Author: Real History Lisa

… with a “conspiracy theory.” Many people shy away from such for fear of being ridiculed, of having to defend themselves from all the nuttiness that goes with that label.

But there are a lot of others who simply plow ahead, do the research, and continue to unearth the more buried pieces of our secret history.

I just wanted to share this with you so you know it’s okay to pursue the truth WHEREVER it leads, and not to be intimidated by the thought police who try to make you foolish for even considering the possibility of conspiracy.

Enjoy. You won’t see stories like this in any other mainstream publication.

Yet.

But if we all persist, and stop with the knee-jerk avoidance of such issues, maybe, just maybe, we can occupy the public mindspace around such topics the same way people are occupying the physical public spaces.

http://www.salon.com/2011/11/21/the_other_kennedy_conspiracy/

This is not me as a reporter. This is me passing along info just received from a fantastic activist I know in Wisconsin. I haven’t stopped to check facts and figures, so don’t quote any of this as fact unless you check it out for yourself. But that said – I heard enough to be terrified. Because this is the bare, raw, Republican agenda, coming soon to a state near you.

Wisconsin is in far more trouble than you have even heard. My mind is reeling from all I’m hearing. The governor is essentially leveling by the minute a forest of important legislation it took 100 years to grow.
Walker is not only going to hand over control of public employee retirement pension funds to HEDGE fund managers – Gov. Walker gets to personally pick them! Political payback, at the expense of teachers, police, firemen – outrageous. The budget bill also allows Walker to dip into that pension fund money. Problem is, when a previous state employee, Tommy Thompson, did that some years ago, and used those funds for another purpose, the State Supreme Court made him pay it all back. So all this does is guarantee Walker will costs the state more money than he can get from those funds.

Gov. Walker was put in office in part by large contributions from construction firm Payne and Dolan. In thanks, presumably, Walker has moved up the construction deadline of the Zoo interchange (where I894, I94 and I43 meet, if I wrote that down correctly). The project was set to be completed in 2017, at a cost of 1.3 billion. Walker wants it done by 2014, and has cut state funding to schools by 1.3 billion to pay for this (in his proposed budget, I think – couldn’t caputre notes fast enough).

Gov. Walker is selling off the two biggest revenue-generating public universities – making them go private. So costs at UW Madison will rise 26% by September(!!) and the state loses the revenue generated, meaning smaller schools are going to be scrambling even harder to stay afloat.

Walker is wiping out the mandate for curbside recycling. No more requirements for homes or business owners to recycle. Without that mandate, recycling will drop, just as gas prices are skyrocketing.

Walker removed recently-enacted limits on phosphorous in agricultural and residential projects.

Walker is trying to open up a pristine wetland in the state so important that a previous developer who had been offered the rights refused to destroy the land. Walker said he will PERSONALLLY find someone to develop it.

Walker’s budget bill will cause the state to lose federal transit funding. That funding pays for kids to ride city buses to schools. And with gas prices soaring, and school cuts forcing school closures and more busing, how are parents going to be able to afford to get their kids to schools?

My friend is working hard to get a recall effort going. It’s not just about Gov. Walker, as the State Senate is now controlled by Republicans. But if they can recall at least three of the Senators who are going along with this wholesale destruction of years of legislation, then they can turn this around. The problem? They only have 60 days to do this. If anyone has time and wants to help – I can put you in touch with activists there. This is deadly serious, and they’re really going to need more hands on this.

MEANWHILE, KARL ROVE is now sponsoring Gov. Walker on a tour around the state where they will preach an economic emergency that ISN’T and lie to citizens to ensure these “reforms” go through. It’s so toxic in the state that neighbors and families and indeed, communities are splitting in two over these issues. The Tea Partiers are unable to comprehend the destruction they are bringing, but the ones who get it need to persuade all the ones who aren’t yet getting active that window to stop this destruction is rapidly closing.

I’m going to try to get to Wisconsin during this 60-day window for a few days to do all I can to help. Can you do the same? If not here, where? If not not, when? If not us, who? Do what you can. Because the other side isn’t sleeping at all. They’re running with their advantage. Don’t let them win, or we all lose so much!

