Progressive immigration policy is not only politically wise; it is just. Undocumented immigrants and their children contribute to our economy and have earned the rights of all Americans. A reform plan without citizenship would create a new Jim Crow reality: They’d have the right to live here—but only as second class citizens. That would be wrong and completely at odds with American values.

This is a country of immigrants, and as long as it leads the world in freedom and opportunity, it always will be. It is also a rapidly changing society. The only way to ensure that our hard-won progress toward greater freedom and tolerance is embraced and carried forward by new citizens is to allow them to personally experience its benefits themselves.

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

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

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

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

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

And have fun while I was doing it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And you were against cosmetic surgery.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As I chronicled in my book Living the Bill of Rights, Otis told the magistrates: “The freedom of one’s house is an essential liberty, and any law which violates that privacy is an instrument of slavery and villainy.”

Otis lost the case, but in the courtroom was a lawyer named John Adams (later our second President), who wrote in his notebook that very night: “Every man of an immense crowded audience appeared to me to go away as I did, ready to take arms against writs of assistance. Then and there was the first scene of the first act of opposition to the arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and there the child Independence was born.”

Otis subsequently proclaimed in a pamphlet that those writs violated the British constitution and Magna Carta. Hence, as I have told American schoolchildren over the years, they inspired the Fourth Amendment to our Constitution. This part of the Bill of Rights guards against unreasonable searches and seizures and decrees that any warrant be judicially sanctioned and supported by probable cause.

Adams later wrote, “Otis was a flame of fire [that night].” But since 9/11 the Bush- Cheney Administration and Barack Obama’s even more harshly have dimmed that flame.

And now our lawmakers practically eviscerated the Fourth Amendment on December 28, 2012. As Robert Pear reported in the New York Times, “Congress gave final approval… to a bill extending the government’s power to intercept electronic communications of spy and terrorism suspects after the Senate voted down proposals from several Democrats and Republicans to increase protections of civil liberties and privacy.” The vote was 73 to 23.

The dissenters worried that electronic surveillance, though directed at suspected non-citizens abroad in contact with Americans, “inevitably swept up communications of Americans as well.”

More pointedly, despite President Obama’s strong support of the bill and its passage in the House of Representatives, Senate Democrat Richard J. Durbin of Illinois reminded those few of us who were paying attention that this extension of the government’s surveillance authority for five more years “does not have adequate checks and balances to protect the Constitutional rights of innocent American citizens.”

How many of us are still regarded by our intelligence agencies as “innocent American citizens”?

Dig this from Pear’s report: Senator Mark Udall (D-Colorado) said he and Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) “were concerned that ‘a loophole’ in the 2008 law [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] ‘could allow the government to effectively conduct warrantless searches for Americans’ communications.’”

Of course, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. told Congress, “There is no loophole in the law.” So how come, fellow Americans, Pear reported that “by a vote of 52 to 43, the Senate…rejected a proposal by Mr. Wyden to require the national intelligence director to tell Congress if the government had collected any domestic e-mail or telephone conversations under the surveillance law”?

In the midst of Republican and Democratic administrations’ reluctance to tell We the People what the hell is going on as the government invades our privacy ever more contemptuously, Senator Wyden told his colleagues that this impervious secrecy from on high “reminded him of the ‘general warrants that so upset the colonists’ more than 200 years ago.” Me too.

Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) noted, “The Fourth Amendment was written in a different time and a different age, but its necessity and its truth are timeless.” He added: “Over the past few decades, our right to privacy has been eroded. We have become lazy and haphazard in our vigilance.”

We’ll long be paying for our laziness in ways we will not even know while those we keep electing continue to pry into our lives.

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Nat Hentoff is a historian of the Constitution, a jazz critic and a columnist for the Village Voice and Free Inquiry. His incisive books include The First Freedom: The Tumultuous History of Free Speech in America and Living the Bill of Rights.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moreover, it is a right that must also be extended to our presumed adversaries. Yet— and this high crime is even more vicious than the assault on the bodies and minds of so many prisoners—the right of the accused to the presumption of innocence until proven guilty in a fair court of law has been obliterated by the leaders of our nation on an unprecedented international scale. Check the OSF report for the details of our depravity and then demand of our leaders that such horrid acts never again be conducted in our name.
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Before serving almost 30 years as a Los Angeles Times columnist and editor, Robert Scheer spent the late 1960s as Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor in chief of Ramparts magazine. He is now editor of TruthDig.com. His latest book is The Great American Stick-Up: Greedy Bankers and the Politicians Who Love Them.

