In its premiere episode, Moyers & Company dives into one of the most important and controversial issues of our time: How Washington and Big Business colluded to make the super-rich richer and turn their backs on the rest of us. Bill’s guests – Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, authors of Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer — And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, argue that America’s vast inequality is no accident, but in fact has been politically engineered. How, in a nation as wealthy as America, can the economy simply stop working for people at large, while super-serving those at the very top? Through exhaustive research and analysis, the political scientists Hacker and Pierson — whom Bill regards as the “Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson” of economics — detail important truths behind a 30-year economic assault against the middle class. Who’s the culprit? “American politics did it– far more than we would have believed when we started this research,” Hacker explains. “What government has done and not done, and the politics that produced it, is really at the heart of the rise of an economy that has showered huge riches on the very, very, very well off.” Bill considers their book the best he’s seen detailing “how politicians rewrote the rules to create a winner-take-all economy that favors the 1% over everyone else, putting our once and future middle class in peril.” The show includes an essay on how Occupy Wall Street reflects a widespread belief that politics no longer works for ordinary people, including footage we took at the OWS rally from October – December 2011.
This weekend, continuing its sharp multi-episode focus on the intersection of money and politics, Moyers & Company explores the tight connection between Wall Street and the White House with David Stockman – yes, that David Stockman — former budget director for President Reagan. Now a businessman who says he was “taken to the woodshed” for telling the truth about the administration’s tax policies, Stockman speaks candidly with Bill Moyers about how money dominates politics, distorting free markets and endangering democracy. “As a result,” Stockman says, “we have neither capitalism nor democracy. We have crony capitalism.” Stockman shares details on how the courtship of politics and high finance have turned our economy into a private club that rewards the super-rich and corporations, leaving average Americans wondering how it could happen and who’s really in charge. “We now have an entitled class of Wall Street financiers and of corporate CEOs who believe the government is there to do… whatever it takes in order to keep the game going and their stock price moving upward,” Stockman tells Moyers. Also on the show, Moyers talks with Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter and columnist Gretchen Morgenson on how money and political clout enable industries to escape regulation and enrich executives at the top.
Big banks are rewriting the rules of our economy to the exclusive benefit of their own bottom line. But how did our political and financial class shift the benefits of the economy to the very top, while saddling us with greater debt and tearing new holes in the safety net? Bill Moyers talks with former Citigroup Chairman John Reed and former Senator Byron Dorgan to explore a momentous instance: how the late-90’s merger of Citicorp and Travelers Group – and a friendly Presidential pen — brought down the Glass-Steagall Act, a crucial firewall between banks and investment firms which had protected consumers from financial calamity since the aftermath of the Great Depression. In effect, says Moyers, they “put the watchdog to sleep.” There’s no clearer example of the collusion between government and corporate finance than the Citicorp-Travelers merger, which — thanks to the removal of Glass-Steagall — enabled the formation of the financial behemoth known as Citigroup. But even behemoths are vulnerable; when the meltdown hit, the bank cut more than 50,000 jobs, and the taxpayers shelled out more than $45 billion to save it. Senator Dorgan tells Moyers, “If you were to rank big mistakes in the history of this country, that was one of the bigger ones because it has set back this country in a very significant way.” Now, John Reed regrets his role in the affair, and says lifting the Glass-Steagall protections was a mistake. Given the 2008 meltdown, he’s surprised Wall Street still has so much power over Washington lawmakers. “I’m quite surprised the political establishment would listen to groups that have been so discredited,” Reed tells Moyers. “It wasn’t that there was one or two or institutions that, you know, got carried away and did stupid things. It was, we all did…. And then the whole system came down.” How Wall Street and Washington got together and stacked the deck against the rest of us. Watch it here.
Our country is more politically polarized than ever. Is it possible to agree to disagree and still move on to solve our massive problems? Or are the blind leading the blind — over the cliff? Bill and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt talk about the psychological underpinnings of our contentious culture, why we can’t trust our own opinions, and the demonizing of our adversaries. “When it gets so that your opponents are not just people you disagree with, but… the mental state in which I am fighting for good, and you are fighting for evil, it’s very difficult to compromise,” Haidt tells Moyers. “Compromise becomes a dirty word.” Also, a Bill Moyers essay on why Newt Gingrich might be afraid of Saul Alinsky.
There are 80-plus million Americans today who were born roughly between 1978 and 2000, and they’re getting hit hard by economic circumstances created over the past 30 years. The Millennials are the first generation of Americans who cannot count on doing better than their parents. Many Millennials are working longer hours, and have seen their earnings decrease. Meanwhile, their personal debt has increased over the last four years to the point where they face unrelenting payments on interest for money they borrowed for college or just to stay above water. How have these realities affected their outlook? And how will it impact Barack Obama’s future? Millennials turned out for him by huge margins in 2008, but their enthusiasm has waned. On this week’s Moyers & Company, Bill Moyers talks with a Millennial who has dedicated herself to tackling these issues. At 31, Heather McGhee directs the Washington office of the research and advocacy group Demos, and is fighting for financial reforms and consumer protection. “Our generation is the most diverse generation in American history… But we are also the generation that is experiencing record inequality — inequality in our economy and inequality in our democracy,” McGhee tells Moyers. “We need to become a very politically-engaged generation.” In the same broadcast, Moyers talks with conservative economist Bruce Bartlett, who wrote “the bible” for the Reagan Revolution, worked on domestic policy for the Reagan White House, and served as a top treasury official under the first President Bush. Now he’s a heretic in the conservative circles where he once was a star. Bartlett argues that right-wing tax policies — pushed in part by Grover Norquist and Tea Party activists — are destroying the country’s economic foundation. When he called George W. Bush out as “a pretend conservative” in his book Impostor: Why George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy, Bartlett was fi
We’re saturated with deceptive political advertising — aided and abetted now with spending by citizens, corporations and super PACs that seems to know no bounds. Add to that relatively cheap “buys” on the media landscape including television, the web, print media and social networks, and there’s no place for the electorate to escape. But help is on the way. This weekend on Moyers & Company, Bill asks political communication expert Kathleen Hall Jamieson to decode the political misinformation campaigns of 2012 thus far. Jamieson runs the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, including the sites FactCheck.org and FlackCheck.org. The show then moves from politics to poetry as Bill welcomes former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove, who this week received the National Medal of Arts from President Obama. Dove was the youngest and the first African American to be named poet laureate in 1993. Through an intimate conversation and select readings, Moyers and Dove explore American history, language, culture and ideas. They also talk about the responsibility — and controversy — that comes with editing a prestigious anthology, as Dove was recently tasked for The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry.
This weekend’s Moyers & Company starts with a compelling Bill Moyers Essay: Is it fair for parents to opt out of vaccinations for their children on the basis of religion or philosophy? Bill weighs the value of personal liberty versus the greater public health. Next, film historian and culture critic Neal Gabler joins Bill to discuss how representations of heroism in movies shape our expectations of a U.S. president, and how our real-world candidates are packaged into superficial, two-dimensional personas designed to appeal to both the electorate and the media. As a result, says Gabler, we never get to the true pressing questions and issues of America. Finally, Bill has a moving conversation with acclaimed poet and Poetry Magazine editor Christian Wiman about how finding true love and being diagnosed with a rare and incurable blood cancer reignited his religious passion as well as his creative expression.
Nine years after Baghdad erupted in “shock and awe,” we’re once again hearing in America the drumbeat for war in the Middle East. Now, the bull’s-eye is on Iran. But what we need more than a simple change of target is a complete change in perspective, says Andrew Bacevich, a West Point graduate and Vietnam veteran-turned-scholar who’s become one of the most perceptive observers of America’s changing role in the world. This week, on an all-new Moyers & Company, Bill Moyers and Bacevich explore the futility of “endless” wars, and provide a reality check on the rhetoric of American exceptionalism. “Are we so unimaginative, so wedded to the reliance on military means that we cannot conceive of any way to reconcile our differences with groups and nations in the Islamic world, and therefore bring this conflict to an end?” Bacevich tells Moyers. Bacevich also answers the question of whether Iran is a direct threat to America with a definitive no. “Whatever threat Iran poses is very, very limited,” he tells Moyers, “and certainly does not constitute any kind of justification for yet another experiment with preventive war.”
American history is rich with stories of social change inspired by the actions of motivated individuals and organized groups. Today’s activists are no different — facing long odds against powerful and systemic special interests. On this weekend’s Moyers & Company, Bill Moyers talks with young but very experienced organizers George Goehl, Ai-jen Poo, and Sarita Gupta – all involved with a nationwide citizens’ initiative called the The 99% Spring, which takes place the week of April 9th. Organizers aim to train 100,000 Americans to teach about income inequality in homes, places of worship, campuses and the streets. A 99% Spring co-organizer, George Goehl is executive director of National People’s Action, a network of grassroots organizations using direct action to battle economic and racial injustice. Ai-jen Poo, director and co-founder of the 10,000-member National Domestic Workers Alliance, led the fight for passage of The Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights in New York State, the first of its kind in America. Sarita Gupta is executive director of Jobs with Justice, a labor organization in 46 cities and 26 states working to create a broad, global movement for economic and social justice. Poo and Gupta are also participating in an economic campaign for domestic and homecare workers of all ages called Caring Across Generations. Moyers concludes the broadcast with an essay on what citizens can do to find out who’s paying for all those political ads running on their local television stations, including references to initiatives from ProPublica and the New America Foundation.
You’d think after such a calamitous economic fall, there’d be a strong consensus on reinforcing the protections that keep us out of harm’s way. But in some powerful corners, the opposite is happening. Business and political forces, including hordes of lobbyists, are working hard to diminish or destroy these protections. One of the biggest bull’s-eyes is on the Volcker Rule, a section of the Dodd-Frank Act that aims to keep the banks in which you deposit your money from gambling it on their own — sometimes risky — investments. On this week’s Moyers & Company, Bill talks with the namesake of the Volcker Rule — Paul Volcker, who served two terms as Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System from 1979-1987 and formerly headed President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. Volcker contends the rule aims to curb conflicts of interest between bankers and their customers. He suggests that former investment companies like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, which sought banking licenses during the economic crisis in order to access federal protection against failing, should now turn in those licenses if they want to do speculative trading. “You shouldn’t run a financial system on the expectation of government support. We’re supposed to be a free enterprise system,” Volcker tells Moyers. “The problem of course is once they get rescued, does that lead to the conclusion they’ll get rescued in the future?” If all that disillusions you about government, know you aren’t entirely powerless to create change. So says Bill’s second guest, Carne Ross. Once the rising star of British diplomacy and now a global activist, Ross’ book The Leaderless Revolution outlines ways to create alternative systems of governance and commerce. “We have to accept that government is no longer fixing things for us. Whoever’s in charge, whichever bunch of politicians has taken over government, they will not provide the answer,
Angela Glover Blackwell has spent her adult life advocating practical ways to fulfill America’s promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for all. Now, with our middle class struggling, poverty rising, and inequality growing, the founder and chief executive officer of PolicyLink, an influential research center, finds reasons for hope in the face of these hard realities. On this week’s Moyers & Company, Bill Moyers and Blackwell discuss what fuels her optimism. “I’m not discouraged, and I wouldn’t even dream of giving up, because we’re at a moment right now where I think we have more possibility than I’ve seen in my adult lifetime,” Blackwell tells Moyers. “Part of what I’ve been feeling is that all the issues are finally on the table… So many people who are being left behind are now in places where they have voice, and influence, and they’re forcing their way into the conversation.” “America doesn’t want to talk about race,” Blackwell states, but says the future “is a five-year-old Latina girl. It is a seven-year-old black boy. What happens to them will determine what America looks like.” “And so this country, as a democracy, really cannot expect to continue to be proud on the world stage, competitive in the global economy, or having a democracy it can put forward as working in a multi-racial society if we don’t invest in the people who are the future.”
Two movements once at the vital center of our society, liberal politics and American Christianity have gone astray. In separate conversations on this weekend’s Moyers & Company, Eric Alterman and Ross Douthat discuss the implications of these wayward courses on American democracy. First, Eric Alterman describes the grand aspirations, ambitions, and historical ironies that prompted him to write his new book The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama. He calls on liberals to regain “the fighting spirit” that characterized Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and to put it in service of new liberal policies for the 21st century. Liberals, he tells Moyers, have overpromised and underperformed, and it’s time once again to make government credible. Ross Douthat, the conservative op-ed columnist for The New York Times and author of Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, is just as candid about how traditional and institutional Christianity has declined from a vigorous, mainstream, and bipartisan force to a polarizing, heretical combatant in the culture war. He argues that a revival of true and basic Christian principles can lead to American renewal. Also, can you imagine Super Grover from Sesame Street followed by a super PAC ad from K Street? Neither can Bill Moyers. In an essay at the top of the show, Moyers talks about the recent U.S. Circuit Court decision to allow political and issue advertising on public TV and radio channels. “Just say no,” Moyers urges station managers across the country — but they need your help.
Big money and big media have coupled to create a ‘Disney World’ of democracy in which TV shows, televised debates, even news coverage is being dumbed down, resulting in a public less informed than it should be, says Marty Kaplan, director of USC’s Norman Lear Center and an entertainment industry veteran. Bill Moyers talks with Kaplan about how taking news out of the journalism box and placing it in the entertainment box is hurting democracy and allowing special interest groups to manipulate the system. Later on the show, Bill talks about Florida Rep. Allen West and shocking modern-day McCarthyism. Wasn’t this lesson already learned?
No writer understands the border culture between Mexico and the United States more intimately than Luis Alberto Urrea, whose life is the stuff of great novels. Son of a Mexican father and Anglo mother, Urrea grew up first in Tijuana and then just across the border in San Diego. Over the years he has produced a series of acclaimed novels, including The Hummingbird’s Daughter, The Devil’s Highway, and his latest, Queen of America — each a rich and revealing account of the people of the borderlands that join and separate our two nations. Earlier this year, a number of books were removed from Tucson, Arizona classrooms when the Tucson school district eliminated a Mexican-American studies program on the accusation it was “divisive.” The program included references to Urrea’s work. Urrea talks with Bill Moyers about that episode as he unfolds the modern reality of life on the border.