I’m surprised that otherwise intelligent people continue to believe the myth that the media is “liberal.” I think it’s worth discussing what a liberal media would look like if we had one, so we can better understand that we don’t have one.

Let’s imagine a fictional cable network called LNN – the Liberal News Network. What might the morning news on such a channel be?
The show might lead with pictures of starving children all over the world, so that while you sat down to breakfast, you’d be reminded of just how lucky you were to have been born in the U.S., and how others are still very much in need.

Viewers would be encouraged to send in at least some of their morning latte money to feed a baby for a week. Each morning, the number of children who had been moved out of poverty would also be shown. If there were truly a liberal media, that number would be growing, daily, by leaps and bounds.

You would see pictures of the war – really horrible, tragic pictures, showing not just death, but the maiming, the suffering, the devastation to innocents we currently think of solely as “collateral damage.” Each day, the grievances of both sides would be fully aired.

We’d hear not only from our own soldiers but from soldiers we were fighting, so we could start to understand why they are fighting back. If we are truly the good guys, there’d be no reason for anyone to oppose us.

A truly liberal media would allow us to hear the other side so we could better understand how our actions are affecting others, and what we could do to improve relations with the ultimate goal of ending all wars.

Truly, fostering better communication skills, deploring greed, and promoting fairness would be keystones of this network.

The commentators would be drawn from not merely all nationalities, but all walks of life. Instead of recycling the same news and intelligence and government figures, commentators would be sought among farm workers and blue-collar workers as well as low-level white-collar workers. The view from the socio-economic top would be balanced by the view from the bottom.

On LNN, union issues would be a regular discussion. Are workers getting a fair shake? Are unions really helping their membership or are they getting too close to management? When do unions go too far?

The ecological “state of the planet” would also be a regular discussion. Audiences would learn the science behind pollution, so that they’d make the link between the chemical elements in the products they buy and the environmental damage caused at every point in the production chain.

Corporations that were finding a way to offset their environmental damage would be recognized as heroes, while those whose policies amounted to a hit-and-run on the environment would be publicly castigated at ever turn.  

Truly educational information about child rearing would be offered. Are those soft drinks making your children obese? No amount of advertiser action would stop LNN from exposing such a connection.

Can yelling at your child be a form of abuse? A liberal media would talk about things many people would rather not think about.

A liberal media would not make us feel good all the time, but would poke at us and challenge us to be better parents, better neighbors, better people.

A liberal news channel would have a regular report about working conditions around the world. Would you still buy that piece of clothing if you knew it was sown under essentially slave-labor conditions, sometimes by children working 12 hours a day?

Would you admire China’s economy if you realized its coal-powered growth made it one of the most polluted places in the world? Would you travel to Thailand if you understood how much of the tourist economy depends on sex-slave trafficking dollars?

Or might you spend that money instead on a country that plowed the money received from tourism into a public fund from which all citizens who shared that country could benefit? Would you enjoy flowers sent to you on Valentine’s Day if you found those flowers had been picked by forced labor on farms where women routinely faced sexual harassment?

If we had a liberal media, we’d be hearing about other economic models around the world. When does capitalism work best? Would the answer be like what we hear from CNBC anchors who say capitalism should be unregulated – or “self-regulating” – allowing monopolies to take over, which then can raise prices and strangle our options?

A rising tide won’t lift all boats if it’s only happening in a private pool.

LNN would talk about the difference between labor-based income and non-labor-based income (passive income), and discuss how the upper class has kept the latter from the masses to preserve the power of the rich, and how we need to change that.

There are other models, even within our own country, such as the Alaska Permanent Fund, a fund that allows all citizens of Alaska to receive royalties on the oil recovered from their state.

All products come ultimately from some finite earth resource. Imagine if we all had a share of income generated from the products taken from the ground in our respective countries.

LNN would never shade the truth to further an agenda. The facts would be selective, necessarily, but extraordinary effort would be used to ensure all sides of an issue were fairly presented.

Note that, however, that does not mean all sides would be proportionally presented by certain measures. Although 20 percent of the people control 93 percent of the wealth, it does not follow that they should be allowed to control 93 percent of the media. The other 80 percent deserve a much larger say than they have.

