Moyers on Wealth, Power, & Democracy
These are paragraphs I selected from Bill Moyers' "America 101", a speech he gave in San Diego on 27 October 2006 to the Council of Great City Schools.
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Despite continued growth in the economy, real median household income declined between 2000 and 2004. Between 1980 and 2004, real wages in manufacturing fell 1 percent while the real income of the richest 1 percent rose – by 135 percent. In 1976 the top 1 percent of Americans owned 22 percent of our total wealth. Today, the top 1 percent controls 38 percent of our total wealth. In 1960, the gap in terms of wealth between the top 20 percent and the bottom 20 percent was 30 fold. Now it is more than 75 fold.Such concentrations of wealth would be far less of an issue if the rest of society were benefiting proportionately. But that’s not the case. According to Census Bureau data, Americans have become progressively less likely to advance up the socio-economic ladder. One study cited by Stephen Heinz concludes, “The rich are likely to remain rich and the poor are likely to remain poor.”
Aristotle thought injustice resulted from pleonexia, literally, “having more.” A class of people having more than their share of the common wealth was the characteristic feature of an unjust society. Plato thought that the common good required a ratio of only 5 to 1 between the richest and poorest members of a society. Even J.P. Morgan thought bosses should only get twenty times more than their workers, at most. How quaint: In 2005 the average CEO earned 262 times what the average worker got.
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This wasn’t meant to be. America was not meant to be a country where the winner takes all. Our system of checks and balances – read the Federalist papers — was going to keep an equilibrium in how power works, and for whom. Because equitable access to public resources is the lifeblood of democracy, Americans made primary schooling free to all. Because everyone deserves a second chance, debtors – especially the relatively poor – were protected by state law against rich creditors. Charters to establish corporations were not restricted to elites. Government encouraged Americans to own their own piece of land, and even supported squatters’ rights. Equal access to opportunity began to materialize for millions of us.
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It’s all right there in bold letters in the early manifestos of the Reagan Revolution – essential reading like William Simon’s A Time for Truth . He argued that “funds generated by business” would have to “rush by multimillions” into conservative causes to uproot the institutions and the “heretical” morality of the New Deal. An “alliance” between right-wing leaders and “men of action in the capitalist world” must mount a “veritable crusade” against everything brought forth by the Progressive era. Reading right out of the new reactionary playbook, the business press somberly concluded that “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,” BusinessWeek sermonized.
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In 2001, 397,000 people who applied for the Earned Income Tax Credit were audited, one out of every 47 returns. That’s a rate eight times higher than the rate for people earning $100,000 or more. Only one out of every 366 returns of wealthy households was audited. Over the previous 11 years, in fact, audit rates for the poor increased by a third, while the wealthiest enjoyed a 90 percent decline in IRS scrutiny. Of all the 744,000 tax returns audited by the IRS in 2002, more than half, David Cay Johnston finds, were filed by the working poor. More than half of IRS audits targeted people who account for less than 20 percent of taxpayers, the poorest 20 percent.
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William Henry Harrison, our ill-fated ninth president and unlikely Whig populist, once said that it’s “true Democratic feeling that all the measures of the Government are directed to the purpose of making the rich richer and the poor poorer.” I’d say it’s more than a feeling. It’s the God’s honest truth, and we need to see it for what it is – the betrayal of the American Revolution.
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We know now that “a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” can, indeed, perish. And perish not under fallen battlements and bombs raining down and the sneak attack of some fanatical distant foe, but by the deliberate plunder of an organized minority – for our governing elites do not represent the majority of Americans – that methodically imposes its will on the laws and institutions of a people until the whole foundation has become their very throne.
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Yet history tells us that concentrated wealth and political power can be challenged. The Jeffersonian “second revolution” of the 1790s; the populist revolt of the 1890s that led to the Progressive era of reform; the powerful electoral ratification of the New Deal; the equally powerful rejection of race and gender discrimination in the 1960s — all manifested the ordinary beliefs and values, collectively revived, to confront the domination by wealthy elites that had debased the American Promise inherent in our revolutionary beginnings.
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I welcome comments -- even dissent -- but I will delete without notice irrelevant, rude, psychotic, or incomprehensible comments, particularly those that I deem homophobic, unless they are amusing. The same goes for commercial comments and trackbacks. Sorry, but it's my blog and my decisions are final.
on Sunday, 5 November 2006 at 01.47
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I'll add a few counter thoughts.
Part of what you rail against was brought on by the public at large, who wants things done in a big way by someone else: "we" tend to buy our goods from big corporaions, who have a generous return policy, well trained clerks, lots of brand name items in one place, and who have deep pockets if we need to sue them.
Our attempts at regulating business has at times built barriers to entry for newcomers that might have reigned in some excesses of the current fat cats.
on Sunday, 5 November 2006 at 12.53
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First, I get to rail. Part of it was brought on by people who wanted "smaller government" and voted for the current government — a big mistake for them.
But you're right. I'd be rich by now if I had a nickel for everyone I'd heard say "I would never buy at Wal*Mart with all their anti-everything attitudes and policies, although sometimes I'm forced to because their prices are lower". I, too, tend to get irritated by silly lawsuits, although the alternative of trying to regulate such lawsuits might be a cure worse than the disease, and we know that big piles of money always attract all sorts of unsavory activity.
And what you say about regulation is true as far I can see. As you know, I'm not one to support wholesale non-regulation — I believe it's entirely within the rights of the American people to regulate commerce in America — but I recognize that an awful lot of "regulation" is done at the hands of the companies being "regulated", and that's generally not healthy for competition.