A Friendly Reminder

The United States' embargo against Cuba has been in place for 46 years. After the Soviet Union's fall in '89-'92, The United Nations has ANNUALLY condemned the embargo. It stands only now as the means by which Cuba is made an example of economic collapse for any vulnerable nation that actively stands against U.S. foreign policy and oligarchical capitalism.

In the U.N.'s World Food Program, it costs 19 cents to feed a child for a day.

Nineteen cents.

20,000 children die of hunger every day. 20 will have died by the time you're done reading this.

One minute of war in Iraq would feed 2,000,000 children for a day.
One day of war in Iraq would feed 8,000,000 children for a year.

There are an estimated 800 million hungry human beings in the world. Three to four months of war in Iraq would feed them all.



(The following are the views and opinions of this author and not necessarily those of others associated with this blog...though I do hope so)

Let's count the number of wars that the United States has engaged itself in in the last half-century. How many people--LIVES! THESE ARE HUMAN BEINGS. THEY SMILE AND CRY LIKE YOU. THEY HAVE THEIR OWN LIVES. THEIR OWN LIVES!--how many of them could the wealthiest and most prosperous nation in history have fed, clothed, sheltered, and educated? And why in God's name would that nation want to do that in the first place?...

...MAYBE BECAUSE A LIFE IS ETERNALLY HOLY, BEAUTIFUL, PRECIOUS, AND FRAGILE...
...AND MAYBE BECAUSE WE ALL SHARE THE SAME RESPONSIBILITY FOR ONE ANOTHER,
we are, after all, our brothers' keepers, are we not? The oligarchy that controls this nation politically, economically, and militarily claim it to be so through their professed beliefs in Judeo-Christian theology. Wolves in sheep's clothing. This nation claims vague ideals of 'democracy,' 'freedom,' and 'JUSTICE' only for the benefit of wealthy families and multinational corporations who have been protected by a military-industrial complex since the end of World War II; and that military-industrial complex is protected and ensured by a voting population of apathetic and feebleminded consumers, forced into fear by their government, with attention-spans long enough to hate this or that candidate or this or that policy based soley on unfounded and ethically and socially illogical premises propagated by this same oligarchical elite. It's not about dominating one group of people or another, it's about a few groups of people grabbing as much money as they can from the dead bodies of their own brothers and sisters. And granted, there are people who do their part to help through complex and simple means alike, but it sickens me to think that all the people, myself included, who recognize this and have yet to leave or take themselves off of the grid are tacitly complying with this hatred and greed. But how in the name of Peace is anyone going to solve anything by leaving??? Look at us, Ulysses between a rock and a hard place.


Jesus must be gouging his eyes out on his crown of thorns.

End Post. Read more!

Blood Pressure Elevation

All I really wanted for Christmas was for O'Reilly to be banished from planet Earth. But a new camera will do.

Read more!

Fox News Gets Reefer Madness Over So-Called Killer Marijuana

From LiberViewer:
In the tradition of the 1936 anti-drug film "Reefer Madness," the Fox News story I caught airing on July 13 contained misinformation, a lot of scare words, and no independent fact checking of the claims of government agents.

Read more!

Free Palestine

Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land

[Please watch all 73 minutes. It is very much worth your time. These are things you need to know. Be forewarned that some, many, scenes in this movie may shred your insides.]





Also, I will be going to a screening of Occupation 101 on this topic tomorrow, Tuesday the 16th in Irvine. I do hope to see a good turnout and that some of you can make it. For details on the screening click HERE, for details on the movie itself click HERE. Read more!

Corporation Conglomerate Kings of the Concrete Jungle

How's that title for alliteration?

Please Click This Link before reading the article.
(Credit is due! I was forwarded to this link on a post by Alx B.)

What's Wrong With This Picture?

by MARK CRISPIN MILLER
[from the January 7, 2002 issue, the Nation]

For all their economic clout and cultural sway, the ten great multinationals profiled in our latest chart--AOL Time Warner, Disney, General Electric, News Corporation, Viacom, Vivendi, Sony, Bertelsmann, AT&T and Liberty Media--rule the cosmos only at the moment. The media cartel that keeps us fully entertained and permanently half-informed is always growing here and shriveling there, with certain of its members bulking up while others slowly fall apart or get digested whole. But while the players tend to come and go--always with a few exceptions--the overall Leviathan itself keeps getting bigger, louder, brighter, forever taking up more time and space, in every street, in countless homes, in every other head.

