A NOTED COLUMNIST AND AUTHOR DETAILS HOW THE BANKS ARE TURNING YOU IN TO A DEBT SLAVE AND HOW THE AMERICAN PEOPLE CAN TAKE BACK THE POWER OF CREATING MONEY.

from THE Q & A with Ellen Brown interviewed by Mark Johnson
in HUSTLER Magazine – February 2010

In 1933, President Roosevelt summed up the truth about power in America: “A financial element in the large centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.” That financial element was—and still is—the banking system, headed by a private cartel known as the U.S. Federal Reserve. Over the years Roosevelt’s truth has been echoed many times by politicians and scholars trying to break the bankers’ stranglehold. Now, as the Obama Administration continues to bail out the banks, we may be facing the economic endgame. In her eye-opening new book The Web of Debt, attorney Ellen Brown zeros in on the fraudulent core of our imploding economy: Banks have been using accounting tricks to create money out of thin air, charging interest on it and siphoning off the profits. Brown stresses that the only feasible way to rein in the private banking cartel is to set up a competitive system of public banks, owned by the people, that act in the common interest. This would be the first step toward giving We the People back the power to create our own money.

HUSTLER: How is our money currently created?

ELLEN BROWN: All of our money is created as a debt to private banks. We have no actual money in our monetary system except for coins, which are created by the government. Coins compose a tiny fraction of the money supply. The rest is created by banks in the form of loans. That includes paper dollar bills or Federal Reserve Notes, which compose about 3% of the money supply. Federal Reserve Notes are created by the Federal Reserve, a privately owned banking corporation, and lent to the government and to other banks. But 97% of all money exists only in ledgers, not as actual circulating currency.

When I go into a bank and ask for $100,000 to buy a house, where does that money come from?

They will write your mortgage up on one side of their books as an asset to themselves because you will pay them money over time. Then they will write the same sum on the other side of their books as a liability because that amount becomes your account that you write checks on. This is called double-entry bookkeeping. They have created a plus $100,000 and a minus $100,000, which comes out to zero. They’ll say that their books balance. The bookkeeping entries on the liability side are what circulate in the economy as “money.” Money has actually been added to the money supply. And that money creation is at interest, so there is always more money owed back than is put out. The money that banks lend is not from preexisting deposits. It is new money that did not exist until it was lent.
But if I write a check to the mortgage company, someone is taking that out as cash somewhere along the line.

The bank can pay out money because it operates under what’s called a reserve requirement. Banks are supposed to keep 10% of their assets in the form of cash reserves. Let’s say they have $1 million in outstanding loans; they should have $100,000 in actual money that they could pay out immediately.

Long ago, when we were on the gold standard, it was discovered that people came for their gold only 10% of the time. Our reserve requirement still reflects the fact that 90% of the people won’t come for their money. The 10% kept in reserve comes from depositors. This money is not lent out. The banks use it to create loans under the system of “fractional reserve banking.”

Say they start with $10,000 in bank assets. They’re allowed to lend 90% of that, so they lend $9,000. It’ll go into another bank somewhere, and that bank is allowed to lend 90% on top of that and so on. The deposit keeps multiplying until the original $10,000 is turned into accountability and disclosure to the public.

The power to create money is given to Congress in the Constitution.

When does the Fed decide to print more money?

They print money when the banks need it to meet the banks’ cash reserve requirements. Most people think the government prints the money. The government owns the machinery that prints the dollars, but it’s the Federal Reserve that commissions them to print the dollars.

That’s where the deception is. The Fed tells our printers to print it, and the Fed pays the cost of printing. So they get it for pennies on the dollar, then lend it to us at full face value. The income tax was originally set up to pay the interest on the debt incurred to the Federal Reserve. Very little of the interest now actually goes to the Federal Reserve. But when it was first set up, that was the intent of the bankers that got the law passed. The government passed both laws the same year, 1913: the 16th Amendment for the income tax and the Federal Reserve Act.

The Federal Reserve Act initiated the current system of creating money?

That’s when it was formalized, but we’ve had banker-created money all of our formal existence. In 1791, Alexander Hamilton—our first Treasury Secretary—started the first U.S. bank. It was originally 80% privately owned, and then the government sold the other 20%, so it wound up being 100% privately owned. Thomas Jefferson was opposed to the idea. He considered Hamilton’s plan traitorous and unconstitutional. For a hundred years before that, Americans had money issued by the colonial governments. It worked really well. We flourished all through the colonial period at a time when the British were suffering from the ravages of the Industrial Revolution.

