Bill Moyers Journal (2007-2010); 1239; Leo Gerard; Earmark Update; Moyers on Gaza

warriors. And on this edition of the journal, as Barack Obama talks, frankly, about the economic hole we're in, we'll talk with the powerful progressive leader of the largest industrial union in North America and ask him if the Obama presidency can rescue labor and the working class. Our colleagues at Expo say, report on the latest round in earmark reform, where there's a will, there's a loophole, and some closing thoughts on the war in Gaza and bearing witness to the debt. Stay tuned. Funding for Bill Moyer's journal is provided by the Partridge Foundation, a John and PolyGuth Charitable Fund, Park Foundation dedicated to heightening public awareness of critical issues. The Colbert Foundation, the Herb Alpert Foundation, Marilyn and Bob Clements and the Clements Foundation, Bernard and Audrey Rappaport and the Bernard and Audrey Rappaport Foundation, the Petzar Institute, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Corfola Family Foundation, the Public Welfare Foundation, and by our sole corporate sponsor, Mutual of America, providing retirement products and services to employers and individuals

since 1945. Mutual of America, your retirement company. Special funding for our Expo is a report provided by Bernard and Irene Schwartz, Park Foundation, Kingsford Capital Management, the Riva and David Logan Foundation, and the Blanchett Hooker Rockefeller Fund. From our studios in New York, Bill Moyers, welcome to the journal. No sooner did Barack Obama get the Washington this week than he sounded an economic call to arms. We've got trouble, he said. If we don't take dramatic action fast, the recession could last for years and unemployment would continue to skyrocket. Already, he said nearly two million jobs have been lost. This is a perilous moment. Many businesses cannot borrow or make payroll. Many families cannot pay their bills or their mortgage. Many workers are watching their life

savings disappear. Many, many Americans are both anxious and uncertain of what the future will hold. He wasn't all doom and gloom. The president-elect said recovery wouldn't come easily, but it will come if we don't just ask, what's good for me, but what's good for the country, my children will inherit. No one has more at stake in Obama's plan to pull us back from the brink than American labor. The working men and women hit so hard by the meltdown. On Capitol Hill today, Obama's nominee for labor secretary, Representative Hilda Solis from Southern California, herself, the daughter of a union household, and a strong labor advocate, told Congress that the needs of American workers will be front and sit there. Now more than ever, we must work together to ensure that all Americans have the same opportunities that I had. Unfortunately, increasing numbers of middle-class families, retirees, and youth in America are losing

their jobs or homes and their retirement savings. The labor department must ensure that American workers are paid what they deserve, are treated fairly and have safe and healthy workplaces. We can accomplish this through enforcement, transparency, cooperation, and balance. America's unions have bet on the Obama administration being able to pull off a recovery that will revive not only the economy, but the entire organized labor movement. And here to talk about labor's hopes and fears is Leo Gerard, the international president of the United Steelworkers, the largest industrial union in North America. They're the dominant union in paper forestry products, steel, aluminum, tires and rubber, glass, chemicals, and petroleum. Born in Canada, the son of a union minor, during his tenure, Gerard has revitalized the steelworkers and brought hundreds of thousands of new members into his union. Welcome, the out to the journal. My plans are great to be here with you, Bill. So we have a new president,

a new administration, and a new secretary of labor. And I know you have been excited by Obama's nomination of Congresswoman Solis. Why the enthusiasm for her in particular? I think from my point of view, I can relate to her because I grew up like she did. I grew up in a union household where my dad made very little money and when he needed drill bits for the mine or he needed what they called oilers, which is the rubber where you work underground, they took it off his paycheck. Congresswoman Solis grew up in a union family, her parents were immigrants and didn't make a lot of money. So my personal thing is that he's one of you. Well, not necessarily just one of me, but she can feel what I feel. So in that way, there's a there's a relation to that. But through her career, she hasn't been an extremist on either side. She's been for working people. She's been for a good job. She's been for a good pay. She's been for opening the green jobs. She's been for making sure that workers are going to get trained and getting opportunity to get into the good job. So all of the things that she's

fought for are the things that ordinary Americans would be supporting. What is it say to you that Obama names Congresswoman Solis a real advocate of labor? And then he appoints as his nominates for his trade rep. And it did the former mayor of Dallas who was a lobbyist for many of the companies that benefit from NAFTA. It seems to me that he has put two contradictory personalities and philosophies next to each other to be a bit facetious. I think you made one good decision or one bad decision. But I think it goes to what he's always told us. He wants counter views. He wants to be able to see people debate in front of them. Then he'll make the choice. You're not worried about that. Absolutely. I'm worried about that. You are worried about that. I think that there is no way that the current global agenda of America can be sustained for America. It's simple as that. And we've got to find a way to move into the kind of trade that brings in balance trade. I've been panicked almost to tell you the truth and some people are tired of hearing my