The rise of the cartel has been a long time coming (and it still has some way to go). It represents the grand convergence of the previously disparate US culture industries--many of them vertically monopolized already--into one global superindustry providing most of our imaginary "content." The movie business had been largely dominated by the major studios in Hollywood; TV, like radio before it, by the triune axis of the networks headquartered in New York; magazines, primarily by Henry Luce (with many independent others on the scene); and music, from the 1960s, mostly by the major record labels. Now all those separate fields are one, the whole terrain divided up among the giants--which, in league with Barnes & Noble, Borders and the big distributors, also control the book business. (Even with its leading houses, book publishing was once a cottage industry at both the editorial and retail levels.) For all the democratic promise of the Internet, moreover, much of cyberspace has now been occupied, its erstwhile wildernesses swiftly paved and lighted over by the same colossi. The only industry not yet absorbed into this new world order is the newsprint sector of the Fourth Estate--a business that was heavily shadowed to begin with by the likes of Hearst and other, regional grandees, flush with the ill-gotten gains of oil, mining and utilities--and such absorption is, as we shall see, about to happen.


Thus what we have today is not a problem wholly new in kind but rather the disastrous upshot of an evolutionary process whereby that old problem has become considerably larger--and that great quantitative change, with just a few huge players now co-directing all the nation's media, has brought about enormous qualitative changes. For one thing, the cartel's rise has made extremely rare the sort of marvelous exception that has always popped up, unexpectedly, to startle and revivify the culture--the genuine independents among record labels, radio stations, movie theaters, newspapers, book publishers and so on. Those that don't fail nowadays are so remarkable that they inspire not emulation but amazement. Otherwise, the monoculture, endlessly and noisily triumphant, offers, by and large, a lot of nothing, whether packaged as "the news" or "entertainment."

Of all the cartel's dangerous consequences for American society and culture, the worst is its corrosive influence on journalism. Under AOL Time Warner, GE, Viacom et al., the news is, with a few exceptions, yet another version of the entertainment that the cartel also vends nonstop. This is also nothing new--consider the newsreels of yesteryear--but the gigantic scale and thoroughness of the corporate concentration has made a world of difference, and so has made this world a very different place.

Let us start to grasp the situation by comparing this new centerfold with our first outline of the National Entertainment State, published in the spring of 1996. Back then, the national TV news appeared to be a tidy tetrarchy: two network news divisions owned by large appliance makers/weapons manufacturers (CBS by Westinghouse, NBC by General Electric), and the other two bought lately by the nation's top purveyors of Big Fun (ABC by Disney, CNN by Time Warner). Cable was still relatively immature, so that, of its many enterprises, only CNN competed with the broadcast networks' short-staffed newsrooms; and its buccaneering founder, Ted Turner, still seemed to call the shots from his new aerie at Time Warner headquarters.

Today the telejournalistic firmament includes the meteoric Fox News Channel, as well as twenty-six television stations owned outright by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation (which holds majority ownership in a further seven). Although ultimately thwarted in his bid to buy DirecTV and thereby dominate the US satellite television market, Murdoch wields a pervasive influence on the news--and not just in New York, where he has two TV stations, a major daily (the faltering New York Post) and the Fox News Channel, whose inexhaustible platoons of shouting heads attracts a fierce plurality of cable-viewers. Meanwhile, Time Warner has now merged with AOL--so as to own the cyberworks through which to market its floodtide of movies, ball games, TV shows, rock videos, cartoons, standup routines and (not least) bits from CNN, CNN Headline News, CNNfn (devised to counter GE's CNBC) and CNN/Sports Illustrated (a would-be rival to Disney's ESPN franchise). While busily cloning CNN, the parent company has also taken quiet steps to make it more like Fox, with Walter Isaacson, the new head honcho, even visiting the Capitol to seek advice from certain rightist pols on how, presumably, to make the network even shallower and more obnoxious. (He also courted Rush Himself.) All this has occurred since the abrupt defenestration of Ted Turner, who now belatedly laments the overconcentration of the cable business: "It's sad we're losing so much diversity of thought," he confesses, sounding vaguely like a writer for this magazine.