With the 2012 campaign season moving from primary to election mode, Bill invites back to his studio master media decoder Kathleen Hall Jamieson for a closer look at the role misinformation will play in the Obama vs. Romney TV ad slugfest. Jamieson, who runs the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, including the sites FactCheck.org and FlackCheck.org, discusses the sharp increase in deceptive advertising in the 2012 race, and equally-alarming new obstacles to campaign ad transparency. Later in the show, Bill talks to RoseAnn DeMoro, who heads the largest registered nurses union in the country, and will lead a Chicago march protesting economic inequality on May 18. DeMoro is championing the Robin Hood Tax, a small government levy the financial sector would pay on commercial transactions like stocks and bonds. The money generated, which some estimate could be as much as $350 billion annually, could be used for social programs and job creation — ultimately to people who, without a doubt, need it more than the banks do. DeMoro and her organization have an inspiring history of defeating some of the toughest opponents in government and politics.
Songs of social protest — music and the quest for justice — have long been intertwined, and the troubadours of troubling times — Guthrie, Seeger, Baez, Dylan, and Springsteen among them — have become famous for their dedication to both. Now we can add a name to the ranks of those who lift their voices for social and economic justice: Tom Morello. Morello is the Harvard-educated guitarist who dabbled in politics, then chose rock music to make a difference. He played guitar for the popular band he co-founded — Rage Against the Machine — and then for Audioslave. Rolling Stone chose his album “World Wide Rebel Songs” as one of the best of 2011, and named him one of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time. As likely to be spotted at a grass-roots rally as he would at a concert hall, Morello was in Madison, Wisconsin last year, braving bitter winter weather to sing on the steps of the state capitol in support of public service workers. Morello defended their collective bargaining rights against Republican Governor Scott Walker. He was in New York City at the May Day demonstrations, an honorary commander of a battalion of musicians they called the “Occupy Guitarmy.” That same night, Harry Belafonte presented Morello with the Officers’ Award from the Sidney Hillman Foundation, honoring his “advocacy for and support of working people across the world.” Tom Morello shares his music, his message, and mission with Bill Moyers, who’s all ears.
After 9/11, the U.S. government turned to torture — in defiance of domestic and international laws — to extract information about and from terrorists and others who might follow after them. Were it not for defense attorneys and the work of human rights organizations, these prisoners would be ignored. But that’s changing. The American Civil Liberties Union and the international literary and human rights group PEN have teamed up to comb through 150,000 declassified documents — as well as large collections of articles and transcripts — to produce The Torture Report: What the Documents Say About America’s Post-9/11 Torture Program, written by PEN’s Larry Siems. PEN and the ACLU have also staged readings of excerpts from the documents and first-person testimony at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah and Lincoln Center here in New York. Those readings have been videotaped and are being made into a documentary by movie director Doug Liman called Reckoning with Torture. Liman is now asking people across the country to videotape their own readings of declassified memos and testimonies for the project. Learn how to get involved. On this weekend’s Moyers & Company, Siems, director of the Freedom to Write and International Programs at PEN American Center, and Liman, whose credits include The Bourne Identity, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and Fair Game, join Bill Moyers to talk about what we should be learning from and doing about U.S. torture tactics. “We made mistakes. We made grave, serious mistakes of judgment,” Siems tells Moyers, “And we would be stronger as a nation, if we stood up and said, ‘We did these things. We’re sorry. We’re gonna do better.’”
“Let’s face it,” the founder of a super PAC recently told Mother Jones magazine. “Politics in this country is coin-operated.” True enough, as evidenced by the billions projected to be spent in this year’s elections — untold amounts of it unleashed by the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision. Even with all that money being cashed in, the busy check-writers and the influence they purchase remain largely hidden, including those who helped Republican Governor Scott Walker dramatically out-fundraise his Democratic challenger to win last week’s recall election. While much of the mainstream media looks the other way, some are working hard to identify the fingerprints super PACs and their benefactors leave on our victimized democracy. On this week’s Moyers & Company, Bill talks with historian Thomas Frank, author of the bestseller What’s the Matter With Kansas?, about the power of concentrated money to subvert democracy. How does a society built on democratic ideals allow them to become so corrupted? Frank’s most recent book is Pity the Billionaire. Bill also talks to Mother Jones editors Clara Jeffery and Monika Bauerlein, who continue to throw light on what they call “dark money” — the conspiracy of cash that allows the rich to influence our most fundamental political freedoms. On the show, Bill calls out some of the biggest super PAC donors, revealing how easy it is for the wealthy one percent to sway an election. Finally, as his grandson graduates from high school, Bill reflects on what we’re leaving the next generation of Americans: a country mired in debt and inequality, and controlled in large part by Wall Street insiders and Washington hucksters.
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s appearances in the last two weeks before Congressional committees — many members of which received campaign contributions from the megabank — beg the question: For how long and how many ways are average Americans going to pay the price for big bank hubris, with our own government acting as accomplice? On this week’s Moyers & Company, Rolling Stone editor Matt Taibbi and Yves Smith, creator of the finance and economics blog Naked Capitalism, join Bill to discuss the folly and corruption of both banks and government, and how that tag-team leaves deep wounds in our democracy. Taibbi’s latest piece is “The Scam Wall Street Learned from the Mafia.” Smith is the author of ECONned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism. Meanwhile, for anyone who wants to understand why, in one of the richest nations in the world, so many poor people are teetering on the edge, author and advocate Peter Edelman talks about continuing efforts to fight poverty, and what it will take to keep the needs of poor people on the American political agenda. A former aide to Robert F. Kennedy and faculty director of Georgetown University’s Center on Poverty, Inequality, and Public Policy, Edelman’s new book is So Rich, So Poor: Why It’s So Hard to End Poverty in America.
Bill opens this weekend’s Moyers & Company with a reminder that behind this Fourth of July holiday are human beings, like Thomas Jefferson, who were as flawed and conflicted as they were inspired, who espoused great humanistic ideals while behaving with reprehensible racial discrimination. That conflict – between what we know and how we live – is still a struggle in contemporary politics and society. No stranger to the contradictions of history and their racial touchpoints is Bill’s studio guest Khalil Gibran Muhammad, head of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and author of The Condemnation of Blackness. Muhammad and Moyers discuss the importance of confronting the contradictions of America’s past to better understand present issues of race and equality.
Bill opens this week’s show by explaining how last week’s Supreme Court decision not to reconsider Citizens United exposes the hoax that Citizens United was ever about “free” speech. In reality, Bill says in a broadcast essay, it’s about carpet bombing elections “with all the tonnage your rich paymasters want to buy.” Also lost in the Supreme media chatter last week: a disturbing ruling in Knox vs. SEIU Local 1000 that restricts labor unions from directing collected dues toward political causes. There’s no similar limit on corporations, naturally – yet another indication that the power and status of modern unions is waning, especially when compared to the unbridled influence of Corporate America. With a sharp decline in union membership, a legion of new enemies, and a series of legal and legislative setbacks, can unions rebound and once again act strongly in the interest of ordinary workers? On this week’s Moyers & Company, Bill talks to two people who can best answer the question: Stephen Lerner and Bill Fletcher, Jr. The architect of the SEIU’s Justice for Janitors movement, Lerner directed SEIU’s private equity project, which worked to expose a Wall Street feeding frenzy that left the working class in a state of catastrophe. Fletcher took his Harvard degree to the Massachusetts shipyards, and worked as a welder before becoming a labor activist. He served as Assistant to the President of the AFL-CIO, and is author of the upcoming book “They’re Bankrupting Us!”: And 20 Other Myths about Unions. Later in the show, Bill talks with and invites readings by poet Philip Appleman, whose creativity spans a long life filled with verse, fiction, philosophy, religion… and Darwinism. Appleman’s latest collection is Perfidious Proverbs.
Just when you think the reputation of banks couldn’t get any worse, comes word that we’ve seen nothing yet. As many as 20 banking institutions, including Barclays Bank, Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, UBS and HSBC, are reportedly under investigation for illegal and unethical practices toward protecting their profits at all costs and letting others pay for their mistakes. In this episode, financial expert Sheila Bair talks with Bill about the lawlessness of our banking system and the prognosis for meaningful reform. Bair was appointed in 2006 by President George W. Bush to chair the FDIC. During the 2008 meltdown, she argued that in some cases banks were NOT too big to fail — that instead of bailouts, they should be sold off to healthier competitors. Now a senior adviser to the Pew Charitable Trusts, Bair has organized a private group of financial experts including former Fed chairman Paul Volcker, former Senators Bill Bradley and Alan Simpson, and John Reed, once the chairman of Citicorp, to explore ways to prevent the banking industry from scuttling reforms created by the Dodd-Frank Act. Also on the show, Bill talks to scientist and philosopher Vandana Shiva, who’s become a rock star in the global battle over genetically modified seeds. These seeds — considered “intellectual property” by the big companies who own the patents — are globally marketed to monopolize food production and profits. Opponents challenge the safety of genetically modified seeds, claiming they also harm the environment, are more costly, and leave local farmers deep in debt as well as dependent on suppliers. Shiva, who founded a movement in India to promote native seeds, links genetic tinkering to problems in our ecology, economy, and humanity, and sees this as the latest battleground in the war on Planet Earth.
There are forgotten corners of this country where Americans are trapped in endless cycles of poverty, powerlessness, and despair as a direct result of capitalistic greed. Journalist Chris Hedges calls these places “sacrifice zones,” and joins Bill this week on Moyers & Company to explore how areas like Camden, New Jersey; Immokalee, Florida; and parts of West Virginia suffer while the corporations that plundered them thrive. “These are areas that have been destroyed for quarterly profit. We’re talking about environmentally destroyed, communities destroyed, human beings destroyed, families destroyed,” Hedges tells Bill. “It’s the willingness on the part of people who seek personal enrichment to destroy other human beings… And because the mechanisms of governance can no longer control them, there is nothing now within the formal mechanisms of power to stop them from creating essentially a corporate oligarchic state.” The broadcast includes a visit with comics artist and journalist Joe Sacco, who collaborated with Hedges on Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, an illustrated account of their travels through America’s sacrifice zones. Kirkus Reviews calls it an “unabashedly polemic, angry manifesto that is certain to open eyes, intensify outrage and incite argument about corporate greed.” A columnist for Truthdig, Hedges also describes the difference between truth and news. “The really great reporters — and I’ve seen them in all sorts of news organizations — are management headaches because they care about truth at the expense of their own career,” Hedges says.
America has been at war for over a decade now, with millions of soldiers having seen death and dying up close in Afghanistan and Iraq. But most Americans, watching comfortably on their TVs and computers, witness mostly to statistics, stump speeches, and “expert” rhetoric, don’t get what’s really going on there. Bill talks to Karl Marlantes — a highly-decorated Vietnam veteran, Rhodes Scholar, author, and PTSD survivor — about what we on the insulated outside need to understand about the minds and hearts of our modern warriors. Marlantes shares with Bill intimate stories about how his battlefield experiences both shaped and nearly destroyed him, even after returning to civilian life. “’Thou shalt not kill’ is a tenet you just do not violate, and so all your young life, that’s drilled into your head. And then suddenly, you’re 18 or 19 and they’re saying, ‘Go get ‘em and kill for your country.’ And then you come back and it’s like, ‘Well, thou shalt not kill’ again. Believe me, that’s a difficult thing to deal with,” Marlantes tells Bill. “You take a young man and put him in the role of God, where he is asked to take a life — that’s something no 19-year-old is able to handle.”
The fight against voter fraud is a solution in search of a problem — these days, documented instances of voter fraud are virtually non-existent. Nonetheless, since the 2010 mid-term elections, 10 states have passed laws requiring government-issued photo IDs to vote — identification that for many is too expensive or otherwise difficult to obtain. Bill talks to Keesha Gaskins and Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center for Justice about new voter ID and other election laws that keep the young, elderly, minorities and the poor from exercising one of the most fundamental American rights. “When these votes come under attack by this level of partisan gamesmanship, it’s completely inappropriate and antithetical to our history,” Gaskins tells Bill. “This is a very real political issue, but beyond that, this is a real issue of real Americans being able to access and be self-determinative in how we’re governed.” Also on the program, Bill talks with independent filmmaker Anthony Baxter, director of You’ve Been Trumped, a new documentary about the perils of rampant capitalism and gluttonous conspicuous consumption, epitomized by Donald Trump’s aggressive efforts to build “the greatest golf course in the world” across ancient sand dunes in Scotland. A veteran journalist, Baxter says what Trump and the Scottish government are hailing as an economic boon is actually a disaster to the environment and a callous disruption of people’s lives by a ruthless one-percenter run amok. “It seems to me there’s one rule for the super-rich and one rule for everybody else,” Baxter says. “And the 99 percent of people in the world are tired and fed up of having money and power riding roughshod over their lives and our planet… Our planet, I don’t think, can afford these kinds of decisions.” To end the broadcast, Bill shares his thoughts on the 47th anniversary of Medicare — the apex of Lyndon Johnson’s ambitious vision for America. Bill was
Weeks before Republican Paul Ryan was selected to run for vice president, Sister Simone Campbell — who heads NETWORK, a Catholic policy and lobbying group — hit the road to protest the so-called “Ryan budget” recently passed by the House of Representatives. She and some of her sister nuns rolled across the heartland on a bus trip designed to arouse public concern over what the Ryan plan would mean for social services in America, especially its slashing of programs for the poor. Sister Simone says his budget is inconsistent with Catholic social teaching. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops agrees. But other Catholics say Sister Simone and the nuns have crossed a line. Robert Royal, editor in chief of The Catholic Thing and founder of the Faith & Reason Institute, believes that issues of economic inequality are being oversimplified. Royal says the focus should be on creating a more dynamic economy for all. In this episode, watch our field report from producers who rode along on the ‘Nuns on the Bus’ tour, then join a passionate, candid discussion about faith and economics with Sister Simone and Royal.
