Friday, December 19, 2014
Saturday, January 18, 2014
Moyers & Company 140117
BILL MOYERS: This week on Moyers & Company astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson on science, God and the universe.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: If God is the mystery of the universe, these mysteries, which we're tackling these mysteries one by one. If you're going to stay religious at the end of the conversation, God has to mean more to you than just where science has yet to tread.
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BILL MOYERS: Welcome. Look at this glorious photograph. It was taken by a NASA space telescope and shows the remains of a supernova, an exploded star, 17,000 light years away from us, back when here on planet Earth we were still in the Stone Age.
Now hold your hand up to the screen and see how the photo resembles the X-ray of some large celestial hand. That’s why astronomers have called this image the “Hand of God.”
Not literally, of course. But the picture does provide us with an elegant entry into the next part of my conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson. He's the director of the Hayden Planetarium at New York’s American Museum of Natural History.
He's also the narrator of a mesmerizing new show at the planetarium called Dark Universe, and this spring he’ll appear as the host of a remake of the classic PBS series Cosmos. You can see it on the National Geographic Channel and FOX TV…
In our first episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson talked about the phenomenon of dark energy, the accelerating expansion of our universe.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON from Moyers & Company Show 301: We expected gravity to be slowing down the expanding universe. The opposite is happening. We don't know what's causing it.
BILL MOYERS: Nor do Tyson and his colleagues yet fully comprehend another cosmic enigma known as dark matter.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON from Moyers & Company Show 301: There is no known objects accounting for most of the effective gravity in the universe. Something is making stuff move that is not anything we have ever touched.
BILL MOYERS: On that mysterious note, we begin the next part of my talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson. Welcome.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Thank you.
BILL MOYERS: There were two strange sequences in your planetarium show. And I managed to go online and look at.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: You've become a dark matter junky here. You're going online, you need more.
BILL MOYERS: I think--
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: You need more.
BILL MOYERS: So let's talk about the scene of dark matter from your show at the planetarium.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: So what's going on here is you're viewing the structure of the large-scale universe. And what we've represented here are dark areas that themselves have more gravitational attraction than the light areas. So the light areas are drawing themselves to the dark areas. And so you, what happens is, as this happens over the eons, structure begins to manifest in the universe. And you see this web work, and it looks almost organic, or it looks like some kind of neurosynaptic map. The formation and collection of matter in the universe follows the laws of physics. And when you add in the dark matter, this extra gravity, it turns the universe into the universe that we see.
That's why we know that dark matter is real. We don't know what it is. But we know it's there because we can't make the universe as we see it unless we put this extra gravity into our simulations to match the gravity that we see.
BILL MOYERS: So you know it's something.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: It's something. And there's some exotic ideas for it, by the way. Particle physicists are convinced that it might be an exotic particle that doesn't interact with us. Doesn't interact with our light, with our telescopes, but that it has gravity. So these particles are doing their own thing, invisible to us, but otherwise attracting our matter into their, nucleating us among them. So, but of course, a particle physicist would think that the solution is a particle. If you're a hammer, all your problems look like nails. One of the more intriguing accounts I've heard is if you have multiple universes, it turns out gravity can spill out of one universe and be felt by another.
And if we have another universe adjacent to ours, it could be that these sites where we see extra gravity is ordinary gravity in a parallel universe. And here we are, looking at it mysteriously like, "What is this?" It's like the blind man touching the elephant. "I don't know what this whole thing is, but here I can describe this part of it. And it's kind of textured, and it's, no, no, no, no, no, this got, it's smooth and hard." And, you know, you can't see the whole elephant. Maybe the elephant is ordinary gravity in another universe and we're feeling it and we're making stuff up just to account for it.
BILL MOYERS: You think there could be another universe?
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: I don't see why not. Because back when we thought Earth was alone in the universe, we knew that there were other planets, that the Earth is just a planet, one of many. "Well, the sun is surely special." No, the sun is one of a hundred billion other suns. So, the galaxy, the Milky Way. No, the galaxy is one of hundred billion galaxies. How about the universe?
We have philosophical precedent to suggest that why should nature make anything in ones? Okay? Everything else we ever thought was unique or special, well, we found more of them. So philosophically, it's not unsettling to imagine more than one universe.
We also have good theoretical grounds for suggesting the existence of a multiverse. Where our universe is just one of some countless number of other universes coming in and out of existence, with slightly different laws of physics within them. That makes it a little dangerous. Because we are held together, involved in a universe where we work. Where we work physically. If you want to visit another universe, I would, like, you know, send something else ahead of you.
BILL MOYERS: So explain this to me, why is it I felt more satisfied watching the planetarium show, and as I'm sure we will watching the new "Cosmos," than I do personally from science fiction? I mean, I came away with a sense of really having experienced something authentic at the planetarium.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: That's a great question. By the way, there are many science-fiction fans who also embrace the science reality. And people who are fans of fantasy and super heroes and science fiction and all the storytelling that goes on on the frontier, essentially, everyone there knows the difference between that frontier and the real science that comes out.
And they will judge the storytelling based on how much science it got right before starts inventing what the frontier of imagination would bring. If you violate a known law of physics, that's lesser science fiction than the one where you get all your physics right, now take me, now give me the warp drive. Now give me the transporter.
Take me beyond what we know. So, but to your point I think maybe it's the same effect as if you tour the Air and Space Museum in Washington, which has the history of flight, including space flight, that we could've made an exact, we museum people, could've made an exact replica of the Apollo 11 command module that went to the moon.
And then we'd say, "Here's an exact replica." So that's okay. But if I now say, "This actual thing went to the moon," intellectually, that means something different to you. Your eyes see exactly the same, you could make a replica, a perfect, that looks exact, with all the blemishes and all the heat shield damage. You could do that. But if you know it's the real thing, the meaning is magnified. And so yes, you go to our space show, it is the real science. And it is captivating you the way we'd only perhaps had thought science fiction could.
BILL MOYERS: Science fiction came first in a way, in terms of popular entertainment.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: In some cases. But I'm a fan of JBS Haldane once said, I'm paraphrasing, he said, the universe is not only stranger than we have imagined, it's perhaps stranger than we can imagine. And when you realize that I, you understand why some people don't need to read the science fiction. Because black holes flaying stars in orbit around them and planets that have life forms undreamt of on Earth, this is, we're speaking real stuff here. Maybe that's as seductive as the imagination of someone standing on the frontier.
BILL MOYERS: One thing I took away from your planetarium show is that dark energy, is the increasing rate at which the universe is pulling itself apart, so how does it happen that we don't experience this expanding of universe as we walk down the street, or sit here in this building?
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, because you live 80 years instead of billions. If you lived billions of years, oh yeah. This would be, "Hey, check that out. Look what I noticed." Yeah, I think about things you miss because of how short our time on Earth is. I'll, the best example I can give is when you walk around, say, "Oh, there's a nice, puffy cloud." You don't stare at it for an hour, you just notice it.
BILL MOYERS: Right.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: If you do a time-lapse of the cloud, especially cumulus clouds, they are roiling, gurgling, boiling, places of condensed water vapor. They're alive. Yet, when you walk down the street, you think it's just sitting there peaceful and calm if it's just a simple cloud. So even something that does change in your lifetime, you don't think of as an actively roiling place, a cloud. So imagine longer, imagine mountain building on Earth. Imagine watching the Hawaiian islands pop up, or come, imagine watching ice ages come and go. Imagine watching species of life rise up, the dinosaurs, and then an asteroid comes, they go extinct essentially overnight on the, in the fossil record. That's a whole other way to see the world.
And it’s the task of the geologist, the astrophysicist to think about how that works. Fortunately, we have computers that can speed up time. I'll give you a great example. We used to have catalogues of galaxies. We say, "That's a really messed-up looking galaxy there. Let's make a catalogue of irregular galaxies."
So we have a catalogue of beautiful galaxies and irregular galaxies. And then people came up with theories, "How does a galaxy become irregular?" No one knew until we realized, galaxies collide. Galaxies feel each other's local gravity, collide, and it's a train wreck. And half the irregular galaxies are train-wrecked galaxies.
There's a famous astronomer, Gérard de Vaucouleurs who said, a wrecked Lexus is still a Lexus. It just happened to be in a car accident. So we would learn. Now, how do you get to know that galaxies collide? You put in the forces of gravity on a computer, run the simulation, and watch it unfold. And there you can recreate the havoc that you see in the universe on a 100-million-year time scale.
BILL MOYERS: So when a child sings, or used to sing, I don't think they do anymore, "Twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are," it's not twinkling. Something powerful, dramatic, and dynamic is happening to it. Right?
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Well, yes, and we call that twinkling. So yeah, there's starlight coming billions of, or millions of light years, well it depends on if it's a galaxy, well, hundreds of thousands of light years across space, and it's a perfect point of light as it hits our atmosphere, turbulence in the atmosphere jiggled the image, and it renders the star twinkling.
And by the way, planets are brighter than stars typically, like Jupiter and Venus. Venus has been in the evening skies lately. And if you go, "Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are," and you, I want, you want to wish upon the star, most people are wishing on planets. That's why their wishes don't come true. Because the planets are the first stars to come out at night.
BILL MOYERS: Don't you sometimes feel sad about breaking all these myths apart?
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: No, no, because I think it's, some myths are, deserve to be broken apart. The, out of respect for the human intellect. That, no, when you're writhing on the ground and froth is coming out of your mouth, you're having an epileptic seizure. You have not been invaded by the devil. We got this one figured out, okay? I mean, discovery moves on. So, I don't mind the power of myth and magic. But take it to the next frontier and apply it there. Don’t apply it in places where we've long passed what we already know is going on.
BILL MOYERS: I came out of the planetarium, and that evening, I sat thinking about what you said in the show about, you acknowledged the Big Bang and you, and I remember that Hubble rewound the process mathematically. Correct me if I'm wrong, and calculated that everything, matter, space, energy, even time itself, actually had a beginning.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: So it turns out that was not Hubble, although Hubble had the data that enabled the calculation. The person who did that was a Belgian priest Georges Lemaître, he was a priest, physicist. Physicist-priest, okay?
What a cool thing to have on your business card. You got people coming and going with that. But he calculated what the implications of Einstein's general relativity, which was the new theory of gravity, would be with Hubble's expanding universe. And he says, the whole universe may have begun in a singular point in the past. And thus Big Bang as a phrase was used pejoratively of this idea, but it stuck.
BILL MOYERS: Well, the astronomer Robert Jastrow described it like the explosion of a cosmic hydrogen bomb. Not the explosion of a cosmic hydrogen bomb, but like the explosion of a cosmic hydrogen bomb.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, so there you're stuck with the analogy of the biggest explosion you know, using that to describe something that's even bigger. Which is hard to do, right? I mean, not to get morbid on you, but I was four blocks from the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. I live downtown. And I was trying to describe to others the sound of the collapse of 107-story building. And it is not like anything else. So I can say, "Well, imagine two trains colliding." But how many of us even have heard or seen that? Whatever that is, it's more than that. So you're stuck. If the biggest explosion we've made on Earth is the hydrogen bomb, and then you say it's a cosmic hydrogen bomb, it is, I think saying it's a cosmic hydrogen bomb cheapens the event. Yeah, it's way bigger than--
BILL MOYERS: I understand. An incredible flash of energy and light, though?
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: And matter and, yeah, all of this. All of the above.
BILL MOYERS: Do you give people who make this case, that that was the beginning and that there had to be something that provoked the beginning, do you give them an A at least for trying to reconcile faith and reason?