The bank of Pennsylvania—in Benjamin Franklin’s province—was the ideal colonial model. Franklin was considered the father of paper money. He raved about it and said it was responsible for the abundance in the colonies. The government would issue a certain amount of money and then lend it to the farmers at 5% interest.

The government would also issue a little extra and spend it on public works, like building roads. Then they had enough money in the system to cover principal and interest as the loan money went out and came back, without having to inflate the system. During that time the Pennsylvania colonists paid no taxes, had no government debt, and there was no price inflation—a brilliant, self-contained, sustainable system.

A major factor that led to the American Revolution was that King George told us we could no longer print new issues of our own money. The worst part was we had to pay our taxes in gold to England. That was why the colonists were so upset about the taxes. It wasn’t just that there was a tax on tea. It was that we had to pay this tax in gold, which we didn’t have. The farmers had to borrow it from the British bankers. The colonists wound up in foreclosure. They were losing their farms. So they just went back to printing their own money because they had to. They needed a money supply. It was an act of rebellion. Tom Paine called this government-issued paper money “a cornerstone of the Revolution.”

Was that money backed by gold or silver?

No. It was backed by the full faith and credit of the government. The system was started in 1691 when the governor of Massachusetts, who didn’t have gold or silver, gave out government receipts to his soldiers, saying, “Go and trade with this; it will be honored for your service to the community.” That worked. The colonies paid for the Revolutionary War with paper money. Unfortunately, it was easily counterfeited. The British were sitting in the harbor with printing presses on ships, madly running their presses.

After the war, even if the government had tried to issue paper dollars, nobody would have accepted them because they were so heavily devalued during the war. So Hamilton resorted to a ruse where he took the gold that the government had—which wasn’t that much—and put it in the bank and started issuing paper bank notes, saying that they were redeemable in gold. That was the so-called gold standard.

The bankers knew people would only come 10% of the time for their gold, so they could issue ten times as many notes as they had gold. Suddenly they had ten times more money. The problem was that the banknotes were lent to the government by private bankers, putting us into this whole debt syndrome we’re in now.

Lincoln also printed “greenbacks” to finance the Civil War. What happened to that idea?

Lincoln tapped into the same cornerstone that had gotten the impoverished colonists through the Revolution: He authorized the government to issue its own paper money. But private bankers sought to eliminate Lincoln’s “greenbacks” since they weren’t under their control. Lincoln was shot, and the bankers pressured Congress to pass the National Banking Act, which allowed them to replace the “greenbacks” with their own privately issued currency.

What would be the most workable reform of the banking system?

We need state-owned banks. With a public, state-owned bank, your profits go back to the community. You don’t have a parasite pulling profits out the way you do with private banks. The whole point of a corporation is to make money for the stockholders and management. If you’re a public entity, you don’t have to worry about profits to your shareholders, and your shareholders and customers don’t have to be nervous about losing their money because you’ve got a huge pool backed by the state. You can create many times your deposits in loans, to fund government projects, helping the community, and all the profits go back to the center—the state bank.

Any sort of public entity can own a bank. A university like UCLA could own a bank. They could take all their revenues, put them in their bank, create many times that sum in loans and build a stadium. The profits from the stadium would go back and pay off the loan.
They could do it interest-free.

Why don’t they?

I don’t think they know they can do it; we’ve been kept in ignorance for so long. In the 1890s, people actually knew the banks were $100,000 or more, distributed among several banks. It’s like a mirror trick. The problem is if you get rid of the first dollar, the whole mirror effect collapses.

Banks need to generate debt to create money?

Yes, essentially all of our money comes from loans. Our current private banking system is a pyramid scheme. Banks have to continually suck new borrowers in because they never put as much money out as they want back. They put out ten; they take back 11. They put out 11; they take back 121/2. So in order to create that extra money, you always have to find somebody else who will borrow. They’re scrambling to find debtors. This is the scheme they use for everything from mortgages to credit cards. Our central bank, the Federal Reserve, authorizes the activity of creating money out of nothing.

Is the Fed part of the private banking system?

The Federal Reserve is not actually federal. It is composed of 12 branches, which are private corporations owned by a consortium of banks. We, the public, do not own one share of stock in the Federal Reserve. Our President appoints the head of the Federal Reserve, but once appointed, he’s pretty much on his own.