Carmen “Killer” Ortiz hit the national radar early this year when Swartz—an Internet activist and technological whiz kid who, at the age of 26, had already pioneered cutting-edge social-networking systems—hanged himself after landing in Ortiz’s clutches.

What did he do that merited a soul-crushing federal indictment? Expose national security secrets? Hack into the nuclear codes? No, he downloaded content from JSTOR, a database of scholarly articles openly accessible to universities all over the country. And what did he plan to do with it? Plagiarize it? Sell it for illegal profit? No, he was going to distribute it free of charge, believing that everyone should have free access to educational content.

JSTOR must have pressed for Swartz to be sent up the river, right? Wrong. JSTOR got all its content back and refused to press charges! If anything called for the proverbial slap on the wrist, this was it.

But Ortiz, always on the lookout to score cheap political brownie points, knew low-hanging fruit when she saw it. She sent her ass-sucking henchman, Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann—a G-man with a notorious hard-on for hackers—after Swartz. Heymann’s prosecution had already driven another young hacker, Jonathan James, to suicide after naming him in an identity theft and hacking case.

Ortiz’s office slapped Swartz with four felony counts that could have put him behind bars for 35 years and financially crippled him with $1 million in fines. But she was just getting warmed up. Even though Ortiz knew that Swartz suffered from severe depression, her office upped the felony count to 13. That meant a possible 50 years. Basically, a life sentence for the victimless, nonviolent crime of downloading some fucking college papers!

That’s what’s called prosecutorial abuse. Read that carefully, Ortiz. Our lawyers already have. So if you want to come after us, fuck you!

Now let’s consider this carefully for a moment. A brilliant, ambitious young mind with all the potential of a fledgling Bill Gates, working at the forefront of a field in which our country desperately needs to excel to remain a world leader in innovation, is snuffed out by an aging, dogmatic and vindictive dinosaur who has never so much as innovated a new way to wipe her ass.

“Objection!” Ortiz would no doubt screech at this point. Like most overzealous benchwarmers, she drapes her absolutist, all-or-nothing interpretation of the law in bloated sanctimony. When justified objections started flying as she carefully wove Swartz’s judicial noose, she bellowed, “Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar.” That’s the same kind of shit medieval magistrates spewed before torturing people to death for stealing a loaf of bread. These days we have something called judicial discretion that is supposed to keep the legal process from turning into an inhuman nightmare.

Flaunting the basic precept that a defendant is innocent until proven guilty, Ortiz’s office has a history of shifting the burden of proof onto its targets. Under Ortiz’s watch, DEA agents allegedly combed through crime reports to find juicy real estate that could be seized under a statute that allows for forced forfeiture of assets with suspected links to crime. In one case, the Feds grabbed a shabby little Massachusetts motel because of some minor drug offenses even though the owners were never accused of wrongdoing. Here too, Ortiz’s goons went after easy pickins: small fries that couldn’t mount a costly defense. The magistrate judge reviewing the case ended up laughing it out of court. As Swartz’s loved ones can attest, most of Ortiz’s victims haven’t been that lucky.

Eager to add an anti-terrorist stripe to her robes, Ortiz once hunted down a pharmacist who posted stupid pro-al-Qaeda YouTube videos for “conspiring to kill Americans overseas.” No actual link to any planned attack was ever proven, and the defendant claimed he was being persecuted for not being an FBI informant. But Ortiz knew that few people would give a shit if the guy rotted in jail, so that’s where he landed. Meanwhile, she got to strut around like the baddest bitch in Boston.

If there’s one good thing to come out of the Aaron Swartz tragedy, it’s that Carmen Ortiz’s path to a coveted seat on the U.S. Supreme Court is now so strewn with bodies, it’s a longshot she’ll ever get there. No President is going to relish the crapfest of an Ortiz confirmation that would be sure to get shitcanned anyway.

