Democracy in America Is a Series of Narrow Escapes, and We May Be Running Out of Luck
The following is an excerpt from Bill Moyers’ new book, “Moyers on Democracy“.
Democracy in America is a series of narrow escapes, and we may be running out of luck. The reigning presumption about the American experience, as the historian Lawrence Goodwyn has written, is grounded in the idea of progress, the conviction that the present is “better” than the past and the future will bring even more improvement. For all of its shortcomings, we keep telling ourselves, “The system works.”
Now all bets are off. We have fallen under the spell of money, faction, and fear, and the great American experience in creating a different future together has been subjugated to individual cunning in the pursuit of wealth and power -and to the claims of empire, with its ravenous demands and stuporous distractions. A sense of political impotence pervades the country — a mass resignation defined by Goodwyn as “believing the dogma of ‘democracy’ on a superficial public level but not believing it privately.” We hold elections, knowing they are unlikely to bring the corporate state under popular control. There is considerable vigor at local levels, but it has not been translated into new vistas of social possibility or the political will to address our most intractable challenges. Hope no longer seems the operative dynamic of America, and without hope we lose the talent and drive to cooperate in the shaping of our destiny.
The earth we share as our common gift, to be passed on in good condition to our children’s children, is being despoiled. Private wealth is growing as public needs increase apace. Our Constitution is perilously close to being consigned to the valley of the shadow of death, betrayed by a powerful cabal of secrecy-obsessed authoritarians. Terms like “liberty” and “individual freedom” invoked by generations of Americans who battled to widen the 1787 promise to “promote the general welfare” have been perverted to create a government primarily dedicated to the welfare of the state and the political class that runs it. Yes, Virginia, there is a class war and ordinary people are losing it. It isn’t necessary to be a Jeremiah crying aloud to a sinful Jerusalem that the Lord is about to afflict them for their sins of idolatry, or Cassandra, making a nuisance of herself as she wanders around King Priam’s palace grounds wailing “The Greeks are coming.” Or Socrates, the gadfly, stinging the rump of power with jabs of truth. Or even Paul Revere, if horses were still in fashion. You need only be a reporter with your eyes open to see what’s happening to our democracy. I have been lucky enough to spend my adult life as a journalist, acquiring a priceless education in the ways of the world, actually getting paid to practice one of my craft’s essential imperatives: connect the dots.
The conclusion that we are in trouble is unavoidable. I report the assault on nature evidenced in coal mining that tears the tops off mountains and dumps them into rivers, sacrificing the health and lives of those in the river valleys to short-term profit, and I see a link between that process and the stock-market frenzy which scorns long-term investments — genuine savings — in favor of quick turnovers and speculative bubbles whose inevitable bursting leaves insiders with stuffed pockets and millions of small stockholders, pensioners, and employees out of work, out of luck, and out of hope.
And then I see a connection between those disasters and the repeal of sixty-year-old banking and securities regulations designed during the Great Depression to prevent exactly that kind of human and economic damage. Who pushed for the removal of that firewall? An administration and Congress who are the political marionettes of the speculators, and who are well rewarded for their efforts with indispensable campaign contributions. Even honorable opponents of the practice get trapped in the web of an electoral system that effectively limits competition to those who can afford to spend millions in their run for office. Like it or not, candidates know that the largesse on which their political futures depend will last only as long as their votes are satisfactory to the sleek “bundlers” who turn the spigots of cash on and off.
The property qualifications for federal office that the framers of the Constitution expressly chose to exclude for demonstrating an unseemly “veneration for wealth” are now de facto in force and higher than the Founding Fathers could have imagined. “Money rules Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags. The parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us.” Those words were spoken by Populist orator Mary Elizabeth Lease during the prairie revolt that swept the Great Plains slightly more than 120 years after the Constitution was signed. They are true today, and that too, spells trouble.
Then I draw a line to the statistics that show real wages lagging behind prices, the compensation of corporate barons soaring to heights unequaled anywhere among industrialized democracies, the relentless cheeseparing of federal funds devoted to public schools, to retraining for workers whose jobs have been exported, and to programs of food assistance and health care for poor children, all of which snatch away the ladder by which Americans with scant means but willing hands and hearts could work and save their way upward to middle-class independence. And I connect those numbers to our triumphant reactionaries’ campaigns against labor unions and higher minimum wages, and to their success in reframing the tax codes so as to strip them of their progressive character, laying the burdens of Atlas on a shrinking middle class awash in credit card debt as wage earners struggle to keep up with rising costs for health care, for college tuitions, for affordable housing — while huge inheritances go untouched, tax shelters abroad are legalized, rates on capital gains are slashed, and the rich get richer and with each increase in their wealth are able to buy themselves more influence over those who make and those who carry out the laws.
Edward R. Murrow told his generation of journalists: “No one can eliminate prejudices — just recognize them.” Here is my bias: extremes of wealth and poverty cannot be reconciled with a genuinely democratic politics. When the state becomes the guardian of power and privilege to the neglect of justice for the people as a whole, it mocks the very concept of government as proclaimed in the preamble to our Constitution; mocks Lincoln’s sacred belief in “government of the people, by the people, and for the people”; mocks the democratic notion of government as “a voluntary union for the common good” embodied in the great wave of reform that produced the Progressive Era and the two Roosevelts. In contrast, the philosophy popularized in the last quarter century that “freedom” simply means freedom to choose among competing brands of consumer goods, that taxes are an unfair theft from the pockets of the successful to reward the incompetent, and that the market will meet all human needs while government itself becomes the enabler of privilege — the philosophy of an earlier social Darwinism and laissez-faire capitalism dressed in new togs — is as subversive as Benedict Arnold’s betrayal of the Revolution he had once served. Again, Mary Lease: “The great evils which are cursing American society and undermining the foundations of the republic flow not from the legitimate operation of the great human government which our fathers gave us, but they come from tramping its plain provisions underfoot.”
Our democracy has prospered most when it was firmly anchored in the idea that “We the People” — not just a favored few — would identify and remedy common distempers and dilemmas and win the gamble our forebears undertook when they espoused the radical idea that people could govern themselves wisely. Whatever and whoever tries to supplant that with notions of a wholly privatized society of competitive consumers undermines a country that, as Gordon S. Wood puts it in his landmark book The Radicalism of the American Revolution, discovered its greatness “by creating a prosperous free society belonging to obscure people with their workaday concerns and their pecuniary pursuits of happiness” — a democracy that changed the lives of “hitherto neglected and despised masses of common laboring people.”
I wish I could say that journalists in general are showing the same interest in uncovering the dangerous linkages thwarting this democracy. It is not for lack of honest and courageous individuals who would risk their careers to speak truth to power — a modest risk compared to those of some journalists in authoritarian countries who have been jailed or murdered for the identical “crime.” But our journalists are not in control of the instruments they play. As conglomerates swallow up newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, and networks, and profit rather than product becomes the focus of corporate effort, news organizations — particularly in television — are folded into entertainment divisions. The “news hole” in the print media shrinks to make room for advertisements, and stories needed by informed citizens working together are pulled in favor of the latest celebrity scandals because the media moguls have decided that uncovering the inner workings of public and private power is boring and will drive viewers and readers away to greener pastures of pabulum. Good reporters and editors confront walls of resistance in trying to place serious and informative reports over which they have long labored. Media owners who should be sounding the trumpets of alarm on the battlements of democracy instead blow popular ditties through tin horns, undercutting the basis for their existence and their First Amendment rights.
Bill Moyers is the author of many books including “Moyers on Democracy” (Doubleday, 2008) and the host of the PBS show, Bill Moyers Journal.
Right on the money Bill Moyers. I don’t agree with everything you write but in this you’ve got your finger on the pulse.
I’m not sure what we need in this country, clearly we need to stop the flow and super concentration of wealth in the highest strata of our society. We are turning into a third world country with a hereditary elite.
Obama/Moyers ‘08!!!
it showes that you can still control people, you only have to be good at one thing - propaganda. In the age of the mass media nothing else matters…
Jewbacca;
working on the sabbath? tut tut.
Moyers is quite right, and paints a rather scary view of what’s to come in the usa.
“what’s to come” is already here.
Thank you Bill Moyers for fighting the good fight. You are a rare ray of light in a very dark world.
The very first thing we need to do is reject the one-party (two-party) system entirely. Stop the vicious circle “catch 22″ of viability and simply say “NO” to our corporately sponsored oppresors. Recognition that we are an occupied nation - by a cabal of corporations controlling every aspect of our lives - and rejecting it, even when we personally “like” candidates, is a good place to start.
Television is the key. It is the chief device of the propaganda machine. Film and video move too fast to allow perusal of the message, and the presence of that ‘news’ device in every household absolutely assures that over 50% of those viewers can be swayed in their views to support the ruling barons. [Please stop calling them elite - there is nothing elite about thievery, oppression and other forms of knavery so common in that category of creatures.] No matter what else we do, the bottom line is that we must find some way to eradicate television and its ubiquitous presence in American life. Without that done, we cannot fight this fascism, even with the guns that more and more of us are buying.