The only leverage Congress really has is to modify or eliminate the Federal Reserve Act. The question is, can this secretive private cartel be trusted with so much unregulated power? It would be cheaper and safer to give the power to create dollars to Congress itself, with full creating money because there was no Federal Reserve. It was obvious that when you went to the bank, they were giving you a bank note supposedly backed by their own gold. You knew that it was privately issued money. Today we’ve been led to believe the government issues the money and that they’re the problem. We’ve been sucked into supporting the banking beast when we could walk away and form our own credit system.

Has this idea of public banking been tested?

It has. One state owns its own bank: North Dakota. It’s also one of only two states that are currently able to meet their budgets. The Bank of North Dakota was set up during a populist movement in 1919. By law, all of the state’s revenues go into its own state-owned bank. These then serve as the deposit base for many times that sum in loans, and the excess profits go back to the state.

They don’t publicly say they’re creating credit out of nothing on their books, but that’s how all banks work; many authorities have said so. North Dakota now has the lowest unemployment rate in the country, it has plenty of money for things like student loans and sustainable energy development, and it’s generally not feeling the pinch of the credit crisis at all.

What’s preventing a system like that from being instituted nationwide?

Corruption and multimillion-dollar salaries. You can’t change the system until it collapses. But that’s the point we’re at now. It has collapsed.

Would a public banking system still be competitive enough on an international scale?

A public banking system could be more competitive than private banks. Banks create credit on their books, and a government bank could do exactly the same thing—without all the toxic assets that are preventing the banks from making loans now, and without having all the profits going out to a parasitic banking elite.

You could set up a public banking system that could start fresh. You could still let the private banks operate. They do that in India. It used to be that the private Indian banks were preferred because they were profit-generating, but now suddenly everybody’s rushing to the public banks because they’re more secure.

Aren’t the people who are making money off the current private banking system going to fight a public system tooth and nail?

Sure, but what can they say if we’re playing by their rules? We just want to join in the game. We could just set up public banks to fund infrastructure, to fund the stimulus program. Let the private banking system alone. Don’t try to prop it up and don’t try to bring it down. Just see which one works better. I’ll place a wager that it’s going to be the public system and that everyone’s going to rush to the public system when they see how well it works.

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WILLIAM A NOTED REPORTER AND AUTHOR TELLS US HOW CORPORATIONS ARE DESTROYING THE AMERICAN ECONOMY AND WHAT WE CAN DO TO FIX IT.

from THE Q & A with William Greider interviewed by Mark Johnson
in HUSTLER Magazine – January 2010

William Greider is one of the experts who warned us ten years ago that our economy was headed into the shredder. A longtime observer of runaway capitalism, Greider has written several books and worked as a reporter for numerous newspapers and magazines, including the Washington Post and Rolling Stone. He is currently national affairs correspondent for The Nation.

During his 40-year career he has crossed paths with the country’s most powerful people. He has examined in detail how and why America went from a thriving democracy to a nation run by bankers. In his latest book—Come Home, America: The Rise and Fall (and Redeeming Promise) of Our Country —Greider maintains that we are at an epic turning point in our history. It is time for people to step up and reclaim their role as true citizens.

HUSTLER: How did you recognize early on that our economy was in deep trouble?

WILLIAM GREIDER: Ten years ago I wrote in my book One World Ready or Not that our [economic] system, despite all of its creative energies, was veering off-balance. The United States was playing buyer of last resort for everybody else. We had our arms wide open and accepted imports from everywhere when no one else would. Our multinational corporations were going into poorer countries, developing production there and shipping parts back into the U.S.
We now import four or five times more than we export. Because our production and jobs have been moving offshore, we don’t have the money to pay for the imports. We borrow the money from the people who are selling us stuff. There’s surplus production every year all around the world. Most countries won’t take it, either because they can’t afford it or because they just won’t let it in. The U.S., because we’re the big-hearted Goliath, says,“We’re for free trade; keep it coming.” The long-term consequences are the U.S. gets deeper and deeper in debt, and American workers suffer stagnant or falling wages because they’re competing with foreign low-wage workers.

Has this policy been pushed by the multinational corporations?

Absolutely. Both Democrats and Republicans have supported this in the belief that if our U.S. multinationals do well in the world, we’ll be okay. But it doesn’t work that way. The multinationals (whether you’re talking about General Electric or Microsoft or whomever) can do very well and actually hurt the United States in the process. As long as it was just T-shirts and cheap shoes, you could say, “That’s not going to make much difference.”

