Larry Flynt's Blog, page 25

THE WALL STREET FINANCIAL CRISIS: A MISTAKE OR A CRIME?

QUESTION: WHEN IS A CRIME NOT CONSIDERED CRIMINAL? ANSWER: WHEN IT'S HATCHED ON WALL STREET.

By Danny Schechter
for HUSTLER Magazine January 2011

All over Europe and in much of the rest of the world, a new fictional hero has engaged the fascination of millions of readers. His name is Mikael Blomkvist, and he's the protagonist of the late Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy. These thrillers, set against the background of high financial crimes and misdemeanors, have become global best-sellers, doubtless in part owing to their gripping plots, elaborate mysteries and engaging characters. But their success is also indisputably a by-product of the macroeconomic chicaneries of our era and the human catastrophes they have wrought.

Larsson understood that financial crimes are far from victimless. They have upended millions of people's lives, even if most of the victims don't understand how they've been shortchanged and who is responsible.

Although the financial crisis that swept the world may have started on Wall Street, it has brought down governments and shredded economic security worldwide, resulting in the loss of millions of jobs and homes as businesses collapse, foreclosures grow, credit tightens and communities are devastated. One estimate of the damage: $197 trillion.

The Pew Economic Policy Group reports the average U.S. household lost $66,000 in stock holdings and $30,000 in real estate values from June 2008 through March 2009 due to the upheaval in world markets. This brings us close to $100,000 per family. Against that backdrop, it's not hard to see the appeal of Larsson's hero Blomkvist, whose "contempt for his fellow financial journalists" the author encapsulates with stinging clarity: "A bank director who blows millions on foolhardy speculations should not keep his job. A managing director who plays shell company games should do time…. The job of the financial journalist was to examine the sharks who created interest crises and speculated away the savings of small investors, to scrutinize company boards with the same merciless zeal with which political reporters pursue the tiniest steps out of line of ministers and members of Parliament."

This is why I identified with Blomkvists's fictional mission; in some ways it captured my own frustrations in a media world for which "the c-word"— as in financial crime—seems must never be spoken.

The media failed us on the most crucial story of our era. Our newspapers and TV sources contributed to an economic disaster so cynically engineered even billionaire investor Jim Chanos was prompted to ask, "So where are the perp walks? How long does it take before we see any investigations? It boggles the mind that $150 billion is vaporized…there haven't been any arrests, any indictments, nor any convictions at any major bank or at any of the government-owned financial institutions Fannie, Freddie and AIG."

I know how hard it is to alarm the public with mere facts. They don't have the context within which to interpret complicated stories. In 2006 I released the film In Debt We Trust, exposing illegal subprime scams and warning of the coming meltdown. It was well reviewed, but no mainstream TV outlet would air it.

I was dismissed as an alarmist and a "doom and gloomer." A mass denial of the dangers ahead seemed to be embedded in the euphoria of the very bubble that was bringing in billions for Wall Street's financial alchemists, who themselves seemed oblivious to the risks and indifferent to the social impact their practices courted.

The media coverage has made a complex reality deliberately complicated, even incomprehensible. The satirical paper The Onion put the financial press in its place regarding the totally obtuse reporting for which financial journalists were justly infamous even before the biggest scoop since 1929 fell into their laps: "JPMORGAN CHASE ACQUIRES BEAR STEARNS IN TEDIOUS-TO-READ NEWS ARTICLE." The Onion witheringly characterized the coverage as "bogging down the news for anyone who might be remotely interested in grasping what the fuck is going on."

Yet there were truth-tellers out there who were largely ignored. Investors like Warren Buffett compared the new exotic financial instruments to weapons of mass destruction— financial nuclear bombs.

Even guru of the right Ayn Rand had warned in Atlas Shrugged about greed destroying her beloved free market: "When you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you—when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice—you may know that your society is doomed."

Doomed or not, in the second year of the Age of Obama the hoped-for economic turnaround has yet to occur. Even as the stock market goes up again, benefitting institutional investors with the capabilities to exploit it, unemployment remains high and loan defaults continue to rise. The best projections forecast a "jobless recovery," which for millions is no recovery at all. How did we get into this mess? Put ten economists in a room, and you get 20 explanations. Most of them revolve around business mistakes, poor risk models or even psychological problems like delusion and market madness. Few will concede Senator Ted Kaufman (D-Delaware) is right in charging that "fraud and potential criminal conduct were at the heart of the financial crisis." Missing has been a hard-nosed look at the crisis as a crime story. Former bank examiner William Black understands this. Focusing on looting and CEO fraud, he helped send over 1,000 bankers to prison during the S&L crisis in the 1980s. This time there were neither dogged sleuths nor crime-busting newshounds on the beat.

Even Alan Greenspan has finally admitted in his all-too-polite exchange with a government inquiry that has come to resemble a Princeton seminar, "If you don't have enforcement, and a lot of that stuff was just plain fraud, you're not coming to grips with the issue." Of course, this "maestro" didn't go into detail on "a lot of that stuff."

What we are watching is an abstruse debate about banks that are "too big to fail," not too big to jail.Very little of the discourse speaks in terms of the victims—the millions of families now without breadwinners or homes. Most of the commentary still looks up at CEOs, not down at the people whom they robbed by design, as folk singer Woody Guthrie put it, not with a six-gun but "with a fountain pen."

