Washington continues to reward wealthy donors and Wall Street but what about everyday Americans? Author and historian Steve Fraser joins Bill to discuss.
The New Robber Barons from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.
Sunday, December 21, 2014
Saturday, November 29, 2014
How Putin and his cronies stole Russia
Anne Applebaum | New York Times
18 Dec 2014
In her book Sale of the Century (2000), Chrystia Freeland memorably describes the moment when she realized that the confusing regulations and contradictory laws that hog-tied Russian business in the 1990s were not a temporary problem that would soon be cleaned up by some competent administrator. On the contrary, they existed for a purpose: the Russian elite wanted everybody to operate in violation of one law or another, because that meant that everybody was liable at any time to arrest. The contradictory regulations were not a mistake, they were a form of control.
READ IT HERE:
18 Dec 2014
In her book Sale of the Century (2000), Chrystia Freeland memorably describes the moment when she realized that the confusing regulations and contradictory laws that hog-tied Russian business in the 1990s were not a temporary problem that would soon be cleaned up by some competent administrator. On the contrary, they existed for a purpose: the Russian elite wanted everybody to operate in violation of one law or another, because that meant that everybody was liable at any time to arrest. The contradictory regulations were not a mistake, they were a form of control.
READ IT HERE:
Thursday, November 27, 2014
Monday, November 17, 2014
Remembering the real Ronald Reagan – Michael Moore's 'Capitalism: A Love Story'
"The banks and the corporations had a simple plan: to remake America to serve them. But pulling it off would require electing a spokesmodel as president".
Remembering the Real Ronald Reagan -- Michael Moore's 'Capitalism: A Love Story' from MMFlint on Vimeo.
Remembering the Real Ronald Reagan -- Michael Moore's 'Capitalism: A Love Story' from MMFlint on Vimeo.
Wednesday, November 05, 2014
Wednesday, October 29, 2014
Monday, October 27, 2014
Monday, October 20, 2014
Ted Cruz: Why GOP blocked Obama's surgeon general nominee
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) on Sunday accused President Barack Obama's pick for Surgeon General of not being a "health care professional" because the doctor had backed a ban on military-style assault rifles.
Sunday, October 19, 2014
Saturday, October 04, 2014
Thursday, October 02, 2014
2 Oct 1835: Texas Revolution begins at Gonzales
Monday, September 29, 2014
Saturday, September 27, 2014
Anthony Bourdain: Under The Volcano
Americans love Mexican food. We consume nachos, tacos, burritos, tortas, enchiladas, tamales and anything resembling Mexican in enormous quantities. We love Mexican beverages, happily knocking back huge amounts of tequila, mezcal and Mexican beer every year. We love Mexican people—as we sure employ a lot of them. Despite our ridiculously hypocritical attitudes towards immigration, we demand that Mexicans cook a large percentage of the food we eat, grow the ingredients we need to make that food, clean our houses, mow our lawns, wash our dishes, look after our children.
As any chef will tell you, our entire service economy—the restaurant business as we know it—in most American cities, would collapse overnight without Mexican workers. Some, of course, like to claim that Mexicans are “stealing American jobs”. But in two decades as a chef and employer, I never had ONE American kid walk in my door and apply for a dishwashing job, a porter’s position—or even a job as prep cook. Mexicans do much of the work in this country that Americans, provably, simply won’t do.
We love Mexican drugs. Maybe not you personally, but “we”, as a nation, certainly consume titanic amounts of them—and go to extraordinary lengths and expense to acquire them. We love Mexican music, Mexican beaches, Mexican architecture, interior design, Mexican films.
So, why don’t we love Mexico?
READ IT ALL.
Sunday, May 11, 2014
Sunday, March 30, 2014
Tuesday, March 25, 2014
Tuesday, March 18, 2014
No escaping Dragnet Nation | Bill Moyers
14 March 2014 | Corporations, data brokers and the government
are collecting and selling A LOT of information on you, Julia Angwin,
author of the new book Dragnet Nation, tells Bill this week. She was
shocked to learn how much they had on her.
Monday, March 17, 2014
What the Hell is Barack Obama's presidency for?
If there was a plot, he's lost it. If there was a point, few can
remember it. If he had a big idea, he shrank it. If there's a moral
compass powerful enough to guide such contradictions to more consistent
waters, it is in urgent need of being reset.
Gary Younge | The Guardian
23 February 2014
His second term has been characterised by a profound sense of drift in principle and policy. While posing as the ally of the immigrant he is deporting people at a faster clip than any of his predecessors; while claiming to be a supporter of labour he’s championing trade deals that will undercut American jobs and wages. In December, even as he pursued one whistleblower, Edward Snowden and kept another, Chelsea Manning, incarcerated, he told the crowd at Nelson Mandela’s funeral: “There are too many leaders who claim solidarity with Madiba’s struggle for freedom, but do not tolerate dissent from their own people.”
