Moyers & Company

First it was Wisconsin. Now it’s North Carolina that is redefining the term “battleground state.” On one side: a right-wing government enacting laws that are changing the face of the state. On the other: citizen protesters who are fighting back against what they fear is a radical takeover. This crucible of conflict reflects how the battle for control of American politics is likely to be fought for the foreseeable future: not in Washington, DC, but state by state. This week on Moyers & Company, “State of Conflict: North Carolina” offers a documentary report from a 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 is also a major funder of conservative political candidates in the state. Pope’s most ardent opponent is the Reverend William Barber, head of the state chapter of the NAACP, who says the right-wing state government has produced “an avalanche of extremist policies that threaten health care, that threaten education [and] that threaten the poor.” Barber’s opposition to the legislature as well as the Pope alliance became a catalyst for the protest movement that became known around the country as “Moral Mondays.” “State of Confl

This week on Moyers & Company, Bill begins a new half-hour format with nothing short of the universe itself. In a multi-part series with the popular astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill explores a variety of topics, including the nature of an expanding, accelerating universe (and how it might end), the difference between “dark energy” and “dark matter,” the concept of God in cosmology and why science matters. “Science is an enterprise that should be cherished as an activity of the free human mind,” Tyson tells Bill. “Because it transforms who we are, how we live, and it gives us an understanding of our place in the universe.” Starting in March, Tyson will host a new, updated version of the hit PBS television series Cosmos, which made the late Carl Sagan a household name. This time the new series, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, comes courtesy of the National Geographic Channel and Fox TV.

This week on Moyers & Company, David Simon, journalist and creator of the TV series The Wire and Treme, talks with Bill about the crisis of capitalism in America. After President Barack Obama’s annual State of the Union address, it’s a reality check from someone who artfully uses television drama to report on the state of America from an entirely different perspective — the bottom up. “The horror show is we are going to be slaves to profit. Some of us are going to be higher on the pyramid and we’ll count ourselves lucky and many many more will be marginalized and destroyed,” Simon tells Moyers. He blames a “purchased” Congress for failing America’s citizens, leading many of them to give up on politics altogether.

After the State Department issued a long-awaited environmental impact statement on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline last week, environmentalists and those opposed to the 1,179-mile pipeline have intensified their push for the Obama administration to reject the project. This week, Bill Moyers talks with Bill McKibben, an activist who has dedicated his life to saving the planet from environmental collapse, about his hopes that Americans will collectively pressure Obama to stand up to big oil. “Most people understand that we’re in a serious fix,” McKibben tells Moyers, “There’s nothing you can do as individuals that will really slow down this juggernaut … You can say the same thing about the challenges faced by people in the civil rights or the abolition movement, or the gay rights movement or the women’s movement. In each case, a movement arose; if we can build a movement, then we have a chance.”

On Wednesday a federal jury found Ray Nagin, the former New Orleans mayor, guilty of bribery and fraud, in the latest example of corruption in politics and the power of the almighty dollar. This week on Moyers & Company, we feature two Americans fighting the good fight against greed and corruption. First, David Simon, former crime reporter and creator of the TV series The Wire and Treme, returns to talk with Bill about his belief that getting money out of politics is a major priority. Also, a special report on a two-week, 185-mile trek through the winter cold in New Hampshire, led last month by constitutional scholar and activist Lawrence Lessig, to raise awareness of the crippling problem of corruption in American politics.

Everyone knows about the military-industrial complex, which, in his farewell address, President Eisenhower warned had the potential to “endanger our liberties or democratic process” but have you heard of the “Deep State?” Mike Lofgren, a former GOP congressional staff member with the powerful House and Senate Budget Committees, joins Bill to talk about what he calls the Deep State, a hybrid of corporate America and the national security state, which is “out of control” and “unconstrained.” In it, Lofgren says, elected and unelected figures collude to protect and serve powerful vested interests. “It is … the red thread that runs through the history of the last three decades. It is how we had deregulation, financialization of the economy, the Wall Street bust, the erosion or our civil liberties and perpetual war,” Lofgren tells Bill. Lofgren says the Deep State’s heart lies in Washington, DC, but its tentacles reach out to Wall Street, which Lofgren describes as “the ultimate backstop to the whole operation,” Silicon Valley and over 400,000 contractors, private citizens who have top-secret security clearances. Like any other bureaucracy, it’s groupthink that drives the Deep State. In conjunction with this week’s show, Mike Lofgren has written an exclusive essay, “Anatomy of the Deep State.”

