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 ...
Do-Nothing Congress Gives Inertia a Bad Name
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 ...
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
POGO Sticks It to the SEC
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 ...
Foul Play in the Senate
Corporate Party Favors at the Inaugural Shindig
Paul Krugman Explains the Keys to Our Discovery
Paul Krugman is professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University. Since 1999, he's been an op-ed columnist at The New York Times and now also writes a blog for the paper titled "The Conscience of a Liberal." According to the search engine Technorati, it's the most popular blog by an individual on the internet. Author or editor of some twenty books and more than 200 professional papers, Krugman is a thinker so esteemed and widely known in his field he's become an icon. Read more...
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 ...
