A special programming note from Senior Writer Michael Winship:

"As you probably have figured out by now, because Hurricane Sandy hit New York City and its surroundings with such a mighty punch, the Moyers & Company production team has been – literally, as Joe Biden would say – scattered to the winds. Many of us are still without power and light and unable to get to our studio or offices (On top of which, our offices were closed because of the building’s proximity to that high rise crane collapse you might have heard about, but that’s another story.)

As Bill said via phone earlier today, “We all live at the whim of Nature and Nature always has the last word.” And so this weekend we’re airing a repeat program as our Hurricane Sandy Special Edition: the very first of our Moyers & Company broadcasts, which initially aired in January and remains as relevant and powerful heading into Election Day as it was then.

The program spotlights the book Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer – And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class and its authors, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson. Bill Moyers notes that right from this very first broadcast we said that our series would focus on income inequality, corruption and the undue influence of Corporate America on a government bought and paid for by big business. Together they’re the proverbial elephant in the room politicians refuse to acknowledge – “all but unmentioned in the presidential debates and barely discussed throughout this long and painful election campaign” – but the source of the dysfunction and inertia that paralyze Congress, the White House – and the nation.

If you‘ve missed this edition of Moyers & Company, we hope you’ll watch before you cast your ballot on Tuesday. And if you’ve already seen it, take another look and remind yourself as you prepare to enter the voting booth of how we’ve been maneuvered by Wall Street and Beltway insiders, politically engineered into a state of inequality and the disproportionate power of a very few."

In its premiere episode, Moyers & Company dives into one of the most important and controversial issues of our time: How Washington and Big Business colluded to make the super-rich richer and turn their backs on the rest of us.

Bill’s guests – Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, authors of Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer — And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, argue that America’s vast inequality is no accident, but in fact has been politically engineered.

How, in a nation as wealthy as America, can the economy simply stop working for people at large, while super-serving those at the very top? Through exhaustive research and analysis, the political scientists Hacker and Pierson — whom Bill regards as the “Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson” of economics — detail important truths behind a 30-year economic assault against the middle class.

Who’s the culprit? “American politics did it– far more than we would have believed when we started this research,” Hacker explains. “What government has done and not done, and the politics that produced it, is really at the heart of the rise of an economy that has showered huge riches on the very, very, very well off.”

Bill considers their book the best he’s seen detailing “how politicians rewrote the rules to create a winner-take-all economy that favors the 1% over everyone else, putting our once and future middle class in peril.”

The show includes an essay on how Occupy Wall Street reflects a widespread belief that politics no longer works for ordinary people, including footage we took at the OWS rally from October – December 2011.

Full transcript of the show below the fold...

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GOP Congressman-wannbe-senatorTodd Akin was asked why he voted against the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act at a town hall on Thursday. Akin's response suggests that a) he doesn't understand what federal law was prior to the Ledbetter Act, b)he doesn't understand what's in the Ledbetter Act, c) he's a misogynistic cretin who thinks it should be legal for employers to discriminate against women and d)that he will say he believes anything the GOP backer Koch brothers tell him to.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: You voted against the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. Why do you think it is okay for a woman to be paid less for doing the same work as a man?

AKIN: Well, first of all, the premise of your question is that I'm making that particular distinction. I believe in free enterprise. I don't think the government should be telling people what you pay and what you don't pay. I think it's about freedom. If somebody wants to hire somebody and they agree on a salary, that's fine, however it wants to work. So, the government sticking its nose into all kinds of things has gotten us into huge trouble.

It's been illegal to discriminate against women by paying them less since 1960s. The Ledbetter Act just made it easier for women to sue if they find out they're being discriminated against. Because, see, where Akin says that "If somebody wants to hire somebody and they agree on a salary, that's fine, however it wants to work," the reality is that employers don't generally say to women, "Hey, I'm going to pay you less than I'm paying men doing the same job as you." They just pay less, and keep quiet about it, because they're breaking the law. Which means it would be bad for them if the women they were discriminating against found out about it because there are consequences for breaking the law.

The only "freedom" Akin is talking about here is the freedom of businesses to break the law. Which he thinks is fine, because he doesn't think that equal pay should be the law, even in largely unenforceable theory. Just like he doesn't think there should be a minimum wage for anyone.

Note also how in this case "the government sticking its nose into all kinds of things" is not a good thing, according to Akin, but when it comes to women's vaginas more intrusive government is just fine.

This may be the spookiest political ad ever: Chuck Norris, along with his wife Gena, have offered a dire warning to America, claiming that Americans face "socialism," (*Gasp!*) or something worse," and "1,000 years of darkness" if President Obama is re-elected for a second term in November.

In the Youtube video above, Norris and his wife warn of a "growing concern" that the America we know can be "lost forever" if Obama is re-elected.

“If we look to history, our great country and freedom are under attack,” Norris says. “We’re at a tipping point and, quite possibly, our country as we know it may be lost forever if we don’t change the course in which our country is headed.”

Gena Norris then cites the statistic that in 2008 more than 30 million Evangelical Christians stayed home on Voting Day and Obama won. *Gasp!*

She then quotes the late President Ronald Reagan, "You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into 1,000 years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children’s children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.”