Whereas five years ago the clueless Westinghouse owned CBS, today the network is a property of the voracious Viacom--matchless cable occupier (UPN, MTV, MTV2, VH1, Nickelodeon, the Movie Channel, TNN, CMT, BET, 50 percent of Comedy Central, etc.), radio colossus (its Infinity Broadcasting--home to Howard Stern and Don Imus--owns 184 stations), movie titan (Paramount Pictures), copious publisher (Simon & Schuster, Free Press, Scribner), a big deal on the web and one of the largest US outdoor advertising firms. Under Viacom, CBS News has been obliged to help sell Viacom's product--in 2000, for example, devoting epic stretches of The Early Show to what lately happened on Survivor (CBS). Of course, such synergistic bilge is commonplace, as is the tendency to dummy up on any topic that the parent company (or any of its advertisers) might want stifled. These journalistic sins have been as frequent under "longtime" owners Disney and GE as under Viacom and Fox [see Janine Jaquet, "The Sins of Synergy," page 20]. They may also abound beneath Vivendi, whose recent purchase of the film and TV units of USA Networks and new stake in the satellite TV giant EchoStar--moves too recent for inclusion in our chart--could soon mean lots of oblique self-promotion on USAM News, in L'Express and L'Expansion, and through whatever other news-machines the parent buys.

Such is the telejournalistic landscape at the moment--and soon it will mutate again, if Bush's FCC delivers for its giant clients. On September 13, when the minds of the American people were on something else, the commission's GOP majority voted to "review" the last few rules preventing perfect oligopoly. They thus prepared the ground for allowing a single outfit to own both a daily paper and a TV station in the same market--an advantage that was outlawed in 1975. (Even then, pre-existing cases of such ownership were grandfathered in, and any would-be owner could get that rule waived.) That furtive FCC "review" also portended the elimination of the cap on the percentage of US households that a single owner might reach through its TV stations. Since the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the limit had been 35 percent. Although that most indulgent bill was dictated by the media giants themselves, its restrictions are too heavy for this FCC, whose chairman, Michael Powell, has called regulation per se "the oppressor."

And so, unless there's some effective opposition, the several-headed vendor that now sells us nearly all our movies, TV, radio, magazines, books, music and web services will soon be selling us our daily papers, too--for the major dailies have, collectively, been lobbying energetically for that big waiver, which stands to make their owners even richer (an expectation that has no doubt had a sweetening effect on coverage of the Bush Administration). Thus the largest US newspaper conglomerates--the New York Times, the Washington Post, Gannett, Knight-Ridder and the Tribune Co.--will soon be formal partners with, say, GE, Murdoch, Disney and/or AT&T; and then the lesser nationwide chains (and the last few independents) will be ingested, too, going the way of most US radio stations. America's cities could turn into informational "company towns," with one behemoth owning all the local print organs--daily paper(s), alternative weekly, city magazine--as well as the TV and radio stations, the multiplexes and the cable system. (Recently a federal appeals court told the FCC to drop its rule preventing any one company from serving more than 30 percent of US cable subscribers; and in December, the Supreme Court refused to hear the case.) While such a setup may make economic sense, as anticompetitive arrangements tend to do, it has no place in a democracy, where the people have to know more than their masters want to tell them.

That imperative demands reaffirmation at this risky moment, when much of what the media cartel purveys to us is propaganda, commercial or political, while no one in authority makes mention of "the public interest"--except to laugh it off. "I have no idea," Powell cheerily replied at his first press conference as chairman, when asked for his own definition of that crucial concept. "It's an empty vessel in which people pour in whatever their preconceived views or biases are." Such blithe obtuseness has marked all his public musings on the subject. In a speech before the American Bar Association in April 1998, Powell offered an ironic little riff about how thoroughly he doesn't get it: "The night after I was sworn in [as a commissioner], I waited for a visit from the angel of the public interest. I waited all night, but she did not come." On the other hand, Powell has never sounded glib about his sacred obligation to the corporate interest. Of his decision to move forward with the FCC vote just two days after 9/11, Powell spoke as if that sneaky move had been a gesture in the spirit of Patrick Henry: "The flame of the American ideal may flicker, but it will never be extinguished. We will do our small part and press on with our business, solemnly, but resolutely."

