Bill Moyers describes the problems of informing the public about political and business corruption

Bill Moyers has published an article that says a great deal about the reason why America's government is no longer working. Here is a key paragraph:

The late scholar Cleanth Brooks of Yale thought there were three great enemies of democracy. He called them "The Bastard Muses":

• Propaganda, which pleads sometimes unscrupulously, for a special cause at the expense of the total truth;
• sentimentality, which works up emotional responses unwarranted by, and in excess of, the occasion; and
• pornography, which focuses upon one powerful human drive at the expense of the total human personality.

The poet Czeslaw Milosz identified another enemy of democracy when, upon accepting the Noble Prize for Literature, he said "Our planet that gets smaller every year, with its fantastic proliferation of mass media, is witnessing a process that escapes definition, characterized by a refusal to remember." Memory is crucial to democracy; historical amnesia, its nemesis.

Against these tendencies it is an uphill fight to stay the course of factual broadcasting. We have to keep reassuring ourselves and one another that it matters and we have to join forces to defend and safeguard our independence. I learned this early on.
[Formatting added by the editor of WTF-o]

Bill Moyers goes on to describe some instances in which he helped expose corruption in politics, but one item in the story is especially memorable. It involves exposing wrong-doing by corporations.

But shining the spotlight on political corruption is nothing compared to what can happen if you raise questions about corporate power in Washington, as my colleague Marty Koughan and I discovered when we produced a program for David Fanning and "Frontline" on pesticides and food. Marty had learned that industry was attempting behind closed doors to dilute the findings of the American Academy of Sciences study on the effects of pesticide residues on children. Before we finished the documentary, the industry somehow purloined a copy of our draft script - we still aren't certain how - and mounted a sophisticated and expensive campaign to discredit our program before it aired. Television reviewers and editorial pages of key newspapers were flooded with propaganda. Some public television managers were so unnerved by the blitz of misleading information about a film they had not yet broadcast that they actually protested to PBS with letters that had been prepared by the industry.

Here's what most perplexed us: the American Cancer Society - an organization that in no way figured in our story - sent to its 3,000 local chapters a "critique" of the unfinished documentary claiming, wrongly, that it exaggerated the dangers of pesticides in food. We were puzzled. Why was the American Cancer Society taking the unusual step of criticizing a documentary that it had not seen, that had not aired and that did not claim what the Society alleged? An enterprising reporter named Sheila Kaplan later looked into those questions for the journal Legal Times. It turns out that the Porter Novelli public relations firm, which had worked for several chemical companies, also did pro bono work for the American Cancer Society. Kaplan found that the firm was able to cash in some of the goodwill from that "charitable" work to persuade the compliant communications staff at the Society to distribute some harsh talking point about the documentary before it aired - talking points that had been supplied by, but not attributed to, Porter Novelli. Legal Times headlined the story "Porter Novelli Plays All Sides." A familiar Washington game.

Others also used the American Cancer Society's good name in efforts to tarnish the journalism before it aired, none more invidiously than the right-wing polemicist Reed Irvine, who pumped his sludge through an organization with the Orwellian name Accuracy in Media. He attacked our work as "junk science on PBS" and demanded Congress pull the plug on public broadcasting. Fortunately, PBS once again stood firm. The documentary aired, the journalism held up and the publicity liberated the National Academy of Sciences to release the study that the industry had tried to cripple.

This is really a long way from the ideal of representative democracy we were taught about in civics. This is the corporations working to take control of America and simply do whatever they want to do in the name of increased profit. It is the story we all know of Wall Street which, in its greed, sold mortgage backed securities with essentially fake financial insurance that made the securities seem like a sure route to wealth for the investors. Instead they were the destruction of the Wall Street banks and the world economy. For a while in the fall of 2008 Wall Street was literally dead.

Only amazing efforts by governments around the world and handouts of lrge sums of taxpayer money to the very banks that caused the problem saved the world economy from the second Great Depression. We still call the residue of that period the Great Recession and we will not recover for years.

Wall Street and the American corporations do not want that story told. Go back and look at the list of four highlighted items above. All of them are in play, especially propaganda and the strange amnesia of the public.

Go read Moyer's entire article. As usual it is both very good and highly entertainikng.

Bush's war against the Rule of Law

One of the core concepts that has made America a great nation is that it is a democracy based on the Rule of Law. That is, Americans are governed by laws rather than by the arbitrary whims and decisions of some leader. Inherent in that idea is the fact that there is no individual in America who has the Constitutional Right to ignore law and act contrary to Law without punishment.

The Bush administration, led by Dick Cheney and David Addington and supported whole-heartedly by George W. Bush, has moved sharply in the last eight years to create a Presidency which is above the law and which is not restrained by the law in any way. The Bush administration is worked diligently to institutionalize government based on the arbitrary rule of the Office of the President rather than Rule of Law.

Glenn Greenwald explains this in an in-depth interview with Bill Moyers. This link leads to both the video of the Bill Moyers interview with Glenn Greenwald and to the transcript.

Of all the very destructive and clearly Unamerican legacies that Bush will leave behind him, including the worst Recession since the Great Depression, the concerted effort to destroy the Rule of Law in America will be the longest and most destructive action Bush has supervised.

Greenwald describes the first time he was aware that the government had totally stepped over the line and departed from a government under the Constitution.

BILL MOYERS: Was there a moment when what you lay what you have called "creeping extremism" became apparent to you in a minute particular?

