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On October 13, we lost a resolute champion of the law, a man who left his impact on the lives of untold numbers of Americans.
His very name made his life’s work almost inevitable, a matter of destiny. William Wayne Justice was a Federal judge for the Eastern District of Texas. That’s right, he was “Justice Justice.” And he spent a distinguished legal career making sure that everyone – no matter their color or income or class – got a fair shake. As a former Texas lieutenant governor put it last week, “Judge Justice dragged Texas into the 20th century, God bless him.”
Dragged it kicking and screaming, for it was Justice who ordered Texas to integrate its public schools in 1971 – 17 years after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision made separate schools for blacks and whites unconstitutional. Texas resisted doing the right thing for as long as it could. Many of its segregated schools for African-American children were so poor they still had outhouses instead of indoor plumbing.
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Before the terrorists struck on 9/11 I had been scheduled to speak to the Environmental Grantmakers Association on the impact of money in politics, one of my regular beats in journalism. When I went on the air with a daily broadcast after 9/11 I thought of canceling the speech, then five weeks away; it just didn’t seem timely to talk about money and politics while the country was still in mourning. But I began to notice some items in the news that struck me as especially repugnant amid all the grief.
In Washington, where environmentalists and other public-interest advocates had suspended normal political activities, corporate lobbyists were suddenly mounting a full-court press for special favors at taxpayer expense. There was no black crepe draped on the windows of K Street – the predatory epicenter of Washington; inside, visions of newfound gold danced in the heads of lobbyists. And in corporate suites across the country CEOs were waking up to the prospect of a bonanza born of tragedy. Within two weeks of 9/11 the business press was telling of corporate directors rushing to give bargain-priced stock options to their top executives. The WALL STREET JOURNAL would later piece the whole story together: stocks had fallen sharply after the attacks, reaching a low on September 21; families of 9/11 victims were still waiting for some piece of flesh or bone to confirm the loss of a loved one; soldiers were loading their gear for deployment to Afghanistan; and corporate executives were too busy counting their shekels to notice. As stock options grant executives the right to buy shares at that low price for years to come, the lower the price when options are awarded, the more lucrative they are. “Since the house is on fire, let us warm ourselves,” goes an Italian proverb. Translated to English, it reads: “Grab the loot and run.” Some CEOs didn’t need reminding.
During the last days of September, 511 top executives at 186 companies gobbled up stock-option grants—more than twice as many as in comparable periods in recent years. Almost 100 companies that did not regularly grant stock options in September now did so. One company—Teradyne—had begun laying off employees just hours before the terrorists struck; the chairman, nonetheless, helped himself to 602,589 options just two weeks later, and when JOURNAL reporters wanted to ask about it, his spokesman said the CEO wouldn’t be available for an interview because “I don’t want to put him in the position of answering how does he feel about potentially benefiting from the 9/11 tragedy.”
President Bush had already urged us to prove our patriotism by going shopping. New York mayor Rudy Giuliani went on television to say we should “step up to the plate right now and show the strength of the American economy.” Giuliani himself would soon be hauling in a fortune exploiting his newfound celebrity to advise corporations on how to protect against terrorism. And in Washington the marionettes of the military-industrial-security complex salivated at the prospect of windfall profits rising from the smoldering ruins. Grief would prove no match for greed. I decided not to cancel the speech.
AFTER 9/11
Keynote address to the Environmental Grantmakers Association
Brainerd, Minnesota
October 16, 2001
This isn’t the speech I expected to give today. I intended something else.
For several years I’ve been taking every possible opportunity to talk about the soul of democracy. “Something is deeply wrong with politics today,” I told anyone who would listen. And I wasn’t referring to the partisan mudslinging, or the negative TV ads, the excessive polling or the empty campaigns. I was talking about something deeper, something troubling at the core of politics. The soul of democracy – government of, by, and for the people – has been drowning in a rising tide of money contributed by a narrow, unrepresentative elite that has betrayed Abraham Lincoln’s vision of self-government.