mouth run about it. We're accumulating now roughly seven to eight hundred billion dollars a year of trade deficit. And if you continue on the same curve during President Obama's first term, we'll hit a trillion dollar a year trade deficit. How do you sustain an economy like that? The accumulated trade debt that America has is an excess of five trillion. The interest on that debt or the asset sales that we have to make to protect that debt are almost six hundred billion a year. Do you know what we could do with six hundred billion? We could have national health care. We could make sure every kid that wanted to go to college could afford to go to college. So we've got to start reducing that. It took us 25 years to get there. It's going to take us a long time to get back, but that means we got changed direction. So Secretary of Labor Solis calls you in soon after she's taken the oath of office and says, what do you want me to do on day one? What's your answer? On day one, I think I want her to be a loud and strong voice

for the right to worker-storganize, protect collective bargaining, and start to be a voice for moving towards a balanced trade agenda. There's so many things to do. We've got 25 years of this ideology that says, don't interfere in the free market, and people never understood there is no such thing as a free market. All markets are regulated. If you took that and you put it out on the street, I'm sure that if I had a big, powerful vehicle, I could plow through New York without stoplights. But we put stoplights in so that the big trucks don't run over the small trucks. And so we need to go back to the kind of meaningful regulation of the workplace, of collective bargaining. That, to me, is her big task and she has to be. And so this President Obama, we can't let him off the hook. How do you want to hold him accountable? I want to hold him to his values. What do you mean? His values are to bring about change of direction. He knows what it was like for

steel workers to lose their job when he went to work on the south side of Chicago. He knows the value of collective bargaining to bring some equity to the society, to raise the middle class. So if we can hold him to his values, I don't expect him to change the world. Once he's inheriting bigger problem that I believe even FDR did. He said yesterday in the speech on the economy and jobs. It's getting to be too late to say they kind of, that's a pretty dire premise. Well, look at I'm almost sorry to be able to say this to you. But a week ago I got up for the first time in my lifetime and I said to my wife, I don't know if we can save this thing. What do you mean? There's so many problems. And the other side is so resentful of any change that President Obama and his team have to be strong. And they can't let themselves get pushed off their agenda. If they do, if he compromises too much, the economy won't recover quick enough. And we're going

to continue to spiral down. We now got a whole generation of people that may not be able to send their kids to college. One of my best friends in our building. He went to college and came out of college owing no money by working in a mill during the summer time. Now if he got his son to work in the mill in the summer time and his son graduated, it's still owe $50,000. That's twice my first market. You know, so that the time to act is now it has to be bold. It has to be job-creating. It has to be focused on putting America back to work. And we need it to be done. I know that one of the top priorities of the labor movement is passage of the employees free choice act. Help me understand exactly how that act would work. Well, if a worker wanted to join you in that simply would contact the union of their choice or sometimes the union is contacting people in their sector or in their industry. And if a majority of the workers wanted to join the

union, they would sign a petition or sign courage, whatever the process would be. And then before during or after that process, they would indicate whether they wanted the final determination to be made in a vote or whether they wanted to do it by the card check. What do you mean card check? It's pretty simple that a worker signs their name and says they want to belong to a union. And then those signatures are matched against their signatures. And if a majority of them have signed that out of a hundred to 51 signed, then you get a union. Now the opponents of the employee free choice act say that's exactly the problem that it strips workers of their ability to vote in private, the secret ballot, which of course as you know opponents say is the is the heart of the democratic process. In America, there's this myth about wave voting takes place in a workplace. It's not a secret ballot when the only way that you can get to the vote is by the boss being able to call you in and sit you down alone and say, by the way, if the union

comes in, you could lose your job. By the way, I hear you're the organizer for the union. You're done. Get out of here. And you do all that stuff in a power structure with the bosses over you. Is that vote really secret? Then when you go in, you got all that piled on top of you. When we talk about intimidation, we ought to be talking about the intimidation is taking place now. There's polls that are done that if workers were allowed to choose freely to join a union, almost 60% of them would today join a union. The reason the opposition is so great is because what we see by the lack of unionization is workers haven't been able to get their share of the wealth that they've been creating in our society. But if I put my name on a card that openly says for anybody who can see it, I don't want to have a union. I don't want to join a union. Doesn't that mean that the union chiefs can come in and make life difficult for me? Look at, we don't do that. I mean, the fact of the matter is that you go into a workplace, usually it's worker talking to worker, this fallacy that union bosses. I don't go around