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: I don't think they're reconcilable.
BILL MOYERS: What do you mean?
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Well, so let me say that differently. All efforts that have been invested by brilliant people of the past have failed at that exercise. They just fail. And so I don't, the track record is so poor that going forward, I have essentially zero confidence, near zero confidence, that there will be fruitful things to emerge from the effort to reconcile them. So, for example, if you knew nothing about science, and you read, say, the Bible, the Old Testament, which in Genesis, is an account of nature, that's what that is, and I said to you, give me your description of the natural world based only on this, you would say the world was created in six days, and that stars are just little points of light much lesser than the sun. And that in fact, they can fall out of the sky, right, because that's what happens during the Revelation.
You know, one of the signs that the second coming, is that the stars will fall out of the sky and land on Earth. To even write that means you don't know what those things are. You have no concept of what the actual universe is. So everybody who tried to make proclamations about the physical universe based on Bible passages got the wrong answer.
So what happened was, when science discovers things, and you want to stay religious, or you want to continue to believe that the Bible is unerring, what you would do is you would say, "Well, let me go back to the Bible and reinterpret it." Then you'd say things like, "Oh, well they didn't really mean that literally. They meant that figuratively."
So, this whole sort of reinterpretation of the, how figurative the poetic passages of the Bible are came after science showed that this is not how things unfolded. And so the educated religious people are perfectly fine with that. It's the fundamentalists who want to say that the Bible is the literally, literal truth of God, that and want to see the Bible as a science textbook, who are knocking on the science doors of the schools, trying to put that content in the science room. Enlightened religious people are not behaving that way. So saying that science is cool, we're good with that, and use the Bible for, to get your spiritual enlightenment and your emotional fulfillment.
BILL MOYERS: I have known serious religious people, not fundamentalists, who were scared when Carl Sagan opened his series with the words--
CARL SAGAN from Cosmos: The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.
BILL MOYERS: I mean, that scared them, because they interpret that to mean, then if this is it, there's nothing else. No God and no life after.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: For religious people, many people say, "Well, God is within you," or God, the, there are ways that people have shaped this, rather than, God is an old, grey-bearded man in the clouds. So if God is within you, what, I'm sure Carl would say, in you in your mind. In your mind, and we can measure the neurosynaptic firings when you have a religious experience.
We can tell you where that's happening, when it's happening, what you're feeling like at the time. So your mind of course is still within the cosmos.
BILL MOYERS: But do you have any sympathy for people who seem to feel, only feel safe in the vastness of the universe you describe in your show if they can infer a personal God who makes it more hospitable to them, cares for them?
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: In this, what we tell ourselves is a free country, which means you should have freedom of thought, I don't care what you think. I just don't. Go think whatever you want. Go ahead. Think that there's one God, two Gods, ten Gods, or no Gods. That is what it means to live in a free country. The problem arises is if you have a religious philosophy that is not based on objective realities that you then want to put in a science classroom. Then I'm going to stand there and say, "No, I'm not going to allow you in the science classroom.” I'm not telling you what to think, I'm just telling you in the science class, “You're not doing science. This is not science. Keep it out." That's where I, that's when I stand up. Otherwise, go ahead. I'm not telling you how to think.
BILL MOYERS: I think you must realize that some people are going to go to your show at the planetarium and they're going to say, "Ah-hah! Those scientists have discovered God. Because God,” dark matter, “is what holds this universe together."
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: So is that a question?
BILL MOYERS: It's a statement. You know, you know they're going to say that--
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: So the history of discovery, particularly cosmic discovery, but discovery in general, scientific discovery, is one where at any given moment, there's a frontier. And there tends to be an urge for people, especially religious people, to assert that across that boundary, into the unknown lies the handiwork of God. This shows up a lot. Newton even said it. He had his laws of gravity and motion and he was explaining the moon and the planets, he was there. He doesn't mention God for any of that. And then he gets to the limits of what his equations can calculate. So, I don't, can't quite figure this out. Maybe God steps in and makes it right every now and then. That's where he invoked God.
And Ptolemy, he bet on the wrong horse, but he was a brilliant guy. He formulated the geocentric universe, with Earth in the middle. This is where we got epicycles and all this machinations of the heavens. But it was still a mystery to him. He looked up and uttered the following words, “when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies,” these are the planets going through retrograde and back, the mysteries of the Earth, “when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies, I no longer touch Earth with my feet. I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia.”
What he did was invoke, he didn't invoke Zeus to account for the rock that he's standing on or the air he's breathing. It was this point of mystery. And in gets invoked God. This, over time, has been described by philosophers as the God of the gaps. If that's how you, if that's where you're going to put your God in this world, then God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance.
If that's how you're going to invoke God. If God is the mystery of the universe, these mysteries, we're tackling these mysteries one by one. If you're going to stay religious at the end of the conversation, God has to mean more to you than just where science has yet to tread. So to the person who says, "Maybe dark matter is God," if the only reason why you're saying it is because it's a mystery, then get ready to have that undone.
BILL MOYERS: In the next and concluding part of my conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson, we’ll talk about science and democracy.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: You have not fully expressed your power as a voter until you have a scientific literacy in topics that matter for future political issues. This requires a level, a base level of science literacy that I don't think we have achieved yet.
BILL MOYERS: At our website, BillMoyers.com, there’s more about and from Neil deGrasse Tyson. I’ll see you there and I’ll see you here, next time.
[Credits]
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
RT: Cell Phones & Child Brains
RT:My name's Daniel Bushell. Class action lawsuits filed against cell phone manufacturers. Coming up…
Announcer:
Insurers refuse public liability for cell phone use.
The warning buried deep inside your mobile.
And the next 'casualty catastrophe' after tobacco and asbestos.
Keith Philips, brain tumor survivor: I would hold my cell phone here and the tumor was right there.
Stuart Cobb, brain tumor survivor: I always held it on my right side, right here. The industry should have put these warnings on these phones a long time ago.
RT:Professor Dariusz Leszczynski is one of the world's leading radiation biologists, and brave. He knew phone manufacturers would try to end his career for printing groundbreaking research, proving cell phones do cause biological damage.
Professor Leszczynski joins us, great to see you. How did the industry react?
Prof. Dariusz Leszczynski, Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority, Finland:So far I think I didn’t experience any smear campaign. But in my case it was just that the industry used their influence to prevent funding of my research projects.
RT:But studies like Professor Leszczynski’s now allow top neurosurgeons to issue a stark cell phone warning.
Dr. Keith Black, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center neurosurgeon: It's essentially cooking the brain.
RT:Ellie Marks' husband Alan suffered serious memory loss after years of using a mobile.
At 2am one night he had a massive seizure. Surgeons found a tumor the size of a golf ball right where he held the phone.
Ellie, thank you so much for joining us. Why are you and so many others suing the industry?
Ellie Marks, wife of brain tumor victim:There’s many many many others that are already deceased from this and are dying from this, younger than my husband. Some as young as 28 who are deceased and their neurosurgeons actually told them that it was probably their cell phone use.
We had about 20 cities and states that wanted to legislate as San Francisco had and they were all threatened with lawsuits by this industry.
RT:This is a photo of Bret Bocook's brain. The top quarter responsible for body balance has had to be removed after surgeons found this vast tumor right where he held the phone.
A US national rowing champion, now he can barely move.
Bret, great to speak to you, tell us about the class action lawsuit against the phone industry.
Bret Bocook, brain tumor victim:The only way you can educate the public against big business is through lawsuits. That was how they did it with smoking. It was not until the District Attorneys in the United States got involved and sued the cigarette industry that they actually had a huge settlement, had to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for public education as to the dangers of smoking.
That’s what’s going to happen with cell phones. It’s just unequivocal categorical that these things cause cancer. And also, they don’t want you to know that.
This is on the same trajectory as smoking. Because if you look at smoking in the '60s they had doctors coming on TV and saying 'Hey, smoke Marlboro, smoke this brand, because it's good for your cough.'
Camel cigarette commercial: And see how well Camels agree with your throat!
The Flintstones cigarette commercial: Winston, America's best selling best tasting filtered cigarette!
Bret Bocook, brain tumor victim: And more dangerous for children, because their skulls are a lot thinner. At least you can’t buy cigarettes unless you’re 18. But even a five-year-old can go and buy a phone.
RT:For phone manufacturers young children are targets. There are now working cell phones even for babies.
PCMag phone review: The glowPhone is for kids maybe five to eight and the flyPhone is for tweens.
RT:Samantha Miller's funeral was on her 18thbirthday.
Phone use through childhood first gave her headaches, reports the Daily Mail, then the brain tumor that killed her.
In the West, brain tumors have overtaken leukemia, notes Senator Lyn Allison, as the number one child killer illness.
But doctors warn that's the tip of the iceberg.
Clinical studies find young men who keep phones in their pockets have much lower chances of producing offspring, while women often store them on their chest.
Tiffany Frantz, breast cancer victim: I would just tuck it right into my bra.
RT:Tiffany Frantz got breast cancer aged just 21, right where since childhood she's stored her phone.
These spots mark the areas of Donna Jaynes' cancer. Her doctors call this a ‘new breed of distribution’ that exactly matches where women keep their phone.
Dr. John West, Chairman, Breast Care Center:It’s a very unusual pattern where these multiple small cancers were confined to the upper inner aspect of the breast, I’ve never seen anything quite like this.
RT:This is a radiation detector, in normal surroundings around 30 microvolts/meter (µV/m).
Microwave ovens reach 800 µV/m. Wi-Fi routers use the same radiation technology.
Loading a film on a tablet PC reaches 2,000 µV/m.
Some of the world's best selling smartphones register over a thousand times above normal levels.
Insurers have in fact stopped covering cell phone manufacturers for public health.
Insurance firms privately call cell phones the next public ‘casualty catastrophe’ after asbestos and cigarettes.
Phone manufacturers have now quietly inserted a legal disclaimer.
On iPhones you have to go to Settings, General, About, at the bottom scroll down to Legal and at the end – RF Exposure, Radiofrequency Exposure.
Unlike most pages, the small print here can't be enlarged, but it reads: ‘Carry iPhone at least 10mm away from your body’
At the same time the industry says all its studies show phones are perfectly safe.
Thomas Wheeler, CTIA phone lobby head:Radio waves from cellular phones are safe.
RT:A 'conflict of interest' Harvard ethics professor Lawrence Lessig calls industry paid studies, which consistently conclude phone radiation is harmless.
Independent scientists meanwhile overwhelmingly find the most serious problems, from DNA damage to three times lower sperm counts, 290% more brain tumors, autism and birth defects.
Former senior White House advisor and leading epidemiologist Dr. Devra Davis has testified to Senate on the subject she joins us, great to see you.
How do you explain the completely opposite findings between industry and independent studies?
Dr. Devra Davis, author of Disconnect: Anytime there was independent research, what industry would do was three things: first they would go attack the scientists who have done the studies, they would try to get them fired, they’d try to get their funding taken away or they would accuse them of fraud.
When that didn’t work they hired other scientists who knew nothing about the field to do studies that looked like they were replicating the other studies but they really weren't.
And when all of those things failed, they wrote a memo in which they said if the cellular industry has done its job we think we war-gamed the science. That’s a quote - ‘war-gamed’ the science. Now science is not a matter of war, and it’s not a matter of games; we’re deadly serious about our health and that of our children.
RT:War-gaming, reveals this leaked Motorola document, is industry paid studies purely for reassuring the public.