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Click the video below for Bill Moyers' thoughts on President Obama and his plan for health reform.
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Push finally came to shove in Washington this week as the battle for health care escalated from scattered sniper fire into all-out combat. If it all seems to be getting more and more confusing, join the club. It’s hard to see what’s happening through all the gun smoke.
The Republicans have more than health care reform in their bombsights – they want a loss for Obama so crushing it will bring the administration to its knees and restore GOP control of Congress after next year’s elections. In the words of Republican Senator Jim DeMint, “If we’re able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.”
The “Waterloo” of DeMint’s metaphor, of course, is not the 1974 ABBA hit but the battle in 1815 that ended Napoleon Bonaparte’s rule as Emperor of France – a humiliating defeat and a turning point in European history. Right wingers like Glenn Beck see Obama as Napoleon incarnate, a popular emperor who must be stopped.
Here’s what Beck said on his television show Monday, July 20: “I’m telling you, this guy is dangerous. He’s never lost before. He won’t understand… like, ‘Who are you to question me?’ I mean, this guy is practically an imperial President now. When he starts to lose and people start to question him and push him back against the wall, he’s not gonna know how to react.”
The Republican strategy is almost identical to the way they turned health care into Waterloo for Bill and Hillary Clinton in 1993. Back then, one of their chief propagandists, William Kristol, urged his party to block any health care plan for fear that Democrats would be seen as “the generous protector of middle class interests.” Now he’s telling the GOP to “go for the kill… throw the kitchen sink… drive a stake through its heart… We need to start over.”
Continue reading "Bill Moyers & Michael Winship: Obama's Health Care Struggle – Waterloo or Water Down? " »
This is a story of health care and two Americans; a tale of two citizens, if you will.
This week, Regina Benjamin was nominated by President Obama as our next surgeon general, charged with educating Americans on medical issues and overseeing the United States Public Health Service. She was the first African American woman to head a state medical society, a member of the board of trustees of the American Medical Association and last year was named the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation genius award.
But more important, she’s a country doctor, a family physician along the Gulf Coast of Alabama, serving the poor and uninsured – white, black and Asian. After Hurricane Katrina destroyed her clinic – the second time a hurricane had done so – she mortgaged her own home to rebuild it. The day it was to reopen, a fire burned the clinic to the ground. Moving to a trailer, Dr. Benjamin and her staff never missed a day of work.
Stan Wright, the tobacco-chewing mayor of Bayou La Batre, the small shrimp-fishing community in which Dr. Benjamin practices, told National Public Radio, “She’ll do whatever she’s gotta do to make sure everyone’s taken care of.”
Continue reading "Bill Moyers & Michael Winship: Oysters for Health Care" »
If you want to know what really matters in Washington, don't go to Capitol Hill for one of those hearings, or pay attention to those staged White House "town meetings.” They’re just for show. What really happens – the serious business of Washington – happens in the shadows, out of sight, off the record. Only occasionally – and usually only because someone high up stumbles -- do we get a glimpse of just how pervasive the corruption has become.
Case in point: Katharine Weymouth, the publisher of THE WASHINGTON POST – one of the most powerful people in DC – invited top officials from the White House, the Cabinet and Congress to her home for an intimate, off-the-record dinner to discuss health care reform with some of her reporters and editors covering the story.
But CEO’s and lobbyists from the health care industry were invited, too, provided they forked over $25,000 a head – or up to a quarter of a million if they want to sponsor a whole series of these cozy get-togethers. And what is the inducement offered? Nothing less, the invitation read, than “an exclusive opportunity to participate in the health-care reform debate among the select few who will get it done.”
The invitation reminds the CEO’s and lobbyists that they will be buying access to “those powerful few in business and policy making who are forwarding, legislating and reporting on the issues…
"Spirited? Yes. Confrontational? No." The invitation promises this private, intimate and off-the-record dinner is an extension “of THE WASHINGTON POST brand of journalistic inquiry into the issues, a unique opportunity for stakeholders to hear and be heard.”