...It was obvious what his election was for. First, preventing the alternative: presidential candidates in the grip of a deeply dysfunctional and reactionary party. His arrival marked a respite from eight years of international isolation, military excess and economic collapse. He stood against fear, exclusion and greed – and won. Second, it helped cohere and mobilise a new progressive coalition that is transforming the electoral landscape. Finally, it proved that despite the country’s recent history Americans could elect a black man to its highest office.
So his ascent to power had meaning. It’s his presence in power that lacks purpose. The gap between rich and poor and black and white has grown while he’s been in the White House, the prospects for immigration reform remain remote, bankers made away with the loot, and Guantánamo’s still open. It’s true there’s a limit to what a president can do about much of this and that Republican intransigence has not helped. But that makes the original question more salient not less: if he can’t reunite a divided political culture, which was one of his key pledges, and his powers are that limited, then what is the point of his presidency?
READ IT ALL:
Gary Younge | The Guardian
23 February 2014
His second term has been characterised by a profound sense of drift in principle and policy. While posing as the ally of the immigrant he is deporting people at a faster clip than any of his predecessors; while claiming to be a supporter of labour he’s championing trade deals that will undercut American jobs and wages. In December, even as he pursued one whistleblower, Edward Snowden and kept another, Chelsea Manning, incarcerated, he told the crowd at Nelson Mandela’s funeral: “There are too many leaders who claim solidarity with Madiba’s struggle for freedom, but do not tolerate dissent from their own people.”
...It was obvious what his election was for. First, preventing the alternative: presidential candidates in the grip of a deeply dysfunctional and reactionary party. His arrival marked a respite from eight years of international isolation, military excess and economic collapse. He stood against fear, exclusion and greed – and won. Second, it helped cohere and mobilise a new progressive coalition that is transforming the electoral landscape. Finally, it proved that despite the country’s recent history Americans could elect a black man to its highest office.
So his ascent to power had meaning. It’s his presence in power that lacks purpose. The gap between rich and poor and black and white has grown while he’s been in the White House, the prospects for immigration reform remain remote, bankers made away with the loot, and Guantánamo’s still open. It’s true there’s a limit to what a president can do about much of this and that Republican intransigence has not helped. But that makes the original question more salient not less: if he can’t reunite a divided political culture, which was one of his key pledges, and his powers are that limited, then what is the point of his presidency?
READ IT ALL:
Thursday, March 13, 2014
Jon Stewart calls out Diane Feinstein's hypocrisy over CIA scandal
The Daily Show's Jon Stewart takes Sen. Dianne Feinstein to task for her hypocrisy over the latest revelations that the CIA was spying on members of congress and their staff.
Friday, March 07, 2014
Third World Health Care - Knoxville, Tennessee Edition
Aasif Mandvi visits an impoverished, underdeveloped locale with shocking health care conditions.
Big Vladdy - Semi-Delusional Autocrats
Conservative pundits are won over by Vladimir Putin's shirtless, horseback-riding antics.
Sunday, March 02, 2014
Essay: Anatomy of The Deep State | Bill Moyers
MIKE LOFGREN | 21 Feb 2014
billmoyers.com
There is the visible government situated around the Mall in Washington, and then there is another, more shadowy, more indefinable government that is not explained in Civics 101 or observable to tourists at the White House or the Capitol. The former is traditional Washington partisan politics: the tip of the iceberg that a public watching C-SPAN sees daily and which is theoretically controllable via elections. The subsurface part of the iceberg I shall call the Deep State, which operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power.
During the last five years, the news media has been flooded with pundits decrying the broken politics of Washington. The conventional wisdom has it that partisan gridlock and dysfunction have become the new normal. That is certainly the case, and I have been among the harshest critics of this development. But it is also imperative to acknowledge the limits of this critique as it applies to the American governmental system. On one level, the critique is self-evident: In the domain that the public can see, Congress is hopelessly deadlocked in the worst manner since the 1850s, the violently rancorous decade preceding the Civil War.