The reality is, we’re now getting some of the most advanced products and technology in the world out of places like China.We’re losing what businesspeople call “value added production.” The process of making a product produces high value added [for the producing country]. Most countries understand that they’ve got to hang on to that really valuable production and the jobs that go with it to maintain a prosperous middle class. Otherwise you sink lower and lower. Twenty years ago I talked to working guys in auto plants, and they told me this was happening to them. Blue-collar people understand this way better than the people who run the country.

How do you bring production back to the United States?

It starts in politics. You get a government and a political party that stands up and says to the American people, “We’re in a deep hole, and it’s getting deeper, and we cannot go on like this.” First, we’ve got to change our approach to the U.S. multinationals. We’re going to say to them, “Look, we’re not handing out tax breaks and other subsidies any longer. You have some obligations to the home country. We want you to be profitable, but you have to include the national interest in your business strategies.” If they don’t, we will reform the corporate income tax so that the companies that do better at retaining the jobs and keeping value added gain in our own home country will get a lower tax rate than companies simply moving it out the door.

How likely is that to happen with Congress in the pocket of Big Business?

Politicians are in line with the most powerful companies and financiers because they support globalization. However, in Congress there’s a growing nucleus of representatives who are mad because their constituents are mad. It’s just a start, but it’s not hopeless. As candidate for President, Barack Obama said that we’re going to stop rewarding the companies that simply move production overseas and start rewarding companies that do the best job of keeping it here in the U.S. with a modest tax incentive.

His idea doesn’t go far enough, but I’m encouraged he’s starting down that road. People should be banging on him right now saying, “Hey, you said this during the campaign. What are you doing about it?” The other thing we’ve got to do is say to the rest of the world, “We’ve been generously supporting the development of the global economy for years, but the whole system is going to come crashing down if the United States taps out. We’re going to put a cap on our trade deficits and gradually reduce it so we can come closer to something like a balanced trading system.”

What’s wrong with trade tariffs?

Nothing. Every country in the world uses them. I’m for a trading system that functions for poor people as well as the wealthy. When I started writing about this 20-plus years ago, a lot of people dismissed me as a fearmonger and a protectionist. Now the facts are so devastating that a lot of people who used to be cheerleaders for free trade are not so anxious to be identified with it.

I would put Obama in that category. He’s willing to acknowledge things are not working in America’s self-interest. But he’s not yet ready to step up and really forcefully address it. [He and his advisers] are blinded by the ideology that the world works better if government gets out of the way and lets business do its thing. That’s not only nonsense, it’s morally wrong. These same businesses siphon off taxpayer money, and the things they promised do not happen. When you ask Americans how they feel about corporations, an overwhelming consensus says corporations have too much power, and the government should get some control over them.

Why doesn’t the government do that?

Because those same corporations are manipulating elected politicians and financing their campaigns. The American people have a deeper understanding of this reality than they’re given credit for. I’m optimistic this is going to change, but it’s got to be bloody. The usual interests will just try to either stomp on people or brush them aside. Somebody ought to stand up and say, “I am proposing an amendment to the Constitution that clarifies once and for all: Corporations do not have the rights of people.” It would give you a fight for people to organize around.

Is our technology going overseas along with our jobs?

Yes. A good example is Boeing, which makes large-body commercial aircraft. They will contract out to scores of other countries: China, Indonesia, Europe, the Middle East, the whole list. They’ll say, “We want you to make the titanium alloy strut that holds up the engines on a 747, and we’ll show you how to make it. We’ll have guys in your plant, your foundry, monitoring you for quality because we can’t screw this up. This has got to work, because otherwise the plane will crash.” The Chinese will take instructions from the Americans, make that part, ship it to Seattle or Wichita, Kansas, where it is then installed in a Boeing assembly line and becomes part of the aircraft. They do that with hundreds of components. The most obvious reason is wages: It’s cheaper. But that’s not even the main motive for Boeing. Boeing wants to sell airplanes to those countries. China especially has a huge air-travel industry. So Boeing buys market share [meaning the ability to sell huge amounts of product in China] by trading away American jobs. I’ve had interviews with Boeing managers and strategists, and they’re pretty upfront about it. They say, “Look, if we don’t do this, they won’t buy our airplanes.”

The reason that we have to fight for both manufacturing and service jobs is because even the high-end technical, professional jobs are now being shipped overseas. Google and Microsoft are competing in China now. They’ve both opened big research centers there. The workers are cheaper, but they’re perfectly good engineers. Hundreds of big-name companies have traded technology to those developing countries in exchange for cheap labor and market access.

