Bill Moyers | The Great American Class War: Plutocracy vs. Democracy
By Bill Moyers, TomDispatch | Speech Excerpt
Thursday, 12 December 2013
I met Supreme Court Justice William Brennan in 1987 when I was creating a series for public television called In Search of the Constitution, celebrating the bicentennial of our founding document. By then, he had served on the court longer than any of his colleagues and had written close to 500 majority opinions, many of them addressing fundamental questions of equality, voting rights, school segregation, and -- in New York Times v. Sullivan in particular -- the defense of a free press. Read more ...
Henry A. Giroux | The Spectacle of Illiteracy and the Crisis of Democracy
Henry Giroux on the "School to Prison Pipeline"
Bill Moyers | Henry Giroux: Zombie Politics and Casino Capitalism
With Today’s Nuclear Option, the Senate Inches Closer to Democracy
Following the Ninth
How a Shadowy Network of Corporate Front Groups Distorts the Marketplace of Ideas
November Days of Drums
How Big Money and Big Media Undermine Democracy
Rip-off: High Out-of-Pocket Social Costs are a Stealth Tax on the Middle Class and the Poor
Real-Life Hunger Is No Game
Freedom of Speech in the Digital Age
America's Drone Wars
By Staff, Moyers & Company | Video Report
Thursday, 07 November 2013
The use of drones has intensified under President Obama's leadership as the number of troops on the ground in Afghanistan and the Pakistani tribal areas has been scaled back. But the drones often kill innocent civilians, including children. That is the subject of Robert Greenwald's new documentary, Unmanned: America's Drone Wars. Here, we look at clips from the film, which shares testimony, stories and alarming news on the fatal impact of our drone strategy. Read more ...
Dark Money’s New Frontier: State Judicial Elections
Bill Moyers: Yves Smith and Dean Baker on Secrets in Trade
Bill Moyers: Obamacare - The Right Wing's Alamo
By Bill Moyers, Moyers & Company | Video
Monday, 04 November 2013
As Republican members of Congress demand apologies and administration officials dutifully offer up mea culpas for the botched Obamacare rollout, Bill wonders, wouldn’t it be fair to expect just a morsel of apology from the right as well? Read more ...
Hurricane Sandy One Year Later: Lessons Learned and Unlearned
The Great American Ripoff: The High Cost of Low Taxes
An Oasis in a Food Desert
Why JPMorgan May Be Getting Off Easy
Peter Dreier on a New Generation of Activists
Historian Peter Dreier shares why he's optimistic about America's future, including dynamic grass-roots initiatives around the country and, believe it or not, the radical politics of Dr. Seuss. Read more...
Politicians' Extortion Racket?
By Karin Kamp, Moyers & Company | Op-Ed
Thursday, 24 October 2013
There are two sides to the story of special interest money in Washington, according to an op-ed today in The New York Times by Peter Schweizer, a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution. While the traditional narrative is that politicians are corrupted by wealthy interests, Schweizer says we may be getting it wrong. Read more ...
Will Every State Eventually Expand Medicaid?
By John Light, Moyers & Company | Op-Ed
Thursday, 24 October 2013
While red state Republicans rail against Obamacare, the question of whether their poor constituents are eventually covered under the law’s Medicaid expansion may ultimately come down to state budget realities. Read more ...
Healthcare.gov Debacle: Spare Some Blame for Bush and Clinton
By Joshua Holland, Moyers & Company | Op-Ed
Thursday, 24 October 2013
If the problem-plagued rollout of healthcare.gov is any indication, 25 years of bipartisan efforts to downsize the federal government and turn a broad swath of what was the public sector over to private contractors haven’t yielded the awesome efficiencies the “reinventing government” crowd promised us. What a shocker. Read more ....
Bill Moyers: Martin Wolf on the Debt Ceiling Circus
By Bill Moyers, Moyers & Company | Video Interview
Monday, 21 October 2013
This week, Congress approved an 11th-hour deal to raise the debt ceiling, which threatened to push the global economy over the edge, but instead of resolving the debt crisis lawmakers simply delayed it. Bill speaks to Financial Times chief economics commentator, Martin Wolf, who says the US debt ceiling is "the legislative equivalent of a nuclear bomb aimed by the US at itself." Read more ...
