January 27, 2014
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AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to Bill Moyers, the legendary broadcaster and host of
Moyers & Company. Earlier this month, his program,
Moyers & Company, aired the documentary report,
State of Conflict: North Carolina. He is the former host of
Bill Moyers Journal.
He has won more than 30 Emmy Awards. He’s also a founding organizer of
the Peace Corps, press secretary for President Lyndon Johnson, publisher
of
Newsday, senior correspondent for CBS News. His most recent book is
Bill Moyers Journal: The Conversation Continues,
as I hope it continues right here. Quite a report, and it isn’t even
the whole thing. You go on in this report on the state of conflict in
North Carolina to talk about the whole issue of voting rights.
[Watch the documentary here, with full transcript published on AlterNet earlier this month].
BILL MOYERS: Yes,
North Carolina now, because of this new far-right government—and these
are not your father’s Republicans, they are really right-wing
Republicans adhering to the fundamentalism of the right—they went after
voting rights. It was one of the first objectives they fulfilled when
they took power. And they now have the most restrictive voting rights in
the country—a very complicated process of getting IDs that you have to
have. They’ve redistricted in a way that packs African Americans into
three districts, so that it’s hard to argue "one man, one vote" is
happening down there. And the Justice Department has challenged the
North Carolina state voting laws. But they are very restrictive, and
they’re designed to perpetuate the Republican rule and to make it harder
for the elderly, for the young, for minorities to vote.
AMY GOODMAN: One
of the things they realized very quickly was that a lot of the voters
who were voting early were voting Democrat, so they’re cracking down on
the number of days that you can take—the number of days you can vote.
BILL MOYERS: Yes,
there—for a while, it looked as if Mitt Romney had won in 2012, but
when the early votes were finally counted, the margin went to—victory
went to Obama. So, they don’t like that, and they’re doing away with
early voting.
AMY GOODMAN: So, why did you focus on North Carolina, of all the states? Is it really so singular, so unique?
BILL MOYERS: Well,
it’s very compact, what’s happening down there, and it’s very recent.
This has happened to a considerable extent in Wisconsin. These are
battleground states, where the right wing and the conservatives and the
business and wealthy communities are collaborating to make sure they
don’t lose again. North Carolina is an interesting state in and of
itself. It’s a blue state, it’s a red state, it’s a purple state. Obama
carried it by a whisker in 2008, Romney by a whisker in 2012. It goes
back and forth. Jesse Helms, the, to use your term, legendary right-wing
senator from North Carolina, was simultaneously in office with a
progressive United States senator. It’s a purple state, really, that
goes this way. So the Republicans, the right wing, are focusing on it.
The Democrats ought to be focusing on it, but they’ve had their problems
down there with corruption and scandals that played into Art Pope’s
hands.
But there are three
reasons for this story. One, it’s very clear what’s happening in North
Carolina. Second, it’s a paradigm, a harbinger of what’s happening in
other states. And then, most important, it really reveals what dark
money is doing to American politics. So much of this money that has
flowed into North Carolina comes from untraceable and unaccountable
sources. They don’t know in North Carolina who’s funding the
redistricting. They don’t know who’s funding these campaigns against
their opponents. It’s coming from national sources, from Republican
sources in Washington, from very wealthy people around the country. And
that is, of course, flying in the face of the fundamental tenet of
democracy, which is, we should know who’s buying our government.
AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, there is a North Carolinian in this, and it is Art Pope himself, also close to the Koch brothers.
BILL MOYERS: Yes,
he is a—he’s been called a kingmaker as well as a king, because he has
used his money—he’s a smart man, very shrewd, very intelligent, and very
ruthless in how he uses his money. And as Jane Mayer, The New Yorker reporter,
terrific reporter, as you and I both know, says at the end of the
broadcast, this is more than North Carolina; this shows what a wealthy
individual can do in any state where he or she is willing to put their
money into politics in this way. So it’s a harbinger, as I say, of how
our democracy—you know, organized money is the greatest threat to
democracy because it unbalances the equilibrium. Democracy is supposed
to check the excesses of private power and private greed. And if money
disestablishes that equilibrium, we’re in trouble.