While Romney, Ryan, Rubio, and Eastwood got the lion’s share of attention during the Republican Convention this week, three one-time college Republicans who are now the party’s real power-brokers — Karl Rove, Ralph Reed, and Grover Norquist — were busy doing what they do best: leveraging their political, religious, and financial resources to back pro-corporate, anti-government objectives at the core of the conservative agenda. The true surprise at the Tampa convention was Ralph Reed’s resurrection. When the former head of the Christian Coalition was discovered to have raked in millions of dollars from the super lobbyist — and eventually convicted felon — Jack Abramoff, Reed wound up in political purgatory. But outraged by the election of Barack Obama, and responding to what he describes as God’s call (via Sean Hannity), Reed returned to start the Faith and Freedom Coalition with the aim of toppling Barack Obama from the White House. To succeed, Reed needs to win the allegiance of many of the trusting Christian followers he had duped and double-crossed while working with Abramoff. This week, Moyers & Company tracks Reed’s rise, fall, and return: does it signal a new revolution, or an old racket? [NOTE: This segment originally referred to a story at AlterNet.org that alleged a connection between the voter contact efforts of Faith and Freedom Coalition and Millennium Marketing, a division of Century Strategies, whose founder and CEO is Ralph Reed, prior to the 2012 recall election of Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin. Because AlterNet.org subsequently updated and modified its report, this segment has also been modified to remove that allegation.] Later on the show, Bill talks with Mike Lofgren, a long-time Republican who describes modern corruption and dysfunction in both the Republican and Democratic parties. Lofgren’s new book is The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted.
The conventions are over — now it’s time for some thinking outside the box. So Bill welcomes to his studio Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who’s been an independent in Congress for 21 years — longer than anyone in American history. Sanders talks about jobs, the state of our economy, health care, and the unprecedented impact of big money on the major political parties. “What you are looking at is a nation with a grotesquely unequal distribution of wealth and income, tremendous economic power on Wall Street, and now added to all of that is big money interests, the billionaires and corporations now buying elections,” Sanders tells Bill. “I fear very much that if we don’t turn this around, we’re heading toward an oligarchic form of society.” Also on the show, Bill talks to Green Party presidential and vice presidential candidates Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala, who share their unique perspectives on the intersection of personal missions and modern politics. Stein graduated from Harvard Medical School to become an internist specializing in environmental health. She was a Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate in 2002, co-founded the Massachusetts Coalition for Healthy Communities in 2003, and represented the Green-Rainbow Party in state races in 2004 and 2006. Honkala is an anti-poverty activist and community organizer who co-founded the Kensington Welfare Rights Union and the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign. A formerly homeless single mother, Honkala became the first woman ever to run for Sheriff of Philadelphia in 2011.
Because of partisan gridlock in Washington, the Supreme Court has become the most powerful and outspoken branch of government – decisions they make shape our democracy’s fate for generations to come. Now, one has only to look at Bush v. Gore, Citizens United, and the Affordable Care Act rulings to understand why some call it a “one-percent Court” — dedicated by majority rule to preserving the power and influence of a minority of wealthy special interests. In this episode, The Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel and Jamie Raskin, constitutional law professor and Maryland state senator, join Bill to discuss how the uncontested power of the Supreme Court is changing our elections, our country, and our lives. The two joined forces for a special upcoming issue of The Nation entitled “The One Percent Court.” “We wanted to bring attention to how this court has empowered the 1% at the expense of the 99%,” says vanden Heuvel. “How it is now working for big business, for corporate power against the interests of ordinary citizens in this country.” Also on the program, Bill talks with Craig Unger, author of Boss Rove: Inside Karl Rove’s Secret Kingdom of Power, about Rove’s behind-the-scenes maneuvering to once again affect the outcome of a presidential election. “Most people thought he was a creature of the Bush family,” Unger tells Bill. “I think he’s a force more powerful than that.”
One of the reasons Moyers & Company frequently returns to the theme of money and politics is because it’s absolutely necessary to do so. Nothing corrupts our political system more than the ability of the rich and influential to spend limitless amounts of money — often in secret — with the intention of creating preferred political outcomes. And far from being a regulator of campaign finances, our political funding laws — aided by a corporate-friendly Supreme Court and self-interested politicians — only facilitate the process of empowering the few while subjugating the many. Few understand how money moves in and out of our political system better than campaign finance reform advocate Trevor Potter. A former chairman of the Federal Election Commission and founding president of the Campaign Legal Center, Potter was Stephen Colbert’s chief advisor when Colbert formed his own super PAC and 501 (c)(4) in a clever effort to expose the potential for chicanery behind each. Bill and Potter discuss how American elections are bought and sold, who covers the cost, and how the rest of us pay the price. “I can assure you that if someone is spending millions of dollars to elect the candidate, the candidate knows where that money is coming from. There’s nothing illegal about telling them, but the voters aren’t going to know that,” Potter tells Bill. “We’re creating opportunities for corruption and candidates being beholden to specific private interests because of funding, yet there’s no disclosure to the rest of us.” Also on the show, a Bill Moyers essay on how the Citizens United decision has candidates campaigning for cash more than votes, and how that money is pouring into TV ads and high paid political consultants.
Moyers & Company presents “United States of ALEC,” a report on the most influential corporate-funded political force most of America has never heard of — ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council. A national consortium of state politicians and powerful corporations, ALEC presents itself as a “nonpartisan public-private partnership”. But behind that mantra lies a vast network of corporate lobbying and political action aimed to increase corporate profits at public expense without public knowledge. Using interviews, documents, and field reporting, the episode explores ALEC’s self-serving machine at work, acting in a way one Wisconsin politician describes as “a corporate dating service for lonely legislators and corporate special interests.” In state houses around the country, hundreds of pieces of boilerplate ALEC legislation are proposed or enacted that would, among other things, dilute collective bargaining rights, make it harder for some Americans to vote, and limit corporate liability for harm caused to consumers — each accomplished without the public ever knowing who’s behind it. “All of us here are very familiar with ALEC and the influence that ALEC has with many of the [legislative] members,” says Arizona State Senator Steve Farley. “Corporations have the right to present their arguments, but they don’t have the right to do it secretly.” “United States of ALEC” is a collaboration between Okapi Productions, LLC and the Schumann Media Center, headed by Bill Moyers, which supports independent journalism and public watchdogs including the Center for Media and Democracy, whose investigators are featured in the report. Also on the Moyers & Company broadcast, master media decoder Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center and founder of FactCheck.org, joins Bill to discuss a recent Annenberg Center report that reveals widespread ignorance of the presidentia
According to the 2010 census, the number of American Hispanics grew 43% in the last decade to over 50 million. By 2050, Hispanics are projected to number 132 million and represent 30% of the population. As that population evolves, so does their political power. A new report by the Pew Hispanic Center shows that America’s Hispanic voting population has grown 22% since 2008. But what are the cultural and political implications of these now well-understood statistics? Bill goes beyond the numbers with two of our nation’s most popular and influential journalists: Univision’s Jorge Ramos and María Elena Salinas. A Spanish-language U.S. television network, Univision has the largest audience of Spanish-language television viewers, according to Nielsen ratings. Ramos, says The Washington Monthly, is ”the broadcaster who will most determine the 2012 elections,” while The New York Times calls Salinas “the voice of Hispanic America.” In a candid and comprehensive discussion, Ramos and Salinas discuss their responsibilities both as reporters and representatives of their culture, their aggressive journalistic approaches to both President Obama and Governor Romney, and how immigration reform will influence this potentially-decisive voting bloc in November. Also on the show, Bill shares the story of a young U.S. soldier killed in Afghanistan and the Republican congressman he inspired to ask, “Why are we killing kids that don’t need to die?”
At the top of the program, Bill offers some fact-checks to Bill O’Reilly for false statements the Fox News icon made about him during O’Reilly’s public debate with Jon Stewart, and reiterates his longstanding invitation to O’Reilly to appear on Moyers & Company for some straight talk. Afterward, James Balog, one of the world’s premier nature photographers, joins Bill to explain how “the earth is having a fever.” At tremendous risk to his own safety, Balog has been documenting the erosion of glaciers in Switzerland, Greenland, Iceland, and Alaska. Now he joins Bill to share his amazing photos, discoveries, and self-discoveries – including his transformation from climate change skeptic to true believer. Balog’s soon-to-be-released film, Chasing Ice, is a breathtaking account of climate change in action. In the final segment, Bill explores a judicial system under partisan attack. Thirty-eight states now elect their high court judges. Over the last decade, $200 million — much of it secret and tied to partisan agendas — has poured into these judicial campaigns. In Florida, Pennsylvania, and Iowa, for example, justices are being targeted by radical groups that abhor judicial independence and want the courts to reflect their own political biases. In Iowa, a state whose judicial system has been praised for its fairness and impartiality, the political and religious Right ousted three justices in 2010 over marriage equality, and is now trying to take down a fourth over the same issue. But this time a bipartisan coalition called Justice Not Politics is fighting back. Its co-founders – Democrat Sally Pederson and Republican Joy Corning, each of whom served Iowa for eight years as lieutenant governor – talk with Bill about what’s at stake when justices are at the mercy of partisan passions and money in politics.
The One Percent is not only increasing their share of wealth — they’re using it to spread millions among political candidates who serve their interests. Example: Goldman Sachs, which gave more money than any other major American corporation to Barack Obama in 2008, is switching alliances this year; their employees have given $900,000 both to Mitt Romney’s campaign and to the pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future. Why? Because, says the Wall Street Journal, the Goldman Sachs gang felt betrayed by President Obama’s modest attempts at financial reform. To discuss how the super-rich have willfully confused their self-interest with America’s interest, Bill is joined by Rolling Stone magazine’s Matt Taibbi, who regularly shines his spotlight on scandals involving big business and government, and journalist Chrystia Freeland, author of the new book Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else. Following the conversation, Bill shares his thoughts on corporate executives who — enabled by the Citizens United ruling — are strong-arming their employees to vote as they say, from the Murray Energy CEO who reportedly made his workers spend unpaid time at a pro-Romney rally; to David and Charles Koch, who sent anti-Obama and pro-Romney materials to the 45,000 employees of their subsidiary Georgia Pacific; to ASG Solutions boss Arthur Allen, who sent an intimidating email to his employees.
Four debates have come and gone, and in the aftermath of the pomp, points, and politics, what have we learned? And how has democracy been served? Two of the country’s most astute political media observers — Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Marty Kaplan — join Bill to weigh in on the rhetoric and realities of two campaigns now in the home stretch, looking to make their cases by any means affordable. Jamieson is director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania and the driving force behind the acclaimed online watchdog FactCheck.org. Marty Kaplan is the founding director of the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Bill is later joined by Neil Barofsky, who held the thankless job of special inspector general in charge of policing TARP, the bailout’s Troubled Asset Relief Program. Between President Obama’s ineffectual proposals and Mitt Romney’s loving embrace, bankers have little to fear from either administration, and that leaves the rest of America on perilously thin economic ice. Barofsky discusses the critical yet unmet need to tackle banking reform and avoid another financial meltdown. Currently a senior fellow and adjunct professor at the New York University School of Law, Barofsky is the author of Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street.
The election is finally over, so what happens next? Long-time New York Times columnist Bob Herbert and Reihan Salam, a conservative blogger at National Review Online’s “The Agenda,” join Bill to assess and debate how the election revealed changes in American social and political culture. They also discuss what Obama’s re-election means for working families and people at the bottom of our economic ladder. “I think this election really did demonstrate that there’s been a dramatic change particularly with regard to social issues and how folks talk about them,” Salam tells Bill. “I think that that has proven very sobering for a lot of folks on the right.” Salam is the co-author, with Ross Douthat, of Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream. Herbert says, “I think the Republican Party is accurately defined as a party that looks out for the interests of the very wealthy. The Democratic Party less so, but I think they look out for the interests of the wealthy, too, before they look out for the interests of working Americans.” Herbert has been traveling the country for the past two years, reporting for his forthcoming book Wounded Colossus. He is now Distinguished Fellow at the think tank Demos. Later on the show, Bill gets more insight from veteran journalist James Fallows, including his thoughts on how the election stopped the conservative propaganda machine, the truth behind the economic threat from China, and why he thinks Obama will be a better president in his second term. “[Obama] knows who he’s dealing with now. The first two years of the administration, he thought that they were going to be able to make a split-the-loaf deal with the current Republican Party. And they weren’t interested in that,” Fallows tells Bill. “I think he will have a firmer approach from the get-go… He has shown only growth that I’ve seen, rather than a regression. And I hope that continues.” F
Hurricane Sandy wreaked havoc on the East Coast, but Naomi Klein says Sandy’s tragic destruction can also be the catalyst for the transformation of politics and our economy. The author of the international bestseller The Shock Doctrine joins Bill to discuss hurricanes, climate change, and democracy. Klein has been in New York visiting the devastated areas — including those where “Occupy Sandy” volunteers are unfolding new models of relief — as part of her reporting for a new book and film on climate change and the future. “Let’s rebuild by actually getting at the root causes. Let’s respond by aiming for an economy that responds to the crisis both [through] inequality and climate change,” Klein tells Bill. “You know, dream big.” In the same broadcast, former Federal Election Commission Chairman Trevor Potter — the lawyer who advised Stephen Colbert on setting up a super PAC — dissects the spending on the most expensive election in American history. Many voices are claiming “money didn’t matter, Citizens United wasn’t a factor,” but Potter disagrees. “Super PACs just upped the ante,” he tells Bill. “If you’re a senator and you have just been elected, or heaven forbid you’re up in two years, you’re thinking I don’t have time to worry about deficit reduction and the fiscal cliff. I have to raise tens of thousands of dollars every day to have enough money to compete with these new super PACs… And that means I need to be nice to a lot of billionaires who often want something from me in order to find the funding for my campaign.”
