The lowdown from Hightower

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_5827.shtml

The lowdown from Hightower
By Michael Winship
Online Journal Guest Writer
May 3, 2010

I first became aware of Jim Hightower more than 20 years ago, during the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta. The Democrats were nominating Massachusetts Governor Mike Dukakis to run for president against Reagan’s vice president, George H.W. Bush, and at the time Dukakis looked like he had a pretty good chance at the White House.

This was before a series of events did him in, including the notorious Willie Horton ad that attacked Dukakis for a Massachusetts weekend furlough prison program that allowed a convicted murderer back on the street, where he robbed and raped.

And it was before Dukakis bobbled a harsh debate question about what he would do if his own wife Kitty was raped and murdered. And it was before he was photographed atop an Abrams tank wearing a helmet that made him look like he was starring in “Snoopy III: This Time It’s Personal.”

All of that misery lay ahead. The Democrats were still in giddy spirits during the convention and had a high old time poking fun at Bush, Sr. That was when the late Ann Richards, then the Texas state treasurer, famously lamented, “Poor George! He can’t help it - he was born with a silver foot in his mouth!”

But it was the convention speech by Hightower that I especially remember. He was the Texas agriculture commissioner in those days -- an important job in the Lone Star State -- and described Bush as a “toothache of a man,” a cruel but remarkable metaphor. And he said that Bush behaved like someone who was “born on third base and thought he hit a triple . . . He is threatening to lead this country from tweedle-dum to tweedle-dumber.”

Maybe Hightower didn’t originate those lines (as Milton Berle used to say, “When you steal from me, you steal twice”), but he delivered them with a gusto akin to genuine authorship and over the years has come up with enough original material of his own to absolve him -- mostly -- from the sin of occasional joke-filching.

Now others steal from him. It was Jim, I believe, who came up with the notion that all elected officials be required to wear brightly colored, NASCAR-like jumpsuits with the corporate logos of their biggest campaign contributors, an idea I’ve heard appropriated by several others without proper attribution. And I think it was Jim who first said of George W. Bush, “If ignorance ever reaches $40 a barrel, I want the drilling rights to his head.” (On hearing that another politician was learning Spanish, Hightower is supposed to have remarked, “Oh good. Now he’ll be bi-ignorant.”)

These days, Jim Hightower broadcasts daily radio commentaries and edits “The Hightower Lowdown,” an invaluable monthly newsletter. With the passing of both Ann Richards and Molly Ivins, he has became the funniest person in Texas politics -- intentionally, that is. But it is his steadfast advocacy of progressive politics, his unyielding embrace of the old time gospel of populism, that made him an especially appropriate guest on the final edition of the PBS series, BILL MOYERS JOURNAL.

“Here’s what populism is not,” he told my colleague Bill Moyers. “It is not just an incoherent outburst of anger. And certainly it is not anger that is funded and organized by corporate front groups, as the initial tea party effort [was], and as most of it is still today -- though there is legitimate anger within it, in terms of the people who are there. But what populism is at its essence is just a determined focus on helping people be able to get out of the iron grip of the corporate power that is overwhelming our economy, our environment, energy, the media, government.

“ . . . One big difference between real populism and . . . the tea party thing is that real populists understand that government has become a subsidiary of corporations. So you can’t say, ‘Let’s get rid of government.’ You need to be saying, ‘Let’s take over government.’”

As Hightower’s fond of saying, the water won’t clear up until we get the hogs out of the creek. “I see the central issue in politics to be the rise of corporate power,” he reiterated. “Overwhelming, overweening corporate power that is running roughshod over the workaday people of the country. They think they’re the top dogs, and we’re a bunch of fire hydrants, you know?”

Of President Obama he said, “It’s odd to me that we’ve got a president who ran from the outside and won, and now is trying to govern from the inside. You can’t do progressive government from the inside. You have to rally those outsiders and make them a force . . . Our heavyweight is the people themselves. They’ve got the fat cats, but we’ve got the alley cats . . .”