Certainly the FCC has never been a democratic force, whichever party has been dominant. Bill Clinton championed the disastrous Telecom Act of 1996 and otherwise did almost nothing to impede the drift toward oligopoly. (As Newsweek reported in 2000, Al Gore was Rupert Murdoch's personal choice for President. The mogul apparently sensed that Gore would happily play ball with him, and also thought--correctly--that the Democrat would win.)

What is unique to Michael Powell, however, is the showy superciliousness with which he treats his civic obligation to address the needs of people other than the very rich. That spirit has shone forth many times--as when the chairman genially compared the "digital divide" between the information haves and have-nots to a "Mercedes divide" between the lucky few who can afford great cars and those (like him) who can't. In the intensity of his pro-business bias, Powell recalls Mark Fowler, head of Reagan's FCC, who famously denied his social obligations by asserting that TV is merely "an appliance," "a toaster with pictures." And yet such Reaganite bons mots, fraught with the anti-Communist fanaticism of the late cold war, evinced a deadly earnestness that's less apparent in General Powell's son. He is a blithe, postmodern sort of ideologue, attuned to the complacent smirk of Bush the Younger--and, of course, just perfect for the cool and snickering culture of TV.

Although such flippancies are hard to take, they're also easy to refute, for there is no rationale for such an attitude. Take "the public interest"--an ideal that really isn't hard to understand. A media system that enlightens us, that tells us everything we need to know pertaining to our lives and liberty and happiness, would be a system dedicated to the public interest. Such a system would not be controlled by a cartel of giant corporations, because those entities are ultimately hostile to the welfare of the people. Whereas we need to know the truth about such corporations, they often have an interest in suppressing it (as do their advertisers). And while it takes much time and money to find out the truth, the parent companies prefer to cut the necessary costs of journalism, much preferring the sort of lurid fare that can drive endless hours of agitated jabbering. (Prior to 9/11, it was Monica, then Survivor and Chandra Levy, whereas, since the fatal day, we have had mostly anthrax, plus much heroic footage from the Pentagon.) The cartel's favored audience, moreover, is that stratum of the population most desirable to advertisers--which has meant the media's complete abandonment of working people and the poor. And while the press must help protect us against those who would abuse the powers of government, the oligopoly is far too cozy with the White House and the Pentagon, whose faults, and crimes, it is unwilling to expose. The media's big bosses want big favors from the state, while the reporters are afraid to risk annoying their best sources. Because of such politeness (and, of course, the current panic in the air), the US coverage of this government is just a bit more edifying than the local newscasts in Riyadh.

Against the daily combination of those corporate tendencies--conflict of interest, endless cutbacks, endless trivial pursuits, class bias, deference to the king and all his men--the public interest doesn't stand a chance. Despite the stubborn fiction of their "liberal" prejudice, the corporate media have helped deliver a stupendous one-two punch to this democracy. (That double whammy followed their uncritical participation in the long, irrelevant jihad against those moderate Republicans, the Clintons.) Last year, they helped subvert the presidential race, first by prematurely calling it for Bush, regardless of the vote--a move begun by Fox, then seconded by NBC, at the personal insistence of Jack Welch, CEO of General Electric. Since the coup, the corporate media have hidden or misrepresented the true story of the theft of that election.

And having justified Bush/Cheney's coup, the media continue to betray American democracy. Media devoted to the public interest would investigate the poor performance by the CIA, the FBI, the FAA and the CDC, so that those agencies might be improved for our protection--but the news teams (just like Congress) haven't bothered to look into it. So, too, in the public interest, should the media report on all the current threats to our security--including those far-rightists targeting abortion clinics and, apparently, conducting bioterrorism; but the telejournalists are unconcerned (just like John Ashcroft). So should the media highlight, not play down, this government's attack on civil liberties--the mass detentions, secret evidence, increased surveillance, suspension of attorney-client privilege, the encouragements to spy, the warnings not to disagree, the censored images, sequestered public papers, unexpected visits from the Secret Service and so on. And so should the media not parrot what the Pentagon says about the current war, because such prettified accounts make us complacent and preserve us in our fatal ignorance of what people really think of us--and why--beyond our borders. And there's much more--about the stunning exploitation of the tragedy, especially by the Republicans; about the links between the Bush and the bin Laden families; about the ongoing shenanigans in Florida--that the media would let the people know, if they were not (like Michael Powell) indifferent to the public interest.