GLENN GREENWALD: Actually, there was. And I'll describe to you exactly what it was. It was in 2002 when Jose Padilla, an American citizen born in the United States on U.S. soil, was essentially abducted by the government - by the U.S. government. And it was - he was accused in a press conference held by John Ashcroft of being the dirty bomber.

BILL MOYERS: Yeah.

GLENN GREENWALD: Of seeking to detonate a radiological weapon within an American city. Obviously something that is a crime and it should be prosecuted as a crime. But rather than announce that they intended to indict him and bring charges against him, as the Constitution requires, the Bush administration instead announced that it has the power to arrest and detain American citizens on U.S. soil indefinitely based solely on the say so of the president without having to charge that person with a crime and without even having them have access to a lawyer.

And that's exactly what was done the Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen in this country, for years. And the lynchpin of American liberties since the founding, as the founders said, has been that the government does not have the power, not even the British king had the power since the Magna Carta, to order citizens imprisoned without charges based solely on the unchecked say so of the president. That is the power that this government assorted and seized and exercised. And that's when I realized that things had gone radically awry.
[Underlining mine - WTF-o]

Go watch (or read) the Interview between Bill Moyers and Glenn Greenwald.

Or go to a copy of the full transcript of the interview.

Moyer interviews Bacevich on the American security complex and its' failed Iraq war

Tonight at 9:00 pm Bill Moyers will air an interview with Col. Bacevich about the nature of the Imperial Presidency, the nature of the security state which has grown up since WW II, Congress' abdication of control and its new job as a perpetual job machine for Congress persons, and the way our security state has failed to stop 9/11 and failed to properly plan and organize the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Here is a short excerpt from that hour-long interview:



If this doesn't leave you thinking, then give it up. You have nothing to think with.


[H/T to Talking Points Memo.]

---

Addendum 8/16/2008 1:11 pm CDT
Here is a link to the full transcript of the show "The Imperial Presidency" which aired last night.

Here is a video of the entire show shown last night.

This is Bacevich's newest book "The Limits of Power" which is scheduled for release next Tuesday, August 19, 2008.

This is Barnes & Noble's synopsis of the book:

The Limits of Power identifies a profound triple crisis facing America:

• the economy, in remarkable disarray, can no longer be fixed by relying on expansion abroad;
• the government, transformed by an imperial presidency, is a democracy in form only;
• U.S. involvement in endless wars, driven by a deep infatuation with military power, has been a catastrophe for the body politic.

These pressing problems threaten all of us, Republicans and Democrats. If the nation is to solve its predicament, it will need the revival of a distinctly American approach: the neglected tradition of realism.

Andrew J. Bacevich, uniquely respected across the political spectrum, offers a historical perspective on the illusions that have governed American policy since 1945. The realism he proposes includes respect for power and its limits; sensitivity to unintended consequences; aversion to claims of exceptionalism; skepticism of easy solutions, especially those involving force; and a conviction that the books will have to balance. Only a return to such principles, Bacevich argues, can provide common ground for fixing America’s urgent problems before the damage becomes irreparable.
[I have added the emphasis and the bullet points. Editor WTF-o]

Glenn Greenwald dissects the Bill Moyers PBS report

Glenn Greewald does a really good job of telling us what we saw when we watched last night's Bill Moyers PBS special "Buying the War." I'll admit that I have been sitting here thinking "Yeah, I knew it was bad, but this bad?"

Greenwald takes the next step, which should have been obvious to me but wasn't until I read what he wrote:

Moyers' documentary is a superb piece of journalism and makes inescapably clear how profoundly corrupt our dominant political and media institutions were prior to the invasion. But most national "journalists" will simply ignore the whole program (as Digby notes, The New York Times, one of the principal culprits, did not even review it). [Editor - highlighting is mine.]

Has America become so corrupt that it now subordinates the goals of building a better nation, better people and providing an environment of Freedom has become subordinate to greater money-making and building worldwide power? What has happened to the two century experiment in democracy on the North American continent?

Instead of a nation of the people, by the people, and for the people have we succumbed to the disease of Imperialist wars in support of an ever wealthier elite who gather all power to themselves? We have let them centralize control of the broadcast media and the daily and weekly print media. This gives the elite the wealth to rob the rest of us of any control of our nation.

So the wealthy American elite buy an all-volunteer military and send them on a fool's errand to occupy Iraq for the primary purpose of overawing the major oil supplying nations in the world. Control of the the flow of energy supplies allows those wealthy elite to gain greater power and wealth without spreading more than a minimum of that wealth to the mass of the people who actually create it.

Bush may have overreached himself when he has decided to ignore Congress and the American people in their desire to get out of the fighting in the Middle East. But why should he listen to the American People? He has the major media and the pundits on his side?

Is this what it means to say that our democratic institutions have become corrupted? Sure looks like it to me, when Bush can steal elections without having the media tattle on him, ignore Congress with signing statements and eliminate habeas corpus by Presidential decree.

The Romans didn't really recognize that the Republic had been destroyed and replaced by the empire until generations later. We may recognize the change here sooner, but can we then prevent it? What is happening to the two century experiment in democracy? Is it over now?

Tom Tomorrow quotes the pundits

Bill Moyers in his "Buying the War" last night made a major point that the pundits who actively pumped public opinion to support the preemptive invasion of Iraq and downplayed the risk are all still in business on TV and newspaper OpEd pages today. So Tom Tomorrow offers a cartoon panel that identifies many of the more significant offenders. Go read.