And
the only answer—as we’ve seen in this film, the only answer to
organized money is organized people. And that’s what really at first
drew me to North Carolina. I’ve had a history there. I was on the board
of Wake Forest University for years. I was in—I have good, close friends
there who teach and who write and who work there. And I know something
about North Carolina. And when I saw what was happening on these Moral
Mondays, I knew nothing about them until the press stories began to come
out. These people were gathering, not spontaneously, because Reverend
Barber, who is himself a shrewd cat, a cool cat, as they say—I knew what
he was doing in organizing these. The first arrest came in the summer,
and then the news started—the news media started paying attention. It
was obvious that people were becoming alarmed, agitated and organized in
response to the buyout of North Carolina. And that remains the most
hopeful—whether you’re a progressive conservative—a progressive
Republican or a progressive liberal Democrat, you have to know that the
only way we’re going to preserve our democracy is to fight this
organized money. And that’s what the Moral Monday protesters are doing.
AMY GOODMAN: And
they’re trying to plan the largest protest ever yet, and that will be
February 8th. But there is a distinction sometimes between the
progressives who are out there on the streets, who are getting
arrested—more than a thousand got arrested in 2013—and the Democratic
Party of North Carolina.
BILL MOYERS: That’s
true. And this, of course, has played into the hands of the right wing.
Progressives, of course, are more progressive than partisan. Democrats
want Democrats to be re-elected, even if they’re centrists or
center-right Democrats. So, there’s resentment in North Carolina among
some traditional Democrats to Art—to Reverend Barber. He has now emerged
as the progressive leader—not the Democratic leader, because he’s not a
partisan in this respect. And so, there’s conflict between progressives
and Democrats who are not progressives in North Carolina. This is an
old—an old story, as you know.
The right
wing solved it by this enormous confomity that they brought to their
movement 25 and 30 years ago. The tea party was together enough to take
over the Republican Party. Progressives are not together enough to take
over, step by step, precinct by precinct, the Democratic Party. And
that’s a source of conflict. And, of course, as I say in the documentary
and said a moment ago, Democrats had some corruption and some scandals a
few years ago when several went to jail. And that’s been a problem.
That played right into the right’s hands, and it’s created a further
rift between progressives and Democrats.
AMY GOODMAN: Reproductive
rights also very much under attack. Fascinating to see Governor McCrory
saying—you know, very simple answer when asked if he would be
supporting more restrictions against abortion, in one of the debates,
and his answer was "None," very clearly stated, but that hasn’t been the
case.
BILL MOYERS: He
read the tea leaves and saw that when he got into office—he was elected
with the help of these conservatives, and of course he has to appease
them in order to be re-elected, if he runs again. And one of the first
changes in his agenda was to go against what he had said earlier and
sign the most restrictive abortion bill, reproductive rights
bill—anti-reproductive-rights bill in the country.
AMY GOODMAN: Last year, as you also clip, make an excerpt of in this documentary, The Daily Show’s
Aasif Mandvi spoke to a North Carolina county precinct Republican chair
named Don Yelton about North Carolina passing one of the most
restrictive voter suppression bills in the nation.
DON YELTON: The bottom line is the law is not racist.
AASIF MANDVI: Of course the law is not racist, and you are not racist.
DON YELTON: Well,
I have been called a bigot before. Let me tell you something. You don’t
look like me, but I think I’ve treated you the same as I would anybody
else.
AASIF MANDVI: Right.
DON YELTON: Matter of fact, one of my best friends is black.
AASIF MANDVI: So, one of your best friends—
DON YELTON: One of my best friends.
AASIF MANDVI: —is black.
DON YELTON: Yes.
AASIF MANDVI: And there’s more.
