Larry Flynt's Blog, page 17

Why Isn’t Pot Legal?

With polls showing that 50% of Americans favor the legalization of marijuana, why aren’t steps being taken to make that a reality? Blame those that have the most to lose from legal weed: the pharmaceutical, alcohol and prison industries. Pharmaceutical companies don’t want people turning to pot for pain relief because it would mean fewer customers buying prescription medications. Brewers and distillers don’t want the competition either. With mounting scientific evidence that pot is safer than alcohol, legal marijuana would clearly put a major dent in the booze business’s profits. Private, for-profit prisons only make money if they’re filled to capacity, and that means locking up weed growers and pot smokers.

Coming: The Total Surveillance State?

AIRCRAFT WITHOUT PILOTS, PASSENGERS OR BEVERAGE CARTS—JUST CAMERAS AIMED AT YOU—MAY SOON FILL THE SKY

by Nat Hentoff

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Barack Obama have convinced some Americans that no matter how or where they express themselves, their thoughts may wind up in a Big Brother database. But most of us are more preoccupied with immediate, all-too-real fears like higher gasoline prices and unemployment.

In his article “Dawn of the Drone: The Realization of the Total Surveillance State,” the Rutherford Institute’s John Whitehead offers a scarier scenario: implementation of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Reauthorization Act. In a few years, this legislation may prompt a lot of us to look skyward with chilling apprehension.

“Imagine a robot hovering overhead as you go about your day, driving to and from your work,” Whitehead envisions. “The robot records your every movement with a surveillance camera and streams the information to a government command center. … If you make a wrong move or even appear to be doing something suspicious, the police will respond quickly.”

You see, the FAA Reauthorization Act mandates that there will be about 30,000 pilotless aircraft in our skies by 2020. As I’ve reported, these ghostlike carriers of surveillance cameras have already been sent out by the Department of Homeland Security and local and state police to observe “suspicious” activists’ meetings or to follow likely narcotics distributors.

The ACLU insists that “drones not be deployed indiscriminately unless there are grounds to believe the unmanned aerial planes will collect evidence about a specific crime.” Voicing optimism, the ACLU also acknowledges, “If we can set some good privacy ground rules, our society can enjoy the benefits of this technology without having to worry about its darker potentials.”

We’ll all be protected under the supposedly transparent Obama Administration? And in view of the millions of dollars to be harvested by the aviation industry thanks to law enforcement’s delight in the drone, would a Republican administration be any more of a threat to the rapidly fading Fourth Amendment than Obama and our current Congressional leaders?

Regarding drones, John Whitehead is a deeply experienced realist: “Until the American people succeed in raising their collective voices against this technological tyranny, the powers that be will continue on the path of total control, and the condition of our civil liberties will become more dire with every passing day.”

So will this really be “the realization of the total surveillance state”? Don’t count on it. I have never forgotten the dissenting opinion of Justice Louis Brandeis in the U.S. Supreme Court’s first wiretapping case, Olmstead v. United States (1928). Recognizing that the creation of inventive technologies would be boundless, he wrote: “Ways may someday be developed by which the government, without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court, and by which it will be enabled to expose to a jury the most intimate occurrences of the home.”

In Constitution 3.0: Freedom and Technological Change, Jeffrey Rosen—whose byline on these dread matters I never miss—wrote: “The technologies that Brandeis imagined have now come to pass—and they do not only affect privacy; they affect a broad range of Constitutional values.”

Here is how the ACLU is trying to protect you: “Now we have joined together with our coalition partner, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, to petition the FAA to ‘address the threat to privacy and civil liberties involved in the integration of drones in the national airspace.’” Remember: Some drones may soon have facialrecognition capability.

“You should sign too,” the ACLU continues. “Let’s make it clear that Americans are deeply concerned that drones not become a common feature of our skies until strong privacy protections are in place to ensure they do not become tools for routine aerial surveillance of American life.”

Are we “deeply concerned”? Then how come we don’t make that clear? For instance, do you know or care that the FBI publishes characteristics of people we should report as possible terrorists? As U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) notes in his National Review Online article “Indefinite Detention and American Citizens,” the list includes “the possession of ‘meals ready-toeat,’ missing fingers, brightly colored stains on clothing, paying for products in cash and changes in hair color.”

Like his father, Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas), Rand Paul is one of the few members of Congress who truly cares about Americans’ right to privacy. So when you see a drone up in the sky, try to look as if you’re not a national security risk.

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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.

Richard Heinberg: Salvaging the American Dream

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.

Can The Constitution Survive Obama’s Reelection?

THE NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT FURTHER SOURS THE SWEET LAND OF LIBERTY

by Nat Hentoff

When the Tea Partiers broke into the national consciousness, with copies of the Constitution in their pockets as they rallied, I was too quickly impressed. I titled one of my syndicated columns “The New American Revolution.” But in the months since President Barack Obama signed a law passed by a bipartisan Congress that smashes key parts of the Bill of Rights, the Tea Partiers have not risen to defend those most basic personal liberties. Nor have Republicans, except for a few, been publicly criticizing the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The Democrats, of course, are nearly unanimous in support of their hollow leader.