Our neighbors are brainwashed…you know that behind the wheel of every “powerful” gas guzzler is a weak scared devotee to FOX news and a proud dittohead. Our ELECTED representatives including and especially Bill helped this happen. The wise and fair New Deal is almost as dead as the Fairness Doctrine, while the New Jersey Generals of politics, the Democratic Party, cannot muster the balls to flush Shillary. I just want to know when my opportunity to stop Lady Liberty from being beaten and raped is….
Perhaps the entire problem could be condensed into two words __ HUMAN NATURE __.
We American for the most part are all guilty. “We the people” have allowed to happen what has transpired over the past 60 years.
“WE” by a large majority do not vote, and even those who do vote every election, by again the large majority, are primarily swayed by televison ads, we don’t bother to study the important issues. There are few Statesmen who serve in our local or state governments and in our congress. Those who rule do not want stateman in office and we seldom get them.
Consequenlty we end up with a majority of elected who have decieved us and who are under the “bought and paid for” control of a very few people who actually own and run almost everything, including our press and media.
An example is, when an employee begins to steal from their company, they soon need that stolen money to continue the life style it affords, they never stop stealing until they are caught. ___ Once humans are corrupted, including those elected, they stay corrupt, they are humans who have allowed greed to overcome their conscience. ___ It’s human nature.
When was America *ever* democratic?
America was founded by rich, white landholders; with blacks still in slavery and women nowhere to be found politically.
This was followed by decades of rule by the elite — the robber barons, railroad tycoons, Wall Street, the “malefactors of great wealth.”
All this exploitation nearly sunk capitalism, until FDR, a rich boy who, ultimnately and successfully, knew how to protect his own, “saved” the system with a series of reforms — not fundamental changes, but rather ” reforms” — which over the past 30 years have been systematically dismantled by the Republicans and the right — with the explicit consent and/or acquiescent of the Democratic Party.
– Is the Electoral College democratic?
– Are the choices presented to the American public come election time democratic?
– Can a country that has such abiding poverty, unemployment, economic deprivation, *structural oligarchy* built into it be in any meaningful way considered a democracy?
As far as advanced industial nations are concerned, social democracies exist in the Scandanavian countries, but certainly not in America.
As much as I admire Bill Moyers, he needs to face up to the fact that what’s needed are FUNDAMENTAL CHANGES, not more “reforms.”
Calling for just reforms nearly got him kicked off PBS (*public* broadcasting, *corporately* sponsored — go figure that one out) — let’s see if he has the guts to argue for fundamental changes to the system.
Unfortunately, while still on the left, Moyers, like many, has moved to the right slong with the “moving political consensus.”
The American democratic model was born in an agrarian society. Since industrial and post-industrial societies have subsequently replaced it, democracy may not survive. Only if the people shift from the having mode orientation toward life to the being mode will it avoid succumbing to the failure-to-thrive syndrome.
Moyers describes a battle being lost by an entity known as the “middle class”. Oh yes, we can’t forget another large group of people generally referred to as “blue collar”.
This battle need not be lost if the bastards are reformable, which they certainly are. Their is no jail or assault of propoganda that can hold back the wrath of the oppressed. This is in no way a good thing, it’s always human nature at it’s very worst, history shows us this again and again in cyclical menace. Shining beacons of hope are usually assasinated.
It’s not just the factory job that disappeared, it’s the 100K programmer who suddenly finds himself thrown out like garbage by his corporate masters. It’s the loved one dying from a treatable disease for lack of “tribute to the machine.” Constant outrages like this in a broken land that have illegitimized so-called authority. The media is held in check by fear, they don’t want to get hurt either.
No disrespect KP. We are obviously using different meanings of Human nature. I think of Human nature as something unique to us all, and not to certain groups of people. I have had this debate with others before who suggest it Human Nature to commit murders and rapes. Certainly it something some humans do, but it not something all humans must do. So my definition is from Wikipedia where there a good discussion on the various POV’s.
>>Human nature is the set of logical characteristics, including ways of thinking and acting, that all normal human beings have in common.[1] The branches of science associated with the study of human nature include sociology, sociobiology and psychology, particularly evolutionary psychology and developmental psychology. Philosophers and theologians have also carried out research on human nature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_nature
I cant help but believing that it “human Nature” is a type of copout to allow a behaviour we can control by claiming it something that is just part and parcel of our makeup.
I do understand your own meaning of the word is likely very different.
Those types of people you just described are humans ~GWNORTH~. How they act is Human Nature. ___ Words are words.
The only three political commentators in Ameri(k)a who get it right 100% of the time are Moyers, Nader, and Kucinich. For those voting for Clinton and Obama you might want to not only read this piece, but understand its context.
Like many of the Hopi mentors Ive known who assert one thing to the younger brothers and sisters: “PREPARE!”
I dont think its a series of narrow escapes. I think its a series consistent descents without good depth perception, because the media is paid not to mediate these descents.
As kindly Uncle Joe Stalin said, “It’s not who votes that counts, it’s who counts the votes.”
I’d love to see Bill Moyers as President, but undoubtedly one of the large cadre of “lone crazed assassins” would take him out before he could get his hand off the bible.
Obama/Clinton/Edwards(AG) 2008 is the best fast plan we have to mitigate what Moyers is talking about. Some other year with dumber dumbed-down media (and citizens) is just harder.
Bill Moyers does speak the truth. That takes courage and Bill Moyers knows the price of courage. Yet he continues to “let his light shine”. Thank you Bill Moyers!
Would that we each be courageous enough to speak Truth when and as we see it where ever we are.
Huck is correct.
“PREPARE!”
I just think it’s a huge mistake to constantly attack poorer people, by calling them “bastards” or whatever, or attacking their leisure pursuits. It’s a mistake to call women names, even Ann Coulter. And it’s a bigger mistake not to realize the importance of our own progressive culture - why didn’t everybody run to see “Body Of War”, which should have gotten our economic support? It’s more important than alot of other things to support our own culture. That is where culture wars are actually won and lost.
Stop the planet… I want to get off.
LONG LIFE TO THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION!
A little perspective can be useful if one is to avoid the flawed perceptions that come from being too close to the subject. That simple observational truth was the point of Noam Chomsky’s ‘journalist from Mars’ thought experiment in his 2002 book, Media Control (Seven Stories Press). The accessibility of this idea threw the apologists for fascism in the corporate media into an infantile tizzy and their response only multiplied the public’s exposure to the idea, albeit in a negative and incomplete way.
Let’s take away from Chomsky’s Martian journalist the benefit of language and allow him only visual observation of behavior and then ask “When was slavery abolished?” or “When did the American Revolution succeed?” the only sensible response would be that both are good and necessary ideas, but at best are works in progress.
If you are among the many with an opinion about Howard Zinn’s great book People’s History of the United States, without the benefit of actually having read it, you may be surprised at how little of that history you know. The Founding Myth that has been created to insure our subservience is that of the Great Men bestowing freedom on the people, much like the return of Moses with the stone tablets. The genius of Zinn’s work is to show that the masses have wrested such freedoms as they have (only at great cost and with great effort) from those same Great Men and the financial, social and political interests that they in fact served. He also points out that the electoral process has mostly served as a diversion from that struggle and this idea is especially important in an election year.
Those who grew up in the Periclean age of the American Empire (1945-1973) have an especial difficulty in separating out material abundance from moral integrity, but the time that our masters shared with residents within national boundaries is past. We have all been invited to lunch, but we are on the menu rather than the guest list. This has been fairly obvious since 1973.
The inability of the public to absorb that knowledge has only been sustained with great amounts of money and some skill on the part of the corporate servants who take up most of the public space in our discourse. The willingness of our co-humans to harm one another for the barest individual gain has certainly inhibited natural corrective processes, yet moments of clarity in the body politic continue to occur with some frequency. We may be in such a window of opportunity now when polls show that so many believe that the country is on the wrong track.
Nothing less than revolution is required. In the past, all revolutions involved violence. It may be possible for a violent revolution to result in peace and justice but none has, so far. There have always been non-violent components of revolutions and those have often been the most successful. In a time when so many can be harmed by so few, doesn’t it make sense to work on the non-violence thing to make a real revolution? Do not mistake this for an easy answer. Adoption of non-violence by a revolution provides no guarantee that suffering can be avoided in doing what needs to be done. The magician’s trick of misdirection will work on many of the aggrieved but naïve, causing them to bite their own tails. They may also bite you. Non-violence, like old age, is not for sissies!