This past weekend, Jim was honored at Texas State University-San Marcos with an exhibition celebrating his life’s work as a populist journalist, historian and advocate. They’re calling the event “Swim Against the Current” because, as Moyers says, “That’s what he does.”

In fact, “Swim Against the Current” also is the title of Hightower’s most recent book, subtitled, “Even a Dead Fish Can Go with the Flow.” He comes from a long history of flow resisters, a critical, American political tradition. “I go all the way back to Thomas Paine,” he said. “I mean, that was kind of the ultimate rebellion, when the media tool was a pamphlet.” The men who wrote the Bill of Rights, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence “didn’t create democracy. [They] made democracy possible.

“What created democracy was Thomas Paine and Shays Rebellion, the suffragists and the abolitionists and on down through the populists and the labor movement, including the Wobblies. Tough, in your face people . . . Mother Jones, Woody Guthrie . . . Martin Luther King and Caesar Chavez. And now it’s down to us.

“These are agitators. They extended democracy decade after decade. You know, sometimes we get in the midst of these fights. We think we’re making no progress. But . . . you look back, we’ve made a lot of progress . . . The agitator after all is the center post in the washing machine that gets the dirt out. So, we need a lot more agitation. . . .

“We can battle back against the powers. But it’s not just going to a rally and shouting. It’s organizing and it’s thinking. And reaching out to others. And building a real people’s movement.”

Michael Winship was senior writer of the weekly public affairs program, Bill Moyers Journal, which concluded last Friday night on PBS.

Financial Regulation & Regulatory Capture

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/blog/2010/04/financial_regulation_regulator.html

Financial Regulation & Regulatory Capture
Simon Johnson and James Kwak
April 16, 2010

The White House and Democrats in Congress have begun pushing in earnest for a package of financial reforms. But will it be enough to stop Wall Street from causing another meltdown?

To find out what real financial reform needs to look like, Bill Moyers turns to Simon Johnson and James Kwak, the co-authors of 13 BANKERS: THE WALL STREET TAKEOVER AND THE NEXT FINANCIAL MELTDOWN.

The problem, according to Kwak, is that the legislation currently doesn't address the central problem of the crisis, that America's banks have grown 'too big to fail.' In fact, the problem has gotten worse, with just six banks holding assets in excess of 63% of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product. Kwak explains that the crisis actually made the surviving banks more powerful, "I think what's remarkable is that it used to be maybe eight or nine banks. But what's happened over the last two years, as Simon is saying, is that these banks have gotten bigger, because they've bought each other. They've become more powerful. And they have an even stronger market position in some key markets like credit cards, mortgages, equity underwriting, and derivatives."

Johnson argues that for reform to work, policy makers and regulators must reject the belief that Wall Street knows what's its doing, that its interests are always aligned with the nation as a whole, "The idea that we need Wall Street with its current structure — and a disproportionate economic power that implies — to somehow make this economy work and drive entrepreneurship, that idea is nonsense. This is why we wrote the book, all right? There's plenty of evidence on this issue. We go through it. If you want a faith based economy in this regard, you can disregard the evidence."

Senator Brown and the 'Volcker Rule'

Johnson and Kwak believe Congress should pass a law capping the size of the banks, to keep them from becoming so large that their failure threatens the world economy. This approach has been dubbed the 'Volcker Rule,' after Paul Volcker, the well-respected former Federal Reserve chairman who has pushed hard for its inclusion. Senator Sherrod Brown from Ohio has introduced an amendment to the bill that would do just that, reading in part that, "No bank holding company may possess non-deposit liabilities exceeding 3 percent of the annual gross domestic product of the United States."

The Six Big Banks

The names of the six banking behemoths are no doubt familiar to most Americans. The four largest by assets — Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Citigroup — hold 39 percent of American's deposits.

The six biggest commercial banks by deposit:
Bank of America, $817.9 billion
JPMorgan Chase Bank $618.1 billion
Wachovia Bank $394.2 billion
Wells Fargo Bank $325.4 billion
Citibank $265.9 billion
U.S. Bank $151.9 billion
Source: FDIC

James Kwak

James Kwak is the co-author, along with Simon Johnson, of 13 BANKERS: THE WALL STREET TAKEOVER AND THE NEXT FINANCIAL MELTDOWN, and the co-founder/co-author of THE BASELINE SCENARIO. Kwak is currently a student at the Yale Law School. Previously, he was a management consultant at McKinsey and Company and co-founder of a successful software company. Kwak received an A.B. in Social Studies from Harvard College and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley.

