Larry Flynt's Blog, page 22

BOB WOODWARD THE STORY HE WON'T TELL

IS AMERICA'S FAVORITE INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER A GOVERNMENT OPERATIVE? POLITICAL COMMENTATOR RUSS BAKER OFFERS INTRIGUING EVIDENCE!

By Russ Baker

From HUSTLER MAGAZINE July 2011

In June 2009,Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward traveled to Afghanistan with General Jim Jones, then President Obama's National Security Advisor, to meet with General Stanley McChrystal, then the commander of forces there. Why did Jones allow this journalist to accompany him? Because he knew that Woodward could be counted on to deliver the company line—the military line. In fact, Jones was essentially Woodward's patron.

The New Republic's Gabriel Sherman pointed out that when Sally Quinn and Ben Bradlee hosted a 50th-birthday party for Woodward's wife, reporter Elsa Walsh,"Jones was a guest of Woodward. "According to Sherman, one attendee told him, "Woodward and Elsa were glued to Jones at the cocktail party before the dinner started."

In September 2009, McChrystal (or someone close to him) leaked a document to Woodward that essentially forced Obama's hand. The President wanted time to consider all options on what to do about Afghanistan. But the leak, publicizing the military's "confidential" assertion that a troop increase was essential, cast the die, and Obama had to go along. Nobody was happier than the Pentagon—and, it should be said, its allies in the vast military-contracting establishment.

FireDogLake.com chronicled the developments in a pungent essay: "Apparently General McChrystal and the Petraeus cabal aren't willing to wait for their Commander in Chief to set the strategy. Prior to the President's interviews, McChrystal's people were already telling journalists that they were 'impatient with Obama,' as Nancy Youssef reported. This 'Power Play'… included a veiled threat that McChrystal would resign if he didn't get his way.

"And, sure enough, just hours after the Commander in Chief was on the airwaves, somehow McChrystal's classified report hit the Washington Post…compliments of Bob Woodward, no less. Wow, what a coincidence!"

This episode highlights a crucial aspect of Woodward's career that has been ignored by most of the media. Simply put, Woodward is the military's man and always has been.

For almost four decades, under cover of his supposedly "objective" reporting, Woodward has represented the viewpoints of the military and intelligence establishments. Often he has done so in the context of complex inside maneuvering of which his readers have little clue.

Typically, Woodward uses information he obtains from his main sources (much of it self serving) to gain access to others. He then gets more "secrets" from them, and so on down the line. Woodward's unique persona as the main repository of this inside dope has been key to the relentless success machine that his media colleagues have perpetuated.

The New York Times' review of his recent book on President Obama laid out the formula: "In Obama's Wars, Mr. Woodward, as usual, eschews analysis and commentary. Instead, he hews to his I Am a Tape Recorder technique, using his insider access to give readers interested in inside-the-Beltway politics lots of granular detail…. As he's done in his earlier books, Mr. Woodward acknowledges that attributions of 'thoughts, conclusions or feelings to a person' were in some cases not obtained directly from that person, but from 'notes or from a colleague whom the person told'—a questionable but increasingly popular method, which means the reader should take the reconstructed scenes with a grain of salt."

And then, thanks to all this attention and even with that grain of salt, Obama's Wars went to number one.

Bob Woodward's stature as the world's most acclaimed investigative journalist is almost entirely based on his helping to end the Presidency of the reviled Richard Nixon. As the saying goes, the past is prologue, and that long-ago affair turns out to have direct relevance to events besieging another President, Barack Obama. For a sense of how, we go back to the beginnings of Woodward's journalistic career.

The young Woodward did not fit the profile of the stereotypical daily print reporter with a deep suspicion of the establishment, particularly in the turbulent late '60s and early '70s. Midwestern and Republican, Woodward attended Yale University on an NROTC scholarship and then spent five years in the Navy. He had begun with a top-secret security clearance onboard the USS Wright, specializing in communications. Some of his duties involved communication with the White House.

Woodward's commanding officer was Rear Admiral Robert O. Welander, who would later be implicated in a well-documented military spy ring in the Nixon White House. That subterfuge, generally referred to as the Moorer Radford affair, is a segment of American history that is known to serious researchers and documented in numerous books but still somehow almost completely missing from the narrative typically offered to the public.

It involves a behind-the-scenes power struggle pitting Nixon against his former allies in the military, intelligence and corporate worlds. It is this struggle that begins to reveal the outlines of a larger battle over the Presidency and democracy itself. It leads to truths so deeply disturbing that the general reaction has been—and continues to be—denial by those who decide what books and interpretations get heavy publicity and the stamp of establishment approval.

According to the 1991 book Silent Coup, Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin's exhaustive study of the aforementioned military espionage scandal, Woodward left his ship in 1969 and arrived in Washington, D.C. There he worked on the staff of Admiral Thomas Moorer, chief of Naval operations, again as a communications officer, this time one who provided briefings and documents on national security matters to top brass in the White House. Colodny and Gettlin wrote that Woodward frequently walked through the basement offices of the West Wing with documents from Admiral Moorer to General Alexander Haig, who served under Henry Kissinger—then Nixon's National Security Advisor.

In a 2008 interview with me, Woodward categorically denied having any intelligence connections. He also denied having worked in the White House or having provided briefings there. "It's a matter of record in the Navy what I did, what I didn't do," Woodward said. "And this Navy intelligence, Haig and so forth, you know, I'd be more than happy to acknowledge it if it's true. It just isn't. Can you accept that?"

Journalist Len Colodny, however, has produced audiotapes of interviews by his Silent Coup coauthor Robert Gettlin with Admiral Moorer, former Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, Pentagon spokesman Jerry Friedheim and even with Woodward's own father, Al, discussing Bob's White House service.

At a minimum, Woodward's entry into journalism received a valuable outside assist, according to an account provided by Harry Rosenfeld, a retired Washington Post editor, to the Saratogian newspaper in 2004: "Bob had come to us on very high recommendations from someone in the White House. He had been an intelligence officer in the Navy and had served in the Pentagon. He had not been exposed to any [major] newspaper."

In 2008, after I spoke to Woodward, I reached Rosenfeld. He remembered that Woodward had been recommended by Paul Ignatius, the Post's president, who previously had served as President Lyndon B. Johnson's secretary of the Navy.

In a subsequent interview, Ignatius told me: "It's possible that somebody asked me about him, and it's possible that I gave him a recommendation. I don't remember initiating anything, but I can't say I didn't. "When I asked Ignatius how a top Pentagon administrator such as himself would even have known of a lowly lieutenant—Woodward's rank back in those days—he said he did not recall.

Yet even with this apparent high-level pressure to hire Woodward, the editors couldn't justify putting in a complete novice. So Woodward was packed off to a Maryland-based weekly— the Montgomery County Sentinel—for a spell, then hired at the Post in September 1971. The eminent paper itself is steeped in intelligence connections. The Post's owners, the Graham family, were aficionados of the apparatus and good friends of top spies such as longtime CIA Director Allen Dulles. Both the late publisher Philip Graham and Woodward's boss and confidant, editor Ben Bradlee, had served in military intelligence during World War II.