Civil disobedience and non-violent direct action can circumvent the misdirection of the corporate media and make each person a primary source for the history that must be made. Your actions must show those who labor under delusions that the only threat they face is from their own false beliefs. Show them the man behind the curtain. Replace their fear with understanding. Forgive their foolishness without reinforcing it. Make no compromise with falsity, but include rather than divide. And most of all, have courage!
It’s time for America to say that there is something more important than the pursuit of private interests. The environment, human rights, the public health and safety, the dignity of individual human beings and the welfare of our communities should all come ahead of the pursuit of corporate gain. Our laws should be changed to reflect this and, until they are, America (and the liberal democracy more widely) will continue to slide into oblivion.
That’s an amazing article, written by a master of his trade. I wish I could be optimistic about Americans getting their shit together, but I’m not.
It’s as if Americans are living on a massive aircraft carrier, with all kinds of high tech gadgetry, chock full of all the food they can eat and any kind of mind numbing entertainment they want. There are no portholes to look out of but no one cares, they are in a stupor, lulled by the low hum of the engines running full steam toward god knows where while the captain plays high stakes poker with his officers. “We’re the greatest ship on earth.”
The crew is fat, lazy, and non thinking dullards that believes the captains lies. But the massive war machine is about to run aground.
What does “prepare” look like?
Good article Bill!
You rightly and eloquently focus on the threat to democracy from the growing abuses of the wealthy. However there is something you aren’t getting right about the domain you know best, the Media. You write:
“…the media moguls have decided that uncovering the inner workings of public and private power is boring and will drive viewers and readers away…” and “Media owners who should be sounding the trumpets of alarm [are] undercutting the basis for their existence and their First Amendment rights.”
But when you speak of the wealthy, the “insiders”, the “speculators”, and the “conglomerates” swallowing up the media - just where do you place the Media Owners in this picture? Editors may be pawns doing the owners’ bidding, but how can you separate the owners from the rest of the power structure? Do they not belong to the same country clubs, share the same assumptions, participate in the same ruling class conversation, raise capital from the same investors, invest their own money across the economy? Just which interests of theirs are they undermining?
This was not perhaps so completely true when you were young. Now the situation seems to have passed far beyond the control of journalists and editors, with the smaller and independent commercial media being a nearly vanished species.
Hardly a day goes by without some vital story vanishing into the black hole of media silence. Dockworkers on the West Coast shut down the docks to protest the War? Did it really happen? Was that news? Or did I just dream it? The great haul of captured Iranian arms in Iraq that turned out to have no, zero, Iranian arms in it? Was that news? Does anyone know except for a few oddball readers of the alternative press? And a hundred million people more or less who’ve never heard of Kucinich? Excuse me?
How could this kind of silence happen unless it is manufactured and enforced by agreement at the top?
It is time to be talking instead of creating alternative media - to which Common Dreams is a contribution - that can bypass The Media and allow the people to talk to each other in our millions - nay, scores of millions - in a conversation that focuses on needs, realities and solutions. Common Dreams is a start, but we need to find a way to make a quantum leap in our reach.
For whatever good it will do, I mailed my ballot today with my vote for Obama. Maybe it’s the unknown factor with him; he’s a fresh, young face; with a totally different genetic background from all the rest. I had hoped to be voting for Bill Richardson, and haven’t been able to get with any of the other, even Obama.
My little container garden is growing. Saw three carrots making a show this morning.
Two days-old sparrow hatchlings were dumped from the nest after three days of near 100 degree weather. Guess it was just too much for them, or else the parents dumped them overboard to save the rest.
I’ve made the decision to give up my basic cable to use the $22 a month to support the local library - closed now for a year because Bush wants the timber money from OR going to Iraq instead. I’ll get a whole lot more from the library than I do from basic cable. And since I won’t have that to watch, I can give up on the once a week newspaper I buy for the TV guide it carries.
Not much, but but with my steadfast refusal to give WalMart a cent of my money, I’ll also no longer be contributing to any other big corporations - except for the medical insurance one, and I’m working on that one.
WHY has MSNBC/NBC, CBS (& FOX & CNN) been putting out PRO-Obama/Anti-Clinton PROPAGANDA…everyday all day long - since last November?
ANSWER: Because Obama is PRO-Nuclear & he voted FOR the Cheney Energy Bill; Clinton is NOT Pro-Nuke & Voted AGAINST the Cheney Energy Bill.
GE owns MSNBC/NBC, Westinghouse owns CBS … & Thanks to the Cheney Energy Bill they are planning to reap BILLIONS in profits (Risk-Free) from building 29 new nukes AND from 30-40 years of HIGHER ELECTRICITY RATES. (GE & Westinghouse have been pumping $Billions of ADVERTISING dollars for all their PRODUCTS - Into Every FORM of MEDIA, for generations.)
Other participants in Cheney’s NExt Big
MONOPOLY POWER
—ENERGY RIPoff—
Excelon Corp. of ILLINOIS, Entergy (owners of many utilities in the Southern States); 3 consortiums of nuke industry corporations.
McCain voted for the Cheney Energy Bill & has already said on the campaign trail: “I have to remember to say … its absoultely necessary for…us…to build nuclear power plants.”
Cheney, GE, Westinghouse; the nuke industry … Are running Obama AND McCain for President. The only way we are going to get the NEW Clean Green ENERGY Technology/ECONOMY we need is the election of Clinton to the Presidency. We cannot afford to squander hundreds of $Billions on Obsolete 70-yr ofd nuclear power plants.
Last week’s NEWS: The governor of South Carolina is refusing to allow the Federal govt. to ship 30 tons of plutonium into South Carolina—until the Feds provide him with a written agreement that the Feds will –REMOVE– the plutonium from South Carolina—in the event their plans to produce nuke reactor FUEL are unsuccessful.
Looks like the govt. wants to move 30 TONS of plutonium from the western states to South Carolina to locate it closer to the 29 nukes to be built in many of the Eastern & Southern states.
(See Map at NY Times LINK: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/washington/31nuclear.html?_r=1&oref=slogin )
(BTW a microscopic particle of plutonium, once inhaled, will kill you from lung cancer in about a week.)
Plans to build those nuclear power plants are well advanced - with licensing hearings already scheduled for the first few.
If you think nukes are ok… just
GOOGLE: Rocky Flats Denver plutonium, and, Hanford WA nuclear waste.
OBAMA = NO Experience Getting CHANGES made,
His whole campaign is based on ONE Big LIE:
Obama claims 7 years experience in the Illinois legislature - Working Across the Aisles, Bringing people together to get good CHANGES passed -as exemplified by 26 good bills with his name on them.
A Chicago reporter says all 26 bills were passed in ONE Year and they were NOT Obama’s.
http://wweek.com/editorial/3418/10516/
EXCERPTS:
But what’s interesting, and almost never discussed, is that he built his entire legislative record in Illinois in a single year.
Republicans controlled the Illinois General Assembly for six years of Obama’s seven-year tenure.
Then Emil Jones Jr. (became the Senate Majority leader), He became Obama’s kingmaker.
Jones appointed Obama sponsor of virtually every high-profile piece of legislation, angering many rank-and-file state legislators who had more seniority than Obama and had spent years championing the bills.
During his seventh year in the state Senate, Obama … sponsored a whopping 26 bills including many he now cites in his presidential campaign when attacked as inexperienced.
Working Across the Aisles/
Making CHANGES = ZILCH
Taking Credit for Other People’s
Work/INTEGRITY = ZERO
Obama’s book “Audacity…” confirms those 26 bills were passed in the last year Obama was in the Illinois legislature
–when–Democrats had a majority.
Quote:
“After two terms during which I labored in the minority, Democrats had gained control of the state senate, and I had subsequently passed a slew of bills, from reforms of the Illinois death penalty system to an expansion of the state’s health program for kids. I had continued to teach at the University of Chicago Law School, a job I enjoyed, and was frequently invited to speak around town.”
PLEASE Pass the Word. Since the TV “News” has now become nothing but Obama Propaganda, its up to We The People to get the Real News out.
Let’s say 60% of the population is working class, 30% is professional class and 10% are property owning elite. Out of every calorie expended by people in any class, 20% benefits the working class, 30% the professional class and 50% the elite. If the parents, employers, schools, and entertainment and news media illustrated these distributions and raised them as a prominent issue, and suggested how people might act to create more equitable distributions, then more equitable distributions would be realized. The people have to know why and how to act.
pardon my french but, fuck those of you who talk about preparing. You talk from victim mentality.
We are NOT VICTIMS and this fallacy must be stood up to. We have inherited this
beautiful, fragile, alive world and WE cannot just sit around and collect our rice and dried
beans, and 50 lb. bags of dog food and wait for the poop to hit the friggin fan. It has already hit the
fan and maybe we were too distracted with staying alive to notice To go to the next step of neo-con
thinking and “preparation,” we’ll need canned air, canned food, bottled water (yeccccch),
and eventually brain transplants to plug into the latest fix. And then there’ll be those “identity
cards” that George Orwell predicted in his book “1984.” We will need them to buy groceries,
get prescriptions filled, buy bottled air. Is this really where “we” want to go folks?
