On Tuesday morning, the taxpayer-subsidized Pacifica Radio network broadcast a Friday night speech from leftist filmmaker Michael Moore trashing America just hours after the Newtown school shooting. He began by trashing our warlike culture, and then claimed "all the wrong people are in prison in this country."
"Democracy Now" anchor Amy Goodman found zero irony in the fact that Moore spoke at a "Bring Leonard Peltier Home 2012 event" at the Beacon Theatre in New York City. Peltier was convicted of shooting two FBI agents dead in 1975 on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. (Hollywood lefties have long claimed the trial was unfair. Peltier acknowledged in a 1999 memoir that he shot at the agents, but claimed he didn't kill them.)
Goodman introduced a speech snippet: "We turn now to the Oscar-winning filmmaker Michael Moore, who won that award for his 2002 documentary, Bowling for Columbine, about gun violence in the United States." Moore lectured:
Other countries, I mean, they have their crazy people, and they have people that—there have been shootings and killings in Norway, in France and in Germany. But there haven’t been 61 mass killings like there have been in this country just since Columbine. Sixty-one mass shootings in this country. I like to say that I sort of agree with the NRA when they say, "Guns don’t kill people, people kill people," except I would just modify that a bit and say, "Guns don’t kill people, Americans kill people," because that’s what we do. We invade countries. We send drones in to kill civilians. We’ve got five wars going on right now where our soldiers are killing people—I mean, five that we know of. We are on the short list of illustrious countries who have the death penalty. We believe it’s OK to kill you when you’ve committed a crime.
And then we have all the other forms of violence in this country that we don’t really call violence, but they are acts of violence. When you—when you make sure that 50 million people don’t have health insurance in your country and that, according to the congressional study that was done, 44,000 people a year die in America for the simple reason that they don’t have health insurance, that’s a form of murder. That murder is being committed by the insurance companies. When you evict millions of peoples—millions of people from their homes, that’s an act of violence. That’s called a home invasion.
All the wrong people are in prison in this country. I can’t believe we’re just standing blocks away from the biggest criminal operation that this country has ever seen, right down that street [on Wall Street], and not one of them has gone to prison for what they’ve done. When you have eliminated so many millions of jobs, when you’ve ruined communities like mine, Flint, Michigan, you have killed people, because—because having seen firsthand the effects of these corporate decisions—the alcoholism, the drug abuse, divorce, suicide, all the social problems that go along with this act of violence—but we don’t call it violence, and no one’s ever arrested for it—I think it’s a real shame. And frankly, as an American, this is not how I want to be remembered.