On that fateful day—December 31, 2011— ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero declared that Obama “will forever be known as the President who signed indefinite detention, without charge or trial, into law. The statute is particularly dangerous because it has no temporal or geographic limitations, and can be used by this and future Presidents to militarily detain people captured far from any battlefield.” This includes American citizens caged (a more accurate term than detained ) right here in this country.

In his signing statement, Obama tried to pretend that by interpreting the law in his own regal way, American citizens won’t be subject to detention by the military. He’s the boss!

But, Mr. President, even you cannot “interpret” what is plainly in the NDAA. Enter former federal judges Abner Mikva, William Sessions and John Gibbons, who are cited in an Antiwar.com article by Carl Mirra.They warn that the law “codifies methods such as indefinite detention without charge and mandatory military detention and make[s] them applicable to virtually anyone…including U.S. citizens.”

And dig this from the same story: Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) “is one of the few supporters of the NDAA to plainly admit that ‘the statement of authority to detain does apply to American citizens, and it designates the world as the battlefield, including the homeland.’” Whose homeland?

That American citizens can and will be subject to military imprisonment subverts the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee that “no person shall be compelled in any criminal case to be… deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law.” Yet Senator Carl Levin (D-Michigan) maintains that a law existing before Obama signed the NDAA has been held by the U.S. Supreme Court as having no bar “to indefinite detention of American citizens.” But the High Court also gave habeas corpus rights to such prisoners. And it has yet to rule on a law that radically nullified the Fifth Amendment’s very core of the American system of justice.

There’s more to this astonishing transmogrification of what all Presidents embrace as “our values.” Remember the controversy surrounding previous administrations’ renditions? The CIA would kidnap suspected terrorists, then send them to foreign nations known for torturing their captives during “enhanced interrogations.”

As pointed out by Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fitrakis in the article “2012’s Civil Liberties Apocalypse Has Already Happened,” the NDAA “allows trial by military tribunal, or ‘transfer to the custody or control of the person’s country of origin’ or transfer to ‘any other foreign country or any other foreign entity.’” Any other country? Huh? Somalia? North Korea? Afghanistan?

To what extent will Obama’s signature on this utter contempt for the Bill of Rights affect the President’s reelection campaign? This could depend on how many American voters are familiar with the Bill of Rights. And even if they are, how many have paid attention to the National Defense Authorization Act? Jonathan Turley—one of this country’s most knowledgeable civil liberties lawyers and law professors— notes: “The almost complete failure of the mainstream media to cover this issue is shocking. Many reporters have bought into the spin of the Obama Administration as they did the spin over torture by the Bush Administration.”

Affirming my belief that the Constitution has virtually become wastepaper, Wasserman and Fitrakis have come to this doomsday conclusion: “What most of the nation doesn’t realize is that the end of our basic civil liberties, in place since the December 1791 ratification of the Bill of Rights, has already taken place.”

If Obama manages to occupy the White House for another four years, America will continue turning into a country the Founding Fathers would deplore. Not that I have faith in a Republican coming to the rescue.

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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; Living the Bill of Rights ; and the forthcoming Is This Still America?

Mitt Romney: Greed-Run-Wild Apostle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Before serving almost 30 years as a Los Angeles Times columnist and editor, Robert Scheer spent the late 1960s as Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor in chief of Ramparts magazine. Now editor of TruthDig.com, Scheer has written such hardhitting books as The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America and his latest, The Great American Stick-Up: Greedy Bankers and the Politicians Who Love Them.

The Problem with Florida

I have no way of knowing with certainty what really transpired in Sanford, Florida, between Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman on that fateful night of February 26, 2012, although it appears Zimmerman was out looking for trouble. However, I can say with certainty that the Stand Your Ground law signed by Florida Governor Jeb Bush back in 2005 has been nothing but a prescription for disaster.

Essentially the statute allows any licensed gun owner to shoot someone if he or she feels “reasonably” threatened by that person—even if that person is unarmed. In effect, this has turned the entire state of Florida into the Wild West, where deadly shootouts were once commonplace. Already 200 people in Florida have been killed as a result of the Stand Your Ground law. According to press reports, many of the victims were unarmed.

Most disturbing, 25 other states have followed Florida’s example by passing similar laws. Is this really the America we want? I don’t think so.

Homeland Security and FBI Getting Sneakier Than Ever

REMEMBER THOSE CLAIRVOYANT COPS IN THE TOM CRUISE MOVIE MINORITY REPORT? THEY JUST MIGHT BE AROUND THE CORNER.

Nat Hentoff

President Obama’s ever-suspicious Department of Homeland Security is, of course, “renowned” for earnestly probing the private parts of travelers at U.S. airports. But the range of its inquiries into likely disloyal Americans is growing wider and deeper. Dig this header for a dispatch from the international news agency Reuters: “Homeland Security watches Twitter, social media.” That’s just to start with.