Thank You ~ELME~ excellent.
The truth shouldn’t hurt, but for many it will and does.
Elme…thank you. I definitely noticed the Obama promoted by NBC owned by GE connection a few weeks ago. Thanks for spelling it out.
randolfski- you need to realize we are way far into it at this point. Please read Naomi Kleins “China’s All Seeing Eye” inorder to understand that it ain’t going to be identity cards or little microchips…. it is technology like you can’t even imagine and it’s already here.
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/05/15/8970/
Bill Moyers is always interesting to listen to or read.
As for human nature, the dominant ethics of the society affect what people view as human nature. This was brought home to me at a vegan meal program where for the most part, the same people did the work. Even though people might mouth the ideas of cooperation, the ability to get without giving was the behavior.
The me first, look out for #1 mantras combined with the suburbanization of America, the unions trading militant unionism for benefits have helped build our current predicament. And yes, Madison Avenue, McCarthyite politics and the military-corporate industrial complex surely steered us where we are.
We’re entering a period where our society, not just parts that have long been disenfranchised, have to undergo a transformation. Whether positive or negative, towards democracy and sustainability or fascism, destructiveness and unsustainability, it will happen. The combination of the end of cheap oil/energy, global warming and its many effects, environmental degredation/ toxification and the rapid increase in food prices will surely have combined catastrophic effects.
Nonparticipatory democracy doesn’t work. And my fear is that people will not confront the situation we’re in and the powers that put us here. Doing nothing, not getting involved will just bring people closer to the rapids and waterfalls of our societal direction. We’re living in a period of institutional irresponsibility/lawlessness and personal sink or swim.
We must find a way to pluralistic community. We must find a way to accountability.We can no longer allow the pillagers and wasters to continue their desructive ways.
And without a doubt (or in botched Spanish sin doodah) we all must make the small changes and contribute to the big changes that need to happen for a more positive outcome. It’s going to be a rough ride regardless. I for one, don’t want to go to hell in a handbasket without paddling upstream.
Democracy? Ben Franklin gave us a Republic - if we could keep it. Alas, we didn’t.
Veco wrote that nations cycle through Theocracy, Aristocracy, Democracy and Chaos.
Welcone to chaos.
The elephant in the room that even Bill Moyers won’t address is the perverse belief that the resources of the planet belong to those with the talents and/or good fortune to get them first. The resulting inequitable distribution of capital goods that is the consequence of laws which codify this belief will always lead to the distortions of reality that we see under capitalism. Paradoxically, while education is the only way to correct this false belief, the present education system is itself a victim of it.
The money quote:
“Here is my bias: extremes of wealth and poverty cannot be reconciled with a genuinely democratic politics.”
Which means: salary/profit caps, non-profit health care and education and prisons, seriously harsh and oft enforced punishments for white collar thieves and domestic Constitutional enemies, publicly financed elections (including equal and free “air” and print time for all candidates,) and, most importantly, a relentless attack on Greed Spongiform Encephalopathy, the un-addressed epidemic presently effecting most Americans. Like sex ed and drug ed, “greed is bad” ed needs to begin in elementary school.
Three or so months ago, I was flabbergasted when, during a local newscast in Denver, a commercial for homebuilder HB Horton was broadcast… the announcer boasted that home prices had hit “rock bottom” and it was now “time to buy!”
Uh, say what? Reeeeeally? Rock bottom?
I emailed the manager of the Gannett station asking about the dubious and misleading statement by his client, and he simply said that “they don’t censor their clients advertising”.
There was, at a time, a “Seal of Good Practice” that the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) used to abide by. Station and sales managers routinely checked commercials for any false claims and the like, before they aired.
I guess those days are over with. The same station hosted a web program on the real estate crisis. I emailed the host asking about the commercial that ran on his station and mentioned the NAB Seal and he said he’d “never heard of it”, and came across as a holier-than-thou-snob.
More evidence (like we need any more) that anything presented by the MSM and their client advertisers, should be always be suspect.
At least we have CD and people like Bill Moyers.
Daniel David,
I admire your steadfast, non flustered, ever hopeful optimism about the Democratic party coming to the rescue. You seem to be an honest, kindly person, with seldom a harsh word for anyone. But I think you are living in an era gone by and are in denial about the current democratic party. Maybe your talents could be put to use in an alternative party?
presence, namaste, nspire, etc. how do you do that?? Sometimes I get so enamored with your creative dazzle I forget to read the content, which is usually very nspiring. Your words are often a beacon of light, thanks.
To address the threads topic …Bill Moyers ROCKS!!
To address “elme”’s atatement that Hillary doesn’t support nuclear power…
All 3 U.S. presidential candidates back nuclear power
By Jeff Mason - Reuters
Published: May 7, 2008
INDIANAPOLIS: But John McCain, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton all have different approaches to how they would use nuclear power, seen by some as dangerous and others as needed to fight climate change.
John McCain embraces it. Barack Obama wants to address its flaws. Hillary Clinton is cautious but not opposed.
Nuclear power - controversial in the United States and throughout much of the world - is on the agenda of all three U.S. presidential candidates as they seek to diversify the country’s energy mix and reduce its dependence on foreign oil.
Interviews with top policy advisers to the three White House hopefuls reveal a varied approach to a technology that some observers consider a necessary answer to fighting climate change and that others view as expensive and dangerous.
…
Clinton, a New York senator also seeking the Democratic nomination, has said she prefers using renewable fuels to fight climate change because of nuclear energy’s risks.
“Hillary has real concerns about nuclear power because of the issues around safety, waste disposal and proliferation,” her policy director, Neera Tandem, said.
“She opposes new subsidies for nuclear power, but would continue research focused on lowering costs and improving safety,” Tandem said.
The major roadblock to new U.S. nuclear plants has been finding a home for nuclear waste. Congress designated Yucca Mountain in Nevada, about 90 miles, or 145 kilometers, from Las Vegas, to be the U.S. waste repository, but development of the storage site is years behind schedule and it has powerful opponents like the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has not issued a new nuclear plant license since the mid 1970s. Utility companies have balked at proposing new plants because of concerns about safety and cost overruns.
Despite signs that that trend may be changing, the environmental group Greenpeace, which opposes nuclear energy because of the serious problem with waste disposal, does not see an industry renaissance on the horizon, said Jim Riccio, the group’s nuclear policy analyst in Washington.
He described the Democratic candidates’ positions as nuanced. Clinton’s energy platform is “better than the others” because of its focus on nonnuclear sources, though she appeared to change her stances in different states, he said.
Both Democrats have received campaign contributions from nuclear energy companies, Riccio said, Exelon to Obama and Entergy to Clinton.
There is one point that Moyers has missed. Democracy is rule by the people, backed up with elections where the people mark their choice on a piece of paper. That paper can be counted, verified that it marked the clear intention of the voter. It’s worked for decades after the introduction of the secret ballot.
In the upcomming November election how many paper ballots will be counted? Those who do not think about the integrity of the vote may be content that the electronic machines are made by corporations owned by members of the Republican party. Can anyone really trust the outcome of the upcoming election?
If, and that’s a heck of a big if, the dems win in a massive landslide then I may start to think that democracy has survived the bush years. But an election that sees McCain as the victor will herald the end of democracy in the usa, if such a concept hasn’t ended already.
Stopping to think one is the greatest place on the planet without actually having any knowledge of other places would be a good starting point!
America is as closed a society as North Korea, with the exception that ideas actually get out of America - but none ever are allowed to enter America. Americans don’t even know how Canada functions, by comparison. Let alone other places.
Every time I am there I just shake my hand in utter disbelief when uneducated people in their trailer parks still honestly believe that this is better than everything the rest of the world has. We have no trailer parks in Europe, thank you very much.
So looking around you instead of investigating your own belly-buttons would be a great starting point for Americans. Every single issue Bill Moyers mentions has of course been encountered by other countries but nobody in America bothers to look at how they solved it. Oh yeah, reinventing the wheel must be a national pastime!
Not having looked around to investigate how others solved their problems got America into this situation where the only ones who believe that America is the greatest place to be in this world are Americans themselves or those who come from the Third World.
For the words ‘America’ and ‘Democracy’ to be linked together is, in 2008, unforgivable.
America is not a democracy since Bush came to power. You only have to look at Iraq to see what America means by democracy.
America exports its ‘Wild West’ ethos wherever it goes, the one where the law of the gun and the missile prevails. America has lost the plot.
Or is it just revealing the true nature of its plot to control the world and remake it in America’s ugly, greedy image?
P.S. Check my blog for some thoughts.
At the end of the day, WE, the PEOPLE, are going to win this. It doesn’t matter how bleak it looks today.
