Studs Terkel and Bill Moyers in their 1984 documentary for CBS News

When Studs died in 2008, Bill presented this brief tribute, including excerpts from a documentary the two made in 1984 for CBS News.

Once again, doing God’s work — that is, betting huge sums of money with depositor funds knowing that you are too big to fail and can count on taxpayers riding to your rescue if your avarice threatens to take the country down — has lost some of its luster. The jewels in Dimon’s crown sparkle with a little less grandiosity than a few days ago, when he ridiculed Paul Volcker’s ideas for keeping Wall Street honest as “infantile.”

To find out more about what this all means, I turned to Simon Johnson, once chief economist of the International Monetary Fund and now a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He and his colleague James Kwak founded the now-indispensable website baselinescenario.com. They co-authored the bestselling book 13 Bankers and the most recent book, White House Burning, an account every citizen should read to understand how the national deficit affects our future.

Bill Moyers: If Chase began to collapse because of risky betting, would the government be forced to step in again?

Simon Johnson: Absolutely, Bill. JPMorgan Chase is too big to fail. Hopefully in the future we can move away from this system, but right now it is too big. It’s about a $2.5 trillion dollar bank in terms of total assets. That’s roughly 20 percent of the U.S. economy, comparing their assets to our GDP. That’s huge. If that bank were to collapse — I’m not saying it will — but if it were to collapse, it would be a shock to the economy bigger than that of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and as a result, they would be protected by the Federal Reserve. They are exactly what’s known as too big to fail.

Moyers: I was just looking at an interview I did with you in February of 2009, soon after the collapse of 2008 and you said, and I’m quoting, “The signs that I see, the body language, the words, the op-eds, the testimony, the way these bankers are treated by certain congressional committees, it makes me feel very worried. I have a feeling in my stomach that is what I had in other countries, much poorer countries, countries that were headed into really difficult economic situations. When there’s a small group of people who got you into a disaster and who are still powerful, you know you need to come in and break that power and you can’t. You’re stuck.” How do you feel about that insight now?

Johnson: I’m still nervous, and I think that the losses that JPMorgan reported — the CEO Jamie Dimon reported — and the way in which they’re presented, the fact that they’re surprised by it and the fact that they didn’t know they were taking these kinds of risks, the fact that they lost so much money in a relatively benign moment compared to what we’ve seen in the past and what we’re likely to see in the future — all of this suggests that we are absolutely on the path towards another financial crisis of the same order of magnitude as the last one.

Moyers: Should Jamie Dimon resign? I ask that because as you know and as we’ve discussed, Chase and other huge banks have been using their enormous wealth for years to in effect buy off our politicians and regulators. Chase just had to pay up almost three quarters of a billion dollars in settlements and surrendered fees to settle one case alone, that of bribery and corruption in Jefferson County, Alabama. It’s also paid out billions of dollars to settle other cases of perjury, forgery, fraud and sale of unregistered securities. And these charges were for actions that took place while Mr. Dimon was the CEO. Should he resign?

Johnson: I think, Bill, there should be an independent investigation into how JPMorgan operates both with regard to these losses and with regard to all of the problems that you just identified. This investigation should be conducted separate from the board of directors. Remember that the shareholders and the board of directors absolutely have an incentive to keep JPMorgan Chase as a too-big-to-fail bank. But because it is that kind of bank, its downside risk is taken by the Federal Reserve, by the taxpayer, by the broader economy and all citizens. We need to have an independent, detailed, specific investigation to establish who knew what when and what kind of wrongdoing management was engaged in. On the basis of that, we’ll see what we’ll see and who should have to resign.

Moyers: Dimon is also on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which, as everyone knows is supposed to regulate JPMorgan. What in the world are bankers doing on the Fed board, regulating themselves?

