"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.

As Gordon Quinn of the independent documentary company Kartemquin Films (Hoop Dreams) told Anthony Kaufman of the website IndieWire, “In terms of having an audience in a democratic society, in terms of getting people talking about things, there’s nothing like a PBS broadcast. PBS is free, and it’s huge in getting into rural areas. That reach, all over the country, it’s a critically important audience that’s vastly underserved.”

Two PBS series have provided outstanding showcases for the work of new and established documentarians and between them have 13 Oscar nominations and 54 Emmys to prove it. For years, Independent Lens and POV held a nationwide time slot as part of the PBS core schedule on Tuesday nights, with public TV stalwart Frontline as a worthy lead-in, funneling to the independent films just the kind of audience that enjoys and appreciates documentaries.

But this season, PBS chose to move Independent Lens and POV to a new time slot -- 10 PM ET, on Thursday nights. This may not seem like such a big deal at first, until you know that on Thursday nights stations can broadcast any program they like in prime time, whether it’s part of the PBS schedule or not. Many take the opportunity to offers viewers locally produced programs, British sitcoms or reruns of Antiques Roadshow. As a result, episodes of the independent documentary series can now be run anywhere local stations choose to fit them in (here in New York, WNET airs the films at 11 pm on Sundays) or maybe not at all.

POV does not begin the new season -- its 25th -- until June, but as Dru Sefton first reported in the public broadcasting trade publication Current, in the first few months since Independent Lens was shuffled into its new Thursday time slot last October, ratings plummeted 42 percent from the same period last season. With programs scattered throughout the schedule in different cities, not only is it now more difficult for viewers to find them but coordinated national advertising and promotion campaigns are, at best, extremely difficult.

The team at PBS consists of dedicated people; all are our colleagues and many are our friends. They are constantly looking for ways to increase the audience that watches public television. But there is always a danger, in any organization, of only seeing the world from the top down, and then counting heads to measure whether something is good or not. An open letter to PBS from Kartemquin Films says it well:

“Public television is not just a popularity contest, or a ratings game. Taxpayers support public broadcasting because democracy needs more than commercial media’s business models can provide. PBS’ programming decision makes a statement about PBS’ commitment to the mission of public broadcasting.”

It goes on to note the mandate cited in the recently revised and reissued Code of Editorial Integrity for Local Public Media Organizations: “Our purposes are to support a strong civil society, increase cultural access and knowledge, extend public education, and strengthen community life through electronic media and related community activities.”

Most of both our careers have been in public television. Our affection and gratitude for it abideth, but we are not blind to the problems. Public broadcasting’s ever-tenuous funding places it in a perpetual dilemma and forces it into a delicate balancing act. PBS provides programming like Independent Lens and POV that may not garner the most viewers but helps fulfill its essential mission of public service — and, candidly, attracts grants from kindred spirits who believe in a robust mix of ideas and visions. But to lure a wider audience, it also airs what our neighborhood diner calls “lighter fare” — whether entertaining, upscale imports like Downton Abbey, home-grown, how-to programs like This Old House or (during pledge drives) nostalgic reruns of folk musicians, pop crooners, and financial and spiritual gurus – aimed at older viewers with, presumably, more disposable income.

Add to this the constant political pressures, especially from conservative politicians ever eager to cut off its funding (Mitt Romney says he wants to see commercials on “Sesame Street”), plus the self-censorship that all too often results, and you get a tendency toward orthodoxy and an aversion to controversy.

A PBS spokesperson told The New York Times that the service “is fully committed to independent films and the diversity of content they provide.” That can quickly be demonstrated by reversing a bad decision and returning to a national core time slot the independent documentaries created -- often at real financial sacrifice -- by the producers and filmmakers whose own passion is to reveal life honestly and to make plain, for all to see, the realities of inequality and injustice in America.

Along with its open letter to PBS, Kartemquin Films published a petition and asked for signatures from independent filmmakers and their supporters. We two are among the more than 300 who have signed it as of this writing. If you think the creativity and unique visions of life captured by independent producers, journalists and filmmakers deserve the best possible platform on public television, you can read and sign it yourself.

The effort has made a difference. Talks are ongoing and the Times reports that PBS now has “agreed to find a new home next season” for the two series. An announcement is expected to be made at the PBS annual meeting in May. That’s good news, but until the decision is made, it’s important to keep letting them know how you feel — write PBS or sign that petition.

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Bill Moyers is managing editor and Michael Winship is senior writer of the weekly public affairs program, Moyers & Company, airing on public television. Check local airtimes or comment at www.BillMoyers.com.

Women are the New Illegals

Those in the Republican Party who are intent on exercising a fervent grip on women's reproductive rights by cutting off oxygen to Planned Parenthood, yes, those like leading contender, Mitt Romney, who want to "get rid of it," aren't referring only to Planned Parenthood when they say "it," but to half a century of gains women have made in the working place.

From the ultrasound requirement that crept from Kansas to Pennsylvania to muted chatter about rolling back affirmative action rulings, this assault on choice isn't about morality, or the dubious rights of a one inch fetus, but instead garden variety economics plain and simple.

Rich white men of the mostly Republican persuasion are increasingly threatened by the emergence of women as a force to be reckoned with in the marketplace. Mostly rich white men of the conservative persuasion are likewise threatened by the growing number of women in Congress whose constituency includes not merely their wives and sisters, daughters, and mothers-in-law, but their bosses, too.

Nowadays, men often find themselves subordinate to women, and having to deal with the growing probability that there may soon be almost as many women in America's boardrooms as in America's bedrooms. The solution for Santorum, Romney, Gingrich et. al is to return to the days when women were toiling over a hot stove, mostly barefoot, and pregnant.

The growing phenomenon of women in the workforce and so-called "illegal" immigrants both pose a threat not merely to the financial elite, but to fire fighters, law enforcement officers, service members, those in the service industry, as well as in any industry that is often called blue collar. Arguably, men who see women as competition for a job, regardless of their income bracket, are more likely to vote for Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, et. al. .

What's more, now that more women are graduating from colleges than men, pretty soon women will have better documents than men to get those high octane, six figure jobs.

So it is then, in a thumbnail, when listening to Romney talk about pulling the plug on Planned Parenthood, remember that this has nothing to do with abortion, or contraception either. Romney has said he's not trying to dissolve Planned Parenthood, but merely to cut federal funding for Planned Parenthood. Remember that the candidate who wants to cut funding for Planned Parenthood, if elected, will be the president who appoints the next justice to the Supreme Court who will doubtless roll back whatever protections are in place for minorities in affirmative action rulings.

By way of contrast, as his first act as president of the United States in 2008, Barack Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Act. Some may argue this was mostly a symbolic act, and that the egregious inequality in pay for men and women still exists. This is true. Rest assured that none of the candidates from Romney's party will lift a finger to address this economic injustice, but instead work to reassure those who feel most imperiled by the economic empowerment of women.

Indeed, it is doubtful that women would win the write to vote in the current neo-conservative climate that has captured the House, and much of the Senate.

Not only are the Republican candidates not addressing the gross inequality between the sexes that manifests not only when it comes to payday, but in the fact that women pay more for everything from dry cleaning to health benefits, but if given their way, they will work sedulously to roll back those inroads and safeguards that have taken half a century, and a Democratic administration, to achieve.

Once the Republicans pick their nominee, in the coming months, expect to hear more banter from that party about the issue of "illegal immigration," and how to secure the border to keep more "illegals" out.

Republicans are right to focus on the issue of illegal immigration. They just have it a little backwards. They should instead be highlighting the egregious, ongoing exploitation of undocumented workers both in this country's farms, as well as in sweatshops.

Similarly, those who are most emphatic about the right to life of an unborn fetus are really more concerned about the "right to wife" of men who are fed up with having to salute their women in the boardrooms, and on the front lines, and who want to return to the days of saluting only in the boudoir.

So it is then that the struggles of undocumented workers and women in 2012 are a push back against exploitation, and for equal opportunity, a push back against reserving a college education for the privileged few, and for keeping higher education, and social mobility unobstructed.

Those who want to highlight of the so-called right to life are accomplishing what they never set out to. They are making the differences between the two parties sharper than they have been for generations.

Voters will have to choose, in November, whether to allow those who want to take from the rights of the living to enhance the rights of the unborn are to prevail. They have lost that battle fifty years ago, and they must not be allowed to win it now.