In evidence, i submit that here we are, the people, discussing the state of our “democracy,” an act not even imaginable twenty years ago. Tens of millions of people around the world protested BEFORE the Iraq War–nothing in history ever touched that kind of awareness.
I submit that the rise of “socialist” regimes in South America-an act of utter defiance of the neo-liberal Clinton and WTO paradigms of social control testifies to our eventual victory.
I also submit that the rise of Russian independence, regardless of our feelings about the rule of Putin, must be viewed as an act against the current neo-liberal agenda and its constraints on social programs in countries.
the world is just starting to wake up. We WILL win!
Is anyone out there in the U.S. paying attention? Why has “The People” given it all away?
Human Nature it is, but is is all so the sheer impossibility for the average individual to crawl out of the noisy white noise and mess that is modern, commercial media, less of a problem in Australia, the UK and Europe with strong public media organisation, ABC, BBC, etc. I am of the opinion and based on University media study as well that the corporate media have a lot to do with this, chasing ratings and money, dumbing down an already half witless population who have succumbed to the I want it now culture: The endless search for the latest spectacular, the belief that sport of any kind IS worthwhile entertainment, that analysis, reading, thinking is a waste of time and hopelessly boring:
Where do you stop - its hard to know where to start. Maybe we the people will revolt, but will they do it when its too late, only when the world and its American commercialism and insular ism starts to crumble and the real world enters that universe, but it maybe too late to save. maybe America is looking at the next great conflagration, speed-ed up by technology and greed. If the mistakes that caused the wars of the 19th and 20th century were bad enough, maybe this time around it will be like the second coming.
But will god, or some omnipotent being be there to press the reboot button?
“Terms like “liberty” and “individual freedom” invoked by generations of Americans who battled to widen the 1787 promise to “promote the general welfare” have been perverted to create a government primarily dedicated to the welfare of the state and the political class that runs it.”
Those who take the oath of office to uphold the promises of the consitution have not done so. Maybe we should start using words like ‘criminal” and “treason” to describe the intentional destruction of America as a sacrifice for Globalization.
It has long been recognized that our democracy could only be subverted from within. Consider it subverted.
Treason is a crime.
What’s wrong with this country? Well, for nearly as long as I can remember, whenever something wasn’t quite right, or something bad happened, everyone cried, “The government needs to fix this!” And everything needing to be done, it was “Let George do it.”
Well, guess what - we’ve gotten what we asked for.
I have a couple of observations on “human nature”.
I worked for many years in factories. Industrial, with workers of different “races”. This social production, had a bonding effect that allowed us to fight together for our common interests. This was the material bases for our “human nature”. Joint action was based on an understand that we were part of a class.
If any of you have been in a natural disaster, you will find the disaster as the material bases for people working together. People will do heroic things to save other people. “Human nature”, this is the kind of action people will take, and will do what ever it takes to save their community.
Individualism, is pushed on us every day. As individuals we can and will be beaten. If we become conscious as a class, and fight as one for our class interests, we will not be defeated.
Flyer man (3:30pm)…….Amen
Chris Horton (3:42pm……..Amen
Quality Time (8:22pm)……double down Amen.
Anyone in West Palm Beach want to start the revolution here?
Anyone??
Veco? I did a google search and came up with nothing…
Did you mean Vico?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giambattista_Vico
I will concur that human behaviour will shape itself around the type of society it lives in. It more the nature of that societies economic structures and social structures that give the perception.
Capitalist societies where everyone is in it for themselves and trying to grab all they can get while they can will definitely reward the ruthless and the greedy more then it will those who work in common. It is in those societies best interests, and especially those in power to continually tell its members that this is the way it must be and the only way it can be. Those in power will then demonize any other system.
A simple example. A local beach had been harvested for centuries by native tribes for clams. They harvested the clams for the collectibve good of the tribe in that all shared equally in the resource. It did not “belong” to any one member. No one member could say these clams are mine and no one elses.
(BTW I am a Canadian)
This clam bed serves to feed the many members of the tribe for thousands of years. Then we get Capitalism and the concept of ownership. The Canadian Government takes over the responsibility for the clam bed. They decide in their infinite wisdom that locals should all be allowed to “profit” off the resource.
They open the clam beds to any and all. People arrive from all over to get every clam they can possibly get, The large, the small. If they do not fill their buckets and sell it for a profit someone else will so they feel forced to take all they possibly can.
The Clam bed was harvested to the last clam. No clams have since been harvested. They are all gone.
Capitalism ignores the concept of the collective good and the commons. Everything must be owned by someone. In giving ownership of resources to certain small groups of people they are given inordinate power and the only check on the power theoretically is the will of the people, those masses with out.
To keep them down they must be conditioned from birth to accept the status quo. They are brainwashed into believing that those of wealth and power are somehow more deserved of power . That some how they are the elite that drive all societies forwards.
rebelnow,
I’m gonna keep pitching the Democrats until they either succeed or fail this year. As far as them “coming to our rescue”, I think it’s more like we need to rescue them, so they can get straight and help. I may be naive, but I believe that is what Obama is trying to do. And he’d probably rather drink vinegar than tap Hillary—but he NEEDS her and her supporters to make a coalition work.
We’ll see. Maybe someday I’ll go Nader or something, but I need to stick with the Dems for now. If they have a “year”, this is it.
We seem to pretty close, if not in, a hyperinflationary period…perhaps not as bad as the weimar republic of the 1920’s…perhaps that will knock more Americans out of their stupor on how badly they have been served by politicians for since Nixon who took out Bretton Woods…Nixon should have been hung for it.
I expect my precious metals to do quite well which the founding fathers knew was the only legitimate money in the world…as my metals do great…I will be grieving for once was a reasonably decent country as it falls into full blown fascism.
Moyers, a Christian, continues to ignore the American Indian Genocide in which one hundred million plus American Indians lost their lives. He also continues to ignore the continuing genocide in the theft of money, land, and resources that results in deep poverty and death. Nor does he even address the failure to keep a single Indian treaty by the United States. I cannot take Mr. Moyers seriously when he allows this great moral blot to remain purposefully hidden. Mr. Moyers is a part of the problem, not the solution. His selective reporting lacks moral strength.
Daniel David, I know you’ve gotten a lot of flack here for so steadfastly supporting the democrats, despite the fact that they (except for a very few, like Kucinich) have so far done little or nothing to end the war in Iraq, but I’m going to have to back you up a bit here.
I’m going to try to give the dems one more chance this year, too, for the very simple reason that I’d like to see what would happen if we give them what they want, which is a big numerical superiority in both the House and Senate. They’ve been claiming that they don’t have the votes to end the war, and they don’t if they want to end the war by bringing the troops home without cutting off the funding to it.
They do have the numbers to end the war by cutting the funding, though, but they won’t do that, possibly because they’re afraid of the repubs’ “cutting the funding is synonymous with not supporting the troops” tactic, and possibly because they want to control Iraqi oil just as much as the repubs do.
If we give them what they want and they still don’t end the war, then we’ll know, once and for all, that the dems are just as complicit as the repubs re this stupid war, and we can finally give up completely on both them and the repubs and vote third party (Green Party would be my choice) without having any doubts whatsoever that we will be wasting our votes.
And, besides, Kucinich endorsed Obama, at least for one state, and if there’s any politician out there that I can trust, it’s Kucinich. And Edwards, whose ideas are more progressive than either Obama’s or Hillary’s are, endorsed Obama, too. And maybe, just maybe, both Kucinich and Edwards know something about Obama that we don’t.
~TICONDEROGA~ Here’s something you probably didn’t know about Obama, the man who “refuses” to take PAC money and got “ALL” of his campaign funds in small amounts from his many “grass root” supporters.
http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.asp?id=n000096388&cycle=2008
Kem: Obama is FAR from perfect, and may very well end up a tool for the health insurance lobby, which he especially seems to be getting money from.
The key is to make it clear that our support of him is conditional. Republicans made a HUGE mistake by continuing to support Bush after 2005, when there should have been immediate and profound statements of policy and philosophy difference between the party and the president. I think Obama would be far more likely to follow the will of his party and his people then Bush. Though honestly, Bush’s people STILL haven’t told him off as they should be.
You people supporting McKinney are just not serious. We don’t need her to save this country, and she’s a globalist in, ummm, “sheeps”? clothing anyway.
The loss of our democracy is a most serious issue. But you know what? I have an issue that’s far, far more serious to me.
It’s been very warm here where we live for the past six weeks, spring has sprung full time. This evening, as is our normal practice, we ate our dinner out on our rear patio deck and watched the georgous Arizona sunset. Not a single fly or any other type of bug bothered us. We didn’t need OFF or a fly swatter and we never use any poisons on our property and we are very isolated.