In 1983, 50 corporations controlled a majority of American media. Now that number is six. And Big Media may get even bigger, thanks to the FCC’s consideration of ending a rule preventing companies from owning a newspaper and radio and TV stations in the same city. Such a move — which they’ve tried in 2003 and 2007 as well –would give these massive media companies free rein to devour more of the competition, control the public message, and also limit diversity across the media landscape. Bernie Sanders, one of several Senators who have written FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski asking him to suspend the plan, discusses with Bill why Big Media is a threat to democracy, and what citizens can do to fight back. Also on the show, Bill is joined by former Republican Congressman Mickey Edwards, a founding father of modern conservative politics who now fears the movement has abandoned its principles. Edwards explains why both political parties require radical change, and shares his perspective on Grover Norquist and anti-tax pledges. “It’s not conservatism, not rational, not adult,” Edwards tells Bill. ” It’s a 12-year-old’s kind of thinking.” Edwards chaired the Republican Policy Committee, was a founding trustee of the conservative Heritage Foundation, and served as National Chairman of the American Conservative Union. Finally, in an original essay, Bill Moyers says there’s more to Norquist’s anti-tax pledge than ideology or principle.
When it comes to America’s economic health, all anyone seems to talk about is the “fiscal cliff,” and the perils of our inevitable plunge. But media’s favorite metaphor is distracting us from actual and crucial fiscal realities. Independent political and economic analysts Bruce Bartlett and Yves Smith join Bill in a discussion about why Washington insiders are talking about the deficit crisis instead of the jobs crisis. Bartlett, former advisor to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, got into hot water with fellow conservatives when he aired concerns about the direction of their ideology and wrote critically of the second George Bush. His most recent book is The Benefit and The Burden: Tax Reform — Why We Need It, and What It Will Take. Yves Smith, who spent more than 25 years in the financial services industry, is the founder and editor of the popular blog Naked Capitalism, and runs a successful management consulting firm. Following the conversation, Bill shares his perspective on one of the most corrupting D.C. fixtures — the revolving door between Washington leadership and lobbying. That lucrative pathway ensures that “when push comes to shove, corporate interests will have the upper hand in the close calls that determine public policy… no matter which party is in power.” Finally on the broadcast, poet and former publishing executive James Autry joins Bill to talk about issues of art and of heart. He shares his poems with Bill and discusses his and his wife Sally’s challenging but inspiring experience raising their autistic child.
One reason so many people are disillusioned by the state of things in America — even more so after the terror in Newtown — is that our political system hasn’t produced consistently good results in a long time. We’ve forgotten that democracy is supposed to be about addressing our problems through a political system that encourages bargaining, compromise, and progress. Except for taking us to war, showering largesse on the privileged and powerful, and courting donors instead of representing voters, Washington politics promotes gridlock, paralysis, and stalemate. But Bill Moyers finds hope in the movie Lincoln. Pulitzer Prize winner Tony Kushner, who wrote the film’s screenplay, joins Bill to talk about finding the man inside the monument, and what Abraham Lincoln — 147 years after his death — can still teach us all about politics, compromise, and the survival of American democracy. “The job of the president is both to make the compromises necessary to actually have things happen in a democracy, which means compromising at a slower pace than anybody would necessarily like,” Kushner tells Bill. “At the same time he has to keep telling us where we’re going, what we’re trying to arrive at. And I think that Obama has done an astonishing job of doing that over and over, of reminding us that government is a good thing, and that we share responsibility for one another because without that shared responsibility our own lives are destroyed.” Also on the show, Bill urges us to remember the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre by name. He also rejects the notion of doubling down on guns and body armor as a response, and encourages all of us to work hard on realistic and moral solutions.
The life and work of Junot Díaz contains many worlds. His books, including National Book Award finalist This Is How You Lose Her and Pulitzer Prize-winner The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, journey between the old and the new, and between the America that was and the America we’re becoming. Born in the Dominican Republic, but raised in New Jersey and American to the core, Junot Díaz is a spotter of the future, a curator of the past, a man of the here-and-now. Díaz joins Bill to discuss the evolution of the great American story. Along the way he offers funny and perceptive insights into his own work, as well as Star Wars, Moby Dick, and America’s inevitable shift to a majority minority country. There is an enormous gap between the way the country presents itself and imagines itself and projects itself and the reality of this country,” Díaz tells Bill. “Whether we’re talking about the Latino community in North Carolina. Whether we’re talking about a very active and I think in some ways very out queer community across the United States. Or whether we’re talking about an enormous body of young voters who are either ignored or sort of pandered to or in some ways, I think that what we’re having is a new country emerging that’s been in the making for a long time.”
Remember climate change? The issue barely came up during the presidential campaigns, and little has been said since. But bringing climate change back into our national conversation is as much a communications challenge as it is a scientific one. Scientist Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, joins Bill to describe his efforts to do what even Hurricane Sandy couldn’t – galvanize communities over what’s arguably the greatest single threat facing humanity. Leiserowitz, who specializes in the psychology of risk perception, knows better than anyone if people are willing to change their behavior to make a difference. “[A] pervasive sense up to now has been that climate change is distant — distant in time, and distant in space,” Leiserowitz tells Bill. “And what we’re now beginning to see is that it’s not so distant. It’s not just future generations. It’s us and it’s our own children. I have a nine-year-old son — he’s going to be my age in the year 2050. I don’t want him to live in the world that we’re currently hurtling towards.” Later in the show, in a broadcast essay, Bill reports on how the NRA and gun merchants continue to strong-arm Congress and state legislatures into keeping any and all discussion of sensible gun control off the table.
Our current obsession with slashing the deficit is getting in the way of real work that needs to be done to preserve both our economy and our democracy. In this episode of Moyers & Company, Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman argues that we should put aside our excessive focus on saving money, try to overcome political recalcitrance, and spend money to put America back to work. Krugman offers specific solutions to not only end what he calls a “vast, unnecessary catastrophe,” but to do it more quickly than some imagine possible. His latest book, End This Depression Now!, is both a warning of the fiscal perils ahead and a prescription to safely avoid them. Later on the show, Bill explains how last week’s fiscal cliff deal gave tens of billions in tax breaks to Wall Street and corporations — what even the Wall Street Journal calls a “crony capitalist blowout.”
President Obama’s second inauguration will be a day of celebration, but whether or not he accomplishes his second-term goals depends on what happens the next day — Tuesday, January 22 — on Capitol Hill. That’s when the United States Senate is supposed to decide the fate of the filibuster. Once “the world’s most deliberative body”, the Senate has become a graveyard of democracy where, says Bill Moyers, “grown men and women are zombified in a process no respectable witch doctor would emulate for fear of a malpractice suit.” Case in point: The 112th Congress that just ended — the least productive in the record books — saw Republicans mounting or threatening to mount nearly 400 filibusters, blocking everything from equal pay for equal work and jobs bills to immigration reform and judicial appointments. As a result, there are more vacancies on the federal courts today than when President Obama first took office. With minimal effort — and hardly a word spoken — a minority of Senators can prevent lawmakers from even discussing legislation by simply making phone call to the cloakroom. The filibuster is also “a triumph of hypocrisy,” Moyers says, because the party in the majority always wants to reform it, until that same party winds up in the minority and wants to keep it. Larry Cohen, president of the 700,000-member Communications Workers of America, joins Bill to make the case for common-sense reform that would bring the Senate back to serving democracy. Cohen is a leader of the Democracy Initiative, a coalition of nearly 50 progressive organizations campaigning hard to change the filibuster rules — not to deny a minority the right to be heard, but to hold Senators accountable by bringing back the requirement that they show up in person and talk in plain sight, so we can know who’s holding democracy hostage. But time is not on their side — unless the Senate reforms the filibuster at the beginning of the new 113th Congress — that
At the top of the show, Bill digs deeper into a startling New York Times-reported story about a cost-control exception provided to Amgen, the world’s largest biotechnology firm. According to the report, the sweetheart deal — hidden in the Senate’s final “fiscal cliff” bill — will cost taxpayers half a billion dollars. Bill talks to U.S. Representative Peter Welch (D-VT) about the bi-partisan bill he recently sponsored to repeal that giveaway, and the political factors that allow such crony capitalism to occur. Later, as we note the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, Bill discusses the fierce challenges facing the reproductive rights movement with Jessica González-Rojas, Executive Director of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, and Lynn Paltrow, founder and Executive Director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women. Though a majority of Americans now believe abortion should be legal in most cases, anti-abortion forces showing no sign of relenting. A study by the Guttmacher Institute reported that state legislatures passed 92 provisions restricting a woman’s access to reproductive health care in 2011 — a number four times higher than the previous year.
In the fight against terrorism, the American military’s escalating drone program has become the face of our foreign policy in Pakistan, Yemen and parts of Africa. And while the use of un-manned drones indeed protects American soldiers, the growing number of casualties — which include civilians as well as suspected terrorists — has prompted a United Nations investigation into both the legality and the deadly toll of these strikes. Bill explores the moral and legal implications of using drones to target our enemies — both foreign and American — as well as other intelligence issues with Vicki Divoll, a former general counsel to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and former deputy legal adviser to the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center, and Vincent Warren, Executive Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Also on the show, Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi on the shocking lack of accountability for big bankers who continue to act unethically, and in some cases, illegally.
America has a wide digital divide — high-speed Internet access is available only to those who can afford it, at prices much higher and speeds much slower in the U.S. than they are around the world. But neither has to be the case, says Susan Crawford, former special assistant to President Obama for science, technology and innovation, and author of Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age. Crawford joins Bill to discuss how our government has allowed a few powerful media conglomerates to put profit ahead of the public interest — rigging the rules, raising prices, and stifling competition. As a result, Crawford says, all of us are at the mercy of the biggest business monopoly since Standard Oil in the first Gilded Age a hundred years ago. “The rich are getting gouged, the poor are very often left out, and this means that we’re creating, yet again, two Americas, and deepening inequality through this communications inequality,” Crawford tells Bill. Also on the show, journalist Nick Turse describes his personal mission to compile a complete and compelling account of the Vietnam War’s horror as experienced by all sides, including innocent civilians who were sucked into its violent vortex. Turse, who devoted 12 years to tracking down the true story of Vietnam, unlocked secret troves of documents, interviewed officials and veterans – including many accused of war atrocities – and traveled throughout the Vietnamese countryside talking with eyewitnesses to create his book, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. “American culture has never fully come to grips with Vietnam,” Turse tells Bill, referring to “hidden and forbidden histories that just haven’t been fully engaged.”
There’s no question that big money calls the shots, or at least strongly influences the agenda, on many issues vital to America’s democracy and integrity. Dan Cantor, Executive Director of New York’s Working Families Party, and Jonathan Soros, co-founder of the Friends of Democracy super PAC and a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, join Bill to discuss their proposals to fight the corrosive effects of money in politics. With the help of Soros’ anti-super PAC super PAC, the two are combating the negative impacts of Citizens United by backing candidates who stand up for campaign finance reform. Soros and Cantor advocate for a New York State public financing system inspired by New York City’s publicly-funded program that makes it less financially prohibitive to run for city-wide office. Also on the program, Martín Espada on the power of poetry, and Bill’s essays on what money and influence will buy you in Washington.
Even as President Obama’s talking points champion the middle class and condemn how our economy caters to the very rich, modern American capitalism is a story of continued inequality and hardship. Even a modest increase in the minimum wage — as suggested by the president — faces opposition from those who seem to show allegiance first and foremost to America’s wealthy and powerful. Yet some aren’t just wringing their hands about our economic crisis; they’re fighting back. Economist Richard Wolff joins Bill to shine light on the disaster left behind in capitalism’s wake, and to discuss the fight for economic justice, including a fair minimum wage. A Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, and currently Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School, Wolff has written many books on the effects of rampant capitalism, including Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It. Also on the broadcast, activist and author Saru Jayaraman marches on Washington with restaurant workers struggling to make ends meet, and talks about how we can best support their right to a fair wage. Jayaraman is the co-founder and co-director of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, which works to improve pay and working conditions for America’s 10 million-plus restaurant workers. She is also the author of Behind the Kitchen Door, a new exposé of the restaurant industry.
Religious fundamentalists backed by the right wing are finding increasingly stealthy ways to challenge evolution with the dogma of creationism. Their strategy includes passing education laws that encourage teaching creationism alongside evolution, and supporting school vouchers to transfer taxpayer money from public to private schools, where they can push a creationist agenda. But they didn’t count on 19-year-old anti-creationism activist Zack Kopplin. From the time he was a high school senior in his home state of Louisiana, Kopplin has been speaking, debating, cornering politicians and winning the active support of 78 Nobel Laureates, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the New Orleans City Council, and tens of thousands of students, teachers and others around the country. The Rice University history major joins Bill to talk about fighting the creep of creationist curricula into public school science classes and publicly funded vouchers that end up supporting creationist instruction. Also on the program, journalist and historian Susan Jacoby talks with Bill about the role secularism and intellectual curiosity have played throughout America’s history, a topic explored in her new book, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought.
Sheila Bair, the longtime Republican who served as chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) during the fiscal meltdown five years ago, joins Bill to talk about American banks’ continuing risky and manipulative practices, their seeming immunity from prosecution, and growing anger from Congress and the public. Also on the show, Richard Wolff, whose smart, blunt talk about the crisis of capitalism on his first Moyers & Company appearance was so compelling and provocative, we asked him to return. This time, the economics expert answers questions sent in by our viewers, diving further into economic inequality, the limitations of industry regulation, and the widening gap between a booming stock market and a population that increasingly lives in poverty.
