Washblog

A TIME FOR ANGER, A CALL TO ACTION
By Bill Moyers

Common Dreams
March 22, 2007

http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0322-24.htm
or
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/032407C.shtml

--The following is a transcript of a speech given on February 7, 2007, at Occidental College in Los Angeles.

I am grateful to you for this opportunity and to President Prager for the hospitality of this evening, to Diana Akiyama, Director of the Office for Religious and Spiritual Life, whose idea it was to invite me and with whom you can have an accounting after I've left.  And to the Lilly Endowment for funding the Values and Vocations project to encourage students at Occidental to explore how their beliefs and values shape their choices in life, how to make choices for meaningful work and how to make a contribution to the common good.  It's a recognition of a unique venture:  to demonstrate that the life of the mind and the longing of the spirit are mirror images of the human organism.  I'm grateful to be here under their auspices.

I have come across the continent to talk to you about two subjects close to my heart.  I care about them as a journalist, a citizen, and a grandfather who looks at the pictures next to my computer of my five young grandchildren who do not have a vote, a lobbyist in Washington, or the means to contribute to a presidential candidate.  If I don't act in their behalf, who will?

One of my obsessions is democracy, and there is no campus in the country more attuned than Occidental to what it will take to save democracy.  Because of your record of activism for social justice, I know we agree that democracy is more than what we were taught in high school civics -- more than the two-party system, the checks-and-balances, the debate over whether the Electoral College is a good idea.  Those are important matters that warrant our attention, but democracy involves something more fundamental.  I want to talk about what democracy bestows on us -- the revolutionary idea that democracy is not just about the means of governance but the means of dignifying people so they become fully free to claim their moral and political agency.  "I believe in democracy because it releases the energies of every human being" -- those are the words of our 28th president, Woodrow Wilson.

I've been spending time with Woodrow Wilson and others of his era because my colleagues and I are producing a documentary series on the momentous struggles that gripped America a century or so years ago at the birth of modern politics.  Woodrow Wilson clearly understood the nature of power.  In his now-forgotten political testament called The New Freedom, Wilson described his reformism in plain English no one could fail to understand:  "The laws of this country do not prevent the strong from crushing the week."  He wrote:  "Don't deceive yourselves for a moment as to the power of great interests which now dominate our development . . . There are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States.  They are going to own it if they can."  And he warned:  "There is no salvation in the pitiful condescensions of industrial masters . . . prosperity guaranteed by trustees has no prospect of endurance."

Now Wilson took his stand at the center of power -- the presidency itself -- and from his stand came progressive income taxation, the federal estate tax, tariff reform, the challenge to great monopolies and trusts, and, most important, a resolute spirit "to deal with the new and subtle tyrannies according to their deserts."

How we need that spirit today!  When Woodrow Wilson spoke of democracy releasing the energies of every human being, he was declaring that we cannot leave our destiny to politicians, élites, and experts; either we take democracy into our own hands, or others will take democracy from us.

We do not have much time.  Our political system is melting down, right here where you live.

A recent poll by the Public Policy Institute of California found that only 20% of voters last November believe your state will be a better place to live in the year 2025; 51% say it will be worse.  Another poll by the New American Foundation -- summed up in an article by Steven Hill in the January 28th San Francisco Chronicle -- found that for the first time in modern California history, a majority of adults are not registered with either of the two major parties.  Furthermore, writes Hill, "There is a widening breach between most of the 39 million people residing in California and the fewer than 9 million who actually vote."  Here we are getting to the heart of the crisis today -- the great divide that has opened in American life.

According to that New American Foundation study, frequent voters [in California] tend to be 45 and older, have household incomes of $60,000 or more, are homeowners, and have college degrees.  In contrast, the 12 million nonvoters (7 million of whom are eligible to vote but are not registered) tend to be younger than 45, rent instead of own, have not been to college, and have incomes less than $60,000.