As for Woodward's initial introduction to the newspaper, nobody seems to have questioned whether a recommendation from someone in the White House would be an appropriate reason for the Post to hire a reporter. Nor does anyone from the Post appear to have put a rather obvious two and two together by noting that Woodward made quick work of bringing down the President of the United States, a feat that might have led to speculation about who at the White House had recommended Woodward in the first place—and with what motivation.

There was this, however: After Nixon aide Charles Colson met with Senator Howard Baker (the ranking Republican on the Senate Watergate Committee) and his staff—including legal counsel (and future senator) Fred Thompson—he recounted the session in a previously unpublished memo: "The CIA has been unable to determine whether Bob Woodward was employed by the Agency. The Agency claims to be having difficulty checking personnel files. Thompson says he believes the delay merely means that they don't want to admit Woodward was in the Agency.

Thompson wrote a lengthy memo to Baker…complaining about the CIA's noncooperation, the fact that they were supplying material piecemeal and had been very uncooperative."

Senator Baker sent this 1974 memo directly to CIA Director William Colby with a cover note, and within a matter of a few hours an incensed Woodward called Baker. The memo had been immediately leaked to the Post reporter. Woodward's good connections helped generate a series of exclusive-access interviews that would result in rapidly produced bestsellers. One was Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA,1981-1987,a controversial book that relied in part, Woodward claimed, on a deathbed interview—not recorded—with former Director of Central Intelligence William Casey. (Casey's widow and former CIA guards said the interview never took place.)

The 543-page book, which came out as George H.W. Bush was seeking the Presidency in 1988,contained no substantive mentions of any role on the part of Poppy Bush in these "secret wars," although Bush was both Vice President with a portfolio for covert ops and a former CIA director. Bush, like Woodward, had served in top-secret Naval operations in his younger days. Veil relied on Navy Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, a rival of Casey's, as its key source. (Inman,a Texan, was closely identified with the Bush clan.)

Asked how it was possible to leave George H.W. Bush out of such a detailed account of covert operations during his Vice Presidency, Woodward replied, "Bush was, well, I don't think he was—what was it he said at the time? 'I was out of the loop'?"

Woodward went on to be blessed with unique access to another Bush, Poppy's son George W. Bush—a President who did not grant a single interview to America's top newspaper, the New York Times, for nearly half his administration. This favoritism and the resulting exclusivity guaranteed a series of automatic smash bestsellers. Woodward would also draw attention to himself for knowing about the administration's role in leaking the identity of CIA undercover officer Valerie Plame but not writing or saying anything about it despite an ongoing investigation and media tempest. When this was revealed, Woodward issued an apology to the Post.

To its credit, in the '60s the Washington Post had staffers doing some of the best reporting on the intelligence establishment. Perhaps the most revealing work came prior to Nixon's tenure, while Woodward was still a Naval officer. In a multipart, front-page series by Richard Harwood in early 1967, the Post began reporting the extent to which the CIA had penetrated civil institutions not just abroad, but at home as well. As Harwood wrote, "Intellectuals, students, educators, trade unionists, journalists and professional men had to be reached directly through their private concerns [organizations]."

"Journalists" too. Woodward's Watergate reporting partner, Bernstein, later wrote about the remarkable extent of the CIA's penetration of newsrooms, detailing numerous examples in a 1977 Rolling Stone article. As for the Post itself, Bernstein wrote: "When Newsweek was purchased by the Washington Post Company, publisher Philip L. Graham was informed by Agency officials that the CIA occasionally used the magazine for cover purposes, according to CIA sources. 'It was widely known that Phil Graham was somebody you could get help from,' said a former deputy director of the Agency. Some Newsweek correspondents and stringers continued to maintain covert ties with the Agency into the 1970s,CIA sources said.

"Information about Agency dealings with the Washington Post newspaper is extremely sketchy. According to CIA officials, some Post stringers have been CIA employees, but these officials say they do not know if anyone in the Post management was aware of the arrangements."

When the Watergate burglary story broke in 1972, Bob Woodward got the assignment, in part, his editor Barry Sussman recalled, because he never seemed to leave the building. "I worked the police beat all night," Woodward said in an interview with authors Tom Rosenstiel and Amy S. Mitchell, "and then I'd go home—I had an apartment five blocks from the Post—and sleep for a while. I'd show up in the newsroom around ten or 11 and work all day too. People complained I was working too hard."

So when the bulletin came in, Woodward was there. The result was a front-page account revealing that E. Howard Hunt's name appeared in the address book of one of the burglars and that a check signed by Hunt had been found in the pocket of another burglar, who was Cuban. It went further: Hunt, Woodward reported, worked as a consultant to White House counsel Charles Colson.

Yes, Woodward played a key role in tying the Watergate burglars to Nixon. Woodward would later explain in All the President's Men (coauthored with Bernstein) that to find out more about Hunt he had "called an old friend and sometimes source who worked for the federal government." His friend did not like to be contacted at his office and "said hurriedly that the break-in case was going to 'heat up,' but he couldn't explain and hung up."

Thus began Woodward's relationship with "Deep Throat," that mysterious source who, Woodward would later report, served in the executive branch of government and had access to information in the White House and Nixon's reelection campaign committee.

Based on tips from Deep Throat, Woodward and Bernstein began to "follow the money," writing stories in September and October 1972 on a political "slush fund" linked to Nixon's reelection committee. One story reported that the fund had financed the bugging of the Democratic Party's Watergate headquarters as well as other intelligence-gathering activities.

Eventually, of course, this reporting played a key role in Nixon's forced departure from the White House in 1974. His successor, Gerald Ford, then took a hard turn to the right on foreign policy and elevated to prominent roles three individuals who would later become household names: George H.W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

Amazingly, despite the overwhelming public sense that Nixon was somehow "behind" the scandals collectively referred to as Watergate, virtually no evidence ever emerged of Nixon's involvement or prior knowledge, besides agreeing to bad advice on how to handle the affair once it became public through leaks via Woodward and others. Meanwhile, the collection of individuals whose "inside" testimony helped sink Nixon had, like Woodward, a history with military or civilian intelligence operations.

So let's summarize: Young Bob Woodward, Naval intelligence officer, gets sent to work in the Nixon White House while still on military duty. Then, with no journalistic credentials to speak of and with a boost from White House staffers, he lands a job at the Washington Post. Not long thereafter he starts to take down Richard Nixon. Meanwhile, inside the White House, Woodward's military bosses are running a spy ring that is monitoring Nixon and Kissinger's secret negotiations with America's enemies (China, the Soviet Union, etc.), stealing documents and funneling them back to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They are then leaked to columnist Jack Anderson and others in the press.