Our fictional liberal network would be absolutely fearless in taking on corruption within our own government. A liberal media would relentlessly ferret out secrets, exposing them unless doing so would genuinely damage more people than would be helped.

Even “taboo” topics with strong factual support, such as the Kennedy assassination and the October Surprise case, would receive a fair hearing, on our mythical LNN.

Read the rest at http://www.consortiumnews.com/2011/020911a.html.

Here is the entire talk, filmed at the Saban Theater in Beverly Hills, California, on November 8, 2010, 50 years to the day after John F. Kennedy was elected President.

I have to say, each and every one of these men was just as nice and genuine and brilliant offstage as they were onstage. It was such a treat to share the stage with them for this event! YouTube limits uploads to 15 minutes, hence the five parts, below.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

Part 5:

P.S. Here is the review Ellsberg asks me to speak about: http://www.truth-out.org/topstories/1214097

Here’s a little 15-minute digest of the event last Monday. I think the whole event will eventually be posted, but this is a good little intro.

Crossposted from my article at http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/110610a.html.

The horseracing world is holding its collective breath for a true superstar.    

Zenyatta is about to do what no horse has done — not Secretariat, not Cigar, not Seabiscuit, and not even Man O’War — since 1874: be undefeated in 20 outings. This is the last race she will ever run. She’s 19-0. Can she win one more time?

Even trainers with colts running against her hope that if they lose, it’s to her. “Once she comes past your horse,” competing trainer Bob Baffert told the Telegraph, “you start rooting for her.”

The record is held, ironically, by an outstanding but little-discussed mare named Kincsem from Hungary, who won 54 victories in a row. But for all her victories, Kincsem didn’t race past the age of five.

Zenyatta is a six-year-old mare who faces the best of the best in the Breeder’s Cup Classic for a mile and a quarter, the same distance as the Kentucky Derby, run on the same track as the Derby — Churchill Downs in Louisville.

She won this race last year (and won me a little money in the process) against the boys — the first mare to do so. But can she still beat the teenage-like three-year-olds when she’s already middle-aged, in racehorse terms?

She does tower over them, and I don’t mean that metaphorically. She stands an impressive 17.2 hands high, nearly a foot taller than her competitors.

So famous that “60 Minutes” aired a segment about her last Sunday, Zenyatta seems poised to race her way into the record books tonight. She’s already raced her way into many hearts.

At Hollywood Park recently, hundreds of bettors waited a long time in the sun to have Zenyatta’s regular jockey, Mike Smith, sign commemorative mugs honoring the mare.

Where many of her challengers are famously high-strung, Zenyatta is remarkably calm, almost humble. But don’t be deceived by her demeanor. Her jockey Smith has described her on “60 Minutes” as  “a loaded gun – if you pull the trigger, she’s going to fire.”

After her come-from-12-lenths-behind run in the Breeder’s Cup last year, Smith said she wasn’t even breathing hard, noting “I’ve never gotten to the bottom of her. We don’t even know how many gears she has.”

Maybe her Zen-like attitude can be attributed to the occasional treat her trainer gives her: beer. Zenyatta is a genuine Guiness lover. Her trainer, Vietnam Vet John Shirreffs, said he tried other beers, but she only likes the hearty Irish stout.

Zenyatta is a tease. Like Secretariat, she tends to come from behind, biding her time until the home stretch, and then shifting into what seems an impossibly higher gear to outrun her competitors. This leaves her fans holding their breath each time she runs, wondering if she’ll manage to make it to the front.

Read the rest at http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/110610a.html.

Reprinted from my article at ConsortiumNews.com.

It was rather horrifying to wake to hear that the Obama administration is considering sending hunter-killer teams into Yemen in hopes of seeking out and killing suspected terrorists.

First, there’s no guarantee that the people the CIA has identified are, in fact, terrorists. There is no court for assessing evidence and no appeal process if mistakes are made. If some CIA analyst decides someone is a terrorist, that’s it. That’s horrific to me, as a lover of truth and justice.
Second, imagine telling your children that if they have a disagreement with another child at school, they shouldn’t talk, they shouldn’t appeal to higher authorities, they should just kill them. That’s essentially what the United States is doing and teaching by these actions. Shame.