In other words, "Considering that California often has one of the lowest voter participation rates in the nation -- in some elections only a little more that 1/3 of eligible voters participate -- a small group of frequent voters, who are richer, whiter, and older than their nonvoting neighbors, form the majority that decides which candidates win and which ballot measures pass."  The author of that report (Mark Baldassare) concludes:  "Only about 15% of adult people make the decisions and that 15% doesn't look much life California overall."

We should not be surprised by the consequences:  "Two Californias have emerged.  One that votes and one that does not.  Both sides inhabit the same state and must share the same resources, but only one side is electing the political leaders who divide up the pie."

You've got a big problem here.  But don't feel alone.  Across the country our 18th political system is failing to deal with basic realities.  Despite Thomas Jefferson's counsel that we would need a revolution every 25 years to enable our governance to serve new generations, our structure -- practically deified for 225 years -- has essentially stayed the same while science and technology have raced ahead.  A young writer I know, named Jan Frel, one of the most thoughtful practitioners of the emerging world of Web journalism, wrote me the other day to say:  "We've gone way past ourselves.  I see the unfathomable numbers in the national debt and deficit, and the way that the Federal government was physically unable to respond to Hurricane Katrina.  I look at Iraq; where 50% of the question is how to get out, and the other 50% is how did so few people have the power to start the invasion in the first place. If the Republic were functioning, they would have never had that power."

Yet the inertia of the political process seems virtually unstoppable.  Frel reminds me that the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee can shepherd a $2.8 trillion dollar budget through the Senate and then admit:  "It's hard to understand what a trillion is.  I don't know what it is."  Is it fair to expect anyone to understand what a trillion is, my young friend asks, or how to behave with it in any democratic fashion?  He goes on:  "But the political system and culture are forcing 535 members of Congress and a President who are often thousands of miles away from their 300 million constituents to do so.  It is frightening to watch the American media culture from progressive to hard right being totally sold on the idea of one President for 300 million people, as though the Presidency is still fit to human scale.  I'm at a point where the idea of a political savior in the guise of a Presidential candidate or congressional majority sounds downright scary, and at the same time, with very few exceptions, the writers and journalists across the slate are completely sold on it."

Our political system is promiscuous as well as primitive.  The first modern fundraiser in American politics -- Mark Hanna, who shook down the corporations to make William McKinley President of the United States in 1896 -- once said there are two important things in politics.  "One is money, and I can't remember the other one."  Because our system feeds on campaign contributions, the powerful and the privileged shape it to their will.  Only 12% of American households had incomes over $100,000 in 2000, but they made up 95% of the substantial donors to campaigns and have been the big winners in Washington ever since.

I saw early on the consequences of political and social inequality.  I got my first job in journalism at the age of 16.  I quickly had one of those strokes of luck that can determine a career.  Some of the old timers were on vacation or out sick and I was assigned to cover what came to be known as the 'Housewives Rebellion.'  Fifteen women in my home town decided not to pay the social security withholding tax for their domestic workers.  They argued that social security was unconstitutional, that imposing it was taxation without representation, and that -- here's my favorite part -- "requiring us to collect (the tax) is no different from requiring us to collect the garbage."

They hired themselves a lawyer -- none other than Martin Dies, the former Congressman best known, or worst known, for his work as head of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the 30s and 40s.  He was no more effective at defending rebellious women than he had been protecting against Communist subversives, and eventually the women wound up holding their noses and paying the tax.  The stories I wrote for my local paper were picked up and moved on by the Associated Press wire to newspapers all over the country.  One day, the managing editor called me over and pointed to the AP ticker beside his desk.  Moving across the wire was a notice citing one "Bill Moyers" and the News Messenger for the reporting we had done on the rebellion.

That hooked me.  In one way or another -- after a detour through seminary and then into politics and government for a spell -- I've been covering politics ever since.

By "politics" I mean when people get together to influence government, change their own lives, and change society.  Sometimes those people are powerful corporate lobby groups like the drug companies and the oil industry, and sometimes they are ordinary people fighting to protect their communities from toxic chemicals, workers fighting for a living wage, or college students organizing to put an end to sweatshops.