Fifty years ago, the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in the case of Gideon v. Wainwright established the constitutional right of criminal defendants to legal representation, even if they can’t afford it. The Court ruled there shouldn’t be one kind of justice for the rich and another for the poor, but the scales of the American legal system still tilt heavily in favor of the white and wealthy. Attorney and legal scholar Bryan Stevenson joins Bill to expose the system’s failures, and ongoing struggles at the crossroads of race, class and justice. Stevenson’s Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative has reversed the death sentences of more than 75 inmates. But right now, there are more than 3,100 inmates on death row, and more than 60% are members of racial or ethnic minorities. Over time, Supreme Court Justices have fine-tuned the circumstances under which the death penalty may still apply, but no set of laws or jurisprudence can undo wrongful executions — or, it seems, completely prevent them. According to journalists Martin Clancy and Tim O’Brien, authors of Murder at the Supreme Court, in recent years at least 18 inmates were released from death row because DNA evidence proved their innocence. These cases are among more than 140 death penalty exonerations over the last three decades. The broadcast closes with a Bill Moyers Essay on the hypocrisy of “justice for all” in a society where billions are squandered for a war born in fraud while the poor are pushed aside.
Martin Luther King, Jr., who died 45 years ago this month, had long known that racial equality was inextricably linked to economic equity — fairness for all, including working people and the poor. In the last year of his life, Dr. King announced the Poor People’s Campaign to demand an “Economic Bill of Rights” for all Americans, regardless of color. But nearly a half-century later, that dream is still a dream deferred. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Taylor Branch and author and theologian James Cone join Bill to discuss Dr. King’s vision of economic justice, and why so little has changed for America’s most oppressed. Also on the show, poet Kyle Dargan talks about his efforts to reconcile disparate cultural environments through poetry.
The unprecedented level of economic inequality in America is undeniable. In an extended essay, Bill shares examples of the striking extremes of wealth and poverty across the country, including a video report on California’s Silicon Valley. There, Facebook, Google, and Apple are minting millionaires, while the area’s homeless — who’ve grown 20 percent in the last two years — are living in tent cities at their virtual doorsteps. “A petty, narcissistic, pridefully ignorant politics has come to dominate and paralyze our government,” says Bill, “while millions of people keep falling through the gaping hole that has turned us into the United States of Inequality.” Later, Bill is joined by writer Sherman Alexie. Born on a Native American reservation, Alexie has been navigating the cultural boundaries of American culture in lauded poetry, novels, short stories, screenplays, even stand-up comedy for over two decades. Alexie shares his irreverent perspective on contemporary American life, and discusses the challenges of living in two different cultures at the same time, especially when one has so much dominance over the other. “I know a lot more about being white than you know about being Indian,” Alexie tells Bill.
Biologist, mother and activist Sandra Steingraber joins Bill to explain why she was willing to go to jail — and did — for blocking access to the construction of a storage and transportation facility involved in the controversial process of fracking. Steingraber has become internationally known for building awareness about toxins she says are threatening our children’s health by contaminating our air, water and food, and talks to Bill about how we must take action stop these “toxic trespassers.” With government captured by the very industries it’s supposed to regulate, Steingraber has lost patience with politicians and corporations, and says we need to work together now to prevent destruction to the environment. Also on the show, Bill presents the short documentary “Dance of the Honey Bee.” Narrated by Bill McKibben, the film takes a look at the determined, beautiful, and vital role honey bees play in preserving life, as well as the threats bees face from a rapidly changing landscape.
The violent Boston rampage triggered a local and federal response that, according to journalist Glenn Greenwald, adds a new dimension to troubling questions about government secrecy, overreach, and what we sacrifice in the name of national security. Greenwald joins Bill to peel back layers that reveal what the Boston bombings and drone attacks have in common, and how secrecy leads to abuse of government power. Also on the show, political scholars Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann tell Bill that Congress’ failure to make progress on gun control last week — despite support for background checks from 90% of the American public – is symptomatic of a legislative branch reduced to dysfunction, partisan ravings and obstruction. A year ago, the two — who had strong reputations as non-partisan analysts — decided to speak truth to power with their book It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism. In it, they argue that congressional gridlock is mostly the fault of right wing radicals within the Republican Party who engage in “policy hostage-taking” to extend their political war against the president. What’s more, Ornstein and Mann say, the mainstream media and media fact-checkers add to the problem by indulging in “false equivalency” — pretending both parties are equally to blame.
Francine and David Wheeler’s youngest son Ben was one of the 20 children killed in the December 14th attack at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Their grief has led them to Sandy Hook Promise, a now-nationwide group founded by Newtown friends and neighbors to heal the hurt and find new ways to talk about and campaign against the scourge of gun violence in the United States. One of their allies is folk singer Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary fame, who joined with the Wheelers and others in a February concert of harmony, resilience and solidarity. Francine Wheeler and Peter Yarrow discuss with Bill the power of music to create change, and their mission to protect children and adults from gun violence in communities across America. We also see excerpts from the concert, soon to appear on many public television stations. Later, the conversation continues as David Wheeler joins his wife to talk about what can be done and if the gun issue can be addressed in a way that includes diverse viewpoints and bypasses partisan brinkmanship.
With our democracy threatened by plutocrats and the politicians in their pockets more than ever, the antidote to organized money is organized people. It takes time and effort, but across the country, grass roots democracy is growing. Individuals are banding together, organizing toward common goals and demanding change – and often delivering it. Bill sits with three organizers leading the way. Marshall Ganz is a social movement legend who dropped out of Harvard to become a volunteer during Mississippi’s Freedom Summer of 1964. He then joined forces with Cesar Chavez of the United Farmworkers, protecting workers who picked crops for pennies in California’s fields and orchards. Ganz also had a pivotal role organizing students and volunteers for Barack Obama’s historic 2008 presidential campaign. Now 70, he’s still organizing across the United States and the Middle East, and back at Harvard, teaching students from around the world about what it takes to beat Goliath. Later on the broadcast, economic equality advocates Rachel LaForest, executive director of Right to the City, and Madeline Janis, co-founder and national policy director of Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, discuss with Bill how social action can change both policy and lives. Janis led the fight for a living wage in Los Angeles; LaForest fights for fair and affordable housing across the country.
Science can be a battleground — witness the politics of climate change, the teaching of evolution, the uncharted terrain of genetic modification and stem cell research, among other contentious issues. But when industries release untested chemicals into our environment — putting profits before public health — our children are the first to suffer. Nowhere is this more troubling than in the ongoing story of lead poisoning. Bill talks with David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, public health historians who’ve been taking on the chemical industry for years — writing about the hazards of industrial pollution and the neglect of worker safety — despite industry efforts to undermine them. Their latest book, Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America’s Children, is the culmination of 20 years of research. Markowitz and Rosner warn that, for young children, there’s no safe level of exposure to this dangerous toxin still lurking in millions of homes. The authors discuss thwarted efforts to hold the lead industry accountable, failed attempts to find cheap solutions, and the cost to the future of our children. As long as the chemical industry and its powerful lobbies prevail in blocking efforts to reform outdated laws, Markowitz and Rosner say, we will continue to float in a soup of toxins — inhaling, drinking, and absorbing chemicals that we may learn, years later, have put us all in harm’s way. Also on the show, Bill is joined by the heads of two independent watchdog groups keeping an eye on government as well as on powerful interests seeking to influence it. Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics and OpenSecrets.org, and Danielle Brian, who runs the Project on Government Oversight, talk to Bill about the importance of transparency to our democracy, and their efforts to scrutinize who’s giving money, who’s receiving it, and most importantly, what’s expected in return.
In December 2008, during the closing weeks of the Bush White House, 27-year-old environmental activist Tim DeChristopher went to protest the auction of gas and oil drilling rights to more than 150,000 acres of publicly-owned Utah wilderness. But instead of yelling slogans or waving a sign, DeChristopher disrupted the proceedings by starting to bid. Given an auction paddle designating him “Bidder 70”, DeChristopher won a dozen land leases worth nearly two million dollars. He was arrested for criminal fraud, found guilty, and sentenced to two years in federal prison — even though the new Obama Administration had since declared the oil and gas auction null and void. DeChristopher — who was released less than a month ago — joins Bill to talk about the necessity of civil disobedience in the fight for justice, how his jury was ordered to place the strict letter of the law over moral conscience, and the future of the environmental movement. Bidder 70, a new documentary chronicling DeChristopher’s legal battle and activism, opened May 17. DeChristopher is co-founder of the grassroots environmental group Peaceful Uprising. Also on the show, Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Gretchen Morgenson tells Bill that, five years after the country’s economic near-collapse, banks are still too big to fail, too big to manage, and too big to trust. Stockholders’ reaffirmation of Jamie Dimon as JP Morgan Chase’s chairman and CEO this week — despite a year of accusations and investigations at the bank — is further evidence, she says, of an unchecked system that continues to covet profits and eschew accountability, putting our economy and democracy at risk. Morgenson also discusses how behemoth companies like Apple manipulate the system and avail themselves of the biggest tax loopholes money and influence can buy.
Whatever your take on the recent revelations about government spying on our phone calls and Internet activity, there’s no denying that Big Brother is bigger and less brotherly than we thought. What’s the resulting cost to our privacy — and more so, our democracy? Lawrence Lessig, professor of law and director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University and founder of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, discusses the implications of our government’s actions, Edward Snowden’s role in leaking the information, and steps we must take to better protect our privacy. “Snowden describes agents having the authority to pick and choose who they’re going to be following on the basis of their hunch about what makes sense and what doesn’t make sense. This is the worst of both worlds. We have a technology now that gives them access to everything, but a culture if again it’s true that encourages them to be as wide ranging as they can,” Lessig tells Bill. “The question is — are there protections or controls or counter technologies to make sure that when the government gets access to this information they can’t misuse it in all the ways that, you know, anybody who remembers Nixon believes and fears governments might use?” Few are as knowledgeable about the impact of the Internet on our public and private lives as Lessig, who argues that government needs to protect American rights with the same determination and technological sophistication it uses to invade our privacy and root out terrorists. “If we don’t have technical measures in place to protect against misuse, this is just a trove of potential misuse…We’ve got to think about the technology as a protector of liberty too. And the government should be implementing technologies to protect our liberties,” Lessig says. “Because if they don’t, we don’t figure out how to build that protection into the technology, it won’t be there.” “We
A national consortium of state politicians and powerful corporations, ALEC — the American Legislative Exchange Council — presents itself as a “nonpartisan public-private partnership”. But behind that mantra lies a vast network of corporate lobbying and political action aimed to increase corporate profits at public expense without public knowledge. In state houses around the country, hundreds of pieces of boilerplate ALEC legislation are proposed or enacted that would, among other things, dilute collective bargaining rights, make it harder for some Americans to vote, and limit corporate liability for harm caused to consumers — each accomplished without the public ever knowing who’s behind it. Using interviews, documents, and field reporting, the episode explores ALEC’s self-serving machine at work, acting in a way one Wisconsin politician describes as “a corporate dating service for lonely legislators and corporate special interests.” Former health care industry executive Wendell Potter says, “Even though I’d known of [ALEC] for a long time, I was astonished. Just about everything that I knew that the health insurance industry wanted out of any state lawmaker was included in that package of bills.” Following up on a 2012 report, this update includes new examples of corporate influence on state legislation and lawmakers, the growing public protest against ALEC’s big business-serving agenda, and internal tactics ALEC is instituting to further shroud its actions and intentions. “United States of ALEC” Executive Producer Tom Casciato says people who saw the first report “might be surprised to learn that, despite more than 40 companies having dropped out of ALEC, the organization is still going very strong.” He adds, “ALEC doesn’t publish a list of its members, so covering will always be hard, but in a democracy it’s a good idea for people to know where their laws originate.” “United States of ALEC” is a collabo
The story of American families facing food insecurity is as frustrating as it is heartbreaking, because the truth is as avoidable as it is tragic. Here in the richest country on earth, 50 million of us — one in six Americans — go hungry. More than a third of them are children. And yet Congress can’t pass a Farm Bill because our representatives continue to fight over how many billions to slash from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as food stamps. The debate is filled with tired clichés about freeloaders undeserving of government help, living large at the expense of honest, hardworking taxpayers. But a new documentary, A Place at the Table, paints a truer picture of America’s poor. “The cost of food insecurity, obesity and malnutrition is way larger than it is to feed kids nutritious food,” Kristi Jacobson, one of the film’s directors and producers, tells Bill. She and Mariana Chilton, director of the Center for Hunger-Free Communities, explain to Bill how hunger hits hard at people from every walk of life. “There’s no opportunity for people who are low-income to really engage in our democracy,” says Chilton. “I think they’re actively shut out.” Later, Greg Kaufmann — poverty correspondent for The Nation — talks about how the poor have been stereotyped and demonized in an effort to justify huge cuts in food stamps and other crucial programs for low-income Americans. “People are working and they’re not getting paid enough to feed their families, pay their utilities, pay for their housing, pay for the healthcare… if you’re not paying people enough to pay for the basics, they’re going to need help getting food,” Kaufmann tells Bill. “There are a lot of corporations that want to be involved in the fight against hunger. The best thing they can do is get on board for fair wages.”