Sylvia's Bank Robber Story

Legend has it that my ninety-something year old aunt, Sylvia, my dad's only sister, was working in a bank once when a robber came in and handed her a note. He demanded that she turn over all the money in her drawer.

As the story goes, while Sylvia, tiny as a leprechaun and just as fiesty, filled a bag with money, a security guard fired at the bank robber, missed, and the bullet grazed Sylvia's ear. As her granddaughter, Bonnie, tells it, Sylvia said she could "feel the breeze of the bullet."

Never being one to let a bullet, or the breeze of one, stop her, when the bandit returned in two weeks to pull off what he thought would be another successful heist, he was greeted by a fainting teller and Sylvia who handed him another bag of money admonishing him never to return again which, by the way, he never did.

And, as Sylvia's bank story shows, leprechauns can sometimes be of the female persuasionm and courage come in small packages.

This is but one of many stories from Sylvia who, at 96, is said to be writing her memoirs. At the link is a photo of Aunt Sylvia and Uncle Ellie celebrating their 75th wedding anniversary last March, being guided by their granddaughter, Bonnie Reunis. http://www.tcpalm.com/photos/2011/mar/29/296225/ )

"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 bowl 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.”

On Ash Wednesday, churches in San Francisco announced they were removing $10 million from Wells Fargo and called on the bank, as per the advocacy group Faith in Public Life, “to put an immediate freeze on its foreclosures and repent for their misconduct.” The March 9 New York Times reported that, “The Rev. Richard Smith of St. John the Evangelist, an Episcopal church in San Francisco, likened the divestment campaign and public protests to early Christianity’s ritual of ‘reconciliation of the penitents.’ Far from taking place in the private sanctity of the confessional, that rite occurred in public, with the penitent overseen by a priest and required to present himself before a bishop.

“’It seemed like a parallel to us,’ said Mr. Smith, 62. ‘Our banks have done a great deal of damage in a very public way. So it seems appropriate as we enter into a season of penitence that we invite those who separated themselves from the community to repent with us. It’s basically ‘Ethics 101.’”

The effort is part of several national campaigns to get consumers and community groups to remove their money from the big banks and transfer accounts to credit unions and smaller financial institutions. Travis Waldron at ThinkProgress wrote, “Religious organizations have been at the forefront of movements to get consumers to move their money. The New Bottom Line, a coalition of faith groups, pledged to move $1 billion this year, and before Thanksgiving, churches moved $55 million away from Wall Street banks with pledges to remove as much as $100 million more.”

Occupy Wall Street has been in the lead, as has the Move Your Money project – its website even includes a handy locator that lists credit unions and community banks near your zip code (http://ow.ly/9ELQ6) On the November 5th “Bank Transfer Day,” some 40,000 moved their money out of the nation’s biggest banks, but according to the consulting firm Javelin Strategy and Research, the event actually had a much wider impact. In a January 26 report, Javelin estimated, “5.6 million U.S. adults with a banking relationship changed providers in the past 90 days. Of those switchers, 610,000 US adults (or 11% of the 5.6 million) cited Bank Transfer Day as their reason and actually moved their accounts from a large to a small institution.”

The March 2 Los Angeles Times noted, “Consumers fed up with the rising tide of bank fees helped the nation’s credit unions more than double their number of new customers last year… More than 1.3 million Americans opened new credit union accounts last year, up from less than 600,000 in 2010, the National Credit Union Administration reported. That brings the number of credit union members to a record 91.8 million.”

As a result of all this, CNN Money reported last November, “The nation's 10 biggest banks could stand to lose as much as $185 billion in deposits in the next year due to customer defections, according to cg42, a Wilton, Conn.-based management consulting firm that has conducted research for several of the nation's top banks.” Sounds like a lot, but keep in mind those same ten banks hold retail deposits of $2.04 trillion.

Nonetheless, public opinion and the post-meltdown, Dodd-Frank financial regulations have the banks and other financial institutions scrambling, while they continue to scream in protest and lobby on Capitol Hill against the ignominy of reform. On March 12, that $25 billion foreclosure abuse settlement was filed by the federal government and 49 states – Oklahoma was the holdout – with Ally Financial, Bank of America, Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo. Twenty billion of it will be used to give a break to military and the unemployed, reduce principal for delinquent or near default loans and refinance mortgages already underwater. Another billion and half will provide some small restitution to people whose homes were sold or foreclosed upon. But as the Associated Press pointed out, “About 11 million American households are ‘underwater’ on their mortgages, meaning they owe more than their homes are worth,” but the settlement “is expected to reduce loans for only about 1 million.”

We’re told that the banks, desperate when thrown a lifeline by taxpayers in 2008, are now stronger and better able to weather a crisis than they were. Fifteen of the 19 largest financial firms passed the Federal Reserve’s latest stress test. Regardless of whether we as individuals could survive, the test asks, according to The New York Times, “whether banks would have enough capital to weather a peak unemployment rate of 13 percent, a 21 percent drop in housing prices and severe market shocks, as well as economic slowdowns in Europe and Asia.

“The Fed’s stress tests assumed that the 19 banks would be slammed with $534 billion of losses in just over two years. Even after such hits, most banks would emerge with adequate capital…” But one of those that failed was Citigroup, our third largest, the one that took the most government assistance during the meltdown – and this in the wake of last week’s announcement that in 2011 the bank paid CEO Vikram Pandit nearly $15 million in total compensation, including a cash bonus of more than $5 million, his first since the 2008 crash.

What’s more, the Times said the tests revealed to the Fed that, “In business loans -- called commercial and industrial loans by bankers -- Citi and U.S. Bancorp had the worst portfolios, while Wells Fargo and Fifth Third had the shakiest credit card portfolios. In commercial real estate, regional banks appear to be the most vulnerable.” Swell.

There’s still a lot to be angry about, still good reason to contemplate transferring your money or at least filing with the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau if you have a complaint about your mortgage, deposit accounts or credit cards (consumerfinance.gov). As former Goldman Sachs executive director Greg Smith said in this week’s bombshell Times op-ed announcing his resignation, “It astounds me how little senior management gets a basic truth: If clients don’t trust you they will eventually stop doing business with you. It doesn’t matter how smart you are.”

Jeff Horwitz at the financial daily American Banker this week exposed J.P. Morgan Chase’s credit card services division, reporting that it “took procedural shortcuts and used faulty account records in suing tens of thousands of delinquent credit card borrowers for at least two years,” sparking an investigation by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. “The bank's errors could call into question the legitimacy of billions of dollars in outstanding claims against debtors and of legal judgments Chase has already won, current and former Chase employees say.” As Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi observed, “Countless credit card borrowers would now have collection agents chasing them for money they did not owe,” and in some cases, according to a key witness, Chase actually owed the customer money.

Allegedly one of Chase’s more pernicious practices was “robosigning,” the mass production and signing of credit-related affidavits without any semblance of verification, an illegal shortcut similar to the one that plagued the mortgage market and one of the targets of a new report from the inspector general of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

“Managers at major banks ignored widespread errors in the foreclosure process,” the Times reports, “in some cases instructing employees to adopt make-believe titles and speed documents through the system despite internal objections… the report concludes that managers were aware of the problems and did nothing to correct them. The shortcuts were directed by managers in some cases…” In one of the more blatant falsifications, a Wells Fargo employee whose prior work experience was at a pizza parlor was named a bank vice president.

Inspector General David Montoya said, “I believe the reports we just released will leave the reader asking one question -- how could so many people have participated in this misconduct? The answer -- simple greed.”

Simple greed – hey banks, how about giving that up for Lent?

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Michael Winship, senior writing fellow at Demos and president of the Writers Guild of America, East, is senior writer of the weekly public television series, Moyers & Company. Comment at www.BillMoyers.com.

Sabbatical

Sabbatical is one of those words I'm never sure I spelled right. That may be because I've never actually taken a sabbatical.

Am reminded of Andy Rooney, legendary commentator for the CBS series, 60 Minutes, who said that writing is one field from which one can never retire. This is true.

Memories of one of my favorite playwrights, Samuel Beckett, struggling with his health, yet doggedly working on and indeed writing while there was even an ounce of breath left in his body come to mind. And, no, that has nothing to do with the fact that Saturday is St. Patrick's Day.

Privacy is almost as important to me as air, but when one enters the public domain as I do here, one can no longer take refuge in privacy, so it is that I share with you that my silence of late is not because I can't think of anything to say about what's going on these days in the political arena, but because I'm struggling with something that is, alas, way beyond politics; life and death.

If my presence here is erratic, please think of this as a sabbatical, a brief hiatus prompted by the wrenching need to keep myself alive.

Indeed, isn't it the wrenching need to stay alive that is behind why we open our eyes in the morning. Are we not all thick with the same struggle, the one that faced Jacob when he wrestled with the angel, the one that faces each of us every day, the decision to choose life over death?

Oh, you say, it's not always our decision, and you're right. Mortality inevitably wins out. That said, I think we have more control over things than we think we have. I can only speak for myself when I say I'm not ready to go to that place where there is total, unstoppable silence.

There can be no denying that life is more fragile than language. Language hangs tough in the face of out of print anthologies, and myths that limp past us like so many strangers. Words are funny creatures. They often come to us in our sleep, yet artfully escape us when we most need them.

Often, we choose when to exit by choosing the hand we play. We will our path, and we pave our will. Nobody forced me to live the life I have. It was my choice, and I accept whatever consequences arise from that choice.

Growing old may be customary, but it is not mandatory. Still, it's the best option on the menu so far. It is sometimes said that one has failed at life. No one has ever accused anyone of failing at death.

So, as Samuel Beckett said, "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail better."

"Politicians Won't Return Ponzi Payoffs"

By Michael Winship

On Tuesday, Texas financier Robert Allen Stanford was convicted in a Houston federal court on 13 out of 14 criminal counts of fraud. As The New York Times reported:

The jury decision followed a six-week trial and came three years after Mr. Stanford was accused of defrauding nearly 30,000 investors in 113 countries in a Ponzi scheme involving $7 billion in fraudulent high-interest certificates of deposit at the Stanford International Bank, which was based on the Caribbean island of Antigua.

Media accounts of Stanford’s conviction were filled with stories of his excesses — mansions, private yachts and jets, and so much money invested in Antigua — including bribes — the small island awarded him a knighthood. Among his other indulgences, noted the Reuters news service: “He bought a castle in Florida for one of his girlfriends and his oldest daughter lived in a million-dollar condominium in Houston. He wore custom-made suits and bankrolled a $20 million prize for an international cricket tournament.”

But what most of this week’s stories failed to mention was the large amount of his clients’ cash that was spent on campaign contributions, greasing the corrupt nexus of money and politics for personal gain. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were given to candidates, including Barack Obama, John McCain, John Boehner and Harry Reid; as well as national fundraising committees for the Republican and Democratic parties. The court-appointed receiver charged with returning money to Stanford’s investors is trying to get the contributions back. And the committees are resisting.

We first reported on Stanford’s political wheeling-and-dealing three years ago on Bill Moyers Journal:

“He bankrolled junkets to [Antigua’s] balmy shores for several members of Congress including Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn and New York Democratic Congressman Charlie Rangel, [then] chair of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee. Stanford partied with Nancy Pelosi and Bill Clinton at the Democratic National Convention last summer. And when Tom DeLay was still House Majority Leader, he flew the friendly skies in Stanford’s private jet 16 times in three years, including a trip to Houston for DeLay’s arraignment on money-laundering charges. I am not making this up!

Sir Allen also showered millions of dollars on political campaigns; much of it in the very year Congress was debating a bill to curb financial fraud. Two of the biggest recipients were Democratic Senator Bill Nelson and Republican John McCain, one of the original Keating Five. Three key Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee got checks from Stanford, too. Surprise, surprise --the reform bill never got out of the Senate.”

The non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics elaborated on its Open Secrets blog:

Between its PAC and its employees, Stanford Financial Group has given $2.4 million to federal candidates (including both candidate committees and leadership PACs), parties and committees since 2000, with 65 percent of that going to Democrats. Stanford and his wife, Susan, have given $931,100 out of their own pockets, with 78 percent going to Democrats…

The company gave the most during the 2002 election cycle, when Congress was debating the Financial Services Antifraud Network Act, a bill that would have created a computer network linking the databases of state and federal banking, securities and insurance regulators to curb financial fraud. Lobbying reports indicate that Stanford Financial Group lobbied on the bill, which the House passed but the Senate did not.

On February 13, Murray Waas of Reuters reported, “The court-appointed receiver charged with returning money to Stanford investors obtained a federal court order last June against five Democratic and Republican campaigns. But they haven’t returned the money. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee received $950,500; the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), $238,500; the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, $200,000; the Republican National Committee $128,500, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) $83,345.”

House Speaker Boehner, Senate Majority Leader Reid, Senator McCain and some others already have returned their contributions, but Waas writes, “the roughly $154,000 recovered from elected officials is a fraction of the $1.8 million missing.” Others, including President Obama, turned money over to charity — $4,600 in Obama’s case, received directly from Allen Stanford in 2008. Nonetheless, the receivership has asked the Obama campaign to turn the same amount back to investors, and Waas adds, “The total may be as high [as] $31,000 when Stanford’s contributions to Obama’s other campaign committees are included, along with money from senior Stanford executives, and the Stanford Financial Group’s now-defunct PAC, according to campaign finance records and an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics.”

Kevin Sadler, lead counsel for the receivership, told Reuters, “The money was never theirs to begin with,” and that taking Stanford’s campaign contributions was akin to someone being given cash by “a guy who goes into a Seven Eleven and robs the store.”

The national campaign committees are appealing to a higher court a federal judge’s order to return Stanford’s donations.

We spoke with Kevin Sadler, who said that in the meantime, a federal district judge has just ordered the committees to pay the receivership $370,000 in legal fees, with another $120,000 in fees to come if their appeal is unsuccessful, and yet another $275,000 if the committees take the case to the Supreme Court and lose.

“In light of this,” Sadler told us, “and the Stanford guilty verdict, it is a puzzling act of bi-partisanship that all the political committee defendants persist in their fight against the receiver.”

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Michael Winship, senior writing fellow at Demos and president of the Writers Guild of America, East, is senior writer of the weekly public television series, Moyers & Company. Comment at www.BillMoyers.com.

"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 of our 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.

The March 5 Wall Street Journal reported that as the Federal Reserve prepares to release the results of the latest round of stress tests, evaluating how banks would respond in the event of another severe financial crisis, “Bankers are pressing the Fed to limit its release of information -- expected as early as next week -- to what was published after the first test of big banks in 2009.

“Three years ago, as the financial crisis was abating, the Fed published potential loan losses and how much capital each institution would need to raise to absorb them. This time around, the Fed has pledged to release a wider array of information, including annual revenue and net income under a so-called stress scenario in which the economy would contract and unemployment would rise sharply.”

The banks cite competitive concerns but regulators “view full disclosure as critical to assuaging investor concerns about banks' capacity to withstand a market shock or economic setback.” Add to the mix the banks’ fear of further government interference – when it’s of the non-bailout variety, that is – and continued resistance to the new rules imposed by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. In any case, they’re being assured by the Fed that it won’t release data “that rivals could mine for future acquisitions or other moves,” such as quarterly breakouts of projected losses.

Banks also are dragging their heels over a requirement that arose from last November’s G-20 meeting. Representatives of 19 of the biggest industrial and emerging nations, plus the European Union, decreed that the world’s largest banks – including eight from the United States -- must create “living wills,” plans that lay out what they would do in the event of another crisis, including how banks could be stabilized or even shut down.

The wills are an idea that makes perfect sense. Think of them as a business model for the apocalypse. But drafts of the banks’ projected scenarios are due by June and must be completed by the end of the year, and the Financial Times reports, “Independent research showed only one bank out of 29 globally considered itself to have finished a draft recovery and resolution plan, according to a survey by Ernst & Young…”

“Living wills form a critical part of global efforts to avoid a recurrence of the 2008 financial crisis, when governments in the US, UK and elsewhere were forced to shell out billions of dollars in taxpayer funds to rescue troubled financial institutions. Some bankers also hope that regulators will reward institutions that write credible plans that allow an easier wind up with lower capital requirements.”

Off the record, bankers in the United States and the UK told the Financial Times that “cross-border disagreements among regulators were proving to be the biggest hurdle to writing comprehensive plans.”

Meanwhile, Simon Johnson, the savvy MIT and former International Monetary Fund economist, warns that if the Republican Party takes over both the House and Senate, they may attempt to force the heretofore non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which evaluates the impact of the Federal legislature’s fiscal proposals, to switch to a scoring system “that would attach magical growth implications to tax cutting.”

