But obviously the old man knows he sent a real lemon to the White House, and there was nothing to be done about it because the old boy was playing the dirtiest politics on Earth. I mean, he picked up Rove out of the dust. And a lot of undesirable neocons. Junior was their creature, and his father certainly must have known it but didn’t like it. His father is, I gather, an old-fashioned WASP with a dislike for the Jews and did not like being bossed around by Tel Aviv or wherever the commands come from. Nor did Dubya at the beginning. He bit back once or twice and decided it wasn’t worth the battle.

So you’re acknowledging that Israel has a lot of influence on our foreign policy?
Nobody in their right mind would say no. But there are a lot of people who are not in their right mind because it doesn’t suit their career moves to say so.

And why we’re in Iraq and probably soon in Iran is heavily influenced by Israeli policy as well? You said this; I didn’t say it. But I assume something like that, of course.

And in conjunction with oil interests of the United States?
Yes, and the political aspirations of a bunch of third-raters. Look at Rome—largely the new rich took over. That’s the kind of government we’ve got. But [Bush] is an easy target. The fact that he made it there is interesting. And what is interesting are the Roves, the neocons. This is a little cabal which is not acting in the interest of the American people because the neocons don’t know who Americans are, and if they knew, they wouldn’t like them. They have great contempt for Americans.

Do you think Americans see through that?
Well, how can you acknowledge anything as traumatic as what has happened to us? I mean you have to realize there’s been a revolution. You didn’t know what was going on, and you didn’t know who was maneuvering it. There was no opposition to it, at least none that anybody seems to have heard.

What is the role of the military-industrial complex?
Well, it governs everything. That’s why I go out and raise money and speak for various Congressional candidates, because the House of Representatives [which can vote against military funding] is the only thing we have close to democracy. It’s not very close, but it’s close. And with people like [Dennis] Kucinich and so on, there’s a real chance that good actions can come out of it. So I wear myself out, lose my voice, hoping there’ll be a change of heart out there in the great prairie.

It seems as though there are two types of politicians. John F. Kennedy had compassion and could see himself projected into the future and be concerned about how history would judge him. Then we have politicians like George W. Bush who can’t project into the future at all.
He’s too busy working to see there is no future.

Is it fair to say that a person like Kennedy cares?
That’s totally wrong. You want to believe it, to feel better. [But] the others are not necessarily assholes. They are convinced they are doing what is right for the country. I come from a [famous political] family, the Gore family.We [have been] consistently an antiwar family. [My grandfather] opposed World War I. He was one of the heads of the America First movement, as was I. These were old-fashioned patriots.

But Franklin D. Roosevelt did change things.
Well, he’s been much sentimentalized and romanticized. He was like nobody that you’ve ever read about. He was megalomaniacal. He did great damage to the republic, and I think rather intended to. In 1960 I was running for Congress; Jack [John F. Kennedy] was running for President. Mrs. Roosevelt didn’t like him, and I was doing my best to bring her around. I remember one afternoon she said, “Do you realize that there are people today who have never heard of the Depression? How do they not know?” That’s one of the great facts of the 20th century. The whole economy had crashed, and capitalism was about to be destroyed. Roosevelt saved it for the ungrateful assholes.

Are we on the verge of another Depression?
Yeah, I think we are. But the solution is so simple: You stop the wars! Trillions are now going nowhere.

What about corporate control in the 1920s and the Depression that resulted. Is that what we’re seeing today?
It’s an ongoing atrophy of the democratic principle.

History shows that once you have an economic collapse, fascism is next.
Oh, it’s been here quite some time.

So how do we start the revolution?
Take the White House!

If you were President, what would you focus on?
The restoration of the Constitution. It’s going to take two generations to get over what Bush did, particularly to the federal branch. He’s got every lunatic they could find. They find the worst person possible for these jobs. And where does this come from? It’s a weird thing: somebody trying to overthrow a government from the office of President.

What kind of President do we need?
The President who wants to say, “I am going to restore the Constitution of the United States of America. I will restore the Bill of Rights.” The only way you can advance in the United States is to go backwards. That’s the only thing people understand. We had a good beginning and a bad present, so refer to the beginning and make it the present.