In short, the news divisions of the media cartel appear to work against the public interest--and for their parent companies, their advertisers and the Bush Administration. The situation is completely un-American. It is the purpose of the press to help us run the state, and not the other way around. As citizens of a democracy, we have the right and obligation to be well aware of what is happening, both in "the homeland" and the wider world. Without such knowledge we cannot be both secure and free. We therefore must take steps to liberate the media from oligopoly, so as to make the government our own. [Source]

Please Do! Read more!

...With Liberty and WHAT for WHO?

I pledge allegiance to Keith Olbermann.



You cannot have peace without justice! You simply cannot! But they don't want justice! And they sure as hell don't want peace! The resignations of Rummy, Rove, Wolfowitz, and thereafter are not enough, never enough. The best these acts can do is get people to start asking Why? and not settling for the partisan answer. It requires the understanding that things can never be parrallel in a world of lies. I am again eternally grateful to Mr. Olbermann for pointing this out daily on the tube, and making the acquirement of that understanding smoother for we common class folk.

We've been seeing a lot of injustice lately, it's been making my soul and my eyes sore. I'm sure it's always been there but I've personally started to feel drowned in the unfair reality of it all. So, I wonder, what are we going to do NOW? Now that we've been reminded that the chair of the world our children will grow up in is being devoured by gluttonous merciless termites? That we are being slid down and deceived into the paper shredder? Now that this has constantly been affirmed by your information seeking and sharing and by mine? Get angry and then what? and then WHAT?

I wouldn't even know how to answer that, though. Sometimes I wish the rapture would happen sooner. I hear the powers-that-be have humanity roasts on Sundays in the oval office. Maybe the rumor will get to a wrathful God. Fingers crossed.

And because it came on my shuffle this morning:
Some folks inherit star spangled eyes,
Ooh, they send you down to war, lord,
And when you ask them, how much should we give?
Ooh, they only answer more! more! more! yoh
-CCR

End of Post. Read more!

"The Final Corporation"

I've been making a mental note to watch this movie for too long. Maybe this weekend.



Arthur Jensen: You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it! Is that clear?! You think you've merely stopped a business deal -- that is not the case! The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back. It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity. It is ecological balance. You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West! There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-variate, multi-national dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, Reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU WILL ATONE!

Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?

You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen, and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and A T & T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state -- Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale! It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war and famine, oppression or brutality -- one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.

And I have chosen you to preach this evangel, Mr. Beale.

- Arthur Jensen, Network (1976) [Source] Read more!

Did Princess Diana Die AGAIN?

If not, then I don't understand the commotion. So it's been 10 years. She's dead and she was dead 10 years ago and since. That's all that needs to be said. I really don't care what she did 1 minute before she died. 2 minutes. 3 hours. The route she took. What she was wearing. Who drove by the wreckage. Who built the tunnel. Diana herself is turning in her grave at the publicity her 10 year anniversary is being given. So much for anyone meaning "Rest In Peace". Rest in everlasting scrutiny, morelike. The media is doing nothing to respect her memory with any kind of memory respect paying. Real respect would be knowing that Diana's work was all about influencing peace in the world and helping others and social justice and then featuring stories that promote that. But no, let's talk about the prospect that this one woman, out of the millions that die regularly, might have been pregnant the night she died. WHO CARES?!

I'm also partial because I saw the movie The Queen yesterday and I rather sympathize with Queen Elizabeth II's wish that D's death be considered a private matter and rejection to make any statement to the press. The British people were outraged that the royal family weren't making flashy shows of grief like the people that didn't even know this woman. It's sad, this modern world. Read more!

