I am getting his updates and I thought it wouldnt be a bad idea 2 share it with you.

Why I Will Not Seek a Best Documentary Oscar
(I'm giving it up in the hopes more voters can see "Fahrenheit 9/11")

9/6/04
Dear Friends,

I had dinner recently with a well-known pollster who had often worked for Republicans. He told me that when he went to see "Fahrenheit 9/11" he got sodistraught he twice had to go out in the lobby and pace during the movie.

"The Bush White House left open a huge void when it came to explaining the war to the American people," he told me. "And your film has filled that void -- and now there is no way to defeat it. It is the atomic bomb of this campaign."

He told me how he had conducted an informal poll with "Fahrenheit 9/11" audiences in three different cities and the results were all the same. "Essentially, 80% of the people going IN to see your movie are already likely Kerry voters and the movie has galvanized them in a way you rarely see Democrats galvanized.

"But, here's the bad news for Bush: Though 80% going IN to your movie are Kerry voters, 100% of those COMING OUT of your movie are Kerry voters. You can't come out of this movie and say, 'I am absolutely and enthusiastically voting for George W. Bush.'"

His findings are similar to those in other polls conducted around the country. In Pennsylvania, a Keystone poll showed that 4% of Kerry's support has come from people who decided to vote for him AFTER seeing "Fahrenheit 9/11" -- and in an election that will be very close, 4% is a landslide. A Harris poll found that 44% of Republicans who see the film give it a "positive" rating. Another poll, to be released this week, shows a 21-point shift in Bush's approval rating, after just one viewing of the movie, among audiences of undecideds who were shown "Fahrenheit 9/11" in Ohio.

My pollster friend told me that he believes if Kerry wins, "Fahrenheit 9/11" will be one of the top three reasons for his election. Kerry's only problem, he said, is how many people will actually be able to see it before election day. The less that see it, the better for Bush.

But 20 million people have already seen it -- and the Gallup poll said that 56% of the American public has seen or plans to see "Fahrenheit 9/11" either in the theater or on home video. The DVD and home video of our film, thanks to our distributors listening to our pleas to release it before November, will be in the stores on October 5. This is very good news.

But can it also be shown on TV? I brought this possibility up in this week's Rolling Stone interview. Our contract with our DVD distributor says no, it cannot. I have asked them to show it just once, perhaps the night before the election. So far, no deal. But I haven't given up trying.

The only problem with my desire to get this movie in front of as many Americans as possible is that, should it air on TV, I will NOT be eligible to submit "Fahrenheit 9/11" for Academy Award consideration for Best Documentary. Academy rules forbid the airing of a documentary on television within nine months of its theatrical release (fiction films do not have the same restriction).

Although I have no assurance from our home video distributor that they would allow a one-time television broadcast -- and the chances are they probably won't -- I have decided it is more important to take that risk and hope against hope that I can persuade someone to put it on TV, even if it's the night before the election.

Therefore, I have decided not to submit "Fahrenheit 9/11" for consideration for the Best Documentary Oscar. If there is even the remotest of chances that I can get this film seen by a few million more Americans before election day, then that is more important to me than winning another documentary Oscar. I have already won a Best Documentary statue. Having a second one would be nice, but not as nice as getting this country back in the hands of the majority.

The deadline to submit the film for the documentary Oscar was last Wednesday. I told my crew who worked on the film, let's let someone else have that Oscar. We have already helped to ignite the biggest year ever for nonfiction films. Last week, 1 out of every 5 films playing in movie theaters across America was a documentary! That is simply unheard of. There have been so many great nonfiction films this year, why not step aside and share what we have with someone else? Remove the 800-pound gorilla from that Oscar category and let the five films who get nominated have all the attention they deserve (instead of the focus being on a film that has already had more than its share of attention).

I've read a lot about "Fahrenheit" being a "sure bet" for the documentary Oscar this year. I don't believe anything is truly a "sure bet." And, in the end, I think sometimes it's good for your soul to give up something everyone says is so easily yours (ask Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps why he gave up his spot in the last race to someone else equally deserving, and you'll know what I am talking about).

I have informed our distributors of my decision. They support me (in fact, they then offered to submit our film for all the other categories it is eligible for, including Best Picture -- so, hey, who knows, maybe I'll get to complete that Oscar speech from 2003! Sorry, just kidding).