I left the patio lights on for two hours after sunset and there is not a single moth, miller, spider or praying mantis anywhere near the lights.___ NONE.__ It’s been that way all year and it is neither normal nor good. The walls should have been covered with bugs.
Our trees are now in blossom, we have dozens of trees near the house. Not a single bee of any of Earth’s known 20,000 different specie has shown up, no wasps, no hornets, no bats and very few birds now. Our place was a liken too a wildlife refuge until two years ago. Now it’s feels sort of like we live in a dead zone.
The air seems to be clear enough, the mountain stream is still falling and running across it’s rocky bed nicely, we can hit the full moon with a rock, or so it seems. At 3am we can count every constellation in our blackend sky and the Milky Way is as wide as a mighty river, but it’s so damn quiet now, it’s errie. It’s like the still before the storm.
That is my most important issue. __But, that’s me. I am sorry for the interupption of this important issue.
Good post, Araquin; I especially liked your sentence about how,”Every time I am here, I shake my head in disbelief when uneducated people in their trailer parks still honestly believe that this is better than everything the rest of the world has.” I have met garbage collectors in the U.S. who voted for W.Bush, but who could not tell you what the First or Fourth, or any other amendment states, or that they are part of the Bill of Rights. How can we speak of “we the people” or “the American people,” when these people are very much divided among themselves and within themselves? There is probably 30 percent of the American public who would root for any war that Bush started, and who would also simply say, “so?” if you told them that American wages have remained stagnant for 30 years. A large portion of Americans believe that there is no global warming or overpopulation. To whom are “we” referring when “we” say “we the people”?
As always, I stand in awe of Mr Moyers and his vision. He, and the rest of you, may well also agree with the 25 characteristics of a civilised country posted at http://www.blognow.com.au/mrpickwick/89890/Costs_nothing_to_be_civil.html. I wonder how you would score the America of 2008 on that scale.
Moyer fans, and I’m one of them, please take note of 5/16 programs second half with an interview with Melody Perterson(?), who is the author of the “Medicine Cabinet… (I think this is what it was called), ” about the corruption of the pharmaceutical industry. I new most of this stuff but she has it all wrapped up in this 30 minute interview with Bill. Not only does a lot of this expensive alchemy not work, it can kill you dead away. It is an absolute must see and if you need any verification you can dig back into the “Front Line” archives as they have a couple of programs on the Pharmaceutical industry (big prices, big profits and little efficacy).
Remember for the coming hard times one needs to be as healthy and pure is possible and that means eating real whole foods, of course exercise and if at all possible (some peoples conditions are so compromised that they need allopathic medicines) avoiding the poison pushers lies about health coming from some overpriced pill that you might well end up taking the rest of your life - which might very well be shortened by said pill.
Remember the revolution/evolution is inside as well as outside.
To chezgebaude 1:49 am:
Absolutely! Ask most Americans who their congressperson or senators are, and you’ll get a lot of hemming and erring. Ask them to name the head of the NSA, Sec’y of State or Defense. Ask them to name the PM of Great Britain. Blank looks. Ask them the score of their favorite team’s latest game, and you’ll get every stat and detail imaginable.
Americans walk around (I’m sorry, drive around) yelling about how their country (and their state, their town, their team, their high school) is the best on the planet. Ask them what metrics they are using, and you’ll get the same dumb look.
Does anyone out there REALLY think the war & occupation in Iraq would be unpopular in this country if things were going well (and for half the price)?!
After all, when American Idol is beckoning, and that Powerball ticket in your wallet is going to solve all your finaincial problems, what really matters to most American voters is (1) would I have a good time drinking beer and killing other creatures with this person and (2) is this person gonna protect me and mine from all the gays who wanna get married?
Fuck this place.
Bill, so true - the media is failing us in ways that are incomprehensible, and totally irresponsible, more so when it becomes apparent that they have been sitting on the biggest story in our human history, yet fail to report on it in any serious way.
There is amongst us a spiritual Goliath awaiting the invitation to come forward and inspire us to rebuild the planet by implementing the principles of sharing, brotherhood and justice. We need these answers now to solve the critical issues we face as a planet - climate change, rising poverty, wars and energy and food shortages.
The media of the world know every facet of this information, however little they inform the public of its nature. Many of its representatives have met this individual, have heard Him speak, and yet stay silent themselves.
They are not alone - politicians, economists, scientists, artists, religious leaders and everyday people from all over the world have also met Him.
This individual is Maitreya - the World Teacher, and intends to serve as such for the next world cycle. His impact on humanity cannot be comprehended. His coming is a truly momentous happening, which must be prepared for beforehand, and adequately explained to men of every station.
The world’s media are ideally placed to acquaint us with the true happenings of our time. They are looked to for information, and often guidance, by millions of us thirsty for the truth, for knowledge and hope. It behoves the men and women of the media, men and women of goodwill, to acquaint themselves with this information, where necessary, and to serve the public by its serious introduction.
Bill Moyers, will you be one of them?
Kem, I know that Obama didn’t get all of his money from the little guys. I also know that he did get a lot of his money from the little guys. And I also know that if he refused to take any money from any of the big corporations, like Kucinich did, he wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting elected.
I also know that Hillary got a hell of a lot of money from the big corporations.
And, yeah, I know that global warming is a very serious problem, and I also know what might happen if the arctic tundra melts and releases all it’s stored-up methane into the air.
But thanks for the tip.
Thanks for sharing Kem. I too, agree that the most important issue facing us is the environment.
Bill Moyers only hits the tip of the iceberg, 99% of that iceberg remains unseen and unknown by the general public, although with the advent of the internet more are becoming aware.
Here is and excerpt from speech given by David Rockerfeller in 1991 to the Trilateral Commission:
“We are grateful to the Washington Post, The New York Times, Time magazine and other great publications who directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost 40 years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march toward a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries.”
Senator Barry Goldwater in 79 said “What the trilateralists truly intend is the creation of a worldwide economic power superior to the political governments of the nation-states involved. They believe the abundant materialism they propose to create will overwhelm existing differences. As manager and creators of the system they will rule the future”.
Thanks kgarry. I love Bill Moyers, but big media is not the only problem, and we have never had a democracy in the United States; we have had a peculiar republic. Write a letter to a big Hollywood production company and ask them why they make so many movies about crime and violence, and you will receive a reply to the effect that “this is what the public wants.” As the controversial psychiatrist, Thomas Szasz has written, ” a large portion of the public finds the destruction of life, liberty, and property endlessly entertaining.” Hmmm . . . do these people vote?
After the coming energy driven Depression (circa 2015), the financial and environmental reforms enacted by FDR (old model) and whoever steps into the mess (new model) should be a Constitutional Amendment instead merely normal laws which can be trashed by an administration of looters.
The tumbling down of the government sponsored ponzi-mortgage bubble is going to really hurt if delayed much longer.
Brilliant analysis by Moyers, one of the FEW journalists who tells the truth and thank God gets some media time!
Excellent postings by: NAMASTE, FLYERMAN, REBELNOW, CHRIS HORTON, BILL BRG, ARAQUIN & GW NORTH.
KEM: There ARE bees here… but I know what you mean. Florida could well be the insect capital of the world. My using fire ants as the symbol for Aries, the “first ray or MARS-RULES coalition” in my children’s allegory is apt. There’s no way to get rid of them! This year they are really into attack gear. Seems nature, the elementals are saying they’ve had enough of mankind’s thought-less encroachment, as if the WEB of life didn’t require all species to retain its integrity.
Thank you presence_aka_NamasteI like cornflowerblue.And purple! Namaste…
The film makers give the public what it will buy, Television give the public what it will watch, Corporations give the consumer what it will buy so my friends the majority of the public has what it wants except cheap energy.
The article above is just an excerpt of Bill Moyer book so it is possible it is a bit out of context but it was addressing journalism and not all the other ills of the “American” society.
I am 70 years old and I feel that the Government has been in a slow drift to the political right throughout my lifetime. A dozen box-cutters in the hands of a few religious extremest has put that drift into a plunge. “The people” have set on their asses for all of my 70 years the only period of time there was any real grassroots revolt against the drift was in the 60s but those days are gone, those who participated have mostly succumed to greed. I supposed that as one gets older and takes on more responsibilities (family, job etc.) it is human nature to get mentally flabby but where is the youth of today?
Thanks again Presence, Maybe I’ll get it right this time.
Barn Burner,
Thank you for your insight. It pretty much sums it up.
For my 56 years greed has not entered the picture. We have led a very low resource lifestyle. Except for a few short years in the 80’s my husband and I have been self employed since neither of us fit the corporate mold very well. That meant not a lot of frills. We could have been at home as commune members then.
Now we would like to reconnect to earth at an off the grid level. Problem is the drift has turned into a raging river and the floodwaters are sucking many of us downstream. All the plans we can make cannot be implemented fast enough against the rising tide. For us that is the problem.