Johnson: This is a terrible situation, Bill. It goes back to the origins, the political compromise at the very beginning of the Federal Reserve system about a hundred years ago. The bankers were very powerful back then, also, and they got a Federal Reserve system in which they had a lot of representation. Some of that has eroded over time because of previous abuses, but you’re absolutely right, the prominent bankers, including most notably, Jamie Dimon, are members of the board of the New York Federal Reserve, a key element in the Federal Reserve system. And he should, under these circumstances, absolutely step down from that role. It’s completely inappropriate to have such a big bank represented in this fashion. The New York Fed claims there’s no impropriety, there’s no wrong doing and he doesn’t involve himself in supervision and so on and so forth. Perhaps, but why does Mr. Dimon, a very busy man, take time out of his day to be on the board of the New York fed? He is getting something from this. It’s a trade, just like everything else on Wall Street.

Moyers: He dismissed criticism of his dual role yesterday by downplaying the role of the Fed board. He said it’s more like an “advisory group than anything else.” I had to check my hearing aid to see if I’d heard that correctly.

Johnson: Well, I think he is advising them on lots of things. He also of course meets with some regularity with top Treasury officials, and some reports say that he meets with President Obama with some regularity. The political access and connections of Mr. Dimon are second to none. One of his senior executives was until recently chief of staff in the White House, if you can believe that. I really think this has gone far enough. Under these kinds of circumstances with this amount of loss of control over risk management, what we need to have is Mr. Dimon step down from the New York Federal Reserve Board.

Moyers: He told shareholders at their annual meeting Tuesday — they were meeting in Tampa, Florida — that these were “self-inflicted mistakes” that “should never have happened.” Does that seem reasonable to you?

Johnson: Well, it’s all very odd, Bill, and I’ve talked to as many experts as I can find who are at all informed about what JPMorgan was doing and how they were doing it and nobody really understands the true picture. That’s why we need an independent investigation to establish — was this an isolated incident or, more likely, the breakdown of a system of controlling and managing risks. Keep in mind that JPMorgan is widely regarded to be the best in the business at risk management, as it is called on Wall Street. And if they can’t do this in a relatively benign moment when things are not so very bad around the world, what is going to happen to them and to other banks when something really dramatic happens, for example, in Europe in the eurozone?

Moyers: Some of his supporters are claiming that only the bank has lost on this and that there’s absolutely no chance that the loss could have threatened the stability of the banking system as happened in 2008. What do you say again to that?

Johnson: I say this is the canary in the coal mine. This tells you that something is fundamentally wrong with the way banks measure, manage and control their risks. They don’t have enough equity funding in their business. They like to have a little bit of equity and a lot of debt. They get paid based on return on equity, unadjusted for risk. If things go well, they get the upside. If things go badly, the downside is someone else’s problem. And that someone else is you and me, Bill. It goes to the Federal Reserve, but not only, it goes to the Treasury, it goes to the debt.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the increase in debt relative to GDP due to the last crisis will end up being 50 percent of GDP, call that $7 trillion dollars, $7.5 trillion dollars in today’s money. That extraordinary. It’s an enormous shock to our fiscal accounts and to our ability to pay pensions and keep the healthcare system running in the future. For what? What did we get from that? Absolutely nothing. The bankers got some billions in extra pay, we get trillions in extra debt. It’s unfair, it’s inefficient, it’s unconscionable, and it needs to stop.

Moyers: Wasn’t part of the risk that Dimon took with taxpayer guaranteed deposits? I mean, if I had money at JPMorgan Chase, wouldn’t some of my money have been used to take this risk?

Johnson: Again, we don’t know the exact details, but news reports do suggest that yes, they were gambling with federally insured deposits, which just really puts the icing on the cake here.

Moyers: Do we know yet what is Dimon’s culpability? Is it conceivable to you that a risk this big would have been incurred without his approval?

Johnson: It seems very strange and quite a stretch. And he did tell investors, when he reported on first quarter earnings in April, that he was aware of the situation, aware of the trade — he called it a “tempest in a teacup,” and therefore, not something to worry about.

Moyers: He’s been Wall Street’s point man in their campaign against tighter regulation of derivatives and proprietary trading. Were derivatives at the heart of this gamble?

Johnson: Yes, according to reliable reports, this was a so-called “hedging” strategy that turned out to be no more than a gamble, but the people involved perhaps didn’t understand that or maybe they understood it and covered it up. It was absolutely about a bet on extremely complex derivatives and the interesting question is who failed to understand exactly what they were getting into. And how did Jamie Dimon, who has a reputation that he burnishes more than anybody else for being the number one expert risk manager in the world — how did he miss this one?