When most of us think of crime, we think of gangsters with guns, not banksters with elaborate schemes designed to transfer your wealth to their accounts. Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair—a publication more at home with Groucho Marx than Karl—said of the meltdown: "[This] may well turn out to be the greatest nonviolent crime against humanity in history…never before have so few done so much to so many."

Yet economists, even progressive ones like James Kwak, deeply mired in the labyrinthian world of financial transactions, still don't believe it. The day the SEC filed a complaint against Goldman Sachs, he wrote on BaselineScenario.com, one of the more critical Web sites covering the collapse of this vast swindle: "One of the things I say now and then that most annoys people is that the financial crisis was not caused by criminal behavior…. My general line is that I'm sure there was some bad behavior that rose to the level of criminal liability—like lying in disclosure documents—but that it wasn't necessary for the crisis, and we could have had the crisis without any criminal activity at all." The problem with this thinking is that it defines financial crime too narrowly, only in terms of securities laws concerned primarily with protecting investors.

It doesn't acknowledge that financial institutions spent nearly a billion dollars underwriting efforts to erode government controls and change rules, regulations and even laws to allow them to get away with whatever enhanced their bottom lines, no matter who got hurt. Their well-documented history of aggressive lobbying and buying up politicians qualifies them as avaricious manipulators, not law-abiding companies. Their legal and moral defenses for this conduct are entirely bogus.

Let's look at Goldman Sachs. In my film I report that Goldman was accused by Massachusetts authorities of deliberately designing mortgages to fail. They settled the complaint by paying a $60-million fine and wrote it off as a cost of doing business. The SEC later filed civil fraud charges on similar grounds. This was followed by turbulent hearings on the Hill during which Senator Carl Levin (D-Michigan) repeatedly cited an internal correspondence reference to "shitty" deals that Goldman Sachs peddled only to bet against them. The Justice Department, in a separate action, was asked to open a criminal file.Among the allegations: shady accounting schemes. The giant firm has certainly come in for excoriation and ridicule, but none of Goldman's officers has been convicted of wrongdoing, and they are "lawyered up" to the gills. Leslie Griffith on Reader Supported News writes: "A modern-day financial monarchy, Goldman acts with the impunity once reserved for kings. Controlling legislators. Electing Presidents. Filling the Executive Branch with well-heeled lackeys, manipulating world markets and betting against the welfare of its own clients…the American people. When their equivalent of 'tax time' came, they squeezed the peasants for billions of bail-out bucks."

In their testimony before Congress, Goldman bankers defended themselves by saying all big banks did what they did. A weak alibi at best, it nonetheless seems to be working for them. The assignment of criminal liability is hardly underway. As one lawyer said to Bloomberg News, "In order to proceed criminally in a case, you need to have very clear evidence of lying, cheating and stealing." In plain English: Don't get your hopes up. The government has not declared war on Wall Street even after Wall Street declared war on Main Street. The housing bubble was built on a bedrock of fraud linking shady subprime brokers and appraisers to an industry of financial products that were then resold with misrepresented values thanks to the connivance of unethical ratings agencies.

The selling and reselling of assetless asset-backed securities is a central element of the vast fraud, as is the practice of insuring while simultaneously betting against these investments through companies like AIG. We are talking about a criminal enterprise involving tens of thousands of people working in the financial services industry. Martin Wolf of The Financial Times explained that three industries worked together almost like a cabal to perpetuate these schemes. The architects of the FIRE economy (structured around Finance, Insurance and Real Estate), operated in the shadow of bent rules and apathetic regulators. They built a huge infrastructure of collaborators and henchmen called "financial service professionals."

Writes Wolf: "In between the ultimate borrowers and the risk-takers were loan-originators, designers and packagers of securitized assets, ratings agencies, sales staff, managers of banks and SIVs [Structured Investment Vehicles] and managers of pension—and other—funds." What chance did some poor homeowner or credit card customer have against this savvy and well-funded phalanx of operatives whose one mission was to separate them from their property and money?

Many knew the people they were selling to could not afford to buy their products. They didn't care. It was all done deceptively and by design. It was deliberate, engineered in public and hidden in plain sight. At the local level, mortgage companies said they were under pressure from Wall Street to keep selling homes to the poor so the paper could be resold in an atmosphere of trickle-down corruption.

My own investigation led me to produce a new film, Plunder: The Crime of Our Time, out on DVD from Disinfo. (PlunderTheCrimeOfOurTime.com). I also wrote a companion book, The Crime of Our Time (Disinformation Books) with more documentation than you can get into any film of reasonable length. I was surprised when the Wall Street Journal characterized it as an "anti-Wall Street film [that] isn't just for Michael Moore fans." The Hollywood Interview blog called it "fascinating and nailbiting, much like All the President's Men."

Movie City News elaborated: "Plunder: The Crime of Our Time describes how Wall Street interests greased the skids for just such a collapse, consciously breaking laws they knew government regulators were unlikely to defend. Michael Moore has trod similar ground, but in a more overtly entertaining style…. It's a sobering documentary, but one that's too important to ignore…in Schechter's case, again."

This crisis can be explained in a way most people will understand, and when the public "gets it" they will get angry and act. It's the oldest truism: Where there is a will, there's a way.