Simon Johnson

Simon Johnson is the Ronald A. Kurtz (1954) Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT's Sloan School of Management, a position he has held since 2004. He is also a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C., and co-founder of a Web site on the global economic and financial crisis, THE BASELINE SCENARIO and "The Hearing," a new economics blog at washingtonpost.com. He is co-director of the NBER project on Africa and President of the Association for Comparative Economic Studies (term of office 2008-09). He is also a contributing editor at the HUFFINGTON POST.

From March 2007 through the end of August 2008, Professor Johnson was the International Monetary Fund's economic counsellor (chief economist) and director of its research department. At the IMF, Professor Johnson led the global economic outlook team, helped formulate innovative responses to worldwide financial turmoil, and was among the earliest to propose new forms of engagement for sovereign wealth funds. He was also the first IMF chief economist to have a blog.

In 2000-2001 Professor Johnson was a member of the US Securities and Exchange Commissions Advisory Committee on Market Information. His assessment of the need for continuing strong market regulation is published as part of the final report from that committee.

Johnson is an expert on financial and economic crises. As an academic, in policy roles, and with the private sector, over the past 20 years he has worked on crisis prevention, amelioration, and recovery around the world, in both relatively rich and relatively poor countries. His work focuses on how policymakers can limit the impact of negative shocks and manage the risks faced by their countries.

Johnson has worked with most of the leading research organizations focused on global economic stability. He remains a Research Associate at the NBER, a CEPR Research Fellow, a BREAD affiliate, a member of the Advisory Group at the Center for Global Development (CGD) in Washington D.C., a member of the International Advisory Board of CASE in Warsaw, and a non-resident Research Fellow at the Asian Institute for Corporate Governance of Korea University. In 2006-07, he was a Visiting Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C.

Recent papers have appeared or are forthcoming in THE AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW, THE JOURNAL OF POLITICAL ECONOMY, THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS, THE JOURNAL OF FINANCIAL ECONOMICS, and THE JOURNAL OF FINANCE. He is on the editorial board of THE JOURNAL OF FINANCIAL ECONOMICS, THE REVIEW OF ECONOMICS AND STATISTICS, THE JOURNAL OF COMPARATIVE ECONOMICS, and CLIOMETRICA (a new journal of historical economics and econometric history).

His Ph.D. is in economics from MIT, while his M.A. is from the University of Manchester and his B.A. is from the University of Oxford.

A REVIEW OF THE HISTORY OF HAITI

Bill Moyers Journal
A REVIEW OF THE HISTORY OF HAITI
January 22, 2010

BILL MOYERS: Even some of the most hardened reporters I know, old hands at covering famine, disaster, and war, are shaken by the carnage in Haiti. Over my own long life in journalism I've had my share of the sounds and smells that linger in your head long after you have left the scene. But I've found it especially hard this past week to absorb the pictures coming from Haiti.

Perhaps it's that as we get older, we become more melancholy watching history repeat itself, seeing people suffer all over again, when you've already seen them suffer so much. As if you know now some things will never change.

You have to ask, why does this country suffer so? The reverend Pat Robertson gave us his answer, recycling his theology of a vindictive god.

REV. PAT ROBERTSON: Something happened a long time ago in Haiti and people may not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon the Third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the Devil. They said, "We will serve you if you get us free with the French." True story. And so the Devil said, "Okay, it's a deal."

BILL MOYERS: This is the same Pat Robertson, of course, who agreed with his soul mate, the late Jerry Falwell, that God had allowed the terrorist attacks on 9/11 because America needed a come-uppance for tolerating gays, women's rights and the separation of church and state.

But this time Robertson's callous idiocy toward the suffering in Haiti created such a backlash that his press agent came out to explain that the good Reverend does indeed have compassion for Haitians and is actually sending relief and recovery teams to help them.