Moyers: I’ve been reading a lot of stories today about members of the house, Republicans in particular, saying this doesn’t change their opinion at all that we’ve got to still kill Dodd-Frank and diminish regulation. What do you think about that?

Johnson: I think that it is a recipe for disaster. Look, deregulating or not regulating during the boom is exactly how you get into bailouts in the bust. The goal should be to make all the banks small enough and simple enough to fail. End the government subsidies here. And when I talk to people on the intellectual right, Bill, they get this, as do people on the intellectual left. The problem is, the political right largely doesn’t want to go there because of the donations. I’m afraid some people, not all, but some people on the political left don’t want to go there either.

Moyers: The Washington Post reported that the Justice Department has launched a criminal investigation into JPMorgan’s trading loss. Have you spotted — and I know this is sensitive — but have you spotted anything in the story so far that suggests the possibility of criminality? Dodd-Frank is not in existence yet, so where would any possibility of criminality come from?

Johnson: Well Dodd-Frank is in existence but the rules have not been written and therefore not implemented. So yes, it is hard to violate those rules in their current state. And many of those rules, by the way, violation would be a civil penalty, not a criminal penalty. If you violate a securities law — if you’ve mislead investors, if there was material adverse information that was not disclosed in an appropriate and timely manner — that’s a very serious offence traditionally.

I have to say that the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission have not been very good at enforcing securities law in recent years including and specifically since the financial crisis. I am skeptical that this will change. But if they have an investigation that reveals all of the details of what happened and how it happened, that would be extremely informative and show us, I believe, that the risk management approach and attitudes on Wall Street are deeply flawed and leading us towards a big crisis.

Moyers: So what are people to do, Simon? What can people do now in response to this?

Johnson: Well, I think you have to look for politicians who are proposing solutions, and look on the right and on the left. I see Elizabeth Warren, running for the Senate in Massachusetts, who is saying we should bring back Glass-Steagall to separate commercial banking from investment banking. I see Tom Hoenig, who is not a politician, he’s a regulator, he’s the former president of the Kansas City Fed, and he’s now one of the top two people at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the FDIC. He is saying that big banks should no longer have trading desks. That’s the same sort of idea that Elizabeth Warren is expressing. We need a lot more people to focus on this and to make this an issue for the elections.

And I would say in this context, Bill, it’s very important not to be distracted. I understand for example, Speaker Boehner, the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, is proposing to have another conflict over the debt ceiling in the near future. This is the politics of distraction. This is refusing to recognize that a huge part of our fiscal problems today and in the future are due to these risks within the financial system that are allowed because the people running the biggest banks hand out massive campaign contributions across the political spectrum.

Moyers: Are you saying that this financial crisis, so-called, is at heart a political crisis?

Johnson: Yes, exactly. I think that a few people, particularly in and around the financial system, have become too powerful. They were allowed to take a lot of risk, and they did massive damage to the economy — more than eight million jobs lost. We’re still struggling to get back anywhere close to employment levels where we were before 2008. And they’ve done massive damage to the budget. This damage to the budget is long lasting; it undermines the budget when we need it to be stronger because the society is aging. We need to support Social Security and support Medicare on a fair basis. We need to restore and rebuild revenue, revenue that was absolutely devastated by the financial crisis. People need to understand the link between what the banks did and the budget. And too many people fail to do that. “Oh, it’s too complicated. I don’t want to understand the details, I don’t want to spend time with it.” That’s a mistake, a very big mistake. You’re playing into the hands of a few powerful people in the society who want private benefit and social loss.

With oil pump jacks as a backdrop, President Barack Obama speaks at an oil and gas field on federal lands, March 21, 2012, in Maljamar, NM. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)

In fact, according to the website Politico, “Energy industry bigwigs have spent the past three-plus years talking trash about President Barack Obama’s policies, but that’s not stopping their executives and employees from filling his campaign war chest.”