How did Singapore, a tiny city-state, get so good at making disc drives invented by IBM and other U.S. companies?

The answer is: IBM taught them, in return for tax subsidies and protection against wage increases [in Singapore].

How do we rein in the banks as well?

Obama should be using the government’s power to say, “Until we get out of this crisis, we’re in charge. We’re keeping you afloat with our loans. That gives us the power, and if we have to, we’ll pass a law to direct you and your behavior and cut out all the bullshit and get this credit system working again so that we can get a real economic recovery.” The banks are in trouble because they still have these huge portfolios of rotten assets. Nothing has happened to change that. The bankers know that if they do get back in trouble, the government has to come and save them again. It’s a one-way bet for them: Heads we win, and tails you lose.

How do you get out of this quickly rather than dragging it on for years?

You get these bad assets out of the banks so they can begin lending again. They didn’t do that because the bankers said, “Well, if the economy comes back, this stuff is going to be worth a lot of money again, and we don’t want to sell it cheap.” At that point, if the government had the balls, they would have grabbed these bankers by the collar and said, “You’re going to sell this stuff or we’re cutting off your water right now.” The government has them in a life-and-death situation, and Obama won’t use that.

How do we force politicians to keep their promises?

People have to create their own power and their own communication. That’s what the Internet is about. Ordinary Americans are learning to use these technologies for their own purposes. It means communicating with people they don’t even know, who may be on the other side of an issue, and spreading the word. Out of that can come organizations independent of both political parties. They have to be able to mobilize lots of people to do a jujitsu on the system. Jujitsu is when the little guy flips a big guy on his back. People can do that in the electoral arena if they’ve got the nerve.

The Democratic Party is supported by all kinds of groups—unions, environmentalists, consumer advocates, civil rights activists. But what these groups haven’t been able to do is punish the Democratic Party when it sells them out. They have to say, “You’re screwing us. We’re going to make a list of senators or House members [who are working against us].

Instead of handing over our money, we’re going to take some of it and run our own candidates against Democratic incumbents.” You can do that with a minor percentage of the vote if you’re willing to take on the big party and say we’ve had enough.

One guy I know is warning the Democrats that they’re going to have a political train wreck in the Congressional elections if they go ahead with the idea of taxing health benefits. One of the guys talking this up is Max Baucus, senator from Montana and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. Must be a Republican, right? No, he’s a Democrat! His position goes against what Obama said during the campaign. It goes against basic fairness.

Anybody in a union knows they traded wage increases for better benefits. Along comes the government and pretends they’re getting this stuff for free.We have to say to the Democratic Party, “Don’t go down that road. If you do, you’re going to wind up where you did in 1994, when the Republicans took back the House of Representatives after 50 years.”

Ordinary people, both nonunion and union, can begin to provoke this. They can say to the unions [and other groups], “You come around and ask for money every year, but you won’t threaten the Democrats or members of Congress with retribution when they sell you out.” Nothing moves opinion in the Congress more reliably than members seeing a couple of their colleagues cut down out of the blue by something they didn’t take seriously.

People are always screaming about how influential the NRA [National Rifle Association] is. The NRA is influential because they play hardball. Every member of Congress, whether they’re far left or far right, understands that. The NRA will not forget when they’re crossed, and they’re effective. You don’t have to be a political party, you don’t have to be a labor union to play that kind of politics. I envision lots of what I call “independent formations.” Not political parties, not issue groups. They’re people together exercising their rights as citizens. It’s like guerrilla warfare. Guerrilla warfare works not because the fighters are bigger or stronger, but because they pick their spots. They’re willing to shoot for the kneecaps.

What can the average person do in terms of forcing change?

Above all, trust your guts. Have faith in your basic convictions and tune out the propaganda that’s meant to manipulate your mind. I have a lot of faith in the capacity of Americans, regardless of their status, to think for themselves. They’ve been pushed around for so many years. Yes, they’re cynical; they don’t know who to trust; and so forth. The first step is for them to uncover that good stuff in themselves. As they do that, they don’t have to ask me or anyone else what to do. They’ll figure that out for themselves. I believe that deeply.
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You may purchase the hard copy of the January 2010 Issue of HUSTLER Magazine (with free shipping) at HustlerMagazine.com.

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JOHN NICHOLS, the Washington correspondent ofThe Nation, is also a contributor to The Progressive and In These Times and a bestselling author. His latest book,The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders’ Cure for Royalism (TheNewPress.com), reveals startling parallels between previous presidencies and the Bush regime’s abuses of power. In a compelling interview, Nichols roasts corporate media and boldly lays out a bill of particulars for impeaching Bush and Cheney.