The youth have followed the elders example. Too few of us rejected Empire while it rose to power. Many of us found the luxuries of dining out, movies, shiny toys and travel irresistible. Now the cost is upon us.
I have no confidence that the youth or the elders will be able to turn this around. My team of two here in West Palm Beach cannot do much with those who willfully remain ignorant of the gravity of our predicament.
Our governments have lulled the public into believing that they still have control over the events of the day. No one wants to believe otherwise. That would require them to lay their toys in the toybox and not pick them up again for a very long time. How likely given the attitude of most around you do you think that would be?
Thank you for modeling the role for ‘connecting the dots’. The task ranges far beyond what Mr. Moyers has alluded to in this except, however. The ‘dots’ in the incomprehensible explanation for the events of 9/11/01 are a good example. But there are other, more potentially troublesome dots that could also be connected. We live in a world in which systems of communications, transportation, and infrastructure interweave one another. I sketched out how connecting the dots can also be of a far more visceral concern to everyone in a short story I wrote this past week, called “Cascade”. You can read it at:
http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/2008/05/14/short-story-cascade/
A lot of interesting stuff here. I will add my 2 cents, and I’ll also send a copy of “Women: DOWN through the Ages, How Lies have shaped our Lives” to Mr. Moyers.
What is missing is this debate is this: women have been missing, absent from the “picture” since the beginning of “history,” when men took over the ownership and running of the earth. It’s that simple: men are simply incapable of doing it all alone. They do, at best, a half-assed job. At worst, where we are today, they’re endangering the very planet.
And remember, they are supposed to be the “rational ones,” women the irrational ones. Why is it that women are always blamed for men’s shortcomings?
This is the real elephant in the living room, the real, ultimate revolution. That would change everything: for starters, no more false pretences for war. Not that women are anymore perfect than men; it’s just that when you have a genuine (not a Thatcher or Hillery) woman’s voice to balance a scared, little-kid, sabre-rattling voice like Georgie’s, you’d have a different outcome. Assuming she had the same stature which is the way it should be. I’m sure Finland isn’t perfect, but look at the dramatic difference between that country, where women have parity with men at every level, and the USA. (note: checkout the article about Bernie Saunder’s interview with Finish diplomat).
Of course it is a tiny percentage of men, maybe 1% or less, who are in charge of the world, who dictate what is “right” and “good.” It’s been that way since men kicked women down the stairs to the basement in the patriarchal period. And that’s where they still remain, a few steps further down in some places, a few steps up in others.
But all men are implicated, to a degree, simply because we all share in the continuing debasement of women. It’s part of our culture. If we didn’t share in it, rape would be unheard of.
Men will not easily give up the perks. But we’re reaching a point where we may have to. Our hand is being forced by Mother Nature herself. She’s pissed, and she’s storming back. And no matter how catastropic the situation is all over the globe with tin-pot dictators and genocides getting to be commonplace, the response–again by the men who own the planet–is more of the same disastrous decisions and policies that got us here: full speed ahead (keep the money coming and the wars raging) come hell or hight water, and both of those aren’t just coming. They’re here, brought to us by our corporate sponsors.
Thank you Bill Moyers.
The ‘crazy’ part about this recent surge of “owner-class” elitists.. is, gee, how did most of them acquire their land?.. Most of their parents got a GI loan after WWII and bough a humble house. These houses, with time and inflation, values became worth beyond their parent’s imagination and, et voila~ the kids got to become what they always wanted and aspired to be, wealthy land-owners.. Tada. In a nation teeming with immigrant’s and homeless people, suddenly the homeowners take on a new meaning than it ever did prior in my lifetime. It drives me nuts, because when I was a kid, almost everyone owned their house and Nobody was That special.
CUTBANKID: Excellent posting. I, too, have brought this issue up in the forum. My favorite illustrations for how the imbalance works include the idea that BOTH oars are necessary for any vehicle to make progress, and with only the male, pro-logic (anti-feelings, including compassion and the mystical sense of ONEness that LOVE can rouse in people, not to mention the whole of humanity) “oar” guiding the global vessel, it circles endlessly and redundantly and what the “experts” note appears to be inevitable. Rather, it’s the fault of asymmetric conditioning and an apparatus of church-state that maintains the imbalance and inequity.
I tend to relate matters here on earth to their celestial counterpart. From the cult of the ancient astrologers, I honor (and constantly see grounds for its veracity) the “As above, so below” Divine equation. In my view, the monotheistic orientation pushed on the masses to the point that any dissenters were labeled heretics and often put to death, does not worship the God of Jesus, a God of compassion, mercy and Love; but rather an Old Testament Saturn (judgment) Mars (war/violence) hybrid that in the name of this faux deity has brought the world, as evidenced in the conflagration in the “Holy land,” birth of all three “great religions” to the brink of catastrophic decimation. I could add Mammon to the list of faux gods worshipped to complete the trio of madness, militarism and materialism that have made of humankind an equivalent virus devouring and everywhere destroying its own nest and taking the grand galaxy of diverse species along with it.
Yes. Women with open hearts and clear minds could do much to change the tide… if asked or allowed or invited! (Same can be said of other marginalized voices starting with the Indigenous of all lands who generally best understand a symbiotis as opposed to exploitative relationship to the natural world).
Oops.. symbiotic!
As much as I feel great respect and admiration for the principles that Bill Moyers stands for, and for the stories he reports on often underreported topics and issues, I can’t help but be disappointed by his seeming indifference to alternative parties and their candidates, and in the Green Party in particular, of which I’m a member and delegate. I must admit that I was surprised when I learned he read one of my email comments on the air after his recent show on alternative candidates in which I criticized the show for not interviewing alternative party candidates but only Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul who are still products of the major parties if not exactly embraced by them. All of the issues Moyers brings up in this article have been, and continue to be addressed by candidates such as independent Ralph Nader and Green Party candidates Cynthia McKinney, Kat Swift, Jesse Johnson and Kent Mesplay. Aside from Nader and possibly McKinney, who did you say? And that’s the point. Moyers, possibly of all journalists today, is in a position to present these alternative voices to the public and yet, at least to my knowledge, has not done so. In pollings that the Green Party has done, a majority of respondents agree with virtually all of our platform and yet say they will not vote for our candidates because it would be a wasted vote. So they’ll continue to vote for candidates, as Moyers describes, as beholden to a two party system controlled by corporate interests and not their interests. It’s easy to dismiss alternative parties and candidates because we’re not well known. We’re not well known because we’re not reported on and don’t have the resources to compete with the corporate powers. A truly independent press might be able to change that fact.
It’s interesting to note that when our candidates have the rare opportunity to particpate in debates, as happened recently with Illinois Green Party Gubernatorial candidate Rich Whitney, our polling numbers jump markedly - Whitney garnered 10-11% of the votes a very high number for Greens. Not impressed? Most of our candidates are lucky to break 2 or 3%. Ralph Nader, as our Presidential candidate in 2000, couldn’t break 5%, a thresholdv that, had it been reached,would have ensured us matching funds and major party status by the Federal Elections Commission.
A majority of the American people are dissatisfied, disgusted and downright scared by the direction in which this country has been headed. Unfortunately, until we all know that there are alternative candidates and parties that we can rally ’round we’re in for more of the same, if not worse.
Can America be saved? is a question for our candidates to explore and answer responsibly-re poverty and riches, war not peace, authoritartianism vs democratic rule and so on.
Elme, are you posting this information elsewhere? Go to Larry Johnson’s No Quarter blog. This is important — so important to the future of all of us.
I agree with the sentiment that TV/ Cable is undoing our democracy right under our noses. We all need to WAKE UP ! ! !
Yeah, Yeah, Yeah! Democracy is going down; the planet is going under, but don’t talk about the cause. Don’t talk about 6.5 billion naked apes whose everyday needs cause the mountain tops to be ripped off and the land destroyed or the fact that we allow politicians to deny woman the right to contraception and sex education and safe abortions.
Come on Bill MOyers and all you progressives, get real about the need for controlling our numbers. It is already too late to avoid catastrophe, but we can prevent more children from being born into the coming crash as oil is depeleted and food scarcity brings on famines. The degradation of our democracy is just one more symptom of a world where hope and opportunity is fast leaving the scene because of overpopulation and its concommitant destruction of the planet. If you have money to spare give it to those organizations that provide family planning. All other causes are already lost!
As this roll of comments demonstrates — “We the People” is still around … how to turn this all into a democratic influential force is the key … words turned into organization, into resistance, into huge voting blocs that will alter the current course, into wise decisions about this kind of choice, into the dedication of time involved to be “we the people.”
Bill Moyers, like always, makes the complete description of “The State of The Union” Webster would have been proud.
One key detail he mentions is that Propaganda rules our elections and our business.
If I may go further on this….