Twenty-two years ago, Bill Moyers started documenting the story of two ordinary families in Milwaukee, Wisconsin — families whose breadwinners had lost well-paying factory jobs. Relying on the belief that hard work is the key to a good living and better life, the Stanleys and the Neumanns, like millions of others, went about pursuing the American dream. But as they found other jobs, got re-trained, and worked any time and overtime, they still found themselves on a downward slope, working harder and longer for less pay and fewer benefits, facing devastating challenges and difficult choices. Bill Moyers revisits his reports on the Stanleys and Neumanns — whose stories Bill updates on the July 9 Frontline report “Two American Families.” He also talks with the authors of two important books about how the changing nature of the economy is affecting everyone: Barbara Miner, a public education advocate who’s been following the decline of her own Milwaukee hometown for nearly 40 years and just published Lessons from the Heartland: A Turbulent Half-Century of Public Education in an Iconic American City; and author, activist and playwright Barbara Garson, who’s published a number of books about the changing lives of working Americans. Her most recent is Down the Up Escalator: How the 99% Live in the Great Recession. “The growing [economic] disparity didn’t happen as some sort of natural event, like the rain falling from the sky… it really is the result of policy decisions,” Miner tells Bill. “Forty years of concentrated efforts have gone to lowering wages, whether it was breaking unions or creating laws that allowed you to make more money overseas than you might have otherwise,” says Garson. “We just have to raise wages — not only for the sake of people getting the low wages, but if we don’t raise wages, we’re well on our way to the next debt crisis.” The Stanleys and Neumanns were first featured in Minimum Wages: The New Economy
Across the world — Greece, Spain, Brazil, Egypt — citizens are turning angrily to their governments to demand economic fair play and equality. But here in America, with few exceptions, the streets and airwaves remain relatively silent. In a country as rich and powerful as America, why is there so little outcry about the ever-increasing, deliberate divide between the very wealthy and everyone else? Media scholar Marty Kaplan points to a number of forces keeping these issues and affected citizens in the dark — especially our well-fed appetite for media distraction. An award-winning columnist and head of the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California, Kaplan also talks about the appropriate role of journalists as advocates for truth. Later on the show, acclaimed historian Gary May puts the recent Supreme Court decision gutting the Voting Rights Act into historical perspective. A specialist in American political, diplomatic and social history, May’s latest book is Bending Toward Justice: The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy.
Since the end of slavery in America, no workers have been more exploited than the men and women who bend to the earth in backbreaking labor, picking fruits, vegetables, and tobacco, and getting very little back in terms of wages or respect for their humanity. But their cause has a champion in Baldemar Velásquez. Velásquez was among hundreds of thousands of children who joined their migrant parents working long hours in the fields. Inspired by that early experience, he founded the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) in 1967. Velásquez joins Bill to talk about the ongoing David vs. Goliath struggles to ensure fairness for American farmworkers. Also on the program, author and gun industry analyst Tom Diaz explains how a lethal combination of self-defense laws and concealed carry laws — championed by the NRA and the gun industry — makes us more vulnerable to gun violence. He warns that the genie is out of the bottle and we should be gravely concerned about the unrelenting marketing of guns. Diaz’s latest book is The Last Gun: How Changes in the Gun Industry Are Killing Americans and What It Will Take to Stop It.
Bill Moyers and Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) meet to share experiences and revelations about the momentous March on Washington both attended 50 years ago. Their discussion takes them to the spot in front of the Lincoln Memorial where Lewis, Martin Luther King, Jr., Bayard Rustin, Roy Wilkins, and others famously spoke about freedom and justice, creating critical momentum for both the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. While there, Moyers and Lewis attract the attention of schoolchildren, and conduct a spontaneous living history lesson. The March on Washington is largely remembered for King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. The 23-year-old Lewis, newly named to lead the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was the youngest of the featured speakers, but among the most defiant. Now a 14-term congressman from Georgia, Lewis shares new insight into how the event unfolded — including last-minute conflicts over his own manuscript. He also discusses the continuing challenges to racial and economic equality, and his unwavering dedication to nonviolence and brotherly love as a means toward a more just end — even when facing inevitable violence and brutality. “To look out and see the best of America convinced me more than anything else that this is the product, this is the work of the movement,” Lewis tells Bill. “Sometimes you have to not just dream about what could be — you get out and push and you pull and you preach. And you create a climate and environment to get those in high places, to get men and women of good will in power to act.” Threading rarely-seen documentary footage into their conversation, Bill — who was deputy director of the newly-created Peace Corps at the time — also shares his own memories of the day. He concludes with an essay about how the goal of equal rights and opportunities for all Americans — so championed at the March on Washington — continues to elude us. “But for a few hours that day,” Bill say
Mark Leibovich covers Washington, D.C., as chief national correspondent for The New York Times Magazine. In his new book, This Town, he writes about the city’s bipartisan lust for power, cash and notoriety. It’s the story of how Washington became an occupied city; its hold on reality distorted by greed and ambition. Leibovich pulls no punches, names names, and reveals the movers, the shakers and the lucrative deals they make — all in the name of crony capitalism. Also this week, in an essay, Moyers says the parody and satire of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert pay Washington the disrespect it deserves, but in the end it’s the city’s predatory mercenaries who have the last laugh.
With the probability of American intervention, Syria is everywhere in the news. On this week’s Moyers & Company, Phil Donahue, filling in for Bill Moyers, speaks with National Public Radio Middle East correspondent Deborah Amos and historian and Vietnam veteran Andrew Bacevich about the possible repercussions of our actions in the Middle East. As he has done so often in recent years, Andrew Bacevich is asking the important questions about America’s role in the world and specifically why we should go into Syria. Is a military response justified and if we take action, where does it stop? A graduate of West Point and Vietnam veteran, he served for 23 years in the military before becoming a professor at Boston University. His new book, Breach of Trust, asks whether our reliance on a professional military rather than a citizen’s army has lured us into a morass of endless war — a trap that threatens not only our global reputation but democracy itself. Among its deadly side effects, the war in Syria has created a refugee crisis beyond that country’s borders — a “disgraceful humanitarian calamity” and “the great tragedy of this century,” according to the United Nations. Deborah Amos, a veteran National Public Radio correspondent, joins Donahue for a discussion about the human toll of the Syrian fighting, and the potential impact of millions of displaced people on the region.
The thrill of victory, the agony of defeat; the millions of dollars spent in the pursuit of power and celebrity — sports and politics have a lot in common. And although in a perfect world, athletes are supposed to put politics aside when they take to the field, in reality, the two forces are inextricably entwined. Look at the black power protests at the Summer Olympics in 1968, the terrorist tragedy at the Munich games in 1972, or the current controversy around next year’s Winter Olympics in Russia because of that nation’s virulent anti-gay policies. Witness demonstrations in Brazil against millions being spent on World Cup stadiums, or disputes here at home over taxpayer funding of new municipal arenas — not to mention the physical risks faced by athletes from steroid use and repetitive injuries. The NFL recently announced it would pay out $765 million to settle a lawsuit from thousands of former players suffering from concussions and related brain trauma. Dave Zirin, The Nation magazine’s first ever sports writer, joins Bill Moyers to discuss the collision of sports with politics and why it’s not only inevitable but significant and newsworthy. He’s been called the best sportswriter in the United States and also hosts Sirius XM Radio’s popular weekly broadcast, Edge of Sports. A prolific author, his books include Bad Sports: How Owners Are Ruining the Games We Love and this, his most recent, Game Over: How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down. Also on this week’s Moyers & Company, Bill Moyers says that in time, the White House, Congress and the punditry of the Beltway may ultimately be grateful to a public that weighed in on a potential military strike in Syria – that the collective common sense of everyday people became a force so powerful it could not be ignored.
This week marks both the fifth anniversary of the fiscal meltdown that almost tanked the world economy and the second anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, the movement that sparked heightened public awareness of income inequality. Yet the crisis is worse than ever – in the first three years of the recovery, 95 percent of the economic gains have gone only to the top one percent of Americans. And the share of working people in the U.S. who define themselves as lower class is at its highest level in four decades. More and more are fighting back. According to Robert Reich, Bill Clinton’s secretary of labor: “The core principle is that we want an economy that works for everyone, not just for a small elite. We want equal opportunity, not equality of outcome. We want to make sure that there’s upward mobility again, in our society and in our economy.” This week, Reich joins Moyers & Company to discuss a new documentary film, Inequality for All, opening next week in theaters across the country. Directed by Jacob Kornbluth, the film aims to be a game-changer in our national discussion of income inequality. Reich, who Time magazine called one of the best cabinet secretaries of the 20th century, stars in this dynamic, witty and entertaining documentary. A professor at the University of California Berkeley, Reich is the author of thirteen books, including The Work of Nations, which is available in 22 languages; Aftershock and Supercapitalism, which were best sellers; and his latest, Beyond Outrage: What Has Gone Wrong with Our Economy and our Democracy, and How to Fix It. He appears regularly on television and radio – you can hear him on public radio’s Marketplace – and blogs about politics and economics at RobertReich.org.
As of this moment Vladimir Putin’s government is holding in custody the Arctic Sunrise, the command ship of the environmental activist organization Greenpeace International. The ship was seized by armed members of the Russian Coast Guard last week after Greenpeace activists tried to board an offshore oil platform as a protest against drilling for fossil fuels in the fragile environment of the Arctic, where global warming has reduced the sea ice cover 40 percent since 1980. On this week’s broadcast Bill Moyers talked with the executive director of Greenpeace International, Kumi Naidoo, about the fate of the Arctic Sunrise and the charges of piracy brought against the crew of 30. Naidoo tells Bill, “If there’s injustice in the world, those of us that have the ability to witness it and to record it, document it and tell the world what is happening have a moral responsibility to do that. Then, of course, it’s left up to those that are receiving that knowledge to make the moral choice about whether they want to stand up against the injustice or observe it.” In an essay following the conversation, Moyers links Naidoo’s courage in speaking truth to power with an account of the recent visit by Pope Francis to Sardinia, the Mediterranean island known for its beautifully beaches and palatial homes owned by the richest of the rich. Sardinia is now blighted by widespread joblessness – 51 percent of its young people are out of work — and as the pope heard the stories of desperation and deprivation, he threw away his prepared speech and decried a global economic system “that does us so much harm.” The story leads Bill to conclude that unless we “dethrone our present system of financial capitalism that rewards those at the top” while everyone else is struggling, “it will consume us” and democracy will be finished.
This week on Moyers & Company in a rare television interview, Bill talks to visionary, author and farmer Wendell Berry to discuss a sensible, but no-compromise plan to save the Earth. We also examine the critical role of honey bees in our food supply and the threats they face in The Dance of the Honey Bee. And after the antics in Washington this week, Bill shares his views on the government shutdown. Wendell Berry, one of America’s most influential writers who has written more than 40 novels, books of poetry, short stories and essays, has become an outspoken advocate for revolution. He’s calling for immediate action to end industrial farming and return to the sustainable farming methods of years past. In his interview with Bill, Berry says: “People who own the world outright for profit will have to be stopped; by influence, by power, by us.” The short documentary Dance of the Honey Bee, narrated by Bill McKibben, takes a look at the determined, beautiful and vital role honey bees play in preserving life, as well as the threats bees face from a rapidly changing landscape. “Not only are we dependent on the honey bee for much of what we eat,” says Bill, “there is, of course, a grace and elegance they bring to the natural world that would diminish us all were they to disappear.” And this week’s government shutdown has consequences for all of us, costing an estimated $300 million each day that the government is closed for business. Many Americans have voiced their frustrations with the fallout from the shutdown on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter using the hash tag #DearCongress. Here, Bill Moyers shares his own frustrations, admonishing the Republican Party for holding the country hostage via an irrational “ransom list” of demands, while sabotaging democracy in the process.
While much of the government continued in shutdown mode this week, the Supreme Court was back in business starting off its new term with a controversial campaign finance case. This week, the court heard arguments in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, a case that could have a huge impact on the way money influences our democracy. McCutcheon challenges aggregate caps on how much individual donors can give to candidates and political parties. The current overall cap stands at $123,200 per donor for a two-year election cycle, but McCutcheon could raise that amount to more than $3.5 million. This week on Moyers & Company, Bill talks to Yale Law School election and constitutional law professor Heather Gerken who warns that McCutcheon has the potential to kill campaign finance reform, already reeling from the Citizens United decision that gave corporations, unions and the wealthy the opportunity to pour vast and often anonymous amounts of cash into political campaigns. Gerken tells Bill that if McCutcheon prevails, a small group of wealthy donors will have an immense influence on elections and government policy. “It’s not just a seat at the table on election day. It’s a seat at the table for the next four to six years when they’re governing,” Gerken says. Bill also speaks with historian Joyce Appleby whose new book, Shores of Knowledge, provides a captivating account of curiosity and how it has shaped our modern world.
After a 16-day shutdown, there’s finally a deal to raise the debt limit and reopen the government. But the can’s just been kicked down the road – another Congressional confrontation over spending cuts, entitlement programs and possible default will take place within a few months. Nonetheless, Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator of the Financial Times, believes that no matter the rhetoric and flamethrowing, the debt ceiling has to be raised because the alternatives are “simply, unimaginably horrible.” This week on Moyers & Company Wolf, who has been described as “the premier financial and economics writer in the world,” joins Bill Moyers for a discussion of the current crisis in Washington and its potentially lethal impact on the global economy. Wolf views the debt ceiling as the legislative equivalent of a nuclear bomb the US has aimed at itself, but its fallout could spread throughout the global economy. Bill also speaks with media scholar Sherry Turkle who says that the Internet and social media have changed not only what we do but also who we are. She’s a developmental psychologist who has studied the impact of computers on culture and society. A professor at MIT and director of the university’s Initiative on Technology and Self, Turkle has written several books, including her most recent, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other.
It’s the largest corporate fine in American history — $13 billion. That’s the amount JPMorgan Chase will reportedly pay to settle civil charges around its alleged manipulation of mortgage securities — a series of shady business deals that five years ago crippled homeowners and helped trigger the meltdown that threatened the world’s economy. And that’s just the tip of a REALLY big iceberg. What does the settlement tell us about the corruption of American capitalism? This week on Moyers & Company Bill Moyers poses that question to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gretchen Morgenson, a columnist for The New York Times. Bill also speaks to historian and author Peter Dreier who sees the current political crisis as fraught with possibility for progressives in America — and shares the reasons he continues to be optimistic, including dynamic grass-roots initiatives around the country and, believe it or not, the radical politics of Dr. Seuss.