Another controversy was triggered when the conservative David Brooks offered a less superstitious explanation for Haiti's suffering than Pat Robertson's. Brooks opined that it's because Haiti is "progress-resistant" — a society held back by voodoo religion, high levels of social mistrust, poor child-rearing traditions, and a lack of any internalized sense of responsibility. Critics fired back that Brooks should read a little history.

The journalist Mark Danner has done just that. He's also lived some of Haiti's history, almost losing his life a few years ago while covering unrest there. Writing in the New York Times this week, Danner said "There is nothing mystical in Haiti's suffering, no inescapable curse that haunts the land." It was brought on, he said, by human beings, not demons.

Start with the French. They ran Haiti as a slave colony, driving hundreds of thousands of slaves to early deaths in order to supply white Europeans with coffee, sugar and tobacco. In 1804, the slaves rebelled and after savage fighting defeated three foreign armies to win their independence. They looked to America for support, but America's slave-holding states feared a slave revolt of their own, and America's slave-holding president, Thomas Jefferson, the author of our Declaration of Independence, refused to recognize the new government.

Their former white masters made matters worse by demanding reparations, and by exploiting and exhausting the country's natural resources. Fighting over what little was left, Haitians turned on each other.

Coup followed coup, faction fought faction, and in 1915, our American president Woodrow Wilson sent in the Marines. By the time they left almost 20 years later, American companies had secured favored status in Haiti. In 1957, the country was taken over by the brutal and despotic rule of Papa Doc Duvalier, whose son, Baby Doc, proved just as cruel as his old man. Don't let the familial nicknames fool you. The Duvaliers were murderous thugs and thieves who enjoyed the complicity of American interests until the dynasty played out in 1986.

Five years later in 1991, when the popular former priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide won the presidency as a champion of the poor, he spooked Washington. Said one U.S. senator, Aristide "wasn't going to be beholden to the United States, and so he was going to be trouble. We had interests and ties with some of the very strong financial interests in the country and he was threatening them."

The Bush/Cheney administration, in cahoots with Haiti's privileged, helped destabilize his government.

Every president from Ronald Reagan forward has embraced the corporate search for cheap labor. That has meant rewards for Haiti's upper class while ordinary people were pushed further and further into squalor. Haitian contractors producing Mickey Mouse and Pocahontas pajamas for American companies under license with the Walt Disney Company paid their sweat shop workers as little as one dollar a day, while women sewing dresses for K-Mart earned eleven cents an hour. A report by the National Labor Committee found Haitian women who had worked 50 days straight, up to 70 hours a week, without a day off. If that doesn't impact the tradition of child rearing and lead to social distrust, I don't know what will.

So, once again, beware the terrible simplifiers and remember that through all its suffering Haiti is a country born of revolution, like our own, whose people sing of their forefathers breaking their shackles, proclaiming their right to equality, and shouting "Progress or Death." Yes, there's still more death than progress. It's the bitter fruit of exploitation centuries old. But even if the Devil were at work, there are Haitians determined that he will not have the last word. The last word is the poet's calling. Listen to what was written by Danielle Legros Georges, born in Haiti and now teaching at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She sent us a poem and we asked our colleague Kamaly Pierre, who also has family and roots in Haiti, to read it. Its title: "Poem for the Poorest Country In the Western Hemisphere."

KAMALY PIERRE: Oh poorest country, this is not your name.
You should be called beacon, and flame,

almond and bougainvillea, garden
and green mountain, villa and hut,

little girl with red ribbons in her hair,
books-under-arm, charmed by the light
of morning,

charcoal seller in black skirt, encircled by dead trees.

You, country, are the businessman
and the eager young man, the grandfather

at the gate, at the crossroads
with the flashlight, with the light,

with the light.

BILL MOYERS: That's all for now. I'm Bill Moyers.