Propaganda and Advertising are based on the study of the emotion to manipulate the voter, and the buyer, to “buy” the right thing or the candidate being promoted. With two exception, in California, the candidate that spends the most wins. This has to do with power, not with Democracy.
But, and this is my dubious extension, we seem to have promoted Emotions over Reason.
One candidate insists in repeating the word “tought” as if no one cares “Tough on What?”, to what purpose and objective, she never says, and up to what limits does she intend to be “tough”.
That is the choice we face now: A Choice Between Meaninglessness and Meaningfullness. We get to think and consider the views of one candidate or we can “share the emotions”, like she said once “I just don’t want us to go back!”
Does she believe that she is the ONLY qualified person in the US that could be President?
How about Bill Moyers For President?
I’m not an American but I’ve lived in the USA for 16 years. Where Americans get the idea you have a democracy is just simply hogwash, you don’t and I don’t think you ever have. For a real democracy requires the whole spectrum of political philosophy not only to be represented but to take an active roll, but in the USA it’s either extreme right wing or right wing. I’ve heard some politicians being labeled “liberals ” what is that somebody with a little empathy, someone who has some thoughts about the welfare of another person or persons rather than me, me and me.
Not only is this dog eat dog society bad policy it’s criminal. Small children being deprived of basic needs when others live in palaces all over the world and want for nothing. The poor are their own worst enemy, they look up and admire these greedy gluttons because they dream of being one of them one day, where is democracy in that, worst of all where is the common sense.
Bill Moyers is certainly reasonable in his questions concerning Democracy. Certainly the idea of Democracy has always been in question when we consider the electorial college, conspiracy theories, the absence of non landowners, blacks or even women to vote. The nation has aspired to overcome these obstacles many times through hardship or even bloodshed. The reality as Moyers has pointed out is that we have a new form of authority because we have now have an administration which squashes opposition by invoking the “War on Terrorism” to deny, destroy, manipulate or investigate basically any person or business which is seen as a threat.
The “new social order” has been brought about by a “new world order” characterized by the all fair policy of supply and demand, supply side economics, Reaganomics, Limbaugh, Fox news philosophy that protects the interests of the very rich and Bildebergers employing ideas that support the top two percent (such as the estate tax) and force feeding the population that its in their best interests. Our advice is fed to us via all the media that listening to “How to be a billionaire” (although most inherited their money) should imply this opportunity should be enough for us to lay it all on the line– meaning homes, jobs, savings and of course justice itself to feed the frenzy of big money opportunities.
Meanwhile the reality is that the new social order exists. This reality suggests that the social quest implemented by showing off the Oprah’s, Donald Trumps, Michael Jordan’s, Tiger Wood’s or even Sam Walton’s gives us all a chance. But the real story also means that a large majority of people are leveraged, enslaved, denied, disappointed and asked to accept their new found insecurities as destiny because of their ineptitude and lazy, negative attitude. Millions losing their homes is their own damn fault. Wars are fought because our leaders know better. Health care bankrupts those who therefore are simply unfortunate. Individual Rights have never meant to be applied to large corporations or large banks. Our President cares enough to keep the populace in line with a rebate to keep “Wall Street” kicking. They keep us all believing were alone in our plight, while they increase surveillance, police authority and wait to squash those most passionate about that thing we’ve all come to believe “Democracy”. Yeah Bill may be right, but lets hope not.
Everyone complains (done a lot myself), but we all know the problems - for a change, for a look at a positive vision of where we ought to be going, try Green Island http://www.rudemacedon.ca/greenisland.html
The best part of any Moyers article on CD is usually the discussion that follows. A wide range of people bring up a wide range of concerns and even those who post to dispute points mostly do so with courtesy and respect. Such is the power of Moyers.
I am glad Bill Moyers got out of politics (LBJ aide) and has stuck with journalism. I would love to hear him blister the ears of the Democratic Party elite at their convention in Denver in a couple of months with an unforgettable keynote address, but know better than to seriously expect it. I hope he devotes some of his remaining time on earth to mentoring replacements for his dying breed of journalism.
Wilmor, I commend your personal example and believe that multiplied by the millions such practice could change things for the better. I disconnected from the cable a long time ago and fully expect to stop watchng any TV (maybe I watch 1-2 hours a month now) come February next year when all existing non-HDTV TV’s will become obsolete.
I give to the local food bank, homeless shelter, battered women’s and children’s shelter, and the Vietname Veterans of America clothing drives. I also support several community radio stations around the US (which, thanks to the Internet, I can hear) when they have their pledge drives.
To my former Philadelphia colleague Kem Patrick: In Florida I have noticed the same thing, even the bugs are getting scarce. I saw a garter snake in the back yard today while raking leaves but even the mosquitos are way down. I too have wondered exactly what the rest of the natural order is trying to tell us by their disappearence and so far the speculations are not very comforting.
Siouxrose, your occasional meta-views of our plight are both welcome and interesting. Do you ever feel like Cassandra alluded to by Moyers in his article? The role of prophet or prophetess seems to be mocking if things they predict don’t immediately come true and resentment or anger at them if they do. Either way it is not an easy calling.
Well, here’s an issue that’s important that gets little coverage: John McCain was part of the Keating 5, S&L scandal. Today several McCain Staffers stepped down in a lobbyist purge, one of which was John McCain’s national finance co-chairman Loeffler.
I did a google search and this is what I found:
“As a congressman, Loeffler was the top of five members of Congress who received illegal donations from Vernon Savings & Loan. The S&L was eventually bailed out by $1.3 billion in taxpayers money. Loeffler also tried to set up a meeting with then-US Secretary of Treasury James Baker III to discuss the S&L paying off the debt accumulated from his failed 1986 gubernatorial race.”
And
Bush Family:
“There are several ways in which the Bush family plays into the Savings and Loan scandal, which involves not only many members of the Bush family but also many other politicians that are still in office and still part of the Bush Jr. administration today. Jeb Bush, George Bush Sr., and his son Neil Bush have all been implicated in the Savings and Loan Scandal, which cost American tax payers over $1.4 TRILLION dollars (note that this is about one quarter of our national debt).”
I only hope that other people will do some research for themselves.
Listen to Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and all the other right-wing bloviators. They absolutely deny that anything’s seriously wrong with the Bush’s America and refer to those who do see the truth and try to warn of what’s coming as various kinds of idiots, morons, loonies, and whackos. These people have millions of fawning, eagerly believing listeners who grasp on their every word like it’s Holy Gospel. If America is going to avert catastrophe, it can only happen if there is unity of purpose. We are nowhere near to that. Half this country can’t even be bothered to vote in a Presidential election, and half of those who do vote, voted twice to install the biggest gang of the most greedy, arrogant, and power-hungry thieves, thugs, crooks, shysters, and whores in history into the halls of power. Turning around that kind of entrenched, bone-deep stupidity would be difficult in the best of circumstances. With the likes of Limbaugh, Coulter, O’Reilly, and Hannity reinforcing it daily, it is pretty much impossible. America had a great run. The good news is that we’ll leave a detailed account of our collapse so that future generations can perhaps learn from our example.
Self-interest rules all unfettered species. National interests only differentiate our primary concern if our National interests require it. The Vietnam War was the last time we nationally showed up to the party. Since then, many have assumed that “autopilot” is all the oversight that Citizens need endorse of our officials.
The deeper into history one travels, the clearer it becomes. For the lower class to expect any consideration at all, our leaders require regular monitoring.
Autopilot conversely, is akin to falling asleep at the wheel.
Every generation prior to the Baby Boomers, understood both the need to contribute as well as embrace the nation. Ask any generation prior to the baby boomers. The contrast between the prevailing senses of civic obligation, against that of today is compelling. Our elder’s descriptions often point toward the source of our lack of community.
In order to develop a sense of community, devoid an accompanying societal demand, remains easier said than done. The autopilot generations, now charged with oversight, are no longer capable of identifying impending hazards. Let’s just say that we have never seen a need.
It seems rather obvious that global concerns require global participation. Global participation summons global unity as well. Now let’s evaluate whether global unity serves the many or the few. Democracy by definition describes the many. If you consider yourself among the many, we need not continue any further.
Divisiveness, opposes the concerns of the many in a Global realm. We have however, globally as well as nationally grown more and more opposed since the Vietnamese national muster.
Moderation, acceptance and community, this is where we have been heading all along. We must collectively determine where our allegiance lies. The factions that fight most furiously often have the most in common as well. Perhaps like our forbearers we should unite as one for our common good.
“United we stand, Divided we fall”
Kem Patrick et al.
The second biggest stumbling black to critical thinking is your idea of human nature. The first is religion. While I applaud most of what you write, maybe all else, I find the ideas represented by your mere words on human nature quite intellectually limiting. Human nature is what we make it; each day, each word we write. Without this core truth, for me, hope is just foolishness.
Thanks for listening
Kem, In addition