———-

News Dissector Danny Schechter, graduate of Cornell University and the London School of Economics, has been a radio news director, local TV news reporter, CNN show producer and Emmy Award-winning ABC News broadcast producer. He is cofounder of Globalvision, an independent film and television production company. He has directed 25 documentaries, including his latest, Plunder: The Crime of Our Time, about the financial crisis as a crime story. He has been honored as a blogger and has written 11 books, including The Crime of Our Time, further detailing his findings regarding financial crime. He has reported from 60 countries. Comments to Dissector@MediaChannel.org.

I, LUDDITE

by Alex Bennet

from HUSTLER Magazine December 2010

THE FUTURE IS HERE, BUT IS IT THE ONE WE WANTED?

As far back as I can remember, I've been obsessed with technology. I bought my first PC before they had hard drives; all it had were two 5-inch floppy disks and virtually no memory at all. I was thrilled. If it was electronic, I reveled in the fact that I was living in the future I had always dreamed of. My Web site went up before most people even knew what the World Wide Web was. I had to learn the code that it took to put a page online. No short-cut programs—just hard code.

Nor was my interest in technology limited to computers. I remember buying a stereo TV adapter before there was any programming and a DVD player before there were any discs. Yes, I was crazy about tech and walked the walk. Now, however, I'm morphing into the kind of person I once eschewed. I'm becoming a Luddite. The term derives from a group of British weavers in 1811— led by a man named Ned Ludd—who destroyed textile machines in the belief that they would cost jobs. Today the term has come to mean anyone who opposes technology or technological change.

Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, was the ultimate Luddite. In his manifesto he raged against technology, claiming it would erode human freedom. It wasn't that old Ted didn't have a point; the problem was that he blew people up. Now locked up in the Supermax prison, Ted can languish for the rest of his life technology-free.

The question I had to ask myself was were these advances a blessing or a curse? Let's examine some of them.

Cell phones are great. On the one hand, we can take them anywhere, talk on them anytime. On the other hand, we are always at somebody else's disposal, especially bosses who can now keep us working regardless of where we are.Then there's the question of quality. How many times have you yelled the phrase "Can you hear me?!" into your phone? The damn thing keeps dropping calls or, worse, the calls start breaking up. I think of the smartphone as a less sophisticated computer that makes lousy phone calls.

Let's talk about the beloved Internet. It's the world at your fingertips and an endless repository of information. Right? Wrong! It's actually a cesspool of misinformation. No one's out there to vet the material. When I write something here, I have editors who fact-check what I'm saying. Who's doing that for people writing on the Internet? Pure lies can be disseminated, and you wind up telling a friend "It must be true" because you saw it on the Internet. The biggest beneficiaries of the Internet are scammers and pedophiles.

While we're on the subject of the Internet, we should talk about communication. In our quest for instant gratification, nothing beats e-mail. You type it, you send it, and someone gets it. No more cramps from pesky handwriting, no stamps to adhere and no mailbox. But e-mail doesn't have the same impact as a thoughtfully written or typed letter. Even rejection letters seem nicer when they come through the postal system. E-mail just doesn't transmit emotion very well. Things like love and sarcasm don't come across unless you use those stupid emoticons like .

Then there's texting. You have to abbreviate your thoughts: Mk yr spellng shrter. And how do you tell when it's over?

"See you later."

"Okay." "Bye."

"So long."

"Are we through?"

"Yes."

"Thank God."

"There is no God."

It's maddening. I asked somebody why he sends text messages when they're going to phone numbers that could just as easily be called. The answer was "I don't have to talk to them."

The worst may be social networking, which isn't very social at all. It's really just a way to avoid human contact. Facebook allows for a couple of sentences, which go out to all your "friends." ("Hi, everybody. I just jerked off.") To its credit, however, Facebook also permits the sending of longer private messages to a single individual. Also on the plus side, I have touched base with people I haven't talked to in years. That, however, is usually a onetime deal. You never communicate with them again—at least until there's a new Internet craze.

Twitter, on the other hand, just cuts to the chase, only allowing 140 characters per message. It's the less sociable Facebook.

Two last things: How many times does your high-def cable stutter and freeze? Did that ever happen with your analog TV? And digital audio doesn't sound better than your old LPs, which had a great dynamic range and weren't compressed. You think it's better only because today's manufacturers have numbed down what you expect from audio.

Sure, I suppose we are in a technologically better age, but have life's simple pleasures been the tradeoff? Or is it possible to still have both? Well, don't worry. I'm not off to my mountain cabin to make bombs.

Alex Bennett is a longtime HUSTLER contributor. The two-time Emmy winner, who broke into broadcasting as a teenager, can be heard on Sirius Left. 146 (9 a.m. to noon ET) and XM America Left 167 (midnight to 3 a.m. ET).

NAKED POWER GRAB

by Robert Scheer

from HUSTLER Magazine December 2010

ON ELECTION DAY REMEMBER THAT THE GOP MAJORITY REJECTED EXTENDING UNEMPLOYMENT

CHECKS TO MILLIONS OF CITIZENS THROWN OUT OF WORK BY THE WALL STREET DEBACLE.

The garbage charge of this year's midterm elections is that Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress are anti-business or, even worse, some kind of socialists. Just the opposite is the case with this President, who—like Bill Clinton before him—has given the Wall Street lobbyists just about everything they had paid for. Those same lobbyists, ingrates that they are, now are pushing for Republican control of Congress because they want to pressure our Democratic President for even greater concessions in the remainder of his term.

