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Let us pray.
Almighty Father, in the Gospel of St. John, Jesus promised us that we would know the truth
and the truth would set us free. Help us and empower us to know the truth, Lord, in a world
where it is so often surpressed.
Amen.
Did you see the President's State of the Union address? Yeah, OK, OK, well for those of you
who didn't see it, it went something like this:
We knocked off bin Laden! Our military's great! Money, money, money. Work, work, work. Jobs,
jobs, jobs. Iran better watch out! We knocked bin Laden! Yeah!
The speech started and ended with the military. Almost everything in between was pro-business.
His big human interest story was as much about finding Siemens Corporation a worker as it
was about finding the woman seated next to his wife a job. A nuclear armed Islamic state
is pretty scary, but can you blame them? They look to their left; they look to their right;
they think, "Well, they never invaded Russia!"
And Occupy? In November, the President told a group of Occupy hecklers at a New Hampshire
"mike check" that young people like us were the reason he ran for office. Yet in the State
of the Union address, he never mentioned Occupy once. And why should he? After all, we'd "gone
away".
We need to stop kidding ourselves about this President. He is a militant capitalist who
expects to run against another militant capitalist this fall. He sat back, well... He'll bomb
Libya until democracy wins because we couldn't live with ourselves otherwise, but in his
own country, he'll stand back and do nothing while S.W.A.T. teams bust up a fledgling anti-capitalist
political opposition.
The media is part and parcel of this whole thing. There is no way that the government
could have gotten away with S.W.A.T. teams against political protesters if the media
had been screaming "Tienammen Square! Tienammen Square! Tienammen Square!"
And yet, that's essentially what it was. Another group of protesters occupying public space,
the government puts up with them for a little while, and then they're going to just make
them go away. And the media laughed it up all the way.
The media is... the main media, the mainstream media is controlled by capitalists. They sell
air time, thirty seconds at a time on ad slots.
Think about the big political campaigns: Obama, Gingrich, Romney. What do they spend their
money on? For the most part, they need their money to purchase media coverage. That's what
the mainstream media has become. It is a big business, they are selling commercial airtime,
and they sell it to political campaigns just like they sell it to corporations.
So Occupy, first of all, being, essentially an anti-capitalist or at least an anti-corporatist
opposition. They're not unbiased. They're right there, trying to spin this thing, it's
all so confusing, they don't know what these people represent.
I took a look at the 2008 Democratic and Republican national party platforms. I think the Democratic
party was like 59 pages long, I want to say, and the Republican platform was 67 pages long.
No media spin there, that there's too many issues, it's too confusing, it's really just
media spin.
And now what we're facing is essentially media blackout. You've probably heard about the
riots, really, down in Oakland. These speeches, that I give here, every Sunday afternoon,
channel 2, channel 11, channel 13, the Daily News, they get press release after press release
after press release. Every Thursday evening they get a press release announcing the upcoming
speech on Sunday. Where are they? They are not here. They will cover riots but they will
not cover speeches. That is why they're able to spin Occupy as a bunch of hooligans. Do
I look to you like a hooligan? You may not agree with what I'm saying but I'm not a hooligan,
I'm out here giving a speech, but the media will not cover speeches, they will only cover
riots. It is essentially a media-concocted lie; it is their favorite kind of lie, it
is a lie by ommission. None of the individual facts they are presenting are false, but because
they are so selective in what they present, what it adds up to is a lie. That Occupy is
a bunch of hooligans, so the government should just come in with S.W.A.T. teams, bust them
up, and move them off.
This is what we are facing right now with Occupy. It is a difficult and dangerous sitation.
It is certainly something that has troubled me a lot and we are, you know, I pray at the
beginning of my speeches, I pray a lot, and truly right now, the biggest prayer I've got
is how to.. just guidance from the Lord as to how to lead this thing and to deal with
what I think, at this point, is our number one enemy, and that is a biased media that
is out to twist and surpress the truth about this movement.
Amen.