What do Cadillac-driving “welfare queens,” a “food stamp president” and the “lazy, dependent and entitled” 47 percent tell us about post-racial America? They’re all examples of a type of coded racism that this week’s guest, Ian Haney López, writes about in his new book, Dog Whistle Politics. Haney López is an expert in how racism has evolved in America since the civil rights era. Over the past 50 years, politicians have mastered the use of dog whistles – code words that turn Americans against each other while turning the country over to plutocrats. This political tactic, says Haney López, is “the dark magic” by which middle-class voters have been seduced to vote against their own economic interests. “It comes out of a desire to win votes. And in that sense… It’s racism as a strategy. It’s cold, it’s calculating, it’s considered,” Haney López tells Bill, “it’s the decision to achieve one’s own ends, here winning votes, by stirring racial animosity.” Ian Haney López, a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, is a senior fellow at the policy analysis and advocacy group, Demos.

This week on Moyers & Company, Bill continues his conversation with author and legal scholar Ian Haney López about dog whistle politics – code words that use race to turn Americans against each other. Politicians manipulate deep prejudice to rouse hostility against minorities and the government, according to Haney López, and summon support for policies that make economic inequality even worse. And it’s not just Republicans and the tea party who have used this “strategic racism” to win votes, but Democrats as well. “Democrats have understood, even as early as 1970, [that] race was gonna be an effective wedge issue against them. And when the Democrats responded they responded not by contesting that politics but instead by embracing it. And this is part of the story of dog whistle politics — Republicans shift right and the Democrats have tracked rightward, following them,” Haney López tells Moyers. The two also discuss dog whistling and the debate over food stamps, the presidency of Barack Obama and the rise of the tea party, as well as the origins of this election strategy. Haney López also tells Bill that he expects the racial provocations will evolve to target members of the Latino and Asian communities in the coming years.

This week, as the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee Dianne Feinstein publicly accused the CIA of spying on her committee’s computers, Bill talks with investigative reporter Julia Angwin, author of Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance. The book chronicles the indiscriminate tracking of our everyday lives — where government and business are stockpiling data about us at an unprecedented pace. Reporters are a prime target for Internet snooping, says Angwin, “Journalists are the canary in the coal mine. We’re the first ones to seriously feel the impact of total surveillance, which means we can’t protect our sources. But what happens next? What happens next is we’re not good watch dogs for democracy. And that’s a very worrisome situation.” Angwin and Moyers also discuss our exposure to fraud from online data mining; why mass data collection is not making us safer in the face of terrorism and why European privacy regulations are stronger than those in the US. Julia Angwin covered the business and technology beat at The Wall Street Journal for 13 years and is a Pulitzer Prize winner now working for the independent news organization ProPublica.

In the coming weeks, the Supreme Court is expected to issue another big decision on campaign finance, one that could further open the floodgates to unfettered and anonymous contributions, just as the Citizens United case did four years ago. This week Bill speaks with investigative journalists Kim Barker and Andy Kroll about the role of dark money — and the wealthy donors behind it — in this year’s midterm elections. Already, three times as much money has been raised for this year’s elections as four years ago, when the Citizens United decision was announced. “This is the era of the empowered ‘one percenter’. They’re taking action and they’re becoming the new, headline players in this political system,” Kroll tells Moyers. Kim Barker adds, “People want influence. It’s a question of whether we’re going to allow it to happen, especially if we’re going to allow it to happen and nobody even knows who the influencers are.” Barker is an investigative reporter with the independent, non-profit news organization ProPublica and Andy Kroll is a journalist in the Washington bureau of Mother Jones magazine. Bill Moyers is president of Schumann Media Center which supports independent journalism, including Andy Kroll’s work at Mother Jones.