A cornerstone of President Obama’s plan to create more American jobs is a new agreement called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), referred to by some as “NAFTA on steroids.” While negotiations are being carried out in secret and very little about the terms has been leaked, enough is known to worry about its possible effect on trade unions and our copyright and patent laws, not to mention environmental, health and safety regulations. This week on Moyers & Company, Bill discusses the TPP with two perceptive observers of the global economy. Yves Smith is an expert on investment banking who runs the Naked Capitalism blog, a go-to site for information and insight on the business and ethics of finance. Dean Baker is co-director of the progressive Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. Also on this week’s broadcast, a preview of Robert Greenwald’s new documentary, Unmanned: America’s Drone Wars. It’s release coincided with a first: victims of deadly drone attacks testified at a special briefing for members of Congress. In this week’s show we feature clips from the film, which shares testimony, stories and alarming news on the fatal impact of our drone strategy. And a Bill Moyers’ essay on Obamacare’s rocky rollout.
The money and power behind this week’s election results confirm what everyone knows: democracy is under siege. Corporations buy elections with virtually unlimited cash and big media conglomerates reap billions from political advertising. This week on Moyers & Company, Bill talks to John Nichols and Robert McChesney about America’s transformation into a dollarocracy and what we can do to get our political system back on track. Nichols is the Washington correspondent for The Nation and McChesney is a leading professor and scholar of communications and society at the University of Illinois. Their latest book is Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex Is Destroying America. Also this week, executive director of the National Lawyers Guild Heidi Boghosian joins Bill for a conversation on the illicit surveillance strategies used by the government and corporations to track us all. In her book Spying on Democracy: Government Surveillance, Corporate Power, and Public Resistance, she has collected stories of how public and private sector surveillance has turned innocent lives upside down and has been used to suppress journalists, whistleblowers and activists.
Between them, doctors Jill Stein and Margaret Flowers have been arrested nine times. In the face of injustice in America, rather than look the other way and stick to practicing medicine, they decided to do something about it. Stein and Flowers serve as president and secretary of health, respectively, for the Green Shadow Cabinet, a new organization formed to speak out against dysfunctional government and offer alternative policies. Each fights against political corruption and a host of grievances that that have led many people to cynicism and despair. This week on Moyers & Company, Bill Moyers speaks with Stein and Flowers about their personal journeys, what they have learned about our political system along the way and why they continue to fight the good fight. Also on the broadcast, Bill reports back on viewer response to our recent segments on drone attacks and government surveillance and previews the new film Following the Ninth, a documentary exploring the worldwide cultural and political influence of Beethoven’s masterpiece, the Ninth Symphony and its majestic “Ode to Joy.”
This week on Moyers & Company, author and scholar Henry Giroux explains how our political system has turned people into zombies – “people who are basically so caught up with surviving that they become like the walking dead — they lose their sense of agency, they lose their homes, they lose their jobs.” Also on the broadcast, Bill looks at Birth of the Living Dead, a mesmerizing new documentary that examines the singular time in which the classic 1968 film Night of the Living Dead was shot – when civil unrest and violence gave the nation nightmares and zombies were a metaphor for a troubled and distressed American public. Bill also reflects on his 2003 interview with Nobel-prize winning novelist Doris Lessing who passed away earlier this week in London at the age of 94.
As America remembers the victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting a year after a lone gunman shot and killed 26 people, including 20 children, Bill speaks with cultural historian and scholar Richard Slotkin about the role of guns and violence in our society. Slotkin is the author of an acclaimed trilogy — including Gunfighter Nation — on the myth of the frontier that has shaped our nation. In an essay following his conversation with Slotkin, Bill talks about the role of the NRA in the firearms debate and looks at a new public service announcement by Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, a gun control organization.
America’s prison population has exploded from 300,000 to more than two million today due to harsh sentencing policies and the 40-year-old war on drugs. This week, Bill speaks to civil rights lawyer and legal scholar Michelle Alexander about why we need to end our system of mass incarceration. The program also includes an excerpt from the film Susan, by Tessa Blake and Emma Hewitt. It tells the story of former California inmate Susan Burton who built an organization in Los Angeles devoted to helping formerly-incarcerated women rebuild their lives.
In just a few months, Pope Francis has proven to be one of the most outspoken pontiffs in recent history, especially when it comes to the widening gap between the rich and poor. This week on Moyers & Company Bill talks to author and historian Thomas Cahill to get his perspective on what the actions of Pope Francis could mean for the future of the church and why he has some conservatives up in arms. In a web extra, they continue their conversation on the nature of human progress and explore the ascendancy of Christopher Columbus, who Cahill describes as an “avatar of the new man” that emerges following the Black Death. Also on the broadcast, poet Philip Levine joins Bill to discuss why Americans have lost sight of those who really keep the country afloat – the hardworking men and women who toil, unsung and unknown, in our nation’s fields and factories. Levine himself worked on the assembly lines of Detroit’s auto plants, and his experience inspired several of his poems. Described by one critic as “a large, ironic Whitman of the industrial heartland,” Levine recently served as the nation’s poet laureate at the Library of Congress.
First it was Wisconsin. Now it’s North Carolina that is redefining the term “battleground state.” On one side: a right-wing government enacting laws that are changing the face of the state. On the other: citizen protesters who are fighting back against what they fear is a radical takeover. This crucible of conflict reflects how the battle for control of American politics is likely to be fought for the foreseeable future: not in Washington, DC, but state by state. This week on Moyers & Company, “State of Conflict: North Carolina” offers a documentary report from a state that votes both blue and red and sometimes purple (Romney carried it by a whisker in 2012, Obama by an eyelash in 2008). Now, however, Republicans hold the governor’s mansion and both houses of the legislature and they are steering North Carolina far to the right: slashing taxes on corporations and the wealthy, providing vouchers to private schools, cutting unemployment benefits, refusing to expand Medicaid and rolling back electoral reforms, including voting rights. At the heart of this conservative onslaught sits a businessman who is so wealthy and powerful that he is frequently described as the state’s own “Koch brother.” Art Pope, whose family fortune was made via a chain of discount stores, has poured tens of millions of dollars into a network of foundations and think tanks that advocate a wide range of conservative causes. Pope is also a major funder of conservative political candidates in the state. Pope’s most ardent opponent is the Reverend William Barber, head of the state chapter of the NAACP, who says the right-wing state government has produced “an avalanche of extremist policies that threaten health care, that threaten education [and] that threaten the poor.” Barber’s opposition to the legislature as well as the Pope alliance became a catalyst for the protest movement that became known around the country as “Moral Mondays.” “State of Confl
This week on Moyers & Company, Bill begins a new half-hour format with nothing short of the universe itself. In a multi-part series with the popular astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill explores a variety of topics, including the nature of an expanding, accelerating universe (and how it might end), the difference between “dark energy” and “dark matter,” the concept of God in cosmology and why science matters. “Science is an enterprise that should be cherished as an activity of the free human mind,” Tyson tells Bill. “Because it transforms who we are, how we live, and it gives us an understanding of our place in the universe.” Starting in March, Tyson will host a new, updated version of the hit PBS television series Cosmos, which made the late Carl Sagan a household name. This time the new series, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, comes courtesy of the National Geographic Channel and Fox TV.
A new poll by Pew Research has found that one-third of Americans do not believe in evolution, with Republicans far less likely to believe that humans evolved over time than Democrats. That may be why the teaching of evolution to children continues to be an often temper-flaming debate. In states like Texas, some public school students are opening their biology textbooks to find evolution described as “dogma” and an “unproved theory.” While astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson believes all individuals have a right to their own beliefs, he’s passionate about what should be taught in science class – science. “If you have a religious philosophy that is not based in objective realities that you then want to put in the science classroom, then I’m going stand there and say no, ‘I’m not going to allow you in the science classroom,’” Tyson tells Bill. In the second part of their conversation, Tyson and Bill discuss whether science and religion can ever be reconciled, explore the cosmic enigma known as dark matter and the possibilities of parallel universes. Neil deGrasse Tyson is host of the upcoming series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson unwittingly triggered a controversy in the blogosphere last week when he said this on our show: “If you have a religious philosophy that is not based in objective realities that you then want to put in the science classroom, then I’m going to stand there and say no, ‘I’m not going to allow you in the science classroom.’” This week on Moyers & Company, Bill weighs in on that debate with an essay on politicians and others who refuse to accept the reality of evolution and climate change. And in part three of their conversation, Bill and Tyson discuss why science literacy is important for the future of our democracy, economy and standing in the world: “Science literacy is an inoculation against charlatans who would exploit your ignorance of scientific law to then take your money from you or your opportunity from you.” And that literacy is at risk, Tyson concludes. Bill and Tyson also talk about American students’ poor performance on international math and science tests as well as the relationship between income inequality and education. Neil deGrasse Tyson is host of the upcoming series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey
This week on Moyers & Company, David Simon, journalist and creator of the TV series The Wire and Treme, talks with Bill about the crisis of capitalism in America. After President Barack Obama’s annual State of the Union address, it’s a reality check from someone who artfully uses television drama to report on the state of America from an entirely different perspective — the bottom up. “The horror show is we are going to be slaves to profit. Some of us are going to be higher on the pyramid and we’ll count ourselves lucky and many many more will be marginalized and destroyed,” Simon tells Moyers. He blames a “purchased” Congress for failing America’s citizens, leading many of them to give up on politics altogether.
After the State Department issued a long-awaited environmental impact statement on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline last week, environmentalists and those opposed to the 1,179-mile pipeline have intensified their push for the Obama administration to reject the project. This week, Bill Moyers talks with Bill McKibben, an activist who has dedicated his life to saving the planet from environmental collapse, about his hopes that Americans will collectively pressure Obama to stand up to big oil. “Most people understand that we’re in a serious fix,” McKibben tells Moyers, “There’s nothing you can do as individuals that will really slow down this juggernaut … You can say the same thing about the challenges faced by people in the civil rights or the abolition movement, or the gay rights movement or the women’s movement. In each case, a movement arose; if we can build a movement, then we have a chance.”
On Wednesday a federal jury found Ray Nagin, the former New Orleans mayor, guilty of bribery and fraud, in the latest example of corruption in politics and the power of the almighty dollar. This week on Moyers & Company, we feature two Americans fighting the good fight against greed and corruption. First, David Simon, former crime reporter and creator of the TV series The Wire and Treme, returns to talk with Bill about his belief that getting money out of politics is a major priority. Also, a special report on a two-week, 185-mile trek through the winter cold in New Hampshire, led last month by constitutional scholar and activist Lawrence Lessig, to raise awareness of the crippling problem of corruption in American politics.
Everyone knows about the military-industrial complex, which, in his farewell address, President Eisenhower warned had the potential to “endanger our liberties or democratic process” but have you heard of the “Deep State?” Mike Lofgren, a former GOP congressional staff member with the powerful House and Senate Budget Committees, joins Bill to talk about what he calls the Deep State, a hybrid of corporate America and the national security state, which is “out of control” and “unconstrained.” In it, Lofgren says, elected and unelected figures collude to protect and serve powerful vested interests. “It is … the red thread that runs through the history of the last three decades. It is how we had deregulation, financialization of the economy, the Wall Street bust, the erosion or our civil liberties and perpetual war,” Lofgren tells Bill. Lofgren says the Deep State’s heart lies in Washington, DC, but its tentacles reach out to Wall Street, which Lofgren describes as “the ultimate backstop to the whole operation,” Silicon Valley and over 400,000 contractors, private citizens who have top-secret security clearances. Like any other bureaucracy, it’s groupthink that drives the Deep State. In conjunction with this week’s show, Mike Lofgren has written an exclusive essay, “Anatomy of the Deep State.”
What do Cadillac-driving “welfare queens,” a “food stamp president” and the “lazy, dependent and entitled” 47 percent tell us about post-racial America? They’re all examples of a type of coded racism that this week’s guest, Ian Haney López, writes about in his new book, Dog Whistle Politics. Haney López is an expert in how racism has evolved in America since the civil rights era. Over the past 50 years, politicians have mastered the use of dog whistles – code words that turn Americans against each other while turning the country over to plutocrats. This political tactic, says Haney López, is “the dark magic” by which middle-class voters have been seduced to vote against their own economic interests. “It comes out of a desire to win votes. And in that sense… It’s racism as a strategy. It’s cold, it’s calculating, it’s considered,” Haney López tells Bill, “it’s the decision to achieve one’s own ends, here winning votes, by stirring racial animosity.” Ian Haney López, a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, is a senior fellow at the policy analysis and advocacy group, Demos.
This week on Moyers & Company, Bill continues his conversation with author and legal scholar Ian Haney López about dog whistle politics – code words that use race to turn Americans against each other. Politicians manipulate deep prejudice to rouse hostility against minorities and the government, according to Haney López, and summon support for policies that make economic inequality even worse. And it’s not just Republicans and the tea party who have used this “strategic racism” to win votes, but Democrats as well. “Democrats have understood, even as early as 1970, [that] race was gonna be an effective wedge issue against them. And when the Democrats responded they responded not by contesting that politics but instead by embracing it. And this is part of the story of dog whistle politics — Republicans shift right and the Democrats have tracked rightward, following them,” Haney López tells Moyers. The two also discuss dog whistling and the debate over food stamps, the presidency of Barack Obama and the rise of the tea party, as well as the origins of this election strategy. Haney López also tells Bill that he expects the racial provocations will evolve to target members of the Latino and Asian communities in the coming years.
