John Cusack is an intense actor. He has starred in such films as The Grifters, True Colors, Being John Malkovich, High ...Fidelity, Cradle Will Rock, and Grace Is Gone.

Now he’s the prime mover behind War, Inc., which opened in May. He helped write, produce, and star in the picture, along with Dan Aykroyd, Ben Kingsley, Marisa Tomei, Joan Cusack, and Hilary Duff. It’s a satire on a fictional country where an entire war is outsourced to corporations. Sound familiar?

Not afraid to enter the political ring, Cusack also recently narrated a MoveOn ad that criticizes John McCain.

I interviewed him on May 23 for Progressive News Radio, and I found him eager to talk about not only the film but the politics behind it.

Q: How did the writing process get started?

John Cusack: We wanted to do something about the situation the country’s been forced into by this neoconservative movement that’s taken over this country. It’s been plotting to do these types of things and working at them openly for thirty or thirty-five years: the evisceration of the government and the promotion of the corporatist worldview where everything is privatized. It wants to drown the government and then say it doesn’t work. And then in the meantime just create a feeding frenzy for these corporations.

It’s kind of reached its apotheosis in Iraq. I studied what the Bush Administration was up to, and realized it was worse than most of your fears, so I thought that probably putting an absurdist lens on the situation was maybe the only way to get the information out there.

The Republicans and the Democrats have enabled this kind of fiasco. We’re deeply and savagely down the rabbit hole. As writers, we wanted to express that, call things what they are, and then do a story. We sort of conceived it at the peak of Bush’s popularity, right after the statue had fallen and “Mission Accomplished” was proclaimed. We figured it would be a good idea not to be cowed. So we decided to make a film where we didn’t pull any punches. And we didn’t. We hope it can be part of a larger conversation.

Q: How excited was the rest of the cast to come on board with you?

Cusack: Oh, they were thrilled. A lot of people know that something very drastic has happened to the very idea of America. People know that the Bush Administration has tried to gut the country, to really destroy it. People are angry, they’re pissed off. They really feel it doesn’t represent them, or their interests, or their ideology, or their humanity, or their sense of compassion. And they want their country back. The cast was very excited about being part of something that didn’t back down.
Satire is meant to have teeth; satire is meant to be dangerous. But it also happens to be fun because subversion and telling the right kind of people to go to hell is supposed to feel good.

Q: Why haven’t people in Congress been standing up to the President? Are Americans numb to this?

Cusack: The extent of the hypocrisy is so big that a lot of people can’t get their minds around it. It’s really the Big Lie. The people who say they’re for democracy want nothing to do with democracy. The people who say they support the troops not only don’t support the troops; they want to privatize the army and turn it into a bunch of mercenaries. And when the real troops come home they don’t support the GI Bill.

It’s fraud and hypocrisy at every level. People don’t want to believe that, but it’s pretty much out in the open.

Anybody connected with the Republican establishment should be held accountable for standing with this President. And it’s incredibly troubling that Nancy Pelosi would say impeachment is off the table. I don’t know what that means. If the Democrats are within striking distance of gaining power, then the law has no meaning?

Q: Do you have any idea why she took it off the table?

Cusack: I have to think it’s pure political calculus. I don’t know what a President would have to do now to be indicted. If these things go unpunished and they get away with this, future Administrations will get to treat Supreme Court rulings as gentle suggestions and defy the rule of law. It’s very troubling to think there will be no accountability for this.

We’ve got to force the Democrats to get a spine. If they don’t want to have a spine, we should throw them out. If they don’t want to stand up for the rule of law, then I’m not a Democrat.

Q: I hear you’re a big fan of Naomi Klein and her book The Shock Doctrine.

Cusack: I’ve been a great admirer of Naomi’s for a long time. As we were writing this, I was lucky enough to get to know Naomi and I spoke to her when she went to Iraq, and I tried to find out more about it from other independent journalists like Jeremy Scahill, who is another friend. While we were doing the film, Naomi was writing The Shock Doctrine and she was kind enough to share some of her wonderful research with us. Her article “Baghdad Year Zero” came out right as we were in the writing process and that really challenged me to dig deeper into this. I saw the economic reasons for the war. I saw the war as an extension of what the rightwing considers to be legitimate economic policy, which involves basically murdering people and outsourcing every core function of the state—and even illegal ones, like torture. Not only are we a country where torture is now policy. It’s now outsourced. It’s given to companies at a cost-plus basis. It’s a triple whammy of surreal, absolute madness.

Q: What would you tell the American people to get them active in taking back this country?

Cusack: The two best books I could recommend would be Naomi’s The Shock Doctrine, and Blackwater, by Jeremy Scahill. And go see this crazy, incendiary political cartoon we’ve done, War, Inc. Get your sense of outrage back, and your sense of defiance and spirit back, and try to put these pieces together and confront the excesses of empire at every turn. Don’t buy into the corporate mythology that’s been rammed down our throats for all these years. These guys who talk about free markets, they’re not ideologues; they’re crooks. It’s very important to understand this. The “disaster capitalism” economy that Naomi talks about dwarfs anything that Eisenhower ever warned you about. It’s all about making money off of war, reconstruction, disaster, jails, interrogation, border patrol. It’s not a conspiracy; it’s just an open fundamentalist ideology against the New Deal.

I do think this ideological movement, which has been backed by Heritage Foundation and Cato, is pretty open for all to see. You can study the laws that Paul Bremer passed while the place was still burning. It was straight up armed robbery.

These people say free markets are the way to go, but wink, wink, the markets aren’t really free. They’re just a protectionist racket, and we have to pay for it all on every level. It’s really quite extraordinary, and immoral, and illegal. These things need to be named, and shamed, and outed, and mocked, and prosecuted.

I never really saw myself as an activist but at some point the activist is the only moral position to take.

Jim Swanson is the founder and host of Progressive News Radio, a three-hour weekly podcast. For more information, go to progressivenewsradio.com.