Third, I’ve been reading a lot about President John F. Kennedy’s foreign policy in the last few weeks. He knew that you’d never win a war by firepower alone. If your enemy is hungry, first feed them, then seek common ground. Violence only ever begets more violence.

I talked to someone whose hardcore Republican parents nonetheless talked with great fondness for President Kennedy and felt he was the best president we ever had.

Why? They were immigrants from El Salvador, and remembered how where Reagan had sent guns, Kennedy had sent care packages – caritas – of food to give away to the starving people. That bought more goodwill for America than violence ever did.

His “Alliance for Progress” started as a program to bring economic support to Latin America. The perversion of that program to include police and military training came about after Kennedy’s death. (You can read Kennedy’s original vision for the program, as outlined in this speech, given in the first 100 days of his administration.)

In Indonesia, Kennedy created a plan of economic stimulus and support, which was reversed after his assassination.

Kennedy was so certain that the way to a better future came from educating and feeding people, rather than killing them, that he created the Peace Corps with the goal of doing just that.

Yemen is so poor its capital city may run out of water within a decade. A third of its population is malnourished. I can’t think of anything more likely to breed terrorism than a population that has no choice but to kill to survive.

That kind of terrorism I understand. I certainly don’t condone it, but I understand that terrorism does not feel like a choice when people are that desperate.

Where Kennedy would have sent food and water, the Obama administration is considering sending “hunter-killer” teams. And the fact that the media can talk so openly about this shows how far we’ve fallen from Kennedy’s vision of America as a benevolent leader. Where is the outrage?

And does it even make sense that anyone in Yemen would be trying to attack the United States?

Yemen is already in conflict with its neighbor, Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is rich, so it would at least make sense that Yemenese terrorists would target their rich neighbor in the hope of winning concessions.

It makes little sense that they would instead take whatever tiny resources they could scrape together in an effort to target the U.S. half a world away. [Indeed, the director of Yemenia Airways has denied that any UPS cargo plane or packages had left Yemen in the 48 hours prior to the alleged bomb shipment.]

I suspect this latest counter-terrorism operation isn’t about trying to end terrorism, which has supplanted “anticommunism” as the excuse du jour for enacting whatever policies Washington wants overseas. As with anticommunism, counter-terrorism is the excuse used for going after other countries’ resources.

When the CIA helped overthrow Iran’s democratically elected leader Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, the explanation at the time was that he was suspected of being a communist, but the CIA’s official history gives the first reason as Mossadegh’s nationalization of Iran’s oil industry.

When the CIA then overthrew Guatemala’s democratically elected leader Jacobo Arbenz, another non-communist, it was to reclaim nationalized farmlands for American businesses and to show Latin America that further nationalizations would not be tolerated.

In 1990, after Saddam Hussein got an apparent “green light” from President George H.W. Bush’s ambassador to invade Kuwait, the Iraqi invasion became an excuse to put U.S. troops permanently in the oil-rich region.

But President George W. Bush’s “war on terror” changed everything. While the United States used to do its empire building covertly, now it’s just a bald imperialist power, trying to establish military bases in other countries all over the world and not surprisingly upsetting many of the locals.

Imagine if China established a military base on American soil. Would Americans become sudden fans of the Chinese? Or would we be angry, fearing our nation had been in part taken over by a foreign power we never invited in? How is it that Americans do not understand that nearly every “victory” abroad won with guns ensures a long-term loss for America?

The Democratic Party’s severe losses on Tuesday were in part a reflection of President Obama’s failure to follow the moral vision President Kennedy once outlined. He showed Americans how to lead with our hearts and thus how to win the hearts of people from other nations.

Unfortunately, those who feel that the only way to lead is with guns now run the show.

Hey, BTers. I know several of you live out here on the Left Coast, and I wanted to invite you to come here me speak on a panel with Oliver Stone and James Douglass, moderated by Daniel Ellsberg’s son Robert, about Douglass’ excellent book on JFK’s life and death, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why he died and why it matters.
Douglass’ book was first published by a small Catholic press, but it was so popular that Simon and Schuster decided to publish an updated version.