That's what they did to Clinton after his first two years in office, and the tactic worked brilliantly, turning the Arkansas poor boy populist into a submissive water carrier for Wall Street for his next six years in office. It was Clinton who reversed the Depressionera Glass-Steagall Act that prevented highflying investment banks from playing with the federally insured banking deposits of ordinary folk. And when those bankers all too predictably abused their newfound freedom from sensible regulation by designing and marketing the Ponzi scheme of toxic derivatives and credit default swaps, it was Obama who went even further than George W. Bush in bailing them out.

This is a far cry from your grandfather's Democratic Party, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt responded to the lessons of the Great Depression by corralling Wall Street greed with legislation designed to prevent the big banks from being too big to fail. Ever since Ronald Reagan, the Republicans have talked a good game of ending those New Deal restraints on big finance, but it was Clinton who got it done. That's what freed Wall Street to run amok, almost sending the entire economic system off the cliff. And it was Obama who kept open the spigot for a federal bailout following George W.'s welfare program to save the bankers from the consequence of their uncontrolled greed.

Faced with that disaster, Bush just threw taxpayer money at Wall Street while asking absolutely nothing in return to help those same taxpayers who were hurting so thanks to Wall Street excess. Obama is now attacked because he got back a few very modest new regulations to prevent a future financial meltdown, and for that sensible protection of the public interest he is being damned.

The Democrats, whose voting base is centered more on those who still have to work for a living than on the country-club set at the heart of Republican power, do have to spread the wealth just a bit. That's why the Democrats favor healthcare reform and job-stimulus programs, while the Republicans are all heart for rich retired golfers. But the irony is that, in the crunch, the Democrats, despite offering a few morsels for the rest of us, have been better for Big Business than their Republican opponents.

Both major parties are under the control of Wall Street, but the Democrats are the lesser evil because they have to deliver some crumbs to ordinary folks. All you should require as a reason for not voting for a Republican is that the GOP led a filibuster against legislation that would extend unemployment benefits for some of the 8 million people thrown out of work by the Wall Street debacle. Only two Republicans—Maine Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins—voted to support the extension. It seems Republicans—who, under George W. Bush, threw trillions at Wall Street—are suddenly worried about the national debt when it comes to putting food on the table of unemployed workers. The Republicans in Congress voted against every effort to force the banks to help people stay in their homes; at least the Democrats made some effort to put people first.

That was too much for the bankers who want it all. Their attacks on Obama as antibusiness are nothing more than shameful hypocrisy on the part of the corporate lobbyists who know that the Democrats deliver for them even if the right-wing nutjobs on talk radio and television don't. When the Big Business hotshots complain about Obama, it's nothing more than their way of upping the ante. The best defense is a good offense, so why not cry foul about a rising national debt whenever the government spends money on anyone but the undeserving rich?

"Play the victim, woe is me" is the cry of such ripoff artists as Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, so maybe no one will notice that your financial banditry turned millions of foreclosed homeowners and unemployed workers into virtual paupers. That's what's up with this election: It's a naked power grab to weaken the Democratic hold over Congress in order to push Obama further into the ungrateful arms of the Wall Street fat cats who want even more.

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.

BIG BROTHER BARACK ORDERS OUR BEHAVIOR MODIFICATION

by Nat Hentoff

from HUSTLER Magazine December 2010

OUR PRESIDENT SEEMS INTENT ON TELLING

US WHAT TO EAT AND WHEN TO DIE!

Some of our President's critics say he is "cold," but he is so concerned with our cost-efficient well-being that on June 10, 2010, he issued an executive order (not requiring Congressional approval) that inserts into the Obamacare law yet another regulatory committee. Never before has there been anything like this governmental shaping of our lifestyles. As Bob Unruh of WorldNetDaily reported, the new committee will "make recommendations about and establish rules for everything from how people exercise to whether they smoke to the food they eat and the medicines they use. And it specifically requires the committee list the priorities for lifestyle behavior modification that the government will pursue."

On White House stationery, Obama's historic executive order is listed as "Establishing the National Prevention, Health Promotion, and Public Health Council." Among the behavior deciders on this advisory board—a brain trust that 1984 author George Orwell never thought of in his futuristic novel—are the chiefs of the Agriculture, Labor, Health & Human Services, Transportation and Homeland Security departments. Oh, yes, also the director of the National Drug Control Policy.

To indicate how seriously the Obama Administration intends to control how you take care of yourself, Bob Unruh earlier reported a Department of Justice brief to dismiss a lawsuit by the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, which was opposing the Food and Drug Administration's ban on the interstate sale of raw milk.

Here is the unequivocal statement by our government that the claim by the plaintiffs in this lawsuit "of a 'fundamental right to their own bodily and physical health, which includes what foods they do and do not choose to consume for themselves and their families' is…unavailing because plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to obtain any food they wish." You have been warned by your government.

The Obama regime will tell you what's good or what's bad for you to eat and drink. How come the Founders never thought of that? Some of them were not very careful of what they ate or drank.

