¡Viva WikiLeaks! SiCKO Was Not Banned in Cuba

¡Viva WikiLeaks! SiCKO Was Not Banned in Cuba
by Michael Moore
Sat Dec 18, 2010 at 03:38:15 AM PST

Yesterday WikiLeaks did an amazing thing and released a classified State Department cable that dealt, in part, with me and my film, 'Sicko.'

It is a stunning look at the Orwellian nature of how bureaucrats for the State spin their lies and try to recreate reality (I assume to placate their bosses and tell them what they want to hear).

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The U.S. government has been passing around these "secret" documents to itself for the past fifty years, explaining in painstaking detail how horrible things are in Cuba and how Cubans are quietly aching for us to come back and take over. I don't know why we write these cables, I guess it just makes us feel better about ourselves. (Anyone curious can find an entire museum of U.S. wish fulfillment cables on the website of the National Security Archive.)

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OK, so we know the media is lazy and sucks most of the time. But the bigger issue here is how our government seemed to be colluding with the health insurance industry to destroy a film that might have a hand in bringing about what the Cubans already have in their poverty-ridden third world country: free, universal health care. And because they have it and we don't, Cuba has a better infant mortality rate than we do, their life expectancy is just 7 months shorter than ours, and, according to the WHO, they rank just two places behind the richest country on earth in terms of the quality of their health care.

That's the story, mainstream media and right-wing haters

more plus cables and shit:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/12/18/929939/-Viva-WikiLeaks!-SiCKO-Was-Not-Banned-in-Cuba
seems even The Guardian TODAY - got it wrong:
And not one scintilla of digging to see if Cuba had actually banned the movie! In fact, just the opposite.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/17/wikileaks-cuba-banned-sicko

to protect corporations over citizens!

to misinform the public about Latin America.

Game, set and match, Michael Moore!

one of the best, with a topnotch health care system that provides FREE educations to doctors and other health care professionals, and has consistently yielded results that put the U.S. to shame, given the wealth here (all concentrated at the top).

This is the multinational corporate insurance/health care predators' deepest, darkest secret, which their various tools and lackeys in the U.S. government keep well hidden for them. The more socialist a government is, the better health care does it provide for everyone. And that tiny island off Florida is the best example of it.

I remember getting propagandized about England's health care system and Canada's, way back in my youth--with lies about lack of choice, long waits and so on. Socialism is bad; capitalism is good--this is the lie that was hammered into my head and everybody's heads within reach of the U.S. corporate media machine, which produces a pile of crap a mountain high in defense of "organized money" (as FDR put it). They tried to make you believe that socialism is coercive whereas the rich getting richer is not. The rich getting richer is "freedom" and you, too, can be rich and "free" and lord it over everyone else. You can be rich and "free" and live forever if we just give massive tax subsidies and monopolies to the giant pharmaceuticals who will develop "miracle drugs" for everything.

This propaganda was so pervasive, even back then--1950s-1970s--that it was almost impossible to think for yourself about the matter, if you lived within the mind-prison that the U.S. was already becoming, then. And to even think that a communist country could deliver better health care than U.S.-based transglobal corporations was tantamount to treason, and still is.

That's the other "Big Lie" (or one of them) that corporate control of the media and the government produced: patriotism = fighting (and even dying) for capitalism. Democracy has been made equivalent to capitalism, and has come to mean "freedom" for the few to get very rich and fuck everybody else. That ain't democracy, believe me.

Unfortunately, the propagandists had the communist disasters in the Soviet Union and "Red China"--countries without the slightest experience or tradition of democracy prior to their communist revolutions--to point to as the "bogeymen" for capitalism. See what happens when you seek social justice without capitalist greed controlling the state? Work camps! Slaughters! Repression! The rise of tyrants!

Of course, "capitalism" was slaughtering TWO MILLION Southeast Asians over a country, Vietnam, that had asked for UN-sponsored elections (which the "communists" were going to win) when this crapola began its rise up Shit Mountain. (The U.S. nixed those elections.)

And when a quite different outcome for a communist revolution began to be evident in Cuba, it had to be completely black-holed in the 'news' and buried beneath Shit Mountain so that not the slightest glimmer of real information could get out. Thus, the Embargo--to appearances, insane--but actually quite worthy of Stalin and his "Big Lie" techniques, as to collapsing the independent thought functions of the human brain--the desired effect.

The rest of the world has moved on, and has recognized Cuba as a decent country with a decent government, but it remains a "bogeyman" here precisely because of its achievements. It is not any failures in Cuba with regard to "free speech" or state coercion that concerns our corporate/war profiteer rulers. To them, "free speech" is "free corporate speech," not "free speech" for the peons and the cannon fodder. As for state coercion, how about strip searches at the airports and "stop loss" and gag orders against librarians on government searches of library records--gag orders so severe that librarians are forbidden to talk to anyone about it, even their lawyer!?

Cuba may have its failures--hard to evaluate, given the "Big Lie" propaganda--but so does every government system. That is NOT our corporate/war profiteer rulers' problem with Cuba. They could give a fuck about "human rights." Their problem is that Cuba's health care system and educational systems are better than those produced by our corporate/war profiteer state. And they don't want you and me to know it--because, if we know about it, we might have a choice--if we were ever to get back control of our government (um, starting with the corporate-controlled 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines, people!). We might DISCUSS Cuba's health care system. We might DISCUSS giving everyone a free college education. God forbid that we DISCUSS these things--and form our own opinion about them.

"Free speech," my ass. I'll tell you what I think. I think they've got MORE free speech in Cuba because they are out of the Shit Mountain zone, where five mega-billionaires control all of the public's TV/radio airwaves and virtually all print media. They are freer than we are, is my guess, and they've got universal free medical care.

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(Edited for typo.)

They've even got a better democracy than we do! Our votes have become blips on a private corporate computer screen, totted up by 'TRADE SECRET' code, with virtually no audit/recount controls! What kind of democracy is that? I'll tell you what kind it is. It's the kind where the brownshirts don't have to stuff ballot boxes and beat up voters. There don't even have to be many of them--such a few techies in ES&S/Diebold's basement--and Sarah Palin or John Bolton or Jeb Bush will be in the White House! How do you think we got this Puke Congress (s)elected, after what-all these Pukes did to this country--such a mindbloggling assault on our country and our democracy that it is difficult to describe it all. It is everywhere you look, at home and abroad. And "the People" put them back in charge in Congress? No fucking way.

Hand-counted paper ballots, like they do in Cuba, and still do in many Latin American countries, or OPEN SOURCE code electronics--code that belongs to the public and that anyone may review--with a paper ballot backup and a substantial audit, like they do in Venezuela. Those are democratic vote counting systems. Ours is NOT.

This is the main reason why Latin Americans are electing leaders who act in the interest of their people, and not the conniving Puke frauds and traitors or Blue Dogs that we get here. TRANSPARENT VOTE COUNTING--the bottom line of democracy. Cuba has it and WE DON'T. How's that for the black-holing of information that we suffer here under Corporate Rule!

Recommending, hoping a lot of people see it.