Public education is becoming big business as bankers, hedge fund managers and private equity investors are entering what they consider to be an “emerging market.” As Rupert Murdoch put it after purchasing an education technology company, “When it comes to K through 12 education, we see a $500 billion sector in the US alone.” Education historian Diane Ravitch says the privatization of public education has to stop. As assistant secretary of education under President George H.W. Bush, she was an advocate of school choice and charter schools; under George W. Bush, she supported the No Child Left Behind initiative. But after careful investigation, she changed her mind, and has become, according to Salon, “the nation’s highest profile opponent” of charter-based education. On this week’s Moyers & Company, she tells Bill Moyers, ”I think what’s at stake is the future of American public education. I believe it is one of the foundation stones of our democracy: So an attack on public education is an attack on democracy.” Diane Ravitch is America’s preeminent historian of public education. Her newest book is Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools.

Did you know the federal minimum wage for millions of restaurant workers is $2.13 an hour? Advocate Saru Jayaraman says that’s not only unfair but unsafe.

Historian Harvey J. Kaye talks to Bill about why FDR’s “Four Freedoms” — freedom from fear and want and freedom of speech and religion — are more important now than ever.

Economist Paul Krugman explains how the United States is becoming an oligarchy – the very system our founders revolted against.

Two leaders of the climate change divestment campaign are urging institutions to break ties with the fossil fuel industry.

Democracy loses if the Internet’s sold to the highest bidder — and that may be exactly what’s about to happen.

A geneticist who has made science exciting to millions of TV viewers warns that we’re burning up the planet, but there’s still a chance we can make it.

In part two of his interview, scientist David Suzuki says there’s still hope for the planet, despite the obstruction and greed of politicians and corporations.

This week Bill speaks with Ta-Nehisi Coates, a senior editor for The Atlantic about his cover story on why America needs to reconcile with its racist past.

The Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz on why America’s future prosperity depends on tax reform today.

In part two of his interview, economist Joseph E. Stiglitz says corporate tax abuse has helped make America unequal and undemocratic. But the Nobel Prize-winner has a plan to change that.

Our banks are larger than before the 2008 crash and they’re still living dangerously, economist Anat Admati tells Bill.

While armchair warriors in Washington cry “back to Iraq,” former combat veteran and military historian Andrew Bacevich says no way.

This week Bill speaks with investigative journalist Charles Lewis about why facts, logic and reason are often missing in the rush to war.

This week on Moyers & Company, organized people versus organized money: the battle continues.

Following several high-profile, controversial decisions, Bill speaks to NY Times columnist Linda Greenhouse and Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick about the agenda of the Roberts court.

With new state laws and Supreme Court rulings, the battle over women’s reproductive rights is being fought more fiercely than ever. Roe v. Wade itself may be in peril. Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards joins Bill in the studio this week.

The president of the American Enterprise Institute says free enterprise is good for the poor – and good for the soul.

John Lithgow joins Bill to talk about the challenges and triumphs of playing Shakespeare’s greatest role, and why we are so drawn to the tale of this flawed, contradictory leader at this moment.

Revisit an episode from over 30 years ago, in which Bill joined the legendary writer on her return to the small town where she grew up.

Bill Moyers revisits a 1988 documentary in which he and Maya Angelou attended a conference held in the Hill Country of central Texas.

The Massachusetts senator talks to Bill about taking on the entrenched political and Wall Street interests that have rigged the game against the rest of us.

Christian and climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe talks to Bill about ending the gridlock between politics, science and faith.

Kelsey Juliana, an 18-year-old activist, is fighting climate change in the courts and walking across the country to spread the word on global warming.

Two experts on American foreign policy talk to Bill about our deepening engagement in the fight against jihadists in Iraq and Syria.

A veteran bank regulator lays bare how Washington and Wall Street are joined in a culture of corruption.

Reporter Bob Herbert on his new book, Losing Our Way, an intimate and heartrending portrait of America in economic despair.