“Workers from some of the country’s largest oil, gas and electric utility companies — including ExxonMobil, BP and Exelon — have given $772,000 to Obama’s campaign through mid-April, according to donation data for this election cycle compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.”

That’s less than half of what the sector has given to Mitt Romney and doesn’t include industry contributions from the Koch Brothers and others to anti-Obama super PACs, but it’s still impressive. Among the contributors are Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers, co-chairman of the Democratic National Convention Committee, and Exxon attorney Gregory Kenney, who told Politico, “[Obama]’s been fine. He left us to compete in the free-enterprise system. I don’t take judgment.”

“Energy-minded donors whom POLITICO spoke with gave differing reasons for supporting Obama. Several said they are die-hard Democrats who welcome his first-term emphasis on clean energy and green jobs. Others cited his embrace of the Republicans’ ‘all of the above’ energy message, saying it helped soothe their concerns that his administration would be an excessive regulator if elected for another four years.”

In National Journal, Amy Harder writes, “The White House and the oil and natural-gas industry are getting along better than they have at any time under President Obama’s watch,” and points to the easing of several recent EPA draft proposals and regulations.”

“’My assessment of the past versus the present is they’re starting to better understand what the business community is talking about,’ said one lobbyist for a major oil company, who spoke candidly only on the condition of anonymity. ‘They seem to be really trying to make an effort to stop things before they become explosive, and a lot of that seems to be coming from [White House energy and environment aide] Heather Zichal and the Office of Management and Budget.’”

Sen John Cornyn, R-Texas points to his lapel pin during a news conference on Capitol Hill, March 22, 2012. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

Amy Handler noted:

“The reference in the email to industry and Republicans being ‘partners’ made some of the lobbyists who read it cringe, because it implies that the industry must always be aligned with congressional Republicans. That ignores the reality that major corporations, which are responsible to their investors, must sometimes work with the president when it suits their business interests, said Scott Segal, a lobbyist with Bracewell & Giuliani who received the Banks email.”

At a “Vote 4 Energy” event in Washington on Tuesday, the American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s primary lobbying group, released a wish list of priorities for consideration by the Republican and Democratic Party platform committees. They include recommendations to “dramatically expand offshore leasing to include the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic and Pacific coasts; streamline the rulemaking process for energy regulations; and immediately approve the Keystone XL oil pipeline.”

Watch the full conversation between Bill Moyers and Paul Volcker.

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).

Landstuhl is where the victims of the 1983 bombing of the US Marines Corps barracks in Beirut were brought; Bosnian refugees from the Sarajevo marketplace bombing in 1994, too, wounded from the American embassy bombing in Kenya in 1998 and the 2000 attack on USS Cole. During the first Gulf War, more than 4000 service members were treated at Landstuhl, as have been men and women fighting in the Balkans and Somalia. Since 9/11, the hospital has treated coalition troops from 44 different countries.

They compare this hospital to the center of an hourglass; it’s the midpoint between a combat injury and treatment in the field and then subsequent care back in the States or other home country. Or it’s where a service member is treated and then sent back into battle.

The staff at Landstuhl sees the wounded at their worst. Many who arrive suffer from multiple injuries – “polytrauma” so extensive that several teams of surgeons with different specialties – neurological, thoracic, ear and eye, facial reconstruction, and orthopedic, among others — may work on an individual patient, often simultaneously. Bodies are blown apart or crushed by IEDs, grenades and suicide bombs, but so skillful are the medical teams there, so advanced the techniques and technology, Landstuhl’s survival rate runs as high as 99.5%. (The survival rate among American wounded in World War II was 70 percent.)

But all that success takes a toll. One of the little discussed but potent side effects of war is what’s called Combat and Occupational Stress Reaction or Secondary Traumatic Stress Disorder. Compassion fatigue.

After all the years of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of the doctors, nurses, and other staff at Landstuhl are exhausted or worse. Given what they’ve seen — the horrific wounds and amputations, the infection, agony and grief – some walk around “like zombies,” one therapist said. Feelings of empathy and kindness yield to loneliness, despair and burnout.

