On Democracy

“On Democracy” is a new collection of weekly essays co-written by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship that address issues integral to American life, politics, and culture. They’ll be focusing much of their attention on money and its corrosive influence on government and politics: who’s spending the big bucks on contributions and lobbying — and to whom it’s going, as well as the monster impact of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision that unleashed vast — and often anonymous — corporate and special interest dollars.

EDITORS' PICKS

May 15, 2012

At a Military Hospital, Warriors Are Not the Only Wounded

by Michael Winship

In this picture taken Aug. 29, 2011 a US soldier who was wounded in Afghanistan is carried out of the bus at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Landstuhl, Germany. (AP /Michael Probst)

The weather’s getting warmer in Afghanistan and the war there is heating up again. That means – as it has meant every year for more than a decade — that the pace will quicken at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. More casualties will be brought to this largest American military hospital outside the United States. The Critical Care Air Transport teams and their C-17 Globemasters will fly in from “downrange,” as they call the Afghan battleground, and the injured will be brought by ambulance bus from nearby Ramstein Air Force Base to the hospital front door.

I spent a few days at Landstuhl recently, one of a group of writers from the Writers Guild Initiative, part of the Writers Guild of America, East Foundation (Full disclosure and just to add to the confusion: I’m president of the Writers Guild, East, the union with which the foundation’s affiliated).

For the last four years, the foundation has been conducting writing workshops. The project began with professional writers from stage, TV and movies mentoring veterans from the Iraq and Afghan wars, working with them on writing exercises and projects ranging from memoirs and blogs to children’s books, screenplays and sci-fi novels. Recently, in collaboration with the Wounded Warrior Project, the foundation started similar workshops with caregivers, the loved ones of veterans helping them through the aftermath of catastrophic injuries.

Now, Wounded Warrior had asked some of us to come to Landstuhl to meet with the medical staff there. Some 3,000 strong, military and civilian, they work ceaselessly in what has become one of the busiest trauma centers in the world, helping between twenty and thirty thousand patients a year (not just from the battlefield, but also military and their dependents from all over Europe, Africa and much of Asia). MORE

April 26, 2012

The Ghost of Joe McCarthy Slithers Again

by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

Right: Rep. Allen West, R-Fla., July 28, 2011 (AP Photo/Harry Hamburg); left: Senator Joseph McCarthy, R-Wis., June 9, 1954 (AP Photos)

We’ve talked at times about George Orwell’s classic novel 1984, and the amnesia that sets in when we flush events down the memory hole, leaving us at the mercy of only what we know today. Sometimes, though, the past comes back to haunt, like a ghost. It happened recently when we saw Congressman Allen West of Florida on the news.

A Republican and Tea Party favorite, he was asked at a local gathering how many of his fellow members of Congress are “card-carrying Marxists or International Socialists.”

He replied, “I believe there’s about 78 to 81 members of the Democrat Party who are members of the Communist Party. It’s called the Congressional Progressive Caucus.”

By now, little of what Allen West says ever surprises. He has called President Obama “a low level socialist agitator,” said anyone with an Obama bumper sticker on their car is “a threat to the gene pool” and told liberals like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi to “get the hell out of the United States of America.” Apparently, he gets his talking points from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, or the discredited right wing rocker Ted Nugent. MORE

April 18, 2012

I’m Big Bird and I Don’t Approve This Message

by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski (AP Photo/Danny Johnston, File)

A couple of weeks ago, we wrote about how the media giants who own your local commercial television and radio stations have been striking like startled rattlesnakes at an FCC proposal that would shed a light on who’s buying our elections. The proposed new rule would make it easier to find out who’s bankrolling political attack ads by posting the information online.

The stations already have the data and are required by law to make it public to anyone who asks. But you can get only it by going to the station and asking for the actual paper documents – what’s known as “the public file.” Stations don’t want to put it online because — you guessed it — that would make it too easy for you to find out who’s putting up the cash for all those ads polluting your hometown airwaves.

If approved, the new rule would require the ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox affiliates in the top 50 markets to make their files on political advertising available on line immediately. Other stations would have a two-year grace period.

In the meantime, the mighty giants of broadcasting have been fighting back. A number of senators serving the industry have spoken up against the proposal and the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) — led by their top lobbyist and president, the frozen food millionaire and former Oregon Republican Senator Gordon Smith – have been meeting with commissioners urging them to scuttle its proposal or at least water it down until it means nothing. MORE

April 12, 2012

The Rich Are Different from You and Me – They Pay Lower Taxes

by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

Employees of Rockwell Collins, Inc. gathered at an airport hangar before a rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa on Wednesday, Aug. 17, 2011 in support of the business aircraft industry. Industry leaders used the carefully-orchestrated rally to try to deflect recent criticism of "corporate jet owners" by President Barack Obama and other Democrats. (AP /Ryan J. Foley)

Benjamin Franklin, who used his many talents to become a wealthy man, famously said that the only things certain in life are death and taxes. But if you’re a corporate CEO in America today, even they can be put on the back burner — death held at bay by the best medical care money can buy and the latest in surgical and life extension techniques, taxes conveniently shunted aside courtesy of loopholes, overseas investment and governments that conveniently look the other way.

In a story headlined, “For Big Companies, Life Is Good,” The Wall Street Journal reports that big American companies have emerged from the deepest recession since World War II more profitable than ever: flush with cash, less burdened by debt, and with a greater share of the country’s income. But, the paper notes, “Many of the 1.1 million jobs the big companies added since 2007 were outside the U.S. So, too, was much of the $1.2 trillion added to corporate treasuries.”

To add to this embarrassment of riches, the consumer group Citizens for Tax Justice reports that more than two dozen major corporations — including GE, Boeing, Mattel and Verizon — paid no federal taxes between 2008 and 2011. They got a corporate tax break that was broadly supported by Republicans and Democrats alike. MORE

April 5, 2012

The Best Congress the Banks’ Money Can Buy

by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

Here we go again. Another round of the game we call Congressional Creep. After months of haggling and debate, Congress finally passes reform legislation to fix a serious rupture in the body politic, and the President signs it into law. But the fight’s just begun, because the special interests immediately set out to win back what they lost when the reform became law.

They spread money like manure on the campaign trails of key members of Congress. They unleash hordes of lobbyists on Capitol Hill, cozy up to columnists and editorial writers, spend millions on lawyers who relentlessly pick at the law, trying to rewrite or water down the regulations required for enforcement. Before you know it, what once was an attempt at genuine reform creeps back toward business as usual.

It’s happening right now with the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act – passed two years ago in the wake of our disastrous financial meltdown. Just last week, for example, both parties in the House overwhelmingly approved two bills that already would change Dodd-Frank’s rules on derivatives — those convoluted trading deals recently described by the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission as “the largest dark pool in our financial markets.”

Especially vulnerable is a key provision of Dodd-Frank known as the Volcker Rule, so named by President Obama after the former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker. It’s an attempt to keep the banks in which you deposit your money from gambling your savings on the bank’s own, sometime risky investments.

It will come as no surprise that the financial sector hates the Volcker Rule and is fighting back hard. MORE

March 29, 2012

Let’s Stop Big Media’s (B)AD Behavior

by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

Over the years we’ve been reporting on how power is monopolized by the powerful. How corporate lobbyists, for example, far outnumber members of Congress. And how the politicians are so eager to do the bidding of donors that they allow those lobbyists to dictate the law of the land and make a farce of democracy. What we have is much closer to plutocracy, where the massive concentration of wealth at the top protects and perpetuates itself by controlling the ends and means of politics. This is why so many of us despair over fixing what’s wrong: we elect representatives to change things, and once in office they wind up serving the deep-pocketed donors who put up the money to keep change from happening at all.

Here’s the latest case in point. The airwaves belong to all of us, right? They’re part of “the commons” that in theory no private interest should be able to buy or control. Nonetheless, government long ago allowed television and radio stations to use the airwaves for commercial purposes, and the advertising revenues have made those companies fabulously rich. But part of the deal was that in return for the privilege of reaping a fortune they would respect the public interest in a variety of ways, including covering the local news important to our communities. If they didn’t, they would be denied their license to use the airwaves at all.

Alas, over the years, through one ruse or another, the public has been shafted. We heard the other day of a candidate for office in a Midwest state who complained to the general manager of a TV station that his campaign was not getting any news coverage. “You want coverage?” the broadcaster replied. “Buy some ads and then we’ll talk!” MORE

March 23, 2012

To PBS, With (Tough) Love

by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

Neither of us is old enough to have been fooled by the Trojan Horse (see Wikipedia). But we each have been working in public television decades enough to remember the days when distribution was handled by physically transporting bulky 2-inch videotapes from station to station — “bicycled” was the word — and much of the broadcast day and night was devoted to blackboard lectures, string quartets and lessons in Japanese brush painting: The old educational television versions of reality TV.