Mad As Hell and Terrorstorm

I found this website and I can only afford timewise to watch this first video I'm posting, along with the last video on that link. It's from Network made in 1976, but like many speeches, lectures, lyrics, and essays I've been finding lately, the age-old message is preserved with the humanistic desire to change and progress, beginning with getting people to willingly open their eyes. This Howard Beale character might as well be you or me or any of the fellow Davids standing up to Goliath. Underneath the first video I posted a monologue taken out of the last video, also found on the link. I also found the trailer to this Alex Jones film (Jones is another Robert Greenwald, who made Iraq for Sale) called Terrorstorm. It's on YouTube in its entirety but I don't have the time to spend the two hours watching it at the moment so I'll just post the trailer that I saw. After Loose Change and In Plane Sight, conspiracy theory skeptics, like most of our parents, ask WHY the government would do something like stage a terrorist attack, "Our government would never!". YOUR government. Anyway, this film might help us find or compliment the answer to that "Why?" question.



Beale: I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth; banks are going bust; shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter; punks are running wild in the street, and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it.

We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat. And we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be!

We all know things are bad -- worse than bad -- they're crazy.

It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, "Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials, and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone."

Well, I'm not going to leave you alone.

I want you to get mad!

I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot. I don't want you to write to your Congressman, because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street.

All I know is that first, you've got to get mad.

You've gotta say, "I'm a human being, goddammit! My life has value!"

So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell,

"I'm as mad as hell,

and I'm not going to take this anymore !!!"


Alex Jones' Terrorstorm sneak peak:
Read more!

The President and the Press (Ringing True Today)

Please listen or read. It's beautiful.

Google Video description:
"John F. Kennedy Speech, April 27, 1961

American Newspaper Publishers Association. Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York, NY.

In a speech that should shock Americans. He warns the press and America to be on the lookout for the exact circumstances that have manifest themselves under the Bush Administration and the false flag of state sponsored terrorism.

This speech should chill Americans to the bone. Kennedy died trying to warn us. He wanted to abolish the Federal Reserve and the C.I.A.

On November 22, 1963, hardly past his first thousand days in office, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was killed by multiple assassin's bullets as his motorcade took and unscheduled turn in Dallas. Kennedy was the youngest man elected President; and youngest to die. The Secret Service was not by his side, they had been called off of his motorcade. Who would have the power to do this?

Graduating from Harvard in 1940, he entered the Navy. In 1943, when his PT boat was rammed and sunk by a Japanese destroyer, Kennedy, despite grave injuries, led the survivors through perilous waters to safety. He is a war hero.

Don't let his death be in vain. This speech which has now transcended time could be the key to saving America from the fate which looms over it like a dark spectra.

Author: John F. Kennedy Date: 1961-04-27 Source: John F. Kennedy Presidential Library Recorded by: White House"



Highlights:

"The very word "secrecy" is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment. That I do not intend to permit to the extent that it is in my control. And no official of my Administration, whether his rank is high or low, civilian or military, should interpret my words here tonight as an excuse to censor the news, to stifle dissent, to cover up our mistakes or to withhold from the press and the public the facts they deserve to know."


"It requires a change in outlook, a change in tactics, a change in missions--by the government, by the people, by every businessman or labor leader, and by every newspaper. For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence--on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations."

"Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. It conducts the Cold War, in short, with a war-time discipline no democracy would ever hope or wish to match."

"It is the unprecedented nature of this challenge that also gives rise to your second obligation--an obligation which I share. And that is our obligation to inform and alert the American people--to make certain that they possess all the facts that they need, and understand them as well--the perils, the prospects, the purposes of our program and the choices that we face."

"No President should fear public scrutiny of his program. For from that scrutiny comes understanding; and from that understanding comes support or opposition. And both are necessary. I am not asking your newspapers to support the Administration, but I am asking your help in the tremendous task of informing and alerting the American people. For I have complete confidence in the response and dedication of our citizens whenever they are fully informed."


"This means greater coverage and analysis of international news--for it is no longer far away and foreign but close at hand and local. It means greater attention to improved understanding of the news as well as improved transmission. And it means, finally, that government at all levels, must meet its obligation to provide you with the fullest possible information outside the narrowest limits of national security--and we intend to do it."

Source of Transcript Read more!

www.OUTFOXED.org

Another production by Robert Greenwald, the creator/director/producer of Iraq for Sale and many worthy others made by his production company, BraveNewFilms. One of the BraveNewFilms slogan, at least when it comes to the Fox News channel, is "We watch, so you don't have to." I'd rather watch Flavor of Love.

And because I can't help myself...


Enjoy. Read more!