Many of the compassion fatigue symptoms are similar to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) – physical effects like headaches, gastrointestinal problems, reproductive troubles as well as mental  — nightmares, flashbacks, anxiety, emotional distance, isolation and more.

Working with physically damaged men and women who are so deeply traumatized rubs off. The emotional rawness is contagious. A hospital handout on PTSD understatedly reads, “When life-changing events occur, perceptions about the world may change. For example, before soldiers experience combat trauma, they may think the world is safe. Following combat, a soldier’s perceptions may change — a majority of the world may now seem unsafe.”

That’s why returning vets may reflexively search alongside a U.S. interstate highway for roadside bombs, only shop at Walmart at 3 in the morning, or worry to excess that their children’s school will be attacked by terrorists. And it’s why after hearing the stories of their patients, reliving the horrors of war, watching them endure pain and sometimes countless operations, medical practitioners can suffer from the same fears — whether it’s the surgeon who heals the wounds, the psychiatrist who probes the mind for the source of anguish or even the clean-up staff decontaminating and removing the blood from surgical tools.

Combine that with homesickness, the high operational tempo of Landstuhl, the low tolerance for mistakes, the downtime when the mind takes over and remembers every awful experience. It’s a dangerous, often unhealthy mix.

And so, on a Saturday morning, we writers sat down with a bunch of men and women who work at Landstuhl and other nearby medical facilities. There were fourteen of us and thirty-two or so of them. We broke into small groups – two writers working with a group of two to four hospital staff.

My colleague Susanna and I mentored four – a male Army nurse and a female Navy nurse, a physical therapist and a developmental pediatric psychiatrist. We weren’t there to interview or pry; they would tell us what they wanted us to know when they wished, their stories slowly emerging from conversation and the brief writing exercises we gave them.

The male nurse had been in Special Ops, the Navy, Marines and Army; he was reluctant to talk of what he had experienced but wanted to examine themes of good and evil in an epic novel. The physical therapist told us she wanted to explore the mind-body connection, perhaps with a blog; the Navy nurse spoke of her feelings for the soldiers she took care of from the Republic of Georgia, the former Soviet state, now independent. (By the end of the year, Georgia, aiming at membership in NATO, will have some 1500 troops in Afghanistan.) She had learned how to bake for them the Georgian national dish, khachapuri, a cheese filled bread; now she wants to write a cookbook.

For two days, we talked and they wrote, we recommended books and movies, they told us about the ones they loved. Tears were shed as stories and memories came to the surface, many too private to relate here. Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll stay in touch via e-mail and meet again; trying to be of assistance as they write to express their thoughts and feelings, to tell their stories.

Do the workshops help? Hard to measure, but intuitively it feels as if they do, that in the talking and writing comes self-awareness and some measure of equanimity. And selfishly, for those of us who serve as writer-mentors, the benefits are enormous and fulfilling.

But the statistics are alarming. According to NBC News, “The Pentagon counts more than 6,300 American dead and 33,000 wounded in action in Iraq and Afghanistan. A Rand Corp study estimates that as many as 300,000 post-9/11 veterans suffer from PTSD or major depression, and about 320,000 may have experienced traumatic brain injuries, mainly from bombs.” The number of civilian fatalities in Iraq and Afghanistan remains uncertain but a Brown University study last year reported at least 132,000.

Meanwhile, there are still nearly 90,000 American troops in Afghanistan.  More will die and be wounded. President Obama has pledged their complete departure in 2014.

But even after that, the work at Landstuhl will go on. There are still nearly 300,000 American military personnel overseas, plus family members. Landstuhl will take care of many of them. And, says one of the hospital’s surgeons, with a sigh of resignation, “There will always be the Middle East.”

Yglesias writes:

“These are striking numbers, but they raise the age-old question of correlation and causation. Does this mean that the representative high-school dropout would be doing much better had he stuck it out in school for a few more years? Or is it instead the case that the population of high-school dropouts is disproportionately composed of people who have attributes that lead to low earnings?