Don't get your hopes up for seeing "Fahrenheit 9/11" on TV before the election. In fact, I would count on NOT seeing it there (you know me, I'm always going after something I probably shouldn't). Get to the theaters soon, if you haven't already, or get it from the video store in October and hold house parties. Share it with everyone you know, especially your nonvoting friends. I have included 100 minutes of extras on the DVD -- powerful footage obtained after we made the movie, and some things that are going to drive Karl Rove into a permanent tailspin -- more on this later!

Thanks for all of your support. And go see "Super Size Me," "Control Room," "The Corporation," "Orwell Rolls Over in His Grave," "Bush's Brain," Robert Greenwald's films and the upcoming "Yes Men." You won't be sorry!

Yours,

Michael Moore
mmflint@aol.com

P.S. If you want to read my dispatches for USA Today from inside the Republican Convention, go to www.michaelmoore.com.

I wonder what he will do next when W BUSH wins in nov...I will go to see the CORPORATION heard its a good film

well there seems to be some staunch republicans making films against moore

see link http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertain...lm/3644310.stm

http://www.theunitycampaign.org/battleground/

Interesting Polls

really gotta see this film.

http://www.moveon.org/front/

with the opinion polls I think W will win coz democrats and everyone else is focusing on Florida while the battleground is OHIO this yr

The Warlords of America
by John Pilger; The New Stateman; September 08, 2004

Most of the US's recent wars were launched by Democratic presidents. Why expect better of Kerry? The debate between US liberals and conservatives is a fake; Bush may be the lesser evil.
On 6 May last, the US House of Representatives passed a resolution which, in effect, authorised a "pre-emptive" attack on Iran. The vote was 376-3. Undeterred by the accelerating disaster in Iraq, Republicans and Democrats, wrote one commentator, "once again joined hands to assert the responsibilities of American power".


The joining of hands across America's illusory political divide has a long history. The native Americans were slaughtered, the Philippines laid to waste and Cuba and much of Latin America brought to heel with "bipartisan" backing.
Wading through the blood, a new breed of popular historian, the journalist in the pay of rich newspaper owners, spun the heroic myths of a supersect called Americanism, which advertising and public relations in the 20th century formalised as an ideology, embracing both conservatism and liberalism.
In the modern era, most of America's wars have been launched by liberal Democratic presidents - Harry Truman in Korea, John F Kennedy and Lyndon B Johnson in Vietnam, Jimmy Carter in Afghanistan. The fictitious "missile gap" was invented by Kennedy's liberal New Frontiersmen as a rationale for keeping the cold war going. In 1964, a Democrat-dominated Congress gave President Johnson authority to attack Vietnam, a defenceless peasant nation offering no threat to the United States. Like the non-existent WMDs in Iraq, the justification was a non- existent "incident" in which, it was said, two North Vietnamese patrol boats had attacked an American warship. More than three million deaths and the ruin of a once bountiful land followed.
During the past 60 years, only once has Congress voted to limit the presidents "right" to terrorise other countries. This aberration, the Clark Amendment 1975, a product of the great anti-Vietnam war movement, was repealed in 1985 by Ronald Reagan.


During Reagan's assaults on central America in the 1980s, liberal voices such as Tom Wicker of the New York Times, doyen of the "doves", seriously debated whether or not tiny, impoverished Nicaragua was a threat to the United States.
These days, terrorism having replaced the red menace, another fake debate is under way. This is lesser evilism. Although few liberal-minded voters seem to have illusions about John Kerry, their need to get rid of the "rogue" Bush administration is all-consuming. Representing them in Britain, the Guardian says that the coming presidential election is "exceptional". "Mr Kerry's flaws and limitations are evident," says the paper, "but they are put in the shade by the neoconservative agenda and catastrophic war-making of Mr Bush. This is an election in which almost the whole world will breathe a sigh of relief if the incumbent is defeated."


The whole world may well breath a sigh of relief; the Bush regime is both dangerous and universally loathed; but that is not the point. We have debated lesser evilism so often on both sides of the Atlantic that it is surely time to stop gesturing at the obvious and to examine critically a system that produces the Bushes and their Democratic shadows. For those of us who marvel at our luck in reaching mature years without having been blown to bits by the warlords of Americanism, Republican and Democrat, conservative and liberal, and for the millions all over the world who now reject the American contagion in political life, the true issue is clear.