-snip-
Despite this apparent impotence, President Obama can liquidate American citizens without due processes, detain prisoners indefinitely without charge, conduct dragnet surveillance on the American people without judicial warrant and engage in unprecedented — at least since the McCarthy era — witch hunts against federal employees (the so-called “Insider Threat Program”). Within the United States, this power is characterized by massive displays of intimidating force by militarized federal, state and local law enforcement. Abroad, President Obama can start wars at will and engage in virtually any other activity whatsoever without so much as a by-your-leave from Congress, such as arranging the forced landing of a plane carrying a sovereign head of state over foreign territory. Despite the habitual cant of congressional Republicans about executive overreach by Obama, the would-be dictator, we have until recently heard very little from them about these actions — with the minor exception of comments from gadfly Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Democrats, save a few mavericks such as Ron Wyden of Oregon, are not unduly troubled, either — even to the extent of permitting seemingly perjured congressional testimony under oath by executive branch officials on the subject of illegal surveillance.
READ IT ALL:
billmoyers.com
There is the visible government situated around the Mall in Washington, and then there is another, more shadowy, more indefinable government that is not explained in Civics 101 or observable to tourists at the White House or the Capitol. The former is traditional Washington partisan politics: the tip of the iceberg that a public watching C-SPAN sees daily and which is theoretically controllable via elections. The subsurface part of the iceberg I shall call the Deep State, which operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power.
During the last five years, the news media has been flooded with pundits decrying the broken politics of Washington. The conventional wisdom has it that partisan gridlock and dysfunction have become the new normal. That is certainly the case, and I have been among the harshest critics of this development. But it is also imperative to acknowledge the limits of this critique as it applies to the American governmental system. On one level, the critique is self-evident: In the domain that the public can see, Congress is hopelessly deadlocked in the worst manner since the 1850s, the violently rancorous decade preceding the Civil War.
-snip-
Despite this apparent impotence, President Obama can liquidate American citizens without due processes, detain prisoners indefinitely without charge, conduct dragnet surveillance on the American people without judicial warrant and engage in unprecedented — at least since the McCarthy era — witch hunts against federal employees (the so-called “Insider Threat Program”). Within the United States, this power is characterized by massive displays of intimidating force by militarized federal, state and local law enforcement. Abroad, President Obama can start wars at will and engage in virtually any other activity whatsoever without so much as a by-your-leave from Congress, such as arranging the forced landing of a plane carrying a sovereign head of state over foreign territory. Despite the habitual cant of congressional Republicans about executive overreach by Obama, the would-be dictator, we have until recently heard very little from them about these actions — with the minor exception of comments from gadfly Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Democrats, save a few mavericks such as Ron Wyden of Oregon, are not unduly troubled, either — even to the extent of permitting seemingly perjured congressional testimony under oath by executive branch officials on the subject of illegal surveillance.
READ IT ALL:
Wednesday, February 19, 2014
85 Billionaires and the Better Half
Michael Parenti | Common Dreams
18 Feb 2014
The world's 85 richest individuals possess as much wealth as the 3.5 billion souls who compose the poorer half of the world's population, or so it was announced in a report by Oxfam International. The assertion sounds implausible to me. I think the 85 richest individuals, who together are worth many hundreds of billions of dollars, must have far more wealth than the poorest half of our global population.
How could these two cohorts, the 85 richest and 3.5 billion poorest, have the same amount of wealth? The great majority of the 3.5 billion have no net wealth at all. Hundreds of millions of them have jobs that hardly pay enough to feed their families. Millions of them rely on supplements from private charity and public assistance when they can. Hundreds of millions are undernourished, suffer food insecurity, or go hungry each month, including many among the very poorest in the United States.
READ IT ALL:
18 Feb 2014
The world's 85 richest individuals possess as much wealth as the 3.5 billion souls who compose the poorer half of the world's population, or so it was announced in a report by Oxfam International. The assertion sounds implausible to me. I think the 85 richest individuals, who together are worth many hundreds of billions of dollars, must have far more wealth than the poorest half of our global population.
How could these two cohorts, the 85 richest and 3.5 billion poorest, have the same amount of wealth? The great majority of the 3.5 billion have no net wealth at all. Hundreds of millions of them have jobs that hardly pay enough to feed their families. Millions of them rely on supplements from private charity and public assistance when they can. Hundreds of millions are undernourished, suffer food insecurity, or go hungry each month, including many among the very poorest in the United States.
READ IT ALL:
Wednesday, February 05, 2014
Jon Stewart rips Fox News for endless scandal mongeriing
4 Feb 2014 | The Daily Show's Jon Stewart once again gives the haters over at Faux "news" the treatment they deserve.
SOURCE
SOURCE
Saturday, February 01, 2014
Bully Nation
1 February 2014
Yale Magrass and Charles Derber, Truthout | Op-Ed
Bullying is the means through which the corporate empires were built. Carnegie and Rockefeller intimidated and threatened their rival capitalists to cede them an ever-larger share of the market. They brought in Pinkerton goons to beat striking workers into submission. Workers were forced to either sign "yellow dog" contracts and pledge not to join unions, or be thrown into the street. Similar bullying practices continue today. Corporations warn entire communities they will shut down factories and undermine the local economy if they do not accept low wages and minimal regulations. Banks entice consumers to borrow through predatory loans and then raise interest rates and threaten foreclosure. The corporations are clear they have the power and will not tolerate challenges from weaklings who fail to know their place.