Let that sink in. In this case, the “stakeholders” in health care reform do not include the rabble – the folks across the country who actually need quality health care but can’t afford it. If any of them showed up at the kitchen door on the night of this little soiree, the bouncer would drop kick them beyond the Beltway.
Continue reading "Bill Moyers & Michael Winship: Some Choice Words For "The Select Few"" »
You know by now that in Washington, DC, on Wednesday, an elderly white supremacist and anti-Semite named James W. von Brunn allegedly walked into the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum with a .22-caliber rifle and killed security guard Stephen T. Johns before being brought down himself. He’s 88 years old, with a long record of hatred and paranoid fantasies about the Illuminati and a Global Zionist state. How bitter the bile that has curdled for so many decades.
You will know, too, of the recent killing, while ushering at his local church, of Dr. George Tiller, one of the few doctors in the country still performing late term abortions. Sadly, this case was proof that fatal violence works. His family has announced that his Wichita, Kansas, clinic will not be reopened.
You may be less familiar with the June 1st shootings in an army recruiting office in Little Rock that killed one soldier and wounded another. The suspect in question is an African-American Muslim convert who says he acted in retaliation for US military activity in the Middle East.
Soon, however, these terrible deeds will be forgotten, as are already the three policemen killed by an assault weapon in Pittsburgh; the four policemen killed in Oakland, California; the 13 people gunned down in Binghamton, New York; the 10 in an Alabama shooting spree; five in Santa Clara, California; the eight dead in a North Carolina, nursing home. All during this year alone.
There is much talk about hate talk; hate crimes against blacks, whites, immigrants, Muslims, Jews; about violence committed in the name of bigotry or religion. But why don’t we talk about guns?
Continue reading "Bill Moyers & Michael Winship: Why Have We Stopped Talking About Guns?" »
In all the recent debate over torture, many of our Beltway pundits and politicians have twisted themselves into verbal contortions to avoid using the word at all.
During his speech to the conservative American Enterprise Institute last week – immediately on the heels of President Obama’s address at the National Archives – former Vice President Dick Cheney used the euphemism "enhanced interrogation" a full dozen times.
Smothering the reality of torture in euphemism of course has a political value, enabling its defenders to diminish the horror and possible illegality. It also gives partisans the opening they need to divert our attention by turning the future of the prison at Guantanamo Bay into a “wedge issue,” as noted on the front page of Sunday’s NEW YORK TIMES.
According to the TIMES, “Armed with polling data that show a narrow majority of support for keeping the prison open and deep fear about the detainees, Republicans in Congress started laying plans even before the inauguration to make the debate over Guantanamo Bay a question of local community safety instead of one about national character and principles.“
No political party would dare make torture a cornerstone of its rejuvenation if people really understood what it is. And lest we forget, we’re not just talking about waterboarding, itself a trivializing euphemism for drowning.
If we want to know what torture is, and what it does to human beings, we have to look at it squarely, without flinching. That’s just what a powerful and important film, seen by far too few Americans, does. TORTURING DEMOCRACY was written and produced by one of America’s outstanding documentary reporters, Sherry Jones.
Continue reading "Bill Moyers & Michael Winship: Everyone Should See TORTURING DEMOCRACY" »
In 2003, a young Illinois state senator named Barack Obama told an AFL-CIO meeting, “I am a proponent of a single-payer universal health care program.”
Single payer. Universal. That’s health coverage, like Medicare, but for everyone who wants it. Single payer eliminates insurance companies as pricey middlemen. The government pays care providers directly. It’s a system that polls consistently have shown the American people favoring by as much as two-to-one.
There was only one thing standing in the way, Obama said six years ago: “All of you know we might not get there immediately because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate and we have to take back the House.”
Fast forward six years. President Obama has everything he said was needed – Democrats in control of the executive branch and both chambers of Congress. So what’s happened to single payer?