It is the continuation of a project that began more than 500 years ago. The privileges of "discovery and conquest" granted to Christopher Columbus in 1492, in a world the pope considered "his property to be disposed according to his will", have been replaced by another piracy transformed into the divine will of Americanism and sustained by technological progress, notably that of the media.

"The threat to independence in the late 20th century from the new electronics, " wrote Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism,"could be greater than was colonialism itself. We are beginning to learn that decolonisation was not the termination of imperial relationships but merely the extending of a geopolitical web which has been spinning since the Renaissance. The new media have the power to penetrate more deeply into a 'receiving' culture than any previous manifistation of wetern technology"

Every modern president has been, in large part, a media creation. Thus, the murderous Reagan is sanctified still; Rupert Murdoch's Fox Channel and the post-Hutton BBC have differed only in their forms of adulation. And Bill Clinton is regarded nostalgically by liberals as flawed but enlightened; yet Clinton's presidential years were far more violent than Bush's and his goals were the same: "the integration of countries into the global free-market community", the terms of which, noted the New York Times, "require the United States to be involved in the plumbing and wiring of nations' internal affairs more deeply than ever before". The Pentagon's "full-spectrum dominance" was not the product of the "neo-cons" but of the liberal Clinton, who approved what was then the greatest war expenditure in history. According to the Guardian, Clinton's heir, John Kerry, sends us "energising progressive calls". It is time to stop this nonsense.


Supremacy is the essence of Americanism; only the veil changes or slips. In 1976, the Democrat Jimmy Carter announced "a foreign policy that respects human rights". In secret, he backed Indonesia's genocide in East Timor and established the mujahedin in Afghanistan as a terrorist organisation designed to overthrow the Soviet Union, and from which came the Taliban and al-Qaeda. It was the liberal Carter, not Reagan, who laid the ground for George W Bush. In the past year, I have interviewed Carter's principal foreign policy overlords - Zbigniew Brzezinski, his national security adviser, and James Schlesinger, his defence secretary. No blueprint for the new imperialism is more respected than Brzezinski's invested with biblical authority by the Bush gang, his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard: American primacy and its geostrategic imparatives describes American priorities as the economic subjugation of Soviet Union and the control of central Asia and the Middle East.

His analysis says that "local wars" are merely the beginning of a final conflict leading inexorably to world domination by the US. "To put it in a terminology that harkens back to a more brutal age of ancient empires," he writes, "the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together."


It may have been easy once to dismiss this as a message from the lunar right. But Brzezinski is mainstream. His devoted students include Madeleine Albright, who, as secretary of state under Clinton, described the death of half a million infants in Iraq during the US-led embargo as "a price worth paying", and John Negroponte, the mastermind of American terror in central America under Reagan who is currently "ambassador" in Baghdad. James Rubin, who was Albright's enthusiastic apologist at the State Department, is being considered as John Kerry's national security adviser. He is also a Zionist; Israel's role as a terror state is beyond discussion.


Cast an eye over the rest of the world. As Iraq has crowded the front pages, American moves into Africa have attracted little attention. Here Clinton and Bush policies are seamless. In the 1990's Clinton's African Growth and Opportunity Act launched a new scramble for Africa.

Humanitarian bombers wonder why Bush and Blair have not attacked Sudan and "liberated" Darfur, or intervened in Zimbabwe or the Congo. The answer is that they have no interest in human distress and human rights, and are busy securing the same riches that led to the European scramble in the late 19th century by the traditional means of coercion and bribery, known as multilateralism.

The Congo and Zambia possess 50% of world cobalt reserves' 98% of the worlds chrome reserves are in Zimbabwe and South Africa. More importantly, there is oil and natural gas in Africa from Nigeria to Angola, and in Higleig, south-west Sudan. Under Clinton, the African Crisis Response Initiative(ACRI) was set up in secret.

This allowed the US to establish "military assistance programmes" in Senegal, Uganda, Malawi, Ghana, Benin, Algeria, Niger, Mali and Chad. Acri is run by Colonel Nestor Pino-Marina, a Cuban exile who took part in the 1961 Bay of Pigs landing and went on to be a special forces officer in Vietnam and Laos, and who, under Reagan, helped lead the Contra invasion of Nicaragua. The pedigrees never change.

