This is the Fight of Our Lives by Bill Moyers

[Guest guest]

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0616-09.htm

 

Published on Wednesday, June 16, 2004 by

Inequality.org

 

This is the Fight of Our Lives

by Bill Moyers

 

Keynote speech

Inequality Matters Forum

New York University

June 3, 2004

 

 

" The middle class and working poor are told that

what's happening to them is the consequence of Adam

Smith's 'Invisible Hand.' This is a lie. What's

happening to them is the direct consequence of

corporate activism, intellectual propaganda, the rise

of a religious orthodoxy that in its hunger for

government subsidies has made an idol of power, and a

string of political decisions favoring the powerful

and the privileged who bought the political system

right out from under us. "

-- Bill Moyers, Keynote speech, June 3, 2004

 

It is important from time to time to remember that

some things are worth getting mad about.

 

Here's one: On March 10 of this year, on page B8, with

a headline that stretched across all six columns, The

New York Times reported that tuition in the city's

elite private schools would hit $26,000 for the coming

school year -- for kindergarten as well as high

school. On the same page, under a two-column headline,

Michael Wineraub wrote about a school in nearby Mount

Vernon, the first stop out of the Bronx, with a

student body that is 97 percent black. It is the

poorest school in the town: nine out of ten children

qualify for free lunches; one out of 10 lives in a

homeless shelter. During black history month this past

February, a sixth grader wanted to write a report on

Langston Hughes. There were no books on Langston

Hughes in the library -- no books about the great

poet, nor any of his poems. There is only one book in

the library on Frederick Douglass. None on Rosa Parks,

Josephine Baker, Leontyne Price, or other giants like

them in the modern era. In fact, except for a few

Newberry Award books the librarian bought with her own

money, the library is mostly old books -- largely from

the 1950s and 60s when the school was all white. A

1960 child's primer on work begins with a youngster

learning how to be a telegraph delivery boy. All the

workers in the book -- the dry cleaner, the

deliveryman, the cleaning lady -- are white. There's a

1967 book about telephones which says: " when you phone

you usually dial the number. But on some new phones

you can push buttons. " The newest encyclopedia dates

from l991, with two volumes -- " b " and " r " -- missing.

There is no card catalog in the library -- no index

cards or computer.

 

Something to get mad about.

 

Here's something else: Caroline Payne's face and gums

are distorted because her Medicaid-financed dentures

don't fit. Because they don't fit, she is continuously

turned down for jobs on account of her appearance.

Caroline Payne is one of the people in David Shipler's

new book,' The Working Poor: Invisible in America'.

She was born poor, and in spite of having once owned

her own home and having earned a two-year college

degree, Caroline Payne has bounced from one

poverty-wage job to another all her life, equipped

with the will to move up, but not the resources to

deal with unexpected and overlapping problems like a

mentally handicapped daughter, a broken marriage, a

sudden layoff crisis that forced her to sell her few

assets, pull up roots and move on. " In the house of

the poor, " Shipler writes " ...the walls are thin and

fragile and troubles seep into one another. "

 

Here's something else to get mad about. Two weeks ago,

the House of Representatives, the body of Congress

owned and operated by the corporate, political, and

religious right, approved new tax credits for

children. Not for poor children, mind you. But for

families earning as much as $309,000 a year --

families that already enjoy significant benefits from

earlier tax cuts. The editorial page of The Washington

Post called this " bad social policy, bad tax policy,

and bad fiscal policy. You'd think they'd be

embarrassed, " said the Post, " but they're not. "

 

And this, too, is something to get mad about. Nothing

seems to embarrass the political class in Washington

today. Not the fact that more children are growing up

in poverty in America than in any other industrial

nation; not the fact that millions of workers are

actually making less money today in real dollars than

they did twenty years ago; not the fact that working

people are putting in longer and longer hours and

still falling behind; not the fact that while we have

the most advanced medical care in the world, nearly 44

million Americans -- eight out of ten of them in

working families -- are uninsured and cannot get the

basic care they need.

