NOW with Bill Moyers; 319; Samantha Power on the Abu Ghraib images; Job migration; THE WALL STREET JOURNAL editor Paul Gigot

You Tonight on Now These events occurred on my watch as Secretary of Defense, I am accountable for them and I take full responsibility. Should Donald Rumsfeld resign as Secretary of Defense or be fired?

The Wall Street Journal's Paul Gigos says no. I don't think we've lost this war. I think we can still win it. And what do those shocking abuses by American soldiers tell us about us? I think the temptation now is to say these are exceptional people. A revved up, delighting, sadistic group of bad apples. I guess what I would say is that we all have to ask ourselves, do we have it in us? And you expect labor unions to complain about American corporations sending jobs overseas. But some Republican small business owners are speaking up too. We cannot continue to exploit the low-cost labor countries at the expense of our people here, statesite. All that tonight on Now with Bill Moyers and David Broncaccio, the weekly news magazine from PBS. Funding for Now has been provided by Mutual of America, our sole corporate funder.

For over 50 years, we've put retirement and pension products to work for those in the public service. Now we're doing the same for the rest of America, Mutual of America, for all of America, the spirit of America. And by the Park Foundation, the Bernard and Audrey Rappaport Foundation, the Herb Alpert Foundation, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you. Thank you. From our studios in New York, Bill Moyers and David Broncaccio. Welcome to Now, the political and moral ground shook under our feet today. The world was watching as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told Congress why he should keep his job. He apologized for what happened that the Abu Ghraib prison, but he said he won't resign as long as he's able to be effective.

In Congress, the outrage was bipartisan. Do you believe, based on all the things that have happened, and it will happen, that you're able to carry out your duties in a bipartisan manner? And what do you say to those people calling for your resignation? Certainly, since this firestorm has been raging, it's a question that I've given a lot of thought to. The key question for me is the one you posed, and that is whether or not I can be effective. Needless to say, if I felt I could not be effective, I'd resign in a minute. I would not resign simply because people try to make a political issue out of it. But even after the hearings with Rumsfeld ended this afternoon, the clamor for his resignation grew louder and louder. Joining us tonight for some perspective is Paul Gigo. Paul Gigo is a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist, and now has one of the most powerful jobs in American journalism. He's the editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal.

He oversees the editorials, the op-ed articles, and leisure and art criticism. Welcome back to now. Good to be here, Bill. I started the morning. This morning, reading your very strong editorial blood in the water, arguing in effect that if Donald Rumsfeld resigns or is fired, it's the signal that the war in Iraq has been lost, and George Bush has failed. Well, yes, I mean, I think that Donald Rumsfeld is the most visible cabinet symbol of the president's Iraq policy. He clearly was giving briefings every day or every other day during the Iraq war. And now that it's in a hard patch and a hard struggle, I think that for the president to say, well, I'm going to blame my defense secretary, or I'm going to hold him responsible and distance myself from that policy, is a recipe for conceding that the war was a mistake. And if the people see that, I think the American people will say, well, wait a minute, why should we re-elect George Bush? So I think he's joined at the hip with Donald Rumsfeld. So Rumsfeld cannot be held accountable in order to keep George Bush electable?

Well, he should certainly be held accountable, like any cabinet member, if he does something that warrants firing. Of course, cabinet members in some sense are always there to be fired if they do something wrong, as you know. But in this case, I think what you're talking about is something I don't think Rumsfeld, if you're talking about the abuses of Iraqi prisoners, that he is responsible for, he's responsible as defense secretary for how he handles the accusations and the reports, and all the evidence I see is that it's being handled properly. There is an alternative opinion to what you wrote. And it comes from one of your ideological kinfogs. Sort of. So the economist, who's covered this morning says, resign Rumsfeld. The economist supported, endorsed George Bush in 2000. And it says, Rumsfeld has to resign and demonstrate to the world one of the true American values that senior people take responsibility. And if he won't resign, says the magazine, President Bush should fire him.

In other words, somebody has to stand up with spine in his backbone and say, I do take responsibility, and I'll pay the price worth. Well, responsibility for what? I mean, what is he supposed to take responsibility for? A chain of command that goes down to what happened there. Yeah, but I don't think that we don't know precisely who was responsible yet. And I think that that general to Google report assigned some responsibility. And it's perfectly reasonable to think that it has to go up the chain of command. And I think that's what Rumsfeld was doing when you're part of the civilian leadership. I don't think you can jump the chain of command down and say, wait a minute. I want to grab this report and show it to the American people. You have to have things follow regular order. How is he responsible for what some soldiers do? Well, they kind of seems to be making a moral argument. You seem to be making in your editorial this morning a political argument. The economist is saying the message has to go out to the world that we do take this very, very seriously. And there's more at stake than George Bush's election.