A woman at his town hall meeting in New Mexico last week asked him exactly that. “If I were starting a system from scratch, then I think that the idea of moving towards a single-payer system could very well make sense,” the President replied. “That's the kind of system that you have in most industrialized countries around the world.
“The only problem is that we're not starting from scratch. We have historically a tradition of employer-based health care. And although there are a lot of people who are not satisfied with their health care, the truth is, is that the vast majority of people currently get health care from their employers and you've got this system that's already in place. We don't want a huge disruption as we go into health care reform where suddenly we're trying to completely reinvent one-sixth of the economy.”
So the banks were too big to fail and now, apparently, health care is too big to fix, at least the way a majority of people indicate they would like it to be fixed, with a single payer option. President Obama favors a public health plan competing with the medical cartel that he hopes will create a real market that would bring down costs. But single payer has vanished from his radar.
Continue reading "Bill Moyers & Michael Winship: Rx and the Single Payer" »
Finally, here we are at the end of this week of a hundred days. As everyone in the western world probably knows by now, this benchmark for assessing presidencies goes back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who arrived at the White House in the depths of the Great Depression.
In his first hundred days, FDR came out swinging. He shut down the banks, threw the money lenders from the temple, cranked out so much legislation so fast he would shout to his secretary, Grace Tully, “Grace, take a law!” Will Rogers said Congress didn’t pass bills anymore; it just waved as they went by.
President Obama’s been busy, but contrary to many of the pundits, he’s no FDR. Our new president got his political education in the world of Chicago ward politics, and seems to have adopted a strategy from the machine of that city’s longtime boss, the late Richard J. Daley, father of the current mayor there. “Don’t make no waves,” one of Daley’s henchmen advised, “don’t back no losers.”
Your opinion of Obama’s first 100 days depends of course on your own vantage point. But we'd argue that as part of his bending over backwards to support the banks and avoid the losers, he has blundered mightily in his choice of economic advisers.
Continue reading "Bill Moyers & Michael Winship: Mortgaging the White House" »
Concluding the JOURNAL this week, Bill Moyers reflected on Barack Obama's press conference Tuesday and the questions from the public that he answered on Thursday, suggesting a few questions that he and journalist Morton Mintz would like to see answered:
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What questions would you ask President Obama?
Concluding this week's JOURNAL, Bill Moyers delivered the following commentary on President Barack Obama's decision to send nearly 50% more troops to Afghanistan.
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For more JOURNAL coverage of the situation in Afghanistan, you may wish to explore Bill Moyers' recent conversations with former NPR reporter Sarah Chayes and experts Pierre Sprey and Marilyn B. Young.
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Last week, Bill Moyers answered questions in a live chat on PBS.ORG. Click here to read a transcript of the discussion. Below, he answers more questions from the chat and the MOYERS BLOG.
Q. Dear Mr. Moyers, other than voting and writing to their congress people, what can citizens do to have influence over Washington policy?
Eva Marie Willis
Q. What can we as concerned citizens do to ensure that the necessary reforms in media, the economy, etc. that you've long advocated are actually enacted?
Suzanne Reymer
A. Find one group close by that needs your help. One organization, one cause. Affordable housing. Advocating the cleanup of a toxic site. Agitating for transparency in local government. Seek a chapter with national links — Common Cause, Public Citizen, Institute for America's Future. Study the example of Beverly Eckert, whose husband was killed in the World Trade Center on 9/ll and who herself died in the Continental crash near Buffalo last week. After 9/ll she and other relatives of the victims organized the 9/11 Family Steering Committee and kept the pressure on until they got some answers — including standing down Henry Kissinger after it was announced he would head the 9/ll Commission. See her obituary in the NYT of Saturday February 14. There are many, many such groups, causes, and needs. Find one, join it, serve it, and stay with it.
As for media reform, check out the site freepress.net.
