Larry Flynt's Blog, page 23

Obama, No, You Can't

Mr. President: I'm sure you realize that for the 2012 Presidential campaign you cannot use the same threadbare rhetoric which helped get you elected in 2008. "Yes, We Can" and "The Audacity of Hope" have lost the power they once held. Young voters, black voters, progressive voters and swing voters are no longer seduced by them. You need something new. So here are a few suggestions: "This Time I Mean It" speaks directly to voter concerns about your willingness to fight for the people. "The Other Guy Is Worse Than Me" will no doubt also have a ring of truth to it. Then there's "Don't Blame Me—I Voted for McCain." Those foregoing slogans probably need some fine-tuning, but here's one I think is perfect for you: "The Audacity of Compromise." Well, I'm sure you'll come up with something. You have to. As it stands, you can no longer count on any of the groups that supported your Presidential bid last time around.

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Exclusive Book Signing at Hustler Casino

Larry Flynt will be at Hustler Casino on Thursday September 1st from 6:30pm to 7:30pm.

Mr. Flynt will be signing copies of his new book, One Nation Under Sex.

Click here to reserve your copy of the book at a 40% discount.

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ONE NATION UNDER SEX

Via The Washington Post:

Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt knows the true motivation of American politicians. Ready to feign surprise at the porn peddler's revelation?

"There really is an all-powerful force that shaped our great nation," Flynt writes. "That force is sex."

In "One Nation Under Sex," set for release in April, Flynt says he isn't "out to dish gossip." Rather, he wants "to add a new dimension to American history."

"Other books have exposed the dirty laundry of historical figures and the steamy underbelly of American politics. We do that too, but we also explain how the sex lives of our national leaders affected elections, economics, international relations and even wars."

How did the sex drives of our presidents affect the course of American history? Here are four examples from the book.

Alexander Hamilton

In an effort to discredit his political rival, vice president Thomas Jefferson leaked to the press that Treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton had had an affair. This threatened Hamilton's credibility and his goal of "bringing the Industrial Revolution to the United States." Hamilton addressed his infidelity head on, preventing his "sex scandal from tainting his economic program and impeding the nation's entry into the Industrial Revolution." See how far an eloquently worded apology will take you?

James Buchanan

In the chapter "Sex and the Civil War," Flynt writes that Buchanan had a well-known 32-year love affair with Alabama Senator William Rufus King, resulting in "tragic consequences for our nation." King was adamantly pro-slavery. As the nation was breaking up toward the end of his presidency, Buchanan took his lover's position on the issue. "Throughout his career, Buchanan bent over backward to help the proslavery cause…His decisions make sense only if one makes the connection between his devotion to the Southern cause and his romantic relationship with King."

Franklin Roosevelt

His affairs boosted his self-confidence, which "was essential to his unique ability to rally the country during the Great Depression and World War II. By pumping up FDR, [his mistresses] Lucy and Missy did the nation and world a great service."

Abraham Lincoln

"Was Abraham Lincoln gay or in the terms of his day, a 'sodomite' or 'bugger'? We cannot definitely say…But it is reasonable to assume that a man who felt trapped by the sexual and social mores of the his time would have possessed an added sympathy for the enslaved."

Free-Speech Champion Nixes FBI Grand Jury

WITH OBAMA'S BLESSINGS, OUTSPOKEN U.S. CITIZENS ARE BEING TARGETED FOR AN INQUISITION BEFITTING A DICTATORSHIP.

by Nat Hentoff

from HUSTLER Magazine July 2011

Since the twilight of George W. Bush's regime, the FBI has become, like the CIA, a force that doesn't have to pay any attention to the Constitution. While the CIA operates in secrecy, it is public knowledge that the FBI's Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide—now also fully supported by President Obama and his lapdog, Attorney General Eric Holder—gives the bureau the power to open "threat assessment" investigations of any American without any factual basis, suspicion of wrongdoing or connection to any foreign entity. J. Edgar Hoover would be so envious of the present FBI director, Robert Mueller.

Mike German, a former FBI antiterrorism agent now on the staff of the American Civil Liberties Union, points out that these FBI home and office invasions scoop up "address books, computer records, literature and advocacy materials—First Amendment sort of materials."

On September 24, 2010, in one of its continuous "assessment" raids, the FBI barged into the homes and offices of nonviolent dissenters— antiwar, human rights, labor and other activists—in Chicago, Minneapolis and elsewhere in the Midwest.

