Moyers on America
I finally found time to read Bill Moyers' latest speech, the one he gave recently here in DC to close the "Take Back America Conference". As one has come to expect, the entire speech is alarming in content and inspiring in expression. This is a tiny excerpt — how to choose only three paragraphs from such a rich vein? — that bring up just one point about the current transition to a second American "gilded age" so hoped for by the wealthy, powerful few.
Set aside some time, read the entire speech, and believe that it doesn't have to be this way.
A profound transformation is occurring in America and those responsible for it don't want you to connect the dots. We are experiencing what has been described as a "fanatical drive to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that have shaped public responsibility for social harms arising from the excesses of private power." From public land to water and other natural resources, from media with their broadcast and digital spectrums to scientific discoveries and medical breakthroughs, a broad range of America's public resources is being shifted to the control of elites and the benefit of the privileged. It all seems so clear now that we wonder how we could have ignored the warning signs at the time. Back in the early 1970s President Nixon's Attorney General, John Mitchell, predicted that "this country is going to go so far to the right that you won't recognize it." A wealthy right-winger of the time, William Simon, President Nixon's Secretary of the Treasury, wrote a polemic declaring that "funds generated by business…must rush by the multimillions" to conservative causes. Said Business Week, bluntly: "Some people will obviously have to do with less…It will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more."
We've seen the strategy play out for years now: to cut workforces and wages, scour the globe in search of cheap labor, trash the social contract and the safety net meant to protect people from hardships beyond their control, make it hard for ordinary citizens to gain redress for the malfeasance and malpractice of corporations, and diminish the ability of government to check and balance "the animal spirits" of economic warfare where the winner takes all. Streams of money flowed into think tanks to shape the agenda, media to promote it, and a political machine to achieve it. What has happened to working Americans is not the result of Adam Smith's benign and invisible hand but the direct consequence of corporate money, ideological propaganda, a partisan political religion, and a string of political decisions favoring the interests of wealthy elites who bought the political system right out from under us.
It's an old story in America. We shouldn't be surprised by it any more. Hold up a mirror to this moment and you will see reflected back to you the first Gilded Age in the last part of the 19th century. Then, as now, the great captains of industry and finance could say, with Frederick Townsend Martin, "We are rich. We own America. We got it, God knows how, but we intend to keep it."
They were deadly serious. Go for the evidence to such magisterial studies of American history as Growth of the American Republic (Morison, Commager, and Leuchtenberg), and you'll read how they did it: They gained control of newspapers and magazines. They subsidized candidates. They bought legislation and even judicial decisions. To justify their greed and power they drew on history, law, economics, and religion to concoct a philosophy that would come to be known as Social Darwinism – "backed up by the quasi religious principle that the acquisition of wealth was a mark of divine favor." One of their favorite apologists, Professor William Graham Sumner of Yale, said: "If we do not like the survival of the fittest, we have only one possible alternative, and that is the survival of the unfittest. The former is the law of civilization; the latter is the law of anti-civilization."
[Bill Moyers, "Losing the American Revolution", at the Take Back America Conference, Washington DC, 3 June 2005.]
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on Friday, 8 July 2005 at 13.30
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I am amazed at the number of people who refuse to listen when confronted with hearing from those who are passionate about attempting to hold onto democracy. "I don't want to hear it," they say, or "Please stop. I don't want to get my blood pressure up," or, "I'm tired of hearing this. Can't we talk about something positive. I'm tired of all the negativity in this world."
Are we a nation desirous of remaining in denial, as our entire system of government is being shanghied, pulled out from underneath us by a cadre of greedy, deluded, power-hungry maniacs who believe they have a divine right to rape the planet and its people?
Please come to your senses, fellow Americans, before you wake up one day to ask the question, "What happened?" as you slept through one of the most important parts of U.S. history and, through your own passive, head-in-the-sand behavior, allowed fascism to take shape and then control your destiny and that of your children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren…