Bill Moyers On Sunday

Check your local PBS schedule*, fire-up your DVR. Bill Moyers is back with a new show, Moyers & Company. The series, produced by American Public Television, begins with three broadcasts focused on the intersection of politics and money.

Moyers, who will “believe corporations are people when Texas executes one” (Stephen Colbert interview, 10 January), interviews Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson in the first episode. The two political scientists wrote “Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned its Back on the Middle Class.”

According to Moyers: “Their account does better than any I’ve read to explain 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.” (PRX.org)

“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’.” (BillMoyers.com)

Moyers returns to the airwaves with the goal of making sense of current events “for myself and hopefully for anyone who wants to keep me company.” On deck in the coming weeks: David Stockman, former budget director for Ronald Reagan, who calls today’s political-economic environment “crony capitalism”, and former Citigroup Chairman John Reed. With Reed, Moyers will “explore how the mid-90’s merger of Citicorp and Travelers Group brought down a crucial firewall between banks and investment firms — the Glass-Steagall Act, which had protected consumers from financial calamity since the aftermath of the Great Depression.”

I’ll be there. Well, my DVR will be!

* If your local PBS affiliate is not broadcasting the series, check out the website.