Norman Sandler, Motorola: We have sufficiently war-gamed the issue.
RT:A sting has exposed how easy to get phoney studies in print.
Posing as a serious scientist, John Bohannon sent in a paper full of schoolboy errors, offering payment for publication.
Incredibly more than half the journals in these countries all around the world published it, even lying to the public that the study had been peer reviewed.
Investigative journalist Anthony Gucciardi has broken numerous health scandals, great to see you.
Surely big business wouldn't fake studies to put millions of lives at risk. Do we have documented precedents?
Anthony Gucciardi, Storyleak editor: This is exactly like Eli Lilly which in the 1980s knew that Prozac was leading to suicides and aggressive behavior, the exact opposite effect ofwhat they wanted. They knew that in the 1980s after they conducted the research. They hid the research and it wasn’t exposed until 2005 from the BBC.
But then they would have their corporate interests do studies and talk about how great it was. Now of course they’re required to admit that antidepressants do cause suicide, aggressive behavior, pretty much every shooter is on them.
When these cell phone companies are forced to admit that cell phone radiation does cause brain tumors, that it does do all this, and they’re already saying this in their manuals, so it’s already coming up. But once the public is aware of this fact, it will be even worse than antidepressants, it will be even worse than tobacco.
RT:We invited the powerful phone industry lobby CTIA to discuss the issues raised in this report.
They sent this one-line refusal.
CTIA phone industry lobby:Thank you for contacting us, but we will not be able to do this interview.
RT:The industry's most respected journalist is Dr. Louis Slesin, editor of Microwave News since 1981.
Louis, great to speak to you, there seems to be a parallel universe of what the industry says and everyone else.
Dr. Louis Slesin, Microwave News editor: The whole system is broken. People are not being told the truth, it's crazy. You know it's easy to say we made a mistake on tobacco after we know that tobacco’s a killer.The point is to take action.
RT:Action IS being taken outside the US.
France is moving schools back from Wi-Fi to cabled Internet.
Countries from Germany to Israel and Finland are moving to stop cell phone sales to kids.
But Obama just made industry chief lobbyist Thomas Wheeler head of the regulator itself, the FCC.
A former administration official calls it another astonishing conflict of interest.
So doctors who want parents at least informed of cell phone dangers to their kids say they aren't holding their breath.
Seek truth from facts. This is The Truthseeker.
Monday, January 13, 2014
Moyers & Company 140110
BILL MOYERS:This week on Moyers & Company, Neil deGrasse Tyson on the new “Cosmos” and our dark universe.
NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: Science is an enterprise that should be cherished as an activity of the free human mind because it transforms who we are, how we live, and it gives us an understanding of our place in the universe.
ANNOUNCER: Funding is provided by:
Anne Gumowitz.
Carnegie Corporation of New York, celebrating 100 years of philanthropy, and committed to doing real and permanent good in the world.
The Ford Foundation, working with visionaries on the front lines of social change worldwide.
The Herb Alpert Foundation, supporting organizations whose mission is to promote compassion and creativity in our society.
The John D. And Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. More information at Macfound.Org.
Park Foundation, dedicated to heightening public awareness of critical issues.
The Kohlberg Foundation.
Barbara G. Fleischman.
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BILL MOYERS: Welcome. It's been almost 35 years since PBS premiered one of its most successful series of all time: Carl Sagan's “Cosmos.” Many of you may remember, as I do, his elegant exposition of the universe.
CARL SAGAN in “Cosmos: A Personal Voyage”: Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return. And we can, because the cosmos is also within us – we’re made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.
BILL MOYERS: Over 600 hundred million people in more than 60 countries have now watched "Cosmos." But in the decades since, the universe has kept moving – literally, moving in every direction -- and so has science. And that’s why “Cosmos” is returning this spring, this time on National Geographic Channel and Fox TV.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON in “Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey:” It’s time to get going again.
BILL MOYERS: Our guide is the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, America’s most popular scientist, the unabashed defender of knowledge over superstition and clearly the rightful heir to Carl Sagan's curiosity and charisma. So fasten your seatbelt for a whole new interstellar journey through tens of millions of years and hundreds of millions of miles to the farthest reaches of outer space.
Neil deGrasse Tyson is the Frederic P. Rose director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History here in New York, where he narrates a breathtaking new show titled “Dark Universe.” I took my 12-year-old grandson to see it over the holidays and we were mesmerized. Imagine: trillions of stars, a hundred billion galaxies and light traveling a hundred million years before reaching us here on earth.
That very planetarium, by the way, is where Neil deGrasse Tyson, a kid from the Bronx, age 9, first felt the universe subpoena him to become a scientist in thrall to the night sky. He’s written ten books including this memoir: “The Sky is Not the Limit” and this, his most recent: “Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier.” Oh, yes, I almost forgot – "People" Magazine once voted him the Sexiest Astrophysicist Alive! Welcome.
NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: That was a few years ago, actually.
BILL MOYERS: You only got it once.
NEIL deGRASSE E TYSON: I know.
BILL MOYERS: So no bragging rights, right? But you clearly got more of the star stuff that Carl Sagan said we're all made of. You just got more of it than we did.
NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: Well, yeah, I've been touched by the stars perhaps more frequently than others.
BILL MOYERS: But you were just nine?
NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: Nine, nine years old. A family trip. My parents, we were all native New Yorkers and my parents knew well the value of all of the cultural institutions of New York City. We went every weekend to one or another of these institutions, if not the zoo, the art museum, the many art museums, the Hall of Science.
And our first visit to the Hayden Planetarium for me-- by the way, I would ultimately go as a school trip. But for family, I go there and I sit back and I'm certain-- I love that where you said I was subpoenaed by the universe. I think I had no choice in the matter. I think the universe called me. Because when the lights dimmed and the stars came out when I was nine, I'd never seen a sky like that in my life.
BILL MOYERS: And you met Carl Sagan at 17, when you headed to the Cornell?
NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, well, so I applied to colleges knowing full well that I was interested in the universe. My application to Cornell, unknown to me, was forwarded to Carl Sagan. He was a professor of astronomy there. And I was deciding what college to go to, he sent me a personal letter. Man, I'm just a seventeen-- he's already been on "The Tonight Show" and had best-selling books.
Here's a personal letter said, "I understand you're considering Cornell and you like the universe, as do I. So why don't you come by? I can give you a tour to help you decide whether this is where you'll ultimately attend." So I went up there, he met me outside the astronomy building and gave me a tour of the lab.
One of my favorite memories is he reaches back, didn't even look, just reached back, pulled out one of the books that he wrote, and then signed it to me and I said, "That is awesome." And I said to myself, "If I’m ever in a position of influence the way he is, then I will surely interact with students the way he has interacted with me, as a priority."
BILL MOYERS: Do you remember seeing "Cosmos" when it first aired?
NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, but I was-- by then, I was in graduate school. So it was… it didn't influence me the way it influenced others, because I was already established. But what it did tell me was that there was an appetite out there for science, if it's delivered in a way that's compelling and that's warm, that's compassionate, that is as though the person who is bringing the science to you is sitting next to you on the living room couch. And I thought, "That bedside manner is something that more science expositors should be doing." And I’ve used it kind of as a model for me going forward.
BILL MOYERS: So what are we going to learn about the universe from your “Cosmos” that Carl Sagan couldn't have known about? Well, let me put it this way: if Sagan were around to see your series, what would he learn about the universe that was unknowable 30-some-odd years ago?
NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, so that's a good question. So you need to think of "Cosmos" not as a documentary about science. By the way, since then, there have been many documentaries about science. And it's quite a fertile way of delivering the viewer to the frontier, or bringing the frontier to the viewer. So that's not the issue here. Because we all remember "Cosmos" and so many of these other documentaries maybe lived their moment, but then they fade.
Why did "Cosmos" not fade? It's not because it brought you the latest science. Although it also did that. It's because it displayed for you why science matters. Why science is an enterprise that should be cherished as an activity of the free human mind. Because it transforms who we are, how we live, and it gives us an understanding of our place in the universe. And it's these states of mind that you carry with you for the rest of your life.
So in the new “Cosmos,” that we are continuing this voyage. We're continuing this epic exploration of our place in the universe. We have other stories to tell beyond the ones that went on back then. Yes, right now, we are steeped in the ignorance of dark matter and dark energy.
At the time of the original series, there were no known planets outside of those orbiting the sun. We suspected they were there, but right now, we're rising through 1,000 planets happily orbiting stars that are not the sun. So these are not-- that's not simply new science. It’s new vistas of thought and imagination.
BILL MOYERS: That place in the universe you talk about, as you know, scares some people. Someone once told Sagan that they didn't like astronomy because it made them feel small and insignificant in comparison with the grandeur of the universe. It clearly didn't affect you that way.
NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: Well, it depends on what your ego is going into the conversation. If your ego starts out, "I am important, I am big, I am special," you're in for some disappointments when you look around at what we've discovered about the universe. No, you're not big. No, you're not. You're small in time and in space. And you have this frail vessel called the human body that's limited on Earth.
If you have no ego, if you just want to explore the world, look what happens. Here's-- the conversation goes differently. You learn, oh, the molecules and the atoms of those molecules in my body are traceable to stars across the galaxy that have lived their lives, manufactured these elements, exploded them into the universe from which new generations of star systems were formed. So I look up at the night sky, I don't feel small, I feel large. I feel connected to the universe. It's not just we here on Earth, and that's there. We are one. And that link for me is one of the most profound discoveries of modern astrophysics. And if that, that should not make you feel small, that should make you feel large.
BILL MOYERS: At your planetarium show, which I went to the other day just over the holidays, it-- I did feel small sitting there, looking up at a hundred million light years coming at us. But I also felt significant, the very fact that my grandson and I are here in this universe together is not insignificant.
NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: Not only that, if the human mind applying known laws of physics to the universe allows us to even come with an understanding of what's going on out there.
BILL MOYERS: Have we figured out our galaxy?
NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: So yes and no. All right, so the yes part is we've got some laws of gravity and optics and motion and yeah, we can use our knowledge of physics and our knowledge of the frontier science to land this probe on Mars within a few meters of the target spot. This is tens of millions of miles away, all right? There is no golf shot that's that accurate, all right?
Not even a hole-in-one is as accurate as what this shot is, okay? So what we do know that has been tested works. And that's quite a state of empowerment. But there's a saying where as your area of knowledge grows, so too does your perimeter of ignorance. Because this is the boundary between what you know and what you do not know outside of that area.
So we didn't even know to ask why is the universe accelerating against the efforts of gravity until we made the measurement that it was so. So before 1998, we couldn't even ask the question, we didn't even know to ask the question. So there's no sign that everything will ever be fully known, because this moving frontier continues to bring us more questions.
So can we measure how ignorant we are? Perhaps. We know that what we do know about the universe comprises 4 percent of everything that drives it. 96 percent of what's driving this universe in the form of dark matter and dark energy, we have no idea what--
BILL MOYERS: How do you know that it’s 4 percent? Because you haven't been able, have you, to measure what we don't know?
NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: No, that-- so that's a really cool question. In science, in astrophysics in particular, in all sciences, you have the capacity to measure something even if you don't know what it is.
BILL MOYERS: How so?
NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: Well, so, for example, you could measure the fact that something is falling to the ground, but not know what it is or what's causing it or why. But you can measure it. You can measure the sun moving across the sky, build calendars based on that, and not even know that Earth goes around the sun. You can-- and once you find out Earth goes around the sun, that flips your point of view, but it doesn't invalidate the concept of a year.