The Right's Closed Information Loop May Set Up the Next Shut Down
By Joshua Holland, Moyers & Company | Op-Ed
Saturday, 19 October 2013
It’s impossible to say whether we’ll face another crisis of governance in three months, when the stopgap budget resolution passed on Wednesday expires, but it’s clear that the 40 or 50 hardcore, tea party-backed members of Congress who precipitated the shutdown want another crack at it. Read more ...
Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus - Campaign Cash
By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, Moyers & Company | Opinion
Friday, 18 October 2013
If you want to see how grossly money can distort democracy, just go to the state of Virginia, where there are no limits on how big a check can be written for statewide office. Read more ...
Ignore the Spin: This Debt Ceiling Crisis Is Not Politics as Usual
By John Light, Moyers & Company | Op-Ed
Thursday, 10 October 2013
Never before has a minority party linked controversial legislative demands with a threat to shut down the government or imperil the global economy. But House Republicans would have you believe otherwise. Read more ...
Bill Moyers: On the Sabotage of Democracy
By Bill Moyers, Moyers & Company | Video
Tuesday, 08 October 2013
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 thoughts on the shutdown, and the resulting sabotage of democracy.
The IRS Scandal That Wasn't
In reality, this is a story about how bureaucratic bungling was turned into scandal by right wing politicians desperate to spin gold from straw. But their staged controversy has distracted from a real Washington scandal, our inability to rein in the outrageous amounts of money used by the rich and powerful to secretly broker elections and buy our government.
Pro Football's Unsportsmanlike Conduct
Of the 31 owners of NFL teams, seventeen - more than half - are billionaires. Many boast of being self-made, in the image of Horatio Alger, but are now ensconced in luxury skyboxes far above the proletarians whose own dreams of glory ride vicariously on the grunts and groans of bulky but agile gladiators only one play away from a career-ending collision with the laws of physics. Read more...
Bill Moyers: Let Us Now Praise Common Sense
By Bill Moyers, Moyers & Company | Video
Tuesday, 17 September 2013
On this week’s Moyers & Company, Bill Moyers says that 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. Read more...
In Los Angeles, Labor Redefines Itself
By Michael Winship, Moyers & Company | Op-Ed
Wednesday, 11 September 2013
“It’s time to turn America right side up!” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka exhorted those in attendance at the labor alliance’s quadrennial convention in Los Angeles on Monday. Time, he said in his keynote address, to change the ratio of power, to put the 99 percent in charge rather than let the richest one percent dominate government, politics and society. Read more ...
Marshall Ganz on Making Social Movements Matter
By Bill Moyers, Moyers & Company | Video Interview
Monday, 19 August 2013
Bill's guest, veteran activist and organizer Marshall Ganz, joins Bill to discuss the power of social movements to effect meaningful social change. A social movement legend who dropped out of Harvard to volunteer during Mississippi's Freedom Summer of 1964, Ganz then joined forces with Cesar Chavez of the United Farmworkers, protecting workers who picked crops for pennies in California. 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. Read more ...
Cash and Congress: The Tie That Binds
By Michael Winship, Moyers & Company | Op-Ed
Sunday, 18 August 2013
But despite what you’ve heard, the spirit of bipartisanship in Washington is not dead. Simply look past the vitriol, bombast and gridlock, then listen for the ka-ching of the nearest cash register, made flesh by friendly lobbyists and special interests. Their fat wallets and deep pockets bring together Democrats and Republicans like no one else in a collegial spirit of kumbaya as they dive for dollars in exchange for their votes and influence. Read more ...
Our Growing Racial Wealth Gap
By John Light, Moyers & Company | News Analysis
Wednesday, 14 August 2013
The vast chasm between the richest one percent of Americans and everyone else continues to widen, and researchers have found that when you factor race into the equation, the economic gap is even more pronounced. Read more ...
ALECs Attempts to Thwart Obamacare
By Lauren Feeney, Moyers & Company | Interview
Wednesday, 14 August 2013
As part of our ongoing focus on the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, we checked in with health insurance executive turned industry whistleblower Wendell Potter to learn about ALEC’s efforts to influence the health care debate and undermine The Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare). Read more ...
Taming Capitalism Run Wild
By Bill Moyers, Moyers & Company | Video Interview
Monday, 12 August 2013
Modern American capitalism is a story of continued inequality and hardship. Even a modest increase in the minimum wage 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. Read more ...