Are any of us going to be punished for not obeying this unprecedently benevolent government? An answer comes from Constitutional lawyer and former law professor Herb Titus, the 1996 Vice Presidential candidate on the Constitution Party (a/k/a the U.S. Taxpayers Party) ticket: "It'll be criminalized. Ultimately that's where it's headed. That's what this is designed to do. Ultimately bring everything under the federal umbrella. The only way they can accomplish that is through force."

Depending, of course, on whether this administration stays in office. The vital list of reasons for voting in the midterm elections— let alone on the 2012 decision for a second Obama term—keeps getting longer and longer.

Consider the Behavior Modification Executive Order's Section 3G, which basically mandates that the council in charge of our lifestyles will "carry out such other activities as are determined appropriate by the President." There are no limitations on how our maximum leader can intervene, all by himself, in our personal lives.

And keep in mind this future date, as underlined by WorldNetDaily columnist David Limbaugh (Rush's quieter younger brother). The "Advisory Group" in this executive order "in consultation with the council, must submit, by March 23, 2011, a 'national strategy' to 'set specific goals and objectives for improving the health of the United States through federally supported prevention.' " Who knows what they, or the President alone, will come up with?

Meanwhile, we're learning a lot more about how the Obamacare law will decide how long some of us—whose continued health, and therefore lives, are too costly for the government to sustain—will live. Not only the elderly are imperiled.

We already know that Obama has appointed Dr. Donald Berwick to the single most powerful healthcare position, the head of Medicare and Medicaid. Dr. Berwick has publicly declared his "love" for Britain's National Health Service and its rationing of British healthcare and lives. But now the New York Times' preeminent reporter on all of this, Robert Pear, has discovered that "Dr. Berwick has championed efforts to 'reduce the total supply of high-technology medical and surgical care.'" They're too damn expensive to be permitted by a President committed to reduce our deficits.

I am alive to write this because quadruple bypasses were invented and perfected in time for me to have one 16 years ago, when my cardiologist said that my life was "hanging by a thread." Many of us, of all ages, are still here because of continually invented high-technology medical and surgical care. And many more lives can be saved in the years ahead, unless Obama and Dr. Berwick manage to cut off more and more of the expensive research these advances require.

As for those of us who may need intervention at what could be the final chapter of our lives, Dr. Berwick wants to "reduce the use of unwanted and ineffective medical procedures at the end of life." Your own doctor will not decide if they're unwanted or ineffective; Dr. Berwick and his regulators will. Neither he nor they will have actually seen you.

Remember the fiery debate on whether Obamacare would result in "death panels"? They won't be called that, but in addition to Dr. Berwick, there will be scores of bureaucrats on Obama's regulatory commissions to rule on which American lives are no longer worth living. An accurate Obama campaign promise should have been "Death you can believe in!"

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?

CARLY FIORINA

from HUSTLER Magazine December 2010

The former Chairman and CEO of Hewlett- Packard should be the poster child for the term failing upward. Carly Fiorina did such a horrible job at HP that the company was willing to pay out her $42-million golden parachute rather than keep her around.

The online business magazine Condé Nast Portfolio listed Fiorina as one of "The 20 Worst American CEOs of All Time." The Wall Street Journal said "[HP's board members] lost faith in Carly…it is difficult to find anyone involved with HP today—board member, shareholder, employee, customer, analysts—who isn't happy that Ms. Fiorina is gone."

The Associated Press quoted Jeffrey Sonnenfeld of Yale University School of Management, who described Fiorina's tenure as "a reign of terror and poor performance." The Los Angeles Times added, "She axed tens of thousands of jobs, killed HP's beloved profit-sharing plan, and in the eyes of her many passionate critics, exorcised the benevolent ghosts of company founders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard." With "flowery" assessments like that, it shouldn't be a big surprise that Fiorina has been largely unemployable since leaving HP—unless you count her consultancy for John McCain during his 2008 Presidential bid.

Unable to get a decent job in the business community, Carly is now exploring the world of politics. Using the same intellectual acuity she displayed at HP, Fiorina thinks she has a shot at unseating Senator Barbara Boxer (D-California). One of the best lawmakers on Capitol Hill, Boxer is always fighting for the little guy. Fiorina, on the other hand, fights for Big Business at the expense of the little guy. Want proof? "In the course of my time there [at HP], we laid off over 30,000 people," this Prada-wearing, fish-faced Asshole told InformationWeek magazine.

"I know why they [jobs] leave [our country]," Fiorina continued. So do we: People like her send them to China, where labor costs are 60 cents an hour. Thanks for helping kill our manufacturing base, Carly.

We are aware that screwing workers is not why she got fired from HP. (The company was just fine with that.) It was because of her HP-Compaq merger, which is credited with devaluing HP stock by over 50%. The day after she was dismissed, that same stock rose a dramatic 6.9%. This would be humiliating to anyone other than Fiorina, who is obviously shameless.

Like a fly chasing a pig, Fiorina's incompetence has followed her into the political arena. After appearing at window-maker Anlin Industries in Clovis, California, she released this statement: "It's clear that the $862 billion [stimulus] plan has stimulated nothing but growth in the size and scope of government." However, Anlin's Web site states the manufacturer was, in fact, helped by the stimulus plan, which allowed homeowners to recover up to 30% of the cost for window replacements.