A new poll by Pew Research has found that one-third of Americans do not believe in evolution, with Republicans far less likely to believe that humans evolved over time than Democrats. That may be why the teaching of evolution to children continues to be an often temper-flaming debate. In states like Texas, some public school students are opening their biology textbooks to find evolution described as “dogma” and an “unproved theory.” While astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson believes all individuals have a right to their own beliefs, he’s passionate about what should be taught in science class – science. “If you have a religious philosophy that is not based in objective realities that you then want to put in the science classroom, then I’m going stand there and say no, ‘I’m not going to allow you in the science classroom,’” Tyson tells Bill. In the second part of their conversation, Tyson and Bill discuss whether science and religion can ever be reconciled, explore the cosmic enigma known as dark matter and the possibilities of parallel universes. Neil deGrasse Tyson is host of the upcoming series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Marilynne Robinson talks to Bill about what the title character of her new book Lila, says about the state of democracy in America.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson unwittingly triggered a controversy in the blogosphere last week when he said this on our show: “If you have a religious philosophy that is not based in objective realities that you then want to put in the science classroom, then I’m going to stand there and say no, ‘I’m not going to allow you in the science classroom.’” This week on Moyers & Company, Bill weighs in on that debate with an essay on politicians and others who refuse to accept the reality of evolution and climate change. And in part three of their conversation, Bill and Tyson discuss why science literacy is important for the future of our democracy, economy and standing in the world: “Science literacy is an inoculation against charlatans who would exploit your ignorance of scientific law to then take your money from you or your opportunity from you.” And that literacy is at risk, Tyson concludes. Bill and Tyson also talk about American students’ poor performance on international math and science tests as well as the relationship between income inequality and education. Neil deGrasse Tyson is host of the upcoming series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey

Two experts on American elections talk to Bill about the plot to keep citizens away from the ballot box.

The only independent member of the US Senate tells Bill big money’s purchase of political power is a grave threat, and shares his plan to put government back in voters’ control.

On Election Day, a small California city took on one of the biggest corporations in America… and declared victory.

Two college professors leave academia for the rough-and-tumble world of electoral politics. What did they learn?

Government has become a clearinghouse for corporations and plutocrats with deep pockets to buy the politicians who grease the wheels for lucrative contracts and easy regulation. It’s all pay for play, and look the other way. According to the watchdog Sunlight Foundation, from 2007 to 2012, 200 corporations spent almost $6 billion in Washington on lobbying and campaign contributions. And they received more than $4 trillion in government contracts and other forms of assistance. Now that the midterm elections are over, it’s payback time, with the newly elected Congress ready to deliver to those who invested well in their chosen candidates. This week, Lawrence Lessig and Zephyr Teachout return to talk about the corrupting influence of money in politics — a subject both have studied as scholars and are fighting against as reformers. (Watch part one of Bill’s conversation with Lessig and Teachout) For the 2014 midterm elections, Lessig started the Mayday SuperPac, raising millions for congressional candidates who vowed to fight for campaign finance reform. All but two of them lost – but the fight continues. He tells Bill, “When we look at the systematic way in which our representatives are responsive not to the people alone, but increasingly to the funders exclusively, then that is an obvious corruption… This is not a Democratic issue. This is not a Republican issue. This is an American issue.” Zephyr Teachout ran for governor of New York this year, trying to rouse the public against corruption in state government and received more than a third of the vote in the Democratic primary. She has written the book Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United. “I think we should forget the perfect resume and instead engage people who come from all different backgrounds, including the arts, and get them to run for office. Because this is what the kids in Hong Kong are fighting for. And we have to take the opportunity

Some people say inequality doesn’t matter. They are wrong. All we have to do to see its effects is to realize that all across America millions of people of ordinary means can’t afford decent housing. As wealthy investors and buyers drive up real estate values, the middle class is being squeezed further and the working poor are being shoved deeper into squalor — in places as disparate as Silicon Valley and New York City. This week Bill points to the changing skyline of Manhattan as the physical embodiment of how money and power impact the lives and neighborhoods of every day people. Soaring towers being built at the south end of Central Park, climbing higher than ever with apartments selling from $30 million to $90 million, are beginning to block the light on the park below. Many of the apartments are being sold at those sky high prices to the international super rich, many of whom will only live in Manhattan part-time – if at all — and often pay little or no city income or property taxes, thanks to the political clout of real estate developers. “The real estate industry here in New York City is like the oil industry in Texas,” affordable housing advocate Jaron Benjamin says, “They outspend everybody… They often have a much better relationship with elected officials than everyday New Yorkers do.” Meanwhile, fewer and fewer middle and working class people can afford to live in New York City. As Benjamin puts it, “Forget about the Statue of Liberty. Forget about Ellis Island. Forget about the idea of everybody being welcome here in New York City. This will be a city only for rich people.”