signing people into the union. We go and give them the information. We talk to them, workers organize workers. Workers get together and they decide they want a union. That's who organizes the union most of the time. The organizer is the facilitator. And our job is to create the environment where they have the facts and they have the knowledge and they make an honest decision that they want a union. And once that's been done, what is a greater vote than putting my name on a card? I'm signing my name and saying, I want this union. I brought a couple of ads that have been running by opponents of the Employee Free Choice. Take a look. Today, when workers vote on having a union at their workplace, they use a secret ballot. But a new law could change all that. How are you doing? Who are you? What do you got there? My secret ballot. How do you mourn it? Under a card check law, workers would just sign a card and everybody would know how

they voted. What's your take on that? Well, the first ad is interesting because really what they don't tell us is what's in that, brings trucks, brings trucks as bosses' salaries. And it is about the money. It's about them having had all the money and workers having a declining standard of living. It's not about the kind of money that we put into the election campaign. The election campaign was not just about employee free choice. The economy is going down the tank. America's losing its standing in the world. We represent the voices of ordinary people. And in this year's election, the aspirations of, quote, unionized workers and non-unionized workers were the very same. We want an economy that works. We want an economy that's fair. We want an economy that deals with equity. And in fact, the best way to have a stake in the wealth of the country is through a bargain, through collective bargaining. It's the best vehicle

that's ever been invented. Almost every country in the world has a higher rate of unionization than America. And 70 countries in the world you can join a union by what would be the equivalent of card check. The second one is just really it's stunning about the myth that they create. And it's the way that the second ass, the second ass, you know, that's the guy from the Supreme Court. You ought to be ashamed of himself. He made a ton of money getting union right for the job he did. But the fact of the matter is that that kind of myth is the myth that's created by the union busters. I grew up in a union family. Those guys make me sick living that kind of world. And the reality is that that's not how unions organize. I would flip that to reverse. Those are the kind of guys that come into the workplace now and call the worker into the room and say, you know, buddy, if you join this union, we're going to move this plant to Mexico. Now, go out and decide to vote. What are you going to do when your family and you're making nine bucks an hour or ten bucks an hour and the bosses taking home ten million? What are

you going to do with your so-called secret ballot vote? What do you think the makers of that ad and the sponsors of that ad are appealing to that's a strain in American life? What is the they hope people respond to when they see that ad? Well, I think that there's there's a an appeal to fear. It's the same kind of mentality that told us we couldn't have a clean environment in good jobs. It's the same kind of mentality that called Barack Obama a socialist because he was talking about equity. It's the kind of mentality that tries to divide the country and keep people afraid of their future. It's based on lies and propaganda and it's really put together by the already rich and already very powerful who control the workplaces, who have control the economy and what we've seen is since the Reagan years we've seen a decline in the standard of living, of ordinary working folks. We've seen a huge division in social equity. We're now the gap between the rich and the rest of us is the largest it's been since the Great Depression.

There was a reason that FDR gave us the right to organize and the right to join unions because he believed that collective bargaining was the way for us to sit down with our employer and say, how can we have a more productive workplace? How can we be able to benefit from our work? And we want a profitable company. We want a bargain with profitable, productive employers so that we have good, secure jobs and all we want to sit down and negotiate. That the irony to me is that in this period of time that we're talking about the globalization has occurred so that capital goes looking for the cheapest labor it can find. So even if you had the card system over these years, wouldn't capital still have gone to where it can hire the lowest paid worker? Isn't that an economic phenomenon? Not a political consequence? No, I think it's a political phenomenon as well as an economic phenomenon. It's a political environment that's created in America, the ability of jobs to move offshore. If you go to Germany and you want to move a job offshore,

there's a huge economic price. Everything that you've put in from the management or excuse me from the government, all the training assistance and all that infrastructure, you've got to put back into the social pot. Here we encourage, and we give them a tax break here to go overseas, and I'm proud of Barack Obama to say he's going to put an end to that. And these Toyota Republicans that were... Toyota Republicans? The Toyota Republicans that were prepared to destroy the American auto industry, the couple of weeks after they were blind and deaf and dumb to giving away $700 billion that never did what it was supposed to do. They just gave them taxpayer dollars in New York. It didn't do a damn thing. Hasn't helped one worker get back to work. But they then turned around as you wrote recently and opposed the bailout of the big three in Detroit. Yeah. Those Republicans were prepared to bail out the people that showered before they went to work, but they didn't give a damn about the people who had to show our afterwork. Let me read you what one Republican Senator said during the discussion of the auto industry bailout. This is Jim DeMint of South Carolina telling Fox News, quote, the take home pay of auto workers.

