A recent article in The New York Times reported on a cost-control exception provided to Amgen, the world’s largest biotechnology firm. According to the report, the sweetheart deal — hidden in the Senate’s final “fiscal cliff” bill — will cost taxpayers half a billion dollars. Bill Moyers talks to U.S. Representative Peter Welch (D-VT) about the bi-partisan bill he recently sponsored to repeal that giveaway, and the political factors that allow such crony capitalism to occur.

“When there is this back room dealing that comes at enormous expense to taxpayers and enormous benefit to a private, well-connected, for-profit company, we’ve got to call it out,” Welch tells Moyers. “Those members of Congress who are concerned about the institution, about our lack of credibility, about the necessity of us doing things that are in the public good as opposed to private gain, we’ve got to call it out.”

A full transcript of the show after the jump.

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Thirty-eight states now elect their high court judges. Large sums of money — $200 million over the last decade, much of it secret and tied to partisan agendas — are pouring into these judicial campaigns. In Florida, Pennsylvania, and Iowa, for example, justices are being targeted by radical groups that abhor judicial independence and want the courts to reflect their political bias.

In Iowa, a state whose judicial system has been praised for its fairness and impartiality, the political and religious Right ousted three justices in 2010 over marriage equality, and is now trying to take down a fourth over the same issue. But this time a bipartisan coalition called Justice Not Politics is fighting back. Its co-founders – Democrat Sally Pederson and Republican Joy Corning, both of whom served Iowa for eight years as lieutenant governor — join Bill to talk about what’s at stake when justices are at the mercy of partisan passions and money in politics.

“What people would like to do is intimidate judges and make them understand that if they make a decision that’s counter to the interests of certain groups, that they’ll go after them,” Pederson tells Bill. “You know, we elect our legislators, we elect our president, governor. If we also have money and politics involved in our courts, then what is safe from just the opinions of the day?

Full transcript available here.

Bill Moyers welcomes to his studio Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who’s been an independent in Congress for 21 years — longer than anyone in American history. Sanders talks about jobs, the state of our economy, health care, and the unprecedented impact of big money on the major political parties.

“What you are looking at is a nation with a grotesquely unequal distribution of wealth and income, tremendous economic power on Wall Street, and now added to all of that is big money interests, the billionaires and corporations now buying elections,” Sanders tells Bill. “I fear very much that if we don’t turn this around, we’re heading toward an oligarchic form of society.”

Full transcript from the show follows below the fold.

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