What Matters Today

March 2, 2013

Why Are Walmart Billionaires Bankrolling Phony School ‘Reform’ In LA?

by Peter Dreier

For years, Los Angeles has been ground zero in an intense debate about how to improve our nation’s education system. What’s less known is who is shaping that debate. Many of the biggest contributors to the so-called “school choice” movement — code words for privatizing our public education system — are billionaires who don’t live in Southern California, but have gained significant influence in local school politics. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s recent contribution of $1 million to a political action committee created to influence next week’s LAUSD school board elections is only the most recent example of the billionaire blitzkrieg.

For more than a decade, however, one of the biggest of the billionaire interlopers has been the Walton family, heirs to the Walmart fortune, who have poured millions into a privatization-oriented, ideological campaign to make LA a laboratory for their ideas about treating schools like for-profit businesses, and treating parents, students and teachers like cogs in what they must think are education big-box retail stores.

As a business chain, Walmart has spent a fortune — in philanthropy and campaign contributions — trying to break into the Los Angeles retail market with its low-wage retail stores.

Now the Walton family — which derives its fortune from the Arkansas-based Walmart — is trying to use that fortune to bring Walmart-style education to Los Angeles. MORE

Moyers Moments

March 1, 2013

Moyers Moment (2006): Margaret Atwood on the Hunger for God

In this 2006 Moyers Moment from Bill Moyers on Faith & Reason, author and “strict agnostic” Margaret Atwood discusses the hypothetical effects of removing God from human consciousness, and explains the difference between atheism and agnosticism.

“You can’t run an experiment on whether God exists or not,” Atwood tells Bill. “Therefore you can’t say anything about it as knowledge.”

March 1, 2013

Moyers Moment (2006): Salman Rushdie on Atheism

In this 2006 Moyers Moment from Bill Moyers on Faith & Reason, author Salman Rushdie — a self-described “hard-line atheist” — talks about the need to “broaden what we can understand and say, and therefore be.”

“I’ve been trying all my life to find a language to express our sense of what is not material,” Rushdie tells Bill. “without having recourse to the ready-made ideas of religion.”

Watch the full conversation between Salman Rushdie and Bill Moyers

March 1, 2013

Moyers Moment (2006): Martin Amis on Being Agnostic

In this 2006 Moyers Moment from Bill Moyers on Faith & Reason, novelist Martin Amis talks about his inner conflicts when it comes to his own agnosticism.

“Agnostic is the only respectable position, simply because our ignorance of the universe is s0 vast… We’re about eight Einsteins away from getting any kind of handle on the universe,” Amis tells Bill. “But why is the universe so incredibly complicated? That makes me delay my vote on the existence of some intelligence.”

BillBoard

February 27, 2013

Why Republicans Should Take on Inequality

by John Light

Sheila Bair on Moyers & Company.
(Credit: Dale Robbins)

In an op-ed published in The New York Times yesterday, Sheila Bair, the George W. Bush-appointed chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation from 2006 through 2011, wrote that recent research by economist Emmanuel Saez should prompt Republicans to rethink their policies.

Saez studies income inequality in America, which reached a 90-year-high in 2007, immediately before the financial crisis. And Saez’s recent studies have found that, since 2009, inequality is again on the rise. The economy’s gradual recovery is only a recovery for the one percent: In the last two years, the richest Americans have seen their incomes grow by 11 percent, while the bottom 99 percent of Americans saw their incomes shrink by 0.4 percent. MORE

On Democracy

February 26, 2013

The Revolving Door Spins from Sea to Shining Sea

by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

To those who would argue that the notion of a perpetual motion machine is impossible, we give you the revolving door — that ever-spinning entrance and exit between public service in government and the hugely profitable private sector. It never stops.

Yes, we’ve talked about the revolving door until we’re red or blue in the face (the door is bipartisan and spins across party lines) but this mantra bears its own perpetual repetition, a powerful reason for our distrust of the people who make and enforce our laws and regulations.