Can the Federal Election Commission Be Saved?
By Matea Gold and Michael Winship, Moyers & Company | Radio Report
Friday, 09 August 2013
Reviews of the effectiveness of Federal Election Commission - mandated by Congress back in 1975 to regulate campaign finance - have never been stellar, but lately the word most commonly used to describe it is “dysfunctional.” Listen to the radio report ...
The Wall Street Ties of Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner
By Zaid Jilani, Moyers & Company | Report
Tuesday, 06 August 2013
Larry Summers is under no legal requirement to disclose his most recent payments from corporations until he is officially nominated, and if he’s nominated, he’ll most likely be confirmed. Read more...
The Faces of America's Hungry
By Bill Moyers, Moyers & Company | Video Interview
Monday, 05 August 2013
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. Debates on how to address hunger – in both Congress and the media — are filled with tired clichés about freeloaders undeserving of government help, living large at the expense of honest, hardworking taxpayers. But the documentary A Place at the Table paints a truer picture of America’s poor. Watch the Video ...
Ken Cook on Improving the Chemical Safety Improvement Act
By Theresa Riley, Moyers & Company | Interview
Sunday, 04 August 2013
The Chemical Safety Improvement Act, co-sponsored by Senators Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) and David Vitter (R-LA), was introduced earlier this year, shortly before Sen. Lautenberg passed away on June 5, 2013. Read more ...
"We Can't Survive on $7.25"
By Lauren Feeney, Moyers & Company | Video
Thursday, 01 August 2013
Fast food workers in seven U.S. cities are walking off the job this week in what organizers say is the largest strike in the industry’s history. The wave of protests began Monday in New York City, where workers earning as little as the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour - in a town where the average rent is over $3,000 a month - demanded $15 per hour and the right to organize. Watch the Video ...
The Minimum Wage Doesn't Apply to Everyone
By John Light, Moyers & Company | Op-Ed
Tuesday, 30 July 2013
This week marked the four-year anniversary of the last time Congress increased the minimum wage - from $5.15 in 2007 to $7.25 in 2009. Groups demonstrated across the country, demanding increases at both the state and federal level. Read more ...
Congress Fiddles While the Western States Burn
By Michael Winship, Moyers & Company | Report
Monday, 29 July 2013
In the weeks and months immediately following 9/11, one of the most touching responses in my neighborhood, not far Ground Zero, was the overwhelming support of police and fire departments from around the country. Read more ...
John Lewis Marches On
By Bill Moyers, Moyers & Company | Video Report
Friday, 26 July 2013
I’m writing to let you know of one of the most important and engaging broadcasts we’ve done in this series. Fifty years ago on August 28, 1963, more than a quarter-million people descended on the nation’s capital in a peaceful petition for “jobs and freedoms” that became the historic March on Washington. Read more ...
Mr. President, Have Pity on the Working Man
By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, Moyers & Company | Op-Ed
Monday, 22 July 2013
And you thought the government didn’t have a jobs program. It does. The problem is that the pay and benefits are lousy, and in many cases the working conditions ain’t so great either. Read more ...
Kristi Jacobson and Mariana Chilton on How Hunger Hurts Everyone
By Bill Moyers, Moyers & Company | Video
Monday, 01 July 2013
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. Watch the Video ...
Guns Lost, Stolen or Strayed
By Michael Winship, Moyers & Company | Op-Ed
Saturday, 29 June 2013
Back in January, a month after the Newtown school slayings and just a few days before his second inauguration, Barack Obama announced he would “put everything I’ve got” into the fight against gun violence. Read more ...
David Gregory, Glenn Greenwald and the First Amendment
By John Light, Moyers & Company | Op-Ed
Friday, 28 June 2013
David Gregory ignited further controversy on Meet the Press this weekend when he asked Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who first broke the story of Edward Snowden’s leaked NSA documents, this question: "To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden, even in his current movements, why shouldn’t you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?" Read more ...
Shooting It All in Las Vegas
By Michael Winship, Moyers & Company | Op-Ed
Tuesday, 25 June 2013
I've just flown back from Vegas, and boy, are my arms tired. And brain boggled. After all these years, it was my first visit, and although I've been to Reno and Tahoe and even the casinos of Winnemucca, Nevada - "The Crossroads of the West" - nothing prepared me for the splendor, squalor, sleaze and squander of the ultimate American pleasure dome. Read more ...
