Moyers on the New Gilded Age
Bill Moyers, in a piece about the curious symbiosis between Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff, corruption and the Northern Marianas Islands, wrote
Back in the first Gilded Age, Boies Penrose was a United States senator from Pennsylvania who had been put and kept in office by the railroad tycoons and oil barons. He assured the moguls: "I believe in the division of labor. You send us to Congress; we pass laws under which you make money… and out of your profits you further contribute to our campaign funds to send us back again to pass more laws to enable you to make more money."
Gilded Ages – then and now – have one thing in common: Audacious and shameless people for whom the very idea of the public trust is a cynical joke.
[…]
There are no victimless crimes in politics. The cost of corruption is passed on to you. When the government of the United States falls under the thumb of the powerful and privileged, regular folks get squashed.
[…]
It is time to fight again. These people in Washington have no right to be doing what they are doing. It's not their government, it's your government. They work for you. They're public employees – and if they let us down and sell us out, they should be fired. That goes for the lowliest bureaucrat in town to the senior leaders of Congress on up to the President of the United States.
[Bill Moyers, "Delay, Abramoff, and The Public Trust", The Huffington Post, 28 February 2006.]
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on Thursday, 2 March 2006 at 17.26
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Damn, I wish Moyers would run for president. At the least, I wish he'd team up with someone, maybe John Edwards or Dennis Kucinich — give people a choice, not an echo for a change. And do it by, to borrow a line from James Carville, telling the public, "We're right, they're wrong and here's why."
Moyers nails it, of course. I'm coming to the notion there are certain remarkable parallels between the corporate-dominated, big-money ruled state and the communist state. In the latter, people exist to benefit the state and the regime. In the former, people exist to serve the profit-maximizing, control-avoiding economic interests of their corporate and wealthy masters. How one is much better than the other is hard to appreciate.