You can make all manner of measurements and not know what's causing it. We measure this thing we're calling dark matter. We measure this phenomenon dark energy that's forcing the universe to accelerate. When you add up what we know with those two things about which we don't know what's driving it, we only know 4 percent of what's driving the universe.
So that's humbling. That's humbling. The humblest person in this world is the astrophysicist. Because we are face to face with our ignorance every single day.
BILL MOYERS: But here's what puzzles me among other things about you astrophysicists. The magnitude--
NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: I like the way you say that: "you astrophysicists."
BILL MOYERS: Yeah, well--
NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: You guys.
BILL MOYERS: Yeah, you guys. You're dealing, as I saw your planetarium show, you're dealing with trillions of stars, a hundred million or more galaxies. How do you even imagine? How do you comprehend? How do you get your mind around, to use the cliché, numbers of such magnitude?
NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: We start early. I was--
BILL MOYERS: At nine!
NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, start them early. Think big early. In fact, calculus, as a branch of mathematics embraces the infinite. You sum an infinite series of numbers or expressions. You start thinking about large things early. And-- or a large enumeration of objects early.
The way I like to think of it is you can give analogies. So one of my favorites: do you remember when McDonald's actually kept count of how many hamburgers they sold?
BILL MOYERS: Like the national debt --
NEIL deGRASSE TYSON:Exactly. And they had an interesting sort of their own version of a Y2K problem. Because when they got to 99, there was not a slot for a third place. So there was no room enough to put one, zero, zero. So many of them just got stuck at 99 billion. So, I did the calculation for 100 billion hamburgers.
If you had-- if you laid them end to end, you could go around the Earth, like, 32 times. Around the Earth, end to end. And then with what's left over, after you've done that, you can stack them to the moon and back with your 100 billion hamburgers. And that's about how many stars there are in the universe.
BILL MOYERS: How much Pepto-Bismol would you need to deal with that?
NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: Didn't do the Pepto-Bismol calculation. So it's fun to think of large numbers in these other contexts. And of course, there are numbers larger than anything that enumeratable in the universe. The number of googol, back when googol was only a number, not also a corporation, googol is a one followed by hundred zeros. That number is larger than the account of particles in the observable universe.
So there's nothing in the universe that you can count that will add up to a googol. So what I did as a kid, you just have fun with numbers. And so when big numbers show up in the universe, I say, "Yeah, give me more." And what worries me is that when the debt goes to a trillion dollars, or possibly a quadrillion dollars, the national debt, I hope it's never a quadrillion, but when it gets there, do people really know how big that is? I don't think so.
BILL MOYERS: They don't.
NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: So we're handicapped by not knowing, not being able to think creatively about how large these numbers are.
BILL MOYERS: I think you make me realize what I was experiencing there in the planetarium. When you started, you said, "We're not going to focus on what we can see, stars and planets, moons and nebulae, we're going to focus on what we can't see." And it was-- it is?
NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: Dark matter. That's the audacity of the show. I don't know any other show that said, "We're going to make as the topic, as the central theme, something about which we know hardly anything." And that was not only a scripting challenge. The writer here was Timothy Ferris.
BILL MOYERS: Very informative, he did--
NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: I’m a fan of his work from way back. And so there's a scripting challenge, there's a visualization challenge. Our Director of Astrovisualization, which is a really cool title if you ever want one, I think, is Carter Emmart. These are people-- he's a scientifically-literate artist, a visualizer.
And so you bring this, and others, you bring this talent together. You say, "Here's something, we don't know what it is. But it affects other things. Let's see how the rest of what we know can proxy for that which we do not know." By the way, this is how we know a black hole is out there. You can't see a black hole. But you see what effect a black hole has on everything-- it wreaks havoc on its environment. So dark things have a way of manifesting themselves.
BILL MOYERS: Dark money as well. Dark energy, dark matter. How do they differ?
NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: Well, unfortunately, they have similar-sounding names. And since we really don't know what either of them is, they-- I don't think we should've named them. We should've given then fake names until we understood them. I've been voting for, Fred and Wilma. Something that doesn't give you any cosmic bias, all right? So I can tell you simply what dark matter is. But don't think of it as matter. I don't want to-- I’m concerned--
BILL MOYERS: Like this table.
NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: I don't-- we don't know what it is. So I don't even want to use those two words. If anything, it's dark gravity. Because we look in the universe, and we see the effects of gravity, and they say, "Let's add up all the stars and galaxies and planets and comets and black holes, everything we know about, to account for this gravity that we see."
We account for one-sixth of the forces of gravity we see in the universe. There is no known objects accounting for most of the effective gravity in the universe. Something is making stuff move that is not anything we have ever touched.
BILL MOYERS: And that something you call, for lack of a better term?
NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: Dark matter. But that even implies it's matter. What it truly is is dark gravity. Boom. That's a problem that's been around since the 1930s. It's the longest-standing, unsolved problem in astrophysics. So now, dark energy, we look out in the universe, and we expect to see the universe-- our universe is expanding. We've known this since Hubble, the man Hubble, there was a man called Hubble, before he became--
BILL MOYERS: An astronomer.
NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: Before he became a telescope back in the 1920s. And Edwin Hubble, he discovered not only that our galaxy is one of many, he discovered that galaxies are scattering apart from one another. This was the expanding universe in 1929. So when you reveal this, you say, "Okay, if we've been doing this for a while, all those gravities-- all those galaxies are going to feel each other and they're going to ultimately want to slow us down, in this expansion."
So you go out to measure that. And that act led to a measurement that no one believed. That, initially, that the universe is accelerating. It's not slowing down, it's speeding up. These measurements were made back in the 1980s-- back in the 1990s. A Nobel Prize has now been awarded for this discovery, just recently, a couple of years ago. The discovery papers were in 1998. So we don't know what’s going-- some mysterious pressure in the vacuum of space, acting opposite the force of gravity, we don't know what it is. But we can measure its effect.
BILL MOYERS: So you measure it by measuring its impact on something else?
NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: Precisely. An impact on the 4 percent that we can measure.
BILL MOYERS: So it's the pressure that's expanding the universe?
NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: Something, use the word pressure, something is making the universe accelerate again. We know why we got-- we had a big bang! Big Bang put everything into motion. I'm good with that. We're good. It's like me tossing a ball up into the air. It's moving upward even though it's slowing down, okay? Gravity is slowing down that upward motion. We expected gravity to be slowing down the expanding universe. The opposite is happening. We don't know what's causing it.
BILL MOYERS: What is the practical difference it makes, whether or not we find out what dark matter and dark energy are?
NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: If you were around in 1920, maybe you would've been saying, "What's the practical difference of measuring the behavior of atomic nuclei, or atoms? We can't see atoms. Why do I care? This is just wood. This is a wood table. I'm in a leather chair. I'm good to go. Why are you investing so much energy, so much brain energy on understanding what's in the middle of an atom? That seems like a waste of this brilliance.”
In the 1920s, in addition to discovering we're not the only galaxy in the universe, and that the universe is expanding, that's a watershed decade. Because in that decade, quantum physics was discovered. And perhaps if you were around asking me that similar question then, you would've questioned the whole enterprise. Yet today, a third of the GDP of the world is generated on the creation, storage, and retrieval of information.
And the entire IT revolution cannot exist without an understanding of what's going on inside the atom. It is a quantum physics phenomenon. So you ask me, "Of what value?" I have no idea what value. Come back in 50 years, we'll have this conversation, and you’ll pull up the tape, and I will show you asking me of what value is the knowledge of how that works.
BILL MOYERS: One thing I took away from your planetarium show is that dark energy, as you just said, is responsible for the increasing rate at which the universe is pulling itself apart, right?
NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: Yes. So I'd rather word that differently. I would say the universe is accelerating. We call that dark energy. So you're saying dark energy is responsible for that. There's something, whatever it is, we call it dark energy, that's what, that's our placeholder term, to describe what we observe, the acceleration of the universe.
BILL MOYERS: Well, I'm glad you explained that. Because--
NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: By the way, there's-- nothing known will stop this. So there's been some concern that maybe space does not have the flexibility necessary to allow such rapid expansion. And might space tear in some way previously unimagined, and what does that even mean? What-- does the question even have validity? BILL MOYERS:You mean the House of Representatives cannot pass an act that will stop this? As they would like to? No, seriously, I was going to ask you, because if the universe, that term-- if that phrase, if the universe is pulling itself apart, does it ultimately disintegrate? Does it ultimately collapse?
NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: No. There's no evidence to say that we will ever recycle ourselves. All evidence points to we're in a one-way trip to oblivion. So the universe expands, the temperature of the universe drops, all stars eventually will run out of fuel. So the stars, one by one, in the night sky will turn off. And in the extremely distant future, a quadrillion years into the future, there'll be no light coming to us in the day or night sky.
And, because all stars would have died. And all gas clouds would've made stars that would've--were going to make them, and there'd be no more new stars created. And so that the universe will end not with a bang, but with a whimper. And not in fire, but in ice.
BILL MOYERS:But don't worry; we will not leave you out in the cold. We'll be back, in fact, next time with Neil deGrasse Tyson to talk about whether scientists are discovering God in the dark matter that holds the universe together even as it hurtles ever outward from us.
And in the meantime, there’s much more at our website, BillMoyers.com. I’ll see you there and I’ll see you here, next time.
Moyers & Company 140103
BILL MOYERS: Welcome to you and the New Year. An election year for every seat in the House of Representatives, one third of the Senate, 36 governors, and thousands of state legislators. Now, chances are you’re not hearing a lot about those races yet, but in this era of gridlock and dysfunction in Washington, the battle to determine America’s agenda is being fought in state politics.
So on this first weekend of the year, we’re looking at one state that embodies the conflicts roiling the whole country. On one side: a government controlled by the most right-wing conservatives of the Republican Party, who are remaking their state in their image, fueled by the wealth and power of one very rich man. On the other side: a very vocal mix of citizens whose resistance turned the first day of every week into a “Moral Monday.”
Join us for "State of Conflict: North Carolina."
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BILL MOYERS: A Monday in July. Raleigh, North Carolina. A procession moves toward the state house.
REV. WILLIAM BARBER at the NC General Assembly: Forward together.
CROWD at the NC General Assembly: Not one step back.
REV. WILLIAM BARBER at the NC General Assembly: When it comes to education what do we do?
CROWD at the NC General Assembly: We fight, we fight, we fight.
REV. WILLIAM BARBER at the NC General Assembly: When it comes to healthcare what do we do?
CROWD at the NC General Assembly: We fight, we fight, we fight.
CHIEF WEAVER at the NC General Assembly: My name is Chief Weaver of the General Assembly Police. This is unlawful assembly. You have five minutes to disperse and leave the property.
CROWD at the NC General Assembly: We fight, we fight, we fight.
BILL MOYERS: Once inside they block doors and passageways, knowing it will get them arrested. They are part of a movement that’s become known as Moral Mondays.
WOLF BLITZER on CNN: Thousands rallying, protesting at the North Carolina State House for weeks.
NEWSCASTER on MSNBC: It’s been called Moral Mondays, it’s a protest against the state’s government.
NEWSCASTER on CNN: At the Moral Mondays protests here in Raleigh, North Carolina.
REV. WILLIAM BARBER at Moral Mondays Protest: In a state like North Carolina, in the South, turn to your neighbor, say, “We in the South.”
CROWD at Moral Mondays Protest: We in the South.
REV. WILLIAM BARBER at Moral Mondays Protest: Tell the media, this ain’t Wisconsin.
CROWD at Moral Mondays Protest: This ain’t Wisconsin.
REV. WILLIAM BARBER at Moral Mondays Protest: This is the South.
CROWD at Moral Mondays Protest: This is the South.
REV. WILLIAM BARBER at Moral Mondays Protest: Where justice was hammered out.
CROWD at Moral Mondays Protest: Where justice was hammered out.
REV. WILLIAM BARBER at Moral Mondays Protest: Where freedom was hammered out.
CROWD at Moral Mondays Protest: Where freedom was hammered out.
REV. WILLIAM BARBER at Moral Mondays Protest: This is the South.
NEWSCASTER 1 on WRAL: More than a dozen protesters are still in police custody, hours after taking a stand with…
BILL MOYERS: The protests began with a small gathering on a Monday in April. Then, their numbers started growing, Monday after Monday.
NEWSCASTER 2 on WRAL: Each week there are more arrests than the week before. Tonight there were 49.
BILL MOYERS: The rallies kept growing through the spring and the hot Carolina summer.
NEWSCASTER 3 on WRAL: The 13th wave of the Moral Monday protests. Crowds grew so large police had to shut down a portion of Lane Street in downtown Raleigh.
BILL MOYERS: By August, citizens were turning out in town after town across the state.
NEWSCASTER on ABC 13: Ashville Police telling us 5,000 or more gathered here in downtown Asheville.
BILL MOYERS: And the nation was taking notice.
NEWSCASTER on FOX: Moral Monday organizers say the media attention they’re generating outside the General Assembly makes up for much of the political power they lack on the inside.
BILL MOYERS: The protesters are challenging a relentless right-wing crusade to remake the laws of the state.
NEWSCASTER on CBS: In North Carolina, they are trying a new way to get people back to work. They’re cutting off unemployment benefits.
NEWSCASTER on MSNBC: North Carolina passed one of the most restrictive voter suppression bills.
NEWSCASTER 1 on ABC 11: Lawmakers in the statehouse and Senate just voted to prohibit expansion of Medicaid.
NEWSCASTER 2 on ABC 11: Executions will soon resume here in North Carolina.
NEWSCASTER on NBC-CHARLOTTE: Dropping the state income tax and adding a higher sales...
BILL MOYERS: For the first time in almost 150 years, Republicans control the governorship and both houses of the legislature, where they have a veto-proof majority. And they are using their monopoly of power to enact laws the "Charlotte Observer" says “will touch every North Carolinian’s pocketbook, every student’s classroom and every voter’s experience at the polls.”
BOB ZELLNER: The extreme right-wing, they have overstepped so far.
VICKI RYDER: They seem to be targeting those who can least afford to pay for these changes.
WOMAN 1 at Moral Mondays Protest: We’ve just kicked 71,000 of our neighbors off of the benefits that keep roofs over their heads and food on their tables.
MAN 1 at Moral Mondays Protest: What they are doing to public education is a travesty.
WOMAN 2 at Moral Mondays Protest: The legislature wants to lower the age that we can be tried as adults to thirteen.
CROWD at Moral Mondays Protest: Day or night, we stand for what is right.
WOMAN 3 at Moral Mondays Protest: We are here to save the soul of our state.
ROSANELL EATON at Moral Mondays Protest: At the age of 92, I am fed up, and—and fired up. I said fed up.
CROWD at Moral Mondays Protest: Fed up.
ROSANELL EATON at Moral Mondays Protest: Fired up.
CROWD at Moral Mondays Protest: Fired up.
ROSANELL EATON at Moral Mondays Protest: Fed up.
CROWD at Moral Mondays Protest: Fed up.
ROSANELL EATON at Moral Mondays Protest: Fired up.
CROWD at Moral Mondays Protest: Fired up.
ROSANELL EATON at Moral Mondays Protest: Thank you so very much.
ADAM HOCHBERG: North Carolina has in some ways a bipolar political culture.
BILL MOYERS: Adam Hochberg teaches journalism at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.
ADAM HOCHBERG: A lot of people from outside North Carolina, when you say North Carolina, the first thing they think of is Jesse Helms who was of course a stalwart of the hard right and was our senator here for more than twenty years.
SEN. JESSE HELMS: Homosexuals, lesbians, disgusting people marching in our streets, demanding all sorts of things, including the right to marry each other.
ADAM HOCHBERG: On the other hand, North Carolina is the home of a lot of progressive politicians. At the same time that Jesse Helms was in the Senate in the eighties, Terry Sanford was his counterpart in the Senate who is one of best-known southern progressive liberals.
SEN. TERRY SANFORD: We need to remind ourselves that protest, even obnoxious and blood-boiling protest, is the fundamental ingredient of a free people.
REV. WILLIAM BARBER at Moral Mondays Protest: Our state constitution says …
BILL MOYERS: Today the state’s progressive leader is William Barber. Before the right-wing takeover, his coalition had pushed for a string of successful reforms, including raising the minimum wage and measures increasing voter participation.
REV. WILLIAM BARBER: Because this right to vote, and the fight for it, is not just political, it’s personal.
ADAM HOCHBERG: Reverend William Barber is the head of the North Carolina NAACP. He is a, he is a man if you’re ever in the room with him, you’ll know he’s in the room.
REV. WILLIAM BARBER at Moral Mondays Protest: And we have come to serve notice that we will unleash every political legal and moral strategy that we can to create the New South. But we will not go back.
REV. WILLIAM BARBER: Well, fundamentally America constantly finds itself in, where the question is a moral question. How are we going to live out our deepest moral principles of doing justice, loving your neighbor, and what does that mean in terms of our laws and our public policy?
BILL MOYERS: Barber was arrested on the first Moral Monday back in April. On the news he declared he was protesting an avalanche of extremist policies.
REV. WILLIAM BARBER on WRAL: That threaten health care, that threaten education, that threaten the poor.
SUE STURGIS: One of the things that particularly upset people is we saw cuts to long-term unemployment assistance.
BILL MOYERS: Journalist Sue Sturgis covers North Carolina politics for the progressive Institute for Southern Studies, in Durham.
SUE STURGIS: It wasn’t a lot of money in the first place, but it was a safety net. And so one of the things we’ve seen as part of the agenda that’s now being played out in Raleigh is constant snips and cuts and tears to that social safety net. It’s no longer a priority for the people who control the state.
NEWSCASTER on ABC 11: 31 yeses and 17 nos, the vote tonight on Senate Bill 4 to block the expansion of Medicaid.
BILL MOYERS: The Republican refusal to expand Medicaid meant denying health insurance to half a million people.
REV. WILLIAM BARBER: How can you stand up and say I just cut 500,000 people’s access to Medicaid and it’s the moral thing to do?
DR. CHARLES VAN DER HORST: They decided that they’re not going to expand Medicaid. And this was going to do great damage to my patients. And so I take that very personally that I’m not a person who just takes care of hearts and livers, but I need to take care of their, the whole body and the whole person.
BILL MOYERS: Dr. Charles van der Horst is an infectious disease specialist at the University of North Carolina.
DR. CHARLES VAN DER HORST: What had happened is that April 29th, Reverend William Barber, had had a rally against these policies. So I thought, I should check this out. So on Monday, May 6, I went along and ended up doing civil disobedience and getting arrested.
WOMAN IN CROWD at Moral Mondays Protest: Thank you Dr. van der Horst.
DR. CHARLES VAN DER HORST: And I deliberately made some decisions in subsequent rallies that I, I stand next to him. I wanted there to be an old white guy in a white coat with a stethoscope standing next to him.
REV. WILLIAM BARBER at Moral Mondays Protest: We’re going to walk together.
CROWD at Moral Mondays Protest: Walk together.
REV. WILLIAM BARBER at Moral Mondays Protest: And go forward.
CROWD at Moral Mondays Protest: And go forward.
REV. WILLIAM BARBER at Moral Mondays Protest: Until.
CROWD at Moral Mondays Protest: Until.
REV. WILLIAM BARBER at Moral Mondays Protest: Until.
CROWD at Moral Mondays Protest: Until.
REV. WILLIAM BARBER at Moral Mondays Protest: Love is lifted.
CROWD at Moral Mondays Protest: Love is lifted.
REV. WILLIAM BARBER at Moral Mondays Protest: Until.
CROWD at Moral Mondays Protest: Until.
REV. WILLIAM BARBER at Moral Mondays Protest: Justice is realized.
CROWD at Moral Mondays Protest: Justice is realized.
REV. WILLIAM BARBER at Moral Mondays Protest: Don’t ask us…
ARI BERMAN: He’s trying to build a multi-issue, multi-racial coalition in North Carolina.
BILL MOYERS: Ari Berman has been covering the Moral Mondays movement.
ARI BERMAN: There’s this feeling that social justice is under attack and that people have to get in the streets to make people care, to dramatize what’s happening in the state.
CROWD at Moral Mondays Protest: Same struggle, same fight.
CHANT LEADERS at Moral Mondays Protest: Gay, straight, black or white.
CROWD at Moral Mondays Protest: Same struggle, same fight.
BILL MOYERS The conservative ideology the Moral Monday protesters are fighting isn’t new. What’s new is that just about everything on the right-wing wish list for the past four decades is at last becoming reality. Just as Art Pope planned.
BILL MAHER on Real Time with Bill Maher: What happened in North Carolina? Well, his name is Art Pope. That’s what happened.
ART POPE: I’m Art Pope and I’m a job creator.
CROWD protesting Art Pope Hey hey, ho ho, Art Pope has got to go!
BILL MOYERS: In public, the man most often fingered as the mastermind of the right-wing take-over presents himself as just a low-key member of the governor’s cabinet, running the numbers like an earnest accountant:
ART POPE on WRAL: This budget anticipates revenue neutral tax reform.
BILL MOYERS: He’s self-effacing.
NEWSCASTER on ABC 11: Are you the rainmaker of the North Carolina Republican Party?
ART POPE on ABC 11: No the voters are the rainmaker of the North Carolina Republican Party.
BILL MOYERS But Art Pope wields so much power here that he’s been called everything from kingmaker to king. Pope is very, very rich. And he has shelled out so many millions of dollars for conservative causes and Republican candidates that his adversaries accuse him of buying the state government. Pope claims that’s not what the money’s for.
ART POPE on WRAL: Of course I think it has an impact. But the impact is educating the voters on the issues so they hear both sides of the issues not just one side.
JANE MAYER: There are wealthy individuals who have outsized influence in many states. Usually there’s a handful of them.
BILL MOYERS: Jane Mayer, of "The New Yorker," was the first national journalist to investigate Pope’s power.
JANE MAYER: But he really dominates the landscape in North Carolina in a way that nobody else does.
BILL MOYERS: That’s because he practices the golden rule of modern politics: he with the gold, rules. And Art Pope has the money: his own, his company’s money, and money from the John William Pope Foundation, named for his wealthy businessman father. That single foundation has spent some 46 million dollars on a network of advocacy groups and think tanks bent on steering North Carolina far to the right. Sound familiar?
SUE STURGIS: When people talk about Art Pope, someone who’s often invoked are the Koch brothers, David and Charles Koch, who also run a privately held company and spend a great deal to promote their particular brand of libertarian politics. And he’s very close to the Kochs. He served as a board member of Americans for Prosperity, which is a conservative policy advocacy group that was founded and is funded by the Koch brothers.
