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01/31/2006:

"Harry Belafonte on Bush, Iraq, Hurricane Katrina and Having His Conversations with Martin Luther King Wiretapped by the FBI"

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HARRY BELAFONTE: When Katrina took place, there was a great sense of tragic loss for many Americans who saw that terrible tragedy. What we had not anticipated was that our government would have been so negligent and so unresponsive to the plight of hundreds of thousands of people in the region. And in a dilemma that we all face as to what we could do as private citizens to help the folks that were caught in that tragedy, we began to listen to voices that were outside the boundaries of government, the United States government. We listened to voices that came from as far away as Denmark, who offered to send goods and services in emergency, and we also heard the voices of people from Venezuela through their leader, Hugo Chavez, who said that ‘In this moment of your great tragedy, we, the Venezuelan people, extend all the resources we can summon up to help the plight of those people caught in the Gulf region.

The United States very abruptly and very arrogantly rejected that offer, while in its stead, we did nothing to bring immediate relief. And as a matter of fact, I must tell you, we're still quite delinquent in what the peoples of that region need, because we still failed to fully mobilize and meet the needs of the people, particularly in New Orleans, but other places within that region.

I and many other private citizens decided that we would listen very carefully to what people outside of the government were saying, because there was no immediate sense of relief and response to what we were experiencing, the people in Katrina. And so, like others, I went with a delegation of 15 people, at the invitation of the Venezuelan government, to come and to meet with President Chavez and members of his cabinet to talk about what we could do to help American people caught in this tragedy.

While there, we were given the right and the permission and the opportunity to visit barrios, villages, going into the schools, going into the prisons of Venezuela. We went into the academic institutions, in which Cornel West spoke. Tavis Smiley went to TeleSUR and other television communications development taking place, to examine, to see what was happening to, quote-unquote, “freedom of the press.” As we’ve said, freedom of the press in Venezuela is vigorously denied. There is no opposition noise. Yet it's interesting to note that nothing in Venezuela has been nationalized. There's still a very vigorous private sector, albeit that it's a little disgruntled that it is not able to sustain the rather one-sided agreement that they drew with that government a long time ago in contracts that were drawn for oil and other resources.
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