 

Astonishing as it seems, no one in official Washington

seems embarrassed by the fact that the gap between

rich and poor is greater than it's been in 50 years --

the worst inequality among all western nations. Or

that we are experiencing a shift in poverty. For years

it was said those people down there at the bottom were

single, jobless mothers. For years they were told

work, education, and marriage is how they move up the

economic ladder. But poverty is showing up where we

didn't expect it -- among families that include two

parents, a worker, and a head of the household with

more than a high school education. These are the newly

poor. Our political, financial and business class

expects them to climb out of poverty on an escalator

moving downward.

 

Let me tell you about the Stanleys and the Neumanns.

During the last decade, I produced a series of

documentaries for PBS called " Surviving the Good

Times. " The title refers to the boom time of the '90s

when the country achieved the longest period of

economic growth in its entire history. Some good

things happened then, but not everyone shared equally

in the benefits. To the contrary. The decade began

with a sustained period of downsizing by corporations

moving jobs out of America and many of those people

never recovered what was taken from them. We decided

early on to tell the stories of two families in

Milwaukee -- one black, one white -- whose

breadwinners were laid off in the first wave of

layoffs in 1991. We reported on how they were coping

with the wrenching changes in their lives, and we

stayed with them over the next ten years as they tried

to find a place 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 -- both mothers have had to take

full-time jobs.

 

During our time with them, the fathers in both

families became seriously ill. One had to stay in the

hospital two months, putting his family $30,000 in

debt because they didn't have adequate health

insurance. We were there with our camera when the bank

started to foreclose on the modest home of the other

family because they couldn't meet the mortgage

payments after dad lost his good-paying manufacturing

job. 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 behind, and the gap between them

and prosperous America was widening.

 

What turns their personal tragedy into a political

travesty is that they are patriotic. They love this

country. But they no longer believe they matter to the

people who run the country. When our film opens, both

families are watching the inauguration of Bill Clinton

on television in 1992. By the end of the decade they

were no longer paying attention to politics. They

don't see it connecting to their lives. They don't

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. They

know this, and we know this. For years now a small

fraction of American households have been garnering an

extreme concentration of wealth and income while large

corporations and financial institutions have obtained

unprecedented levels of economic and political power

over daily life. In 1960, the gap in terms of wealth

between the top 20% and the bottom 20% was 30 fold.

Four decades later 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. As the

economist Jeff Madrick reminds us, the pressures of

inequality on middle and working class Americans are

now quite severe. " The strain on working people and on

family life, as spouses have gone to work in dramatic

numbers, has become significant. VCRs and television

sets are cheap, but higher education, health care,

public transportation, drugs, housing and cars have

risen faster in price than typical family incomes. And

life has grown neither calm nor secure for most

Americans, by any means. " You can find many sources to

support this conclusion. I like the language of a

small outfit here in New York called the Commonwealth

Foundation/Center for the Renewal of American

Democracy. They conclude that working families and the

poor " are losing ground under economic pressures that

deeply affect household stability, family dynamics,

social mobility, political participation, and civic

life. "

 

Household economics is not the only area where

inequality is growing in America. Equality doesn't

mean equal incomes, but a fair and decent society

where money is not the sole arbiter of status or

comfort. In a fair and just society, the commonwealth

will be valued even as individual wealth is

encouraged.

 

Let me make something clear here. I wasn't born

yesterday. I'm old enough to know that the tension

between haves and have-nots are built into human

psychology, it is a constant in human history, and it

has been a factor in every society. But I also know

America was going to be different. I know that because

I read Mr. Jefferson's writings, Mr. Lincoln's

speeches and other documents in the growing American

creed. I presumptuously disagreed with Thomas

Jefferson about human equality being self-evident.

Where I lived, neither talent, nor opportunity, nor

outcomes were equal. Life is rarely fair and never

equal. So what could he possibly have meant by that

ringing but ambiguous declaration: " All men are

created equal " ? Two things, possibly. One, although

none of us are good, all of us are sacred (Glenn

Tinder), that's the basis for thinking we are by

nature kin.