JANE MAYER: In some ways, Art Pope is sort of a, a junior-sized version of the Koch brothers. He has what some people call kind of a factory production line for his ideology. The people that work for his think tanks are on the radio, they have websites, they have publications that are statewide. They get their message out all the time.
BILLL MOYERS: Like this message, aimed right at the Moral Mondays protesters.
FRANCIS DE LUCA in Money Monday, Not Moral Monday: Backed by a supportive liberal media, hundreds have been arrested for disrupting the state legislature.
BILL MOYERS: It accuses protest leaders of marching to protect access to government handouts.
FRANCIS DE LUCA in Money Monday, Not Moral Monday: These organizations are fighting to keep their spot at the public trough. Welcome to Money Mondays.
BILL MOYERS: Francis De Luca once ran the North Carolina chapter of the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity. He’s now head of the John William Pope Civitas Institute.
FRANCIS DE LUCA: So Civitas Institute is heavily funded by the Pope Foundation, but I can tell you having now worked at Civitas for seven years and run it for almost six years, Art Pope’s control over Civitas is very little. He likes policy. I always try to describe Art as a policy wonk. He believes in a vigorous debate, even among his different groups. If you check, you will notice that our groups do not always agree. The groups he’s fund do not always agree on policy.
BILL MOYERS: Perhaps not always, but certainly often enough. For example, on cutting tax rates for corporations and the rich, which is exactly what the state recently did. By 2015, the highest earning North Carolinians will pay almost 26 percent less in income taxes than they did in 2013. Corporations will pay over 27 percent less. There’s also been a repeal of the estate tax, which applied only to people so wealthy, that just 23 families had paid it in the year 2011. When corporate and wealthy interests are at stake, Art Pope is right at home.
Where did Art Pope get the money – and the ideas – that have reshaped the politics of North Carolina?
The story begins when he was young man.
JANE MAYER: He was a very intellectual kid and very early on he went to a summer program that was run by the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank and he was quite swept up with libertarian ideology and the ideas of Ayn Rand. Once he was through college and he went to Duke Law School he eventually became the general counsel in the family firm, and then he rose in the firm.
BILL MOYERS: All the way to the top, becoming CEO of that family firm.
SUE STURGIS: It’s a privately held company called Variety Wholesalers. It was started by his forebears. It’s a discount retail chain.
ADAM HOCHBERG: These are usually lower end discount stores than, than a Target or even a Walmart or a K-Mart store. They go by a variety of different names. One of the largest chains he owns is called Rose’s. There’s one called Maxway. He has great personal wealth and great family wealth.
JANE MAYER: And he had great political ambitions.
SUE STURGIS: Pope served in the legislature for several terms back in the 1980s and into the ‘90s.
ADAM HOCHBERG: Art is a, he’s a very bright man and he knows the state budget and he knows numbers inside and out, but he is not what you call the stereotypic political candidate. You know the smiling telegenic politician. And after a couple years he ran for lieutenant governor and lost, badly. And he realized he was not going to influence North Carolina politics by being lieutenant governor or governor. He was just unlikely to get elected.
BILL MOYERS: Turns out he didn’t need to get elected to win elections. He just had to put his money in where it counted. He first set out to purge moderate Republicans from the state assembly by supporting candidates to their right in GOP primaries. And then, in 20l0 he took on the Democrats, who played right into his hands.
SUE STURGIS: The Democrats were in disarray in 2010. There had been a series of scandals in the party. Corruption scandals.
BILL MOYERS: A Democratic governor had pled guilty to a felony campaign finance charge. And that wasn’t all.
ADAM HOCHBERG: We had a Democratic Speaker of the House go to prison on a bribery scheme. I mean there was a lot of, a lot of sleaze in the Democratic Party. We saw a backlash against President Obama and Obamacare, which is the same thing we saw nationally. We saw frustration over a lousy economy, which was the same thing we saw nationally.
SUE STURGIS: Also that election was right after the Citizens United Supreme Court decision that opened up the door to outside money.
BILL MOYERS: That Citizens United decision, the handiwork of the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, enabled corporations and individuals to spend unlimited amounts of often untraceable money—what’s now called “dark money.”
JANE MAYER: He provided a perfect example of how the landscape had changed after the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling.
ART POPE on C-SPAN: Well, break those numbers up.
JANE MAYER: He saw the opportunities and he had the cash because of his family fortune. Art Pope is a very smart man who is, almost thinks about the world almost like an engineer. And it’s as if somebody had looked at the map in every single district and figured out what it would take to get Republican control. And so he along with some of the people he was working with targeted legislative races to pour money into.
BILL MOYERS: One of their vessels was a front group called Real Jobs NC. Co-founded by Art Pope, and bankrolled by one of his companies and a national Republican group, its real job was to demolish the other side. And in 20l0 it went on the attack.
ANNOUNCER in Real Jobs NC Campaign AD 1: Putting Raleigh Liberals first.
ANNOUNCER in Real Jobs NC Campaign AD 2: Their high taxes and wasteful spending cost us jobs.
ANNOUNCER in Real Jobs NC Campaign AD 3: Her priorities are costing us jobs.
ANNOUNCER in Real Jobs NC Campaign AD 4: Real Jobs NC sponsored this ad.
SUE STURGIS: That year he and his family and also the outside spending groups that he’s associated with spent 2.2 million on state legislative races.
JANE MAYER: Which in the national scheme of things is not a tremendous amount of money, but in the context of a state, and in the context of state legislative races where really there’s not usually that much money spent, it—it was decisive.
NEWSCASTER on WRAL: Tonight’s shift in power is historic. The Republicans have taken control of both chambers for the first…
NEWSCASTER 1 on ABC 11: Republicans are now in control for the first time in more than a century.
NEWSCASTER 2 on ABC 11: So how big of a role does Pope himself think he played?
ART POPE on ABC 11: I supported 19 Republican legislative candidates that I contributed to and 17 of those won.
NEWSCASTER 2 on ABC 11: That’s a pretty good track record.
ART POPE on ABC 11: I’m glad.
ADAM HOCHBERG: The 2010 election, Republicans got control of both houses of the state legislature, first time since just after the Civil War.
SUE STURGIS: And the Republicans were very smart. You know they, they realized that there was an opportunity there. Whoever controlled the legislature in 2010 would control the state’s political future.
BILL MOYERS: The winners would control the future because 2010 was a census year – the first in a decade.
ADAM HOCHBERG: That means they get to control the redistricting process. So as you can imagine, that’s an opportunity for legislators to do some pretty self-serving things, and it was the same thing when Democrats were in charge. With computers nowadays you can get very specific about every house that’s included in the district, and you can know, what’s a Republican neighborhood, what’s a Democratic neighborhood, so you can look up at an individual house and say, okay, the man of the house is a Republican, and the lady of the house is a Democrat, and I see they have one adult son living at home and he’s also a Republican, I mean you can do it to that level. And you can draw districts in such a way that pretty much foretells which party is going to control that district. And what the Republicans did was draw districts as best they could to elect Republicans.
BILL MOYERS: They had help, according to the investigative group ProPublica. Help in the form of dark money from outside sources and Republican operatives down from Washington to help figure out the boundaries most favorable to their party. But there was someone else in the room, too. Art Pope. One person present told "ProPublica:" "we worked together at the workstation … he sat next to me." When the next election came around, 2012, the gerrymandering worked like a charm.
ADAM HOCHBERG: The 2012 election occurs and it is the best election for Republicans in modern history in North Carolina. They take not just control of both houses of the state legislature, and they had not done that in a century, but they take overwhelming control. They take a veto-proof majority control of both houses of the legislature. They also get the governor’s mansion back for the first time in 20 years.
GOV. PAT MCCRORY in Campaign Ad: Let’s forget about politics for a while, and think about us. That’s what we tried in Charlotte when I was mayor.
BILL MOYERS: As mayor of Charlotte, Pat McCrory was known to be a fiscal conservative, but on other issues, fairly moderate for a southern Republican.
GOV. PAT MCCRORY in Campaign Ad: I’m Pat McCrory and I’m running for governor.
ADAM HOCHBERG: Governor McCrory in one of the debates before the 2012 election was specifically asked by somebody on the panel in a televised debate, would you sign any measures to further restrict abortion in North Carolina, and he said flat out no.
DEBATE QUESTIONER LAURA LESLIE If you’re elected Governor, what further restrictions on abortion would you agree to sign? We’ll start with you, Mr. McCrory.
GOV. PAT MCCRORY in 2012 gubernatorial debate: None.
DEBATE QUESTIONER LAURA LESLIE: All right.
BILL MOYERS: But once in office McCrory swung hard to the right, beginning with the casual announcement of a key appointment.
GOV. PAT MCCRORY on WRAL: Art Pope has agreed to serve as my deputy budget director.
BILL MOYERS: Say what?
GOV. PAT MCCRORY on WRAL: Art Pope has agreed to serve as my deputy budget director.
BILL MOYERS: An innocuous title, masking a startling reality. The man who for years had poured money into those right wing think tanks into the Republican Party, and into Republican campaigns – including Pat McCrory’s -- would now be the governor’s man overseeing the state budget.
VICKI RYDER: His power is, is tremendous and very frightening to me that people can buy their way into that kind of power in what’s supposed to be a people’s democracy.
THE RAGING GRANNIES at Moral Mondays Protest: We’re the Raging Grannies…
BILL MOYERS: Vicki Ryder sings at Moral Monday protests with a group called “The Raging Grannies.”
THE RAGING GRANNIES at Moral Mondays Protest: To think that men in suits might take our voting rights away.
BILL MOYERS: Several years ago she moved from New York to North Carolina.
VICKI RYDER: After my husband and I retired, we were looking for a place to live that would be supportive of our values. And the Triangle region of North Carolina seemed to be a good fit for us. So we have just been shocked by how quickly things have turned from a very progressive atmosphere to one of extraordinary regression.
BILL MOYERS: Conservatives were getting the results they had been praying for. Some examples. Seventy five percent of the tax cuts went to the top 5 percent of taxpayers. Anyone making more than, say, $250,000 a year would now pay a state income tax rate at the same level as those making $25,000. Earned income tax credits for the poor were cut. Budgets were cut for at-risk kids in pre-K even as vouchers were given to private schools. Unemployment insurance was cut – with a bill crafted by the North Carolina Chamber of Commerce. And in Art Pope’s budget, the state’s higher education system took a hit of 64 million.
ADAM HOCHBERG: You’ve traditionally had a lot of support for education in North Carolina, especially for a southern state. And I think it’s something that a lot of North Carolinians take, take pride in, not just, you know, pointy-headed liberal intellectuals, but a lot of people in the business community too. And I don’t think you’ll find even among Republican business leaders this attitude of marginalizing higher education that you have seen from the state capital. One of the first things that Governor McCrory did, one of the first controversies he got involved with as governor is he went on a conservative radio show, a national show, and took some swipes at the university and said, there are too many degrees in liberal arts, and he said, if you want to get a degree in gender studies, go to private school and do it, the people of North Carolina don’t want to pay for that.
GOV. PAT MCCRORY on Bill Bennett’s Morning in America: That's a subsidized course, and frankly if you want to take gender studies that's fine, go to a private school and take it, but I don't want to subsidize that if that's not going to get someone a job.
MOLLY MCDONOUGH: And he said that if you wanted to study these things that you should go to a private college rather than a, rather than a public one, which is not an option for so many of us.
BILL MOYERS: Molly McDonough grew up in Chapel Hill. She’s a sophomore at North Carolina State University.
