I'm Bill Moyers.

It's good to have your ear.

This week on Moyers & Company, the State of the Union from Beyond the Beltway with journalist-producer David Simon.

The scam of it, the scam of what America's become, you know, give the money to the rich and they'll see that you're not poor.

Is that really what you're saying?

Capitalism is not delivered on the promise to be a see that you're not poor. Is that really what you're saying? Capitalism is

not delivered on the promise to be a measurement of anything other than money of profit. And if profit

is your only metric, man, what are you building? Where does the environment fit into that? Where do

people stand when they fail when they have health needs or when they make a

mistake in life? You know, it was said a long time ago, you judge a society by its hospitals

and its prisons. By that standard, you have a lot to be ashamed of.

Thanks for joining us.

President Obama's State of the Union address and the rebuttals from the Republican Greek

chorus already have been extensively vetted by the media.

So as we say here in New York, enough already.

Instead, we have a reality check from someone who artfully uses television drama to report

on the State of America from an entirely different

perspective from the bottom up. David Simon was a crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun, whose

journalism became the material for two nonfiction books, homicide, a year on the killing streets,

and the corner, a year in the life of an inner city neighborhood.

Each became a TV series and led Simon to leave daily journalism to create two unforgettable shows

for HBO, the wire about the precincts of Baltimore and the corruption of its institutions.

...