As it is, Ortiz will be lucky if she keeps her current gig. Aaron Swartz was a hero to many fighting for Internet freedom. Even in death, he has some high-powered allies who are now turning their sights on Ortiz. As for the Obama Administration that originally applauded her as Massachusetts’s first Latina U.S. Attorney, she’ll be lucky if anyone takes her calls.

Here’s a nasty footnote to the Swartz chapter: Ortiz’s husband, Tom Dolan, saw fit to lash out at the grieving parents by tweeting that they purposefully ignored his wife’s rejected plea offer. What’s wrong, Tom? Home life a little tense these days married to America’s hated Lady Injustice?

The best way to remember Aaron Swartz is, of course, to go online and read all about him. Once you do, you’ll understand why his death is such a big loss. Check out his story at his own activist site DemandProgress.org. It’s free for all to read.

For Immediate Release

AN OPEN LETTER FROM LARRY FLYNT TO MARK SANFORD: “I WILL NEVER DIVORCE YOU.”

(May 2, 2013 – Beverly Hills, CA)

Dear Governor Sanford,

In a vain gesture to achieve respectability, your refusal to accept my endorsement and financial contribution of $2,600 for being America’s great sex pioneer has hurt my tender feelings.

First, you threw your wife overboard. Now you have tossed me aside. I will support you in spite of your hopeless posturing. Nothing can deter me. I came in to save you, like a member of SEAL Team 6, after the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) left you as road kill.

I would remind you Governor, that beggars cannot be choosers. While you have treated me like you have your former wife, you embrace Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) and proudly brandish his endorsement. But now the intelligent voters of South Carolina’s 1st District are asking whether or not you support Sen. Paul’s positions in favor of legalizing marijuana and deploying drones within the United States. Is there anyone you wish to target on Hilton Head?

Regardless of your answers to these and other questions, however reckless, dangerous or euphoric, I will always remain your staunchest supporter for the blow you have struck against traditional values.

I will never divorce you.

Sincerely,

Larry Flynt

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For press inquiries, email Media@LFP.com or call (323) 651-5400.

SANFORD OPEN LETTER 05-02-13

Sanford, who gained national prominence in 2009 as governor of South Carolina when he abruptly abandoned his duties for a secret rendezvous with his mistress, is currently running against Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch for South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District seat. The election will take place on May 7.

In a statement released today, Flynt calls Sanford “the sex pioneer of our time.” In Flynt’s eyes “no one has done more to expose the sexual hypocrisy of traditional values in America today. Sanford’s open embrace of his mistress in the name of love, breaking his sacred marriage vows, was an act of bravery that has drawn my support.” Chastising the Republican Party for not backing Sanford following his run-off victory, Flynt declared: “I am willing to step in and stand erect for Mark Sanford.”

Flynt further elaborated: “My endorsement has not been an easy decision for me. Even though Mark Sanford has emerged as the leader against sexual hypocrisy in American politics, he is a liar. He lied to his gubernatorial staff. He lied to his wife. He lied to his children. He lied to the people of South Carolina and to the press. Despite his journey down this Appalachian Trail of deceit, I support him not for his character, but for exposing the hypocrisy of traditional values. The liar has exposed the greater lie.” Flynt also commended Sanford’s supporters for “tossing aside lifelong convictions” and “teaching their children the invaluable lesson that traditional values are nothing more than a scam.”

Watch Larry’s Video on YouTube

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For press inquiries, email Media@LFP.com or call (323) 651-5400.

Twenty-five years ago I was in major-league trouble. I had picked a fight with preacher Jerry Falwell by making fun of him in a 1983 parody ad in this magazine. He claimed libel, and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court. Did anybody think I could win it? Hell no. But in 1988 I did—and by unanimous decision.

I learned a few things back then. One: Free speech is not something you can take for granted. Two: Starting trouble is worth it if your cause is just. And three: The bigger the enemy, the messier the fight.