 

Second, he may have come to see the meaning of those

words through the experience of the slave who was his

mistress. As is now widely acknowledged, the hands

that wrote " all men are created equal " also stroked

the breasts and caressed the thighs of a black woman

named Sally Hennings. She bore him six children whom

he never acknowledged as his own, but who were the

only slaves freed by his will when he died -- the one

request we think Sally Hennings made of her master.

Thomas Jefferson could not have been insensitive to

the flesh-and-blood woman in his arms. He had to know

she was his equal in her desire for life, her longing

for liberty, her passion for happiness.

 

In his book on the Declaration, my late friend

Mortimer Adler said Jefferson realized that whatever

things are really good for any human being are really

good for all other human beings. The happy or good

life is essentially the same for all: a satisfaction

of the same needs inherent in human nature. A just

society is grounded in that recognition. So Jefferson

kept as a slave a woman whose nature he knew was equal

to his. All Sally Hennings got from her long

sufferance -- perhaps it was all she sought from what

may have grown into a secret and unacknowledged love

-- was that he let her children go. " Let my children

go " -- one of the oldest of all petitions. It has long

been the promise of America -- a broken promise, to be

sure. But the idea took hold that we could fix what

was broken so that our children would live a bountiful

life. We could prevent the polarization between the

very rich and the very poor that poisoned other

societies. We could provide that each and every

citizen would enjoy the basic necessities of life, a

voice in the system of self-government, and a better

chance for their children. We could preclude the vast

divides that produced the turmoil and tyranny of the

very countries from which so many of our families had

fled.

 

We were going to do these things because we understood

our dark side -- none of us is good -- but we also

understood the other side -- all of us are sacred.

From Jefferson forward we have grappled with these two

notions in our collective head -- that we are worthy

of the creator but that power corrupts and absolute

power corrupts absolutely. Believing the one and

knowing the other, we created a country where the

winners didn't take all. Through a system of checks

and balances we were going to maintain a safe, if

shifting, equilibrium between wealth and commonwealth.

We believed equitable access to public resources is

the lifeblood of any democracy. So early on [in Jeff

Madrick's description,] primary schooling was made

free to all. States changed laws to protect debtors,

often the relatively poor, against their rich

creditors. Charters to establish corporations were

open to most, if not all, white comers, rather than

held for the elite. The government encouraged

Americans to own their own piece of land, and even

supported squatters' rights. The court challenged

monopoly -- all in the name of we the people.

 

In my time we went to public schools. My brother made

it to college on the GI bill. When I bought my first

car for $450 I drove to a subsidized university on

free public highways and stopped to rest in

state-maintained public parks. This is what I mean by

the commonwealth. Rudely recognized in its formative

years, always subject to struggle, constantly

vulnerable to reactionary counterattacks, the notion

of America as a shared project has been the central

engine of our national experience.

 

Until now. I don't have to tell you that a profound

transformation is occurring in America: the balance

between wealth and the commonwealth is being upended.

By design. Deliberately. We have been subjected to

what the Commonwealth Foundation calls " 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 land, water and other

natural resources, to media and the broadcast and

digital spectrums, to scientific discovery and medical

breakthroughs, and to politics itself, a broad range

of the American commons is undergoing a powerful shift

toward private and corporate control. And with little

public debate. Indeed, what passes for 'political

debate' in this country has become a cynical charade

behind which the real business goes on -- the

not-so-scrupulous business of getting and keeping

power in order to divide up the spoils.

 

We could have seen this coming if we had followed the

money. The veteran Washington reporter, Elizabeth

Drew, says " the greatest change in Washington over the

past 25 years -- in its culture, in the way it does

business and the ever-burgeoning amount of business

transactions that go on here -- has been in the

preoccupation with money. " Jeffrey Birnbaum, who

covered Washington for nearly twenty years for the

Wall Street Journal, put it more strongly: " [campaign

cash] has flooded over the gunwales of the ship of

state and threatens to sink the entire vessel.