Oh, I agree with that, absolutely. And we said in the editorial, I'm not minimizing this at all. People do have to be held responsible. In fact, I don't think it's enough for the president to simply apologize to the Arab world. I think that's perfectly legitimate and important. I thought that was a good thing to do. But I also think that we have to see that people are fired in the sense of court marshals are made for people who are responsible. But what nobody has shown me yet is that Donald Rumsfeld or the civilian leadership in the Pentagon somehow dropped the ball on this. A minute it was found that this was going on. They've ordered review after review. They've ordered procedures to be followed. They've ordered the chain of command to make sure this is taken seriously right from day one. That's his job. You're editorial yesterday. When you understand you wrote yourself, held that the military got on to this long before the press. But if I remember correctly, this report was finished a couple of months ago. And it was not made public until it appeared on the New Yorker's website a week ago today. Well, I wasn't talking about in the editorial about the degree to which this was made public.

I was talking about the degree to which the military was investigating it and holding people accountable. And that chain of events, that timeline is such that I think you can say that the military is taking this seriously. Has every step of the way has been working with the Red Cross and has been trying to make this right. And that careers have ended. There have been seven letters of reprimand issued. There have been six people indicted so far. And I agree. Maybe this does need to go up to people who are responsible for those prisons and what happened there and those rules of engagement because when you have people who have so much control over the lives of people, as you do in a prison situation, you have to have the proper procedures. But I think this whole investigation has jumped immediately from our justifiable horror under our standards of what happened to get Rumsfeld. And I don't see the connection. Well, it's also possible that it's jumped to send a message out to the world at large. You're, again, another one of your somewhat, perhaps more so than the economist for Turtle, a conservative Charles Krauthammer,

points out that the jihadist of Islam in a column this morning, the Holy Warriors are unique in their loathing for the freedom of women. So he concludes that what makes these horrors so incendiary are the pictures of American women soldiers mocking, humiliating and dominating naked and abused Arab men. Like the one in Thursday's Washington Post, which showed an American woman soldier leading an Arab around naked on the leash. He says, this is why the abuse is so inflammatory. And for us, and our call is so damaging. It reenacted the most deeply psychologically charged and most deeply buried aspect of the entire war on terror. Exactly as Ben Laden would have scripted it. I agree with that. I think it's very been very damaging to our cause. I think it's horrifying. I think we can't simply say, well, you know, we had, the soldiers are in a tough situation and we have to conduct interrogations. You can't rationalize this. I think you have to judge it not by the standards of what prevail elsewhere in the world, but by our own standards and our own values.

And I'm as horrified as anybody by this. What I think you do have to do is you have to put it into some kind of context, which suggests that this is not systematic. I've seen no evidence of that. That this is, that most of our soldiers are highly, highly disciplined, that are doing great things in Iraq. They're building schools. They're trying to get that country on its feet. They're sacrificing their lives over there. And I think the danger is that in this political season, where we're trying to really fight over the Iraq war and whether we refight the Iraq war and whether we should have fought it at all, which is part of this presidential election debate, we have to be very careful of inditing the entire military because we need it as an institution. I agree with that, Paul, but there is another context other than just the American political and military context. There's a global context. Yes, sir. How can we win the war against terrorism when in villages across the world, Muslim villages in the Philippines or in Bosnia or elsewhere? These pictures of this humiliation of Arab men are on the walls.

How can we win the war unless we immediately send a message to those people and those villages. We believe this is not just wrong for America. It's wrong for the world. Do you think that the firing of Don Rumsfeld is going to be that message? I don't think that in the context you just described that that would make an Iota of difference. Can we enlist support in the Arab and Muslim world unless someone does take that responsibility? Well, I mean, this happened. It's extremely damaging. And we have to cope with it. We have to, under our uniform code of military justice, under our system. And then we have to move on and we have to prove ourselves again by proving this won't happen again and proving our bonafides and working to succeed in Iraq and elsewhere in the world. I mean, we can't just say, look, it's hopeless. This has marred us for a generation. It'll marred us for a generation if we wallow in it and don't do anything about it. Who is accountable for the war in Iraq?

Well, the President of the United States is accountable for the war in Iraq. It's his signature policy along with the war on terrorism. It's the most important part of his administration and he's ultimately accountable. It seems to me that what has happened exposes the fundamental and even tragic mistake of the Bush administration. To shift our response to 9-11 from Osama bin Laden who did it to a conventional war against Saddam Hussein, who didn't do it no matter how dangerous or threat he might have been to the Arab world. He didn't do 9-11 and that that tragic assumption of the Bush policy toward Iraq was the same kind of tragic assumption we made in another time about Vietnam, that you could win that war by attacking North Vietnam. Well, I don't think we've lost this war. I think we can still win it. And I think the American people will be the ultimate judges I think in November and beyond about whether we should have fought Iraq. I think there were reasons to do it well beyond any link to Al Qaeda. And in fact, when it was the one place in the world, Iraq was, it was when George W. Bush took office where they were shooting at American servicemen through the enforcement of the No Fly Zone.