At The Baseline Scenario website, Johnson writes, “If you cut taxes, revenues will fall and deficits will increase. If you change the CBO’s scoring process to hide this fact -- as is under consideration by leading Republicans on the House Budget Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee -- you are engaging in exactly the same sort of deception that brought down Greece.”

So whether bankers or politicians, it’s those at the top and not the facts that are being stubborn. And maybe they’re being that other thing Ronald Reagan said facts were, too.

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Michael Winship, senior writing fellow at Demos and president of the Writers Guild of America, East, is senior writer of the weekly public television series, Moyers & Company. Comment at www.BillMoyers.com.

Apps for Apes? Why not for Republicans?

Amazingly, Orangutans now use iPads to paint and video conference. And, if the old maxim neanderthals have more fun is true, then we should be having more fun, too. After all, orangutans may be our closest relatives.

Judging by the seemingly interminable Republican debates, arguably the only ones having any fun at all are the angels footing the bill.

While Apple Computers has nothing to do with this new iPad program, known simply as "Orangutan Outreach," Steve Jobs might be thrilled to learn part of his legacy includes empowering our next of kin with the capacity to paint, surf the Web, and reach out to family members thousands of miles away. http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/apps-apes-orangutans-using-ipads-paint-video-chat-174457692.html

So, keeping it all in the family, if there is an Orangutan Outreach program, why not a Republican Outreach program? Judging by the number of people who show up when leading contender Mitt Romney speaks, there is a definite need for one.

As NPR notes, there have already been 26, yes, 26 Republican debates so far. http://www.npr.org/2012/02/22/147187228/6-reasons-we-re-feeling-debate-fatigue The main objective of these debates is, of course, so voters can become better acquainted with those who aspire to occupy the White House. But, who knows? Maybe the idea of a debate will be archaic in another century, if not sooner, when candidates may instead face off in cyberspace.

While the televised debates seem to benefit more from redundancy than from face-time, the technology is in place to fast forward, pause, and fast rewind talking points ad infinitum.

Republican leadership is so far out of touch with their base that they've effectively lost the votes of 99% of American women in one fell swoop. Republican candidates might as well be running from the moon for all the relevance they have to the issues impacting the vast majority of us today

Since human technology is being used to enable apes to communicate with each other remotely using iPads, why not come out with an application to bolster how Republicans communicate with their base remotely? Either that, or someone should write a sequel to "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus," and call it instead: "Republicans are from Mars, the rest of us are from Planet Earth."

And, right in time for Tuesday, it's worth noting that orangutans at the Florida Zoo already have iPads, so it might behoove Republican Party chair, and some of the candidates, to take a little trip to get a sense of how well this interactive technology is working with other primates.

In the spirit of the season now that there's an app. for other primates, why not an app. for presidential primaries?

As The Sideshow reports, iPads for orangutans were developed for those cold winter months when orangutans tend to stay indoors, and have real time exposure to family. http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/apps-apes-orangutans-using-ipads-paint-video-chat-174457692.html

If there is an iPad for primates, why not one for primary season when during those long, cold winter months candidates are cut off from constituents.

Seeing how out of touch most of the cash crop of Republican contenders are with their electoral base, a special program that might better enable them not only to reach out to potential voters, but also to understand how voters think might be in order. Keep in mind, though, that there isn't an extension cord long enough to enable them to reach out and touch voters now.

Rick Santorum's denunciation of government funding for contraception, and Mitt Romney's absurdist references to how many Cadillacs his wife has in her respective driveways, surely could be enhanced by a program that gives them a real-time view of how 99% of America lives.

Thinking about some Web sites or movies that the 2012 opposition partiers, which is really what they are after all and not tea partiers, these comes to mind. Romney might find a primary app. helpful for a virtual tour of a General Motors plant, so he could tell workers there what a bad idea it was for President Obama to bail out the auto industry, and not lay them off.

Rick Santorum might want to check out the Web site of an AIDS hospice since he thinks that cutting government funding for contraception will only affect women of child-bearing age. When he's done with that, Santorum should also order an ultrasound of the Bible to show which parts of the New Testament are still alive and kicking.

Both Santorum and Ron Paul, who both endorse the idea that life begins at conception, should make their own You Tube video showing body bag being loaded onto military aircraft from Afghanistan, and then say they support the "right to life" as long as it doesn't include men and women who serve their country.

Not fair, you say, Ron Paul, of course, wants to bring the troops home. Right you are, so how about a three dimensional window into some national guard troops lining the border between Arizona and Mexico cause this is where Dr. Paul wants to send troops after they finish their tour of Afghanistan. Using Ron Paul's logic, it still counts as bringing the troops home if we wage war with undocumented immigrants at home instead of the Taliban overseas.

For Newt, a primary app. would be simple. Gingrich's iPad will come in handy when updating new merchandise at Tiffany's Web site.

Oh, and by the way, somebody ought to tell Santorum that he's not going to get any more votes from women by changing the title of the movie to "Ben Her."

Given that only the candidates are having fun at the debates, an incentive for the voting public might be if they were encouraged to view the debates as "play dates" not unlike the ones orangutans have using iPads to touch base with far away friends and family. The notion of a play date might also be helpful not only in choosing the Republican presidential nominee, but also in picking his running mate.

Some orangutans reportedly recognize distant family members using iPads. Doubtless, if given access to the primate app., I can think of at least two Republican contenders off the top of my head who will recognize some of their ancestors using this app.

Putting Super Tuesday aside, 2012 may yet turn out to be a banner year for the Republican Party as this is the year when there isn't an extension cord long enough for any of the candidates to be able to reach out and touch many moderate members of their base. By appealing to the radical right wing fringe of their party, this election may be seen not merely as Gingrich's last stand, but as the last stand of his party.

Orangutans can now communicate with each other using iPads. Until Republicans can come up with a way to show that they're at least minimally in touch with their base, we can count on their defeat, and for 95% of us, that's a good thing, too.

Dancing Shoes

Tell the Devil to
put on his
dancing shoes.
I’m about to
give him a
run for
his
money.


(c) jayne lyn stahl

"The 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?

With Contagion making such a powerful impression, for several days news articles seemed to keep popping up about contagious disease and the conflict between religious beliefs and immunization. There was nothing new about the basics: All fifty states require some specific vaccinations for kids, yet all of them grant exemptions for medical reasons – say, for a child with cancer. Almost all of them grant religious exemptions. And twenty states allow exemptions for personal, moral, or other beliefs.

According to the February 15 edition of The Wall Street Journal, a number of pediatricians are dropping families from their practices when the parents refuse immunization for their kids. “In a study of Connecticut pediatricians published last year,” the paper reported, “some 30% of 133 doctors said they had asked a family to leave their practice for vaccine refusal, and a recent survey of 909 Midwestern pediatricians found that 21% reported discharging families for the same reason.

“By comparison, in 2001 and 2006 about 6% of physicians said they ‘routinely’ stopped working with families due to parents' continued vaccine refusal and 16% ‘sometimes’ dismissed them, according to surveys conducted then by the American Academy of Pediatrics.”

But some parents still fear a link between vaccinations and autism, a possibility science has largely debunked. Some parents just want to be in charge of what’s put into their children’s bodies, as one West Virginia politician puts it. And some parents just don’t trust science, period -- a few have even been known to fake religion to avoid vaccinating their kids. So there are many loopholes. But now seven states are considering legislation to make it even easier for mothers and fathers to spare their children from vaccinations, especially on religious grounds.

In Oregon, according to a story by Jennifer Anderson in The Portland Tribune, the number of kindergartners with religious exemptions is up from 3.7 percent to 5.6 percent in just four years, and continuing to rise. This has public health officials clicking their calculators and keeping their eye on what’s called “herd immunity.” A certain number of any population group needs to have been vaccinated -- 80% for most diseases, 92 percent for whooping cough – to maintain the ability of the whole population – “the herd” – to resist the spread of a disease.

Ms. Anderson offers the example of what used to be called “the German measles” – rubella. All it takes are five unvaccinated kids in a class of 25 for the herd immunity to break down, creating an opportunity for the disease to spread to younger siblings and other medically vulnerable people who can’t be vaccinated. If you were traveling to Europe between 2009 and 2011, you may remember warnings about the huge outbreak of measles there, brought on by a failure “to vaccinate susceptible populations.”