Okay, you ask: If Fiorina is so bad, where is she getting the money to finance her campaign? Someone must believe in her. Well, remember that $42 million Hewlett-Packard forked over? That wasn't all the ex-CEO walked off with. Despite costing stockholders a bundle, she earned a total of almost $100 million during her stint with the company. Now she's using that money to produce and buy TV advertising. So it's Carly Fiorina who believes in Carly Fiorina.

We, on the other hand, find it easier to believe in the tooth fairy. For example, why vote for a politician who has, herself, rarely been politically active (prior to now)? Fiorina has voted in only a third of all elections since 2000 and has no voting record prior to moving to California in 1999. Beyond that, she is anti-choice, believes marriage should solely involve a man and a woman, opposes the legalization of marijuana, supports the death penalty, wants to cut taxes for the rich and the giant corporations and is against extending unemployment benefits.

Fiorina's reason for slashing unemployment benefits is tied to her belief that government should reduce spending. That sounds good until you realize it involves cutting funds that would otherwise go to states for schools, hospitals, roads and social programs that poor people depend on. Like we said, Fiorina is against the little guy and for the super- rich, which means she's for people like herself.

But here's the absolute worst of Fiorina's political positions: She is against more rigorous government regulation of Wall Street—despite the fact that it was the deregulation of the financial industry that caused America's current economic meltdown. If, by some strange perverted act of Satan, she should win Boxer's U.S. Senate seat, her position on that single issue could help usher in another economic calamity.

How ironic that a person who can't get work in the business sector—given her piss-poor record— now wants to be supported by American taxpayers even as she puts the screws to us. Fuck you, Carly!

THE REPUBLICANS' BIG LIE

The GOP strategy for winning in November is to blame the Obama Administration for the mess made by George W. Bush: the devastated economy and two wars. Should the Republicans succeed in hoodwinking the American people, the Democrats could lose the House and possibly even the Senate. Because of GOP partisanship, that will result in a Congressional gridlock this nation has never seen before.

Check the facts: The Republicans spent us into near-bankruptcy while lowering taxes for the rich. They also lied us into wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, costing American lives and trillions of dollars. Given the foregoing, I think President Obama deserves a chance to fulfill his agenda. Please consider that when voting for your representatives this November

Larry Flynt

Publisher

A Bite Of A Rotten Apple

by Alex Bennet

from HUSTLER Magazine November 2010

HOW STEVE JOBS RUINED A COMPANY WHILE MAKING IT SUCCESSFUL

When it came to computers, I was a PC guy. Apple was some kind of off-brand that women and touchy-feely "new age" guys seemed to love. Nor did I change my mind when Apple, aware of my on-the-air criticism, gave me one of its computers in an effort to win me over. It was the worst computer I'd ever used.

I steadfastly remained a PC guy until, having lost my radio gig, I took a job as a video editor. Now I had to use an Apple Macintosh with an Apple editing program called Final Cut Pro. Spending hundreds of hours editing, I soon fell in love with my Mac. So I bought an iMac, then a Mac Pro, another iMac and of course iPhones for both the girlfriend and myself. I am saying all this to let you know I no longer hate Apple products. I just hate the manufacturer.

Two Steves, Jobs and Wozniak, started Apple in a garage. What came out of that garage was the first practical personal computer. Recognizing true visionary entrepreneurs, a cult sprang up to root for the underdogs.

However, in spite of Apple's innovations—a graphical user interface and the mouse—it was still an also-ran. Microsoft and the PC had become huge, largely by stealing from Apple. But through it all, the company's legion of acolytes and dealerships hung tough.

By 1987 the two Steves were out. Although profits increased under CEO John Scullery,Apple lost whatever charm it had left. And that charm did not return when Jobs was brought back as CEO in 1997 due to declining profits.

Jobs turned the company around by improving its computers with a new and better operating system, but his real success wasn't in computers at all. In 2001 Apple produced a music player called the iPod. Within six years it had sold over 100 million of them. Then came the iPhone, another great product. However, what had started out as a pretty hip and humane company turned into just another ugly corporate bully.

In the beginning there was the good Steve and the bad Steve. Wozniak was the lovable computer nerd who envisioned a fuzzy computerized future. Jobs saw only money—and lots of it. In combination they were amazing, but now that Woz is out and Jobs is in, Apple has become one mean motherfucker.

If there was ever a company asking for antitrust action, it's the newly minted Apple Inc. Apple's operating system can only be installed in machines it manufactures. No clones allowed. Because the Apple system uses an Intel processor, common to all PCs as well, Microsoft Windows can be used on a Mac, but the Mac system can't be used on a PC because Apple put in a code making that impossible.

Apple's owned and operated stores are another problem. Gorgeous temples to their leader, Steve Jobs, they are forcing out of business the loyal dealers who stuck with Apple when times were tough. I talked to one dealer, who said he still gets products to sell, but only weeks after the Apple stores get them.

A flagrant example was decades-long Apple dealer MACadam in San Francisco. Apple rewarded the dealer's loyalty by opening a store just down the street. MACadam went out of business. Granted, MACadam had a crappy reputation, but even assholes should be protected from unfair competition by the very entity that supplies them with products.

A few months back an Apple employee accidentally left a prototype of the next iPhone in a Redwood City, California, bar. It wound up in the hands of a blogger, but not before the guy who found it supposedly tried returning the device to Apple. (The company refused, for who knows what ego-driven reason, to even admit having made it.)