Denying a Head Start in Washington State
By Bill Moyers, Moyers & Company | Op-Ed
Thursday, 06 June 2013
To get a sense of just how foolish and shortsighted the $85 billion across-the-board sequester cuts are you don’t have to look any further than Head Start. The federal government’s only pre-K program, Head Start provides comprehensive, high-quality early education and support services to children and their families living in poverty. Read more ...
Good Consumers, Bad Citizens
By Michael Winship, Moyers & Company | Op-Ed
Thursday, 30 May 2013
A few days ago, I was listening to a radio talk show discussion of the bill passed on May 7 by the New York City Council, requiring some businesses to provide paid sick leave to employees. The first caller was indignant. “This bill is anti-consumer!” he bellowed because, he insisted, it would raise prices. I thought, no, this bill is pro-citizen, helping out people, many of them in extremis - and just when did we stop being citizens and become merely consumers? Read more ...
Why Tim DeChristopher Went to Prison for His Protest
By Bill Moyers, Moyers & Company | Interview and Video
Saturday, 25 May 2013
Only weeks after his release from prison, climate activist Tim DeChristopher talks about the necessity of civil disobedience in the fight for environmental justice. Read more ...
Enabling Greed Makes US Sick
By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, Moyers & Co. | News Analysis
Tuesday, 21 May 2013
At the end of a week that reminds us to be ever vigilant about the dangers of government overreaching its authority, whether by the long arm of the IRS or the Justice Department, we should pause to think about another threat — from too much private power obnoxiously intruding into public life. Read more ...
Don't Shoot - Organize!
By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, Moyers & Company | Op-Ed
Saturday, 11 May 2013
We were struck this week by one response to our broadcast last week on gun violence and the Newtown school killings. Read more ...
Sandy Hook Promise: There Will Be Change
By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, Moyers & Company | Op-Ed
Saturday, 04 May 2013
This week, we spent time with Francine and David Wheeler, parents of six-year-old Ben Wheeler, one of the 20 children and six educators shot and killed at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Read more ...
The Worst Congress Money Can Buy
By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, Moyers & Company | Op-Ed
Saturday, 27 April 2013
If you want to see why the public approval rating of Congress is down in the sub-arctic range — an icy 15 percent by last count — all you have to do is take a quick look at how the House and Senate pay worship at the altar of corporations, banks and other special interests at the expense of public aspirations and need. Read more ...
Sandra Steingraber's War on Toxic Trespassers
Biologist, mother and activist Sandra Steingraber joins Bill to talk about the need to build awareness about toxins that contaminate our air, water and food — and threaten our children’s health. Read more ...
The Boston Manhunt as a "Political" Event
Columnist Glenn Greenwald describes how, in the wake of the Boston bombings, people formed opinions about the world and government based on little information. Read more ...
Dance of the Honey Bee
Bill presents and introduces the short documentary "Dance of the Honey Bee." Read more ...
Sherman Alexie on Living Outside Cultural Borders
Born on a Native American reservation, Sherman 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. Read more ...
Dr. King’s "Two Americas" Truer Now than Ever
You may think you know about Martin Luther King, Jr., but there is much about the man and his message we have conveniently forgotten. He was a prophet, like Amos, Isaiah and Jeremiah of old, calling kings and plutocrats to account — speaking truth to power. Read more ...
Homeless in High Tech's Shadow
In California’s Silicon Valley, Facebook, Google and Apple have minted hundreds of new tech millionaires. But not far away, the homeless are building tent cities along a creek in the city of San Jose. Read more ...
Economist Richard Wolff Answers Questions
In Bill’s first interview with economist and professor Richard Wolff, he asked viewers to submit questions for Wolff to answer. We received hundreds, some of which the professor tackled on this week’s Moyers & Company. Read more ...
Bill Moyers: The Hypocrisy of "Justice for All"
Bill reports 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. Turns out true justice — not just the word we recite from the Pledge of Allegiance — is still unaffordable for those who need it most. Read more ...