Insurance lobby's secret plan to attack 'Sicko'

http://rawstory.com/blog/2009/07/video-insurance-lobbys-secret-plan-to-attack-sicko-and-michael-moore/

Insurance lobby's secret plan to attack 'Sicko' and Michael Moore
Diane Sweet
Saturday, July 11th, 2009

In an interview with PBS's Bill Moyers, a former insurance executive reveals a secret plan by the insurance industry to discredit Michael Moore's health care documentary, 'Sicko,' that also included lobbyists threatening negative, attack-style ads aimed at politicians supporting the formation of a government sponsored public health care option during election campaigns.

Michael Moore alerted us to Friday evening's PBS Bill Moyer's Show interview with Wendall Potter, a former executive with insurance giant CIGNA:

We've just been informed that Bill Moyers, on his show tonight, will expose for the first time the health insurance industry's secret campaign against Michael Moore and his film, "Sicko." It contains a stunning revelation and admission by a top health insurance executive -- the former head of publicity for CIGNA, one of the top health insurance companies in the country -- that the disinformation and attacks on Michael and the film were extensive and well-planned. Their job was to stop the movie from reaching a wide audience (and, more importantly, from having the widespread political impact the industry feared "Sicko" would have).

Wendell Potter, former Head of Corporate Communications at CIGNA (which provides health insurance to nearly 70 percent of the Fortune 100 companies) admits that, in fact, "Sicko" "hit the nail on the head" and told the real truth about how much better people in other countries have it when it comes to their health care.
From PBS's website:

In his first television interview since leaving the health insurance industry, Wendell Potter tells Bill Moyers why he left his successful career as the head of Public Relations for CIGNA, one of the nation's largest insurers, and decided to speak out against the industry. "I didn't intend to [speak out], until it became really clear to me that the industry is resorting to the same tactics they've used over the years, and particularly back in the early '90s, when they were leading the effort to kill the Clinton plan."

Potter began his trip from health care spokesperson to reform advocate while back home in Tennessee. Potter attended a "health care expedition," a makeshift health clinic set up at a fairgrounds, and he tells Bill Moyers, "It was absolutely stunning. When I walked through the fairground gates, I saw hundreds of people lined up, in the rain. It was raining that day. Lined up, waiting to get care, in animal stalls. Animal stalls."

Looking back over his long career, Potter sees an industry corrupted by Wall Street expectations and greed. According to Potter, insurers have every incentive to deny coverage — every dollar they don't pay out to a claim is a dollar they can add to their profits, and Wall Street investors demand they pay out less every year. Under these conditions, Potter says, "You don't think about individual people. You think about the numbers, and whether or not you're going to meet Wall Street's expectations."

My fellow Texan

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2317.shtml

My fellow Texan
By Bill Moyers
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Aug 20, 2007

Like the proverbial hedgehog, Karl Rove knew one big thing: how to win elections as if they were divine interventions. You may think God summoned Billy Graham to Florida on the eve of the 2000 election to endorse George W. Bush just in the nick of time, but if it did happen that way, the Good Lord was speaking in a Texas accent.

Karl Rove figured out a long time ago that the way to take an intellectually incurious, draft-averse, naughty playboy in a flight jacket with chewing tobacco in his back pocket and make him governor of Texas, was to sell him as God’s anointed in a state where preachers and televangelists outnumber even oil derricks and jack rabbits. Using church pews as precincts, Rove turned religion into a weapon of political combat -- a battering ram, aimed at the devil’s minions. Especially at gay people.

It’s so easy, as Karl knew, to scapegoat people you outnumber. And if God is love, as rumor has it, Rove knew in politics to bet on fear and loathing. Never mind that in stroking the basest bigotry of true believers you coarsen both politics and religion.

At the same time he was recruiting an army of the Lord for the born-again Bush, Rove was also shaking down corporations for campaign cash. Crony capitalism became a biblical injunction. Greed and God won four elections in a row -- twice in the Lone Star state and twice again in the nation at large. But the result has been to leave Texas under the thumb of big money with huge holes ripped in its social contract, and the U.S. government in shambles -- paralyzed, polarized, and mired in war, debt and corruption.

Rove himself is deeply enmeshed in some of the scandals now being investigated, including those missing emails that could tell us who turned the Attorney General of the United States into a partisan sock puppet.