He's essentially the same, but gold-plated benefits that the unions have negotiated over the years have essentially brought the big three to the brink of bankruptcy. And they will freely admit that the American auto companies that are producing overseas are very competitive because they don't have to operate under the union agenda. I think that Senator DeMint is delusional, or being deliberately dishonest or absolutely uninformed. The difference is very simple on that issue. Most of the transplants have been here less than 30 years. I think in total they might have 300 retirees. The transplants being the Hyundai's and Toyota's and the foreign car companies that came into America in the last 30 years. Mainly in the South Carolina. Mainly in

the South, mainly giving huge, huge amounts of taxpayer dollars to get there in the billions of taxpayer dollars. By the states giving the subsidies to come there. By the states who gave them subsidies and lots of those subsidies were the flow of federal dollars, but then you end up and you say, okay, the auto industry and the American auto industry, the big three, have over a million retirees that they provide healthcare to, a million. They have pension funds. No one that retires from the auto industry gets rich. They have a decent pension so that they can keep their home, that they can have a bit of comfort in their sort of autumn days. And these Toyota Republicans would want to see that taken away. The fact of the matter is that if we had universal healthcare in America, like most of the rest of the industrialized world, most of the rest of the world, that would not be the burden that's put on the auto industry. People miss the huge burden

on North American manufacturing in the way we provide healthcare in America. It's a huge competitive disadvantage. I don't blame General Motors for being decent enough to work with the union to provide healthcare to those retirees. If you ever worked on an assembly line for 25, 30, 40, 45 years or in a steel mill, you're tired when you're at 60 years of age and 65 years of age and when you retire. You ought to have some healthcare. Is that why you are an advocate of universal healthcare to take the burden off of companies? I'm an advocate of universal healthcare for a number of reasons. Taking the burden off of employers and taking out of the collective burden system is one, but also I think it's the right thing to do as a human being. It's the right thing to do as a civil society. It's the right thing to do as a society that wants to... I forget who said the comment, but we ought to be judged by what we do for the weakest among us. I know that you would like to see the Obama administration start to rebuild our manufacturing base, but what gives you hope that we can resurrect the manufacturing base in this country?

I think that we have to go back to a dialogue and I met with some CEOs yesterday to talk to them about whether they want to get in that fight. We don't have to go back to a dialogue in America that understands that the way you really create wealth in America is by making things that people want to buy. Not by creating asset bubbles and credit crunches and that kind of stuff which has been our experience for the last 40 years. What do you think America can manufacture now that consumers will and that the world will? I think we can manufacture cars and I think that if we had the right focus and we took the healthcare burden off of not just the auto industry, all industry in America, the way the rest of the world does. That would increase our global competitiveness. I think if we enforce our trade laws so that... By the way, we compete with China most of the time we're competing against the government, not against the country. So we need to enforce our trade laws and we need to look at green jobs. We need to look at solar energy. We need to look at fixing our energy grid. We need to retrofit our public buildings. We've got kids that

are going into buildings that are using air handling systems from the 40s and 30s. We need to retrofit our courthouses and our city halls. We need to fix the glass in our building so that they're energy efficient. We need to do that using American workers and American products. I happen to know that way back in 1990 you were the first labor leader that I can remember who was advocating moving to a green economy, advocating environmentally friendly business and products. But the question that's come up over the years is suppose we do develop green jobs. What's to keep them from being set abroad to low wage workers the same way auto jobs have been set abroad? I think what we need to do is fix our legislative process so that it's designed to not export our jobs the way other countries do. If having trade laws, we'll say that's protectionism. It's not protectionism. It's creating an environment where it's healthy to keep your jobs at home. And by the way, what's, how, why does protectionism come a bad word? Why does creating jobs at home become a bad thing? You know what? Try to try to do this in

France. President Sarkozy said immediately we're going to help our auto industry in France, but the French taxpayers' dollars are going to be spent in France. What's wrong with that? Try to do this in Japan. I was at a meeting with the head of the Chinese steel industry where one of the American steel company CEOs said what do you think if we were to buy into part of the Chinese steel industry? She said no, no, no. She said no, no, no. Steel is too important to China. In America today 52 percent of our steel is foreign owned. Where did you come to this sense of economic justice? It runs all through your speeches. The way I grew up, growing up in in my hometown, it's where I became an environmentalist when I grew up in my hometown. It was the pollution capital of North America. Where is that? The Siberian Ontario Canada. And there were days where I ran track. I was 17 years old before I understood you could actually run without sucking in sulfur in the air. I grew up three miles from a smelter and I didn't know any better.