Watergate's Lessons, Washed Away
How Worker-Owned Companies Work
The Death Penalty's Fatal Flaws
Robert Reich on Lessons Learned From Watergate
Alex Steffen on Carbon-Zero Cities
Covert Drone Warfare, By the Numbers
Jack Lew, Citigroup and the Ugland Truth
Susan Jacoby on Secularism and Free Thinking
Zack Kopplin on Keeping Creationism Out of Public Classrooms
Saru Jayaraman on Justice for Restaurant Workers
The Revolving Door Spins from Sea to Shining Sea
Richard Wolff on Fighting for Economic Justice and Fair Wages
POGO Sticks It to the SEC
Vietnam and America's "Wandering Ghosts"
Nick Turse Describes the Real Vietnam War
The Hubris of the Drones
By the standards of slaughter in Vietnam, the deaths caused by drones are hardly a bleep on the consciousness of official Washington. But we have to wonder if each innocent killed — a young boy gathering wood at dawn, unsuspecting of his imminent annihilation; a student who picked up the wrong hitchhikers; that tribal elder arguing against fanatics — doesn’t give rise to second thoughts by those judges who prematurely handed our president the Nobel Prize for Peace. Read more ...
Barack Obama, Drone Ranger
Martín Espada's Poem for Howard Zinn
Martín Espada reads the poem he wrote to honor his good friend, historian and activist Howard Zinn, whom Espada calls “the most decent, most generous human being I have ever known.” Zinn died in January, 2010. The poem is entitled “Castles for the Laborers and Ballgames on the Radio.” Watch the Video ...
US Rep. Peter Welch on Amgen’s Sweet Senate Deal
A recent article in The New York Times reported on a cost-control exception provided to Amgen, the world’s largest biotechnology firm. Watch the Video ...
Foul Play in the Senate
Larry Cohen on Eliminating Silent Filibusters
Corporate Party Favors at the Inaugural Shindig
Paul Krugman Explains the Keys to Our Recovery
Moyers: On Democracy
Corporate Gold on a Fiscal Cliff
In economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman’s book, End This Depression Now!, there’s a chapter titled “The Second Gilded Age” in which he describes the extraordinary rise in wealth and power of the very rich during this era of unregulated greed. Since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, the top one percent of Americans have seen their incomes increase by 275 percent. After accounting for inflation, the typical hourly wage for a worker has increased just $1.23. Read more...
The Recent Unpleasantness at FreedomWorks
As Saturday Night Live’s Stefon would say, this Washington tale has everything: accusations hurled and counter-hurled, handguns, multimillion dollar payoffs — just what we need to briefly distract us as the parties play chicken up on Capitol Hill’s fiscal cliff. Read more ...
Bill Moyers: Remember the Victims, Reject the Violence
Washington's Revolving Door: As Old as Lincoln
Washington's Revolving Door Is Hazardous to Our Health
Bill Moyers: The Truth Behind Grover Norquist's Pledge
A Look at the Numbers Behind "Obamacare"
When the Supreme Court handed down its decision on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) last June 28, a handful of conservative governors were quick to declare that their states would opt out of the Medicaid expansion program. Although Obamacare will have a hefty price tag, most of the burden will be carried by the federal government. Read more ...
Inside the Invisible World of Domestic Work: An Interview With Ai-jen Poo
Domestic workers - the nannies, housekeepers, and home health aides who care for our young children and elderly parents — have traditionally been excluded from the most basic protections, like minimum wage. Working behind closed doors in private homes, they are vulnerable to abuse and unable to organize. Read more ...
ALEC Loses Ground in Election
The United States of ALEC
By Bill Moyers, Moyers & Company | Video
Monday 3 December 2012
Welcome, to a story that's been unfolding for more than 30 years but has gone largely untold. That's the way the central characters wanted it. They were smart and understood something very important: that they might more easily get what they wanted from state capitals than from Washington, DC. So they started putting their money in places like Raleigh, North Carolina; Nashville, Tennessee; Phoenix, Arizona; and Madison, Wisconsin. That's because what happens in our state legislatures directly affects our taxes, schools, roads, the quality of our air and water - even our right to vote. Politicians and lobbyists at the core of this clever enterprise figured out how to pull it off in an organized, camouflaged way -- covering their tracks while they put one over on an unsuspecting public. This is the story of how and why it worked. Read More ...