I’m proud of what I did, but I know you don’t always win. Will Wall Street stop being driven by greed because thousands of troublemakers occupied it? No, but they showed that even in our cynical time, people still give a damn. Are you more likely to win your case if you flip off the judge? No, but it shows that the independent human spirit is alive and kicking. That, ultimately, is what justice in our country is measured against: the independent human spirit striving for freedom.

Keep in mind that starting trouble can be a lonely business. When I took my free-speech case to the Supreme Court, I was on my own. Now everyone’s reaping the benefits of my victory. Sometimes it may seem like you don’t have a chance of winning, but you sure as hell won’t if you don’t try.

Not a lot of people have gone looking for trouble as much as I have, and I have the scars to prove it. Everything I know I learned the hard way. Why didn’t I ever learn my lesson and shut the hell up? Because life may be a bitch when you’re fighting for freedom, but the other option is worse.

My greatest hope is that the next generation will look at what I’ve done and realize that sometimes there’s no greater honor than being a righteous pain in the ass.

But on the occasion the Wall Street Journal ran “U.S. Terrorism Agency to Tap a Vast Database of Citizens,” a front-page story by Julia Angwin. She reported that Attorney General Eric Holder—without a peep of protest from President Obama—signed rules that “now allow the little-known National Counterterrorism Center to examine the government files of U.S. citizens for possible criminal behavior, even if there is no reason to suspect them. That is a departure from past practice.”

So much for due process and the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee of privacy. Moreover, Angwin noted, “The agency has new authority to keep data about innocent U.S. citizens for up to five years and to analyze it for suspicious patterns of behavior. Previously, both were prohibited.” And if that wasn’t enough to shock Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in their graves, “The changes also allow databases of U.S. civilian information to be given to foreign governments for analysis of their own.” For future crimes by us.

But why now snatch the very heart of the Bill of Rights and throw it into the incinerator? You must have guessed why, and the Wall Street Journal was on it: “Under the new rules issued in March [2012],” Angwin reported, “the National Counterterrorism Center, known as NCTC, can obtain almost any database the government collects that it says is ‘reasonably believed’ to contain ‘terrorism information.’ The list could potentially include almost any government database, from financial forms submitted by people seeking federally backed mortgages to the health records of people who sought treatment at Veterans Administration hospitals.”

“Reasonably believed”? By what criteria? And will those “suspicious” people even know they’re in one of these databases, which could conceivably stigmatize them for the rest of their lives? And since all of this is done secretly, these citizens will have no chance to defend themselves.

Did you know about this “forced retirement” of our Constitution? One former senior administration official told Angwin that it’s “breathtaking” in its scope. Of course, he didn’t reveal his name. And where was the rest of the media? I saw little about this elsewhere.

I have more questions on this sudden flashing red light vis-à-vis what has been eroding this self-governing republic’s very reason for being since 9/11: In how many of our classrooms have future voters been told about how Obama and Holder—along with Bush and Cheney before them—have wholly betrayed their oath of office to protect the Constitution? And if there have been any discussions, how many students or teachers are concerned about or even sensitive to what this country is turning into?

In one of the few other coverages of this rape of the Bill of Rights, Wired magazine posted on its website an article titled “Attorney General Secretly Granted Gov. Ability to Develop and Store Dossiers on Innocent Americans.” Author Kim Zetter pointed out that “the request to expand the [National Counterterrorism] center’s powers led to a heated debate at the White House and the Department of Homeland Security, with Mary Ellen Callahan—then-chief privacy officer for the Department of Homeland Security—leading the charge to defend civil liberties. Callahan argued that the new rules represented a ‘sea change’ and that every interaction a citizen would have with the government in the future would be ruled by the underlying question, is that person a terrorist?

“Callahan lost her battle, however, and subsequently left her job, though it’s not known if her struggle over the NCTC debate played a role in her decision to leave.”

Have there been any related resignations from the Obama Administration, whose blatant disregard for privacy is making America more like China and Iran than what used to be an admired land of liberty?

I’m intensely interested in whether there have been any classroom or workplace debates on this throttling of who we are. Then again, how many Americans even remember who we’re supposed to be?

If Eric Holder hasn’t already added me to one of his lists of “suspicious” citizens, I expect he already knows my address.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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