These privacy and First Amendment invaders served grand jury subpoenas as they left. One of those summoned, Maureen Murphy (a journalist and advocate of Palestinian solidarity), issued a patriotic defiance of the FBI on CommonDreams.org: "Activism Is Not a Crime: Why I Will Not Testify Before This Federal Grand Jury."

Murphy notes that she was targeted "as part of an investigation into 'material support for foreign terrorist organizations.' No crime has been identified. No arrests have been made. And…the FBI acknowledged that there is no immediate threat to the American public. So what is this investigation really about?"

It could only be a synchronized intent by the Obama Administration—like its predecessor— to tamp down dissent of national security policies so that Obama will stay in office. Recovering somewhat from the Democrats' defeats in the midterm elections, this commander in chief clearly plans to preside over a second term.

Speaking like a reincarnation of Tom Paine, Murphy refuses to be intimidated: "The U.S. government doesn't need to call me before a grand jury to learn my activities and my beliefs. I have often appealed to my elected representatives to take a principled stand on foreign-policy issues, protested outside federal buildings and have written countless articles over the years that can be easily found through a Google search."

Along with Maureen Murphy, 22 other targets of those particular FBI raids were issued grand jury subpoenas last September, and, so far, they too have refused to testify.

Their assertion of quintessential Constitutional Americanism has to be understood by the rest of us in the context of a deep December 10, 2010, Washington Post investigative report. "Monitoring America" by Pulitzer Prize-winner Dana Priest, along with William Arkin, has received far too little attention—and no Congressional action!

I write about this report as masses of courageous Egyptian protesters celebrate their removal of longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak by welcoming the arrival of longdreamed- of democracy.

Consider, however, the state of our own democracy as documented in "Monitoring America": "The United States is assembling a vast domestic intelligence apparatus to collect information about Americans, using the FBI, local police, state Homeland Security offices and military criminal investigators.

"The system, by far the largest and most technologically sophisticated in the nation's history, collects, stores and analyzes information about thousands of U.S. citizens and residents, many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing. The government's goal is to have every state and local law enforcement agency in the country feed information to Washington to buttress the work of the FBI, which is in charge of terrorism investigations in the United States." The Fourth Amendment to the Bill of Rights has been extrajudicially suspended.

Would Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin and the other Founders recognize this as the United States? Do you? And did you know what Maureen Murphy eagerly discloses: "Witnesses called to testify to a grand jury have no right to have a lawyer in the room, and the jury is handpicked by government prosecutors with no screening for bias. It is the ultimate abuse of power for a citizen to be forced to account to the government for no other reason than her exercise of Constitutionally protected freedoms of speech and association."

This unintimidated American pledges that "even though it means I risk being jailed for the life of the grand jury, I will not be appearing before it."

Will the President, now seeking reelection in 2012, award Murphy— and her fellow resisters to grand jury subpoenas—the Presidential Liberty Medal? You can be sure that Barack Obama will not. Egyptians went out to the streets in waves of historic numbers to be free. How free of government spying on us are we citizens of the United States of America? Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black warned us: "We must not be afraid to be free."

At the conclusion of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin was asked by a newly minted American, "What have you given us?"

"A republic," Franklin answered, "if you can keep it." We are fast losing our grip.

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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Let's Fix Campaign Financing

Everyone agrees our political system is totally corrupt. The rich and powerful are buying politicians like cotton candy at a carnival. What's happening in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, Florida, New Jersey and at least 11 other states is proof of that. The solution is obvious: campaign finance reform. Get the money out of politics. Make it illegal for any corporation, union, entity or individual to contribute to a candidate or a political action committee (PAC) in any way whatsoever. Let the government finance each candidate with a sum designated for the particular office being contested. While we're at it, let's shorten the campaign period to something reasonable: say six weeks to two months. This would be easy to accomplish if there was the will to do it. But our politicians are so corrupt, so contemptible, it's unlikely to ever happen. Given that, we will keep ceding power and control to the ruling class.

Our Scatterbrained Leader

ADDRESSING AMERICA'S ECONOMIC WOES, PRESIDENT OBAMA ADMONISHES UNDERACHIEVING STUDENTS, YET CONTINUES TO IGNORE THE REAL CULPRIT.

by Robert Scheer

from HUSTLER Magazine June 2011

There is something perverse about how Presidents, every time they get in trouble over the state of the nation, seize upon education- related scapegoats for all that ails us.