Journalist Naomi Klein on Capitalism and Climate Change
By Bill Moyers, Moyers & Company | Video
Monday 19 November 2012
Climate change and Hurricane Sandy brought Naomi Klein to town, too. You may know her as the author of "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism." Readers of two influential magazines to put Naomi Klein high on the list of the 100 leading public thinkers in the world. She is now reporting for a new book and documentary on how climate change can spur political and economic transformation. She also has joined with the environmental writer and activist Bill McKibben in a campaign launched this week called "Do the Math." Read more ...
Embrace the Fiscal Cliff
Watch out for the coming hysteria on the so-called “fiscal cliff.” In the post-election commentary, you will hear numerous voices – definitely on the right but also on the left – arguing that we could not possibly increase taxes this year or next, as this will push our economy back into recession. Do not believe them – this is just the latest disinformation put out by people who agree with Grover Norquist that the real goal of politics should always and everywhere be to reduce taxes and shrink the size of government. Read more ...
Barbara Ehrenreich: Kiss Goldman Sachs Goodbye
I’m waiting for Obama to recognize the existence of widespread poverty - not just the 15 percent who are officially under the poverty line, but the 30 or more percent who barely getting by from week to week. Mr. President, kiss Goldman Sachs goodbye and bail out your real constituency! Read more ...
Will the Supreme Court Reaffirm Affirmative Action?
Laura Flanders discusses the Fisher v. University of Texas affirmative action case with Kimberlé Crenshaw and Luke Harris. Watch the Video ...
What's Wrong With the Stop Special Interest Money Now Act?
Plutocrats Want to Own Your Vote
Across America, this divide between the super-rich and everyone else has become a yawning chasm that studies indicate may stifle jobs and growth for years to come. At no time in modern history has the top one hundredth of one percent owned more of our wealth or paid so low a tax rate. But in neither of the two presidential debates so far has the vastness of this astounding inequality gap been discussed. Read more ...
Killing the Kids That Don't Need to Die
Bill Moyers: Election Expert Richard Hasen on Voter Fraud and Disenfranchisement
Bill Moyers: More Money, Less Democracy
In this essay, Bill examines how the Citizens United decision has candidates campaigning for cash more than votes, and how that money - pouring into TV ads and high-paid political consultants - is creating "a racket, plain and simple." Read more ...
Investigative Journalist Craig Unger on the Continuing Power of Karl Rove
By Bill Moyers, Moyers & Company | News Analysis
Friday 14 September 2012
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." Read more ...
Money in Politics: Where Is the Outrage?
The For-Profit College Racket
Bill Moyers | Suppressing Votes By Law
Bill Moyers | Veteran Karl Marlantes on What It's Like to Go to War
Moyers and Winship: The NRA Has America Living Under the Gun
Every year there are 30,000 gun deaths and 300,000 gun-related assaults in the U.S. Firearm violence costs our country as much as $100 billion a year. Toys are regulated with greater care and safety concerns than guns. So why do we always act so surprised? Read more ...
Moyers: Vandana Shiva on the Problem With Genetically-Modified Seeds
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. Read more ...
Bill Moyers | Financial Expert Sheila Bair on Keeping Banks Honest
Bill talks with financial expert Sheila Bair 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. Read more ...
Banksters Take Us to the Brink
Every day brings more reminders of the terrible unfairness that besets our country, the tragic reversal of fortune experienced by millions who once had good lives and steady jobs, now gone. Read more ...
Unions Are in Peril
Moyers: On Democracy
Banksters Take Us to the Brink
Every day brings more reminders of the terrible unfairness that besets our country, the tragic reversal of fortune experienced by millions who once had good lives and steady jobs, now gone. Read more ...
Inequality Rises as Union Numbers Decline
Bill Moyers | Messing With Texas Textbooks
Bill Moyers | How Citizen Power Can Save a Library
Bill Moyers | Peter Edelman on Fighting Poverty
The President's Never-Ending Campaign for Cash
My neighborhood has become a cash machine for the Obama re-election campaign.... I still love where I live, but rents, commercial and residential, have skyrocketed; many of the mom-and-pop stores that gave the area character have moved or been forced out of business. How long we happy few, we remnants of the middle class can hang on is the subject of much debate. In the meantime, we have become prime real-estate for Democratic and progressive fundraising. Read more ...