HUSTLER: The Genius of Impeachment discusses Congressman Abraham Lincoln’s efforts to censure and/or impeach President James Polk following the unprovoked imperialistic invasion of Mexico in 1848.

JOHN NICHOLS: The founders established the impeachment power in the Constitution with the purpose of constraining the executive. That was their intent from the beginning. They were terrified a President would become a king for four years, that upon election a President would cease respecting the Constitution and would simply do as he chose.That protection was placed there for a specific reason. Madison and Jefferson and others were very specific. They wanted to chain the dogs of war, to ensure Presidents could not do what kings had always done: lead the country into wars of whim or political desire.

In the 1840s, President Polk—a slaveholder—realized slavery was on the way out. Mexico, Britain and other countries were banning it; he was terrified. Polk said the old order was passing, and he looked at the map and basically said, “How do we get more slave states? … Why don’t we invade a relatively weak, poor country to our south, seize lots of territory there, and then we can make all that territory into a bunch of states.” The 1840s/1850s compromises stated that if you were below the Mason-Dixon Line, you could be a slave state.The more states permitting slavery, he reasoned, the more powerful the slave interest would be.

But a young Congressman came out of the Midwest to challenge this war more aggressively than any members of Congress are currently challenging the Iraq War—except perhaps Representatives Barbara Lee and Maxine Waters.

Was the Mexican-American War launched under false pretexts?

There were lies that Mexicans had attacked Americans. So this young Congressman, Abraham Lincoln, went to the House floor every day with a “Spot Resolution” and essentially said: “President Polk, show me the spot where a single drop of American blood was shed. And if you cannot show it to me, then tell me why we should not act against you as a sovereign who has lied to the American people and their Congress for the purpose of launching an illegal war.”

When Lincoln challenged Polk, [Lincoln's] law partner back in Illinois sent him a letter saying—and I’m paraphrasing here—”You can’t attack the President in a time of war. He’s the commander in chief. The troops are in the field.” Lincoln wrote back, “If I don’t criticize the President in a time of war, then we return the Presidency to the status of a king, and do exactly what we fought against. We make our sovereign an individual who can by whim and lie lead us into a war that will kill our children, empty our treasury and warp the very intents of the country.” Ultimately, Polk didn’t seek a second term.

The biggest tragedy today is that we don’t have enough Abe Lincolns in Congress, because it’s the same struggle: fact after fact, detail after detail, a President doing it without the permission of Congress—these elements come into play.We’ve fought these battles before [and] always come to the same conclusion: A President who does this must be sanctioned. If he is not, we establish in the Presidency a royalty that our founders said would destroy the country.

Do you think Bush will rein himself in?

Fear of losing your power and place in history, being a President sanctioned by censure or impeachment, causes even the most bombastic or irresponsible of Presidents to become self-protective. The push for impeachment is a vehicle by which we might well see George Bush step back from the brink. And if he doesn’t, that clash between the executive and the legislative, which the founders intended and wanted, [happens]. That clash becomes a popular discussion, not a Congressional or legal discussion. The people watch it, decide and tell their members of Congress, “Yes, go after this guy.” Or as happened with Clinton, [the people] say, “Back off; this is ridiculous.” However it plays out, it’s a very democratic process because the President, in the midst of his term—not just merely at an election—is forced to respond to the popular will and to the House of Representatives. When it doesn’t happen for too long, Presidents take more power unto themselves.

Are there grounds for impeaching George W. Bush?

You don’t publish a large enough magazine to detail them all. Smart people have written books on this, [including] Elizabeth Holtzman, who served on the Judiciary Committee during the Nixon era. Let’s be very blunt about the specifics: Bush deceived Congress, intentionally and specifically, for the purpose of launching a war of whim rather than necessity—not a defensive war but a war of desire. We see a violation of the separation of powers, the Constitutional determination that we have a system of checks and balances. Bush swore an oath to a Constitution that says only Congress can declare war. So we have an impeachable offense. There’s simply no question.

Spying on the American people. More revelations in this regard, not merely via the USA PATRIOT Act, but also all the warrantless wiretapping. A viola-tion, not just of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, but also of the Fourth Amendment—[prohibiting] spying on people in their homes without permission of the courts and Congress. Signing statements, an absolutely regal act, that of a king; again, in direct violation of the Constitution’s clear definition of how Congress passes a law: The President signs or vetoes that law.

