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44 Episodes 2013 - 2014
Episode 1
Sun, Jan 13, 201357 mins
Paul Krugman on our need to create jobs.
Episode 2
Sun, Jan 20, 201357 mins
Our last stand to fight the filibuster and save democracy.
Episode 3
Sun, Jan 27, 201357 mins
Public support and political hate behind the modern abortion rights debate.
Episode 4
Sun, Feb 3, 201357 mins
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.
Episode 5
Sun, Feb 10, 201357 mins
Why America's Internet access is slow, expensive... and unfair.
Episode 6
Sun, Feb 17, 201357 mins
Is it too late to save Democracy from Big Money? Fighting for our future.
Episode 7
Sun, Feb 24, 201357 mins
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.
Episode 8
Sun, Mar 3, 201353 mins
The onslaught of creationism and the challenges of free thinking in America.
Episode 9
Sun, Mar 24, 201357 mins
Avarice, Banks, and Capitalism: The ABCs of Economic Inequality.
Episode 12
Sun, Mar 31, 201357 mins
Fifty years after a landmark decision to give the poor their day in court, they still can't afford justice.
Episode 13
Sun, Apr 7, 201357 mins
Dr. King's other dream: economic justice.
Episode 14
Sun, Apr 14, 201357 mins
Writer Sherman Alexie describes living outside tribal lines.
Episode 15
Sun, Apr 21, 201357 mins
How to protect our children from the environment's toxic trespassers.
Episode 16
Sun, Apr 28, 201357 mins
What the Boston bombings and drone attacks have in common, and how secrecy leads to abuse of government power.
Episode 17
Sun, May 5, 201357 mins
Newtown parents and a legendary folk singer lift their voices to end gun violence.
Episode 18
Sun, May 12, 201357 mins
Organized people successfully fighting organized money.
Episode 19
Sun, May 19, 201357 mins
The politics of science, and its threat to America's children.
Episode 20
Sun, May 26, 201324 mins
Tim DeChristopher tells why he spent nearly two years in prison in the name of environmental justice.
Episode 21
Sun, Jun 30, 2013
Episode 22
Sun, Jul 7, 201357 mins
Two decades in the making, the intimate story of two American families struggling to find their place in the new economy.
Episode 23
Sun, Jun 16, 201357 mins
How do we protect our privacy when Big Government and Big Business morph into Big Brother?
Episode 24
Sun, Jun 23, 201357 mins
Following up on a 2012 report, this update includes new examples of corporate influence on state legislation and lawmakers, the growing public protest against ALEC's big business-serving agenda, and internal tactics ALEC is instituting to further shroud its actions and intentions.
Episode 25
Sun, Jul 28, 201357 mins
Bill Moyers and Rep. John Lewis revisit the 1963 March on Washington. How did it transform America?
Episode 26
Sun, Aug 25, 201357 mins
Forget Republican Red or Democratic Blue. The power color in Washington is the cool green of cash.
Episode 27
Sun, Jul 14, 201357 mins
What keeps American outcry over economic inequality so muted? Weapons of mass distraction.
Episode 28
Sun, Jul 21, 2013
Episode 29
Sun, Sep 22, 201357 mins
Robert Reich on Inequality for All.
Episode 30
Sun, Sep 29, 201357 mins
Saving the Earth from Ourselves
Episode 31
Sun, Oct 6, 201357 mins
In a rare television interview, environmental legend and writer Wendell Berry leaves his Kentucky farm for an inspiring conversation with veteran journalist Bill Moyers.
Episode 32
Sun, Oct 13, 201357 mins
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.?
Episode 33
Sun, Oct 20, 201326 mins
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.
Episode 34
Sun, Oct 27, 2013
Historian Peter Dreier talks about outraged citizens fighting corruption and financial columnist Gretchen Morgenson on why JPMorgan may be getting off easily. Continue reading
Episode 35
Sun, Sep 8, 201357 mins
Guest host Phil Donahue examines the deadly civil war in Syria and the consequences of another American intervention in the Middle East.
Episode 36
Sun, Sep 15, 201357 mins
The collision of sports and politics.
Episode 37
Sun, Nov 17, 201359 mins
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.
Episode 38
Sun, Nov 24, 201361 mins
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.
Episode 39
Sun, Dec 15, 201359 mins
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.
Episode 40
Sun, Dec 22, 201359 mins
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."
Episode 43
Sun, Nov 3, 201326 mins
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.
Episode 44
Sun, Nov 10, 201361 mins
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.?
Episode 49
Sun, Dec 15, 201358 mins
Episode 50
Sun, Dec 22, 201358 mins
Episode 51
Sun, Dec 29, 201359 mins
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.
Episode 52
Sun, Jan 5, 201457 mins
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.