Q. What is the selection process for deciding which guests to feature on your program?
Alan
A. My staff and I follow the news trying to assess which voices can add a dimension to it that you won't find elsewhere. We read books looking for people who know something unique on a subject. Magazines, too — on science, nature, history, the arts — and scores of online sites. We're looking for people who usually wouldn't have a mainstream venue, who add a fresh take on a subject, and who don't have a cause or ideology to push but instead are trying to tell the truth as they see it. It's a constant process that calls on our collective journalistic instincts. At some point, after much to-ing and fro-ing, I'll make the call. There are always far more possibilities than we have time to feature.
Q. Did you ever consider entering politics, and, what would you be if you were not a journalist?
Mary M.
A. When I left the White House in January 1967 to publish NEWSDAY, I made my choice about journalism and never looked back, even when people urged me to run. The two don't mix, and if I had pursued journalism with an eye toward political office, I couldn't have trusted myself, much less earn the trust of the people who followed my journalism. Three times I turned down opportunities for appointed positions in Washington that came my way through no effort of my own; it was easy to say no, on the grounds that I belong on this, the journalistic, side of the fence.
Q. Do you think through a rigid recitation of facts journalists can convey the absolute truth of a story? Can journalists fulfill their duty to their community by only reporting verifiable facts or must they go further? If they go further how do they know they are pursuing something truthful and not just their own personal viewpoint?
Kelly Stephens
A. I'm not sure what you mean by a "rigid recitation of facts" or even the "absolute truth of a story." We're not meant to be stenographers -- simply transcribing what officials tell us — but there is always more information about just about any story than we can gather in a limited time and with limited resources. Our job as journalists is to gather as much as we can, weigh it (what appears to be more significant than others), organize what we can verify, and present it as our best-effort account. The "truth of the matter" usually lies beyond the mere presentation of facts, but without the facts, the truth can't be grounded. I see our work as trying to ground our conclusions in solid fact-gathering.
Q. As I admire you and your extraordinary (and desperately needed) work greatly, I was wondering if you could share with us the people that you admire and learn from. I would be very interested to hear what historical and contemporary journalists, political figures, and especially, knowing of your interest in the arts, artists (literary, visual, or musical) you admire.
Chris Ulrich
A. I wish I had more time for this one. I've learned from almost all the people whom I have interviewed over the years. We journalists are licensed, so to speak, to explain things we don't understand. That means talking to as many people as we can, because we don't on our own know very much. I honestly don't have favorites — any more than I favor one of my three children or five grandchildren — but some had more impact than others. Obviously the series with Joseph Campbell on THE POWER OF MYTH. My WORLD OF IDEAS interviews in l988 (see the book.) THE WISDOM OF FAITH with Huston Smith. And the interviews in FAITH AND REASON in 2006. On the other hand, I found last week's interviews on BILL MOYERS JOURNAL with Simon Johnson and Nikki Giovanni remarkably revealing. And on it goes.
Q. Have you read Howard Zinn's book, A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES? If you have, I would appreciate your comments. I would also enjoy seeing him on your program, if he accepts public invitations.
Thank you for your program. I look forward to it every Friday on my local PBS station.
Stephanie Rogstad
I have read it — at least twice. And I interviewed him on my series NOW WITH BILL MOYERS a few years back. You can check it out online here.
Thanks for watching and writing.
-Bill Moyers
Bill Moyers responds to viewer feedback to last week's essay on the violence in Gaza.
PLEASE NOTE: This essay contains images of casualties from the conflict in Gaza. Some viewers may find the images disturbing, but they are in context and germane to the subject matter.
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Bill Moyers reflects on the recent violence in the Middle East.
PLEASE NOTE: This essay containins video and images of the Israeli and Palestinian casualties – including children - in Gaza as well as the Pulitzer prize-winning photo of the nude Vietnamese girl running from napalm bombing. Some viewers may find the images disturbing, but they are in context and germane to the subject matter.