And no wonder. It’s written with heart, grace, skill, and attention to relevant, as opposed to irrelevant or distracting, detail. So much of the JFK literature focuses on minutiae, or repeats bad information that has poisoned the record for too long. Douglass managed to navigate the waters beautifully, and was kind enough to acknowledge the work of myself, Jim DiEugenio and others at the former Probe magazine, put out by Citizens for Truth about the Kennedy Assassination, as having provided the beacon for him to follow.

If you’re only going to read one book on the JFK case, this is the one. And if you don’t believe that, come hear us speak at the Saban Theater in Beverly Hills, November 8 (the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s election), at 7:30 p.m.

Details and a link to get tickets can be found here: http://www.americanvoicesbeverlyhills.com/

If you do come, please come up and introduce yourself afterwards. I’ve met very few of you in person, and would like to meet many more!

[Crossposted from http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/091410b.html.]

Rory Kennedy’s upcoming HBO documentary “The Fence” (“La Barba”) presents a compelling argument that the border fence, the subject of the film, is an ill-conceived and expensive mistake.  

The documentary itself crosses that difficult border from education into entertainment. The audience at the preview screening in Los Angeles was laughing heartily many times throughout the film.

The facts about the fence are so absurdly funny by themselves that Kennedy and crew can afford to underplay them, with delicious results. The first time we are shown the fence, we see a sturdy structure stretching across a desert region. While not insurmountable, it does look like it could at least serve as a deterrent — until the fence abruptly ends.
Roughly 700 miles of fence have been erected along a border region that stretches some 2,000 miles. The fence simply stops and starts in various places. Anyone wishing to cross the border need only follow the fence until they come to a gap.

What this three-year, $3 billion dollar project has done is to force people, seeking to cross the border, to go through more hazardous conditions along the way. It’s also not clear that spending more money to close the gaps in the fence would have the desired effect.
The film presents the strong determination of people who wish to cross the border. As one foreigner noted, “Human beings have more ideas than any device.”

Anyone who buys into any of those ridiculous stereotypes that Mexicans are ignorant, lazy, or “illiterate in any language” (as one Fox News guest says in a captured clip) should consider the ingenuity of the methods the “coyotes” — smugglers of humans — have come up with to get people across the border. One coyote explained how they dug holes under the fence in the morning, guarded them carefully during the day, and then sent people under the fence at night. Yet another man showed how he cut open parts of a car to hide passengers under seats and even in the foot well of the passenger side of the front seat. Another technique was to bring trucks bearing ramps (like the ones used to ferry new cars across the country) right up to the fence so a car could literally drive from the ramp down over the border fence.  

The coyotes charge thousands of dollars to people wishing to cross the border. Would you pay $5,000 to come to America to pick crops in subhuman conditions at less than minimum wage? How horrible must one’s life be for them to want to pay that price for such work? Wouldn’t that $3 billion have been better spent on improving the living and working conditions of our southern neighbors to reduce their incentive to come to America in the first place?

One of the more hilarious moments was shot at a golf course that sits south of the border wall but north of the actual border. The border is denoted by the Rio Grande River, which bends and curves. Instead of building the fence along the river, a decision was made to just build the fence straight across in some spots, creating a strange region that is still part of the United States, but south of the fence. One such region involves a golf course. How bizarre that you need to bring your passport to return from a golf course that is already in America. The absurdities abound.

The film has a point of view, but it is not a completely one-sided presentation. The filmmakers spent a good deal of time following a group of Minutemen who were busy patrolling the border on their own volition, loaded with weapons and a strong belief in the righteousness of their cause. The filmmakers gave them plenty of screen time to explain the reasoning that led to the creation of the fence in the first place. To them, this isn’t about Mexican immigrants coming across the border to work American farms. This is about potential terrorists entering America to create another 9/11.

Rory, who narrated the film, counters this point with a map sprouting X’s to show where certified terrorists have entered the country, Rory reads off the names of the cities — New York, New York, New York, Miami, New York, Los Angeles, New York, New York, New York — and notes, with the kind of dry wit her father Robert Kennedy was famous for, that a pattern seems to be emerging.

One of the film’s most poignant moments was the display of a map showing where immigrants died. While scattered across the border region, there were noticeable areas of concentration. How horrible must one’s life be that they are willing to die to cross into another country? Can any fence hold back those who feel that level of desperation?

The film also touches on the environmental cost of the fence. As Rory noted in a Q&A after the screening, this is some of the most pristine land in America.
The fence prevents the migration of scores of creatures, including deer, mountain lions, and bears, among others. One shot shows some deer nosing up to the fence, presumably wondering how they could get to their usual stomping grounds. As one man noted in the film, imagine someone coming into your home and walling you off from your kitchen, or your bedroom. That’s what we’ve done to a number of species.

Several times, the film references President Ronald Reagan’s famous “Tear down this wall” moment. This is not who we are, as Americans, several voices in the film say. We don’t build walls. We’re a nation of immigrants. So how did this travesty come about?

In the wake of 9/11, and led in large part by activists so vocal they literally shut down the phones on Capitol Hill, 73 percent of our elected representatives approved the border fence. They might not have, Rory noted in the Q&A later, had not one network in particular, whose name she wouldn’t mention except to say it rhymed with “socks,” fanned the flames of anti-immigrant fear to the point where some on the Hill felt they had no politically viable choice but to build the fence.

In 2010, the Department of Homeland Security froze new construction on the fence. But American taxpayers are still committed to paying $49 billion in repairs for a fence that doesn’t even achieve its goal of preventing or even significantly deterring immigration.

If you have HBO, you can see this film Thursday night, Sept. 16. If you don’t have HBO, you’ll have to wait a while, but eventually, this film, like other HBO productions, should be available as a rental.

And if you have HBO but some of your friends don’t, why not set up a screening and invite them over? Films like this cry out to be shared with others.

Oliver Stone is under attack again, which isn’t a surprise, given that no other filmmaker has been so willing to challenge the “conventional wisdom” in an effort to uncover the facts about important events.

After seeing what the media did to Stone for his excellent and provocative film “JFK,” I concluded that the press had become almost a reverse template. If the media trashes a Stone film, I know something important must be onscreen.

And the template holds true with Stone’s latest film, a documentary called “South of the Border.”

In the film, Stone talks to several leaders of the new left in Latin America, many of whom came to power in democratic elections by protesting America’s overt and covert meddling in their countries.
Stone meets, separately and in groups, with Hugo Chávez (President of Venezuela), Evo Morales (President of Bolivia), Lula da Silva (President of Brazil), Rafael Correa (President of Ecuador), Cristina Kirchner (President of Argentina) as well as her husband Nìstor Kirchner (former President of Argentina), and Raúl Castro (currently running Cuba for his ailing brother Fidel). [Correction: Raúl was elected president in 2008.]

Stone asks us to look behind the American media’s one-sided portrayals of these leaders and the countries they represent so we can make up our own minds about who they are and what they are trying to do.

Are these vicious dictators? Are these ignorant leaders who are making a mess of their countries? It’s hard to reconcile such caricatures with the real-life people Stone introduces. We see, instead, that these leaders are working something of a quiet revolution against imperialist interests.

One of the leaders rather humorously talks of closing an American base in his country because the Americans failed to reciprocate by giving him a base in Florida. In recent decades, such chutzpah would have been unthinkable, as the countries in Central and South America were dependent on American largesse to meet financial commitments on their balance sheets.

But these leaders have worked hard to free their countries from subservience, giving them freedom to speak their minds.

Stone’s heresy is that he allows the possibility that these left-leaning leaders may be doing a good job, given what they have to work with, and that the old American way of running the leaders of nations south of our border as subsidiaries of the U.S. government hasn’t worked out so well.

Greatest Offense

The greatest offense, perhaps, is Stone’s warm and fuzzy portrayal of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. The American press has gone to extraordinary lengths to demonize Chávez, to portray him as a dictatorial monster, or worse, a crazy man.

Of course, if Chávez had given American-based businesses control over his country’s oil supply instead of nationalizing it to benefit his countrymen, no doubt the press for Chávez would have been glowing. Historically, the American government and media have both been kind to dictators who allowed the United States to get cheap deals on resources in their country at the expense of the natives there.

