The Pornography of Power: Lust for Empire Has Weakened America

Robert Scheer has been a journalist for 30 years, over which time he has interviewed presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, as well as other major political figures. For years a columnist for the Los Angeles Times and now for the San Francisco Chronicle, he's currently the editor-in-chief at Truthdig.com and represents the left point of view on KCRW's political radio show "Left, Right and Center." In addition to print and radio, Scheer has also worked in movies: He played a reporter in Warren Beatty's "Bullworth" and was a project consultant for Oliver Stone's "Nixon."

Scheer is the author of eight books, among them, Playing President: My Close Encounters with Nixon, Carter, Bush I, Reagan, and Clinton -- And How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W. Bush (Akashic Books, 2006). His latest is The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America. In it, Scheer takes on the United States' foreign policy, arguing that our military budget, which amounts to more than the rest of the world's combined, has gotten completely out of control. AlterNet writer Emily Wilson recently sat down with Scheer at a restaurant in San Francisco to hear his views on the federal government, the media's complicity in war, the rise of the neocons and how even Nixon got some things right.

Emily Wilson: You write in the acknowledgements that you had one book in mind, but your editor wanted you to do this book. Why did he want this book?

Robert Scheer: I had just given a lecture to this libertarian convention. It was called "Ike was Right," and it reflected some of the evolution of my own thinking. I no longer am enamored of the big federal state, because most of what it does I oppose -- particularly once Clinton cut the welfare program. We no longer have a federal program to aid poor people. We don't have a poverty program. And Clinton, with his Financial Services Modernization Act, managed to give the banks everything they wanted and take away more rights from the state. It used to be that in California we had a limit on interest payments. States had reasonable, populist-inspired controls over corporations. And then there's the Telecommunications Act. We used to believe communications should be in part locally owned to have diversity and so forth; that's all gone bye-bye with the Telecommunications Act. So there you go: You have three things the Clinton administration, presumably a progressive administration, did that took away three reasons that I would care about the federal government.

… Now, as my book lays out, six out of ten dollars of the discretionary budget go to the military, and in Congress they're scrambling over how to use the other four out of ten for the other things we care about. So my concern is, all right, let's let California keep its money, let's keep it on a state level -- and in my book I even argue that's what the founders had in mind. I quote George Washington, who's my great hero in this book: They knew if you got into empire you weren't going to have representative democracy. Because when you're on the local level, people can be informed, they can demand the truth, there isn't classification, there isn't national security -- and when you get to empire and foreign adventures (being) the norm, not the exception, is to be lied to and not to discover the truth for 20, 30, 40 years or whatever. The Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which Johnson and McNamara said was the basis for expanding the war to North Vietnam, was based on a lie, that they knew to be a lie when they went to the nation and said we were attacked. They knew there was no evidence of an attack. We didn't learn that for 20 years.

So my feeling before I went to the libertarian convention was … what do I think about the federal government? We needed the federal government when a guy like Roosevelt was our president and we could set some standards of child labor and the right to organize unions, and pay people adequately, and health and safety and so forth. But what the federal government has come to mean is basically an arm of the military industrial complex that favors big business and big agriculture. We'd be better off with the states just keeping their tax dollars and using them to educate their people, and fix their levies, and deal with their subprime mortgage scandals, and all the other things we want money for.