("Quid coniuratio est?")
INTERVIEW WITH SHERMAN SKOLNICK -- MAY 17, 1995
On May 17, 1995, I interviewed, by telephone, Mr. Sherman Skolnick of the Citizens' Committee to Clean-up the Courts [CCCC]. The following is my summary of that interview. (Note that in the following, I neither necessarily agree nor disagree with either all or some of Mr. Skolnick's statements.)
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CONSPIRACY NATION:
Yeah, that's like Leona Helmsley, where she said this thing,
"Only the little people pay taxes."
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Well... She's not that very wealthy. I'm talkin' about the
ultra rich. Not millionaires but ultra rich: the billionaire
billionaires.
And here's Nelson Rockefeller, testifying that he and his family did not pay anything for the previous 11 years! Hey. If the guys that have the most don't pay anything, is it any wonder that we've got 100-year-old bridges that collapse, railroad tracks that are in bad shape, hospitals that are bankrupt {5}, libraries and schools, school districts, that are bankrupt? The guys with the real money are not paying anything! And, since they own the instruments of communication, their puppets are not gonna ask some candidate, "Uh, what are you gonna do, Mr. or Madam Candidate, about the failure to tax the ultra rich?" Nobody asks the question! I'm one of the few that asks the question. And that's because we do a free TV show, where nobody taps us on the shoulder and says, "Hey! Skolnick: shut up!"
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Okay. But I kind of wanted to cover one more thing on this thing
about why we should fear, or be concerned, about "The New World
Order", is that, if a global government coalesces around the
global economic power, then that is gonna supersede the Bill of
Rights in this country.
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Well they're doin' that now. Because the Bill of Rights is in
"suspension mode". Newsletter writers and others are getting
knocks on the door by the FBI: "I saw in your newsletter there
that you mentioned the militia. What about it?"; "I saw in your
commentary... What about it?"
And so those that refuse to talk to the FBI, they show you, right at your door, a big stack of all the information they compiled on you: your bank loan, your car, your this, your telephone -- they got all your telephone records.
See, there's a national security directive in effect right now, as a result of the bombing in Oklahoma. And, in other words, the FBI doesn't need any further powers, because the President himself claims there's a plot to overthrow the government, it's a national security matter. And they're goin' around, and they're tryin' to stifle the few independent voices of communication that we have left in the country: newsletter writers, commentators, smaller radio station moderators -- they're all gettin' a knock on the door! And not every one of 'em is sayin', "Hey, FBI: you don't have an arrest warrant or search warrant for this address. So go away!" Some of 'em are becoming frightened. Why? They have children; they're worried about their mortgage. The FBI informs them that they've already been to the mortgage company; they're talkin' to all their neighbors. In other words, they're puttin' on the general, there's a general "wave of terror" against the few independent voices in the country.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Okay, and that's been prompted by this thing with the Oklahoma
bombing where...
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Yeah well that's a good reason to suspect that the government did
it, for the purpose of suspending the Bill of Rights. Whatever
you think about the militias, whether you're for or against their
position, they seem to have the facts right: there's an effort
underway to suspend the Bill of Rights for this "New World Order"
business.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Yeah. And that would bring me back to this thing of, approaching
this thing from the "left" via Chomsky's idea of governments
coalescing around the economic power, and the global government
superseding the Bill of Rights, so that it is something to be
feared; that this is not some thing where people on the "left"
can say, "Oh well, these 'right wing' people."
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
There are two questions that Time magazine and the other
blowhard pundits have not dealt with is, they have not
adequately explained: What are the large numbers of foreign
troops doing on our soil? Are we facing a big problem, like Spain
in 1933, where they brought Italy and Germany's armies onto
Spanish soil to deal with a civil war?
And the other thing is, Time magazine, discussing what the militias are complaining about, would have you believe that all these secret societies (like the Bilderbergs and so on), which the top publication pundits go to, and then never tell us anything -- what happened there -- that they're just little "luncheon groups" that are of no consequence.