That portrait clashes, of course, with the iconic Woodward of legend—so it takes a while for this notion to settle in the mind. But there's more. Did you know there was really no "Deep Throat," that the W. Mark Felt story was conjured up as yet another layer of cover in what became a daisy chain of disinformation? Did you know that Richard Nixon was loathed and feared by the military brass, that they and their allies were desperate to get him out and halt his rapprochement with the Communists? Or that a bunch of operatives with direct or indirect CIA/military connections—from E. Howard Hunt to Alexander Butterfield to John Dean—wormed their way into key White House posts and started up the Keystone Kops operations that would be laid at Nixon's Oval Office door? Or that it was the CIA-connected Butterfield, for example, who revealed the secret Oval Office audio taping system whose carefully selected and artfully presented excerpts cooked Nixon's goose?

If you want to learn more, Family of Secrets has several chapters on the real Watergate story. Other sources that have put pieces of this puzzle together include the previously mentioned Colodny and Gettlin, as well as James Rosen (The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate) and Jim Hougan (Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA).

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Russ Baker is an award-winning investigative reporter and founder and editor of the news site WhoWhatWhy.com. He has written for the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, the Nation, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Village Voice and Esquire. Some of this material is excerpted from Baker's book Family of Secrets. For more on Baker's work, visit FamilyOfSecrets.com and RussBaker.com.

THE INSANITY OF ONLINE VOTING EXPOSED JUST IN TIME!

SHORTLY BEFORE GOING LIVE, THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA'S INTERNET VOTING SYSTEM IS TAKEN OVER BY AMERICAN WHITE-HAT HACKERS AND ACCESSED BY BLACK HATS IN IRAN AND CHINA.

By Brad Friedman

From HUSTLER MAGAZINE August 2011

In 2009 the U.S. Congress passed, and the President signed, federal legislation allocating hundreds of millions of dollars for states across the nation to initiate Internet voting for military and overseas citizens. Yes, you heard that right. The elected beneficiaries of our riggable e-voting system have decided to double down on the madness. Touch-screen voting systems weren't easy enough to hack?

One of the first rollouts of the new federally fueled Internet voting scheme happened—or nearly did—in Washington, D.C., just before the 2010 midterm election. It would have gone live, with real (unverifiable) votes cast by real people in a very real election, but for the quick work of some patriotic "hackers" from a Midwestern university, who proved what computer scientists and cybersecurity experts have been warning for years: These systems are exceedingly—perhaps even irreconcilably—vulnerable to undetected manipulation from outside hackers and corrupt insiders alike.

Over much of the past decade we've detailed the very real hazards of e-voting, along with the threat of, and evidence of, the easy election fraud it allows. That effort has helped to encourage a rollback of oft-failed, easily manipulated, always unverifiable touch-screen voting systems, which had nonetheless been slated for every voter in the United States. But while use of 100% unverifiable touch-screens is finally on the wane—with numerous states dumping them in favor of verifiable, hand-marked paper ballots—the federal government, in all its idiotic "wisdom," seems hellbent on making things worse.

The District of Columbia's Board of Elections and Ethics (BOEE) decided to conduct a test of its new Internet voting system for military and overseas voters by inviting the public to try to hack it just before the BOEE planned to use it in a real election. Within 36 hours of opening up the system on September 28, 2010, for that public hack test, it had become completely and utterly compromised, and the BOEE didn't even have a clue about that for the first several days.

Once someone finally discovered the University of Michigan fight song playing on the Web browsers of test voters, the BOEE shut down the experiment "due to usability issues, " as it told the public. A few days later those "usability issues" would come to full public light. A team of U-M computer science students and their professor had decimated D.C.'s supposedly "secure" Internet voting system's architecture. It was child's play.

J. Alex Halderman, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at U-M, subsequently traveled to the nation's capital to explain exactly what had happened. At a hearing conducted by the Council of the District of Columbia's Committee on Government Operations and the Environment, Halderman recalled how he and several of his sharpest students had taken over every aspect of the system— from top to bottom. But, perhaps even more chilling, it turns out they weren't alone.

"While we were in control of these systems, we observed other attack attempts originating from computers in Iran and China," Halderman testified in a nearly empty conference room. "These attackers were attempting to guess the same master password that we did. And since it was only four letters long, they would likely have soon succeeded."

It hadn't been Halderman's first e-voting rodeo. About a month earlier, he and Princeton University Ph.D. student Ariel Feldman had revealed another remarkable hack. This one involved the same touchscreen e-voting system that was used in 2008 in 161 jurisdictions with almost 9 million registered voters. That hack, quite literally, really was child's play. The entire voting system software was replaced by a game of Pac-Man—all without disturbing the so called tamper-evident seals that officials claim are sufficient for deterring hackers. In 2006, while a student at Princeton University, Halderman also played a key role in one of the first known hacks of a Diebold touch screen voting system.

The D.C. BOEE, for its part, was also no stranger to e-voting disasters. During a 2008 primary election, for example, thousands of inexplicable "phantom votes" were cast for write-in candidates on the BOEE's new paper-based optical scan voting systems.

According to Halderman's stunning testimony in Washington, the BOEE's implementation of Internet voting was even more menacing. "Within 36 hours of the system going live," he explained, "my team had found and exploited a vulnerability that gave us essentially total control of the voting system software. This included the ability to change votes and to reveal voters' secret ballots. We modified all the ballots stored on the system that had already been cast by voters, and we changed the votes so that the votes would be counted for candidates we selected."

In addition, Halderman and his team were able to discover the identity of every person who'd cast a vote and how each had voted. So much for the "secret ballot." But that's not all. The U-M hackers also injected into the system a script that would change every ballot ever cast on the system in the future and another script to allow them to come back anytime they wanted.

As election officials don't tend to be experts in computer security—and even those who claim to be experts when hired really aren't—a foolish error made entry to the system even easier than the U-M team had expected.

"We gained access to this equipment because the network administrators who set it up left a default master password unchanged," Halderman told Councilwoman Mary M. Cheh, chairperson of the Committee on Government Operations and the Environment. (Of its five members, she was the only one who felt the issue was important enough to show up for the hearing.) "This password we were able to look up in the owner's manual for the piece of equipment."

It was only a four-letter password, but as it turned out, even a more difficult one would have likely been discovered in short order. That's because the U-M team managed to take over the security camera apparatus where the election board's servers were located.

Thus, Halderman told the committee, he and his fellow hackers were able to sit at a computer in Ann Arbor and observe in real time as the D.C. network's operators configured and tested the equipment. They were able to, in Halderman's words, "watch them on camera because we found [that] a pair of security cameras in the data center were on the same network as the pilot system and were publicly accessible with no password at all."

Yes, the U-M team could actually watch the administrators typing the password into the system itself.

While comfortably inside the system, Halderman and his team discovered intrusions from computers in Iran and China, prompting the white-hat hackers from the United States to take measures to protect the D.C. system. "We decided to defend the network by blocking them out by adding rules to the firewall and by changing the password to a more secure one," Halderman explained to Cheh.

"You changed the password of the BOEE system?" the stunned chairperson interjected.

"Of the pilot system, yes," Halderman responded.

"You changed it?!" Cheh asked again, incredulously.

"We did, yeah, to something so that the Chinese and Iranian attackers wouldn't get it,"he stated.