When it comes to early pregnancy, surprising new evidence indicates that Romney and most everyone else have it backward: Having a baby early does not hamper a young woman’s economic prospects, as Romney implies. Rather, young women choose to become mothers because their economic outlook is so objectively bleak.” [Read more]

Economists Melissa Schettini Kearney and Phillip B. Levine write in their paper — “Why is the Teen Birth Rate in the United States so High and Why Does it Matter?” — that “the high rate of teen childbearing in the United States matters mostly because it is a marker of larger, underlying social problems,” having to do with the combination of being poor and living in an “unequal location” — states with higher rates of income inequality also have higher rates of teen pregnancy.

As Yglesias makes clear: “The upshot is that teen motherhood is much more a consequence of intense poverty than its cause.”

In this infographic produced by GOOD and Column Five, data from the Centers for Disease Control and The National Bureau of Economic Research, among others, indicates that although the U.S. teen pregnancy rate has declined dramatically over the past twenty years, it’s still higher than every other developed country (except Russia). Click on the graphic to zoom in on the data at GOOD‘s website.

Credit: GOOD Magazine

Luis Alberto Urrea; Photo: Dale Robbins

During my recent  conversation with Luis Alberto Urrea, we discussed the controversy over the elimination of  Mexican-American studies in the Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) and the subsequent removal of certain books from classrooms.  The TUSD objects to several assertions made during that conversation and has expressed those objections in the letter which we are reprinting here. In the interest of a fair and open  discussion, we  offered Luis the opportunity to respond. Here are both letters.

Statement from Tucson Unified School District:

The Arizona law that resulted in Tucson Unified School District discontinuing classes in Mexican American Studies has sparked an extremely difficult and hurtful time for our students, teachers, and community.

Author Luis Urrea’s false assertions that books have been banned by TUSD are damaging and are a part of a directed effort to discredit the district. No books have been banned by the district.

TUSD disagrees with the state’s assessment that its MAS classes violate the law, and had previously appealed a decision that ruled the classes out of compliance citing an independent audit that supported the district’s position.

TUSD lost that appeal and was directed by the state to shut down the classes or receive a penalty of 10 percent of the district’s monthly apportionment of state aid — a penalty of $15 million a year that would have devastating effect on instruction throughout the district.

The district had no choice but to discontinue the classes or risk supporting the needs of our 50,000 students.

As part of the assurances of compliance document sent to the district from the Arizona Department of Education, the district was required to show proof that all curriculum materials were removed from classrooms.

The seven book titles that were cited in the evidence that found the classes in violation of the law are:

Critical Race Theory by Richard Delgado
500 Years of Chicano History in Pictures edited by Elizabeth Martinez
Message to AZTLAN by Rodolfo Corky Gonzales
Chicano! The History of the Mexican Civil Rights Movement by Arturo Rosales
Occupied America: A History of Chicanos by Rodolfo Acuna
Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire
Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years by Bill Bigelow

Those books were collected from classrooms per the state directive, but were put into school libraries. They were NOT banned, restricted, or blocked in any way for student access. In fact, more students now have access to these books through the library system.

The above titles were the only ones impacted by the ruling. None of Luis Urrea’s books were part of this decision, nor was William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, or any other books mentioned in the interview.

The district is in the process of rebuilding curriculum that ensures inclusion of Mexican American culture and history — a foundation in the multicultural vibrancy of our region. The curriculum must meet the standards of current state law.

The Mexican American Student Services Department is still active and continues in its work of student advocacy with mentoring, tutoring, and efforts to close the achievement gap.

It’s imperative that the viewers of your show are informed of the realities of why the district was required to discontinue the classes and the fact that the books are available to our students.

Response from Luis Alberto Urrea:

No pun intended, but you cannot put this story back in the box. We can argue semantics all day, but the facts stand: On orders from TUSD, books were taken out of student hands, placed in boxes, removed from a classroom — some to the basement, some to the library, the classes abruptly dismantled. TUSD’s assertion that the books were merely “collected” (boxed) does not change the fact that books were removed, classes cancelled, faculty dismissed. Newspeak does not alter reality.