Oh, Chuck and Gena? The name of that speech you quoted, "A Time for Choosing," also known as "The Speech," was presented during the 1964 U.S. presidential election campaign by future president Ronald Reagan on behalf of Republican candidate Barry Goldwater.

Goldwater lost.The world did not end, or even plunge into 1,000 years of darkness.

Drama queens.

Via:

Transcript:

From the Debtor's Jungle:

We are the Invisible Army of Defaulters. We are your neighbors. We are your family, your friends. We are millions. We are everywhere. We are going to bring the system to its knees. We can, because we wield the one power that all the armies of the world can never defeat: The power of refusal. This power has destroyed the mightest empires. The same fate awaits the current system of mafia capitalism in America, an economic system driven by Wall Street CEOs who produce nothing, contribute nothing, who have bought our government and reduced it into a criminal enterprise whose main purpose is to support loan-sharking, gambling, extortion, and the slow reduction of American citizens into debt peons. Every dollar we take from a subprime mortgage speculator, every dollar we save from a collection agency is a tiny piece of our own lives and freedom that we can give back to our communities. To be able to take care of our children, our friends, our families is a value that no accountant can ever measure, that no government, loan administrator, or hedge fund manager can ever have the right to take away from us. We are an army of lovers who cannot be defeated. We are laying the groundwork for another world. Strike debt.

Resist. Insist. Stand together. Build. Never give up. #S17.

A brief message from Occupy Wall Street...

Anonymous hacktivists are targeting Anaheim Mayor Tom Tait and the Anaheim Police Department in an action dubbed “Operation Anaheim.”

In a YouTube video published July 24, Anonymous calls for “the citizens of the United States to rise up in unison” and protest the police brutality in Anaheim.

Violence in Anaheim began Saturday, July 21, with the deadly police shooting of Manuel Diaz, who was unarmed, and according to reports had dropped to his knees before he was shot in the back of the head by police.

Transcript:

Citizens of the World,

We are Anonymous.

The purpose of this video is clear.

We want to inform the citizens of the world, that the United States is setting the flames of revolution. In Anaheim, police shot protesters and bystanders including kids who did nothing wrong. We, Anonymous, are calling yet again to the citizens of the United States, to rise up in unison, and defeat this government which values no lives nor freedom.

Do it for the safety of your families, your homes, and your future generations.

The fate of America is in your hands. Do you wish to be oppressed further, or do you wish to obtain freedom and peace?

The choice is yours. Let beat the drums of war.

Operation Anaheim, engaged.

We are Anonymous.
We are Legion.
We do not forgive.
We do not forget.
Expect us.

United Nations and Arab League envoy Kofi Annan met today with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the midst of worsening violence. Syria's 16-month conflict has so far claimed more than 15,000 lives. Annan said today's last-ditch attempt to salvage a peace effort ended with an agreement on how end the violence, but he did not disclose details. Earlier, he acknowledged his six-point peace plan had failed to halt the fighting between anti-government forces and the Assad regime. "The bottom line is that the majority of the country is engaged in a popular revolution for freedom, for democracy, for dignity," says Rafif Jouejati, the English-language spokesperson for the Syrian Local Coordination Committees, a network of activists throughout the country. "We have mountains of evidence indicating that his armed forces have been engaged in systematic torture, rampant detentions, massacres across the country."

Full transcript here.

The #YoSoy132 (#iam132) movement in Mexico started with the protest of 132 university students against the leading Mexican 2012 presidential candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto, and his close ties with the national media. Today, the protest has morphed into a popular nationwide campaign for freedom of information and media democracy that could bring about a historical change in Mexican politics.

May is Move Our Money Month.
Bank Local! http://fthebanks.org

Will we continue down the path to less freedom, less free time, and more stress. More bills, more greed, environmental destruction. Will we allow the 1% to get away with destroying communities and controlling the government? Or will we say no more. We are the 99% and we will no longer tolerate the greed and rule of the 1%. Our actions determine the direction we go. Lets organize.

Let's move our money out of their criminal too big to fail banks.

Shot by Andrew Stern and Jeremy Baron of Starr Street Studios.

Full message from the video:

Dear brothers and sisters. Now is the time to open your eyes!

In a stunning move that has civil libertarians stuttering with disbelief, the U.S. Senate has just passed a bill that effectively ends the Bill of Rights in America.

The National Defense Authorization Act is being called the most traitorous act ever witnessed in the Senate, and the language of the bill is cleverly designed to make you think it doesn't apply to Americans, but toward the end of the bill, it essentially says it can apply to Americans "if we want it to.

Bill Summary & Status, 112th Congress (2011 -- 2012) | S.1867 | Latest Title: National Defense Authorization Act for.

This bill, passed late last night in a 93-7 vote, declares the entire USA to be a "battleground" upon which U.S. military forces can operate with impunity, overriding Posse Comitatus and granting the military the unchecked power to arrest, detain, interrogate and even assassinate U.S. citizens with impunity.

Even WIRED magazine was outraged at this bill, reporting:

Senate Wants the Military to Lock You Up Without Trial

...the detention mandate to use indefinite military detention in terrorism cases isn't limited to foreigners. It's confusing, because two different sections of the bill seem to contradict each other, but in the judgment of the University of Texas' Robert Chesney — a nonpartisan authority on military detention — "U.S. citizens are included in the grant of detention authority."

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