Political donations determine the course and speed of

many government actions that deeply affect our daily

lives. " Politics is suffocating from the stranglehold

of money. During his brief campaign in 2000, before he

was ambushed by the dirty tricks of the religious

right in South Carolina and big money from George W.

Bush's wealthy elites, John McCain said elections

today are nothing less than an " influence peddling

scheme in which both parties compete to stay in office

by selling the country to the highest bidder. "

 

Small wonder that with the exception of people like

John McCain and Russ Feingold, official Washington no

longer finds anything wrong with a democracy dominated

by the people with money. Hit the pause button here,

and recall Roger Tamraz. He's the wealthy oilman who

paid $300,000 to get a private meeting in the White

House with President Clinton; he wanted help in

securing a big pipeline in central Asia. This got him

called before congressional hearings on the financial

excesses of the 1996 campaign. If you watched the

hearings on C-Span you heard him say he didn't think

he had done anything out of the ordinary. When they

pressed him he told the senators: " Look, when it comes

to money and politics, you make the rules. I'm just

playing by your rules. " One senator then asked if

Tamraz had registered and voted. And he was blunt in

his reply: " No, senator, I think money's a bit more

(important) than the vote. "

 

So what does this come down to, practically?

 

Here is one accounting:

 

" When powerful interests shower Washington with

millions in campaign contributions, they often get

what they want. But it's 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

from paying. You're compelled to abide by laws while

others are granted immunity from them. You must pay

debts that you incur while others do not. You're

barred from writing off on your tax returns some of

the money spent on necessities while others deduct the

cost of their entertainment. You must run your

business by one set of rules, while the government

creates another set for your competitors. In contrast,

the fortunate few who contribute to the right

politicians and hire the right lobbyists enjoy all the

benefits of their special status. Make a bad business

deal; the government bails them out. If they want to

hire workers at below market wages, the government

provides the means to do so. If they want more time to

pay their debts, the government gives them an

extension. If they want immunity from certain laws,

the government gives it. If they want to ignore rules

their competition must comply with, the government

gives its approval. If they want to kill legislation

that is intended for the public, it gets killed. "

 

I'm not quoting from Karl Marx's Das Kapital or Mao's

Little Red Book. I'm quoting Time magazine. Time's

premier investigative journalists -- Donald Bartlett

and James Steele -- concluded in a series last year

that America now has " government for the few at the

expense of the many. " Economic inequality begets

political inequality, and vice versa.

 

That's why the Stanleys and the Neumanns were turned

off by politics. It's why we're losing the balance

between wealth and the commonwealth. It's why we can't

put things right. And it is the single most

destructive force tearing at the soul of democracy.

Hear the great justice Learned Hand on this: " If we

are to keep our democracy, there must be one

commandment: 'Thou shalt not ration justice.' "

Learned Hand was a prophet of democracy. The rich have

the right to buy more homes than anyone else. They

have the right to buy more cars than anyone else, more

gizmos than anyone else, more clothes and vacations

than anyone else. But they do not have the right to

buy more democracy than anyone else.

 

I know, I know: this sounds very much like a call for

class war. But the class war was declared a generation

ago, in a powerful paperback polemic by William Simon,

who was soon to be Secretary of the Treasury. He

called on the financial and business class, in effect,

to take back the power and privileges they had lost in

the depression and new deal. They got the message, and

soon they began a stealthy class war against the rest

of society and the principles of our democracy. They

set out to trash the social contract, to cut their

workforces and wages, to scour the globe in search of

cheap labor, and to shred the social safety net that

was supposed to protect people from hardships beyond

their control. Business Week put it bluntly at the

time: " 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. "

 

The middle class and working poor are told that what's

happening to them is the consequence of Adam Smith's

" Invisible Hand. " This is a lie. What's happening to

them is the direct consequence of corporate activism,

intellectual propaganda, the rise of a religious

orthodoxy that in its hunger for government subsidies

has made an idol of power, and a string of political

decisions favoring the powerful and the privileged who

bought the political system right out from under us.

