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John Cusack appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher to promote his new film, War, Inc. which satirizes the military-industrial complex. While Cusack clearly had the cozy relationship between the Bush/Cheney White House and subcontractors like Halliburton and Blackwater in mind (as well as Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine), host Bill Maher thinks that the blame should be spread around evenly: the White House for perpetrating it in the first place, the Democrats for enabling it and the American public for being complacent about it.

MAHER: I mean, if people really cared, they would care to find out.

CUSACK: Well, but I think they’re getting more and more information about it. And I think, you know, some of these truths are so horrible that you don’t really want to think about that. I mean, I don’t…but I mean, it’s just…I mean, the gig’s up. I mean, if guys who are statesmen on CNN and are also sitting on the boards and are, you know, shareholders in some of the most profitable defense contractors in the world and they publicly make the case to go to war, and then they go to war, right? And they create a new market with their war, they bar their competitors from the aftermath; then they come back and speak evangelically about free markets that aren’t even free, when it’s a vast protectionist racket. These aren’t particularly subtle facts, their stop…stock prices jump 145%, their companies are awarded $2.3billion dollar contracts. I mean, after a while, you have to just expose and shame and indict and hopefully, convict the participants in this illegal, immoral ideology. So yeah, are Americans complacent? But I’m not…I’m not ready to give up or cede the Constitution of the United States to this bunch of hoodlums.

Howie Klein got the chance to see a sneak preview of War, Inc. last week and wrote a glowing review.