Yet it also was a time of innovation and creativity. As the system evolved we saw bold experiments like PBL — the Public Broadcasting Laboratory and Al Perlmutter’s The Great American Dream Machine, each a predecessor to the commercial TV magazine shows 60 Minutes and 20/20. The TV Lab, jointly run by David Loxton at WNET in New York and Fred Barzyk at WGBH in Boston, nurtured and encouraged the first generation of video artists — Nam June Paik, Bill Viola and William Wegman among others — and the early documentary work of such video pioneers as Jon Alpert and Keiko Tsuno of the Downtown Community Television Center, Alan and Susan Raymond, and the wild and woolly, guerrilla camera crews of TVTV.

The descendants of those pathfinders are the independent filmmakers whose works have not only re-energized the motion picture industry but also have vastly expanded the realm of the documentary — in both the scope of its storytelling and the size and diversity of its audience. Public television has faithfully provided an enormous national stage where nonfiction films can be seen by far more people than could ever buy tickets at the handful of movie houses willing to put documentaries up on their theater screens. MORE

March 15, 2012

Giving Up Your Bank for Lent

by Michael Winship

Growing up Protestant in a small town in upstate New York, the commemoration of Lent was not as major an event as it would be in, say, a Catholic household. We didn’t give up chocolate or gum or anything else for those forty days between Ash Wednesday and Easter, nor did most of the grown-ups we knew forsake any of their particular pleasures or bad habits.

When I was twelve, one night a week during Lent was spent in religious training before becoming a member of our church at a service on Maundy Thursday (what Catholics and many others call Holy Thursday, the day of The Last Supper). But baptism was a prerequisite for membership and I had not yet been christened in the Congregational Church we attended; neither had my parents or my younger brother and sister. So all five heathens were lined up in the living room one Monday evening, and our minister quickly did the deed with a glass of tap water. Then we had cake.

My other powerful memory of the Lenten season is weekly religious breakfasts on cold Wednesday mornings. I was in high school and it meant waking up even earlier than usual on frigid winter days and getting a ride to the parsonage.

Yawning protests to the contrary, those meals were worth it. In that big, white-framed house, we were greeted with the sweet maternal warmth of the minister’s wife, enormous platters of food, and a brief talk by the minister on the Eastertime meaning of it all, preaching repentance and redemption but suffused more with brightness than brimstone. Afterward, each of us walked the few remaining blocks to school, our breath in frosty flumes, full of bacon, scrambled eggs and a certain pious self-satisfaction. No fasting for us.

All of which came to mind while learning that today, some churches are taking matters into their own hands and delivering one of the most powerful Lenten messages ever. According to the progressive website ThinkProgress, “As congregations across the country observe the period between Ash Wednesday and Easter by sacrificing and repenting, religious leaders are asking big banks that have wrongfully foreclosed on homeowners and exacerbated the pain of the housing crisis to do the same.” MORE

March 6, 2012

Banks and Congress Grapple with Stubborn, Stupid Facts

by Michael Winship

Facts are stubborn things, said founding father John Adams, a basic truth Ronald Reagan famously mangled at the Republican National Convention in 1988, when he tried to quote Adams and declared, “Facts are stupid things,” before correcting himself.

Nonetheless, in practice, certain financial and political leaders seem to embrace Reagan’s verbal misstep as closer to reality than Adams’ original aphorism. Witness the resistance on the part of banking institutions and certain members of the congressional leadership, despite regulations demanding that they allow facts and figures to be reported, information that could keep us from the edge of yet another economic meltdown. MORE

February 28, 2012

Vaccination Nation

by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

We haven’t even turned the page on the controversy over contraceptives, health care and religious freedom when another thorny one arises involving personal conscience and public health. A flurry of stories over the past few days coincided with seeing a movie that inspires more than passing interest in their subject.

Steven Soderbergh’s film Contagion came out a few months ago and was inexplicably and completely frozen out of the Oscar nominations. But it is the most plausible experience of a global pandemic plague you’re likely to see until the real thing strikes. With outstanding performances from an ensemble cast that includes Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Gwyneth Paltrow and Laurence Fishburne, Contagion is stark, beautiful in its own terrifying way, and all-too-believable. The story tracks the swift progress of a deadly airborne virus from Hong Kong to Minneapolis and Tokyo to London — from a handful of peanuts to a credit card to the cough of a stranger on a subway. Rarely does a film issue such an inescapable invitation to think: it could happen; that could be us. What would we do? MORE

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