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In observation of Labor Day, BIll Moyers shared these thoughts on the JOURNAL this week:
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ABC News’ political blog, “The Note,” points out this week that Paris Hilton is issuing policy statements while John McCain nominates his wife for a topless beauty contest. The world’s turned upside down. Who could blame a person for thinking that chronicling such oddness is beyond the skills of simple journalists? This is a job for the novelists.
Here, for example, is something straight out of Tom Wolfe’s BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES. Are you ready for this? THE WALL STREET JOURNAL reports that, “At a time when scores of companies are freezing pensions for their workers, some are quietly converting those pension plans into resources to finance their executives' retirement benefit and pay. In recent years, companies from Intel Corp to CenturyTel Inc. collectively have moved hundreds of millions of dollars of obligations for executive benefits into rank-and-file pension plans. This lets companies capture tax breaks intended for pensions of regular workers and use them to pay for executives' supplemental benefits and compensation.”
Everyone knows we've been living through one of the great redistributions of wealth in American history – from the bottom up. But this takes the cake, because our tax dollars are subsidizing this spectacular round of robbing the poor to pay off the rich. Sad to say, it’s not fiction.
Continue reading "Bill Moyers & Michael Winship: A Novel Approach to Politics" »
Below is an piece by Bill Moyers and JOURNAL writer Michael Winship. We welcome your comments below.
The Wave of "Capitol Crimes" Continues
by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship
Like the largesse he spread so bountifully to members of Congress and the White House staff -- countless fancy meals, skybox tickets to basketball games and U2 concerts, golfing sprees in Scotland -- Jack Abramoff is the gift that keeps on giving.
The notorious lobbyist and his cohorts (including conservatives Tom Delay, Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed) shook down Native American tribal councils and other clients for tens of millions of dollars, buying influence via a coalition of equally corrupt government officials and cronies dedicated to dismantling government by selling it off, making massive profits as they tore the principles of a representative democracy to shreds.
Continue reading "Bill Moyers & Michael Winship: The Wave of "Capitol Crimes" Continues" »
By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship
Once again we're closing the barn door after the horse is out and gone. In Washington the Federal Reserve has finally acted to stop some of the predatory lending that exploited people’s need for money. And like Rip Van Winkle, Congress is finally waking up from a long doze under the warm sun of laissez faire economics. That's French for turning off the alarm until the burglars have made their getaway.
Philosophy is one reason we do this to ourselves; when you worship market forces as if they were the gods of Olympus, then the gods can do no wrong -- until, of course, they prove to be human. Then we realize we should have listened to our inner agnostic and not been so reverent in the first place.
Continue reading "Bill Moyers & Michael Winship: Mother’s Milk of Politics Turns Sour" »
Below is an piece by Bill Moyers and JOURNAL writer Michael Winship. We welcome your comments below.
It Was Oil, All Along
By Bill Moyers & Michael Winship
Oh, no, they told us, Iraq isn't a war about oil. That's cynical and simplistic, they said. It's about terror and al Qaeda and toppling a dictator and spreading democracy and protecting ourselves from weapons of mass destruction. But one by one, these concocted rationales went up in smoke, fire, and ashes. And now the bottom turns out to be....the bottom line. It is about oil.
Continue reading "Bill Moyers & Michael Winship: It Was Oil, All Along" »
In honor of Memorial Day, JOURNAL writers Bill Moyers and Michael Winship wrote the following essay on how to best honor our veterans.
Memorial Day
We honor our war dead this Memorial Day weekend. The greatest respect we could pay them would be to pledge no more wars for erroneous and misleading reasons; no more killing and wounding except for the defense of our country and our freedoms.
We also could honor our dead by caring for the living, and do better at it than we are right now.
There has been a flurry of allegations concerning neglect, malpractice and corner cutting at the Veterans Administration especially for those suffering from post traumatic stress disorder – PTSD – or major depression, brought on by combat.
Continue reading "Honoring Our Veterans" »
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