When you hear the name Larry Flynt, visions of porn dance through your head, right? Admit it. You salivate thinking of nude women and raw sex. And Sarah Palin? You betcha. Flynt used a Palin look-alike for his parody Nailin Pailin. You can view the teaser on YouTube.
As a woman I should be predisposed to dislike this man and all that he represents. But I admire him for having the strength to survive a shooting by a white supremacist in 1978. God, won't these lunatics ever go away? So, he got addicted to pain killers for awhile. At least he hadn't preached about the evils of drugs while he was stuffing them down his throat.
Flynt has spent a lot of time in court winning some, losing some. I admire him for standing up to Jerry Falwell who was incensed at an ad in Hustler implying that Falwell's first sexual encounter was with his mother in an out-house. Picture that. Flynt won this Supreme Court case. I admire this school drop-out from Kentucky who's a marketing genius with a large dose of brains. The guy has chutzpa, no doubt about it.
Writing about Common Sense 2009 for The Huffington Post, Flynt chides Wall Street, large corporations, and the rich for creating a system where they thrive and where Main Street Americans strive just to get by. He also delivers a few knocks on the backs of the knees of Congress.
The American government -- which we once called our government -- has been taken over by Wall Street, the mega-corporations and the super-rich. They are the ones who decide our fate. It is this group of powerful elites, the people President Franklin D. Roosevelt called "economic royalists," who choose our elected officials -- indeed, our very form of government. Both Democrats and Republicans dance to the tune of their corporate masters. In America, corporations do not control the government. In America, corporations are the government.
This was never more obvious than with the Wall Street bailout, whereby the very corporations that caused the collapse of our economy were rewarded with taxpayer dollars. So arrogant, so smug were they that, without a moment's hesitation, they took our money -- yours and mine -- to pay their executives multimillion-dollar bonuses, something they continue doing to this very day. They have no shame.
The reason Wall Street was able to game the system the way it did -- knowing that they would become rich at the expense of the American people (oh, yes, they most certainly knew that) -- was because the financial elite had bribed our legislators to roll back the protections enacted after the Stock Market Crash of 1929.
Congress gutted the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial lending banks from investment banks, and passed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which allowed for self-regulation with no oversight. The Securities and Exchange Commission subsequently revised its rules to allow for even less oversight -- and we've all seen how well that worked out. To date, no serious legislation has been offered by the Obama administration to correct these problems.
I'm calling for a national strike, one designed to close the country down for a day. The intent? Real campaign-finance reform and strong restrictions on lobbying. Because nothing will change until we take corporate money out of politics. Nothing will improve until our politicians are once again answerable to their constituents, not the rich and powerful.
Let's set a date. No one goes to work. No one buys anything. And if that isn't effective -- if the politicians ignore us -- we do it again. And again. And again.
The real war is not between the left and the right. It is between the average American and the ruling class. If we come together on this single issue, everything else will resolve itself. It's time we took back our government from those who would make us their slaves.
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