READ IT ALL:
Yale Magrass and Charles Derber, Truthout | Op-Ed
Bullying is the means through which the corporate empires were built. Carnegie and Rockefeller intimidated and threatened their rival capitalists to cede them an ever-larger share of the market. They brought in Pinkerton goons to beat striking workers into submission. Workers were forced to either sign "yellow dog" contracts and pledge not to join unions, or be thrown into the street. Similar bullying practices continue today. Corporations warn entire communities they will shut down factories and undermine the local economy if they do not accept low wages and minimal regulations. Banks entice consumers to borrow through predatory loans and then raise interest rates and threaten foreclosure. The corporations are clear they have the power and will not tolerate challenges from weaklings who fail to know their place.
READ IT ALL:
Wednesday, January 29, 2014
Thursday, January 23, 2014
TYT: Senator Bernie Sanders attacks Walmart
18 Jan 2014 - The Young Turks
“Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) demanded that a panel of experts justify why America’s shrinking middle class should continue to subsidize the nation’s wealthiest family in a heated exchange Thursday during a congressional panel.”
“Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) demanded that a panel of experts justify why America’s shrinking middle class should continue to subsidize the nation’s wealthiest family in a heated exchange Thursday during a congressional panel.”
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
The Volokh Conspiracy and Washington Post's move to the right
JUSTIN BERRIER | MediaMatters.org
22 Jan 2014
The announcement that The Washington Post is partnering with and hosting the conservative and libertarian-leaning blog The Volokh Conspiracy is evidence that the Post may be moving to the right in the wake of the paper's acquisition by Jeff Bezos.READ IT HERE:
Sunday, January 19, 2014
The nation sleeps a dreamless sleep | Daily Kos
14 Jan 2014
In the end, the American Dream did not last very long. The modern version, the version with the two point five kids and the house in the suburbs, a nice modest house with a good lawn and a white picket fence (it was always a white picket fence, for some reason, white pickets being the go-to designator of middle class status) had its heyday in the post-war 1950s, and had suffered serious blows when the designated underclasses made themselves too visible in the 1960s, and survived the too-vapid 1970s and wealth-obsessed 1980s in tattered form, but by the 1990s the whole thing was looking a bit sketchy, and by the turn of the millennium it was dodgy, and before the next 10 years were out you were looked at as a bit of a rube if you still believed in it at all.
READ IT ALL:
In the end, the American Dream did not last very long. The modern version, the version with the two point five kids and the house in the suburbs, a nice modest house with a good lawn and a white picket fence (it was always a white picket fence, for some reason, white pickets being the go-to designator of middle class status) had its heyday in the post-war 1950s, and had suffered serious blows when the designated underclasses made themselves too visible in the 1960s, and survived the too-vapid 1970s and wealth-obsessed 1980s in tattered form, but by the 1990s the whole thing was looking a bit sketchy, and by the turn of the millennium it was dodgy, and before the next 10 years were out you were looked at as a bit of a rube if you still believed in it at all.
READ IT ALL:
The problem with Facebook
"Facebook is a complex ecosystem of individuals, creators, brands and advertisers, but I don't think it serves any of these groups particularly well because its top priority is to make money. Now, I don't think making money is a bad thing, in fact I hope to make some myself. The problem is the only way Facebook has found to make money is by treating all entities on the site as advertisers and charging them to share their content".
Friday, January 17, 2014
Wednesday, January 15, 2014
It was the year America stood up... and split apart: 1964 | American Experience | PBS
1964 was the year the Beatles came to America, Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali, and three civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi. It was the year when Berkeley students rose up in protest, African Americans fought back against injustice in Harlem, and Barry Goldwater’s conservative revolution took over the Republican Party. In myriad ways, 1964 was the year when Americans faced choices: between the liberalism of Lyndon Johnson or Barry Goldwater’s grassroots conservatism, between support or opposition to the civil rights movement, between an embrace of the emerging counterculture or a defense of traditional values.
Saturday, January 04, 2014
Rachel Maddow scorches Koch brothers on ‘correction’ demand
Rachel Maddow: "[W]e occasionally find people who have been mentioned in our coverage who are absolutely outraged that they have been mentioned in our coverage".
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