Following Halderman's testimony, computer security and voting systems expert Jeremy Epstein told the committee, "For the first time, what computer scientists have been warning could happen in an election…isn't just a theoretical problem."

Happily, after all of this, the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics decided to shelve Internet voting for the 2010 midterm election.

"Many of us have been arguing that election security is a matter of U.S. national security," computer scientist Dr. David Jefferson of Livermore National Laboratory told me during an interview after the D.C. hearing. Jefferson, who now serves as chairman of VerifiedVoting.org, has worked for more than a decade on these issues. He has testified to countless official bodies about his concerns. Jefferson most recently worked on California Secretary of State Debra Bowen's 2007 landmark Top-to-Bottom Review of the state's electronic voting systems. (All were found to have been easily penetrated and manipulated during the first-of-its-kind independent hack testing by an official state commission.)

"It's really important that it not be possible for foreign governments or crazy, self-aggrandizing hackers in other countries—or in our own—to be able to modify votes and get away with it, "Jefferson said. "But usually this warning that I have given many times, that this is a national security issue, goes, well, underappreciated, "he explained diplomatically during our conversation.

"After this," Jefferson added, "there can be no doubt that the burden of proof in the argument over the security of Internet voting systems has definitely shifted to those who claim that the systems can be made secure…. This successful demonstration of the danger of Internet voting is the real deal."

During the Council of the District of Columbia's hearing, experts noted that—unlike banking online or via ATM, processes that are open to oversight by all parties before, during and after—the secret-ballot system used in U.S. elections cannot be carried out safely at this time on the Internet. Maybe in the future when technology changes, they said, but not for at least a decade.

In short, the experts concurred, this is not "a solvable problem" no matter how much politicians, political parties and even some ill informed voters may wish it to be.

"Let me ask you this, from a legislative perspective, "Councilwoman Cheh said to each of the panelists as the hearing was winding down. "Should the council, by legislation, just shut this down?"

The answer from each one of those testifying was an unambiguous yes.

Nonetheless, 33 states ran Internet-voting pilot programs of various forms during the 2010 midterms. And, unless something changes, you can rest assured that folks who don't really give a damn about democracy will continue to gamble with it in 2012—whether they're Americans, Iranians, Chinese or even al-Qaeda hackers for that matter.

The madness of U.S. "democracy" continues.

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Brad Friedman is a Los Angeles-based investigative journalist and political commentator. Besides co-hosting radio's nationally syndicated Green News Report, he is the executive editor and publisher of The Brad Blog (BradBlog.com).

FARTS IN THE WIND

from HUSTLER Magazine July 2011

• Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas's sidekick on the U.S. Supreme  Court, recently made headlines for proclaiming in California Lawyer  magazine that the 14th Amendment (citizenship,due process and equal- protection clauses) does not extend to protecting women against sex discrimination.  Apparently he doesn't consider women to be "people."  In  fact, Scalia believes women, gays and all emerging minorities should be  left at the mercy of the prevailing political majority when it comes to  ensuring fair treatment.  Back in September 2010 he told an audience at  the University of California Hastings College of Law that "if the current  society wants to outlaw discrimination by sex…you have legislatures."

• Curveball, an Iraqi informer whose real name is Rafid Ahmed  Alwan al-Janabi, claimed that Saddam Hussein's regime was developing mobile biological warfare labs, thereby building a case for the  Iraq War.  After more than seven years of hostilities and the deaths of  thousands of U.S. troops and countless Iraqi civilians, al-Janabi recently admitted to the Guardiannewspaper that he was full of shit:"I had the chance to fabricate something to topple the regime.  I and my  sons are proud of that." And we're proud to also deride the CIA. In  2004 the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee reported that the spy  agency "withheld important information about Curveball's reliability"  from U.S. analysts dealing with the informant's claim.  For God's sake,  al-Janabi was a cab driver.

PLEASE CUT THE CRAP

THE BANKERS AND OTHER WHEELER-DEALERS WHO IMPOVERISHED THE NATION CONTINUE TO ENRICH THEMSELVES.



By Robert Scheer

From HUSTLER MAGAZINE September 2011

Republicans are the party of the super rich, pure and simple, and all that Tea Party garbage about small government is nothing but a big-lie propaganda ploy by an extremely radicalized fringe of the GOP that betrays its moderate heritage.

This is coming from a journalist who still thinks Dwight D. Eisenhower was the best modern day American President after Franklin Delano Roosevelt and who got along just fine with Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon when he profiled them. Nixon even wrote me a letter expressing thanks for my "objective" reporting on his domestic policy, which included a call for a guaranteed minimum income for all Americans and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Try finding a single Republican politician today who is proud to support either of those sensible Nixon proposals. Even the two Bushes look pretty reasonable compared to the current crowd that wants to wipe out Medicare and Social Security to save our tax dollars for even more exorbitant gifts to the bankers and other corporate hotshots who impoverished the nation while enriching themselves.

At a time when 10 million Americans will have lost their homes by year's end, when $5.6 trillion in home equity has been wiped out, when most workers face steep unemployment rates and stagnant wages, Republican ideologues insist that extending the Bush-era tax cuts is the best way to create jobs. The Republicans are drunk on the notions of voodoo economics whereby giving more money to those who already have obscene amounts is good for the rest of us.

Even former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, who supported the Bush tax cuts, has come to his senses by arguing against their extension in the midst of the global economic crisis: During an appearance on NBC's Meet the Press he stated, "This crisis is so imminent and so difficult that I think we have to allow the so-called Bush tax cuts all to expire. "With regard to how much the U.S. government could save from letting income taxes go back up to levels last seen under President Bill Clinton—an estimated $3.6 trillion—Greenspan said, "That is a very big number."

He specifically shot down the absurd notion that those tax cuts will reduce the deficit by freeing up more money in the hands of the rich for investment. When host David Gregory asked his guest if he believed that the tax cuts pay for themselves, as Republicans argue, Greenspan replied unequivocally, "They do not."

The GOP argument that the tax cuts will generate new economic activity because wealthy people will invest more flies in the face of a reality in which the rich are awash with cash but do not spend it in ways that create jobs in this country, as opposed to U.S. corporate investment abroad.

As the New York Times reported, "In the fourth quarter, profits at American businesses were up an astounding 29.2%, the fastest growth in more than 60 years. Collectively, American corporations logged profits at an annual rate of $1.678 trillion."

And to add insult to injury, the top executives—who seem unable or unwilling to create increased their own compensation by a whopping 12% over the previous year, leaving the median pay at $9.6 million for those in control of the 200 leading companies. The Times report added that "CEO pay is also on the rise again at companies like Capital One and Goldman Sachs, which survived the economic storm with the help of all of those taxpayer-financed bailouts."

What the Republicans want you to forget is that the recession brought about by their wild deregulatory policies, allowing Wall Street greed to run wild, was launched by their much-hyped "Reagan Revolution, "which is the basis of our debt crisis. The debt now looms so large because the government had to bail out many of those same corporations, quite a few of which—most notably General Electric and AIG—pay no taxes and have no problem paying truly obscene amounts to their top executives.