And when I became an adult, I said to myself, it doesn't have to be this way. And for all my years growing up, the mining company would say, well, you got to have a choice between these good jobs and a little bit of pollution. The reality is we didn't have to have the choice. We're either going to have both a clean environment and good jobs or in the long run we'll have neither. So with this kind of background and this kind of conviction and also being a very realistic political man, what realistically do you expect soon from Obama? First thing I expect him to stand up and make this bold economic renewal step that is going to have a combination of putting manufacturing back to the top of the heap, understanding you got to put workers back to work, dealing with the environment by retrofitting buildings, fixing the energy grid, looking at mass transit. Those aren't all going to be instant fixes, but they're going to be the kinds of investments that return America and American companies to being the most productive

and competitive in the world. I want President Obama to stick to what he said that this is the final verdict on a failed philosophy where if you reward everybody at the top, it'll trickle down on the rest of us. He was right then. He's right today. He'll be right two years from now. And a few sticks of those values and develops an economic and social agenda that expresses his values. We'll become well again. Come back in a few months and tell me how you think he's doing. All right. I'd be glad to do it. Thank you very much Leo for being here. My pleasure. Thank you. Thank you. The members of the New Congress in Washington face a daunting challenge, just to count all the zeros after the dollar signs. A trillion dollars is a thousand billion dollars. And that's how much

Washington says our government will be spending beyond its means for Barack Obama's economic stimulus program. So the card is a capital hell or fill with happy faces because it's a lot more fun to spend billions than it is to pinch pennies. Now you may be concerned that so much spending invites a feast for the ogres of waste, fraud and abuse. But on Tuesday, President elect Obama promised a higher standard of accountability, transparency and oversight than we used to getting at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue. We are going to bring a long overdue sense of responsibility and accountability to Washington. We are going to stop talking about government reform and we're actually going to start executing. We're not having earmarks in the recovery page, period. No earmarks will be allowed. And if you thought you hadn't heard him correctly, he repeated it in his big speech on Thursday. None of those hidden pet projects with multi-million dollar price tags that individual members of

Congress sneak into bills for special interest or campaign contributors. Can it be true? Have we really crossed the bridge to nowhere for the last time? Don't hold your breath. As a senator, Barack Obama himself was no slouch when he came to passing out earmarks and many of the people in his incoming administration or in themselves accomplished practitioners. Take former Republican Congressman Ray LaHood, Obama's nominee to head the Department of Transportation. Last year, he helped steer $62.7 million in earmarks to his Illinois district. Members of Congress altogether added almost $13,000 earmarks to legislation, totaling more than $18 million in additional spending. Now that may surprise you, especially if you remember, we were promised reform once before. After the Democrats took over Congress in 2006, but never underestimate the ingenuity of legislators to throw the watchdogs off the scent. We offer yet another case study of Houdini-Lakai-Jings

on Capitol Hill from our colleagues at Expo-Zay. They revisit a crack investigative team from the Seattle Times whose award-winning journalism has revealed to the public the connection between campaign contributions and wasteful congressional earmarks. The producer is Mark Schaffer, the narrator Sylvia Chase. America is so fortunate to have as a mixed speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi. Today, the American people voted for change, and they voted for Democrats to take our country in a new direction. The Democrats were going to clean house they promised, and the Democrats intend to lead the most

honest, most open, and most ethical Congress in history. For the first time, lawmakers would post the details of each congressional earmark, its sponsors and value, and they would be required to submit a letter for each of these pet spending project, complete with its purpose and the exact name and address of the beneficiary. In the letters, lawmakers would also certify that neither they nor their spouses had a financial interest in the project. Across the country, in Seattle, one journalist was paying especially close attention. I thought now that we have reforms, I'll be able to tell the whole story on the relationship between money and earmarks. Seattle Times, investigative reporter David Heath,

turned his sights to the 2008 defense bill. The first passed under earmark reform. Just to be sure, Congress was telling the whole truth, Heath cross-checked Congress's official list of earmarks against those he was able to verify on his own, and he made a disturbing discovery. Despite the reform, Congress is still hiding earmarks. So it became a much better story. It wasn't about a corrupting process. It wasn't about wasteful earmarks that were local pork and local pet projects. It was beyond that. It was actually all of that plus active deception and hypocrisy. Joined by his colleague, Christine Wilmson, David Heath spent months following the money. Haynes takingly reviewing each disclosure letter, beginning with those from the House of Representatives. There was well over a thousand of these letters, and we took