The film opens with a Fox News host calling Latin American dictators “drug users” because they chewed “cocoa” leaves. The host soon learns, however, that it’s not “cocoa” leaves but “coca” leaves. And chewing a leaf is not even close to the same as using cocaine, a highly concentrated, processed material made from those leaves.

That opening scene sets the tone: the media isn’t simply wrong; sometimes, it’s downright ridiculous, when it comes to the politics and the realities of Latin America.

The film documents Chávez’s rise to power, from military hero to President to ousted leader in a coup that may very well have been sponsored by the American government and around again to restored leader.

Stone’s film shows how a key fight during the coup period was dramatically misrepresented in the press, where selective footage was used to paint a fictitious picture. Stone shows us the footage the networks didn’t, which put the lie to their case.

While a good portion of the film is focused on Chávez, interviews of the other leaders are also interesting, and often humorous. This is an entertaining as well as informative production. Part history lesson and part road trip, the film is at turns fascinating, frustrating, and funny.

The film also discusses briefly the legacy of Simon Bolivar, a figure I was certainly not taught about in history classes growing up, despite his importance to so many in the Western hemisphere. Born in Venezuela, Bolivar grew up to be South America’s greatest liberator, freeing the lands that became Peru, Venezuela, Columbia, Ecuador, and Panama from Spanish rule.

(Ironically, on July 16, 2010, some 180 years after his death, Bolivar’s body was exhumed in an attempt to determine whether he died of tuberculosis — as originally reported — or whether he had been poisoned accidentally or even murdered.)

At the screening I attended, a number of people had gathered outside the theater to both support and protest the film. Allegations were made there and at other screenings that Chávez himself funded the production, which sounded ridiculous to me. I was curious to find the source of such an allegation.

Unsigned Op-Ed

An unsigned op-ed ran in the July 6, 2010, online issue of Investors Business Daily, which purported that while Chávez was attending the film’s premiere at the Venice Film Festival, he had told the press that he had personally funded the film.

I scoured through accounts of the festival, knowing if Chávez had said any such thing it would have been all over the media. But there were no such accounts. I called Stone’s production company to find out if that was true. A spokesman for the film assured me that Chávez had not funded the film, that the production had been funded by Muse Productions and by the advance sales of foreign film rights.

Investors Business Daily had been told the same thing, but challenged this, saying the Muse Productions Web site didn’t list Stone’s film in their list of projects. A quick check of the Internet Movie Database, however, shows clearly that “South of the Border” was indeed a Muse project. What’s sad is how easily lies like this are spread and repeated by a gullible public.

Such attacks are, sadly, familiar territory for Stone. Stone’s phenomenal success with his film “JFK” brought him an unprecedented level of vitriol from the establishment press.

And rather than consider the possibility that the lone nut version was wrong and investigate the data indicating conspiracy, which screenwriter Zachary Sklar and Stone’s production team did a remarkably accurate job exposing, the establishment instead insisted over and over that Stone was wrong — and worse, un-American — for challenging one of the country’s most cherished myths.

The Oswald-did-it-alone scenario is also one of the establishment media’s most necessary myths, because if Oswald wasn’t the lone assassin of President Kennedy, then the press corps failed us when we needed them most, and that doesn’t bode well for people’s faith in the press, the government, or the establishment.

And a government that loses the trust of its people isn’t destined to last long. So the press made the obvious choice and pilloried Stone’s excellent film. They are doing the same thing again with “South of the Border.”

The establishment press appears to have the agenda of sinking this film because it, too, challenges a necessary myth. If Hugo Chávez is simply a madman and a dictator, then he deserves to be brought down. But if he is an intelligent, left-leaning leader who is doing some good things for his country, that’s a model that could potentially migrate to this country, threatening the establishment in unprecedented ways.

Therefore, Stone’s portrayal, which serves as a counterbalance to the one-sided portrayals we’ve been shown, becomes a threat the establishment cannot leave unchallenged.

The strongest attack on the film came from Larry Rohter in the pages of the New York Times. Rohter attempted to present a list of supposed errors in Stone’s film. Stone and his team rebutted each of Rohter’s specific claims.

Read the rest at Consortium News.