First Oprah, now Bill Moyers

By GottaLaff

Oprah gave us two years' notice. Bill? Only a few months, and I'm way more upset about this one:

Veteran PBS journalist Bill Moyers has announced that he will be ending his Friday night public affairs show “Bill Moyers Journal” as well as “Now on PBS” on April 30, 2010:

Mr. Moyers said he had been planning for some time to retire the program on Dec. 25, but was asked by PBS to raise the funds to continue through April, which he did.

“I am 75 years old,” he said of the decision to end the series, which began in April 2007. The program has recently been having a “good run of it,” he added in a telephone interview on Friday, “so I feel it’s time.” He said he was not quitting television work, although he has no new projects planned.

He's one of the most engaging, well-informed journalists on the Tee Vee Machine. Maybe he'll do specials? Please?

VIDEO: Bill Moyers on Health Care as a Human Right

By GottaLaff

Mandatory viewing. Why? Because this was just superb:

H/t: Heather at Crooks and Liars

VIDEO: Former CIGNA executive says Michael Moore was right all along

By GottaLaff

Via DKos, a must-see:

[I]n an interview with Bill Moyers that aired tonight on PBS, Wendell Potter, former Head of Corporate Communications at CIGNA, admits that Michael Moore nailed it on the head in his movie, Sicko. It's a 30 minute interview that comes close to a confessional of the health insurance industry's enslavement to Wall Street, and I really really hope everybody in this country gets to see this. It's the only thing you'll ever need to show if anyone ever questions the public option or rambles on about the dangers of government bureaucrats.

How does one stop one's blood from boiling? Here is a partial transcript:

WENDELL POTTER: That means that part of the effort to discredit this film was to use lobbyists and their own staff to go onto Capitol Hill and say, "Look, you don't want to believe this movie. You don't want to talk about it. You don't want to endorse it. And if you do, we can make things tough for you."

BILL MOYERS: How?

WENDELL POTTER: By running ads, commercials in your home district when you're running for reelection, not contributing to your campaigns again, or contributing to your competitor.

BILL MOYERS: This is fascinating. You know, "Build awareness among centrist Democratic policy organizations--"

WENDELL POTTER: Right.

BILL MOYERS: "--including the Democratic Leadership Council."

WENDELL POTTER: Absolutely.

BILL MOYERS: Then it says, "Message to Democratic insiders. Embracing Moore is one-way ticket back to minority party status."

WENDELL POTTER: Yeah.

BILL MOYERS: Now, that's exactly what they did, didn't they? They--

WENDELL POTTER: Absolutely.

BILL MOYERS: --radicalized Moore, so that his message was discredited because the messenger was seen to be radical.

WENDELL POTTER: Absolutely. In memos that would go back within the industry — he was never, by the way, mentioned by name in any memos, because we didn't want to inadvertently write something that would wind up in his hands. So the memos would usually-- the subject line would be-- the emails would be, "Hollywood." And as we would do the media training, we would always have someone refer to him as Hollywood entertainer or Hollywood moviemaker Michael Moore.

BILL MOYERS: Why?

WENDELL POTTER: Well, just to-- Hollywood, I think people think that's entertainment, that's movie-making. That's not real documentary. They don't want you to think that it was a documentary that had some truth. They would want you to see this as just some fantasy that a Hollywood filmmaker had come up with. That's part of the strategy.

BILL MOYERS: So you would actually hear politicians mouth the talking points that had been circulated by the industry to discredit Michael Moore.

WENDELL POTTER: Absolutely.

BILL MOYERS: You'd hear ordinary people talking that. And politicians as well, right?

WENDELL POTTER: Absolutely.

BILL MOYERS: So your plan worked.

WENDELL POTTER: It worked beautifully.

BILL MOYERS: The film was blunted, right?

WENDELL POTTER: The film was blunted.

The entire video and transcript here.

This is what we're up against. The Rushpublics care nothing about the health and well-being of America. Nothing.

H/t: Shoq

Bill Moyers on Single Payer Healthcare

Well worth watching the whole thing here and here.

Pollyanna Creep: False economic security gone wild

By GottaLaff

No, Pollyanna Creep isn't about some character who torments Hayley Mills about her impossibly optimistic "Glad Game". One of our many astute Commenters linked me to a different sort of explanation, via Bill Moyers Journal:

Why has all this taken Main Street by surprise? In part, according to Kevin Phillips, because we've been served up years of faulty statistics and even faultier economic projects. This, Phillips maintains, has lead to a spiral of false economic security — Pollyanna Creep. [...]

Kevin Phillips, a political analyst and historian, has been watching this crisis unfold for a long time now, and has a theory about what's gone wrong. As he explains to Bill Moyers on THE JOURNAL:

This is the denouement of the 25-year debt buildup which was undertaken mostly by the financial sector putting themselves on steroids to-- get bigger and bigger and bigger. And we've finally gotten to the point where the bubble isn't sustainable anymore but a lot of Wall Street is dedicated to minimizing the spattering of the bubble, so to speak.

Phillips explains that these are the fruits of what he calls the "financialization" of the United States: the decline of manufacturing and the rise of finance as the central driver of the nation's GDP. It is not a change Phillips believes happened by chance:

You had essentially a financial sector that let's say was sort of neck and neck with manufacturing back in the late 1980s. But they got control in a lot of ways, in the agenda. Finance has been bailed out. I mean, everybody thinks this is horrible now what we're seeing in terms of bailouts. Even a lot of the people who do it think it's bad.

This has been going on since the beginning of the 1980s. [Laffy Note] [...] Finance has been preferred as the sector that got government support. Manufacturing slides, nobody helps. Finance has a problem, Federal Reserve to the rescue. Treasury to the rescue. Subsidies this, that, and the other.

So bit by bit, they got bigger. And the other reason they got bigger was because this became a country that was further and further in debt. Consumerism was just pushed to the nth degree. People were given the sense that they had to buy everything and they had to borrow to do it increasingly.

But we've seen the central component of the rise of the financial sector is the rise of the debt industry. Mortgage, credit cards, all these gimmicks that Wall Street sells-- just all kinds of products. And, of course, the products are laying an egg all over the world right now.

That was so easy to understand that even I, who glaze over at the mere mention of economics, got it.

H/t: Wotching

Bacevich on the Crises Threatening Our Democracy

By GottaLaff

Via TPM.

Andrew J. Bacevich is a retired Army Colonel and International Relations expert who's become one of the most insightful critics of contemporary American militarism.

By most historical standards Bacevich is a conservative. But his criticism of America's post-Cold War military posture, particularly the Iraq War, have made him an ally of many on the left. And in a tragic turn of events his son, First Lieutentant Andrew J. Bacevich, was killed last year in Iraq -- a war his father had been making the case against for half a decade.

Bill Moyers is interviewing Bacevich tonight at 9 PM on PBS in about the Imperial Presidency, American militarism and their challenge to American democracy. We got some advanced excerpts of the show, which we're going to be posting shortly.

Moyers on O'Reilly: "Bill Is Not a Journalist, He's a Pugilist"

By Paddy



In case you missed this yesterday, Bill O'Reilly's little lapdog Porter Berry accosted Bill Moyers at the National Conference for Media Reform about the "left wing" convention and going on O'Reilly's show. A thing of beauty.