He did try to kill a sitting president, the first president Bush. So I guess he was out of office then. But there was a lot of reason to think that it was an awful reason. Instead, he gave the reasons of weapons and mass destruction. And President Cheney, as recently as two weeks ago, was still maintaining the correctness of that policy. He gave the reason as Al Qaeda. He didn't give the reasons you just said. So once you start a war on the wrong premises, can you ever really hope to pull it off? Well, you have to win. Yeah, you have to win. What's winning? Well, winning is succeeding in Iraq on roughly the terms that we went into succeed, that is, exiting with a relatively stable country. That means we have to win in Fallujah. We have to take care of those pockets of insurgency. We have to deal with those Shiites in the South who want to deal with us. Still the majority to put down that insurgent al-Sader, Makkah al-Sader. And ultimately, we have to transfer power. And I think we're reading to do that in June, to an Iraqi government that is more legitimate in the eyes of Iraqis than for an occupation.

And we have to start doing that in June, and we have to keep building on that. And I think that's still very doable. We're seeing not very easy, but I think it's achievable. You say winning in Fallujah. What is winning in Fallujah? I think we're moving it as a sanctuary for the bathists and jihadi insurgents. That means if we have to killing the 1,000 or 2,000 that they think are there. Much as we have done in Samara, where there were a few hundred in other places, which were not as bad as Fallujah, because that has a history going back well before we were there, even under Saddamah was a hard place to control. But we allowed it to become a sanctuary for the insurgency, so these people could go there, build up caches of weapons. We stayed out of it for a long time, our military. And we're now paying the price, and we have to go back in there and make sure that those people are defeated. That's going to be awfully hard if the issue in Iraq and the issue in the world is still what happened at that prison.

Well, I think we can't let, we can't, if we're going to be paralyzed by how we behaved, by how some of our soldiers behaved in the prisons, and that particular prison, Abu Ghrab. Then I think we might as well pull out because we're going to fail. We have to maintain our will and determination to win because our cause overall, as Joe Lieberman said, and as I quoted him in the editorial, these immoral actions should not be allowed to impune the fundamental goodness and wisdom of our effort in Iran. Senator J. Rockefeller was on Charlie Rose the other night. He said the Bush administration was wrong, wrong on the intelligence, wrong about the 9-11 connection, wrong that we would be welcomed as liberators, wrong on setting a date for the handover of government. They don't know who yet they're going to give it to. Bush's advisors, he said, have a batting average of zero on Iraq. Where's the evidence to the country? The one thing that I agree with Senator Rockefeller on that is that we have been drifting in recent months about who to turn the country over to and how to do that process. I think the administration has not been focused as it should be on that. It's been indecisive on that. I think that we've made mistakes in Iraq. There's no question about it, but I don't think they're the mistakes that J. Rockefeller talks about.

I think they're mistakes that we didn't do in Iraq, but we did in Afghanistan, which was to focus on Hamid Karzai, somebody who was somebody we thought could lead and then build a consensus and a new government around him. That's going reasonably well considering the history of Afghanistan, which is difficult. Iraq, we didn't pick that out. We didn't pick somebody to back. We allowed ourselves to become the occupying power and in total control and that was a mistake. We needed Iraqis from the beginning to be our allies, from before the beginning. But we picked Chalabi, who hadn't been in the country for years and sent him back with his own militias to be our representative. Build a mistake. We didn't pick Chalabi. If we had picked Chalabi, he'd be in charge. The point is we didn't pick anybody. I mean, yes, some people favored Chalabi, but where is he? He's a member of the Iraqi governing council that didn't get any kind of support that wasn't allowed to really assert himself. Every time we made an announcement in Iraq, it was the American Paul Bremer making the announcement. We never put the Iraqi faces out front, and that was a big mistake.

Paul, did you go? Thank you for joining us again on now and I look forward to seeing you back with us. Thanks for having me. As those horrible pictures from the Iraq prison kept coming this week, the one person I really wanted to talk to is Samantha Power. She's wrestled with the issue of man's inhumanity demand from Bosnia, to Rwanda, and now in the Sudan. Samantha Power is co-founder of the Car Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard and a Pulitzer Prize winning author. Samantha, welcome back to now. Good to be here. What do you think regular Americans should glean from this whole episode with these photographs about what it either says about our country, about ourselves? Well, I know that when I went over and began interviewing perpetrators of atrocities, of worse atrocities than this, I would kind of go back to my hotel room at night and really have the shivers because what I had realized over the course of drinking coffee with people who were describing the most gruesome acts that they had carried out, some remorseful, some not, was that I had a lot in common with these people. Not because of what I would do, hopefully, if similarly situated, but that they were distinctly ordinary and that in a whole host of ways we were alike.

Let's photographs. Do they depict a war crime? I think unquestionably. I mean, these are practices that are uncondoned, unlicensed, and illegal, and they should be punished. Illegal, but what rules apply? That's one of the big issues here. It is a big issue, and the United States has been very shifty in terms of creating facilities that lie outside American boundaries, like Guantanamo, but also that lie outside the boundaries of international law, and also it has hired contractors, of course, to perform task traditionally performed by the military that would be bound by the Geneva Convention. And thus, it raises whole questions about which laws apply to which individuals within which facility, which is a labyrinth that the drafters and signers of the Geneva Convention never envisaged that states would go out of their way to try to create. Too bad we need the rules. I mean, doesn't every human being on this planet understand by the time they're six months old that one, that thou shall not be a brutal disgusting human being to another person?