UNITED STATES - APRIL 03: Cathy Koch, tax chief for the Senate Finance Committee, poses in the Russell Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill on Friday, April 3, 2009. (Photo By Bill Clark/Roll Call/Getty Images)

Cathy Koch poses in the Russell Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill on April 3, 2009. (Photo By Bill Clark/Roll Call/Getty Images)

Jesse Eisinger, writing at The New York Times, reports that on January 25, Senate Majority leader Harry Reid announced the appointment of Cathy Koch as his chief advisor on tax and economic policy. According to the Times, “The news release lists Ms. Koch’s admirable and formidable experience in the public sector. ‘Prior to joining Senator Reid’s office,’ the release says, ‘Koch served as tax chief at the Senate Finance Committee.’”

But, Eisinger notes, the press statement fails to mention Ms. Koch’s actual last job — as a registered lobbyist for GE. “Yes, General Electric,” he writes, “the company that paid almost no taxes in 2010. Just as the tax reform debate is heating up, Mr. Reid has put in place a person who is extraordinarily positioned to torpedo any tax reform that might draw a dollar out of GE — and, by extension, any big corporation.” MORE

BillBoard

February 26, 2013

Watch ‘The Revisionaries’ on Independent Lens

by Theresa Riley

Last year, we took a look at some of the proposed changes members of the Texas School Board had requested be made to textbooks used in the state’s schools. Because Texas has such a huge school system serving nearly 5 million schoolchildren, many of the textbook changes that get made in Texas end up making their way into school books across the country. Over 100 amendments were debated — many of which had a very clear conservative political agenda.

Later this week we’ll be hitting the books again with our guest, activist Zack Kopplin. The Louisiana native became alarmed when he realized that a law that passed the state legislature was making it easier to teach creationism in public schools. Kopplin wrote a research paper on the law when he was just 14 years old. He assumed someone else would take on the law. No one did. So Kopplin started a campaign to repeal the law. He worked with Sir Harry Kroto, a British chemist who shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in chemistry, to write a letter opposing the law that was signed by 78 Nobel laureates. He’s also drafted three bills, two of which have been introduced in the Louisiana state legislature. MORE

News & Notes

February 25, 2013

The Supreme Court and the Voting Rights Act

by Theresa Riley

President Lyndon B. Johnson meets with Martin Luther King, Jr. on Aug. 6, 1965 upon signing the Voting Rights Act. Credit: Yoichi R. Okamoto, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum

On Wednesday morning, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Shelby County v. Holder, a case with the potential to dismantle the Voting Rights Act. The landmark law, passed nearly 50 years ago and reauthorized by Congress four times, made various forms of voter discrimination in the South, such as poll taxes and literacy tests, illegal. The central issue of the case is whether Congress should continue to review new voter laws in certain states to ensure discrimination is not taking place. MORE

Perspectives

February 25, 2013

The Hidden History of Waterboarding

by Nick Turse, Tom Dispatch

This piece was first published on TomDispatch.

Try to remain calm — even as you begin to feel your chest tighten and your heart race. Try not to panic as water starts flowing into your nose and mouth, while you attempt to constrict your throat and slow your breathing and keep some air in your lungs and fight that growing feeling of suffocation. Try not to think about dying, because there’s nothing you can do about it, because you’re tied down, because someone is pouring that water over your face, forcing it into you, drowning you slowly and deliberately. You’re helpless. You’re in agony.

The Water Torture. — Facsimile of a Woodcut in J. Damhoudère's Praxis Rerum Criminalium: Antwerp, 1556.

In short, you’re a victim of “water torture.” Or the “water cure.” Or the “water rag.” Or the “water treatment.” Or “tormenta de toca.” Or any of the other nicknames given to the particular form of brutality that today goes by the relatively innocuous term “waterboarding.” MORE