these letters and we basically made a database out of them. Under the new rules, members must disclose the exact recipients of their earmarks. Reporting only the federal entities through which the dollars get dispersed is not allowed. For people who obey the rules, the disclosure in the House is pretty good. But not everyone obeys the rules. We found over a hundred cases where a member of the House wasn't really honest. They said the entity getting the funding was Department of Defense or the Office of Naval Research, which doesn't really tell us anything. What we want to know is who's actually getting the money in the end, and this money is almost always going to a contractor, a vendor, a company. Without knowing who's actually getting the money in the end, there's no way to track whether lawmakers are getting campaign contributions from the same people to whom they're funneling earmark dollars. The money trail goes cold. The disclosure letters in the House may have been imperfect, but they proved far more informative than those the reporters

found in the Senate. When Heath and Wilson checked, each senator's disclosure letter said virtually the same thing. All it says is that for all the earmarks I've done, I promise you there's no conflicts of interest. That's all it says. How the Senate managed to hide the details of its earmarks while publicly proclaiming reform is a story of masterful parliamentary sleight of hand. Watch closely or you'll miss it. As soon as he took over, new Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid pledged to come clean on earmarks as part of a massive new ethics bill. The underlying legislation that is bipartisan nature sponsored by the Democratic and Republican leaders is good legislation. It's a significant step forward, anything that's happened in this country since Watergate. Ethics reform, lobbying reform, earmark reform, a very sound piece of life.

But what Senator Reid wasn't saying was that the reform measure contained a caveat. Senators wouldn't have to disclose any earmarks that went to federal entities, but in the defense bill almost all the earmarks first go to federal entities before being passed along to private contractors. In effect, Senators would be able to hide almost every earmark and that prompted a challenge from Senator Jim DeMint, a champion of earmarked transparency. The South Carolina Republican began with a startling admission. Many in this chamber know that I don't often agree with Speaker Pelosi, but Speaker Pelosi has the right idea. And a stunning proposal. As an amendment to the ethics bill, the staunchly conservative Republican DeMint proposed that the Senate adopt word for word, the House version of earmark reform, marshaled through by the Liberal Democrat, Nancy Pelosi. We proposed the Demint Pelosi amendment and I presented it

on the floor and the place was quiet. This is the language that our new Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, has put in this lobbying reform bill in order to make it more honest and transparent. It was a brilliant tactical move. If the Democratic majority was to reject Demint's amendment, it would mean rejecting the much stronger earmark disclosure rules crafted under their own party's high profile Speaker of the House. Harry Reid did not want this to come for a vote. He made a motion to table it, which gives a member some cover because you're not really voting against the amendment. You're just voting to table it. Tabling the so-called Demint Pelosi amendment would mean removing it from consideration, effectively killing it. I would appeal to my friend from South Carolina. I repeat, I know that you're doing this because

you think it's the right thing to do. But take the opportunity to look at what's here. It's better than the House version. So much better. I've only touched upon one. And Senator Reid assumed, as most people did, including me, that he would get 51 votes to table it. And we had a few heroes on the Democrat side that joined us. Barack Obama, a relatively new Senator, bucked his party and voted with us. On this vote, the eyes are 46. The nays are 51. The motion to table is not agreed to. And we defeated the tabling motion. Well, once the tabling motion failed by a voter to everyone knew they were going to have to vote on the real thing. And it was like 98 to nothing. I mean, this is the kind of thing that if Senators know America can see what they're voting on, they were afraid not to vote for it. Indeed, with all eyes watching, 98 Senators voted in favor of the artfully crafted DeMint Pelosi

Amendment, not one opposed it. The junior Senator from South Carolina had taken on the powerful Senate majority leader and one. Or so it appeared. Remember, this was an amendment to a wide ranging ethics bill. And before a bill becomes a law, its final language must be worked out between both houses of Congress. Steve Ellis, a leading earmark reform advocate in Washington, explains how the game works. So rather than doing what the House did, which was simply changed their rules, you're done the next day. Everything has changed and you have to abide by earmark reform. People could still modify it before it actually ended up becoming the rules of the Senate. Which is precisely what happened. Frankly, as we all know, we're going to have to do some work to improve this. Behind the scenes, as the final language to the ethics bill was being hammered out, a mysterious new provision was slipped in. There it is. Paragraph 6, subparagraph

A5. Senators would submit letters to committee chairpersons containing all the earmark information, but they would tell the public only that they have no pecuniary, meaning financial conflict in the projects they were sponsoring. They essentially said that the public can only get this last little thing which says, I'm not a crook. As for who's actually getting the earmark money, that remains a Senate secret. The Senate leadership that was behind cutting this bill were really evil geniuses. This is a provision where I look specifically at it as soon as it came out. Other people in Washington who work on earmark reform look specifically at this provision to make sure that we were going to get the information that we were promised, and we missed it. And they did exactly what I was afraid of. They killed earmark reform. It's a stunning disappointment and a huge misopportunity. It completely guts earmark rules we all agreed to back in January.