Rove is riding out of Dodge City as the posse rides in.

At his press conference last week. he asked God to bless the president and the country, even as reports were circulating that he himself had confessed to friends his own agnosticism. He wished he could believe, but he cannot. That kind of intellectual honesty is to be admired, but you have to wonder how all those folks on the Christian right must feel discovering they were used for partisan reasons by a secular skeptic, a manipulator.

On his last play of the game, all Karl Rove had to offer them was a Hail Mary pass, while telling himself there’s no one there to catch it.

Bill Moyers is managing editor of the weekly public affairs program Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday night on PBS. Check local airtimes or comment at The Moyers Blog at www.pbs.org/moyers.

Moyers on Murdoch

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2144.shtml

Moyers on Murdoch
By Bill Moyers
Online Journal Guest Writer
Jul 2, 2007

If Rupert Murdoch were the Angel Gabriel, you still wouldn’t want him owning the sun, the moon, and the stars. That’s too much prime real estate for even the pure in heart.

But Rupert Murdoch is no saint; he is to propriety what the Marquis de Sade was to chastity. When it comes to money and power he’s carnivorous: all appetite and no taste. He’ll eat anything in his path. Politicians become little clay pigeons to be picked off with flattering headlines, generous air time, a book contract or the old-fashioned blackjack that never misses: campaign cash. He hires lobbyists the way Imelda Marcos bought shoes, and stacks them in his cavernous closet, along with his conscience; this is the man, remember, who famously kowtowed to the Communist overlords of China, oppressors of their own people, to protect his investments there.

The ambitious can’t resist his blandishments, nor his power to get or keep them in office where they can return his favors. Mae West would be green with envy at his little black book of conquests: Tory Margaret Thatcher, Labor’s Tony Blair, George Bush. Even Jimmy Carter couldn’t say no. Now, Bill and Hillary Clinton, who know which side of their bread is buttered, like having it slathered by their new buddy Rupert. Our media and political system have turned into a mutual protection racket.

You will not be surprised to learn that Murdoch’s company paid little or no federal income tax over the past four years. His powerful portfolio positions him to claim a big stake in Yahoo and his takeover of The Wall Street Journal, now owned by the Bancroft family, which, like Adam and Eve, the parents of us all, are tempted to sell their birthright for a wormy apple.

Murdoch and The Journal’s editorial page are made for each other. They’ve both pursued the right's corporate and political agenda of the past quarter century. Both venerate what The Journal editorials call the “animal spirits” of business. But The Journal’s newsroom is another matter -- there facts are sacred and independence revered. Rupert Murdoch has told the Bancrofts he’ll not meddle with the reporting. But he’s accustomed to using journalism as a personal spittoon. In the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq, he turned the dogs of war loose in the newsrooms of his empire and they howled for blood. Murdoch himself said the greatest thing to come out of the war would be “$20 a barrel for oil.”

Of course he wasn’t the only media mogul to clamor for war. And he’s not the first to use journalism to promote his own interests. His worst offense with FOX News is not even its baldly partisan agenda. Far worse is the travesty he’s made of its journalism. FOX News huffs and puffs, pontificates and proclaims, but does little serious original reporting. His tabloids sell babes and breasts, gossip and celebrities. Now he’s about to bring under the same thumb one of the few national newsrooms remaining in the country.

But the problem isn’t just Rupert Murdoch. His pursuit of The Wall Street Journal is the latest in a cascading series of mergers, buy-outs, and other financial legerdemain that are making a shipwreck of journalism. Public minded newspapers are being dumped by their owners for wads of cash or crippled by cost cutting while their broadcasting cousins race to the bottom. Murdoch is just the predator of the hour. The modern maestro of a financial marketplace ruled by money and moguls. Instead of checking the excesses of private and public power, these 21st century barons of the First Amendment revel in them; the public be damned.

Bill Moyers is the managing editor of the weekly public affairs program Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday night on PBS. This essay appeared on Friday’s program. Check local airtimes or comment at The Moyers Blog at www.pbs.org/moyers.