The blogger, Jason Chen of Gizmodo.com, published photos of the misplaced iPhone before returning it to Apple. Next thing you know officers from California's Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team knocked down Chen's door while he was out to dinner, confiscating everything electronic the blogger owned.

I must also mention Adobe, a company that makes Flash, the program you use when watching YouTube and such. Apple refuses to allow Flash to work on any of its products, thereby stifling Adobe's business. Thanks to a suit filed by Adobe, the government is looking into the matter.

Jon Stewart recently said, "Microsoft was supposed to be the evil one. But now you guys [Apple] are busting down doors in Palo Alto while Commandant Gates is ridding the world of mosquitoes. What the fuck is going on?"

Yes, Apple has become the asshole of the world. Now excuse me please. I'm off to the Apple Store to buy an iPad.

Alex Bennett is a longtime HUSTLER contributor. The two-time Emmy winner, who broke into broadcasting as a teenager, can be heard on Sirius Left. 146 (9 a.m. to noon ET) and XM America Left 167 (midnight to 3 a.m. ET).

Has the White House Violated Our Humanity?

by Nat Hentoff

from HUSTLER Magazine November 2010

AS BIG BROTHER GETS BIGGER AND BOLDER, AMERICANS ARE ONCE AGAIN LIVING IN "TIMES THAT TRY MEN'S SOULS."

Many years ago I went to a conference on privacy at Harvard University. The keynote speaker, a high-level assistant to then- FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, was unusually frank for an FBI official. He bellowed, "Privacy? It's gone." Even Hoover himself had no idea of how deep and continuing that loss would become. Last year the Electronic Privacy Foundation—the premier defender of our digital civil liberties—accused the U.S. government of engaging "in a massive program of illegal dragnet surveillance of domestic communications and communications records of millions of ordinary Americans since at least 2001."

Our home and business phones and e-mails are, of course, porous. But federal eyes and ears have moved on to cell phones, texting, Twitter and their ever-more-sophisticated progeny, while also increasing experimentation with methods of mind control through behavioral modification techniques and beyond. (For details, see "Obama Interrogation Official Linked to U.S. Mind Control Research" at PubRecord.org, May 25, 2010.)

James Bamford, the most informed investigator of our cavernous Big Brother—the National Security Agency, known for its limitless databases—reveals in his 2008 book The Shadow Factory : "NSA is also developing another tool that Orwell's Thought Police might have found useful—an artificial intelligence system designed to know what people are thinking."

I've written about our vanishing privacy in this column and in my books, but never with such penetratingly profound awareness as the Wall Street Journal 's Peggy Noonan in her article "Our Lives Laid Bare": "When we lose our privacy, we lose some of our humanity; we lose the things that are particular to us, that make us separate and distinctive as souls, as actually children of God."

Actually, I'm an atheist, but I do have a secular soul with what once were secret compartments that may now be in "persons of interest" files at the J. Edgar Hoover Building, the FBI's headquarters in Washington, D.C. Also, as an unremitting critic of Bush and Cheney and now Obama—the continuer of their anti- Constitutional legacy—I'm not unmindful that were there another 9/11 or worse, I might have a compulsory change of address. So far I've not been able to get my actual current FBI files; but the one I saw years ago had me at a North Africa meeting of purportedly dangerous radicals.

I have never been to Africa, North or South. I did meet Che Guevara once, at New York's Cuban Mission to the United Nations, and I had the irreverent nerve to ask him if Cuba would ever have free elections. He laughed sardonically, obviously not regarding me as a dependable revolutionary.

But there are millions of Americans without a tinge of radicalism or libertarianism (my core belief) in their past who are disquieted at being part of a society under ceaseless surveillance. They hear about current cases like that of Bruce Shore, who caught Kentucky Republican Senator Jim Bunning on C-SPAN complaining about having missed a basketball game to vote on unemployment benefits and then delaying the vote. Shore, a 51-year-old unemployed resident of Philadelphia, sent critical e-mails about Bunning to members of the senator's staff, including "No checks equal no food for me. DO YOU GET IT?"

This citizen, supposedly protected by the First Amendment, was soon visited by United States marshals, who presented him with a grand jury indictment for violating the Communications Decency Act. His alleged crime? Shore, as this law spells out, "did use a telecommunications device, that is, a computer, whether or not communication ensued, without disclosing his identity, to annoy, abuse, threaten and harass any person who received the communication."

Whether or not Shore is eventually found guilty, he is now in a stream of government databases, where he will probably remain for the rest of his life—unless we get a President whose bible, whatever his religion, or none, is the Constitution. If Shore is convicted, he faces up to two years in the slammer and a $250,000 fine.

As for many of the rest of us who could be ensnared in this federal dragnet, Peggy Noonan writes that "Americans, as a people, are not really suited to the age of surveillance, the age of no privacy. There is no hiding place now, not here."

Can we ever get our privacy back? Not unless we fight for it. A movement has begun. According to the Wall Street Journal, such abusers of our privacy as Microsoft, Google, Intel and AT&T "are pushing for more stringent regulations on government ability to access electronic communications."

They are seeking a basic reform and updating of the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which "extended restrictions on government wiretaps to data transmissions as well as phone calls" and "regulated privacy in stored data." But these so-called restrictions have gone with the Presidential winds and whims. Therefore, this coalition—whose ultimate aim is to restore personal privacy—calls itself Digital Due Process.