DON YELTON: When
I was a young man, you didn’t call a black a black; you called him a
Negro. I had a picture one time of Obama sitting on a stump as a witch
doctor, and I posted that on Facebook. For your information, I was
making fun of my white half of Obama, not the black half. And now, you
have a black person using the term nigger this, nigger that, and it’s OK
for them to do it.
AASIF MANDVI: You know that we can hear you, right?
DON YELTON: Yeah.
AASIF MANDVI: OK, you know that, that you—you know that we can hear you.
DON YELTON: Yeah.
AASIF MANDVI: OK, all right.
Then I found out the real reason for the law.
DON YELTON: The law is going to kick the Democrats in the butt.
AASIF MANDVI: Wow!
An executive GOP committee member just admitted that this law isn’t
designed to hurt black people; it’s designed to hurt Democrats.
DON YELTON: 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: Right, right.
DON YELTON: 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.
AASIF MANDVI: And it just so happens that a lot of those people vote Democrat.
DON YELTON: Gee.
AMY GOODMAN: That was from Comedy Central, The Daily Show. Almost immediately after the interview aired on The Daily Show, Don Yelton was forced to resign his position in the Republican Party. Bill Moyers?
BILL MOYERS: It’s
sad that there are so many people in this country who cannot escape the
prison of the past, and race is very much at the heart of
this—particularly in the old Confederate states, this right-wing
resurgence that we’re facing now. There are very few who speak as openly
and as blatantly and as honestly as Don Yelton. He’s telling the
interviewer, "Yeah, this is why I did what I did." Many do without
revealing their motives. And if you track the voting patterns, if you
track what’s happening in the country, you see that unspoken racism is
still driving a large segment of our politics.
And
fortunately, he outed himself and reminded us that the Republican Party
in the South is the party that took over after the signing of the Civil
Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, when President Johnson
said to me, "I think we’ve just handed the South to the Republicans for
my lifetime and yours," because the racists who had been Democrats all
those years until this transformation in American politics through the
civil rights legislation and the civil rights movement—until this
transformation brought them over, the Democrats had been the racist
party in the South. I grew up in the South, and I remember all my
Democratic friends were essentially racist. So, it’s changed, and Yelton
was speaking a truth that dare not be heard. But he did say it, and we
know it.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, Bill, we just came from Sundance Film Festival in Park City. Freedom Summer was
one of the documentaries, from the remarkable filmmaker Stanley Nelson,
and it’s about—this summer coming up is the 50th anniversary of the
summer of 1964, when the three civil rights activists, James Chaney and
Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner, were killed. Of course, they were
named; there were others who we don’t know who died. It was the summer
of organizing in Mississippi, and it was the summer of the Freedom
Democratic—the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. And you were the
press secretary of Lyndon Johnson. What was it like to be there when
Fannie Lou Hamer was taking Lyndon Johnson on at the 1964 Atlantic City
Democratic convention? He did not want that voice, who wanted to
integrate the Mississippi Democratic Party delegation to the convention,
to be heard, and so he gave a speech at the same time, so the cameras
would switch from her—as they did, reliably, giving voice to power—to
President Johnson.
BILL MOYERS: What
a dramatic and traumatic moment it was, a riveting moment. By the way, I
didn’t become press secretary for two years. I was 30 that summer, and I
was actually President Johnson’s domestic policy adviser, working on
civil rights, voting rights and politics. And it was a—it was a dramatic
moment. It was an unfortunate moment, too, because I wish, in
retrospect, that we had embraced Fannie Lou Hamer and realized that’s
where the future of the Democratic Party lay.
AMY GOODMAN: Could it kind of be like North Carolina Democrats today?