Here in the United States, several recent outbreaks of measles have been traced to pockets of unvaccinated children in states that allow personal belief exemptions. The Reuters news service recently reported thirteen confirmed cases of measles in central Indiana. Two of them were people who showed up to party two days before the Super Bowl in Indianapolis. Patriots and Giants fans back east were alerted. So far, no news is good news. .

But this is serious business, made more so by complacency. Older generations remember when measles killed up to 500 people a year before we started vaccinating against them in 1963. The great flu pandemic of 1918 killed ten times more Americans than died in the Great World War that ended that year and took the lives of as many as forty million globally. Our generation was also stalked by small pox, polio, and whooping cough before there were vaccinations.

In a country where few remember those diseases, it’s easy to think, “What’s to worry?” But as the movie Contagion so forcefully and hauntingly reminds us, the earth is now flat. Seven billion people live on it, and our human herd moves on a conveyer belt of perpetual mobility, so that a virus can travel as swiftly as a voice from one cell phone to another. When and if a contagion strikes, we can’t count on divine intervention to spare us. That’s when you want a darn good scientist in a research lab. We’ll need all the help we can get from knowledge and her offspring.

#####

Bill Moyers is managing editor and Michael Winship is senior writer of the new weekly public affairs program, Moyers & Company, airing on public television. Check local airtimes or comment at www.BillMoyers.com.

"Mike Daisey Takes a Bite Out of Apple"

By Michael Winship

If you would seek proof of that famous Margaret Mead adage, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has,” look at what’s happening as more and more people protest Apple Inc.’s labor practices in China.

Take it one step further: if you should ever doubt the impact a solitary artist can have against injustice, meet Mike Daisey.

Daisey is a monologist, a creator of one-man shows, whose performance piece “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” has jolted audiences into action as he parallels the obsessions of Jobs, the recently deceased former CEO of Apple; our consumer-driven lust for iPods, iPhones, and iPads and the human toll taken by their manufacture.

Apple – like virtually every other electronics manufacturer – subcontracts much of the work that goes into building its devices to companies in Asia. One of them, Foxconn Technology, is the largest private employer in China. Its factories there and in other parts of the world put together approximately forty percent of all the consumer electronics devices on the planet. Their largest facility, Foxconn City, is in Shenzhen, just across the border from Hong Kong, and employs nearly a quarter of a million workers.

As The New York Times reported late last month, “Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors.

“More troubling, the groups say, is some suppliers’ disregard for workers’ health. Two years ago, 137 workers at an Apple supplier in eastern China were injured after they were ordered to use a poisonous chemical to clean iPhone screens. Within seven months last year, two explosions at iPad factories, including in Chengdu [the capital of Sichuan province in southwest China], killed four people and injured 77. Before those blasts, Apple had been alerted to hazardous conditions inside the Chengdu plant, according to a Chinese group that published that warning.”

The explosions were due to accumulations of aluminum dust from the polishing of thousands upon thousands of iPad cases. There have been more than a dozen suicides as well – part of Foxconn’s solution was to install nets around buildings to catch jumpers – and accounts of workers fired after their hands were made useless by repetitive stress injuries.

Many have reported on the working conditions at Foxconn, but it’s Mike Daisey’s one-man play, media coverage of his work and the broadcast of a one-hour version on the public radio series This American Life that seem to have galvanized public opinion.

Physically large and in charge, Mike Daisey’s performance style suggests a peculiar combination of the late Spalding Gray and Lewis Black of “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.” He sits at a table on a bare stage with some notes and a glass of water and simply tells his story; at times hysterically funny, at others, poignant, withering and accusatory. Some might find his manner a bit loud and overbearing: the night we were there last fall, media moguls Barry Diller and David Geffen were sitting a couple of rows in front of us and walked out after the first fifteen minutes or so. (Don’t try to deny it: we have your ticket stubs.)

But maybe it wasn’t Daisey’s profanity and mild bellicosity that got under their skin and instead, some simple truths. Daisey begins by detailing his own passion for all things Apple (“I am an Apple fanboy, I am a worshipper in the cult of Mac”) and slowly segues into stories from the company’s history and its increasing dependence on Chinese labor. Daisey traveled to China to see it all firsthand.

“You know,” he says, “when we dream of a future when the regulations are washed away and the corporations are finally free to sail above us, you don’t have to dream about some sci-fi-dystopian-Blade Runner-1984 bull____. You can go to Shenzhen tomorrow – they’re making your s___ that way today.”

All the bad publicity and petitions that sprang up, especially after Daisey’s public radio appearance apparently have gotten to super secretive Apple, which at an estimated worth of more than $465 billion has now surpassed ExxonMobil as the largest publicly traded company in the world. They’ve launched a PR counteroffensive that included this week’s “exclusive” visit to Foxconn City by Bill Weir of ABC’s “Nightline,” who reported on the suicides and other health issues but said, “China has very different values when it comes to gainful employment” and compared some of the complaints to what “you’d hear at any factory or college campus.”

Weir breathlessly referred to Apple products as “precious objects” and “works of art” and said that although Bob Iger, the CEO of the Walt Disney Company, ABC’s owner, sits on Apple’s board and the Steve Jobs Trust is Disney’s largest individual stockholder, “I only agreed to report exactly what I saw.”

In its latest, annual Supplier Responsibility Progress Report, Apple for the first time released a list of its subcontractors and announced that it has joined the Fair Labor Association, which makes unannounced factory inspections to check on working conditions and report violations. And last Saturday, Foxconn announced it’s raising salaries by as much as 25 percent (to $400 a month) and reducing excessive overtime.

But not so fast. According to the activist, Hong Kong-based Students and Scholars against Corporate Misbehavior, “The new basic wage… only applies to the workers in Shenzhen. In inland provinces, where two-thirds of production workers are based, basic salary remains meager. Given that inflation in China is high. Foxconn is just following the trend of wage increases in the electronics industry in China.”

As for the Fair Labor Association, it’s not all that independent. Writing on the CNN website, Scott Nova, executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium notes, “… Most of its money -- millions of dollars per year -- comes from the very companies whose labor practices it is supposed to scrutinize. Although Apple has not disclosed its financial relationship with the Fair Labor Association, it is likely now the organization's largest funder. Moreover, on the association's board of directors sit executives of major corporations such as Nike, Adidas and agribusiness giant Syngenta. The job of these executives is to represent the interests of other member companies, such as Apple. Under the Fair Labor Association's rules, the company representatives on the board exercise veto power over major decisions.”

Jeff Ballinger, director of Press for Change, a labor rights group, told The New York Times, “The Fair Labor Associaion is largely a fig leaf. There's all this rhetoric from corporate social responsibility people and the big companies that they want to improve labor standards, but all the pressure seems to be going the other direction -- they're trying to force prices down.”

Yes, Foxconn employees make well above the average salary of Chinese workers and yes, there are cultural issues and the overwhelming tide of globalization. But Apple is sitting on cash reserves of nearly $100 billion. As others have noted, just one tenth of one percent of that could go a long way toward improving conditions for its workers in China. They could even set up a health care plan. And as an anonymous former Apple executive said, “Suppliers would change everything tomorrow if Apple told them they didn’t have another choice.”

Meanwhile, Mike Daisey keeps performing “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” around the country. He finishes another New York run at the Public Theater on March 18, but you can listen to the This American Life radio version and at his website, MikeDaisey.com, you now can download the entire script.

Daisey says, “If Apple would spend less energy finessing its public image, and instead apply its efforts to real transparency and accountability, it could be a true leader for the electronics industry. Apple today is still saying what it said yesterday: trust us, we know best, there's nothing to worry about. They have not earned the trust they are asking for.”

There’s much protesters can do: petitions, letters, phone calls, boycotts. And Daisey has written that, “Talking about it, thinking about it when making purchasing decisions, and understanding it is not just symbolic. In a world of silence, speaking itself is action. It can be the first seeds of actual change. Do not be afraid to plant them.”

In other words, Mike Daisey proclaims, “Spread the virus.”

######

Michael Winship, senior writing fellow at Demos, is senior writer of the weekly public television series “Moyers & Company.”