Clara Jeffery and Monika Bauerlein on Dark Money
Campaign Cash: The Gift that Keeps on Giving
On Memorial Day Weekend, America Reckons With Torture
Facing the truth is hard to do, especially the truth about ourselves. So Americans have been sorely pressed to come to terms with the fact that after 9/11 our government began to torture people, and did so in defiance of domestic and international law. Most of us haven’t come to terms with what that meant, or means today, but we must reckon with torture, the torture done in our name, allegedly for our safety. Read more ...
A Twenty-One Protest Song Salute
Singer and activist Tom Morello says it’s his job as a musician “to steel the backbone of people on the front lines of social justice struggles, and to put wind in sails of those struggles.” Here’s a list of 21 songs that have done just that - from Woody Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land to Public Enemy’s Fight the Power. Watch the videos.
Tom Morello: Troubadour for Justice
By Bill Moyers, Moyers & Company | Video
Monday 21 May 2012
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. Watch the video.
Tom Morello Leads the Occupy "Guitarmy" (Video)
An army of guitarists took to the streets of New York City as part of Occupy Wall Street's May Day resurgence. Led by former Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello, the 'guitarmy' marched peacefully while strumming protest songs including Woody Guthrie's This Land is Your Land to Morello's World Wide Rebel Song. The foot soldiers of the guitarmy ranged from seasoned activists and Zuccotti occupiers to high school students at their first protest march. Watch the video ...
At a Military Hospital, Warriors Are Not the Only Wounded
The weather’s getting warmer in Afghanistan and the war there is heating up again. That means – as it has meant every year for more than a decade — that the pace will quicken at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. More casualties will be brought to this largest American military hospital outside the United States. The Critical Care Air Transport teams and their C-17 Globemasters will fly in from “downrange,” as they call the Afghan battleground, and the injured will be brought by ambulance bus from nearby Ramstein Air Force Base to the hospital front door. Read more ...
Political Ads: America Discovers Columbus
If you live in Columbus, Ohio, my sympathy. Don’t get me wrong. Columbus is a wonderful town – the state capital, birthplace of the late great humorist James Thurber, location of Ohio State University and my brother Tim. But if you’re a television viewer in Columbus you may be wishing about now that you could jump into your set and join the castaways on Survivor. According to the newspaper USA Today, “As the amount of money spent on political persuasion has risen, there are now some places where political ads are more like a steady rain. Here in Columbus, it is pouring.” Read more ...
Between Two Worlds - Life on the Border
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. Read more ...
Major Super PACs Spent Big on Deceptive Ads
According to a new report from the Annenberg Public Policy Center, four super PACs spent over half of their advertising budgets on deceptive ads in the Republican presidential primary. Spending estimates from Kantar Media CMAG and research by FactCheck.org reveals that 23.3 million (56.7%) of the 41.1 million dollars was spent on “19 ads containing deceptive or misleading claims.” Read more ...
The Best Congress the Banks’ Money Can Buy
Here we go again. Another round of the game we call Congressional Creep. After months of haggling and debate, Congress finally passes reform legislation to fix a serious rupture in the body politic, and the President signs it into law. But the fight’s just begun, because the special interests immediately set out to win back what they lost when the reform became law. Read more ...
Why Age and Race Matter in Activism: Five More Points From George Goehl
After Bill’s conversation with community organizer George Goehl, Goehl mentioned he had five things he wished he’d had a chance to say in the interview, including points about overcoming low economic expectations, the value of younger activist leaders, and the perils of not addressing race. So — because there’s no bad time for a good idea — we turned the cameras back on and recorded this web-exclusive video. Read more ...
Ai-jen Poo and Sarita Gupta on Workers' Rights
Bill Moyers talks with Ai-jen Poo and Sarita Gupta about activism dedicated to restoring workers’ rights — rights they say have been stripped away by corporations. Domestic workers in particular, says Poo, are a “huge and growing part of the 99 percent.” Read more ...
Scrutinizing the Threat from Iran
In the lead up to war in Iraq, misinformation about weapons of mass destruction went virtually unchallenged by the mainstream media. But three reporters for Knight Ridder newspapers (now McClatchy) were skeptical, and their probing investigation of the Bush administration’s justifications for war eventually proved prescient. Read more ...
