Michael Moore flew more than one-thousand miles in the wee hours of March 5, 2011, to speak to the protesters outside the Wisconsin State Capitol. Somewhere, Robert M. (Fightin' Bob) La Follette was smiling. Michael Moore published his speech in his own blog as well as The Huffington Post. Ironically, the editors of The New Republic warned today that Arianna Huffinton's webzine endangered journalism. Wham! Bam! Left Hooks! Right Crosses! When the smoke cleared, this blogger thought: I resemble that remark. If this is (fair & balanced) scraping, so be it.
[Vannevar Bush Hyperlink — Bracketed Numbers — Directory]
[1] "America Is NOT Broke" (video) — Michael Moore
[2] "America Is NOT Broke" (text) — Michael Moore
[3] "Aggregated Robbery" — Critique Of HuffPo By TNR Editors
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"America Is NOT Broke" — Madison, WI Rally — March 5, 2011 (Video)
By Michael Moore
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America Is Not Broke (Text)
By Michael Moore
Tag Cloud of the following speech
Speech delivered at Wisconsin Capitol in Madison, March 5, 2011
America is not broke.
Contrary to what those in power would like you to believe so that you'll give up your pension, cut your wages, and settle for the life your great-grandparents had, America is not broke. Not by a long shot. The country is awash in wealth and cash. It's just that it's not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the uber-rich.
Today just 400 Americans have more wealth than half of all Americans combined.
Let me say that again. 400 obscenely rich people, most of whom benefited in some way from the multi-trillion dollar taxpayer "bailout" of 2008, now have more loot, stock and property than the assets of 155 million Americans combined. If you can't bring yourself to call that a financial coup d'état, then you are simply not being honest about what you know in your heart to be true.
And I can see why. For us to admit that we have let a small group of men abscond with and hoard the bulk of the wealth that runs our economy, would mean that we'd have to accept the humiliating acknowledgment that we have indeed surrendered our precious Democracy to the moneyed elite. Wall Street, the banks and the Fortune 500 now run this Republic — and, until this past month, the rest of us have felt completely helpless, unable to find a way to do anything about it.
I have nothing more than a high school degree. But back when I was in school, every student had to take one semester of economics in order to graduate. And here's what I learned: Money doesn't grow on trees. It grows when we make things. It grows when we have good jobs with good wages that we use to buy the things we need and thus create more jobs. It grows when we provide an outstanding educational system that then grows a new generation of inventers, entrepreneurs, artists, scientists and thinkers who come up with the next great idea for the planet. And that new idea creates new jobs and that creates revenue for the state. But if those who have the most money don't pay their fair share of taxes, the state can't function. The schools can't produce the best and the brightest who will go on to create those jobs. If the wealthy get to keep most of their money, we have seen what they will do with it: recklessly gamble it on crazy Wall Street schemes and crash our economy. The crash they created cost us millions of jobs. That too caused a reduction in revenue. And the population ended up suffering because they reduced their taxes, reduced our jobs and took wealth out of the system, removing it from circulation.
The nation is not broke, my friends. Wisconsin is not broke. It's part of the Big Lie. It's one of the three biggest lies of the decade: America/Wisconsin is broke, Iraq has WMD, the Packers can't win the Super Bowl without Brett Favre.
The truth is, there's lots of money to go around. LOTS. It's just that those in charge have diverted that wealth into a deep well that sits on their well-guarded estates. They know they have committed crimes to make this happen and they know that someday you may want to see some of that money that used to be yours. So they have bought and paid for hundreds of politicians across the country to do their bidding for them. But just in case that doesn't work, they've got their gated communities, and the luxury jet is always fully fueled, the engines running, waiting for that day they hope never comes. To help prevent that day when the people demand their country back, the wealthy have done two very smart things:
1. They control the message. By owning most of the media they have expertly convinced many Americans of few means to buy their version of the American Dream and to vote for their politicians. Their version of the Dream says that you, too, might be rich some day – this is America, where anything can happen if you just apply yourself! They have conveniently provided you with believable examples to show you how a poor boy can become a rich man, how the child of a single mother in Hawaii can become president, how a guy with a high school education can become a successful filmmaker. They will play these stories for you over and over again all day long so that the last thing you will want to do is upset the apple cart — because you — yes, you, too! — might be rich/president/an Oscar-winner some day! The message is clear: keep your head down, your nose to the grindstone, don't rock the boat and be sure to vote for the party that protects the rich man that you might be some day.
2. They have created a poison pill that they know you will never want to take. It is their version of mutually assured destruction. And when they threatened to release this weapon of mass economic annihilation in September of 2008, we blinked. As the economy and the stock market went into a tailspin, and the banks were caught conducting a worldwide Ponzi scheme, Wall Street issued this threat: Either hand over trillions of dollars from the American taxpayers or we will crash this economy straight into the ground. Fork it over or it's Goodbye savings accounts. Goodbye pensions. Goodbye United States Treasury. Goodbye jobs and homes and future. It was friggin' awesome and it scared the shit out of everyone. "Here! Take our money! We don't care. We'll even print more for you! Just take it! But, please, leave our lives alone, PLEASE!"