I am sympathetic to TUSD’s response in this matter. Clearly, TUSD has lost control of this story as a simple Google search of “banned books, Tucson” shows. No matter their protestations, the public reaction remains the same. Because by any definition, for a school to take books away from a student is a banning. TUSD decided the literature was not worth whatever alleged threat the state may have imposed. Whether that makes TUSD cowardly is an issue for the local voters to decide. My issue is with declaring this literature unworthy of being taught — (one wonders why instead of taking away these books, they simply didn’t rename the “Mexican-American literature” classes as “American literature” classes, but that’s another topic).

Although it is true that the actual list of “officially banned” books was quite focused; everyone involved knows perfectly well that the galaxy of books I have mentioned magically vanished. The fact is: Seven books were specifically removed from the classrooms. Some were placed in libraries. Other books, including five of my titles, were listed in a state audit as being inappropriately taught in Mexican-American and Native-American literature classes. Those classes were abolished in January. Those books not allowed to be taught. Those students were left to ask why. We authors are demanding accountability.

This is deeply personal to me, and to all the other affected authors who have responded so emotionally and eloquently to this situation. It is not about our books or about our sales. It is not about politics. It is about the children. It is about education. Literacy is the very definition of education.

The real point is that ethnic studies is not anti-American but is in fact a gateway to American culture for disenfranchised populations who don’t always know how to access that culture. It is not about books, it is about books in brown hands. It’s interesting to me that TUSD’s statement addresses “efforts to close the achievement gap.” The irony is their own nationally recognized Mexican-American Studies program was ALREADY closing the achievement gap (according to test scores and college admissions data). And TUSD destroyed it.

It is my obligation as an educator, as a father, as an author, and as a patriotic American to address these issues. What is happening in Arizona is obvious to the world. And I thank Mr. Moyers for shining a light on it.

Moyers & Company viewers who are looking for more information on the merits of either side of this debate should find the documentary “Precious Knowledge” quite illuminating.

Morello, who will be Bill’s guest on Moyers & Company this weekend (check local listings), is the Harvard-educated guitarist who dabbled in politics, then chose rock music to make a difference.  He played guitar for the popular band he co-founded — Rage Against the Machine — and then for Audioslave.  Rolling Stone chose his album “World Wide Rebel Songs” as one of the best of 2011, and named him one of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time.

As likely to be spotted at a grass-roots rally as he would at a concert hall, Morello was in Madison, Wisconsin last year, braving bitter winter weather to sing on the steps on the state capitol in support of public service workers. Morello defended their collective bargaining rights against Republican Governor Scott Walker.

He was in New York City at the May Day demonstrations, an honorary commander of a battalion of musicians they called the “Occupy Guitarmy.” That same night, Harry Belafonte presented Morello with the Officers’ Award from the Sidney Hillman Foundation, honoring his “advocacy for and support of working people across the world.”

This weekend, Tom Morello shares his music, his message, and mission with Bill Moyers, who’s all ears.

More Morello
Extended Preview: Tom Morello on Writing Songs for Social Justice

Bella Abzug, center with hat, smiles as she holds up her ERA sign in a pro-equal rights demonstration on New York's Fifth Avenue, Aug. 26, 1980. (AP Photo)

Money Unlimited: “In one sense, the story of the Citizens United case goes back more than a hundred years. It begins in the Gilded Age, when the Supreme Court barred most attempts by the government to ameliorate the harsh effects of market forces. In that era, the Court said, for the first time, that corporations, like people, have constitutional rights.” [Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker]

How the ‘War On Women’ Quashed Feminist Stereotypes: “When Phyllis Schlafly is forced to concede that not all feminists are ugly, it’s clear that something has gone awry on the right. Sure enough, in April, Schlafly, a conservative crusader who has been peddling stereotypes of women’s activists as physically and socially unappealing for decades, thought she should warn cadets at the Citadel not to fall for one. ‘Some of them are pretty,’ she said. ‘They don’t all look like Bella Abzug.’” [The Washington Post]

Dirty Energy Money Pouring into Congress Faster Than Ever Before: “Members of Congress have taken almost $16 million from the oil, gas and coal industries so far in this 112th Congress. That puts this Congress on track to be the dirtiest ever.” [Oil Change International]