This week, as the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee Dianne Feinstein publicly accused the CIA of spying on her committee’s computers, Bill talks with investigative reporter Julia Angwin, author of Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance. The book chronicles the indiscriminate tracking of our everyday lives — where government and business are stockpiling data about us at an unprecedented pace. Reporters are a prime target for Internet snooping, says Angwin, “Journalists are the canary in the coal mine. We’re the first ones to seriously feel the impact of total surveillance, which means we can’t protect our sources. But what happens next? What happens next is we’re not good watch dogs for democracy. And that’s a very worrisome situation.” Angwin and Moyers also discuss our exposure to fraud from online data mining; why mass data collection is not making us safer in the face of terrorism and why European privacy regulations are stronger than those in the US. Julia Angwin covered the business and technology beat at The Wall Street Journal for 13 years and is a Pulitzer Prize winner now working for the independent news organization ProPublica.
In the coming weeks, the Supreme Court is expected to issue another big decision on campaign finance, one that could further open the floodgates to unfettered and anonymous contributions, just as the Citizens United case did four years ago. This week Bill speaks with investigative journalists Kim Barker and Andy Kroll about the role of dark money — and the wealthy donors behind it — in this year’s midterm elections. Already, three times as much money has been raised for this year’s elections as four years ago, when the Citizens United decision was announced. “This is the era of the empowered ‘one percenter’. They’re taking action and they’re becoming the new, headline players in this political system,” Kroll tells Moyers. Kim Barker adds, “People want influence. It’s a question of whether we’re going to allow it to happen, especially if we’re going to allow it to happen and nobody even knows who the influencers are.” Barker is an investigative reporter with the independent, non-profit news organization ProPublica and Andy Kroll is a journalist in the Washington bureau of Mother Jones magazine. Bill Moyers is president of Schumann Media Center which supports independent journalism, including Andy Kroll’s work at Mother Jones.
Public education is becoming big business as bankers, hedge fund managers and private equity investors are entering what they consider to be an “emerging market.” As Rupert Murdoch put it after purchasing an education technology company, “When it comes to K through 12 education, we see a $500 billion sector in the US alone.” Education historian Diane Ravitch says the privatization of public education has to stop. As assistant secretary of education under President George H.W. Bush, she was an advocate of school choice and charter schools; under George W. Bush, she supported the No Child Left Behind initiative. But after careful investigation, she changed her mind, and has become, according to Salon, “the nation’s highest profile opponent” of charter-based education. On this week’s Moyers & Company, she tells Bill Moyers, ”I think what’s at stake is the future of American public education. I believe it is one of the foundation stones of our democracy: So an attack on public education is an attack on democracy.” Diane Ravitch is America’s preeminent historian of public education. Her newest book is Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools.
Did you know the federal minimum wage for millions of restaurant workers is $2.13 an hour? Advocate Saru Jayaraman says that’s not only unfair but unsafe.
Historian Harvey J. Kaye talks to Bill about why FDR’s “Four Freedoms” — freedom from fear and want and freedom of speech and religion — are more important now than ever.
Economist Paul Krugman explains how the United States is becoming an oligarchy – the very system our founders revolted against.
Two leaders of the climate change divestment campaign are urging institutions to break ties with the fossil fuel industry.
Democracy loses if the Internet’s sold to the highest bidder — and that may be exactly what’s about to happen.
A geneticist who has made science exciting to millions of TV viewers warns that we’re burning up the planet, but there’s still a chance we can make it.
In part two of his interview, scientist David Suzuki says there’s still hope for the planet, despite the obstruction and greed of politicians and corporations.
This week Bill speaks with Ta-Nehisi Coates, a senior editor for The Atlantic about his cover story on why America needs to reconcile with its racist past.
The Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz on why America’s future prosperity depends on tax reform today.
In part two of his interview, economist Joseph E. Stiglitz says corporate tax abuse has helped make America unequal and undemocratic. But the Nobel Prize-winner has a plan to change that.
Our banks are larger than before the 2008 crash and they’re still living dangerously, economist Anat Admati tells Bill.
While armchair warriors in Washington cry “back to Iraq,” former combat veteran and military historian Andrew Bacevich says no way.
This week Bill speaks with investigative journalist Charles Lewis about why facts, logic and reason are often missing in the rush to war.
This week on Moyers & Company, organized people versus organized money: the battle continues.
Following several high-profile, controversial decisions, Bill speaks to NY Times columnist Linda Greenhouse and Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick about the agenda of the Roberts court.
With new state laws and Supreme Court rulings, the battle over women’s reproductive rights is being fought more fiercely than ever. Roe v. Wade itself may be in peril. Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards joins Bill in the studio this week.
The president of the American Enterprise Institute says free enterprise is good for the poor – and good for the soul.
John Lithgow joins Bill to talk about the challenges and triumphs of playing Shakespeare’s greatest role, and why we are so drawn to the tale of this flawed, contradictory leader at this moment.
Revisit an episode from over 30 years ago, in which Bill joined the legendary writer on her return to the small town where she grew up.
Bill Moyers revisits a 1988 documentary in which he and Maya Angelou attended a conference held in the Hill Country of central Texas.
The Massachusetts senator talks to Bill about taking on the entrenched political and Wall Street interests that have rigged the game against the rest of us.
Christian and climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe talks to Bill about ending the gridlock between politics, science and faith.
Kelsey Juliana, an 18-year-old activist, is fighting climate change in the courts and walking across the country to spread the word on global warming.
Two experts on American foreign policy talk to Bill about our deepening engagement in the fight against jihadists in Iraq and Syria.
A veteran bank regulator lays bare how Washington and Wall Street are joined in a culture of corruption.
Reporter Bob Herbert on his new book, Losing Our Way, an intimate and heartrending portrait of America in economic despair.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Marilynne Robinson talks to Bill about what the title character of her new book Lila, says about the state of democracy in America.
Two experts on American elections talk to Bill about the plot to keep citizens away from the ballot box.
The only independent member of the US Senate tells Bill big money’s purchase of political power is a grave threat, and shares his plan to put government back in voters’ control.
On Election Day, a small California city took on one of the biggest corporations in America… and declared victory.
Two college professors leave academia for the rough-and-tumble world of electoral politics. What did they learn?
Government has become a clearinghouse for corporations and plutocrats with deep pockets to buy the politicians who grease the wheels for lucrative contracts and easy regulation. It’s all pay for play, and look the other way. According to the watchdog Sunlight Foundation, from 2007 to 2012, 200 corporations spent almost $6 billion in Washington on lobbying and campaign contributions. And they received more than $4 trillion in government contracts and other forms of assistance. Now that the midterm elections are over, it’s payback time, with the newly elected Congress ready to deliver to those who invested well in their chosen candidates. This week, Lawrence Lessig and Zephyr Teachout return to talk about the corrupting influence of money in politics — a subject both have studied as scholars and are fighting against as reformers. (Watch part one of Bill’s conversation with Lessig and Teachout) For the 2014 midterm elections, Lessig started the Mayday SuperPac, raising millions for congressional candidates who vowed to fight for campaign finance reform. All but two of them lost – but the fight continues. He tells Bill, “When we look at the systematic way in which our representatives are responsive not to the people alone, but increasingly to the funders exclusively, then that is an obvious corruption… This is not a Democratic issue. This is not a Republican issue. This is an American issue.” Zephyr Teachout ran for governor of New York this year, trying to rouse the public against corruption in state government and received more than a third of the vote in the Democratic primary. She has written the book Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United. “I think we should forget the perfect resume and instead engage people who come from all different backgrounds, including the arts, and get them to run for office. Because this is what the kids in Hong Kong are fighting for. And we have to take the opportunity
Some people say inequality doesn’t matter. They are wrong. All we have to do to see its effects is to realize that all across America millions of people of ordinary means can’t afford decent housing. As wealthy investors and buyers drive up real estate values, the middle class is being squeezed further and the working poor are being shoved deeper into squalor — in places as disparate as Silicon Valley and New York City. This week Bill points to the changing skyline of Manhattan as the physical embodiment of how money and power impact the lives and neighborhoods of every day people. Soaring towers being built at the south end of Central Park, climbing higher than ever with apartments selling from $30 million to $90 million, are beginning to block the light on the park below. Many of the apartments are being sold at those sky high prices to the international super rich, many of whom will only live in Manhattan part-time – if at all — and often pay little or no city income or property taxes, thanks to the political clout of real estate developers. “The real estate industry here in New York City is like the oil industry in Texas,” affordable housing advocate Jaron Benjamin says, “They outspend everybody… They often have a much better relationship with elected officials than everyday New Yorkers do.” Meanwhile, fewer and fewer middle and working class people can afford to live in New York City. As Benjamin puts it, “Forget about the Statue of Liberty. Forget about Ellis Island. Forget about the idea of everybody being welcome here in New York City. This will be a city only for rich people.”
In the wake of decisions by grand juries in both Missouri and New York’s Staten Island not to indict white police officers in the deaths of unarmed African-Americans, this week we present an encore broadcast of Bill’s conversation earlier this year with journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates. First telecast in May 2014, Coates had just written a cover story in The Atlantic magazine, provocatively titled “The Case for Reparations.” It urged that we begin a national dialogue on whether the United States should compensate African-Americans not only as recognition of slavery’s “ancient brutality” — as President Lyndon Johnson called it – but also as acknowledgement of all the prejudice and discrimination that have followed in a direct line from this, our original sin. His words are remarkably prescient in light of recent events. As Coates explained to Moyers, “I am not asking you, as a white person, to see yourself as an enslaver. I’m asking you as an American to see all of the freedoms that you enjoy and see how they are rooted in things that the country you belong to condoned or actively participated in in the past. And that covers everything from enslavement to the era of lynching, when we effectively decided that we weren’t going to afford African-Americans the same level of protection of the law… “There are plenty of African-Americans in this country — and I would say that this goes right up to the White House — who are not by any means poor, but are very much afflicted by white supremacy.” Reparations, Coates said, are “what the United States, first of all, really owes African-Americans, but not far behind that, what it owes itself, because this is really about our health as a country… I firmly believe that reparation is a chance to be pioneers. We say we set all these examples about liberty and freedom and democracy and all that great stuff. Well, here’s an opportunity for us to live that out.”
Negotiators from the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) are in Washington this week for a new round of talks which they hope will lead them closer to agreement on the trade deal. President Obama has called passage of TPP a “high priority.” This week, Bill speaks with outspoken veteran journalist John R. MacArthur, president and publisher of Harper’s Magazine, about the problems with TPP, which is being negotiated in secret, behind closed doors. MacArthur says that the “free trade” agreement will take jobs away from Americans: “I guarantee you, this is a way to send more jobs [abroad], particularly to Vietnam and Malaysia.” Obama’s commitment to trade is just another example of his indebtedness to Wall Street for massive campaign contributions. Hillary Clinton, who MacArthur describes as to the right of Americans’ political beliefs, may be scaring off progressives looking to run in 2016 as she is “very much in harmony” with Wall Street. “There are a lot of people who would make good candidates, but they’re intimidated by the Clinton fundraising machine.”
We’ve just watched the Senate and the House — aided and abetted by President Obama — pay off financial interests with provisions in the new spending bill that expand the amount of campaign cash wealthy donors can give, and let banks off the hook for gambling with customer (and taxpayer) money. What happened in Washington over the past several days sounds strikingly familiar to the First Gilded Age more than a century ago, when senators and representatives were owned by Wall Street and big business. Then, as now, those who footed the bill for political campaigns were richly rewarded with favorable laws. Bill’s guest this week, historian Steve Fraser, says what was different about the First Gilded Age was that people rose in rebellion against the powers that be. Today we do not see “that enormous resistance,” but he concludes, “people are increasingly fed up… their voices are not being heard. And I think that can only go on for so long without there being more and more outbreaks of what used to be called class struggle, class warfare.” Steve Fraser is a writer, editor and scholar of American history. Among his books are Every Man a Speculator, Wall Street: America’s Dream Palace and Labor Will Rule. His latest, The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power, will be published early next year.
American Indians Confront “Savage Anxieties” Earlier this month, as part of the $585 billion defense bill for 2015, Congress passed a measure that would give lands sacred to American Indians in Arizona to a foreign company. The deal gives the Australian-English mining firm Rio Tinto 2,400 acres of the Tonto National Forest in exchange for several other parcels so it can mine a massive copper deposit. This week, Bill speaks with Robert A. Williams Jr., a professor specializing in American Indian law, about how deals such as the one with Rio Tinto are a part of American Indian’s tragic history of dispossession. “Very much like African-Americans, the history of America is taking away resources, whether it’s labor or whether it’s land from one racial group to give them to the dominate racial group,” Williams, who is of Lumbee Indian heritage, says. He adds that the Arizona land set to become the “largest copper mine in the world” is one of the most sacred places of the San Carlos Apache Tribe. “These are folks that have been fighting the federal government over their land rights and cultural rights for a long time,” adding, “and here you have this little, small tribe of Apaches, one of the poorest tribes… trying to stop this.”
The very agencies created to protect our environment have been hijacked by the polluting industries they were meant to regulate. It may just turn out that the judicial system, our children and their children will save us from ourselves. The new legal framework for this crusade against global warming is called atmospheric trust litigation. It takes the fate of the Earth into the courts, arguing that the planet’s atmosphere – its air, water, land, plants and animals — are the responsibility of government, held in its trust to insure the survival of all generations to come. It’s the strategy being used by Bill’s recent guest, Kelsey Juliana, a co-plaintiff in a major lawsuit spearheaded by Our Children’s Trust, that could force the state of Oregon to take a more aggressive stance against the carbon emissions. It’s the brainchild of Mary Christina Wood, a legal scholar who wrote the book, Nature’s Trust, tracing this public trust doctrine all the way back to ancient Rome. Wood tells Bill: “If this nation relies on a stable climate system, and the very habitability of this nation and all of the liberties of young people and their survival interests are at stake, the courts need to force the agencies and the legislatures to simply do their job.”