GOV. PAT MCCRORY on Bill Bennett’s Morning in America: I'm looking at legislation right now in fact, I just instructed my staff yesterday, go ahead and develop legislation which would change the basic formula in how education money is given out to our universities and our community colleges.
BILL BENNETT on Bill Bennett’s Morning in America: Great, great.
GOV. PAT MCCRORY on Bill Bennett’s Morning in America It's not based upon how many butts in seats, but how many of those butts can get jobs.
BILL BENNETT on Bill Bennett’s Morning in America: Excellent. How many employable butts. Okay.
MOLLY MCDONOUGH: I can’t remember the exact quote, but he said, it was something weird. It was about like all the butts in seats need a job.
MOLLY MCDONOUGH at Moral Mondays My name is Molly McDonough. And I am 18 years old. So when I told my friends and my family that I was planning to get arrested, they were all very concerned about my future. And my response to that was I am doing this so that I can have a future.
BILL MOYERS: The budget did more than strip cash from education. Among other things, it got rid of jobs for environmental regulators, cut funds for drug addiction treatment, even funds that help people with AIDS buy drugs – the costly ones that would keep them alive. Sean Gorman is a hemophiliac, who got HIV from a blood transfusion. He’s been treated by Dr. Charles van der Horst since 1985.
DR. CHARLES VAN DER HORST: Again. And he was desperately ill very early with all sorts of horrible, horrible infections, including you had CMV retinitis.
SEAN GORMAN: Yeah, that’s how I lost this eye. I don't have vision in this eye.
BILL MOYERS: Gorman gets his medicine through a program called “AIDS Drug Assistance Program” – “ADAP.”
DR. CHARLES VAN DER HORST: Deep breath.
BILL MOYERS: The Art Pope budget cuts 8 million dollars from ADAP. And advocates say that’s enough to prevent some 900 future AIDS patients from getting the life-saving drugs they need through the program.
SEAN GORMAN: You know, people won’t be able to buy their, you know, to afford to get their medications, then they’ll do without, and then they’ll get some crazy opportunistic disease, go into the hospital and have huge hospital bills which they won’t be able to pay for.
DR. CHARLES VAN DER HORST: Right. The average hospital admission would be something like $100,000 for an opportunistic infection.
Who’s going to pay for that? Well you and I will pay for that. That comes out our health insurance costs. So not only is it not being a good, moral person to take care of them, it economically makes no sense.
SEAN GORMAN: Alright, we’ll see you in six months.
DR. CHARLES VAN DER HORST: Yeah, take care.
SEAN GORMAN: All right, thank you.
DR. CHARLES VAN DER HORST: Good luck. Bye bye.
SEAN GORMAN: Yep, thank you. Bye bye.
BILL MOYERS: There have been other dramatic changes. For one, the election of state judges.
REP. PRICEY HARRISON: I believe we were the first state in the country to enact public financing for our appellate court races, the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court. And the rationale was we didn’t want judges running who were going to be getting money from the lawyers who were going to be appearing before them to finance their campaigns.
SUE STURGIS: And it worked very well and it’s been very popular. Democrats and Republicans, men and women, black and white, across the board it was a very popular program.
BILL MOYERS: But popular or not, the Art Pope network wanted it gone. And the Republicans killed that clean elections system for judges.
DEBATE QUESTIONER LAURA LESLIE: What further restrictions on abortion would you agree to sign?
BILL MOYERS: Then there’s abortion rights.
DEBATE QUESTIONER LAURA LESLIE: We’ll start with you Mr. McCrory.
GOV. PAT MCCRORY: None.
BILL MOYERS: Remember that campaign promise candidate McCrory made in 2012? Well in 2013, Governor McCrory was singing a different tune.
NEWSCASTER on NBC-CHARLOTTE: He says he’ll sign a controversial abortion bill into law. Protesters tell NBC-Charlotte reporter Rad Berky that is a broken promise.
REP. PRICEY HARRISON: Basically the impact will be that 15 of the 16 clinics left in the state that provide abortions will have to shut down under the new standards.
CROWD at Moral Mondays Protest: Hey hey, ho ho, Pat McCrory has got to go! Hey hey, ho ho, Pat McCrory has got to go!
BILL MOYERS: Moral Monday protesters say they barely recognize their state under the current regime. What has outraged them most is the state’s new voting law, which cuts right to the heart of democracy.
CHANT LEADERS at Moral Mondays Protest: When voting rights are under attack, what do we do?
CROWD at Moral Mondays Protest: Stand up, fight back!
CHANT LEADERS at Moral Mondays Protest: When voting rights are under attack, what do we do?
CROWD at Moral Mondays Protest: Stand up, fight back!
BILL MOYERS: To understand their outrage, you need to know a little history.
ARI BERMAN: For a long time, North Carolina didn’t really have a very strong voter turnout.
BILL MOYERS: Journalist Ari Berman is writing a book about voting rights.
ARI BERMAN: And then they did a number of things after the 2000 election to make it easier for people to vote, they, for example, expanded early voting, they allowed same day voter registration during that early voting period, and those kind of things started to propel North Carolina forward in terms of voter turnout.
BILL MOYERS: Those voting reforms were on display during the presidential election of 2008, when North Carolina swung toward the Democrats for the first time in decades – not least because early voting brought more people to the polls.
RACHEL MADDOW on MSNBC: On election day itself there were actually more votes cast for John McCain than there were for Barack Obama, but Obama still won the state because […] more than half of all North Carolina voters in 2008 voted early, and early voters ultimately put Obama over the top.
ARI BERMAN: And so I think Republicans said we need to down some of these voters. We need to make it so that the electorate is older, whiter, more conservative, not younger and more diverse.
BILL MOYERS: And how better to do that, than to push for strict voter ID requirements? And in 2008, that’s exactly what the Pope network began to do.
SUE STURGIS: There just has not been any kind of widespread voter fraud, but they repeatedly raise it as a concern in order to build a case for voter ID laws.
ARI BERMAN: Then you had candidates who are funded by Pope who said the same thing, so that there was some perception among elected officials that voter fraud was a problem even though it wasn’t.
REP. TOM MURRY In order to restore confidence and accountability to our elections, we need voter ID.
ARI BERMAN: And pass this anti-voting legislation, essentially based on the manufactured outrage that Pope had ginned up.
BILL MOYERS: In 2013 the right-wing legislature passed a new law that critics called a voter suppression act – in part because its requirement for ID cards is most likely to affect the young, elderly, poor and minority voters. And there’s more.
ARI BERMAN: They cut a week off of early voting, they eliminated same day registration during that early voting period, they expanded the number of poll watchers that can challenge eligible voters on election day. At the same time they were eliminating pre-registration for 16 and 17 year-olds.
FRANCIS DE LUCA: One of the changes in the bill was this thing they called preregistration, where they registered 16 and 17 year-olds using the schools to register them. You know, I like to call this the “pedophilia enabling act.” Where in the world can I go on a government website and find a list of 16 year-olds and their home addresses? I can go to the state board of elections. If you walked into a school and asked for that list, not only would you not get it, you would probably be arrested. And they would send police to your home and say why do you want a list of all our 16 year-olds in the school?
ARI BERMAN: There is really no evidence that pre-registering 16 and 17 year-olds endangers their security, there’s no evidence that it leads to voter fraud. And so to get rid of something like that I think sends a very bad message to the young people in North Carolina.
REP. PRICEY HARRISON: And I think that it’s unfortunate because it’s, it seems to be part and parcel of pattern to make it much more difficult for a particular demographic to vote. And I guess I would say the bill is designed to make it more difficult for Democrats to vote basically.
BILL MOYERS: If you don’t want to take that from a Democratic legislator like Pricey Harrison, take it from a Republican county executive, Don Yelton, who admitted as much in his now infamous appearance on the Daily Show.
DON YELTON on The Daily Show: The law is going to kick the Democrats in the butt. If it hurts a bunch of college kids that’s too lazy to get up off their bohunkus and go get a photo ID, so be it.
AASIF MANDVI on The Daily Show: Right, right.
DON YELTON on The Daily Show: If it hurts the whites so be it. If it hurts a bunch of lazy blacks that wants the government to give them everything, so be it.
BILL MOYERS: Almost immediately, Yelton was forced to resign his position in the Republican Party.
ROSANELL EATON: Good evening everybody.
CROWD at Moral Mondays Protest: Good evening.
ROSANELL EATON at Moral Mondays Protest: I am Rosanell Eaton, 92 years old. A citizen of Franklin County. I am before you today to speak on voting rights. We need more, not less, public access to the ballot.
BILL MOYERS: Her name is Rosanell Eaton, and she has a very long memory, including crosses burning on her lawn and Jim Crow laws forcing segregation on black Americans far into the 20th century.
ARMENTA EATON: My mother, Rosanell, always believed that everybody should have the right to vote. She’s registered approximately, probably over 4,000 people. She got an award for that. She was awarded what is called the Invisible Giant Award. She would always have her little forms with her, she even has them now when she doesn’t really necessarily have to, but she wants to make sure that everybody—if she’s to see a person, she might ask them if they’re registered to vote.
BILL MOYERS: When she first registered to vote as a young woman, she faced a group of white men who put her to a test reserved for African Americans: she was told if she wanted to vote, she’d have to recite the preamble to the US Constitution.
ROSANELL EATON at Moral Mondays Protest: One of the men told me, stand up straight against that wall with your eyes looking directly toward me, and repeat the Preamble of the United States of America. Without missing a word, I did it.
ARMENTA EATON: All right, ready to roll.
And it really bothers her that voter suppression coming right back in the year 2013. She just never thought she’d have to be fighting this battle just on another type of turf.
REV. WILLIAM BARBER at the N.C. General Assembly: Bring it down, bring it down. Everybody listen up.
ROSANELL EATON at the N.C. General Assembly: So let me tell you people.
REV. WILLIAM BARBER at the N.C. General Assembly: So let me tell you.
ROSANELL EATON at the N.C. General Assembly: There’s nobody in here I know that’s any older than I am.
REV. WILLIAM BARBER at the NC General Assembly: There’s nobody in here any older than I am.
ROSANELL EATON at the NC General Assembly: But you need to get involved.
REV. WILLIAM BARBER at the NC General Assembly: Get involved.
ROSANELL EATON at the NC General Assembly: When something comes up, you be involved.
REV. WILLIAM BARBER at the NC General Assembly: When something comes up, you be involved.
ROSANELL EATON at the NC General Assembly: You won’t have to learn—
REV. WILLIAM BARBER at the NC General Assembly: You—
ROSANELL EATON at the NC General Assembly: You won’t have to learn new strategy.
REV. WILLIAM BARBER at the NC General Assembly: You don’t have to learn new strategy.
ROSANELL EATON at the NC General Assembly: Be ready for them.
REV. WILLIAM BARBER at the NC General Assembly: Just be ready for them.
ROSANELL EATON at the NC General Assembly: So you all just keep on.
REV. WILLIAM BARBER at the NC General Assembly: Keep on.
POLICE OFFICER at the NC General Assembly: …General Assembly Police. You have two minutes to disperse or you will be arrested. Two minutes.
BILL MOYERS: On June 24th, 2013, Rosanell Eaton was arrested at the state legislature and charged with trespassing. Vicki Ryder was arrested in July.
VICKI RYDER: I think one of the things frankly that bothers me the most about what’s happening is that we fought that fight. You know, I was there in Washington, DC 50 years ago when Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. And we thought that we were making some progress.