The punishment of political critics and foes. The Joe Wilson/Valerie Plame case. Again, this goes directly to past impeachments. The third article of impeachment against Richard Nixon involved the use of his office to punish or to go after political critics.

Finally, and perhaps, most importantly, Bush’s sanction of torture and extraordinary rendition. People say, “That violates the Geneva Conventions.” The Constitution requires us to obey our treaties as we obey the law of the land. So if Bush violates the Geneva Conventions, he violates the law. But it’s also a violation of the Bill of Rights, which bars cruel and unusual punishment.

Just in that bare minimum list, we have grounds for an impeachment process any founder would have respected and encouraged. If Jefferson and Madison were here, they’d say: “What are you waiting for? We gave you the outline.We were very specific about when you should do it in a time of war.”

Jefferson said, “We have created a near-perfect republic, but will they keep it?”When he asked that, he wasn’t saying, “Will Congress keep it? Will the press keep it?” He was talking about the people.

Let’s discuss Tragedy and Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy, which you cowrote with Robert McChesney and others. How has the press let us down regarding impeachment?

We have a corporate press in America. Our mainstream media operates in much the same way as an official media does in a royal state, or even in some dictatorships. You may say, “Well, that’s a pretty extreme statement.” Not at all. The press is most useful to power when it maintains the image of being independent and skeptical, but never really is.

Look at the run-up to the war in Iraq. Two days before the war began—on America’s preeminent talk show, Meet the Press—the Vice President is asked, “What’s this war going to be like?” Cheney’s supposed to be the smart one, the guy who knows what’s going on, an ex-secretary of defense. He says, “We’ll be greeted as liberators.” Many Americans believed him, not just because Cheney said it, but because [host] Tim Russert nodded and said, “Very good,” then went on to the next question.

Both the Washington Post and New York Times eventually printed apologies for supporting the administration’s pre-invasion justifications.

So did 60 Minutes for its Ahmed Chalabi story, which was irresponsible and wrong.We have lots of apologies in the aftermath, but the press isn’t supposed to apologize afterward. It’s supposed to try and get it right at the time.

It’s the wonderful opportunity of our craft to be able to speak truth to power. In the Iraq War’s runup, much of the press practiced stenography rather than journalism. The founders figured Presidents and Vice Presidents would lie. They created an incredibly broad freedom of the press so someone would raise their hand and say, “No, this is wrong; this is a lie.”

What accounts for the press’s failure?

It’s too consolidated, too big. One theory is when you get big, you become powerful and can boldly do whatever you want. The opposite is true: Gulliver’s Travels is right. When you become a giant, you’re more easily constrained. It’s not just that they’re corporate, rejecting civic and democratic values of the individual owner, the smalltown guy with his paper, his little radio station. The corporate media wants to make lots of money and appeal to the broadest number of people with the least amount of responsibility.

As a result, you get a press that gives you lots of Anna Nicole Smith and Britney Spears, but very little about our trade deficit or real details of our military engagements around the world or a nuclear plant melting down, etc., because they know Anna Nicole and Britney will keep you entertained. Thus you create the fantasy of a news operation without its responsibility.

That responsibility requires two things big media doesn’t like. First, expenditure. It costs money to go around the world, find out what’s going on. Number two, when you offend power—particularly when you’re in the broadcast media—power says, “Well, we’re not going to talk to you anymore.” In broadcast, when you lose the image of the individual sitting down and talking to you, you lose a lot. So it’s much easier to simply say, “We’re not going to pick on you too much.”

What Jefferson and Madison intended with freepress protection was a wild, cacophonous, at times irresponsible media. They figured you give them all these voices, and people sort it out—they trusted the people. Today, media’s biggest problem is it doesn’t trust the people. It feels you can’t speak truths about difficult things because it will upset the masses. So after 9/11, instead of a discussion about why this occurred, we had a “Why do they hate us?” discussion.

I’ll accept there are probably some people who hate us for our “freedoms.” Some fundamentalists really do want a pretty constrained and unpleasant world. But there’s a broad, deep discussion to be had. After 9/11, Americans were ready for it. I met many people who had so many questions, were really struggling to find out a lot. After 9/11, what media had the biggest, long-term increase in audiences? London’s The Guardian, Independent and BBC. Americans desperate for information looked to their own media and said, “I’m not getting it here.”

