Just a quick note to our BillMoyers.com readers that we are going on a much-needed holiday break. Thanks to all of you for reading, sharing and commenting on our content in 2016.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on what you’d like to see from us in 2017. Please share your ideas in the comments section below.
And have a wonderful holiday! See you in the new year.
"If we are willing to see ourselves as we are and have been, we will also see our potential for prophetic resistance, even in times like these... For we are also the heirs of great dissenters who’ve stood for right even when they were a minority of one." - William J. Barber, II, head of North Carolina NAACP.
A selection of the year’s most riveting photographs, from The New York Times.
Elaine Weiss of the Broader Bolder Approach to Education Campaign wrote her own wishlist for America's children two years ago. Right now, it seems more important than ever.
"In the just released Electoral Integrity Project report, North Carolina’s overall electoral integrity score of 58/100 for the 2016 election places us alongside authoritarian states and pseudo-democracies like Cuba, Indonesia and Sierra Leone.
If it were a nation state, North Carolina would rank right in the middle of the global league table – a deeply flawed, partly free democracy that is only slightly ahead of the failed democracies that constitute much of the developing world."
Worth remembering this month...
Mary Beth Tinker was a 13-year-old junior high school student in December 1965 when she and a group of students decided to wear black armbands to school to prot...est the war in Vietnam. The school board got wind of the protest and passed a preemptive ban. When Mary Beth arrived at school on December 16, she was asked to remove the armband. When she refused, she was sent home.
Four other students were suspended, including her brother John Tinker and Chris Eckhardt. The students were told they could not return to school until they agreed to remove their armbands. The students returned to school after the Christmas break without armbands, but in protest wore black clothing for the remainder of the school year.
Represented by the ACLU, the students and their families embarked on a four-year court battle that culminated in the landmark Supreme Court decision: Tinker v. Des Moines. On February 24, 1969 the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that students do not "shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate."
The Court ruled that the First Amendment applied to public schools, and school officials could not censor student speech unless it disrupted the educational process. Because wearing a black armband was not disruptive, the Court held that the First Amendment protected the right of students to wear one.
The teen magazine has published an excoriating op-ed on Trump. In coming years the challenge to the presidency could come from unexpected quarters, writes The Guardian.
Activists around the country are now trying to figure out not only how to fight Trump and Trumpism, but also how to think strategically about building a powerful progressive movement. Here's a 10-point plan for activists, politicians, the press and everyday citizens to fight for working people.
In case you missed this, Robert Reich writes about the ways in which Donald J. Trump is trying to squelch the press.
In what many have described as a legislative "coup," North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory signed several bills last Friday that were hastily passed by the legislature in order to fundamentally erode the powers of incoming Democratic governor, Roy Cooper. The action was another in a long list of extremist moves by NC lawmakers in recent years.
In 2014, Moyers & Company presented a documentary about the conservative onslaught Republican lawmakers pushed through the state house:... bills that slashed taxes on corporations and the wealthy, provided vouchers to private schools, cutting unemployment benefits, refusing to expand Medicaid and rolling back electoral reforms, including voting rights.
“State of Conflict” is more than a local story. It offers a case study of what may be the direction of American politics for years, perhaps decades, to come. Watch the entire documentary at http://billmoyers.com/epis…/state-of-conflict-north-carolina
Juan Cole of Informed Comment says when it comes to picking the next Supreme Court justice, Democrats should follow the Republicans lead in how they treated Barack Obama.
"They vilified Obama, shouted disrespectfully at him from the floor of Congress, and then they refused even to let his Supreme Court nominee, a centrist, come up for a vote."
Blocking the drill –> In a joint announcement with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, President Obama yesterday said that he would be using a 1953 law to protect vast portions of our waters from drilling.
“The lands covered include the bulk of the Beaufort and Chukchi seas in the Arctic and 31 underwater canyons in the Atlantic. The United States and Canada also announced they will identify sustainable shipping lanes through their connected Arctic waters,” Tom DiChrist...opher reports for CNBC.
The 1953 law, the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, allows the president to declare offshore areas ineligible for drilling, and doesn’t have a mechanism by which another president can declare them re-eligible. For that reason, this move — unlike some of the others that progressives have urged Obama to take on his way out — cannot be easily undone by President-elect Trump.