The executives in the board rooms and hedge funds could not contain their laughter, their glee, and within three months they were writing each other huge bonus checks and marveling at how perfectly they had played a nation full of suckers. Millions lost their jobs anyway, and millions lost their homes. But there was no revolt (see #1 above).
Until now. On Wisconsin! Never has a Michigander been more happy to share a big, great lake with you! You have aroused the sleeping giant know as the working people of the United States of America. Right now the earth is shaking and the ground is shifting under the feet of those who are in charge. Your message has inspired people in all 50 states and that message is: WE HAVE HAD IT! We reject anyone tells us America is broke and broken. It's just the opposite! We are rich with talent and ideas and hard work and, yes, love. Love and compassion toward those who have, through no fault of their own, ended up as the least among us. But they still crave what we all crave: Our country back! Our democracy back! Our good name back! The United States of America. NOT the Corporate States of America. The United States of America!
So how do we get this? Well, we do it with a little bit of Egypt here, a little bit of Madison there. And let us pause for a moment and remember that it was a poor man with a fruit stand in Tunisia who gave his life so that the world might focus its attention on how a government run by billionaires for billionaires is an affront to freedom and morality and humanity.
Thank you, Wisconsin. You have made people realize this was our last best chance to grab the final thread of what was left of who we are as Americans. For three weeks you have stood in the cold, slept on the floor, skipped out of town to Illinois — whatever it took, you have done it, and one thing is for certain: Madison is only the beginning. The smug rich have overplayed their hand. They couldn't have just been content with the money they raided from the treasury. They couldn't be satiated by simply removing millions of jobs and shipping them overseas to exploit the poor elsewhere. No, they had to have more – something more than all the riches in the world. They had to have our soul. They had to strip us of our dignity. They had to shut us up and shut us down so that we could not even sit at a table with them and bargain about simple things like classroom size or bulletproof vests for everyone on the police force or letting a pilot just get a few extra hours sleep so he or she can do their job — their $19,000 a year job. That's how much some rookie pilots on commuter airlines make, maybe even the rookie pilots flying people here to Madison. But he's stopped trying to get better pay. All he asks is that he doesn't have to sleep in his car between shifts at O'Hare airport. That's how despicably low we have sunk. The wealthy couldn't be content with just paying this man $19,000 a year. They wanted to take away his sleep. They wanted to demean and dehumanize him. After all, he's just another slob.
And that, my friends, is Corporate America's fatal mistake. But trying to destroy us they have given birth to a movement — a movement that is becoming a massive, nonviolent revolt across the country. We all knew there had to be a breaking point some day, and that point is upon us. Many people in the media don't understand this. They say they were caught off guard about Egypt, never saw it coming. Now they act surprised and flummoxed about why so many hundreds of thousands have come to Madison over the last three weeks during brutal winter weather. "Why are they all standing out there in the cold? I mean there was that election in November and that was supposed to be that!
"There's something happening here, and you don't know what it is, do you...?"
America ain't broke! The only thing that's broke is the moral compass of the rulers. And we aim to fix that compass and steer the ship ourselves from now on. Never forget, as long as that Constitution of ours still stands, it's one person, one vote, and it's the thing the rich hate most about America -- because even though they seem to hold all the money and all the cards, they begrudgingly know this one unshakeable basic fact: There are more of us than there are of them!
Madison, do not retreat. We are with you. We will win together. Ω
[Michael Moore was born in Flint, MI, and attended Catholic schools, including a year in the seminary, which he says accounts for his healthy respect for the fires of hell that he believes to be located somewhere just outside the gates of Koch Industries. Moore was an Eagle Scout, Newspaper Boy of the Week, and, at 18, the youngest person ever elected to public office in the state of Michigan.
Moore is the Oscar and Emmy-winning director of the ground-breaking, record-setting films "Roger & Me," "Bowling for Columbine," and "Fahrenheit 9/11," which also won the top prize at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival and went on to become the highest grossing documentary of all time. It became the first documentary ever to premier No. 1 at the box-office in its opening weekend. Film Comment called it "The Film of the Year."
His 2007 documentary, "Sicko" is self described as, "a comedy about 45 million people with no health care in the richest country on Earth." Moore investigated American health care horror stories, focusing on large American pharmaceutical companies, the corruption in the Food and Drug Administration, and even brought injured 9/11 rescue workers to Cuba to receive treatment.
Moore also earned the label of America's No. 1 selling nonfiction author, with such books as Stupid White Men and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation, and Dude, Where's My Country. No other author has spent more weeks on the New York Times hardcover non-fiction list from 2002-04 than Michael Moore. Stupid White Men was also awarded Britain's top book honor, "British Book of the Year," the first time the award has been bestowed on an American author.
Moore has two additional books published by Simon and Schuster: Will They Ever Trust Us Again: Letters from the War Zone, which is a compilation of letters he has received from soldiers in Iraq and from their families back home; and The Official Fahrenheit 9/11 Reader, which contains loads of backup materials for the film, plus essays, and the film's screenplay.