Congressman John Conyers Jr. (DMichigan), Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, says he will lead these attempts to rescue privacy. I know that Conyers is deeply into our American music of individual liberty— jazz—but he needs help. Although it may take some courage after what happened to Bruce Shore, notify your representatives in the House and Senate that you demand your privacy back. Peggy Noonan reminds us: "There are cameras all over. No terrorist can escape them, but none of the rest of us can either."

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?

Rape and Spillage

by Robert Scheer

from HUSTLER Magazine November 2010

LURKING BENEATH THE GULF OIL CATASTROPHE IS THE CORPORATE CORRUPTION OF AMERICA'S POLITICAL CULTURE.

What's with Barack Obama's war analogy on the Gulf oil spill? It's as if some extraterrestrial force had suddenly launched "The Invasion of the Slippery Sludge."

"Abroad, our brave men and women in uniform are taking the fight to al-Qaeda," the President said in his June 15 prime-time address from the Oval Office after weeks of being slammed for apparent passivity in the face of mounting disaster. "And tonight, I've returned from a trip to the Gulf Coast to speak with you about the battle we're waging against an oil spill that is assaulting our shores and our citizens."

What nonsense! The oil was minding its own business until some multinational corporations, enabled by a dysfunctional government regulatory regime, decided to wage war on the ecological balance of the oceans by employing technology that they were not prepared to control. Cleaning up the mess we made by raping the environment to satiate our consumer gluttony is not a glorious battle against evil but rather obligatory penance for the profound error of our ways.

You wound Mother Nature by punching a hole deep in her pristine waters, where you have no business going, and when she bleeds uncontrollably, you dare blame her for the assault? This from a President who, shortly before this disaster, had given the oil companies permission to pillage in the deep seas at will.

At least Obama now admits to having been extremely naive in his belief that they knew what they were doing: "A few months ago, I approved a proposal to consider new, limited offshore drilling under the assurance that it would be absolutely safe—that the proper technology would be in place and the necessary precautions would be taken. That obviously was not the case on the Deepwater Horizon rig, and I want to know why."

The President already knows why! It's the same ideological obsession that led to the deregulation of the banking industry—a policy based on the assumption that the unfettered pursuit of multinational corporation profits would somehow serve the public good. In every area of federal governance, the story is the same: The mammoth corporations, through their lobbyists and campaign contributions, end up controlling the government agencies ostensibly regulating the activities of the military-industrial, health, financial and communications complexes. Why be surprised that the oil conglomerates are also in bed with their pretend Washington regulators?  Obviously, Obama cannot be blamed for the bipartisan endorsement of the Reagan Revolution's siren song, a call to make the world safe for multinational corporations. The radical antiregulation campaign—endorsed by Bill Clinton as well as the father-and-son Bush team—corrupted rather than improved the efficiency of the entire private sector, and what happened with the oil industry was the rule and not the exception.

In explaining the failure of the Minerals Management Service, whose responsibilities include regulating oil drillers, Obama stated: "Over the last decade, this agency has become emblematic of a failed philosophy that views all regulation with hostility—a philosophy that says corporations should be allowed to play by their own rules and police themselves. At this agency, industry insiders were put in charge of industry oversight. Oil companies showered regulators with gifts and favors, and were essentially allowed to conduct their own safety inspections and write their own regulations."

That damning indictment of the corporate corruption of our political process should stand as a cautionary tale to everyone, but particularly to the citizens of those red states now suffering, thanks to offshore drilling previously approved by the majority of their voters. Hopefully they, and the President who catered to such impulses, will take away from this very costly mess a justifiable skepticism about the risk assessments of plunderers that treat natural treasures as nothing more than potential profit centers.

The public goes along because, as with the jobs created by military spending and the false wealth of financial bubbles, it is blinded by lavishly funded corporate PR that cloaks the true costs of such reckless corporate behavior.

Coinciding with Obama's June speech, one Republican congressman said British Petroleum— which took steps toward creating a $20-billion fund to pay for spill reparations— was the victim of a "shakedown" by the President. However, even financial experts noted that this may have been as much a crafty Wall Street move as anything, creating with the obligation a "poison pill" for potential "hostile takeover" predators.

Of course, it is quite possible BP could be chopped up and sold—its huge international oil reserves going one way to produce more billions in profits while a rump portion is left to languish through decades of liability litigation.  Ultimately, what must be fought and won is the war against corporate dominance of every important aspect of our political culture. The catastrophic Gulf oil spill is the wake-up call to fight corporate arrogance that we, and our President, desperately needed.

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.

Throw The Bastards In Jail!

Larry Flynt

from HUSTLER Magazine November 2010

If nothing else, the oil-drilling disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, in conjunction with the economic disaster caused by Wall Street, tells us one thing with certainty: Unless the CEOs of companies that have devastated this country are held personally responsible for their actions, nothing is going to change.

People who through negligence or indifference cause death or harm to others, whether it be economic or physical, should no longer be allowed to hide behind a corporation's protective wall. If the CEO of British Petroleum, Goldman Sachs or whatever company is put in jail, his successors will think long and hard before trying to save a buck by taking shortcuts or bending the law.