Sat, Feb 2, 2013
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.
Sat, Feb 23, 2013
Even as President Obama's talking points champion the middle class and condemn how our economy caters to the very rich, the truth behind 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 apparently pledge allegiance first and foremost to America's wealthy and powerful.
Sat, Oct 12, 2013
This week, the Supreme Court began its new term and justices heard arguments in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission. The case has been billed as the successor to the court?s Citizens United decision in 2010 that gave corporations, unions, and the wealthy the opportunity to pour vast and often anonymous amounts of cash into political campaigns. The new case challenges caps on how much individual donors can give to candidates and political parties and could raise the amount to more than $3.25 million.Bill Moyers talks with Yale Law School election and constitutional law professor Heather Gerken who warns that McCutcheon has the potential to be even worse than Citizens United. Political parties pay attention to the people with money, and as the non-partisan Sunlight Foundation reports, most of the funding for congressional and presidential campaigns comes from the top one percent of the one percent of the rich ? ?the elite class that serves as gatekeepers of public office in the United States.?Bill also speaks with historian Joyce Appleby who has a talent for making tales of the past into page-turning books that read like novels. Her newest is Shores of Knowledge: New World Discoveries and the Scientific Imagination. It?s the story of what sent European explorers to the Americas in pursuit of treasure and knowledge, and how they shaped our modern world. Bill describes it as ?a captivating account of curiosity.?
Sat, Oct 19, 2013
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, the 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.?Wolf -- who has been described as ?the premier financial and economics writer in the world? -- joins Bill Moyers for a discussion of the current DC crisis 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 deadly fallout could spread everywhere.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 clinical psychologist and one of the first to study 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 important books, her most recent, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other.
Sat, Nov 16, 2013
Between them, doctors Jill Stein and Margaret Flowers have been arrested nine times. In the face of injustice and government by the one percent, rather than look the other way and stick to practicing medicine they chose a different approach.At first they took separate paths. Margaret Flowers fought for single payer health insurance. She works for the organization Physicians for a National Health Program and is a contributor to PopularResistance.org, a website advocating nonviolent direct action against injustice. Jill Stein advocated for campaign finance reform in her home state of Massachusetts, working in 1998 with others in her community to pass the Clean Election Law. She co-founded the Massachusetts Coalition for Healthy Communities in 2003 and represented the Green-Rainbow Party for governor in 2002, for State Representative in 2004 and for Secretary of State in 2006. She was the Green Party candidate for president in 2012.Now Stein and Flowers are both members of the Green Shadow Cabinet, a group of 100 prominent men and women offering alternative policy and speaking out in an organized voice against a dysfunctional government. Stein serves as president and Flowers as secretary of health. Each fights against political corruption and a host of grievances that that have led many people to cynicism and despair. 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.
Sat, Nov 23, 2013
In his book Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism, author and scholar Henry Giroux connects the dots, threading together ideas and experiences to prove his theory that our current system is informed by a ?machinery of social and civil death? that chills ?any vestige of a robust democracy.?Giroux explains that such a machine turns 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.? What?s more, Giroux points out, the system that creates this vacuum has little to do with expanding the meaning and the substance of democracy itself. Under ?casino capitalism,? the goal is to get a quick return, taking advantage of a kind of logic in which the only thing that drives us is to put as much money as we can into a slot machine and hope we walk out with our wallets overflowing.A cultural and social critic of tireless energy and vast interests, Giroux holds the Global TV Network Chair in the English and Cultural Studies Department at McMaster University and is a distinguished visiting professor at Reyerson University, both schools in Canada. Described by Moyers as ?torch bearer in the art and science of teaching,? he has been an important contributor in a variety of academic fields, including cultural, youth and media studies.Also on the broadcast, Bill Moyers remembers a 2003 interview with Nobel-prize winning novelist Doris Lessing who passed away this week in London at the age of 94. And a look at ?Birth of the Living Dead?, a mesmerizing new documentary that examines the singular time in which the classic film ?Night of the Living Dead? was shot ? when civil unrest and violence gave the nation nightmares, and zombies were a metaphor for an American public troubled and distressed.
Sat, Dec 14, 2013
Cultural historian and scholar Richard Slotkin has spent his adult life studying the violence that has swirled through American history and taken root deep in our culture. He has written an acclaimed trilogy on the myth of the frontier that has shaped our nation's imagination. In Regeneration through Violence, The Fatal Environment, Gunfighter Nation, and other works of history and fiction, he tracks how everything from literature, movies and television to society and politics has been influenced by this violent past ̶ including the gun culture that continues to dominate, wound and kill. And he outlines how America's frantic expansion from the Atlantic to the Pacific led us to embrace a mythology of gun-slinging white settlers taming the wilderness to justify a tragic record of subjugation and bloodshed. On this one year anniversary of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, Bill Moyers speaks with Professor Slotkin, who recently retired from a distinguished teaching career at Wesleyan University, just 45 minutes from Newtown.