One should understand that, and I think what changes when you're in an occupation situation, or in a war situation, is that the question of who is human and who is subhuman, or who is an individual and who is simply a foe, people become very instrumentalized. They become sources and not neighbors, not like the person that you grew up in the sand pit with. We saw it in Vietnam. They would call the Viet Cong gooks dehumanizing them, and therefore somehow making it easier to do horrible things. You have to do it that way, because to fight war, which is, after all, organized slaughter, it would gravely undermine the morale of the soldier if they believe they were killing the person in the sand pit, right? So what happens when you get a protracted occupation is that you see that that mindset of the enemy, the foe, the hunn, in the case of the Rwandan slaughter was the cockroach.

In Nazi Germany, Jews were vermin. There's always some kind of frame that one has to take in order to justify doing awful things. So when you think about American soldiers, they've already branded some of them anyway, the Iraqis as the other, and thus you have people who are prone to give way to the excesses and to an extent to the fear, to the delight, to the power. I mean, it's a whole series of dynamics, but I think once you've branded people in a way that takes them outside the kind of universe of moral obligation, no holds are often barred. So in our tendency as a country since 9-11, especially when we round up people abroad, is to presume them terrorists until they are able to prove they are not terrorists. I mean, that's been the default in Guantanamo and elsewhere that you can get rounded up on very little evidence, and then if you want to prove your case, you have to show that you're not the thing that you're accused of having been.

You take, for instance, the weapons of mass destruction claim, which we have refused to formally drop as our grounds for invading Iraq, and you imagine people in this prison system for the year following the American invasion, you have guards who believe there are weapons of mass destruction. You have inmates who are telling you, we don't know where the weapons of mass destruction are, you have guards who believe there are weapons of mass destruction. So your determination is to get from these people who must know because there are weapons of mass destruction, where the weapons of mass destruction are. It's difficult for Americans. We see ourselves somehow as sometimes beyond the regular rules. Well, I think in America, from the stars, I mean from the founding, onward and from the American Revolution, onward, there has been a presumption of virtue, a kind of genetic predisposition to be higher and grander, and more rights-bearing, and more rights-promoting than just about anybody else. After all, we made human rights. We made the Bill of Rights.

We, in our Declaration of Independence, enshrined equality and liberty, and the kind of the story of America, I think is something that you do breathe in the air. You breathe the story. I don't think the air makes you very different here, or the water makes you any different than it makes you, if you're someplace else. So we do presume that we are a city on the hill and that we are blessed, and I think that explains our position toward the International Criminal Court. You know, we really actually believe that we won't commit genocide crimes against humanity and war crimes, and therefore anybody who would conceivably argue that we should be brought before an International Criminal Court must be making it up. President Clinton signed a treaty saying we would join the International Criminal Court when President Bush came in, he essentially unsigned that treaty. We're concerned that if we're asked to go fix a problem in the world, and we are often asked, as Americans, to fix a problem in the world, that we will then later be accused of war crimes. Yeah, and that, again, because we don't commit war crimes, because we're Americans means that it must be a set of trumped-up charges.

But that relates to the second presumption that we have, I think, of our exceptional nature, and that's that we have exceptionally rigorous structures that will root out the bad apples, in fact, when they emerge. But look, what's its stake? The U.S. prestige abroad, the ability for the U.S. to say to other countries, you need to do a better job with human rights. At the moment, other countries are shrugging their shoulders, at the very least, when America wants to speak up about abuses in other countries. Yeah, well, I mean, when it comes to Iraq, we've now lost the only argument we had going into, you know, the last month, which is that this was a war designed to end torture. That was all we had left, because we'd lost the weapons and mass destruction argument. We'd lost the Al-Qaeda Iraq argument, because, in fact, the war in Iraq seems to have created an Al-Qaeda Iraq connection that didn't exist beforehand. But at least we could say we ended torture in Iraq.

And one of the things that was disappointing, I think, this week, among many news items, was that early in the week President Bush actually gave a speech, this was prior to his apology or his continuum toward an apology, in which he again boasted of the U.S. liberation and how the United States had ended torture in Iraq. And this was four days after the photos had been published in all the major newspapers. This desire, again, to go forward, forward, forward, forward, and kind of pretend history hasn't happened. And to continue, you know, if we don't acknowledge it, maybe they won't notice kind of attitude, which really, I think, marred the Bush administration's early response to these images, is very, very typical. The other tragic component to this, which is not just the lost American lives, not just the lost Iraqi lives and the ever unraveling and uncertain future for Iraq, but is that the United States has so undermined its standing in the world that it actually has proven itself incapable of speaking up on behalf of principle in other areas. In Sudan today, in Western Sudan, a million people have been ethnically cleansed just over the last few months, about 30,000 have been killed.