General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt is making as much as he did before the recession hit, a recession that his GE Capital division did much to cause with its reckless loans. AIG, saved with a government infusion of $170 billion, has lavishly rewarded its top executives but has provided no relief for the homeowners ripped off by its phony credit default swaps.

The result of the Reagan Revolution is that the top 1% of Americans own 40% of the total national wealth, mocking the idea that we are a middle-class-based democracy. That is because the after-tax income of that top 1% has more than doubled in the 30 years since Reagan assumed the Presidency. That's after-tax income, so don't tell me they are hurting from too high taxation.

The reality is quite the opposite: The rich are getting richer while the purchasing power of wages and other income for most Americans has been declining. How obscene then that the Republicans want to gut programs like Medicare, Social Security and workers pensions, which are the main barrier keeping most Americans from a life of retirement in poverty.

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

WE THE PEOPLE VS. OBAMA'S HEALTHCARE RATIONER

THE SLY APPOINTMENT OF A HEARTLESS MEDICAL CZAR HAS LAWMAKERS AND CITIZENS SEETHING.

By Nat Hentoff

From HUSTLER MAGAZINE September 2011

I've never forgotten U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, in his chambers, firmly instructing me, "From the First Amendment, all our liberties flow." This fundamental freedom includes objecting to government dictates.

A powerful example is the storm of nonpartisan protests against President Obama's appointment of Dr. Donald Berwick as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which is responsible for the healthcare of one in three Americans.

For years, Berwick has been a fervent admirer of how the British nationalized healthcare system decides the costs of treatment and medications. If these costs are deemed too expensive for patients near the end of life or with little prospect of improvement, healthcare is denied.

Here in this country, with the federal government determined to slash staggering budget deficits, cost-benefit healthcare is a primary goal of Obamacare. As it is for Berwick, who infamously made his intentions clear even before being named CMS head honcho. "It's not a question of whether we will ration care, "he said during an interview with Biotechnology Healthcare magazine. "It is whether we will ration with our eyes open."

Fearful that Congressional confirmation hearings would be too controversial prior to the 2010 midterm elections, Obama first sneaked Berwick into a recess appointment. Earlier this year, Berwick did appear at such hearings and—what do you know?—backtracked from his previous declaration of "love"(his word) for the British system.

But what Berwick does truly believe is fully documented in his pre-Obama articles and interviews. Even though anger and fear of Obamacare is mounting nationwide, he still holds his crucial position because the President renominated him in January 2011. But without confirmation, Berwick's tenure will last only until the end of this year.

On March 5, 2011, Berwick's doomsday was predicted in a LifeNews.com report titled "Senate Democrats Abandon Rationing Czar Donald Berwick." The Democratic leadership had received an ominous letter from 42 Republicans. If Berwick's nomination is sent to the floor, it spelled out, they threatened a filibuster—thanks to having enough numbers, plus some errant Democrats—to cut off Berwick's budding career as the ultimate decider of how long some of us dependent on government healthcare can live.

Considering the number of Americans 90 years old and over requiring medical attention, not to mention hospital stays, Berwick's presence as head of Medicare and Medicaid Services could have terminal consequences for some octogenarians as well.

But rationing would go beyond that. Many of us younger Americans may well get diagnoses requiring fast and expensive medical care. In a May 2010 DailyCaller.com article, Michael Tanner—like myself, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute— addressed Berwick's long public love affair with British healthcare. Tanner pointed out that "750, 000 patients are awaiting admission to British NHS [National Health System] hospitals…. The latest estimates suggest that for most specialties, only 30% to 50% of patients are treated within 18 weeks. For trauma and orthopedics patients, the figure is only 20%."

And dig this: "Overall, "Tanner continued, "more than half of British patients wait more than 18 weeks for care. Every year 50, 000 surgeries are canceled because patients become too sick on the waiting list to proceed. The one thing the NHS is good at is saving money. After all, it is far cheaper to let the sick die than to provide care."

How could Obama have resisted appointing Berwick, an ardent admirer of the NHS—except when testifying before Congress—to run the cost-efficient core of Obamacare? Whatever ruse the President may devise to keep Berwick in charge of reducing part of the national budget deficits, persistent public use of the First Amendment to oust him will only mean the appointment by Obama of yet another healthcare czar. Meanwhile, even if Berwick is removed, he may unobtrusively remain as an adviser to our doctor in chief.

That's what happened when former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-South Dakota)—a key Obama adviser on how to bring the British system to these shores— withdrew his nomination as secretary of Health and Human Services because of what were euphemistically called tax difficulties. Yet Daschle remained a frequent visitor to the Oval Office to counsel Obama on healthcare efficiency.

As long as Barack Obama is President, many of us will be confronted by what Bruce Chapman wrote on DiscoveryNews.org: "We all face the end-of-life-treatment choices, either because of someone we love, or ourselves. Families, doctors, hospitals all do the best they can and situations vary.

"But when the government is involved and has built-in cost-cutting incentives, there is a tremendous incentive to warp the decision-making process and make it a financial triage issue. That is what President Obama was hinting at in several of the comments he has made in the past about end-of-life care. He thinks that the government cannot afford to take care of all the old and terminally ill and still give full care to the young and fit."

Whatever your age, it would be reasonable—in self-defense—to keep the ultimate cold-hearted creator of Obamacare in mind when you go to the polls in November 2012.

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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 America?

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ASIANS IN THE LIBRARY

A UCLA STUDENT POSTS AN OFFENSIVE VIDEO AND GETS A HARSH LESSON IN REALITY.

By Alexandra Cuerdo

From HUSTLER MAGAZINE September 2011



Hot. Fucking. Mess. That's what Alexandra Wallace is. She's the University of California, Los Angeles, student-turned-dropout behind the videotaped racist rant "Asians in the Library," which she ignorantly posted on YouTube. What followed was a media explosion—including 6 million views, a dozen death threats and countless headlines.

We've seen this before. Celebrity misspeaks fill a weekly quota in the tabloids. Fanatical rage posts flood YouTube on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis. But the viral "it" factor is an elusive bug. It took the perfect storm—of poor timing and even poorer judgment—to stoke Wallace's 15 seconds of fame to a sky-high fever.

On March 11, 2011, a massive earthquake and tsunami hit northern Japan—claiming thousands of lives and triggering a nuclear disaster. On that same day, Wallace trash-talked Asians' supposed inability to teach their children to "fend for themselves." In the video she called herself a political science student with "American manners." Versus, of course, the "hordes of Asian people that UCLA accepts into our school every single year."

Wallace went on to declare, "In America we do not talk on our cell phones in the library! I swear, they're going through their whole families, just checking on everybody from the tsunami thing." Then, as the cherry on top of the shit-show sundae, the perturbed blonde imitated an "Asian" language. Her disparaging line "Ohhh! Ching chong ling long ting tong?! Ohhh!" inspired a Web site, aptly named Ohhhching chonglinglongtingtong.com, and T-shirts, all proceeds of which were donated to Japanese relief funds. Wallace's tirade also turned the limelight to Jimmy Wong, who racked up a zillion YouTube views with his tune "Asians in the Library." Wong's catchy refrain "Ching Chong/It means I love you" made it to iTunes and recently earned him an interview with National Public Radio.

So why did Wallace do it? LA Weekly suggested a classic con: the publicity stunt. Some sleuthing revealed that Wallace sought fame. She aspired to model professionally, she loved Jersey Shore, and a month before her cause célèbre she'd planned a series of "comedic videos" similar to "Asians in the Library." The Sacramento Bee found her father's Facebook profile, which let slip that Wallace was even searching for domain names for a future blog—maybe AsiansInTheLibrary.com?

But those dreams changed once she became a YouTube sensation. Hackers on forum giant 4chan posted Wallace's e-mail, phone number and address the day after her infamous rant. Her Model Mayhem profile—an online portfolio to attract employment opportunities—was so flooded with outraged spam that it was taken down. Multiple Facebook groups reposted Wallace's personal information and encouraged viewers to respond directly to the outspoken student.

In a formal apology published in UCLA's Daily Bruin, Wallace explained how she wanted to "produce a humorous YouTube video" but in stead offended "the entire Asian culture." She made a "mistake" that caused "the harassment of my family, the publishing of my personal information, death threats and being ostracized from an entire community."

Guess no one told Wallace that the Asians she offended are everywhere these days. And that they—along with UCLA Chancellor Gene Block and many others worldwide—would see the derogatory clip and counterattack.

Today Wallace reigns as the new face of institutionalized, not-so-secret racism. She's the living, breathing flaw of the Internet Age: the video we can't stop sharing, the wreck we can't stop watching, the bitch we can't stop shaming. In two minutes and 52 seconds—the running time of "Asians in the Library"—Wallace flung her college career down a black hole.

But we're missing the bigger picture. We live in a culture that's at once sensitive and desensitized. We've taken her words person ally. We've gotten angry. And although it's okay—and understandable—to be pissed off, there's a limit to the madness. There's righteously annoyed, and then there's calling Alexandra Wallace a "slut that deserves to die." Let's face it: Not many of us would be so forward in person. Online raging is so much easier to do, but it doesn't make it any better or the words any nicer.

Maybe when we can own our rage, we can find a better way to express it. Beau, an original cast member of the Tony award-winning Def Poetry Jamon Broadway, gave it a shot. Imitating Wallace's emotional voice, he examined the reasons for her racism in a posted video of his own. "If only these Asians would learn English," Beau said. "If only they understood that I'm here too. That I share this place with them, that I belong here, that the hordes and swarms invading the system I've learned remember who I am as the world changes."

And then Beau—looking right into the camera, like Wallace did the fateful day she aired her dirtiest laundry online— concluded, "I'm so afraid I'll have to fend for myself, without what I've been told was mine."

Beau got to the heart of Wallace's anxiety—that the Asian hordes, whether at UCLA or anywhere else, are the bad guys and that they all want a piece of the pie she rightfully owns, the one we call America. But we know better. America is for everyone. And if you want a piece, you've just got to shut up and take it.

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Alexandra Cuerdo, the daughter of Filipino immigrants, attends UCLA's School of Theater, Film and Television. "I'm a writer, director and decent cook," she says. "And really, I don't even go to the library." Attention college reporters: If you have an idea for a story involving your school— streaking, stripping, partying, pranks, protests, political or censorship issues, etc.— please contact us at Features@LFP.com. If you get the green light, Larry Flynt will send you a check with his name on it. Besides the financial windfall, a HUSTLER story will look good on your résumé.

JAPAN'S NUKE DISASTER

WHAT THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA HASN'T TOLD YOU

By Karl Grossman

From HUSTLER MAGAZINE September 2011

Media coverage of the Fukushima Daiishi nuclear power plant, which was severely damaged as the result of an earthquake and resultant tsunami on March 11, 2011, has been outrageously poor.  Rather than dig for the truth, mainstream journalists and their "experts" have simply parroted the assurances of Japanese and other officials that the amounts of radioactivity being released were low and thus posed "no health threat."

Decades ago scientists thought there was a "threshold dose" of radiation.  That's because when nuclear technology began exposing people to radioactivity, they didn't promptly fall down dead.  But as the years passed by, it became evident that lower levels of radioactivity take time to manifest as cancer and other illnesses.  In fact, there is a five-to-40-year "incubation" period.

Now most scientists acknowledge that any amount of radioactivity can lead to illness and death, especially in fetuses and children (whose cells divide more rapidly than those of adults).  As the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission itself has stated: "Any amount of radiation may pose some risk for causing cancer."

Reporters covering Fukushima have noted that potassium iodide pills being distributed in Japan "block radioactivity." However, they work only on the thyroid gland, filling it with "good" iodine so radioactive iodine-131 cannot be absorbed and cause thyroid cancer.  But there are hundreds of other fission products for which there is no magic pill.  These include cesium-137 and strontium-90, two of the fission products discharged after hydrogen explosions rocked four of the Fukushima power plant's reactor buildings.

The media has given voice to egregious errors.  One example is the lack of understanding about the explosions that blew the roofs off the aforementioned reactor units.  It was reported that zirconium fuel rods were to blame.  Missed was the bigger picture: Zirconium is used in a nuclear plant's fuel rods because it allows neutrons to pass freely so a chain reaction can be sustained.  But the material is extremely volatile.  It explodes at 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.  Pound for pound, zirconium has the explosive power of nitroglycerine.

At lesser heat it emits hydrogen, which also can explode.  That is what occurred twice at Fukushima.  There are around 20 tons of zirconium in an average nuclear power plant.  Using zirconium is like building a bridge with firecrackers.

Then there were the reports about three GE nuclear engineers who'd resigned in 1976 because of suspected defects in the GE Mark 1 Boiling Water Reactor, the same type installed at the Fukushima Daiishi plant.  This was in line with the spin that flawed design was the problem,not nuclear power itself.  In fact, the Mark 1's design was only one factor that prompted GE's Dale Bridenbaugh, Richard Hubbard and Gregory Minor to leave the nuclear industry.

The main reason is summed up in their statement to Congress's Joint Committee on Atomic Energy: "We did so [resigned] because we could no longer justify devoting our life energies to the continued development and expansion of nuclear fission power—a system we believe to be so dangerous that it now threatens the very existence of life on this planet."

Then there were the over-the-top declarations.  "I love nuclear power,"Fox's Geraldo Rivera declared.  Appearing on The O'Reilly Factor, right-wing firebrand Ann Coulter said that radiation is "good for you."  Even host Bill O'Reilly was taken aback.  "You have to be responsible," he cautioned her.

Coulter's remark is based on a scientific concept known as hormesis, which holds that a moderate amount of a toxin can be beneficial.  Therefore, some nuclear scientists believe that exposure to radioactivity, at least in small doses, exercises the recipient's immune system.  These scientists, many of whom are employed as health physicists in nuclear laboratories and other facilities, are supposed to protect people.  Hormesis has been dismissed by national and international agencies involved with radiation protection.

Meanwhile, there was the disinformation about the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in the former USSR.  Reporters, commonly using it as a baseline in projecting the potential impact of radioactivity released from the Japanese reactors, have written that only several hundred people died as a result of the meltdown in Unit 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

Such a low figure ignores the most comprehensive study to date on the effects of Chernobyl: a book published in 2009 by the New York Academy of Sciences titled Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment.  After studying health data, radiological surveys and scientific reports—some 5,000 in all—from 1986 to 2004,a team of scientists from Russia and Belarus determined that the accident actually caused the deaths of 985,000 people worldwide.  More, they wrote, will follow.

That's the real baseline for a major disaster at one nuclear power plant.  Fukushima involves several reactors and a series of spent fuel pools.  The radiation assessment was raised to a level seven—the highest international rating for a nuclear accident, equivalent to the Chernobyl disaster.  But the potential toll might be far greater than Chernobyl's—more than a million dead.

While covering the crisis in Japan, reporters have also been remiss by declaring that "no one died" as a result of the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania in 1979.  That myth was dispelled by the book Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America's Experience With Atomic Radiation by Harvey Wasserman, Norman Solomon, Eleanor Walters and Robert Alvarez (a former U.S.  Department of Energy official).

I did a TV documentary on the impact of the TMI partial meltdown, Three Mile Island Revisited.  Besides addressing the increase of cancer cases and birth defects in the area surrounding the nuclear power plant, it revealed that TMI's owner had quietly issued payouts, many for $1 million apiece, to settle claims involving residents who'd suffered health impacts or lost family members due to radiation exposure.

Data from the Radiation and Public Health Project, a nonprofit organization, claims that infant mortality near Three Mile Island increased by 47% in the two years after the accident and that cancer-related deaths of children under ten were 30% higher in 2004 than they were in 1979.

On March 11, 2011, CNN.com went even further than declaring "no one died": It reported that the TMI "incident caused no injuries or significant releases of hazardous material." Moreover, the media failed to mention that in recent years Japan has become a global giant in the selling of nuclear power plant reactors.  Worldwide, about 80% of them are of GE and Westinghouse manufacture or design.

In 2006, Toshiba bought Westinghouse's nuclear division.  Meanwhile, Hitachi entered into a partnership with GE to run its nuclear division.  How might this huge stake in selling nuclear reactors influence what Japanese officials have been saying about Fukushima? The disaster was certainly not good for business.

Then there was the media line that "we don't have a choice but nuclear power." The Christian Science Monitor asserted that "finding other forms of energy that can provide a stable base load of electricity—other than coal—remains difficult."

Renewables Are Ready is the title of a 1999 book written by two Union of Concerned Scientists staffers.  Today a host of safe, clean, renewable energy technologies are more than ready.  Combined with energy efficiency, they render nuclear power unnecessary.  Also in 1999, Scientific American—a conservative publication—ran a cover story titled "A Plan for a Sustainable Future." Its author noted, "Wind, water and solar technologies can provide 100% of the world's energy,eliminating all fossil fuels."

More recently, in October 2009, the British magazine New Scientist presented a United Nations report declaring that "renewable energy that can already be harnessed economically would supply the world's electricity needs."

But the mainstream media have continued to ignore the fact that safe, clean, renewable energy technologies are available to provide our energy needs.  For example, wind power is less costly than the price tag of a nuclear plant, which can range from $12 billion to $15 billion.

A pioneer journalist on nuclear technology is Anna Mayo, who from 1969 to 1989 penned a Village Voice column titled "Geiger Counter." Japan's nuclear industry, Mayo recently commented, "is trying desperately to conceal the extent of radiation exposure, and they've wheeled out the same, old lies…as usual." Unfortunately, the media have bought this deadly nuclear deception.

Regarding the impact of the disaster on the United States, Dr. Richard Webb—a nuclear physicist and author of the landmark book Accident Hazards of Nuclear Power Plants—said it will take a year for the Fukushima reactors to cool down.  Yes, a year! And during that time "all kinds of things can happen" involving both the reactors and the spent fuel pools, Dr. Webb added.  He is especially concerned that another severe explosion could release many tons of radioactive poisons.

What has happened already is a clear-cut disaster.  But if there are even worse discharges ahead, a horrific catastrophe is in store.  The jet stream blows in an eastward direction—toward the United States.  Consider the fallout that affected so many Americans during the 1950s and 1960s thanks to atmospheric atomic bomb tests.  At that time, the devices contained 15 to 30 pounds of uranium, and fission (the splitting of atoms) lasted for just a second.

There are 200,000 to 300,000 pounds of uranium in each of Fukushima's reactors, and nuclear fission has been taking place continuously since the power plant was commissioned in 1971.  A massive amount of lethal, radioactive poisons accumulated.  The math is clear, and we are downwind from Japan.

 

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Karl Grossman is an investigative reporter, board member of BeyondNuclear.org and professor of journalism at the State University of New York's The College at Old Westbury.  His six books include Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power.  Grossman, the longtime host of the nationally aired TV program Enviro Close-Up, has also written and narrated Three Mile Island Revisited, The Push to Revive Nuclear Power, Chernobyl:A Million Casualties and other documentaries.

 

CLARENCE THOMAS

from HUSTLER Magazine July 2011

Justice Thomas,sir! You are a failure,pure and simple. Oh, sure, you've achieved high office and riches far beyond those of other men, but money and power are not the true measure of a man.  Honesty,integrity and compassion are.  So on that score,sir, you are a total disgrace.

You are a cheat! A sex addict! A liar and a self-hating Negro. You are those things and more.And,with all due respect, we have to wonder about your IQ.But then, you've wondered about that too, haven't you? Nothing came easy for you.You had to really knuckle down to get the grades you got. You disagree, sir? Let us take a trip down memory lane.  Yes, Justice Thomas, this is your life!

You were born in Pin Point,Georgia,an economic backwater without household plumbing, sewer system or paved roads.Your father abandoned you at age two. Your mother struggled to make ends meet, and you frequently went to bed hungry. But fate interceded at age seven when circumstances forced you to move in with your grandfather.  He was the one who taught you the value of hard work and self-reliance.  You owe him for that.

Although you did surprisingly well in high school and college,when you graduated from Yale Law School, your grades were, well, lackluster. This prompted law firms where you sought employment to reject you as an affirmative action beneficiary who had been pushed through the system. How that must have rankled you—even though it was,in fact,true.

In 1975 you read Race and Economics by Thomas Sowell and The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. These books eventually formed the framework for your legal philosophy and your subsequent contributions to the Reagan Administration while serving in the U.S.Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights and later on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.  Yes! You were on your way to the top of your profession. You had proven that self- reliance,determination and a willingness to sell out your fellow man could compensate for a less-than- stellar intellect.

Those were heady days allegedly filled with porn, alcohol and womanizing.  At least that's what your former girlfriend Lillian McEwen stated in a CNN online article.She also said that after you finally gave up drinking, you became mean and abusive,especially toward your son.  You are still mean and abusive,but now it's toward working-class Americans.