I mean, the major makers and shakers of the world go to these secret conferences -- the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group. No report comes back. Only a few, right-wing journals talk about it. And then Time magazine, because the militias are making an issue of it, is pooh-poohing it and says, "No, no... It's just a luncheon group."
When you see a list of the Bilderberg Group, it's... the publisher of Time magazine, the editor-in-chief that's there. How come their magazine doesn't tell us what happened at the secret conference, where they themselves are part of it!?
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Do you know of any good books on the Bilderbergers?
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Uh, the only ones that publish it are the ultra-right wing!
[laughs] So-called "ultra-right wing". The left wing, that gets a
lot of CIA foundation money (like The Nation, and In These
Times, and so on), they're not gonna go into it at all. So, I
mean in a way it's a mistake to call 'em a "left wing".
They're... I'm not sure what part of the airplane they are,
whether they're the tail or the jet. [laughs]
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Yeah, I know what you mean! Because, it's almost like the left
has pretty much disappeared. I mean, the real left. 'Cuz I
remember that, say, in the '60s, that...
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Well if you looked at my files, what would you find? Communist
Party USA, clippings on them is in a right-wing file! [laughs]
CONSPIRACY NATION:
[laughs]
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
You'd have to understand the logic we apply, because they were
a spokesman for the Moscow government. And so, what genuine
left wing is there, in this country? The labor unions are, many
of 'em are too close to the corporations they're supposed to
unionize. It's a mistake to call that there's a union movement in
the United States. The number of people working, that belong to
unions, has fallen below 16 percent. So the bulk of the United
States is working now without union contracts, without union
benefits. Which means, instead of getting $15 an hour, you'd be
lucky if you get $5 an hour. And with that, you have the
contradiction that, you're making $5 an hour, and they want to
sell you a $12,000 car! I mean, there's a contradiction.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
And the thing is, a lot of these so-called, say, call 'em
"establishment leftists"... I don't see that the "left" has
really got a connection to the working class. There's exceptions.
Like there's a group in Detroit that was puttin' out a weekly
newspaper called "The International Workers Bulletin", where they
were involved in their community, okay?
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Yeah. Those are genuine people.
The point is, what "left wing" are they talkin' about? In These Times reportedly gets their money through a so-called "liberal foundation": The Institute for Policy Studies [IPS], which made them make a U-turn on the October Surprise story by threatening to cut their money off. And we, from what we know about the IPS, believe they're connected with the CIA! So I mean, what independent, left-wing publication...
All of the "left-wing" publications, put together, if you added them all up from their circulation statements that they're obliged to file every fall under the postal regulations -- all of 'em, put together, do not amount to 150,000 circulation. The average of these small publications is about 5,000. So one Chicago Tribune or one New York Times drowns them out! In fact, Ferdinand Lundberg(sp?), in his book, The Rich and the Super Rich, sort of laughed a little bit. He says, "These guys, with their mimeograph machines," (that was the thing when that book came out), "they are like throwing spitballs at the Rockefeller battleship."
CONSPIRACY NATION:
On the other hand, I wouldn't -- if they're truly an
independent press -- I wouldn't totally denigrate 'em, because my
feeling is it's better to try and do something.
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Yeah, it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.
[...to be continued...]
---------------------------<< Notes >>--------------------------- {5} "...hospitals that are bankrupt..." As noted, I don't necessarily agree with everything Mr. Skolnick says. Nowadays, many hospitals are for-profit entities, generating cash for investors. Add to that the fact that hospitals and doctors routinely pad their bills, pass these charges along to medicare, and then medicare passes these charges along to the taxpayers. So, my question would be (which I may remember to ask Mr. Skolnick) -- if the money is getting stolen and wasted, what good will increased taxes from any source be, whether "ultra rich" or otherwise?
I encourage distribution of "Conspiracy Nation."
Coming to you from Illinois -- "The Land of Skolnick"