BILL MOYERS: It’s a common theme among the protesters that today’s battles hark back to earlier ones, in the Civil Rights movement.
ARI BERMAN: Remember, North Carolina was where the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC, started. Those sit-ins in Greensboro inspired the modern civil rights movement of the 1960s. And so there’s a long history in North Carolina of civil rights activism and some of those very activists, people like Bob Zellner of SNCC, have been extremely active in the Moral Monday movement today.
CROWD at Moral Mondays Protest: Hey hey, ho ho, Pat McCrory has got to go.
BOB ZELLNER: Well I grew up in L.A., in Lower Alabama. I was the first white southern field secretary for SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and I was one of the first seventeen that were arrested in Moral Monday.
CROWD at Moral Mondays Protest: We fight, we fight, we fight.
BOB ZELLNER: Our purpose in life is to work for those who are powerless. And what’s happening now in the Moral Monday movement is on the same moral plane as what happened in the civil rights movement.
FRANCIS DE LUCA: I got to say I think this is laughable. We’re talking about the people in the civil rights era, we’re talking about people being beaten, we’re talking about people, when they were put in jail, they didn’t get out of jail in time to go eat dinner that night. I am not questioning the individuals, why they’re doing it in their motivation, I am questioning the ones who try and equate it with the ‘60s and ‘50s and some of the great struggles in history.
BILL MOYERS: Protesters, however say the Pope-funded Civitas Institute itself has reached back to the past and dredged up an ugly tactic used against civil rights activists.
DR. CHARLES VAN DER HORST: So what they did, they put all our names, our occupations, our age, our race, party affiliation, and our employer, and our salary if we were public employees.
FRANCIS DE LUCA: And we put all that up there, and we put up their party registration, which we just cross-checked, public record, to help identify what they were.
SUE STURGIS: It really hearkened back, and this is what really upset people a lot, it really hearkened back to a strategy that we saw during the mid-20th century civil rights movement where people protesting Jim Crow, who were signing petitions against segregation would have their names pulled off those petitions and put in the newspaper. And it was a way to encourage retaliation against them. Not necessarily violent retaliation, but you know the employer might see your name there and maybe didn’t want to hire a troublemaker.
FRANCIS DE LUCA: You know I just don’t understand that thing that on one hand, you’re publicizing how you got arrested but on the other hand if we say it, it’s intimidation.
BILL MOYERS: There’s also an interactive feature on the Civitas site.
MOLLY MCDONOUGH: Like there’s this game called “pick the protestor” where it has like three mug shots and it’s like, which person is retired? Which person lives in Chapel Hill? Which person has the last name of McDonough? And you click on the mug shot of the person you think it is.
BILL MOYERS: Francis De Luca says the game is a “fun” way to get people to interact with the site, and to prove that the protesters don’t really represent North Carolina – that they are disproportionately white Democrats, with more clergy and public sector workers than the state as a whole. The protesters say they indeed represent their state’s diversity. And that parts of the database are skewed.
MOLLY MCDONOUGH: I looked myself up and they have some inaccurate information there. They, they have one section of the spreadsheets that are voting discrepancies, and so they say that I’m a registered Democrat which I am and then they say that I am registered to vote at the wrong address. Now what they either didn’t take into account or didn’t, you know, care to think through is that I’m a student. In November I live in Raleigh on NC State campus, and my permanent address is in Chapel Hill. And so when I got arrested I put down the address that they will always be able to contact me through which is my mother’s address. And that’s not where I registered to vote.
FRANCIS DE LUCA: You vote where you live. If I tell you, if I registered to vote, I can tell you, if I get arrested, it’s going to be the same place. My home address is the same place I vote. I mean that’s how it’s supposed to be that your domicile is where you vote so if I’m telling you I get, when I get arrested I actually live somewhere else, but my registration is over here, then one of those two things is a lie.
DR. CHARLES VAN DER HORST: I think their intention was to intimidate others from committing acts of civil disobedience. And instead it’s had the reverse effect.
REV. WILLIAM BARBER at Moral Mondays Gathering: Mr. Pope, it’s a waste of your money. See they want us to come here today and be all upset about this site. They want to sucker us into a back and forth about people on a website so they can take the focus off the policies being passed and signed by them in the General Assembly and in the Governor’s office. But it will not work.
BILL MOYERS: But so far, what North Carolina’s far right government is doing is working.
MAN at NC General Assembly: Clerk will allow the machine to record the vote. 84 have voted in the affirmative, 32 in the negative. The motion passes.
BILL MOYERS: Protesters are powerless to stop the passage of a single law.
REV. WILLIAM BARBER at Moral Mondays Protest: Not going back.
BILL MOYERS: It’s true they aren’t giving up.
REV. WILLIAM BARBER at Moral Mondays Protest: And so turn to your neighbor and say, let us not despair.
MOLLY MCDONOUGH AND HER SISTER at Moral Mondays Protest: Let us not despair.
BILL MOYERS: But neither are Art Pope, the governor, and the veto-proof legislature.
JANE MAYER: Well, I think what’s important is that what Art Pope has done in North Carolina could be done pretty much in any state. He’s shown that one really wealthy individual can almost rule.
BILL MOYERS: And so we enter 2014 with one more reminder that America is a country where the wealthy almost rule. Money talks. Although when we offered Mr. Pope and Governor McCrory an opportunity to be interviewed for our report, they didn’t respond.
Luckily, some people are much more vocal -- fighting back, saying enough is enough. And I don’t just mean the Moral Mondays protestors. The U.S. Justice Department is challenging North Carolina’s restrictive new voting law, arguing that it will have a disproportionate impact on minorities. And those new gerrymandered districts, engineered with Art Pope sitting in the room to ensure Republican dominance, are also being challenged in North Carolina’s own Supreme Court. The charge is that they’re race-based, and therefore unconstitutional. Yet even there, in the state’s highest court, money may affect the outcome. Take a look.
A Republican political action committee in Washington sends over a million dollars to a political action committee in North Carolina called Justice For All NC. That group then sends over a million dollars to a Super PAC called North Carolina Judicial Coalition, which spends over a million dollars supporting Justice Newby’s re-election.
Now that Republican political action committee in Washington where the money started is the same one North Carolinian Republicans worked with to gerrymander the state. That plan is being challenged by citizen groups as race-based and unconstitutional. So where do these citizens turn to seek justice? To the very state Supreme Court, one of whose members was re-elected with money from the partisans who drew up the redistricting in the first place. Justice can't be more corrupted than that. But when money rules, nothing is sacred, or cheap.
Which could explain why Art Pope, as we reported earlier, has waged a long crusade to kill the state’s popular system of public funding for judicial races – a system created to prevent rich people like pope and corporations from buying justice.
Last summer, Pope succeeded, opening North Carolina's highest court to the highest bidders.
Katie bar the door – except that no matter which door we’re talking about, Art Pope has the key to it. And possibly to the future.
Take the firepower of the rich, pour in heaps of dark money loosed by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, add generous doses of fervent ideology, and presto: the battle for American politics and governance is joined. And every state becomes North Carolina, including yours.
TITLE CARD: "State of Conflict" is a collaboration between Okapi Productions, LLC, and the Schumann Media Center, Inc., headed by Bill Moyers, which supports independent journalism.
BILL MOYERS: There’s a reason to keep fighting against the powers that be. Because no matter the setbacks or the years it may take, you can win. Remember when we introduced you to Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner? They’re public health historians who never quit even the giants of industry try to silence them. Their book "Deceit and Denial," for example, told how chemical companies concealed the truth about toxins in our food, water, and air. The companies responded with a vicious attack to discredit them, and failed. They were targets again when their most recent book, "Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America’s Children," warned that kids can still be harmed by lead.
GERALD MARKOWITZ on Moyers & Company: Scientists now say that it is very likely there is no safe level of lead, that any amount of lead in a child’s body, in a child’s blood, you know, causes a variety of neurological and intellectual problems.
DAVID ROSNER on Moyers & Company: The message really should be is we need to really think of lead as one symbol, one symptom of this much larger problem of the pollution of our children, pollution of their lives, the pollution of all of us from a whole host of toxic materials that we are, we've grown accustomed to using.
BILL MOYERS: Markowitz and Rosner are often called as expert witnesses for the prosecution, including one lawsuit in Rhode Island that went to trial in 2005. Decaying paint left a deadly toxic mess in Rhode Island homes. The state Attorney General demanded that the paint companies be held responsible for cleaning it up.
DAVID ROSNER on Moyers & Company: Our documents showed that they had known about what they were creating, they'd known that children would be poisoned, they were discussing children dying as early as the 1920s and '30s, and yet they had created this huge environmental mess of millions and millions of pounds on the walls of Rhode Island, all of which was waiting to poison future generations. And that they had done nothing about it, they continued to market. And that’s really, I think, enraged the jury.
GERALD MARKOWITZ on Moyers & Company: And we were thrilled, just thrilled when at the end of this trial the jury came back and for the first time in lead industry lawsuits they held three lead companies responsible for cleaning up the mess, in the form of lead paint on the walls of houses throughout Rhode Island.
BILL MOYERS: But two years later that groundbreaking decision was overturned by the state supreme court. Yet, when Markowitz and Rosner spoke with us last spring, they were hopeful that a similar lawsuit in California might succeed where Rhode Island had failed.
DAVID ROSNER on Moyers & Company: The Supreme Court of Rhode Island had said this can't go under, there is no standing in future generations to get damages from these companies because they haven't been damaged yet. Until the kids are damaged you can't actually sue. And California has said that absolutely, public health law is all based upon preventing disease. All regulations are in order to prevent future damage, therefore it can go forward in California.
BILL MOYERS: And go forward it did, against more stiff opposition from the industry that denied ever having deliberately sold a harmful product. And yet, documents discovered by Rosner and Markowitz dating back as far as 1900 showed otherwise. Including one company’s admission that lead paint was a “deadly cumulative poison.” Unbelievably, the industry would go on to advertise that it was safe for children.
DAVID ROSNER on Moyers & Company: And they show these ads in which children are painting their toys, painting their cabinets, painting their walls, painting their furniture with a poison. At the same time when in their own internal documents they’re saying, we have these examples, we have, we’re being attacked because children and babies are getting poisoned by lead on their cribs.
BILL MOYERS: Finally, last month, success. That historical record helped convince a California Superior Court justice who wrote in his decision that, “In the 1920s, scientists from the Paint Manufacturers Association reported that lead paint used on the interiors of homes would deteriorate, and that lead dust resulting from this deterioration would poison children and cause serious injury.” The companies just never bothered to warn the public. And even though lead was banned from paint back in 1977, the industry continues to deny accountability and has defeated some 50 lawsuits nationwide. The California judge ruled that three companies must pay $1.1 billion dollars to remove lead paint in some 5 million homes. The companies will appeal. No surprise to Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner.
ROSNER on Moyers & Company: You know, in our lifetime we have seen the abandonment of the commitment to try to help those who are most vulnerable in our society. And instead of that commitment today we ask how much does it cost. And by that we mean how many dollars does it cost. We don’t ask what does it cost in terms of the health of our children, what does it cost in terms of the futures of our children and our society.
BILL MOYERS: So take a lesson from these two citizens who keep fighting for that future against the might of greed and power. Don’t give up. Fight on. You just might win.
At our website, BillMoyers.com, you can read more about the California lead paint lawsuit and also see last year’s complete interview with Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner. There’s also more about the political struggle in North Carolina.
That’s all at BillMoyers.com. I’ll see you there and I’ll see you here, next time.
Happy New Year.
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