It is Arab Muslim violence against African Muslims, it's Muslim on Muslims, it's confusing to people, but it's basically a policy that aims to destroy black life in Western Sudan. The Bush administration is the only administration, the only country in the world at the United Nations that has drawn any attention to this. Doing the right thing in this case. Not enough, not putting enough on the line that the Bush administration has a lot of leverage with the government carrying out these killings. I really do think there's far more that the Bush administration could be doing, but even the little things it's trying to achieve, like getting, you know, UN resolutions denouncing cartoon and trying to mobilize international support for monitoring force that will look out for a million people, 400,000 of whom will be dead by December, if they are not reached and rescued. 400,000, I mean, this is half of the Rwanda tally, that's a lot of people. But what's happening?

The United States, of course, because of Iraq doesn't have the troops or the will to go in itself, nor should it go in, of course, aggressively, but it doesn't plan to contribute peacekeepers or monitors, it doesn't have police. So it goes to the international community, it says, look, we care, this is happening, we stand up against evil, that's what America means. And it goes to Tony Blair, and Tony Blair says, forget it, I'm out of here, you know, I've already been down that road with you once. If you say black, I'm saying white for a while. The French and the Germans utterly mute, Kofi Annan, again, distracted by having to figure out what the UN should be doing in Iraq, has made one statement about the suffering of these people in Sudan, but has not followed up by using his moral authority and his agenda setting capacity to try to draw attention to it, to try to get peacekeepers deployed or monitors deployed, so that these people can return home. The Bush administration goes for it, and then it's surprised when everyone says, you know, you can't just come to us when it suits you. But help me out, Samantha, I mean, I don't want to see more of these pictures, and I don't want to see them, I want to see them if they're happening, but I don't want these practices to continue. What should we do next, given the problems as you see them?

Well, it is about actually making concessions that are hard for us, but that means something to them, so that would mean revisiting the issue of the International Criminal Court, perhaps Kyoto, closing down Guantanamo, and using this as an opportunity to say, the system when it comes to detention is broken. We are fallible, we learned that took us 200 years to learn in America, we're now learning that it applies also to offshore detention facilities, and we are going to start from scratch and train personnel in the same way that we would train them as if they were interrogating Caucasian Americans in Des Moines. This is an opportunity to do an overhaul, but it's also an opportunity to recognize a couple of things about the international system. But it's broken. We don't actually have a policing capacity at an international level that can go in and provide first law and order, because that was the first problem with policing in Iraq, is that we allowed the security to unravel and chaos to envelop the society, which itself has been like the threat in the sweater, where everything has kind of ensued from those early days of chaos and resentment. And what we need as an international community is a police force that is standing by.

And the nature of the United Nations right now that are raising their hands saying, give us enough money, we could probably put that together. But again, we have a tendency to kind of romanticize what the United Nations is. I mean, it's basically a building where states come together, often it's a building that just aggregates the selfishness of states, but this is an opportunity. We get it. It's broken. We need a standing police force that gets training in the much harder task of operating in foreign countries where you can't rely on close ties within the community, you don't even speak the language, you have to rely on translators, etc. I mean, this won't just serve us if we actually use this as an opportunity to learn, it won't just serve us in Iraq over the coming years, because God knows there's going to be an international presence there for many years. But also in other countries that tend to fall off the beaten path like Liberia or like Congo or now like Western Sudan. Samantha Power, thank you so much for having joined us on now. Pleasure, thank you.

We pause for a footnote to David's interview with Samantha Power for an alternative view, which in the interest of fairness and balance we feel obliged to share with you. It comes from that noted moralist and darling of the right, Rush Limbaugh. Let's listen to his show from Tuesday as we look at what he's talking about. It was like a college fraternity prank to stack up naked. Exactly. Exactly my point. This is no different to what happens at the Scullum Bones initiation and we're going to ruin people's lives over it. And we're going to hamper our military effort and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time. These people, you ever heard of emotional release? You ever heard of need to blow some steam off? There's news out there that is not about Iraq. Even as Donald Rumsfeld was testifying today, President Bush was out on the road doing a little populist campaigning in the Midwest.

He's been at it all week, taking out his big red white and blue bus, heavily armored with plush leather captain seats and flat screen TV. The tour aims to showcase the president's image as a regular guy and touch with regular guy problems. Now to be a regular guy in a Midwest manufacturing state these days means you're worried about your job or your small business. Even though there was some good news today for people who work in factories. Employment figures were better for the second month in a row, with new jobs added to nearly every sector of the economy, including manufacturing. Those figures will resonate in a city not on Mr. Bush's itinerary this week, Rockford, Illinois. Folks around town there like to tell you that Rockford was high up on the Soviet Union's nuclear hit list during the Cold War because of its importance as a manufacturing center. Now I went there a couple of weeks ago with producer Peter Marriott.