John F. Kennedy did it with his Sputnik speech prompted by the Soviets, who'd managed to launch the first artificial satellite and later put the first man into space—propaganda coups that did nothing to mitigate the USSR's miserably sagging economy.

George W. Bush devised the "No Child Left Behind" slogan to justify his multitude of screwups, most notably coddling Wall Street while it defrauded American mortgage buyers and incurred the trillions in bad loans that had to be picked up by the taxpayers. Now Barack Obama has seized upon students' lackluster test scores to explain the miserable state of the U.S. economy, playing the Sputnik card by way of justifying saving Wall Street while ignoring the rest of us.

In his 2011 State of the Union address, Obama—who moved sharply to the right after the Democrats' setback in the midterm elections— fully embraced the Wall Street bandits, whose unfettered greed sucked us into this mess. Nevertheless, Obama blamed American students' subpar test scores for our economic woes. What the hell did Sputnik or low aptitude have to do with the Made-in-America financial meltdown that Wall Street bankers inflicted on the entire world?

It is they, the best and the brightest graduates of our business and law schools—not kids struggling at public high schools and community colleges—who designed the toxic derivatives that almost destroyed the world economy. Obama's focus on education in his State of the Union speech is a deliberate diversion from what seriously ails and afflicts us: an unabated mortgage crisis, stubbornly high unemployment and a debt that spiraled out of control while the government wasted trillions of tax dollars making the bankers whole.

What nonsense to insist that low test scores of students at public schools hobbled our economy when it was the highest-achieving graduates of our elite colleges who designed and sold the financial gimmicks that created the Great Recession. Indeed, some of the folks who once designed the phony mathematical formulas underwriting subprime mortgage-based derivatives won Nobel Prizes for their effort. A pioneer in securitizing mortgage debt, as well as in exporting jobs abroad, was one Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, whom Obama appointed to head his new job-creation panel.

That the financial meltdown at the heart of our economic crisis was "avoidable" and not the result of long-run economic problems related to education and foreign competition is detailed in a sweeping report by the Democratic majority on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. In a 576-page book the commission concluded: "The greatest tragedy would be to accept the refrain that no one could have seen this coming and thus nothing could have been done. If we accept this notion, it will happen again."

That is just the warning that Obama has ignored by continually appointing the very people who engineered this crisis, mostly Clinton alums, to reverse its ongoing dire consequences. The commission noted that the decision made in 2000 in the closing days of the Clinton Administration to exempt the complex financial instruments known as over-thecounter derivatives from regulation was "a key turning point in the march toward the financial crisis."

Obama appointed as his top economic adviser Lawrence Summers—who, as Clinton's Treasury secretary, was the key architect of that "turning point"—and Summers's protégé Timothy Geithner as his own Treasury secretary. The finding of the ten members—six Democrats and four Republicans—on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission was that Geithner, who had been president of the New York Fed before Obama appointed him, "could have clamped down" on excesses by Citigroup, the subprime mortgage leader that Geithner and the Fed bailed out along with other unworthy banking supplicants.

That profligate behavior of Wall Street crippled the economy and ran up an enormous debt, which Obama now uses as an excuse for a five-year freeze on discretionary domestic spending, the small part of the budget that might actually help ordinary people. Speaking of our legacy of deficit spending, Obama stated, "…in the wake of the financial crisis, some of that was necessary to keep credit flowing, save jobs and put money in people's pockets. But now that the worst of the recession is over, we have to confront the fact that our government spends more than it takes in."

Why now? It is an absurd demarcation to freeze spending when so many remain unemployed just because corporate profits, and therefore stock market valuations, seem firm. Wall Street profits are booming, but the price has been—as the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission reported—26 million Americans out of work, more than 8 million families that have lost their homes and "nearly $11 trillion in household wealth [that] has vanished, with retirement accounts and life savings swept away." America is a union divided between those who agree with Obama that "the worst of the recession is over" and the far larger number in deep pain that this President, like his Republican predecessor, is bent on ignoring.

 

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.

Larry Flynt to Anthony Weiner

FROM THE DESK OF LARRY FLYNT

June 16, 2011

Anthony Weiner

Mr. Weiner:

After having learned of your sudden and compelled resignation from your Congressional post, I would like to make you an offer of employment at Flynt Management Group, LLC in our internet group. As a Congressman, you are known for your intensity and perseverance. I believe that this attitude, combined with your service in the House of Representatives' Committee on Energy and Commerce, will make you a valuable asset to this corporation.

This offer is not made in jest. To show our sincerity, Flynt Management Group, LLC is willing to pay twenty percent more than your former Congressional salary, ensuring that your medical benefits would be equal to what you were previously receiving. While you will have to relocate to our corporate offices in Beverly Hills, California, we would pay for all relocation costs.

Again, I cannot emphasize enough the genuineness of this offer. We are a serious corporation which, as you know, has been heavily involved in the political environment of this country for over thirty-five years. Our key missions have consistently included the crucial fight of battling hypocrisy within the federal and state governments. Flynt Management Group, LLC and Hustler Magazine have been dedicated to decades of serious political commentary. Just as we do not undertake insincere political crusades, we do not make insincere job offers.

While this employment opportunity is being offered in large part due to your qualifications and clear passion for making a change, I feel that your unfortunate resignation is a prime example of unfounded political pressure and the hypocrisy that has invaded democracy in Washington D.C. I hope you will sincerely consider this offer, and I look forward to your response.

Sincerely,

 

Larry C. Flynt

THE PROBLEM WITH GUNS

People who know my history might be surprised that I am not antigun. However, I do have some concerns on the subject. The right wing says guns don't kill people; people do. That's bullshit. People with guns kill people. On the left the basic argument is that only the Army and law enforcement should have guns. That's bullshit too, although obviously not all people should have all kinds of weapons. For example, most of us would agree that bazookas and rocket launchers are off the table for the average citizen. And that the mentally ill should not have guns at all. The argument gets a little trickier when it comes to things like extended clips. I'm against them, but I might soften my position if we're really having a serious debate. So far, however, the Republicans and the NRA have shown no interest in addressing the problem of the mentally ill possessing firearms. Until they do, I'll maintain my anticlip position.

WEBSTER TARPLEY – SURVIVING THE CATACLYSM

Interview by Mark Johnson

for HUSTLER Magazine – June 2011

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

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

HUSTLER: Is there any hope for Obama?

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

What happened to our economy?

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

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

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

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

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

 

Are we in a new Great Depression?

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…continue reading in HUSTLER Magazine – June 2011.

THE WALL STREET BANKSTERS

"It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system for, if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning." — Henry Ford

Report by Tyler Downey

Financial catastrophe. Double-digit unemployment. Home foreclosures. An everwidening gulf between the extremely rich and the rest of us. Control of government and media in the hands of a select group of elites. Wall Street destroying the middle class. Are these the harsh realities that face Americans today? Absolutely. But they've always been offshoots of crony capitalism, which has a long history of wreaking havoc on this country. Whether it was the railroad bubble of 1893, the rampant financial malfeasance of the Roaring Twenties that led to the Great Depression, the dot-com crash of the late 1990s or the current real estate-driven mess we find ourselves in now, Wall Street speculation and corruption have been at the heart of America's economic crises.

It takes an extremely courageous and patriotic leader to stand up to the Wall Street banking cartels. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was such a man. When he was elected President in 1932, America was beset by the worst financial crisis it had ever known. Despite assurances from the bankers that the Federal Reserve System (formed in 1913) would forever prevent the panics and economic upheaval that had previously struck the country, the Great Depression of the 1930s nearly wiped out the American middle class.

Seeing the damage inflicted by an outof- control Wall Street, FDR took drastic steps to curb the bankers' influence. "We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering," he declared during a campaign speech at New York City's Madison Square Garden in 1936. "They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me— and I welcome their hatred."

The robber barons certainly didn't want Roosevelt, a Democrat, reelected. Once FDR took office in 1933, chief counsel Ferdinand Pecora—a former New York City prosecutor—was given the green light to rev up the Senate Banking Committee's investigation into the practices that had triggered the Stock Market Crash of 1929. Pecora ultimately concluded: "Had there been full disclosure of what was being done in furtherance of these schemes, they could not long have survived the fierce light of publicity and criticism. Legal chicanery and pitch darkness were the banker's stoutest allies."

