Videos

NOW with Bill Moyers - NAFTA: Trading Democracy
"Everyone's heard about NAFTA — the North American Free Trade Agreement — and all the talk about jobs. But almost no one heard about one obscure section of NAFTA — Chapter 11 — except for multinational corporations who are using it to challenge democracy.

Chapter 11 is only one provision in the 555-page North American Free Trade Agreement — negotiated to promote business among the US, Canada and Mexico. It was supposedly written to protect investors if foreign governments tried to seize their property.

But corporations have stretched NAFTA's Chapter 11 to undermine environmental decisions — the decisions of local communities — even the verdict of an American jury. The cases brought so far total almost four billion dollars..."

Read more about NAFTA: Trading Democracy, or view the entire transcript.

Cadillac Desert: Water and the Transformation of Nature
"Cadillac Desert is a four-part documentary series about water, money, politics, and the transformation of nature. Winner of the duPont-Columbia Journalism Award, the series tells, for the first time on television, how Americans have used, abused, protected, controlled, fought over, and died for water.

Cadillac Desert chronicles the growth of a thriving civilization in the great American desert, the fruitful abundance it brought, and the legacy of profound risk it has created at home and abroad. It is the story of tremendous demands for water set against the reality of Earth's physical limits to supply it.

The series' first three episodes, based on Marc Reisner's groundbreaking book, Cadillac Desert, delve into the history of water use and misuse in the American West, exploring the extremes of triumph and disaster, heroism and intrigue, bitter rivalries and strange bedfellows that dominate this little-known chapter of our history. The final episode, drawn from Sandra Postel's book, Last Oasis, examines the global impact of the technologies and policies that came out of America's manipulation of water, demonstrating how they have created the need for conservation methods that will protect Earth's water for the next century..."

Episode One: Mulholland's Dream (1997)
"...tells the incredible story of how the hunt for and the exploitation of water brought the city of Los Angeles to life -- and, literally, life to Los Angeles..."

Episode Two: An American Nile (1997)
"...tells the story of how the Colorado became the most controlled, litigated, domesticated, regulated and over-allocated river in the history of the world. Rich with archival footage and interviews with the river's "shapers" and protectors, the broadcast chronicles how the Colorado became so dammed-up and diverted that by 1969 it no longer reached the sea except in the wettest of years..."

Episode Three: The Mercy of Nature (1997)
"...traces the fierce political and environmental battles that raged around the transformation of California's Central Valley from a semi-arid plain into the most productive and environmentally altered agricultural region in the history of the world..."

Episode Four: Last Oasis (1997)
"...offers an eye-opening report on the ways in which water use -- and misuse -- are affecting the daily lives of millions of people in India, China, Mexico, South America, the Mideast, and here at home in Colorado and California. The broadcast explores how, in the face of rising water needs, advances in water conservation may be humanity's 'last oasis'..."

See more about the series Cadillac Desert.

Trade Secrets: A Moyers Report
This report "is an investigation of the history of the chemical revolution and the companies that drove it – and how companies worked to withhold vital information about the risks from workers, the government, and the public. Journalist Bill Moyers and producer Sherry Jones rely on an archive of documents the public was never meant to see –- documents that reveal the industry's early knowledge that some chemicals could pose dangers to human health that were not disclosed at the time..."

Read more about Trade Secrets.