None of this is discussed in a presidential campaign in which John Kerry strains to out-Bush Bush. The multilateralism or "muscular internationalism" that Kerry offers in contrast to Bush's unilateralism is seen as hopeful by the terminally naive; in truth, it beckons even greater dangers. Having given the American elite its greatest disaster since Vietnam, writes the historian Gabriel Kolko, Bush "is much more likely to continue the destruction of the alliance system that is so crucial to American power. One does not have to believe the worse the better, but we have to consider candidly the foreign policy consequences of a renewal of Bush's mandate . . .As dangerous as it is, Bush's re-election may be a lesser evil. " With Nato back in train under President Kerry, and the French and Germans compliant, American ambitions will proceed without the Napoleonic hindrances of the Bush gang.
Little of this appears even in the American papers worth reading.

The Washington Post's hand-wringing apology to its readers on 14 August for not "pay[ing] enough attention to voices raising questions about the war [against Iraq]" has not interrupted its silence on the danger that the American state presents to the world. Bush's rating has risen in the polls to more than 50 per cent, a level at this stage in the campaign at which no incumbent has ever lost. The virtues of his "plain speaking", which the entire media machine promoted four years ago – Fox and the Washington Post alike – are again credited. As in the aftermath of the 11 September attacks, Americans are denied a modicum of understanding of what Norman Mailer has called "a pre-facist climate" The fears of the rest of us are of no concequence.


The professional liberals on both sides of the Atlantic have played a major part in this. The campaign against Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 is indicative. The film is not radical and makes no outlandish claims; what it does is push past those guarding the boundaries of "respectable" dessent. That is why the public applauds it. It breaks the collusive codes of journalism, which it shames. It allows people to begin to deconstruct the nightly propaganda that passes for news: in which "a sovereign Iraqi goverment pursues democracy" and those fighting in Najaf and Fallujah and Basra are always "militants" and "insurgents" or members of a "private army" never nationalist defending their homeland and whose resistance has probably forestalled attacks on Iran, Syria or North Korea.

The real debate is neither Bush nor Kerry, but the system they exemplify; it is the decline of true democracy and the rise of the American "national security state" in Britain and other countries claiming to be democracies, in which people are sent to prison and the key thrown away and whose leaders commit capital crimes in faraway places, unhindered, and then, like the ruthless Blair, invite the thug they install to address the Labour Party conference. The real debate is the subjugation of national economies to a system which divides humanity as never before and sustains the deaths, every day, of 24,000 hungry people. The real debate is the subversion of political language and of debate itself and perhaps, in the end, our self-respect.


John Pilger's new book, Tell Me No Lies: investigative journalism and its triumphs, will be published in October by Jonathan Cape

@Tahliba

I agree with JohnPilger and did you see his documentary on the plight of aborigines in Australia?

anyways I also agree with the words of Palestinian writer Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism,"The threat to independence in the late 20th century from the new electronics, ""could be greater than was colonialism itself. We are beginning to learn that decolonisation was not the termination of imperial relationships but merely the extending of a geopolitical web which has been spinning since the Renaissance. The new media have the power to penetrate more deeply into a 'receiving' culture than any previous manifistation of wetern technology"

I am now suprised that Naomi Klein and other anti-Bush NO ONE BUT BUSH campaigns,dont get me wrong but I wonder what does Kerry have for Africans in his plate

[align=left]


Powell in neo-con row
A new book claims that the US Secretary of State described neo-conservatives in the Bush administration as '****ing crazies'.
Bush faces assault on war record
[/align]

gumede21@hotmail.com

More than two hundred people who'd come to the University of KwaZulu-Natal for a free screeing and discussion of Michael Moore's Farenheit 9/11, hosted by the Centre for Civil Society, were outraged to hear that that the University cancelled the screening at the last minute after the local distributor, United International Pictures, had approached the South African Federation Against Copyright Theft to exert legal pressure against the univeristy to force the sudden cancelation.

Urgent Press Release: 6:24 p.m. 16 September 2004

Outrage as Corporate Power Use George Bush's Laws to Stop Poor South Africans Seeing Farenheit 9/11

More than two hundred people who'd come to the University of KwaZulu-Natal for a free screeing and discussion of Michael Moore's Farenheit 9/11, hosted by the Centre for Civil Society, were outraged to hear that that the University cancelled the screening at the last minute after the local distributor, United International Pictures, had approached the South African Federation Against Copyright Theft to exert legal pressure against the univeristy to force the sudden cancelation. The screening was scheduled for 5:00 p.m. and the letter forcing its cancellation was received at 4:25 p.m. The screeing has been arranged to enable general members of the public, including many from community organisations and social movements organising in poor communities in Durban, to see a film that reveals important aspects of the global power structure.

