There are those Pacificans who demand a return to the revolutionary ethic at Pacifica and those who don't. /R -----Original Message----- From: change-links@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:change-links@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Geraldo Cienmarcos Sent: Monday, January 30, 2006 8:02 AM To: change-links@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [change-links] Harry Belafonte on Democracy now Harry Belafonte THIS Mon. AM on radio. In Los Angeles area on radia fm KPFK.org 9 am and 6 am. Www.democracynow.org Harry Belafonte on Bush, Iraq, Hurricane Katrina and Having His Conversations with Martin Luther King Wiretapped by the FBI We spend the hour with the legendary musician, actor and humanitarian, Harry Belafonte. He joins us in our firehouse studio to talk about why he recently called President Bush "the world's greatest terrorist;" racism and Hurricane Katrina; Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement and wars of imperialism and resistance. Interview: http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/30/157217 rush transcript AMY GOODMAN: Belafonte spoke at rally in Caracas, where he commented on President Bush. HARRY BELAFONTE: No matter what the greatest tyrant in the world, the greatest terrorist in the world, George W. Bush, says, we're here to tell you: Not hundreds, not thousands, but millions of the American people ? millions ? support your revolution, support your ideas, and yes, expressing our solidarity with you. AMY GOODMAN: Harry Belafonte was standing next to President Chavez when he made those comments, and he didn't let up. When he came back to this country, he spoke in commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King at Duke University, where Belafonte said, quote, "Bush has led us into a dishonorable war that's caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people. What's the difference between that terrorist and other terrorists?" In a speech to the annual meeting of the Arts Presenters Members Conference days later, he said, quote, "We've come to this dark time in which the new Gestapo of Homeland Security lurks here, where citizens are having their rights suspended." Harry Belafonte joins us today in our Firehouse studio for the hour. Welcome to Democracy Now! HARRY BELAFONTE: It's nice to be here. AMY GOODMAN: It's good to have you with us. Well, let's go back for a moment to Venezuela and your comments there, for which you got a lot of attention in the United States. Talk about your views of President Bush. HARRY BELAFONTE: When Katrina took place, there was a great sense of tragic loss for many Americans who saw that terrible tragedy. What we had not anticipated was that our government would have been so negligent and so unresponsive to the plight of hundreds of thousands of people in the region. And in a dilemma that we all face as to what we could do as private citizens to help the folks that were caught in that tragedy, we began to listen to voices that were outside the boundaries of government, the United States government. We listened to voices that came from as far away as Denmark, who offered to send goods and services in emergency, and we also heard the voices of people from Venezuela through their leader, Hugo Chavez, who said that ?In this moment of your great tragedy, we, the Venezuelan people, extend all the resources we can summon up to help the plight of those people caught in the Gulf region. The United States very abruptly and very arrogantly rejected that offer, while in its stead, we did nothing to bring immediate relief. And as a matter of fact, I must tell you, we're still quite delinquent in what the peoples of that region need, because we still failed to fully mobilize and meet the needs of the people, particularly in New Orleans, but other places within that region. I and many other private citizens decided that we would listen very carefully to what people outside of the government were saying, because there was no immediate sense of relief and response to what we were experiencing, the people in Katrina. And so, like others, I went with a delegation of 15 people, at the invitation of the Venezuelan government, to come and to meet with President Chavez and members of his cabinet to talk about what we could do to help American people caught in this tragedy. While there, we were given the right and the permission and the opportunity to visit barrios, villages, going into the schools, going into the prisons of Venezuela. We went into the academic institutions, in which Cornel West spoke. Tavis Smiley went to TeleSUR and other television communications development taking place, to examine, to see what was happening to, quote-unquote, "freedom of the press." As we've said, freedom of the press in Venezuela is vigorously denied. There is no opposition noise. Yet it's interesting to note that nothing in Venezuela has been nationalized. There's still a very vigorous private sector, albeit that it's a little disgruntled that it is not able to sustain the rather one-sided agreement that they drew with that government a long time ago in contracts that were drawn for oil and other resources. AMY GOODMAN: Did you meet with the opposition, as well? HARRY BELAFONTE: Yes. We met with the opposition, as a matter of fact, the leader of the opposition. And for a little over two hours, we had an exchange. I asked him questions that I thought were appropriate about what he felt about Chavez and the program, why did he take an opposition position. And he expressed his thoughts on the way things were going. We found that there were some contradictions to what he said, but that was not my purpose. I wasn't going to be -- I didn't go down to be an investigative reporter. I went down to ascertain facts and to make sure that if we got responses from the Venezuelan government that would help the plight of poor people in America, not just those caught in Katrina, but, as you well know, already the South Bronx has received aid, oil at very favorable prices for people who were not given any to be able to face this winter that we're experiencing now, and it is expected that will become more severe. Massachusetts received oil. They just recently negotiated with Vermont and Maine and other places, about not only oil, but what other goods and services can the Venezuelan government bring to take up the slack for what the United States says it has no resources to fill. It is quite curious that we can find billions and billions of dollars to sustain an illegal and immoral war in the Middle East, invading a country that did not provoke us and moving into this this conflict unconstitutionally, even though it had the approval of the Congress. Even the Congress violated the statutes of the Constitution. We were not invaded. There was no threat of an enemy. We unilaterally walked into a country that had no threat to this country, and we invaded it. That's against the Constitution. AMY GOODMAN: You call President Bush a terrorist? HARRY BELAFONTE: I call President Bush a terrorist. I call those around him terrorists, as well: Condoleezza Rice, Rumsfeld, Gonzales in the Justice Department, and certainly Cheney. I think all of these men sit -- and women -- sit in the midst of an enormous conspiracy that has been unraveling America for the last eight years -- six years. It is tragic that the dubious way in which this president acquired power should have begun to unravel the Constitution and the peoples of this country. Yes, I say that there are people in this country who live in terror. Poverty is terror. Having your Social Security threatened is terror. Having your livelihood as an elderly person slowly disappearing with no replenishment is terror. Students who are dropping out of school because there are no resources to keep us in school is terror. You find people in the streets, watching drugs permeate our communities and destroy our young, it's a life of terror. And men who sit in charge of that distribution mechanism, which can help the American people overcome these problems and refuse to do so, while giving the rich more money than they've ever dreamt of having, while turning around our institutions and redirecting resources from those who are truly in need to those who are already generously endowed, if not hedonistically so, it's a great tradgedy. And I think most important is that we have words that attempt to give us moral cleansing, so that somehow we hold those responsible for crashing into the Twin Towers and killing over 2,000 Americans citizens in cold blood, which is an act of terrorism -- people who have done that should be sought out and brought to justice; there's no question of that -- but when we do what we have done, illegal war, going into the Middle East, bombing at will, and then hundreds of thousands of people get caught, who are either maimed or over 100,000 have already been killed, who are innocent men, women and children, and we chalk that off to a thing called "collateral damage," as if somehow that murderous thing that we're doing so cruelly and so inhumanely has no judgment before world opinion, that we are somehow righteous and above criticism and above the law. That is unacceptable. And that's what I speak out against. AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Harry Belafonte. When we come back, I want to ask him about the latest controversy over spying on American citizens. He's had his own experience with that. Long-time friend of Dr. Martin Luther King, many, many hundreds of conversations with King on the phone. What about his phone calls at that time? Talk to him about the F.B.I. and surveillance. [break] To purchase an audio or video copy of this entire program, click here for our new online ordering or call 1 (888) 999-3877. New Pacifica Working Group http://www.egroups.com/group/NewPacifica 'Save Our Stations!' Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NewPacifica/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: NewPacifica-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/