Sergeant Robert Bales and the Trauma of Repeat Deployments
Does Robert Bales, the army staff sergeant who allegedly killed 17 Afghan civilians on March 11, symbolize a larger problem in our military ranks? In this web-exclusive video, Vietnam veteran and military scholar Andrew Bacevich talks with Bill Moyers about Bales' accountability, the stress of repeated tours on soldiers, and how war itself "compromises our humanity." Read more ...
Andrew Bacevich on Changing Our Military Mindset
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. Read more ...
See video and transcripts from previous programs.
Moyers & Company Programming Note:
Bill Moyers Programming Note: Popular Culture and Political Culture
How does pop culture not only reflect, but influence political culture? On this weekend’s Moyers & Company (check local listings), 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.. Check for your local TV schedule here.
Bill Moyers Essay:
Bill Moyers Essay: Capitalism With a Conscience
With help from the government, a very friendly tax code, and their own coffer-powered influence, big American companies have emerged from the recession flush with cash, less burdened by debt, and with a greater share of the country’s income. As a consequence, Angela Blackwell suggests, people with enormous money and influence often don’t feel connected to the rest of us. Read more ...
Who Pays for Political Ads?
Great efforts are underway both locally and nationally to keep secret the identities of people and organizations paying for local political advertisements. But Americans can still do something, even when broadcasters shirk their responsibilities. In this essay, Bill Moyers suggests what you can do to bring those names to light. Read more ...
The Dangerous Road of Wishful Thinking
Bill Moyers counsels President Obama not to look at America through the rose-colored glasses of people — like Robert Kagan — led by political opportunity and wishful thinking, but by those — like Andrew Bacevich — who see the world as it truly is, and are best poised to make it better. Read more ...
To PBS, With (Tough) Love
A PBS spokesperson told The New York Times that the service “is fully committed to independent films and the diversity of content they provide.” That can quickly be demonstrated by reversing a bad decision and returning to a national core time slot the independent documentaries created — often at real financial sacrifice — by the producers and filmmakers whose own passion is to reveal life honestly and to make plain, for all to see, the realities of inequality and injustice in America. Read more ...
Bill Moyers: Freedom of and From Religion
The president did something agile and wise the other day. And something quite important to the health of our politics. He reached up and snuffed out what some folks wanted to make into a cosmic battle between good and evil. No, said the president, we’re not going to turn the argument over contraception into Armageddon, this is an honest difference between Americans, and I’ll not see it escalated into a holy war. So instead of the government requiring Catholic hospitals and other faith-based institutions to provide employees with health coverage involving contraceptives, the insurance companies will offer that coverage, and offer it free. Read more ...
To read more in the Bill Moyers essay series, click here.
Moyers: Ask Bill
Why Is Our Nation So Divided?
"Why do you think our nation is so divided? Is it because we’re so diverse or is there something else at work here?" Thanks for your question. Read more ...
Fighting Back Against Corporate Personhood
Rarely have so few imposed such damage on so many. When five conservative members of the Supreme Court handed for-profit corporations the right to secretly flood political campaigns with tidal waves of cash on the eve of an election, they moved America closer to outright plutocracy, where political power derived from wealth is devoted to the protection of wealth. It is now official: Just as they have adorned our athletic stadiums and multiple places of public assembly with their logos, corporations can officially put their brand on the government of the United States as well as the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the fifty states. Read more ...
Letter From Bill Moyers
You already may have heard that I'd be coming back in January with a new series on the public television station nearest you. But you may not have heard exactly why. It's not just that I lack retirement skills, as my wife and co-editor, Judith, keeps reminding me. Or that the squeaky rocking chair on the front porch got on my nerves. Read more ...
Bill Moyers Launches New Series With Three Shows Probing the Reasons for Financial Inequality in America
Bill Moyers is back on TV - and online. Continuing his long-running conversation with the American public, Moyers returns to television in mid-January with Moyers & Company, a weekly series the veteran journalist says will try to make sense of our tumultuous times, "for myself and hopefully for anyone who wants to keep me company." Read more ...
Bill Moyers: He’s Back, Just as Curious as Ever
That didn’t last long. Just 20 months after retiring his PBS series “Bill Moyers Journal,” Mr. Moyers was back in the studio on a Wednesday morning in December, deep in conversation about moral political psychology with the author Jonathan Haidt. Read more ...