Private Company Makes Bid to Control State Prisons

As a spunky thirty year old, I went to visit my dad in Boca Raton one summer, and perhaps for the shock value confided to him that I was writing pornography. My father wasn't easily shocked. He looked at me, and said simply, "There's lots of money in pornography."

And, he was right. There was then and still is lots of money to be made in hard and soft porn, but the real money to be made now is in prisons.

Last week Reader Supported News reported that a giant private prison company, Corrections Corporations of America, has approached virtually every state in the union with the offer that they'd buy up their prisons, and "manage convicted criminals at a cost-savings." http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/316-20/10052-private-prison-company-to-demand-90-occupancy

What better time for such an offer, too, when states like California are releasing many minor offenders for lack of money, but a closer look shows that this kind of offer is not unlike a leveraged buyout of federal and state prisons, but with one obvious caveat: per Reader Supported News, too, the company in this case, Corrections Corporations of America, is demanding a 20 year contract. And, more importantly, prisons must be delivered 90% full. 90% full of what, you might ask, of human "product." Inmates are the assets at the root of prison privatization.

CCA has already devoted $250 million to this so-called prison management venture which is, in reality, not unlike the reconstruction deals awarded to Halliburton after the occupation in Iraq. The independent contractors earn just as much revenue as the parent company.

1 in 100 Americans are behind bars as the New York Times has reported. The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. That number is bound to grow when more companies like Corrections Corporations of America get a whiff of all the money to be made in this industry. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/28/us/28cnd-prison.html

This is nothing new, of course, former vice-president, Dick Cheney's Vanguard Group, while dealing in mutual funds, has famously found a breeding ground for investor money in private prisons for the past several years.

What's the difference between what CCA is doing, and what Vanguard and other companies that deal in privatizing prisons have done?

Well, for openers, Corrections Corporations of America is taking its bid to the states, 48 states in all, and is insisting upon a 20 year contract for services rendered. More importantly, CCA will only work with those states that produce can produce a full house, thus they provide dangerous incentives to law enforcement, district attorneys, and judges to book first and ask questions later, if ever. Essentially, what Corrections Corporations of America is capitalizing on is the burgeoning incarceration business.

To think that any firm can engage in gross profit-making activities that lead to questioning whether those who are incarcerated even benefited to their right to a fair trial is nauseating and noxious in any society that even pretends to be democratic.

For the practice of incarceration based on crime to be privatized, and that insidious practice to be neutralized by euphemisms like convict "management" is repugnant, an no less repugnant than an image of the devil selling time shares in hell.

CCA claims it will help states control costs of their prison system, but what they really want, of course, is a piece of the action. The larger question is, does anyone deserve to make profit off human "product," especially when that profit margin depends upon locking up as many of those who have been systematically disenfranchised by ajudicial system that has been compromised for generations?

When payday for corporate carpetbaggers comes as a consequence of further marginalizing those who already endure chronic civic disenfranchisement can there be greater moral turpitude than that?

Indeed, any firm whose sustainability hinges on the management, and exponential proliferation of human "product" for profit can only be called a corporate pimp and since, as Mitt Romney says "corporations are people," it must follow then that corporations can be pimps, too.

The "Nuclear Renaissance?"

Here we are almost a year away from the nuclear meltdown in Fukushima that happened as a result of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami on March 11th of last year, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission announces that it is approving licenses to begin construction on the first nuclear power plants to be built in 30 years. The two new nuclear reactors will be in Georgia.

Southern Company's bid for the two nuclear plants, a project known as the Vogtle project, was greenlighted, as the Associated Press reports, despite the objections from NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko who considers safety still a big issue, and one that has yet to be resolved. Jaczko says, "We've given them a license. They have not given us any commitment they will make these changes in the future." http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jV2lIkdZPwOkxK7sh1CgZwIjekPA?docId=b400fa591a7c4be99bc8523be40a1a5b

And, according to the AP, too, the plants could begin operating as early as 2016, and 2017.

What an odd idea, too, to have a "nuclear renaissance" in the wake of the latest report from Bloomberg that the temperature in a damaged reactor in Fukushima rose to perilous levels even after safety measures were attempted. Yes, that's right, nearly one year after the disaster, one of the now defunct reactors is still dangerously hot. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-13/tepco-says-fukushima-reactor-temperature-breaches-safety-limit.html

Why should Southern Co., and Georgia Power concern themselves with safety hazards like prolonged blackouts, or multiple meltdowns at various U.S. sites? There are no earthquakes in the U.S., right?

And, is the NRC abandoning its pledge, in the aftermath of the nuclear disaster in Japan, to enhance safety at nuclear power plants reactors in this country? Is it responsible governance to build more nuclear plants without unequivocal assurance that they are sound and relatively risk-free?

More importantly, why isn't this story getting more of a mainstream media boost especially given all the hooplah about Ahmadinejad, uranium enrichment, and a nuclear Iran?

President Obama doesn't appear to be concerned about any risks from nuclear meltdown. He's so excited about the new Vogtle project, he's even offered more than $8 billion in federal loan guarantees.

Whose brainchild was Vogtle? Arguably, the the Nuclear Energy Group, a powerful Washington lobbyist, was fine tuning the details on that eight billion as were aforementioned companies Southern Company, and Georgia Power. Oh, and by the way, as noted by the AP, Westinghouse, will be simulating the same reactor design for other yet to be approved for nuclear plants slated for construction in Florida and the Carolinas.

So, at a time when European countries like Germany have been vocal about rethinking their use of nuclear power as an alternate form of energy in light of Fukushima, it seems nothing short of perverse that the federal government should not only restate its commitment to nuclear energy as an alternative, but even go so far as to allot billions in the process at a time when states like California can use a stimulus package more than the nuclear power industry can. Indeed, if we're going to bailout anyone, it should be institutions of higher learning, and not instruments of potential mass casualty like nuclear reactors and drones.

And, as if to add insult to injury, the U.S. is currently engaged in an economic embargo, and on the verge of war with another country, Iran, that continually argues it wants to use nuclear reactors for the same reasons.

There are 104 nuclear reactors in the U.S. many of which would probably not pass a stress test, and a license has just been granted to build another two plants, the greatest increase in the past 30 years. The President has offered billions to help bolster this "nuclear renaissance" at a time when the Republicans are calling for austerity programs, and spending cuts that will impact seniors, workers, students, and those who depend upon government-subsidized health care programs.

This is not the time for a Democratic president to succumb to the wishes of the nuclear energy lobby. This is not the time for a Democratic president to agree to subsidize entitlement programs for big energy companies, but instead this is the time for federal resources to be shared with states that are hurting, so they don't have to turn another college student away, lay off any more firefighters, teachers, and law enforcement.

Time to put the "nuclear renaissance" on hold, and instead look to forge a stronger infrastructure that protects the weakest among us instead of exposing them to more peril.

We don't need a "nuclear renaissance," Mr. President. We need a renaissance in higher education. The many thousands of students who will be unable to go to college because they can't afford tuition, and those children who have to take a bus to go to a school several miles away because their elementary school was closed due to budget cuts, their kind of energy is more important to this country now than nuclear energy. Better to wait another 30 years before building another nuclear reactor, and instead share that $8 billion with those states that have the most egregious budget shortfalls.

"Money Throws Democracy Overboard"

By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

Watching what’s happening to our democracy is like watching the cruise ship Costa Concordia founder and sink slowly into the sea off the coast of Italy, as the passengers, shorn of life vests, scramble for safety as best they can, while the captain trips and falls conveniently into a waiting life boat.

We are drowning here, with gaping holes torn into the hull of the ship of state from charges detonated by the owners and manipulators of capital. Their wealth has become a demonic force in politics. Nothing can stop them. Not the law, which has been written to accommodate them. Not scrutiny -- they have no shame. Not a decent respect for the welfare of others -- the people without means, their safety net shredded, left helpless before events beyond their control.

The obstacles facing the millennial generation didn’t just happen. Take an economy skewed to the top, low wages and missing jobs, predatory interest rates on college loans: these are politically engineered consequences of government of, by, and for the one percent. So, too, is our tax code the product of money and politics, influence and favoritism, lobbyists and the laws they draft for rented politicians to enact.

Here’s what we’re up against. Read it and weep: “America’s Plutocrats Play the Political Ponies.” That’s a headline in “Too Much,” an Internet publication from the Institute for Policy Studies that describes itself as “an online weekly on excess and inequality.”

Yes, the results are in and our elections have replaced horse racing as the sport of kings. Only these kings aren’t your everyday poobahs and potentates. These kings are multi-billionaire, corporate moguls who by the divine right, not of God, but the United States Supreme Court and its Citizens United decision, are now buying politicians like so much pricey horseflesh. All that money pouring into super PACs, much of it from secret sources: merely an investment, should their horse pay off in November, in the best government money can buy.

They’re shelling out fortunes' worth of contributions. Look at just a few of them: Mitt Romney’s hedge fund pals Robert Mercer, John Paulson, Julian Robertson and Paul Singer – each of whom has ponied up a million or more for the super PAC called “Restore Our Future” -- as in, "Give us back the go-go days, when predators ruled Wall Street like it was Jurassic Park.”

Then there's casino boss Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam, fiercely pro-Israel and anti-President Obama's Mideast policy. Initially, they placed their bets on Newt Gingrich, who says on his first day in office he’d move the American Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, a decision that would thrill the Adelsons but infuriate Palestinians and the rest of the Muslim world. Together, the Adelsons have contributed ten million to Newt's “Winning Our Future” super PAC.

Cowboy billionaire Foster Friess, a born-again Christian who made his fortune herding mutual funds instead of cattle, has been bankrolling the “Red White and Blue Fund” super PAC of Rick Santorum, with whom he shares a social right-wing agenda. Dark horse Ron Paul has relied on the kindness of PayPal founder Peter Thiel, a like-minded libertarian in favor of the smallest government possible, who gave $900,000 to Paul’s “Endorse Liberty” super PAC. Hollywood’s Jeffrey Katzenberg has so far emptied his wallet to the tune of a cool two million for the pro-Obama super PAC, “Priorities USA Action.”

President Obama -- who kept his distance from Priorities USA Action and used to call the money unleashed by Citizens United a “threat to democracy” -- has declared if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. He urges his wealthy supporters to please go ahead and back the super PAC. "Our campaign has to face the reality of the law as it stands," his campaign manager Jim Messina said. To do otherwise, he added, would be to "unilaterally disarm" in the face of all those Republican super PAC millions. So much for Obama’s stand on campaign finance reform – everybody else is doing it, he seems to say, so why don’t you show me the money, too?

When all is said and done, this race for the White House may cost more than two billion dollars. What’s getting trampled into dust are the voices of people who aren't rich, not to mention what's left of our democracy. As Democratic pollster Peter Hart told The New Yorker magazine’s Jane Mayer, “It’s become a situation where the contest is how much you can destroy the system, rather than how much you can make it work. It makes no difference if you have a ‘D’ or an ‘R’ after your name. There’s no sense that this is about democracy, and after the election you have to work together, and knit the country together.”

These gargantuan super PAC contributions are not an end in themselves. They are the means to gain control of government – and the nation state -- for a reason. The French writer and economist Frederic Bastiat said it plainly: "When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living in society, they create for themselves, in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it." That’s what the super PACs are bidding on. For the rest of us, the ship may already have sailed.

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Bill Moyers is managing editor and Michael Winship is senior writer of the weekly public affairs program, Moyers & Company, airing on public television. Check local airtimes or comment at www.BillMoyers.com.

Legends

Bet you didn't it possible for a legend to get older. You were right! James Dean, who would have been 81 tomorrow, is now an eternal boy.

Happy Birthday to a rebel whose cause has now become our cause.

At the DMV

At the DMV today, it occurred to me that the DMV is the great equalizer. Great or small, rich or poor, no matter who you are, or what you do, you have to get your registration renewed. If you have a car, that is.

There was a time when, as the maxim goes, there were two things one couldn't escape: death and taxes. Well, we all know that the death part still applies, but how about those taxes?

If you happen to have been born right, like Mitt Romney's sons, you can get away with keeping $100 million in a trust account with your name of it, tax-free. Mr. Romney claims not to know anything about the money that was in his now defunct Swiss bank account as it was part of what is called a blind trust. Do you suppose that trust is the same as our national motto, "In God We Trust?" In God, we place blind trusts?

Moreover, if you happen to be the head of a Fortune 500 company with subsidiaries overseas like Bain Capital, Exxon-Mobil, or General Electric, there is always some legal loophole hanging around that enables you to escape paying millions of dollars in taxes. These are the "entitlement programs" Republicans don't want to talk about. These are the entitlement programs that won't go anywhere if you put another Republican in the White House in 2012.

So, as I waited for my number to be called, I thought about how it is that someone can be pulled over by law enforcement and issued a citation, often in excess of registration fees, for simply being a few days over their vehicle registration deadline date while others can go for years, even a whole lifetime, without paying a nickel in taxes. Who pulls them over? Isn't that what the Attorney-General is supposed to do?

On my way home, I wondered what kind of system is this free enterprise that it's only free for zillionaire CEO's or their progeny, and very costly for the rest of us.

Saul Alinsky, Who?

By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

And now, a word about a good American being demonized, despite being long dead. Saul Alinsky is not around to defend himself, but that hasn’t kept Newt Gingrich from using his name to whip up the froth and frenzy of his followers, whose ignorance of the man is no deterrence to their eagerness, at Gingrich’s behest, to tar and feather him posthumously.

In his speeches, Gingrich pounds away at variations on the theme like the piano player in a cheap Western saloon. He declares, “The centerpiece of this campaign, I believe, is American exceptionalism versus the radicalism of Saul Alinsky,” or, “I believe in the Constitution, I believe in the Federalist Papers. Obama believes in Saul Alinsky and secular European socialist bureaucracy.”

It’s all quite clever and insidious, a classic lesson in how to slander someone who cannot answer from the grave, reminiscent of the tactics Gingrich used in those GOPAC memos back in 1996, when he suggested buzz words and phrases to demonize opponents: corrupt, decay, pathetic, permissive attitude, self-serving, and, of course, radical.

In the case of Saul Alinsky, most of the crowd knows nothing about the target except that they’re supposed to hate him. And why not? There’s the strange foreign name – obviously an alien. One of them. And a socialist at that. What’s a socialist? Don’t know -- but Obama’s one, isn’t he? Barack Hussein Obama, Saul Alinsky – bingo! Two peas in a pod, and a sinister, subversive pod at that.

But just who was Alinsky, really? Born in 1909, in the ghetto of Chicago’s South Side, he saw the worst of poverty and felt the ethnic prejudices that fester, then blast into violence when people are crowded into tenements and have too little to eat. He came to believe that working people, poor people, put down and stepped upon, had to organize if they were going to clean up the slums, fight the corruption that exploited them, and get a handhold on the first rung of the ladder up and out.

He became a protégé of labor leader John L. Lewis and took the principles of organizing into the streets, first in his hometown of Chicago, then across the country, showing citizens how to band together and non-violently fight for their rights, then training others to follow in his shoes. Along the way, Alinsky faced down the hatred of establishment politicians, attacks both verbal and physical, and jail time.

He was a gutsy guy. Outspoken, confrontational, profane with a caustic wit, one journalist said he looked like an accountant and talked like a stevedore. He had a flair for the dramatic, once sending a neighborhood to dump its trash on the front step of an alderman who was allowing the garbage to pile up. Or immobilizing city hall, a department store or a stockholders meeting with a flood of demonstrators demanding justice.

One thing Newt has right -- Saul Alinsky was a proud, self-professed radical. Just look at the titles of two of his books – “Reveille for Radicals” and “Rules for Radicals.” But a communist or socialist he was not. He worked with them on behalf of social justice, just as he worked alongside the Catholic archdiocese in Chicago. When he went to Rochester, NY, to help organize the African American community there after a fatal race riot, he was first invited by the local Council of Churches. It was conscience they all had in common, not ideology.

As far as his connection with Barack Obama, the president was just a kid in Hawaii when Alinsky died, something you would expect a good historian, as Gingrich claims to be, to know. The two men never met, although when Obama arrived on the South Side of Chicago as a community organizer, some of his grass roots work with the poor was with an Alinsky-affiliated organization.

But that’s how it goes in the fight for basic human rights. Alinsky’s influence crops up all across the spectrum, even in the Tea Party. Get this: according to The Wall Street Journal, the conservative holy of holies, the one-time Republican majority leader in the House of Representatives, Dick Armey, whose Freedomworks organization helps bankroll the Tea Party, gives copies of Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” to Tea Party leaders.