Rockford, Illinois, about an hour's drive from Chicago was built on manufacturing and for 100 years it was a thriving center of American industry. Fast forward to 2004 and it's a far different story. Just ask Eric Anderberg and his dad Malcolm. You know Rockford at one point all these buildings were busy full of employment. It was no problem to find a job in this town in any of these buildings, a good paying job. That's just not the case anymore. It's a familiar story. Factory towns across the country have met the same fate as millions of good paying manufacturing jobs have vanished altogether. We've been shipped off to spots where a worker gets paid much less. We're talking about Rockford here today but it's the whole country. Whole manufacturing climate in the country is basically in free fall. The voice of working class America speaking out well hardly this time it's the factory owner sounding the alarm about American companies. So driven by profits that they're shipping some of America's best middle class jobs overseas.

Eric and his dad Malcolm own a small manufacturing company in Rockford. They've had to reduce their workforce from 70 to 40. When you have to walk out and you have to lay off an employee and it's no fault of yours or no fault of that employees that you've lost your work. When an employee has to go home and tell his family that he's lost his job today and he doesn't know where he's going to get one. How am I going to pay my payments on my house? How am I going to pay my payments on my car? How are we going to put food on the table? How are we going to maybe send our children to college? I have a responsibility as an American doing an American business to the people that work for me and I think there should be a responsibility of our country. Stop in at the Sunrise Family Restaurant and you'll find it seems like everyone in Rockford has a story to tell about a job that disappeared. The company that I used to work for no longer exists as an empty building now.

Out of work Chuck Malikot had to retire early. And we went from approximately 70 people on two shifts down to a skeleton crew and eventually they just closed the doors. What's left is these jobs disappear. Malcolm and Eric Anderberg took us on a sobering tour of once mighty Rockford. You get the eerie feeling a neutron bomb could have gone off here. The buildings still stand intact but they're weirdly vacant. Okay over here is the still a Suntech building. It's for sale. It's empty for the most part. They made pumps. Nice eaters are for sale for lease. This building is empty. For lease for sale. You see a lot of that. Then we're building used to be manufacturing. It's now we're else. Turn into we're else. I think it's for sale. Rockford's unemployment rate is sky high. More than 16,000 people here are out of work 8% of the workforce. In manufacturing alone, more than 12,000 jobs have been lost in the last five years.

This is the greenleak compound. Make everything here from a handsaw to complex machine tools. It's a compound almost of several different buildings. And they did everything from make the raw material to finish product. It was a 1,200 or so people worked at this facility. Well there was more than I think somewhere between 1,270 and 1,800 in that area. As you can see it's empty. It's a ghost town that businesses gone away. The Anderbergs are part of a growing chorus of Rockford's business people worried about the future of American manufacturing. Matt Bortoli runs quality metal finishing mid-size manufacturer just outside of Rockford. He used to employ about 700 people. Now his company is down to about 250. We have to have some obligation to the people of this country. And that's the workers that we have in our plants. And the families that those workers support. We cannot continue to exploit the low-cost labor countries at the expense of our people here statesite. That to me is fundamentally wrong. And I think that's just as important as our president talks about protecting our borders from threats and terrorists.

This is the new terrorist threat as far as I'm concerned. That is pretty vivid language coming from a Republican businessman. But the economic numbers across the country bear him out. Since the recession officially began three years ago, manufacturing has been hit harder than any other sector of the U.S. economy. More than two and a half million American manufacturing jobs have been lost. In this American manufacturing town, it's hard to escape the evidence. As Rockford Illinois's factory jobs either just disappeared or moved overseas, what you're left with are scenes like these. Empty chairs, empty desks, even the broken machine tool or two. But what's missing? The engineers, the factory workers who once work right here. Some other local examples, the Amorock Corporation. Decades ago, it coined its name, combining the words America and Rockford. In February, Amorock, which makes hinges and other hardware for cabinets, announced it'll be closing its plant here.

And now says it will manufacture products abroad in low-cost countries, eliminating 450 jobs from the area. Textron, one of the world's largest producers of fascinating products, announced it will close two of its plants in town. Gone will be 700 more Rockford jobs. Even high tech, once considered the answer to America's jobs exodus, has not escaped the giant suck of jobs overseas. Cell phone giant Motorola has cut almost 6,000 positions from the area. We tend to have a peak and we tend to have a valley. But the jobs have always come back. John Lundin runs a job training program in Rockford. He's also written a book about the town's industrial history. What's different this time is that through global communications, primarily the Internet and other kinds of resource distribution around the world, a lot of these jobs have located elsewhere. They've simply been eliminated through automation. We don't need them. You can get the same thing done with the lower-cost worker in China for like a tenth of what we pay here than it's going to go there.