Sat, Dec 21, 2013
There are more African Americans under correctional control today ̶ in prison or jail, on probation or parole ̶ than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began. According to The Sentencing Project, an advocacy group dedicated to changing how we think about crime and punishment, "More than 60 percent of the people in prison are now racial and ethnic minorities. For Black males in their thirties, one in every ten is in prison or jail on any given day." Because of the 40-year war on drugs and get tough sentencing policies, the American prison population has exploded from about 300,000 in the 1970's to more than 2 million today. The United States has a higher rate of incarceration than any other nation and spends billions every year to keep people behind bars. The cost on democracy is immeasurable. Bill Moyers speaks with civil rights lawyer and legal scholar Michelle Alexander. Her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness had just been published last time she joined Bill in conversation, three and a half years ago. It's a work of scholarship that lays out how the war on drugs, harsh mandatory minimum sentencing and racism have converged to create a caste system in this country very much like the one under Jim Crow segregation laws. The book became a bestseller and spurred a wide conversation about justice and inequality in America - inspiring one reviewer to call it "the bible of a social movement."
Sat, Nov 2, 2013
You may remember how in the ?90?s the Clinton Administration talked us into NAFTA ? the North American Free Trade Agreement -- with the promise of jobs and cheaper goods. According to economist Dean Baker, in the end, NAFTA wound up helping corporations and didn't do much for American workers. In fact, there are economists who say that in the United States, NAFTA cost nearly a million jobs. Now, there?s another trade deal in the works that?s even bigger ? ?NAFTA on steroids? as some describe it. The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a coalition of North and South American and Asian trading partners that many believe could give multinational corporations even greater freedom to ignore borders and run roughshod over individual countries and the rule of law. At least that?s what it may be about ? negotiations are being carried on in secret and very little about the terms has leaked out. But enough is known to worry about the implications of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and its possible effect on trade unions and our copyright and patent laws, not to mention environmental, health and safety regulations.Bill Moyers discusses the Trans-Pacific Partnership with two perceptive observers of the global economy: Yves Smith, an expert on investment banking, runs the Naked Capitalism blog, a go-to site for information and insight on the business and ethics of finance; and Dean Baker, co-director of the progressive Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. Also on this week?s broadcast, a preview of filmmaker Robert Greenwald?s new documentary, Unmanned: America?s Drone Wars. The release coincided with a first: victims of deadly drone attacks testified at a special briefing for members of Congress. This episode features clips from the film, which shares testimony, stories, and alarming news on the fatal impact of our drone strategy.
Sat, Nov 9, 2013
The money and power behind this week?s election results confirm what everybody knows: democracy is under siege. We, the People, don?t control our leaders; moneyed interests get their way. Corporations are free to buy politicians, judges, and elections with virtually unlimited cash, and big media conglomerates reap billions from political advertising. We idealize the notion of political equality in the voting booth but eviscerate it in practice, caught in the clutches of a ?money-and-media complex? not unlike the vast ?military-industrial complex? President Eisenhower warned us about more than half a century ago. No one knows the dangers better than John Nichols and Robert McChesney. Nichols is Washington correspondent for The Nation and a pioneering political blogger. McChesney is a leading scholar of communications and society and a professor at the University of Illinois. Together, ten years ago, they became the founding figures of the media reform movement Free Press ? and have never flagged in challenging the Big Money and Big Media that, combined, corrupt our democracy. Their latest book is Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex Is Destroying America. ?Democracy means rule of the people, one person, one vote,? McChesney says. ??Dollarocracy? means the rule of the dollars. One dollar, one vote. Those with lots of dollars have lots of power. Those with no dollars have no power.?
Sat, Dec 28, 2013
In just a few months, Pope Francis, the first in history to take the name of the patron saint of the poor, has proven to be one of the most outspoken pontiffs in recent history, especially when it comes to income inequality. He has criticized the "widening gap between those who have more and those who must be content with the crumbs." And in his recent "apostolic exhortation" on "the economy of exclusion and inequality," he said: "The worship of the ancient golden calf has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose." It remains to be seen if Pope Francis can bend the institutional Church to his exhortation, but for the moment at least, it seems as if the spirit of Occupy Wall Street has settled into a one-man occupation of the Vatican. Francis is the first Jesuit to ascend to the papacy, so we turn to Jesuit-educated author and historian Thomas Cahill to get his perspective. Bill Moyers speaks with Cahill in a conversation on the meaning of Pope Francis and the relevance of the Church in the 21st century. Later, the poet Philip Levine joins Bill to discuss why Americans have lost sight of who really keeps the country afloat - the hard working men and women who toil, unsung and unknown, in our nation's fields and factories. During the years he himself spent in the grit, noise and heat of the assembly lines of Detroit auto plants, Levine discovered that his gift for verse could provide "a voice for the voiceless." Described by one critic as "a large, ironic Whitman of the industrial heartland," Philip Levine is the author of twenty collections of poems and books of translations and essays. He is the recipient of the Pulitzer and two National Book Awards and recently served as the nation's poet laureate at the Library of Congress.
Sat, Jan 4, 2014
STATE OF CONFLICT: NORTH CAROLINA offers a documentary report from the 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 insists that he is simply "educating the voters on the issues so that they can hear both side of the issues, not just one side." The New Yorker's Jane Mayer, the first national journalist to investigate Pope's dealings in North Carolina, begs to differ. She says Art Pope has shown "that one really wealthy individual can almost rule." STATE OF CONFLICT: NORTH CAROLINA is more than a local story. It offers a case study of what may be the direction of American politics for years, perhaps decades, to come. STATE OF CONFLICT is a collaboration between Okapi Productions, LLC and Schumann Media Center, Inc., headed by Bill Moyers, which supports independent journalism and media programs to advance public understanding of the critical issues facing democracy.