Watch out Dick – you could be next on Newt’s list, although, curiously, in his fight against the wealthy Mitt Romney, Gingrich himself has stolen a page from Alinsky’s populist playbook. After Romney beat him in the Florida primary, Newt insisted he would continue the fight for the nomination and shouted, “We’re going to have people power defeat money power,” a sentiment that was Saul Alinsky through and through.

Alinsky died, suddenly, in 1972. At the time, he was planning to mount a campaign to organize white, middle class Americans into a national movement for progressive change, a movement he vowed to take into the halls of Congress and – his words -- “the boardrooms of the megacorporations.”

Maybe that’s why Newt Gingrich has been slandering Alinsky’s name. Maybe he’s afraid, afraid that the very white folks he’s been rousing to frenzy will discover who Saul Alinsky was – a patriot in a long line of patriots, who scorned the malignant narcissism of duplicitous politicians and taught everyday Americans to think for themselves and fight together for a better life. That’s the American way, and any good historian would know it.

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Bill Moyers is managing editor and Michael Winship is senior writer of the new weekly public affairs program, Moyers & Company, airing on public television. Check local airtimes or comment at www.BillMoyers.com.

Romney's Dukakis Moment?

One can fake many things in life, even an orgasm, but one can't fake military experience. Mitt Romney has never been in the military.

It was also true that a senator from Chicago, Barack Obama, who became a candidate for president had no military experience, but not anymore. Obama has been commander-in-chief for the past three years, and while there are those on both the left and right who oppose some of his policies, the argument that the president is inexperienced is no longer valid.

But, this isn't about defending the president's foreign policy record. This is just to say that his likely Republican challenger doesn't have one.

In his Nevada primary victory speech Saturday, Romney accused the president of "shrinking our national defense," adding that he will "insist on a military so powerful that no one in the world would think of challenging it," but when did Mr. Romney become such a hawk?

One shudders to think of a more powerful military given that, over the past decade or more, the U.S. has immersed itself in conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Syria, and is currently insinuating its way into Iran. Indeed, one shudders to think of a foreign policy more hawkish than that of the Obama administration.

Also, how did Romney happen upon such a keen understanding of the workings of the Department of Defense?

Romney vows to keep America strong by not cutting the defense budget, but for a man whose entire life, with the exception of four years as governor, was spent in the private sector, what does he know about defense budgets?

Or, for that matter, what does he know about the national debt? To him $3 trillion is a scary big number that's even bigger than the hundreds of millions he has in his various bank accounts.

As a young man back in the 1960's, Romney followed the family tradition of avoiding the military by serving as a Mormon missionary in France at the onset of the war in Vietnam. His sons, like their dad, are avoiding service by helping their dad's campaign, Romney says. He now has the temerity to suggest that he is is better equipped to lead the way on foreign policy than the man who has just spent three plus years as commander-in-chief.

While Romney likes to think of business as his trump card, so to speak, recent coverage of Bain Capital and his tax shelters overseas has driven him into "greener" pastures by working to assure defense contractors that he's got their back.

And, when Romney says he wants to make this "an American century," don't think for a moment that he isn't thinking about Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and others who have received billions in government bailouts over the past few years. This is who he has in mind when he speaks of maintaining a "strong defense" just as when he promises to balance the budget and not raise taxes, Romney means that he won't raise taxes on the rich.

But, you say, an Obama presidency will keep defense contractors and big business happy, too. Yes, it sure does look like we're about to go over a cliff regardless who's at the wheel, but having Obama in the driver seat has meant a sharp turn away from financial catastrophe despite the best efforts of the obstructionist party to push us over, so when Romney talks about fiscal health he means that any government program that doesn't benefit big business is disposable.

Consider what he said in Las Vegas that drew thunderous applause about how the Declaration of Independence promises "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness" not "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of government handouts." Those government handouts he has in mind are not the ones that went to Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, or the banks, but the ones that went to single mothers who are heads of household, Planned Parenthood, and health programs that benefit legal immigrants.

Yes, what Romney didn't say was that it's not called a handout when a big corporation accepts government money, but doing business. According to The Huffington Post, one of Bain Capital's affiliates was bailed out by taxpayers to the tune of $44 million. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/06/mitt-romney-bain-capital-bailout_n_1189227.html Not to mention, too, that companies asssociated with Bain had no problem taking state and local taxpayer subsidies that totaled in the millions. http://dirtdiggersdigest.org/archives/270

When Romney told fellow Republicans in Las Vegas that the state's real unemployment is about 15%, it gave him the opportunity to add that Nevada has "had enough of Obama's help." He ought to know a thing or two about wearing out a welcome mat. Masssachusetts had enough of Romney's help when he stepped down as governor.

He said he'd create jobs as president, but thanks to other Republicans running for president, we now know more about Romney's record as head of Bain Capital than he'd like. Arnold Schwarzenegger should join Donald Trump and endorse Mitt Romney as Romney can also be called the Terminator.

As The Boston Globe reported back in 2007, hundreds lost their jobs when Bain Capital took over companies that were buried in debt, like Ampad, making millions off their losses. More importantly, as governor, Romney fought against raising the minimum wage. You can count on him to do the same as president.
http://www.massresistance.org/romney/ampad_062607/index.html

But, enough about Bain Capital. Newt Gingrich has already managed to deflate that balloon, and play the leveraged buyout card, so Romney's next move may well be away from his job deflation policies and into a domain about which he knows even less: foreign policy.

Watching his victory speech about a strong defense reminded me of another Massachusetts governor, Michael Dukakis, whose Democratic campaign for president against Republican George H.W. Bush essentially fell apart when a photograph of him sitting atop a military tank hit the airwaves. What chutzpah many thought back then for a New England liberal to pose as a military hawk. But, remember, Governor Dukakis served in the Army. He wasn't a missionary in France for three years at the height of the Vietnam war.

Also, Governor Dukakis was elected for two terms as governor of Massachusetts. Indeed, Dukakis was the longest serving governor in that state's history. Under criticism by the George H.W. Bush campaign for a flaccid stance on defense, his opponents seized on Dukakis's opposition to the death penalty, as well as his veto of a bill that would have required that children recite the Pledge of Allegiance in Massachusetts' classrooms. So, during his visit to a General Dynamic plant when he was the Democratic nominee for president, Dukakis strove to counter the image that he was weak on defense by mounting a tank.

The image of "Dukakis in the tank," as it came to be known, was not only synonymous with a public relations nightmare, but of arrogance. Is it any less arrogant for Mitt Romney, a man who repeatedly touts his background in the private sector as his main selling point in a weak economy, to challenge the defense record of a sitting president who has weathered not one, not two, but three theaters of war?

All the focus on how Gov. Romney has managed to escape paying millions of dollars in federal taxes through the Cayman Islands, now defunct Swiss bank accounts, and opening businesses in his son's name has managed to deflect attention away from the obvious: Romney understands a cash field in the Cayman Islands better than a land mine in Afghanistan.

The closest Mitt Romney has come to making foreign policy was when he deposited money into one of his offshore accounts.

Curiously, too, Dukakis's nemesis, Republican presidential candidate George H.W. Bush, whose campaign tag line was "Read my lips, no new taxes." In Nevada, Mitt Romney said he will balance the budget without raising taxes. Neither Bush nor Romney has any credibility on that score as the only one who would have been capable of balancing the budget without raising taxes is Harry Houdini. The question isn't whether or not taxes will be raised, and on whom. The 2012 presidential and congressional election will decide that.

The Republican soon-to-be nominee chose corporate service after returning from his conveniently timed stint as a missionary during the Vietnam war days unlike the president who chose community service instead. It's true, President Obama didn't see battle either, except as commander-in-chief for the past three years, and unless the Romney campaign has a death wish they should stay away from challenging Mr. Obama's record as commander-in-chief.

If corporations are people, too, as Mitt Romney is fond of saying, how is it that they've managed to escape serving their country? If corporations are people, and he's sincere about making this an "American century," then the Romney camp should come up with a plan to draft corporations for military service.

Dare it!

"On now, dare it. Let there be life!"

(From "Ulysses" by James Joyce)

Joyce was born 130 years ago on Feb. 2, 1882 in Dublin, Ireland.

Feb. 2nd marks 90 years since the first complete edition of "Ulysses" was published by Shakespeare & Company, Sylvia Beach's bookstore in Paris. Joyce insisted the novel be published in time for his 40th birthday on 2/2/22.