Those women in Marshall, Texas -- who didn't want to pay Social Security taxes for their maids -- were not bad people.  They were regulars at church, their children were my friends, many of them were active in community affairs, and their husbands were pillars of the business and professional class in town.  They were respectable and upstanding citizens all.

So it took me awhile to figure out what had brought on that spasm of reactionary rebellion.  It came to me one day, much later.  They simply couldn't see beyond their own prerogatives.  Fiercely loyal to their families, to their clubs, charities, and congregations -- fiercely loyal, in other words, to their own kind -- they narrowly defined membership in democracy to include only people like them.  The women who washed and ironed their laundry, wiped their children's bottoms, made their husbands' beds, and cooked their families meals -- these women, too, would grow old and frail, sick and decrepit, lose their husbands and face the ravages of time alone, with nothing to show from their years of labor but the creases in their brow and the knots on their knuckles.

In one way or another, this is the oldest story in America:  the struggle to determine whether "We, the People" is a spiritual idea embedded in a political reality -- one nation, indivisible -- or merely a charade masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life at the expense of others.

We seem to be holding our breath today, trying to decide what kind of country we want to be.  But in this state of suspension, powerful interests are making off with the booty.  They remind me of the card shark in Texas who said to his competitor in the poker game:  "Now play the cards fairly, Reuben.  I know what I dealt you."

For years now a small fraction of American households have been garnering a larger and larger concentration of wealth and income, while large corporations and financial institutions have obtained unprecedented power over who wins and who loses.  Inequality in America is greater than it's been in 50 years.  In 1960 the gap in terms of wealth between the top 20% and the bottom 20% was 30-fold.  Today it's more than 75-fold.

Such concentrations of wealth would be far less of an issue if the rest of society were benefiting proportionally.  But that is not the case.  Throughout our industrial history incomes grew at 30% to 50% or more every quarter, and in the quarter century after WWII, gains reached more than 100% for all income categories.  Since the late 1970s, only the top 1% of households increased their income by 100%.

Once upon a time, according to Isabel Sawhill and Sara McLanahan in The Future of Children, the American ideal of classless society was 'one in which all children have roughly equal chance of success regardless of the economic status of the family into which they were born.  That's changing fast.  The economist Jeffrey Madrick writes that just a couple of decades ago, only 20% of one's future income was determined by the income of one's father.  New research suggests that today 60% of a son's income is determined by the level of his father's income.  In other words, children no longer have a roughly equal chance of success regardless of the economic status of the family into which they are born.  Their chances of success are greatly improved if they are born on third base and their father has been tipping the umpire.

As all of you know, a college education today is practically a necessity if you are to hold your own, much less climb the next rung.  More than 40% of all new jobs now require a college degree.  There are real world consequences to this, and Madrick drives them home.  Since the 1970s, median wages of men with college degrees have risen about 14%.  But median wages for high school graduates have fallen about 15%.  Not surprisingly, nearly 24% of American workers with only a high school diploma have no health insurance, compared with less than 10% of those with college degrees.

Such statistics can bring glaze to the eyes, but Oscar Wilde once said that it is the mark of truly educated people to be deeply moved by statistics.  All of you are educated, and I know you can envision the stress these economic realities are putting on working people and on family life.  As incomes have stagnated, higher education, health care, public transportation, drugs, housing and cars have risen faster in price than typical family incomes, so that life, says Jeffrey Madrick, "has grown neither calm nor secure for most Americans, by any means."

Let me tell you about the Stanleys and the Neumanns, two families who live in Milwaukee.  One is black, the other white.  The breadwinners in both were laid off in the first wave of downsizing in 1991 as corporations began moving jobs out of the city and then out of the country.  In a documentary series my colleagues and I chronicled their efforts over the next decade to cope with the wrenching changes in their lives and to find a place for themselves in the new global economy.  They're the kind of Americans my mother would have called "the salt of the earth."  They love their kids, care about their communities, go to church every Sunday, and work hard all week.