In the wake of decisions by grand juries in both Missouri and New York’s Staten Island not to indict white police officers in the deaths of unarmed African-Americans, this week we present an encore broadcast of Bill’s conversation earlier this year with journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates. First telecast in May 2014, Coates had just written a cover story in The Atlantic magazine, provocatively titled “The Case for Reparations.” It urged that we begin a national dialogue on whether the United States should compensate African-Americans not only as recognition of slavery’s “ancient brutality” — as President Lyndon Johnson called it – but also as acknowledgement of all the prejudice and discrimination that have followed in a direct line from this, our original sin. His words are remarkably prescient in light of recent events. As Coates explained to Moyers, “I am not asking you, as a white person, to see yourself as an enslaver. I’m asking you as an American to see all of the freedoms that you enjoy and see how they are rooted in things that the country you belong to condoned or actively participated in in the past. And that covers everything from enslavement to the era of lynching, when we effectively decided that we weren’t going to afford African-Americans the same level of protection of the law… “There are plenty of African-Americans in this country — and I would say that this goes right up to the White House — who are not by any means poor, but are very much afflicted by white supremacy.” Reparations, Coates said, are “what the United States, first of all, really owes African-Americans, but not far behind that, what it owes itself, because this is really about our health as a country… I firmly believe that reparation is a chance to be pioneers. We say we set all these examples about liberty and freedom and democracy and all that great stuff. Well, here’s an opportunity for us to live that out.”

Negotiators from the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) are in Washington this week for a new round of talks which they hope will lead them closer to agreement on the trade deal. President Obama has called passage of TPP a “high priority.” This week, Bill speaks with outspoken veteran journalist John R. MacArthur, president and publisher of Harper’s Magazine, about the problems with TPP, which is being negotiated in secret, behind closed doors. MacArthur says that the “free trade” agreement will take jobs away from Americans: “I guarantee you, this is a way to send more jobs [abroad], particularly to Vietnam and Malaysia.” Obama’s commitment to trade is just another example of his indebtedness to Wall Street for massive campaign contributions. Hillary Clinton, who MacArthur describes as to the right of Americans’ political beliefs, may be scaring off progressives looking to run in 2016 as she is “very much in harmony” with Wall Street. “There are a lot of people who would make good candidates, but they’re intimidated by the Clinton fundraising machine.”

We’ve just watched the Senate and the House — aided and abetted by President Obama — pay off financial interests with provisions in the new spending bill that expand the amount of campaign cash wealthy donors can give, and let banks off the hook for gambling with customer (and taxpayer) money. What happened in Washington over the past several days sounds strikingly familiar to the First Gilded Age more than a century ago, when senators and representatives were owned by Wall Street and big business. Then, as now, those who footed the bill for political campaigns were richly rewarded with favorable laws. Bill’s guest this week, historian Steve Fraser, says what was different about the First Gilded Age was that people rose in rebellion against the powers that be. Today we do not see “that enormous resistance,” but he concludes, “people are increasingly fed up… their voices are not being heard. And I think that can only go on for so long without there being more and more outbreaks of what used to be called class struggle, class warfare.” Steve Fraser is a writer, editor and scholar of American history. Among his books are Every Man a Speculator, Wall Street: America’s Dream Palace and Labor Will Rule. His latest, The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power, will be published early next year.

American Indians Confront “Savage Anxieties” Earlier this month, as part of the $585 billion defense bill for 2015, Congress passed a measure that would give lands sacred to American Indians in Arizona to a foreign company. The deal gives the Australian-English mining firm Rio Tinto 2,400 acres of the Tonto National Forest in exchange for several other parcels so it can mine a massive copper deposit. This week, Bill speaks with Robert A. Williams Jr., a professor specializing in American Indian law, about how deals such as the one with Rio Tinto are a part of American Indian’s tragic history of dispossession. “Very much like African-Americans, the history of America is taking away resources, whether it’s labor or whether it’s land from one racial group to give them to the dominate racial group,” Williams, who is of Lumbee Indian heritage, says. He adds that the Arizona land set to become the “largest copper mine in the world” is one of the most sacred places of the San Carlos Apache Tribe. “These are folks that have been fighting the federal government over their land rights and cultural rights for a long time,” adding, “and here you have this little, small tribe of Apaches, one of the poorest tribes… trying to stop this.”