Bill Moyers “Remember when the Occupy movement demanded that issues like income inequality, race-to-the-bottom globalization and the failures of the free market be placed on the agenda?

Remember the silly critique of Occupy that said the movement’s necessary challenge to austerity lacked specifics?

Problem solved.

The pope has gotten specific.

Condemning the “new tyranny” of unfettered capitalism and the “idolatry of money,” Pope Francis argues in a newly circulated apostolic exhortation that “as long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation and by attacking the structural causes of inequality, no solution will be found for the world’s problems or, for that matter, to any problems.”

The pope has taken a side, not just in his manifesto but in interviews, warning: “Today we are living in an unjust international system in which ‘King Money’ is at the center.”

He is encouraging resistance to “the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation” that creates “a throwaway culture that discards young people as well as its older people.”

“What I would tell the youth is to worry about looking after one another and to be conscious of this and to not allow themselves to be thrown away,” he told a television audience in his native Argentina. “So that throwaway culture does not continue, so that a culture of inclusion is achieved.”

Pope: “King Money” Culture is Hurting Young and Old

On his Friday show, Bill Moyers had Vincent Warren, the executive director for the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Vicki Divoll, who used to serve as a legal advisor to the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, to discuss torture, drone strikes, and President Obama.

Divoll also authored an op-ed for the New York Times last month, titled, “Who Says You Can Kill Americans, Mr. President?”

Vicki Divoll, who worked at the CIA until 2000, said that during her time at the intelligence organization, “harsh interrogation, detention, and certainly killing were not on the table. You would have been laughed out of a conference room if you brought up any tactics such as those, at that time.”

Warren said that he was deeply troubled by the secrecy of the Obama administration in regards to torture. “Clearly the Senate Intelligence Committee wants to and needs to keep some of this stuff classified. But we run into this problem where if you look historically, the only way that a country and certainly a country like the United States can torture is if they do it in secret, right? There was a connection between the secrecy and the torture.”

When Moyers asked if Obama was “fighting the war on terror within the rule of law,” Warren replied, “I do not. In fact, I know that he is not.”

Divoll was somewhat more lenient, saying, “I am concerned that he may not be. But I’m not going to go quite so far as to say that he is not following the rule of law. I think his lawyers have told him he is and he believes them.”

Warren asserted that “There’s no judicial oversight for how they determine who they’re going to kill and who they don’t want to kill.”

In regards to Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen killed overseas by the government, Divoll said that there is “plenty of evidence that lots of people are suspected of doing lots of things. And that doesn’t mean we shoot them from the sky.”

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/02/01/moyers-guest-on-drone-strikes-governments-interpretation-of-the-law-is-akin-to-a-state-secret/

Though a majority of Americans believe in global warming, Bill Moyers said — 74% percent, according to a new study by Yale University and George Mason University — the topic has been curiously absent from the U.S. presidential elections.

But on this week’s Moyers & Company, he discussed some of the long-term effects of the phenomenon with photographer turned documentarian James Balog, who documents the disappearance of the Earth’s glaciers in both a new book and film.

Using specially-designed cameras, Balog tracked what he called “glacial retreat,” including one glacier that had dropped 11 miles since 1984.

“It’s like air being let out of a balloon,” Balog said. “You can see what’s called the trim line; it’s the high water-mark of the glacier in 1984. That vertical change is the height of the Empire State Building.”

Though the planet has always gone through cycles of glaciers ebbing and flowing, Balog said, environmental changes over the past four decades have led to a level of carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere unseen in tens of millions of years.

“So people say, you know, why do we care about this warming that’s happened before? Well, guess what? People didn’t live here when it was like that,” Balog told Moyers. “The age of agriculture, the age of industrial civilization depends on us living within this relatively comfortable range of temperature and precipitation and atmosphere that we’ve been in for the past 10,000 years. We’re pushing ourselves far outside our range of comfort right now. And that’s the real danger.”

 

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/10/12/bill-moyers-examines-global-warmings-effects-with-documentarian/