Pecora uncovered stock offerings at discounted prices to politicians, the selling of bad loans to unsuspecting investors and the fact that J.P. Morgan Jr. and his partners had paid no income taxes in 1931 and 1932. The president of Citigroup was forced to resign. As Ron Chernow explained in a 2009 New York Times article, it was Pecora's inquiry that paved the way for the legislation that followed.

Franklin D. Roosevelt first ordered the Treasury Department to close all banks that had been reckless with people's money. There would be no bailout for them. He then signed into law the Banking Act of 1933, better known as the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated investment and commercial banking. No longer could banks speculate with money that customers had deposited into their private accounts.

FDR also pushed legislation making it much harder for banks to repossess family homes and farms. He instituted the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which safeguarded depositors' accounts and thus restored public confidence in the nation's banks. FDR introduced regulation into nearly every sector of the economy— energy, labor, trade—to ensure that the middle class was protected from the predations of crony capitalism.

In his 1944 State of the Union address, Roosevelt even proposed an Economic Bill of Rights. "To assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness," it basically stipulated that no citizen should be denied employment (with a living wage), "a decent home," "adequate medical care," "a good education" and social security. It also called for an end to monopolies and cartels. Unfortunately, FDR died before this great goal could be realized, but his bold actions led to an unprecedented 50 years of prosperity for the American middle class.

Of course, Wall Street would fight back. appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united Abetted by massive campaign donations, media consolidation and good old-fashioned corruption, the robber barons have waged a 75-year war on the policies of FDR.

The tide turned in Wall Street's favor with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. It was his administration that first allowed financiers to write laws that their servants on Capitol Hill enacted. How did the politicians become captives of the ruling class? Since 1990 the financial sector has spent over $2.5 billion on campaign donations alone, not including the astronomical amount spent on lobbying.

This is far and away the most money donated by a single industry—and it's going to Republicans and Democrats! That's why it's impossible to differentiate between Ronald Reagan's "deregulation" policies and those of Democrat Bill Clinton. Both Presidents were bought and paid for by Wall Street bankers. According to bestselling author Charles Geisst, the culmination of this silent war against the legacy of FDR was the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999. Thanks to Clinton, the robber barons came back in full force, and it took less than ten years to see the result of those efforts.

The Federal Reserve's record-low interest rates had spawned a colossal real estate bubble. Freed from the regulations of FDR, Wall Street investment firms issued riskier and riskier loans. By 2008 the corrupt system became untenable. Ordinary Americans lost $17 trillion in retirement savings, announced Treasury Department chief economist Alan Krueger. When it all came crashing down, the bankers threatened to destroy the entire financial system if they didn't get paid off.

Democrat Barack Obama was elected with a mandate to again make government work for the people, not Wall Street. However, his campaign received nearly $40 million in contributions from Wall Street entities. It appears that despite his promises and speeches, Obama is just another politician bought and paid for by the financial industry.

Even after securing his party's Presidential candidacy in 2008, Obama supported President George W. Bush's decision to hand over $700 billion of American taxpayer money—with no claw-backs, no oversight and no controls—to bail out Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Bank of America, AIG and other firms. The recipients then spent about $114 million of our tax money in campaign donations in 2008 alone. They also planned to dole out roughly $14 billion in bonuses to executives.

…. Continues in HUSTLER Magazine – May 2011

WHY I AM DONATING $50,000 TO WIKILEAKS' DEFENSE FUND

Let's get something straight: Julian Assange is a journalist.You can argue that he is not practicing journalism the way you think it should be practiced—releasing classified U.S. State Department documents—but he's a journalist nonetheless.  And for many of us he's a hero.

I'm sick and tired of the politicians and political pundits treating this man as if he were a criminal. If Wiki Leaks had existed in 2003 when George W. Bush was ginningup the war in Iraq, America might not be in the horrendous situation it is today, with our troops fighting in three countries(counting Pakistan) and the consequent cost in blood and dollars.

Here's what I know about censorship: The free flow ofinformation is ultimately less harmful than the impeded flow of information. A democracy cannot exist without totalaccess to the facts.What's wrong is that a concerned outsider—anAustralian publisher, not our own vaunted mainstreampress—exposed the secret documents. For that, Assange has been hit with dubious criminal charges because hiscondom failed during a sexual encounter.  Give me a break. Julian Assange should not face a prison sentence. We should have a ticker tape parade for him.