American Public Television

Earlier this month, as part of the $585 billion defense bill for 2015, Congress passed a measure that would give lands sacred to American Indians in Arizona to a foreign company. This week, Bill speaks with Robert A. Williams Jr., a professor specializing in American Indian law, about how such deals are a part of American Indian's tragic history of dispossession.

The very agencies created to protect our environment have been hijacked by the polluting industries they were meant to regulate. It may just turn out that the judicial system, our children and their children will save us from ourselves, Mary Christina Wood, a legal scholar, tells Bill Moyers this week.

We've just watched as Washington paid off financial interests with provisions in the new spending bill that expand the amount of campaign cash wealthy donors can give, and let banks off the hook for gambling with customer (and taxpayer) money. It all sounds strikingly familiar to the First Gilded Age, says historian Steve Fraser. But back then people rose in rebellion against the powers that be.