The people’s desire for honest information is far greater than most folks in media accept. It troubles me deeply that it took until this last year for one guy in [TV] to start really speaking truth to power— Keith Olbermann. We’re five years into this post- 9/11 period before somebody actually steps up and says, “I’m going to start talking about this in blunt ways.” What happened? It’s supposed to be the kiss of death, right? People came racing to Olbermann, and the effect has been profound.

Do you also think the news media relinquished its role vis-à-vis Iraq because opposing the powers-that-be might lead to punishment?

Bill Maher said some blunt things and was shot down by the White House Press Secretary. Was he dragged off in chains like editors were in the days of John Adams and the Alien and Sedition Acts? No, we’re more sophisticated now. The White House itself just says, “This guy’s not patriotic. He’s a bad guy.”

Look at Helen Thomas, dean of the White House press corps; she was always called on first. Quite a remarkable woman who’s known every President back to Eisenhower. Yet she was treated with maximum disrespect by the Bush Administration, moved to the back corner of the White House press room, because she’s asking skeptical questions. They didn’t call on her anymore. You can get mad at the Bush White House for that. But you should also get mad at the press corps. Why didn’t they say, “This is the senior member of our craft here, and you’re treating her with maximum disrespect; we don’t accept that”?

Tell us about Vice President Cheney, the subject of your hard-hitting 2004 biography Dick, the Man Who Is President.

Cheney avoided serving in the military as a young man, taking five deferments to avoid Vietnam. When he was secretary of defense, despite his lack of experience in military affairs and defense issues, he and his office came up with a plan for invading Iraq during the first Gulf War. [General] Norman Schwarzkopf said, “It’s very interesting, except the way you’re invading, you’d strand our troops in the middle of the desert without water.” Cheney’s incompetence at every turn is just startling.

As Halliburton’s CEO, he organized a merger with another company, failing to do due diligence. It turns out they have billions of dollars in asbestos claims; it almost put Halliburton into complete crisis. They hustled him out quickly to become Vice President just in time to oversee privatization of the military.

One of the biggest problems we have in the Iraq War right now is a largely privatized support system for our military. Ask yourselves, “How are we spending so much money?” Two billion dollars every ten days spent on this war. Yet we can’t get body armor, don’t have vehicles strong enough to withstand mortar attacks. There’s so many brave young Americans being terribly injured or killed. A lot is [because] we’ve created a dysfunctional relationship between the military and its suppliers—these private firms are dominant.They get the big money. If you’re in Iraq, you’ll find somebody getting poverty pay—that’s a soldier. Somebody getting $80,000, $100,000, for doing the same thing a soldier might do, that’s a private contractor. We’ve thrown the entire thing out of whack.

Cheney has always gotten it wrong, and it’s amazing how much of the press corps says, “He’s the administration’s smart, capable guy.”

Are Bush, Cheney and their clique merely elitists who simply think the rules were drawn up for controlling the masses, but don’t apply to them?

You hit it right on the head. This is an issue I come back to all the time: royalism. The American experiment was all about rejecting royalism, the divine right of kings, the notion that God chose our rulers. So [the Founding Fathers] revolted against it. They happened to be people of the Enlightenment who created a relatively liberal state with lots of openness and freedom. But their core instinct was that a ruler shouldn’t have different rules than the people.

Cheney and Bush, their circle and many people in Washington hearken back to that old royalism. They think they have a separate set of rules, that the people are stupid and ought to be constrained morally, economically, etc. I think the opposite: Our leaders ought to be restricted, and the people ought to be free. Jefferson said, “The people should not fear their government. The government should fear the people.”

What can citizens do to advance impeachment?

First, understand it’s not a radical act. Impeachment is a live instrument, something the founders mention six times in the Constitution. They wanted you to know this is yours; you can use it. Get over your fears. The truth is, impeachment is the cure for Constitutional crisis.

The folks of the After Downing Street Coalition have impeachment information online. Get active locally. Communities across this country have passed impeachment resolutions telling Congress, “We want you to raise this issue and get active on this.” That’s a really valuable tool. Let your imagination be free; believe it’s possible. Then act. Go to a town meeting, write a letter, encourage your city council, your town board, to do something on this. It all matters.

EDITOR’S NOTE: On April 24, 2007, Congressman and Democratic Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich filed articles of impeachment against Vice President Cheney in the House of Representatives. On July 22, Democratic Senator Russ Feingold announced that he would introduce two censure resolutions condemning the President, Vice President and other administration officials for misconduct relating to the war in Iraq and for their repeated assaults on the rule of law.