Journalist Mark Hosenball reported that since June 2010, Secretary Janet Napolitano and her insatiable Homeland Security colleagues have been “operating a ‘Social Networking/Media Capability,’ which involves regular monitoring of ‘publicly available online forums, blogs, public Web sites and message boards.’”

Hosenball also wrote that “such monitoring is designed to help DHS and its numerous agencies,” including the Secret Service and Federal Emergency Management Agency.

They may be looking at some of you on such Internet targets as YouTube and Facebook. And if you express opinions via Twitter or popular blogs, you may be databased for what you leave there. If you believe your government, then you’ll believe the DHS official who pledged that “the department would not keep permanent copies of the Internet traffic it monitors.” The DHS vows to hold it only “for no more than five years.” But whom will the Department of Homeland Security give it to then? The FBI, the CIA, the National Security Agency? That’s not for citizens to know. Aren’t you aware there’s a war on?

This rampant tracking of us, which is funded by our tax money, is conducted at the DHS’s National Operations Center (NOC).What is surely going to more than casually interest many journalists looking into this massive surveillance operation is that they too are being monitored and cataloged even though there is barely a shred of evidence that those winding up in this dragnet have done anything illegal.

On January 7, 2012, RT (formerly Russia Today ) reported on a Department of Homeland Security announcement that the NOC’s Office of Operations Coordination “can collect personal information from news anchors, journalists, reporters or anyone who may use ‘traditional and/or social media in real time to keep their audience situationally aware and informed.’”

On what Constitutional grounds is the government digging into the personal lives of journalists doing their job? Now that I’ve asked this hostile question, I guess the Department of Homeland Security and its Big Brother cohorts will eventually find out I have an FBI file starting with my long and irreverent disrespect for J. Edgar Hoover. On one page, an FBI official instructed his field hands: “Watch Hentoff!” My favorite insertion in that file was a footnote in a report to Hoover about something I’d written questioning whether the bureau’s longtime director had ever read the Constitution.

Said footnote went beyond characterizing me as “a person of interest.” It also mentioned: “Besides, he’s a lousy writer.” I figured that if I were to ever sue that FBI agent for defamation and lose, the upholding of the FBI’s judgment on what I do for a living could have hurt my career. Meanwhile, Robert Mueller’s FBI—I guess he has that lifetime director job now—is going much further to discover not only what citizens have allegedly done to threaten national security but also what we’re supposedly thinking of doing.

On January 26, 2012, DigitalTrends.com delivered a chilling preview of how the government can track our most speculative thoughts, not even dim intentions:“The FBI is looking into the creation of a new application that would allow them to not only monitor ongoing threats but also predict potential terrorist attacks and other crimes before they even happen. … If that sounds suspiciously like Minority Report, you’re not alone.”

This reference was a reminder that Minority Report , starring Tom Cruise, had scared me when I first viewed it. The 2002 film revolved around special cops in the year 2054 who could actually read the minds of people who looked law-abiding but would soon terrorize.

So what are we to make of today’s snooping? It is painfully clear that everything we post online is being watched. And if the FBI gets its new social media alert application—which seems inevitable— the eyes with which it scrutinizes our tweets and other messages will have superhuman vision. Less obvious is how the government’s quest to “protect” the public good will be abused by technology to further trample legitimate free speech.

Since the 9/11 attacks, Republican and Democratic majorities in Congress, as well as Presidents Bush and Obama, have shredded the U.S. Constitution. Keep and protect a copy of your own lest it be banned eventually.

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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; Living the Bill of Rights ; and the forthcoming Is This Still America?

Alex Prud’ Homme: Saving Water Drop by Drop

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

Presidency for Sale

UNRESTRICTED CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS HAVE MADE NATIONAL ELECTIONS A SHAM.

by Robert Scheer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Before serving almost 30 years as a Los Angeles Times columnist and editor, Robert Scheer spent the late 1960s as Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor in chief of Ramparts magazine. Now editor of TruthDig.com, Scheer has written such hardhitting books as The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America and his latest, The Great American Stick-Up: Greedy Bankers and the Politicians Who Love Them.

The War on Birth Control

Incredible as it might seem, the Republicans want to turn the clock back to 1937, when contraception was still illegal in this country. That’s what will happen if Personhood USA and several other groups have their way. They are placing—on numerous state ballots—a proposed constitutional amendment declaring that life begins at conception. If passed, this measure not only would likely ban abortions under virtually any circumstances (including rape and incest), but it would also ban birth control methods like the IUD and Plan B emergency contraceptive. Even the Pill could be history.

Worse still, the amendment would prevent married women from conceiving children via in vitro fertilization. The Personhood Amendment will be up for a vote in at least 12 states. Presidential hopefuls Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul have all signed a pledge supporting it. Mitt Romney didn’t sign but has agreed that life begins at conception, the basis of the anti choice measure.

I don’t believe there’s any way the American people will let the GOP get away with this. If the Republicans aren’t careful, they will sow the seeds of their own destruction.