Once they got the loophole created behind the scenes, they figured that no one was going to pay attention. But someone did pay attention. After months of work, David Heath and Christine Wilmson had tracked down every hidden earmark they could find. In the 2008 defense bill, there were 155 of them. And those hidden earmarks were worth three and a half billion dollars. So that was 40% of the earmark money in the defense bill. Among those Congress failed to reveal according to David Heath, $588 million to accelerate the construction of a submarine the defense department hadn't even asked for in its appropriations request. The largest earmark in the entire bill. The reporters tracked the earmark to the giant defense contractor General Dynamics. They also discovered that the office of management and budget had opposed the earmark, saying it would take resources away

from more urgent defense needs. $588 million on a submarine the Pentagon did not want. In fact, the administration said, please take this out of the bill. Then there was the $18 million for Latrobe specialty steel. courtesy of Democratic Congressman John Murtha, powerful chairman of the defense appropriations subcommittee, and one of Capitol Hills leading earmarkers. Latrobe, which sits in Congressman Murtha's Pennsylvania district, had made political donations to Murtha. There was a dotted line between Congress, who they received campaign contributions from, and who got earmarks. When the reporters asked why the Congressman hadn't disclosed the Latrobe steel earmark, they were told through a Murtha spokesman that the measure was competitively bid. And according to the Congressman, that meant it wasn't an earmark at all. They said, oh, that can't be an earmark because it says right in the bill that it's supposed to be competitively

bid, which by the way, all earmarks are supposed to be competitively bid. But it turns out that in this particular case, there wasn't a competitive bid because the company was the only company in America that could actually qualify for this earmark. We found that Congress played word games almost something straight out of George Orwell about what is and is not an earmark. I mean, if it looks like an earmark, it acts like an earmark, an average person applying common sense would say it's an earmark. It's an earmark. I think we could have investigated for years to try and find all the earmarks that were hidden. It's just incredibly difficult to find them. And they're still mysterious ones out there today that we can't track. Congress are the ones to determine whether or not earmark disclosure has been met.

And they're essentially your ultimate Homer referees that are deciding these games. That means, as the Seattle Times would report, even if lawmakers break the earmark rules, they face no punishment. Just don't disclose. Nothing's going to happen. Right? Nothing's happened so far. I mean, we've found people that haven't disclosed and they're not necessarily facing discipline or getting investigated by the ethics committee. Joe Citizen can't figure out what's not being disclosed. I mean, you have to go through the bill and analyze each and every line item to see whether or not it's been disclosed or not. And that's just not something the average person can do. Hope they say spring's eternal. So once again, reform is in the air. Just Tuesday, the chairman of the House and Senate Appropriation Committees announced some rule changes to discourage earmark abuse, including a requirement that requests be publicly disclosed.

And on Wednesday, a bipartisan group of senators introduced new legislation to take earmark reform even further. Oklahoma's Republican Senator Tom Coburn said it's all about the public trust. This is an issue about confidence. We're in the deepest recession in 50 years. And the answer to getting out of a recession is competency and the confidence in the consumer that tomorrow is better, the day is brighter. And the problem is, as long as earmarks exist, the way they do today, we're never going to have the confidence of the American people that we have their best interest at heart. We'll see. Fortunately, we have some help. Two public interest groups, taxpayers for common sense and the Sunlight Foundation have joined forces to dig deep into the data bank to create earmark watch, a website that allows you and me to keep track of what our senators and representatives are up to. You can find out more about earmark watch at our site on PBS.org.

In a city made noisy by hammers and stalls preparing for the inauguration of a new present, a city already reverberating with partisan rancor, and with the constant chatting of the opinionated, it was hard to hear the sound of a single snare drum along Pennsylvania Avenue this week between the White House and Capitol Hill. But there it was. A mere handful of men and women, 70 at most, had come out this rain swept morning to bear witness to the dead to the victims of war. They carried the names of the dead in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and the recent dead in Gaza, along with ages and places. And in many cases, very little more is

known, except that these are people who should still be alive. These are real human beings with family members and loved ones and friends, and we're killing them. They were there for the first hour of the first day of the new Congress. It's a general assumption that power rests at the other end of this street in the White House, and that we may have a better precedent there than we had last night, and we should wait and see what happens. Well, our constitution puts the power to begin and end wars, and fund and defund wars here in the Congress. A short distance away, a noisy media circus surrounded Illinois Democrat Roland Burris as he tried to take a seat in the United States Senate, while scarcely anyone recorded the march of the dead. Inside the hearts of the office building, the marchers unfurled their banner. Seventeen were arrested.