The Lobbyist in the Grey Flannel Suit: “Once a free-wheeling, if ethically challenged, crowd of men (and almost no women), who swapped stories about their clients over Jack Daniels, these expert manipulators of the legislative process and of public opinion have become corporate employees.” [Thomas Edsall, The New York Times]

Cutbacks Hurt a State’s Response to Whooping Cough: “Whooping cough, or pertussis, a highly infectious respiratory disease once considered doomed by science, has struck Washington State this spring with a severity that health officials say could surpass the toll of any year since the 1940s, before a vaccine went into wide use.” [The New York Times]

Lies, damned lies and advertising: “Who pays for those political attack ads? Who knows?” [Doyle McManus, LA Times]

His TED talk — “How economic inequality harms societies” — has garnered over 1 million views on the TED website since October 2011.

We caught up with him to talk about how inequality can be dangerous to our health.

Riley: You published your book in 2009. Since then the growing disparity between the very rich and everybody else has come to dominate the Occupy Wall Street movement and political campaign rhetoric in the U.S. and Europe. What do you think is missing from the conversation that we’re having?

Wilkinson: What’s missing is action. Although, in Britain and perhaps in the U.S., shareholders are beginning to reign in some of these bonuses, not nearly enough is being done. The pattern we’ve found in our research is quite extraordinarily clear. More unequal countries, the ones with the bigger income differences between rich and poor have much more violence, worse life expectancy, more mental illness, more obesity, more people in prison, and more teenage births. All these problems get worse with greater inequality, because it damages the social fabric of a society.

Riley: Why do you think that is?

Wilkinson: In more unequal societies, the levels of trust — the number of people who feel they can trust others — drops to about fifteen or twenty percent. But in more equal societies, more like sixty or sixty-five percent feel they can trust others. I think that makes a difference in the whole social fabric, not only what it feels like to live in those places, how safe you feel if you’ve got to walk home alone at night in any major city, but also in business transactions and an increase of crime and so on. It has consequences for almost every aspect of how a society works.

Riley: What accounts for this mistrust?

Wilkinson: In a society where some people seem to count for everything and are hugely important and valued — remember how we used to regard the bankers as brilliant? — and other people are looked down on has consequences for how we see ourselves, our worries about how we’re seen — and status.

The big multinationals often pay the most junior employees only a quarter or one third of one percent of what they pay their CEOs. There’s no more powerful way of saying to a whole swathe of the population that they’re worth almost nothing.

As these differences in status get bigger, status competition seems to increase and people judging each other more by status. You know, are you somebody I should pay attention to or are you someone I can ignore completely. And what inequality does is shift us a bit more towards competition with each other — and a bit further away from the cooperative reciprocity. All these social comparisons and anxieties and so on, become worse.

The Equity Trust

Wilkinson: I’ve learned how important chronic stress is in terms of general health — affecting the immune system, the cardiovascular system. And the most important sources of stress have to do with social relations, for instance, whether or not you have friends, how many you have and the quality of your close relationships. More friends and good relationships are highly protective of health. One recent study found that whether or not you have friends is marginally more important to your health than whether you smoke.

Riley: Is there any historical research about whether the U.S. was doing better in all of these areas when we weren’t so unequal?

Wilkinson: When the U.S. was one of the more equal countries, its health was amongst the better, not quite at the top, but— in the top few. Now, it comes behind all the other developed countries. And it swapped places with Japan, which used to be one of the more unequal countries, had bad health, but then from the ’50s through the ’80s, they became more equal. Their health outstripped every other country in the world. Their crime rates went down. But the U.S.’s position relative to others has slipped all through that period.

Riley: How do we make the case to the 1% that a more equal society is better for everyone?

Wilkinson: What we can say is the vast majority of the population, given a somewhat decent level of income and education would probably live a bit longer and their kids would be likely to do a bit better at school. They’d be less likely to become victims of violence. Their kids would be less likely to become teenage parents or to get involved in drugs.

I think gated communities are an indication that the rich are feeling the rest of society is dangerous and threatening. And of course, even if they send their kids to private schools, they in some sense share the same culture, listen to the same music and get involved in many of the same problems. You can’t completely isolate yourself. In that sort of way, the vast majority of the population do better in more equal societies.