I am just going to come right out and say it: I love Bill Moyers. I recently started watching Bill Moyers Journal on PBS and I am kicking myself for not have ever watched it all these years. I have only seen a handful of shows and I can already easily say it is hands down the most informative, important, well done show on television period. Every show I have seen has been nothing less than enlightening.
The last show addressed the business of poverty: payday loans, JD byrider, hospital debt collectors etc, the economy in general, the offshore drilling debate. Concerning the offshore drilling thing, I was unsurprised to learn that it will take 10 years to reap anything, at best meet 0.2% of our oil needs and have zero effect on gas prices now... So why are McCain and Obama still even discussing this as a point of contention?, because the media wont do its job which is pointing out the idiocy of this whole thing to the people... Well Bill Moyers did it.
Here are some quotes from the last show concerning the economy:
I am lifting these directly from the website I hope they dont mind (I doubt they will since I am in essence advertising for them).
Okay...They are all discussing how Walmarts recently told its managers to vote and promote Republican candidates because they are less likely to support unions which would be bad for business.. Bill Moyers (playing devil's advocate) said this: "Every time guys like you talk like this.. people like the wall street journal would say, 'You're fighting a class war.'"
Bob Herbert: “The class war is over, and we lost... Over the past 30 years or so, Americans’ wages have remained relatively flat. But women went into the workplace, wives and mothers started working. People started putting things on their credit cards. There was a stock market bubble there for a while. We had a housing bubble. People refinanced and stuff. Now, they’re coming up against a wall. They’re not finding a way now to get some extra money to power the consumer economy.”
Wow! you wont hear honest clear cut commentary like that on the evening news chronicling the Olympics, the latest missing co-ed or Brangelina's twins.
Here is another awesome nugget from another commentator, Dean Baker concerning the sub prime mess etc. :
“All the people who should have been looking out the last six, seven, eight years are all going ‘oh, well, who could have known? Who could have known?’ And they’ll put Alan Greenspan here on a pedestal, because he’s [saying that] he had no idea this was going on. You had to try not to know this was going on. Certainly, someone like Alan Greenspan, our reserve board chair, had all the data I have times a thousand. He absolutely knew what was going on. And he was doing his best to look the other way because you had a lot of big interests who were making a lot of money.”
Public officials deliberately failed to protect ordinary Americans... where is the outrage?... a better question is what can we do with the outrage?... this I sadly cannot answer, but blogging is a good, yet probably ultimately ineffective outlet.
Give this show a watch, I will admit it seems boring on the outset, but it is awesome.
4 comments:
Only caught a portion of the show, but was impressed with Mr. Moyer's guests, Bob Herbert and Dean Baker. Messrs. Herbert and Baker had very straightforward opinions relating to the current state of the nation and its people. Mr. Baker’s comments about what Alan Greenspan must have known about the situation leading up to the sub-prime debacle were the clearest and most honest statements I have heard yet. Which brings to mind, my grievance about information - - what is shared and what is not. The public needs to hold these “power brokers” accountable.
There is a "junk food" factor to our news and information that has helped to dummy us down. Case in point: Google News. I just double-checked the link to Google's news site to see what they show as headline news. My news page is modified only to add the tracking of the Carlyle Group, the weather, and the World News as seen from the British viewpoint (English is the only language I can read well and I wanted a non-US perspective on the world’s situation). Otherwise, it is Google's default news page. On Friday, 8 August, the Royal Bank of Scotland posted their largest loss in their history. It was the 2nd largest loss in British banking history, I believe. According to many analysts, this is merely the tip of the iceberg for the Brits, who are also suffering from a record number of foreclosures. There is nothing posted at present relating to this matter. How is it that this news isn't news? The Financial Times’ article is titled: “Woman in the News: Paris Hilton”. Sue, if you search under "Royal Bank of Scotland" you can find articles, but that isn't the point. Who determines what is "news"?
Who controls the information getting out to the public? Next February 2009, the change to digital will make it even more in the hands of the corporations. Another point I’d like to make is that with the reliance on the internet, the source accountability is very difficult. You can read or see something on the web, but it can be taken down and changed (or corrected) and you see, read and hear a different thing than you did before. For, who has the time, the inclination or the funds to archive everything? (An example of this would be the Carlyle Group website. Prior to 11 September 2001, there were items regarding GHW Bush and his close ties with Saudi Arabia, as well as Carlyle’s interests in Korea and China. Then, afterwards, the website was under construction for a number of days. When it came back up, it had expunged a lot of information about their ties to questionable people. I had first-hand experience regarding this.)
How does the average person handle this new cyber age of information and news? Is there a ethics gap that make it only a concern of older generations? Are our children going to be living in a non-US, non-nation, world? Will corporate unions be the nation-states of the future? Are we experiencing a return to cyber-medievalism, where the middle-class has been reduced to serfdom? I would be curious to know other people's thoughts on this. Thank you.
crowne, i don't know who you are, but i like the cut of your jib. i'd say you're right on the money.
i better get to work, to make money, to buy and consume things.
I'm just an interested citizen of Virginia. Until I signed Dennis Kucinich's on-line impeachment petition and checked the box to have him hand-deliver it to my so-called representative in Congress, I never heard from her. . . . All the years I've written, protested, visited her office. . . all for various & sundry topics. Until it became an election year and he made it a point to let her know that she had constituents who weren't thrilled with her performance, I can say that my elected representatives had no inclination to represent me or the interests of the vast (but dwindling) middle class. Thanks for your encouragement and the opportunity to comment on your blog.
I too recently have had first hand experience with the futility of "writing your congressman" or senator. The form letter responses made me sick, they never addressed the actual question. I bet if 100 or 1000 constituents had the same concerns they would go reight ahead doing what they are doing. Thanks for commenting and commizerating crowne.
Post a Comment