The film maker, Michael Moore, has publicly given his blessing for people to make copies of the the multi-million dollar grossing film and to arrange free public screenings. Civil society organisations around the world have arranged screenings, including in South Africa where the Anti-war Coallition have hosted numerous screeings in Johannesburg and in Cape Town.

The announcement of the cancellation was greated with outrage. AIDS activist Mandisa Mbali spoke movingly about how someone in her family had died of AIDS as a direct result of Bush supported global patent laws that deny poor people access to life-saving essential AIDS medicines. She added that most ordinary people struggling for access to AIDS medication would not be able to afford to see the film that reveals so much behind the power that denies them access to lifesaving medication. Others spoke of their horror at the American attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, the Iraqi occupation and American support for the occupation of Palestine. It was pointed out that many people in Durban will not be able to afford to see this film. Ticket prices and transport to commercial cinemas are simply unaffordable for people who are unemployed and struggling to survive, especially as they are increasingly forced to pay for basic services such as school fees, health care, water and so. An audience member argued that it was the very people most affected by George Bush's neo-liberal polices that are now being prevented from seeing the best documentary on the power behind those polices. Another audience member suggested that people should protest at the first commerical screeings of this film in Durban. This suggestion was greated with great enthusiasm and public commitments were made to protest at commercial screenings of the film.

The film is distributed in South African by the multi-national company United International Pictures and Durban millionaire Anand Singh's Videovision. Singh's wealth, characterised as obscene by an audience member, is already being publicly subsidised by ordinary people in Durban via the effective public subsidy for his cut rate purchase (privatisaion) of the old Natal Command (which was a public asset). The legal pressure came from United Pictures International but Anand Singh's Videovision must, at the very least, be held as co-responsible.

The copyright laws that have enabled United International Pictures to intervene, against Michael Moore's wishes, to suppress this free community screening are enforced on countries around the world by American economic imperialism. Similarly the local organisations that act as enforcers for the global elite and against the interests of ordinary poor people, in our case the South African Federation Against Copyright Theft, are also set up in accordance with trade agreements forced on poor countries by American imperialism. So George Bush's laws have been used to prevent ordinary South Africans from seeing a documentary critical of George Bush's regime. So United Pictures International and Anand Singh's Videovision are seeking to profit from a film critical of Bush by behaving like Bush and in accordance with his rules.

The progressive community in Durban will not be cowed. AIDS Action, the Palestine Support Committee and the eThekweni Soical Forum will network with other progressive organisations and community organisations in Durban in the coming days and, in an emergency meeting after the cancellation, decided to committ to the following actions:

1. Making copies of the film for all interested community organisations and social movements.
2. Protesting at the commerical opening of the film in Durban.
3. Hosting free screenings and discussions in community halls where ever interest is expressed in seeing this film

Information about coming protests and free community screenings will follow shortly. Should United International Pictures and/or Videovision try to use George Bush's laws to prevent free screenings in community halls the progressive movements and organisations in Durban will be quite happy to defy the law. Moreover if there is a legal battle we are absolutely certain that there will be world wide financial and moral support from the global progressive community for a legal and, of course, media battle.

Videovision is currently making much of its involvement with the much hyped film Yesterday. The film, which is increasingly being slammed for trading in sterotypes, documents the HIV pandemic in KwaZulu-Natal. Given the global marketing of the film it will be very easy to mobilise AIDS activists across the world against the obvious hypocracy in preventing poor HIV positive people from seeing the politically enabling and enlightening Farenheit 9/11 while simultaneously profiting by presenting them as politically passive charity cases in Yesterday.

At this afternoon's huge march in support of the Public Sector Workers' strike a new slogan emerged: Phani Amagundane!

So, in this spirit, we too, say Phani Amagundane!

ISSUED BY: AIDS ACTION; THE PALESTINE SUPPORT COMMITTEE and the ETHEKWENI SOCIAL FORUM


Taken from http://southafrica.indymedia.org/