In fact, the average hourly wage for manufacturing in China is less than $1 per hour. In Mexico, it's just over $2 per hour. Compare that to the US, where workers earn on average more than $21 per hour in manufacturing. Multinationals look at the globe and will look at the best opportunities for a dollar return. And that's what they're paid to do. As big companies send more work abroad to where labor is undeniably cheaper, the smaller local manufacturers that supply these bigger companies also lose business. That's another reason why it isn't just blue collar workers talking about job loss anymore. In 1996, Judy Pike took over a small manufacturing business, Akami Grinding, just down the street from the sunrise. A small business owner is sort of like being the head of the family. I mean, you cry with them when people die, you celebrate when their children are born. Pike employed 40 people, but four years ago she found herself faced with a crisis. Her biggest client, Textron, cut back the work it gave her company.

And Pike says she had to go into savings to keep the business afloat. She says many other manufacturers here have faced the same choices. You mortgage your house, you know, you take your 401ks in your retirements. There's a lot of people in this town who are struggling who have done that. I mean, they have wiped out their retirement. And it's a sad situation. She says after looking over her financial books, she knew she had to lay off most of her people. Then, last December, came the day she dreaded. The day that I had to make the decision and tell them we were going to close, it was horrendous. I mean, you never seen such tears in your life. I mean, it was like we were all sad for what was happening. It wasn't that, you know, it was, it was like an end of an era. You know, what were we going to do now? We've had over 50 hearings, 50 hearings dealing with manufacturing.

Rockford's representative in Congress is Republican Don Manzulu. As chairman of the House Small Business Committee, he knows American manufacturing is in trouble. The first thing that has to be done is that the policy makers, and I'm talking to people in both sides of the aisle, whoever's in the White House have to realize the absolute necessity of maintaining manufacturing in this country. There are some people, David, who believe if manufacturing goes so well, we'll have the service jobs. You can't do that. If you can't, if you can't farm, if you can't mine, if you can't manufacture, you become a third world nation. Manzulu says American multinationals are being short-sighted. The Chinese thinks generations, Europeans think generations. That's what we have to do here in America, again. Now, when you think long range like that, as opposed to most American multinationals that are forced, I say forced, to think short range, because there's so much emphasis placed upon increasing the value of stock, then you end up with a European advantage.

An advantage in Europe and elsewhere around the globe, he says, that comes from companies and banks that take a long-term view of investment, profits and employment that stretch over generations. An example, the Italian company that bought Rockford manufacturing heavyweight Ingersoll machine tools after Ingersoll went bankrupt. Tina Oldani is the new president and CEO. He intends to turn a profit while keeping jobs right here in Rockford, citing the community's hard-working and skilled labor force. We're tripping different value to a company. We look into a company as a potential growth of increase for the equity and not a short-term investment, where we do something and through it from now, we run away with a lot of money. Like other business owners we spoke with in Rockford, Oldani is critical of how American multinationals operate. They are not looking at having skilled people. People is a head count. They are not a joe, a joe, a Larry or a Brian. They are a head count. If you look in that way and you don't value the people that they are working for you on your company, you are taking these jobs away, you are outsourcing, you're going to China, you're going to Mexico.

That's what's impacting communities like Rockford right now. It's not because we're not productive, we're not efficient enough to produce things in this country. It's just price, cheap labor. How much profit can I make in this company? That's what the large corporations are doing. And what's the American worker to do? When you look closely at the jobs that are being created these days here in the US, you see more often than not that they pay less and offer fewer if any benefits. What troubles me today is a lot of the youth today. Some of them think making a living is working at Home Depot during the day and delivering down those pizza at night. That's not making a living, that's getting by. In fact, in 48 of the 50 states, high wage jobs and industries like manufacturing are being replaced by low wage ones, such as in the service industry. And that kind of work pays on average 21% less. It's worse in Illinois, where new jobs on average pay 34% less.

I think this wonderful middle class economy that we had, the promise of American life that anybody at the bottom of the ladder could climb to the top if they simply had the skills and the will to do and luck. I don't know if that's the same anymore. The middle rungs are going and we're continually pushing the skill levels up, but we're not bringing along the people at the bottom. Many in Rockford's business community fear that Washington just doesn't get it. The Anderbergs are Republicans who support the president, but they believe America's trade policy is designed to help large multinational corporations at the expense of small companies like theirs. As small business people, the good majority of us. We don't have the time or the money to go to Washington to lobby for what we want or what needs to be done. We would like to see what's in the best interest of all America, not for just the people who have the money to lobby to get their issues and front all the time. Case in point tax cuts, they've been wildly cheered by big business, but just listen to these owners of smaller companies.

Well, good businessmen like yourself must applaud the president's efforts to lower taxes that we've seen in the last couple of years. In our heydays, we paid taxes like nobody's business. Lots and lots of taxes. That means you were making good money, but you've got to be profitable to be able to pay taxes. So cutting the tax rate doesn't do you any good unless you're profitable. In times when I was growing my company, I paid taxes every year. I haven't paid taxes for over five years for my small company. I haven't taken a paycheck in two years myself personally because to keep my company going, to keep my sons working and to keep my employees employed, and that's the truth and that's the fact. Another fact is large manufacturers send work overseas and small manufacturers have to lay people off the whole town's economy suffers. An example, the Sunrise Restaurant, Shamila Sonny is the restaurant's manager.