In addition to winning the Academy Award for "Bowling for Columbine," Moore won the Emmy Award for his NBC and Fox series, "TV Nation" and was also nominated for his other series, "The Awful Truth" (which the LA Times called "the smartest and funniest show on TV.")
Moore also wrote and directed the comedy feature "Canadian Bacon" starring the late John Candy, and the BBC documentary, "The Big One." He has directed music videos for R.E.M., Rage Against the Machine, Neil Young, and System of a Down.
His other best-selling books include Downsize This! Random Threats from an Unarmed American, and Adventures in a TV Nation, which he co-wrote with his wife Kathleen Glynn. His books have been translated in over 30 languages, and have gone to #1 in Italy, Germany, France, Japan, Great Britain, Australia, Ireland, and New Zealand.]
Copyright © 2011 Michael Moore & TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
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Aggregated Robbery
By The Editors
Tag Cloud of the following article
In recent weeks, Google has indicated that it is revising its search algorithm in order to punish so-called "scrapers" and "content farms"—websites that, respectively, steal articles from other publications and write absurdly banal articles built around common search terms, thereby gobbling up traffic. For anyone who cares about the future of writing and reporting, this was certainly good news. But Google's improvements appeared to be aimed fairly narrowly at the most egregious offenders, sites that no one thinks of as legitimate publications, like Associated Content and eHow. Largely ignored was the question of what Google's incentives are doing to journalism as a whole.
The story of how the chase for search traffic came to define contemporary journalism may not exactly begin with The Huffington Post, but Arianna Huffington's Web magazine probably plays the central role. HuffPo is not a scraper or a content farm; it publishes plenty of original journalism. But it has been successful for the same reason that scrapers and content farms are frequently successful—a penchant for search-engine optimization. Often this means that HuffPo simply does a better job of drawing traffic to its own pieces. It's hard to complain about that. But HuffPo also does a great job of drawing traffic to its excerpts of other publications' pieces. Which is to say, it has become quite adept at reaping traffic—and profits—from other people's work.
This is a milder form of scraping, which goes by the name “aggregation.” And, to be fair to HuffPo, everyone does it now. Aggregation doesn’t involve stealing other people’s pieces. It simply involves curating them—copying and pasting a key passage, providing a link to the original, and then hoping that people searching on that topic will stumble across your excerpt before they stumble on the real thing.
There isn’t anything inherently wrong with aggregation. On the contrary—unless we expect readers to get all their news from one publication or, alternatively, spend all day sifting through numerous websites themselves—the Web needs aggregators. And smart aggregation does, in fact, add something to the world by bringing a certain editorial judgment to bear on the selection of pieces.
So the problem isn’t aggregation. It’s that the entire structure of the media world currently provides publications with huge incentives to aggregate and comparatively small incentives to actually create. If your goal is to increase revenue by increasing Web traffic, it’s simply much cheaper and more efficient to excerpt or summarize other stories, rather than to produce your own. And so, increasingly, we are seeing publications devote more and more attention to aggregating—to the model of success pioneered by HuffPo. The New Republic is no exception: We face the same pressures, the same set of skewed incentives, as everyone else; and we too are trying to figure out ways to garner more search traffic through aggregation. In a different world, this is not where we would choose to put our resources. But the fact is, we don’t have much of a choice.
It’s a cliché, but it’s true: The creation of original information and arguments is tremendously important to both the functioning of democracy and the existence of a decent, reflective culture. So, it’s worth taking a step back and asking if there isn’t something that can be done to remedy this situation. The obvious thing is for Google to think more expansively about how to reward the production of original journalism—that is, not just to penalize scrapers and content farms but also to actively reward publications for writing stories rather than aggregating the material of others.
The other solution is more nebulous. No publication is going to stop aggregating. But journalists might, as a collective whole, pause to think about where our priorities ought to lie. Even as we all play the game by the current set of rules—which means we will all continue to invest in aggregation—we need to remind ourselves that aggregation is not a replacement for journalism. With this in mind, perhaps we can all agree not to let the aggregation arms race escalate into madness. Maybe we can establish a rough norm for ourselves: that we will continue to treat aggregation as a side project to what we really do—and, accordingly, that we will limit it to playing a small role in our institutions relative to the production of real writing and reporting. Otherwise, we are going to wake up one day and discover that we are simply aggregating each other’s aggregation, because no one is any longer bothering to create original material. No doubt The Huffington Post would figure out some way to thrive in that world, but the rest of us should do everything possible to make sure it never comes about. Ω
[The Editors include Editor-In-Chief Richard Just, Editor-at-Large Franklin Foer, Literary Editor Leon Wieseltier, Executive Editor Rachel Morris, Managing Editor Jeremy Kahn, Senior Editors Jonathan Chait, Jonathan Cohn, Ruth Franklin, John B. Judis, Adam Kirsch, Noam Scheiber, Jason Zengerle, and Editor-in-Chief Emeritus Martin Peretz.]
Copyright © 2011 The New Republic
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