To make ends meet after the layoffs, both mothers took full-time jobs.  Both fathers became seriously ill.  When one father had to stay in the hospital two months the family went $30,000 in debt because they didn't have adequate health care.  We were there with our cameras when the bank started to foreclose on the modest home of one family that couldn't make mortgage payments.  Like millions of Americans, the Stanleys and the Neumanns were playing by the rules and still getting stiffed.  By the end of the decade they were running harder but slipping further behind, and the gap between them and prosperous America was widening.

What turns their personal tragedy into a political travesty is that while they are indeed patriotic, they no longer believe they matter to the people who run the country.  They simply do not think their concerns will ever be addressed by the political, corporate, and media elites who make up our dominant class.  They are not cynical, because they are deeply religious people with no capacity for cynicism, but they know the system is rigged against them.

"Things have reached such a state of affairs," the journalist George Orwell once wrote, "that the first duty of every intelligent person is to pay attention to the obvious."  The editors of the Economist have done just that.  The pro-business magazine, considered by many to be the most influential defender of capitalism on the newsstand, produced a sobering analysis of what is happening to the old notion that any American child can get to the top.  A growing body of evidence -- some of it I have already cited -- led the editors to conclude that with "income inequality growing to levels not seen since the Gilded Age and social mobility falling behind, the United States risks calcifying into a European-style class-based society."  The editors point to an "education system increasingly stratified by social class" in which poor children "attend schools with fewer resources than those of their richer contemporaries" and great universities that are "increasingly reinforcing rather than reducing these educational inequalities."  They conclude that America's great companies have made it harder than ever "for people to start at the bottom and rise up the company hierarchies by dint of hard work and self-improvement."

It is eerie to read assessments like that and then read the anthropologist Jared Diamond's book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail.  He describes an American society in which élites cocoon themselves "in gated communities, guarded by private security guards, and filled with people who drink bottled water, depend on private pensions, and send their children to private schools."  Gradually, they lose the motivation "to support the police force, the municipal water supply, Social Security, and public schools."  Any society contains a built-in blueprint for failure, warns Jared Diamond, if elites insulate themselves from the consequences of their own actions.

So it is that in a study of its own, the American Political Science Association found that "increasing inequalities threaten the American ideal of equal citizenship and that progress toward real democracy may have stalled in this country and even reversed."

This is a marked turn of events for a country whose mythology embraces "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" as part of our creed.  America was not supposed to be a country of "winner take all."  Through our system of checks and balances we were going to maintain a healthy equilibrium in how power works -- and for whom.  Because equitable access to public resources is the lifeblood of any democracy, we made primary schooling free to all.  Because everyone deserves a second chance, debtors, especially the relatively poor, were protected by state laws against their rich creditors.  Government encouraged Americans to own their own piece of land, and even supported squatters' rights.  In my time, the hope of equal opportunity became reality for millions of us.  Although my parents were knocked down and almost out by the Great Depression, and were poor all their lives, my brother and I went to good public schools.  The GI Bill made it possible for him to go to college.  When I bought my first car with a loan of $450 I drove to a public school on a public highway and stopped to rest in a public park.  America as a shared project was becoming the engine of our national experience.

Not now.  Beginning a quarter of a century ago a movement of corporate, political, and religious fundamentalists gained ascendancy over politics and made inequality their goal.  They launched a crusade to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that have held private power [in check].  And they had the money to back up their ambition.

Let me read you something:

When powerful interests shower Washington with millions in campaign contributions, they often get what they want.  But it is ordinary citizens and firms that pay the price, and most of them never see it coming.  This is what happens if you don't contribute to their campaigns or spend generously on lobbying.  You pick up a disproportionate share of America's tax bill.  You pay higher prices for a broad range of products from peanuts to prescriptions.  You pay taxes that others in a similar situation have been excused fr