The last two years, actually, year and a half, I'm doing very, very, very small business and I used to do almost 30 to 40 percent decrease from the previous two years. I used to have manager, two managers in the scene, I let them both go and I let two cooks go to dishwasher and one bus boy and five waiters. It's a vicious cycle. Just ask one of the waitresses. Elaine Peters, her husband's trucking business, depends on shipping some of the products manufactured here in Rockford. When these companies and manufacturers are closed, they have nothing more to ship which affects his revenue on income that we expected to have this year. It just goes by the wayside instantly and all of a sudden your income that you thought you had is down by more than half. You go into your savings and you thank God that there is an income coming in and that I have this job. Now there have been signs this year in Rockford that the job market is improving. Some employers here have told us that hiring is up slightly. But even the president on that recent campaign swing through the hard hit Midwest acknowledges the pain.

There are workers who are concerned about their jobs, understand that, our economy is in a time of transition. And if you're the one going through transition, it's not an easy experience. Judy Pike voted for Bush in 2000 and were likely to do so again even so. I wish she would really come out here and see 12,000 people out of work and what the heck are they going to do. I mean, what are these educated, trained 12,000 people going to do? People like Thomas Gable, one of about 450 workers will be losing their jobs when Amerock shuts down production here. I don't know what my future is going to be. It's six months from now. You know, a year from now I have no clue what I'm going to be doing. I'm scared. I am really scared. That's what blue collar workers have been saying for years. Now increasingly, their employers are saying it as well.

The better jobs that this so-called global economy is going to create have yet to materialize here in the United States. And I'm not sure whether an accountant would be a good job because you can get your accounting work done in India. I'm not sure whether a programming job would be a good job because that can be done in India. Manufacturing engineer would go to China. Where are these better jobs that we're supposed to get? And nobody's been able to explain that to me. The war in Iraq has become also a war of images. This week we were troubled by pictures of tortured Iraqi prisoners. Last week it was photographs of American soldiers who've given their lives there. On Friday a week ago, on Nightline, Ted Coppel read the names of the dead and showed their photographs. Marshall Edgerton, Christopher Holland, Kimberly Wolves. Those faces and names were blocked out on ABC stations owned by Sinclair Broadcasting.

Sinclair accused Coppel of doing nothing more than making a political statement. But what about Sinclair's own political agenda? With 62 stations, the company is the biggest of its kind in the country. And has lobbied successfully in Washington for permission to grow even bigger. Its executives are generous contributors to the Republican Party. After 9-11, there were reports their own air talent had been required to read statements affirming a station's 100% support for the president. The company's vice president for corporate communications doubles as the own air commentator. According to the angry left and the partisan press, Bush should have been chasing intelligence leads and fighting terrorism during the Clinton administration. That's because Clinton was too busy chasing skirts and fighting personal scandals. Earlier this year he was sent to Iraq to editorialize on the good things happening there. That's Sinclair's prerogative, of course. Every news organization has first amendment rights. I'm exercising mine right now. But speaking out is one thing, keeping others from being heard is another. Sinclair, censored Coppel.

And when the Democratic National Committee wanted to buy time for a spot, critical of the president, Sinclair's station in Madison said no. Clear Channel, the biggest radio conglomerate in the country with 1200-plus stations, was a big winner in the deregulation frenzy triggered by Congress in 1996. Last year, Clear Channel was a cheerleader for the invasion of Iraq with per war rallies. Rupert Murdoch is a big Washington winner too. Congress and the Republican Control Federal Communications Commission let him off the hook even though his news corporation owned more stations than the rules allowed. Murdoch also controls Fox News, another big cheerleader for American policy in Iraq. And the New York Post, for a week, the Post refused to publish photographs of those tortured Iraqi prisoners, saying the pictures would reflect poorly on the troops risking their lives there. Again, their right, freedom of the press, it's been famously said, is guaranteed only to those who own one.

And that's just the point. These media giants can be within their rights even while doing wrong. It's the system, dear Brutus, the system, a cartel, an effect of big companies and big government scratching each other's back. The founders of our government didn't think it a good idea for the press and state to gang up on public opinion. So they added to the Constitution a bill of rights whose first amendment was to be a kind of firewall between the politicians who hold power and the press that should hold power accountable. The very first American newspaper was a little three-page affair whose editor said he wanted to cure the spirit of lying. The government promptly shut him down on grounds he didn't have the required state license. Nowadays, these mega-media conglomerates relieve government of the need for censorship by doing it themselves. And we're reminded, once again, that journalism's best moments have come not when journalists make common calls with the state, but stand fearlessly independent of it. A free press remains everything to a free society.

That's it for now. David Brincaccio and I will be back next week. I'm Bill Moyers. Connect to now online at PBS.org. Find out what the Arab Press is saying about those Iraqi prison pictures. Learn more about retraining and job programs in your area for unemployed workers. Read more about Rush Limbaugh's comments. Connect to now at PBS.org. Call PBS Home Video at 1-800-PLAY-PBS.

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