I'm thrilled that people were willing to bring this message on day one, and not assume that an election solves everything, because elections have never created peace. Only what people do in between elections has ever created peace. Their act of conscience could not have been more timely, but one thing, the Washington Post reports this week, that the U.S. Army sent letters to the 7,000 family members of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Every letter began, dear John Doe. Yes, it was a mistake, and the army is now apologized, but we were reminded of the anonymity that is conferred on America's fallen warriors whose homecoming in caskets, the Bush White House, has tried to keep from the public. They, their parents, spouses, and children, are far removed from the gaze of official Washington. The marchers along Pennsylvania Avenue were reminding us that every

casualty, every victim of war has a name. For too much of the world at large, the names of the dead and wounded in Gaza might as well be John Doe too. They are the casualties and victims of Israel's decision to silence the rockets from Hamas terrorists by waging war on an entire population. Yes, every nation has the right to defend its people. Israel is no exception. All the more so, because Hamas would like to see every Jew in Israel dead. But brute force can turn self-defense into state terrorism. It's what the U.S. did in Vietnam with B-52s and they palm and again in Iraq with shock and awe. By killing indiscriminately, the elderly, kids, entire families, by destroying schools and hospitals, Israel did exactly what terrorists do and exactly what Hamas wanted. It spilled the blood that turns the wheel of retribution.

Come on, come on, come on, come on! Hardly had Israeli tank fire killed in injured scores at a UN school in Gaza, then a senior Hamas leader went on television to announce the Zionist have legitimized the killing of their children by killing our children. Already, attacks on Jews in Europe are escalating. A burning car crashes into a synagogue in southern France. A fiery object is hurled through a window in Sweden, venomous anti-Semitic graffiti appears across the continent and arsonist strike in London. What we're seeing in Gaza is the latest battle in the oldest family choral own record. Open your Bible. The sons of the patriarch Abraham become Arab and Jew. Go to the book of Deuteronomy, when the ancient Israelites entered Canaan, their leaders urged violence against its inhabitants. The very Moses who had brought down the commandment now should not kill. Now proclaimed you must destroy completely all the places where the nations have served their gods. You must tear

down their altars, smash their pillars, cut down their sacred poles, set fire to the carved images of their gods, and wipe out their name from that place. So God soaked violence, became genetically coded. A radical stream of Islam now seeks to eliminate Israel from the face of the earth. Israel misses no opportunity to humiliate the Palestinians with checkpoints, concrete walls, routine insults, and the own slot in Gaza. As if boasting of their mind, Israel defends forces even put up video of the explosions on YouTube for all the world to see. Or no region doctor there tells CBS, it's like dotties in furno. They're bombing one and a half million people in a cage. America has officially chosen sides. We supply Israel with money, F-16s, wings, and tacit signals. Our Christian right links arms with the religious extremist there who claim divine sanction for Israel's occupation of the West Bank. Our politically elites show

neither independence nor courage by challenging the consensus that Israel can do no wrong. Although one recent poll found democratic voters overwhelmingly opposed the Israeli offensive by a 24-point margin, Democratic Party leaders in Congress, nonetheless marched in lockstep to the hardliners in Israel and the White House. Rarely, does our mainstream media depart from the monotonous monologue of the party line? Many American Jews know, as Aaron David Miller writes in the current newsweek, that the destruction in Gaza won't do much to address Israel's longer term needs. But those who raise questions are accused by a prominent reform rabbi of being morally deficient. One Jewish American activist told me this week that never in 30 years as he seen such blind and binding conformity in his community, you'd never know, he said, that it is the gossens who are doing most of the suffering. We are in a terrible bind, Israel, the Palestinians, the United States,

each greases the cycle of violence as one man's terrorism becomes another's resistance to oppression. Is it possible to turn this mindless tragedy toward peace? For starters, read Aaron David Miller's article in the current newsweek, get his book, The Much Too Promised Land, and pay no attention to those Washington pundits cheering the fighting in Gaza as they did the bloodletting in Iraq. Killing is cheap, and war is a sport in a city where life and death become abstractions of policy. Here are the people who pay the price. That's it for the journal, I'm Bill Moir's, we'll be back next week. Track earmarks online, log on at pbs.org.

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