"Corporations are people, my friends": In advance of Wednesday's presidential debate, Obama for America has released a new web video to lay out the facts about Mitt Romney's private sector experience. As Valerie Burton, who lost her job to Bain’s business practices explains, “I really feel in my heart people ought to know what Mitt Romney did.”

At Bain, Romney did not work to create jobs, but instead to create wealth for himself and his partners. As a corporate buyout specialist, Romney led Bain Capital to load companies up with debt, driving several into bankruptcy. Thousands of American workers lost their jobs while Mitt Romney and his investors walked away with millions.

It is these men and women, who lost their jobs because of Bain, who can best express what Mitt Romney is referring to when he talks about his business experience, and, just a few days out from the first presidential debate, why he must not be president.

As some Americans decide who to cast their vote for in November because some still mistakenly believe that because Mitt Romney is a wealthy businessman, that he would know how to create jobs and return us all to prosperity more rapidly. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Romney is a job destroyer who picks the wealth from prospering companies and leaves nothing behind.

Mitt Romney is what's wrong with America, and he must not become president.

Big money and big media have coupled to create a ‘Disney World’ of democracy in which TV shows, televised debates, even news coverage is being dumbed down, resulting in a public less informed than it should be, says Marty Kaplan, director of USC’s Norman Lear Center and an entertainment industry veteran. In this encore broadcast, Bill Moyers talks with Kaplan about how taking news out of the journalism box and placing it in the entertainment box is hurting democracy and allowing special interest groups to manipulate the system.

Later on the show, Bill talks about Florida Rep. Allen West (R-FL) and shocking modern-day McCarthyism. Wasn’t this lesson already learned?

Transcript:

MARTY KAPLAN: It's all about combat. If every political issue is the combat between two polarized sides, then you get great television because people are throwing food at each other. And you have an audience that hasn't a clue, at the end of the story, which is why you'll hear, "Well, we'll have to leave it there." Well, thank you very much. Leave it there.

BILL MOYERS: And how the ghost of Joe McCarthy is back to haunt America.

SENATOR JOSEPH McCARTHY: They shouldn’t be called Democrats, they should be referred to properly as the Commiecrat Party.

BILL MOYERS: Welcome. How about this: enterprising and intrepid journalism students at Kent State University in Ohio took up our challenge to go to nearby television stations, collect data on the political ads they run and post that information on the Internet. It’s supposed to be public information in the first place.

KENT STATE STUDENT: We had one simple question for management at each station. Should these records be put on line? Three stations refused to be interviewed.

BILL MOYERS: Take a look at the complete Kent State video at our website, BillMoyers.com. We’re counting on other journalism students around the country – and maybe you as well – to follow their example and share the results with us. Meanwhile, on with the show, because as you can see, sometimes the truth reveals itself in the darnedest places. In an old movie, for example – one you saw some years ago, forgot, and then, by chance, happen on it again to discover that times have changed, and movies, too. But certain things never change: they just cost more.

Here’s what I mean: remember Eddie Murphy twenty years ago in The Distinguished Gentleman? That’s the term by which members of Congress address each other, no matter how disreputable their conduct.

Continue reading »