Other women have come forward with allegations similar to McEwen's, but none stand out as much as Anita Hill, who almost torpedoed your 1991 Supreme Court nomination.  She claimed you were guilty of sexual harassment,a notion McEwen finds credible based on your porn addiction.  It's ironic that for all your scholarly speeches and judicial decisions,the words you will always be most famous for are,"There's a pubic hair on my Coke can."

You ascended to the Supreme Court despite Ms. Hill's assertions. Finally, after having used affirmative action to climb your way up the ladder of success,you were in a position to pull it up after you. Let's look at some of your Supreme Court decisions:

In Adarand Constructors v.Peñaand in Gratzv. Bollinger you struck hammer blows against equal protection and affirmative action laws that were designed to level the playing field in education and employment for minorities.You sure showed those Yalies what you thought of the help they gave you.

In Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow and Cutter v. Wilkinson you allowed tax-free religious groups to participate politically—in direct conflict with the Establishment Clause of the Constitution.  That's why we now have churches that pooh-pooh evolution and that think Earth is only 6,000 years old influencing what's taught in our schools.  Nice going.

In Planned Parenthood v.Casey you indicated your clear desire to overturn Roe v. Wade,which gave women the right to have an abortion.  Isn't this the kind of case from which a Catholic should recuse himself?

Recusalis a word that's used a lot when your name comes up, Justice Thomas. For example, shouldn't you have recused yourself from the Citizens United v. FEC decision? Allowing corporations to spend as much money as they want—in effect to buy politicians—clearly benefited your good friends,Charles and David Koch.  After all, you've been a paid speaker at their strategy retreats and,based on recently revealed tax returns, they provided you with four days at the exclusive Rancho Las Palmas resort near Palm Springs, California,during one of their powwows.

Not to mince words, the Koch brothers are evil sons of bitches who deny climate change despite the overwhelming evidence. But then, the two billionaires only care about profits from their planet-destroying oil pipelines. So what's your excuse? Oh, yeah. The paid getaways… and the fact that your wife, Virginia, is the indirect recipient of Koch brothers money.

That brings us to the really big brouhaha in your life: your failure to disclose on your income tax forms—for the last 20 years—Virginia's earnings from far-right groups that have benefited from your conservative decisions on the Supreme Court.That,sir,is a crime punishable by up to one year in jail and a $50,000 fine. We understand there are numerous other conflicts of interest that are also being looked into.

People are starting to talk,  Justice Thomas.  They are saying you should be impeached, and that brings us back to our previous "self-hating Negro" assertion.  Your disregard for judicial ethics and public opinion go far beyond mere arrogance.  We see it as a subconscious desire to be punished for your ill deeds.  In that regard,sir,we truly hope you succeed. P.S. Should you ever revert to reading porn—if indeed you ever stopped—we are prepared to offer you a 50% discount on a subscription to HUSTLER.

FORECLOSING THE AMERICAN DREAM

OBAMA PROPOSES KILLING FEDERAL AGENCIES THAT PROVIDE LOW-INTEREST MORTGAGES IN FAVOR OF PRIVATE BANKS.

by Robert Scheer

from HUSTLER Magazine July 2011

The idea that your home is your castle has deep roots in the history of human liberation, and owning your own home, providing an inviolable sanctuary for the family, is a cherished aspect of the American Dream. Your turf, protected by the Constitution from official intrusion, has been key to the notion of a democracy of middleclass stakeholders supported by various government programs going back to the Founders. Not being beholden to the whims of an oppressive landlord, possessing a property deed and buying out the mortgage is a critical enterprise in preserving freedom. That enterprise is now under frontal assault from the Obama Administration.

According to a 31-page policy statement issued in February 2011, the administration is abandoning the government's time-honored role in helping Americans achieve home ownership by underwriting low-interest mortgages through the government-sponsored agencies Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Now President Barack Obama proposes to turn over the entire mortgage industry to the same private banks that sabotaged the American ideal of a nation of stakeholders by "securitizing" our homesteads into poker chips to be gambled away in the Wall Street casino. Instead of punishing those banks, which forced 50 million people into foreclosure or deeply under water on their mortgages, he wants to reward them.

The proposal was originated by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and involves nothing less than a total "winding down" of the nearly 80-year-old federal housing program, setting instead a new goal of a twotiered America in which the masses are content to be mere renters of the American Dream. Such a deal for a country where, as the report concedes, "half of all renters spend more than a third of their income on housing, and a quarter spend more than half."

This is the same Geithner who during his tenure in the Clinton Treasury Department championed the total deregulation of the then-emerging market in collateralized debt obligations. As a result, people's home mortgages were sliced and diced into the toxic securities that created what Geithner's new report calls the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. Later, as president of the New York Fed, Geithner cheered on the banks as they went hog-wild, conning folks into buying homes they couldn't afford and stuffing them into the incomprehensible securities that form the rot at the core of our bankrupt economy.

This is a made-in-the-U.S. nightmare that we inflicted on the world, thanks to an explosion in those toxic securities brought on by the deregulation that most of the Obama economic brain trust supported when they worked for President Bill Clinton and during the ensuing bubble years when they enriched themselves. As the report admits: "The U.S. is…the only high-income country in which securitization plays a major role in housing finance."

Yet instead of ending that practice, Obama now calls for more of the same: "The administration believes the securitization market should continue to play a key role in housing finance." Indeed, the plan's goal of eliminating Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will dry up the alternative public funding that has provided a source of mortgage support ever since President Franklin Delano Roosevelt launched Fannie Mae to check the power of the banks over mortgages. Now Obama proposes to eliminate that check, leaving would-be homeowners to the tender mercy of the banking giants.

Of course Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which had morphed into for-profit enterprises, also bear responsibility for the meltdown. Just as with the Wall Street firms, the massive bonuses paid out to these housing agencies' top executives were contingent on the value of their stock prices, which in turn were fattened by the sale of those same toxic assets. As the Obama report puts it, "Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's profit-maximizing structure undermined their public mission." What the administration should have proposed is to return the government-sponsored housing agencies to their original function as nonprofit entities supplementing, rather than aping, the practices of greedy bankers.

What Obama neglected to discuss is the demise of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's grand experiment at the hands of Democratic Party hustlers who turned the agencies away from their "original mission" and into their personal piggy banks while getting Democrats in Congress to approve regulations enabling their greed.

The folks around President Obama know this sad tale well because some of them were principal actors in the housing agencies' betrayal of the public trust. Just take the case of Tom Donilon, whom Obama recently appointed to the highly sensitive position of National Security Advisor. It was Donilon who was the top legal counsel and lobbyist for Fannie Mae from 1999 to 2005, a period when the agency went off the tracks in backing Countrywide and other private-sector bandits in their irresponsible ripoff scams.

Donilon, who reportedly received $10 million in the three years leading up to the scandal of 2004—when Fannie Mae was fined $400 million for juggling its books to enhance executive bonuses—will never have any trouble financing a home purchase. Not so the tens of millions of Americans who have lost their homes because of Donilon's reprehensible actions and the many more in the future who will be denied government support in trying to get a place of their own.

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