BILL MOYERS: Yes,
exactly, exactly. But here was Johnson’s predicament. He wanted to
carry as many Southern states as he could. He was from Texas. He wanted
to bring progressive, moderate Democrats along with him in his campaign
for ’64. And had he embraced Fannie Lou Hamer, the morally right thing
to do, it would have been, he thought, politically costly. So he
hammered out this compromise, which was not satisfactory to either side,
in order to preserve his political prowess and his political
opportunity to carry the South. And we did carry several states in the
South in 1964 that I think probably he would have lost if he had not
made this compromise. But in retrospect, of course—and not even in
retrospect, at the time, the moral embrace would have been the right one
to do, and that would have been to bring the Mississippi leadership,
the Democratic—the black and civil rights leaders of Mississippi into
the Democratic Party.
AMY GOODMAN: He almost resigned then, didn’t he? The pressure so enormous, at least that’s what comes out in Freedom Summer. He was saying—he was wondering if he would throw in the towel then.
BILL MOYERS: Yes,
he was torn between winning and doing the right thing. Lyndon Johnson
had never been an outstanding proponent of voting—of civil rights when
he was a senator from Texas or the majority leader, but his heart was
always in the right place, because as a young man he was a New Deal
congressman from Texas, and that was trying to embrace a larger
constituency.
AMY GOODMAN: He had just signed the Civil Rights Act earlier that summer.
BILL MOYERS: 1964,
that’s right. And then suddenly he was faced with this
moral-versus-political choice, and it really created a great tension in
him. He was torn by what he had done at the same time. And he wasn’t
sure that winning re-election was worth the moral price he had paid for
it. But he got over that and ran a hearty campaign, and of course
received the largest plurality in the country up until then in a
presidential race.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Bill, before we end the show, I wanted to ask about what your plans are. This year you turn 80.
BILL MOYERS: Yep.
AMY GOODMAN: You announced in October that Bill Moyers & Company,
you’re going to be ending it. You got an avalanche of response.
People—the force more powerful than any one person, the people spoke,
and they said, "You can’t end this show." Bill Moyers—
BILL MOYERS: Well,
enough people spoke to make me think that I was leaving—I was
going AWOLin the middle of the battle. And, you know, when you’ve been
at it 40-some-odd years—I’ve been a broadcaster for 41 years—you do have
somewhat loyal constituents. Many of them are aging out, dying off. I
mean, young journalists have no idea of what’s happened in broadcasting
over the last 40 years. They’re into the web and so forth. But there
were enough loyal fans, constituents around the country. They
wrote—4,000 or 5,000 letters came to us, emails. And I had to face
myself shaving in the morning and saying, "Are you abandoning these
people?" So we came back for one more year.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, it’s great to see you coming back with documentaries like these. What’s your next?
BILL MOYERS: We’re working on a—we’re looking at Ayn Rand’s influence today. Ayn Rand was—is the libertarian, the famous writer, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead,
a libertarian who celebrates the virtue of money and says the—has had
an enormous influence over American politics and is even popular today. I
think Atlas Shrugged sells something like 150-200,000 copies.
It’s being taught. Her philosophy is being taught in universities funded
by Koch brother organizations and others. And so we’re looking at Rand
Paul, for example, who’s a likely candidate for president in—I don’t
know. They say not, but there’s some kind of a convergence there,
because when he was 17, his father, Ron Paul, gave him a set of Ayn
Rand’s novels. So we’re working on that.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we look forward to the commentary. Bill, thanks so much for joining us, legendary broadcaster, host of
Moyers & Company. Earlier this month, his program
Moyers & Company aired a documentary called
State of Conflict: North Carolina, and we’ll link to the
full documentary at democracynow.org.
Bill
Moyers has received 35 Emmy awards, nine Peabody Awards, the National
Academy of Television’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and an honorary
doctor of fine arts from the American Film Institute over his 40 years
in broadcast journalism. He is currently host of the weekly public
television series Moyers & Company and
president of the Schumann Media Center, a non-profit organization which
supports independent journalism. He delivered these remarks (slightly
adapted here) at the annual Legacy Awards dinner of the Brennan Center for Justice,
a non-partisan public policy institute in New York City that focuses on
voting rights, money in politics, equal justice, and other seminal
issues of democracy. This is his first TomDispatch piece.
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