 

To create the intellectual framework for this takeover

of public policy they funded conservative think tanks

-- The Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution,

and the American Enterprise Institute -- that churned

out study after study advocating their agenda.

 

To put political muscle behind these ideas they

created a formidable political machine. One of the few

journalists to cover the issues of class -- Thomas

Edsall of The Washington Post -- wrote: " During the

1970s, business refined its ability to act as a class,

submerging competitive instincts in favor of joint,

cooperate action in the legislative area. " Big

business political action committees flooded the

political arena with a deluge of dollars. And they

built alliances with the religious right -- Jerry

Falwell's Moral Majority and Pat Robertson's Christian

Coalition -- who mounted a cultural war providing a

smokescreen for the class war, hiding the economic

plunder of the very people who were enlisted as foot

soldiers in the cause of privilege.

 

In a book to be published this summer, Daniel Altman

describes what he calls the " neo-economy -- a place

without taxes, without a social safety net, where rich

and poor live in different financial worlds -- and

[said Altman] it's coming to America. " He's a little

late. It's here. Says Warren Buffett, the savviest

investor of them all: " My class won. "

 

Look at the spoils of victory:

 

Over the past three years, they've pushed through $2

trillion dollars in tax cuts -- almost all tilted

towards the wealthiest people in the country.

 

Cuts in taxes on the largest incomes.

 

Cuts in taxes on investment income.

 

And cuts in taxes on huge inheritances.

 

More than half of the benefits are going to the

wealthiest one percent. You could call it trickle-down

economics, except that the only thing that trickled

down was a sea of red ink in our state and local

governments, forcing them to cut services for and

raise taxes on middle class working America.

 

Now the Congressional Budget Office forecasts deficits

totaling $2.75 trillion over the next ten years.

 

These deficits have been part of their strategy. Some

of you will remember that Senator Daniel Patrick

Moynihan tried to warn us 20 years ago, when he

predicted that President Ronald Reagan's real strategy

was to force the government to cut domestic social

programs by fostering federal deficits of historic

dimensions. Reagan's own budget director, David

Stockman, admitted as such. Now the leading rightwing

political strategist, Grover Norquist, says the goal

is to " starve the beast " -- with trillions of dollars

in deficits resulting from trillions of dollars in tax

cuts, until the United States Government is so anemic

and anorexic it can be drowned in the bathtub.

 

There's no question about it: The corporate

conservatives and their allies in the political and

religious right are achieving a vast transformation of

American life that only they understand because they

are its advocates, its architects, and its

beneficiaries. In creating the greatest economic

inequality in the advanced world, they have saddled

our nation, our states, and our cities and counties

with structural deficits that will last until our

children's children are ready for retirement, and they

are systematically stripping government of all its

functions except rewarding the rich and waging war.

 

And they are proud of what they have done to our

economy and our society. If instead of practicing

journalism I was writing for Saturday Night Live, I

couldn't have made up the things that this crew have

been saying. The president's chief economic adviser

says shipping technical and professional jobs overseas

is good for the economy. The president's Council of

Economic Advisers report that hamburger chefs in fast

food restaurants can be considered manufacturing

workers. The president's Federal Reserve Chairman says

that the tax cuts may force cutbacks in social

security - but hey, we should make the tax cuts

permanent anyway. The president's Labor Secretary says

it doesn't matter if job growth has stalled because

" the stock market is the ultimate arbiter. "

 

You just can't make this stuff up. You have to hear it

to believe it. This may be the first class war in

history where the victims will die laughing.

 

But what they are doing to middle class and working

Americans -- and to the workings of American democracy

-- is no laughing matter. Go online and read the

transcripts of Enron traders in the energy crisis four

years ago, discussing how they were manipulating the

California power market in telephone calls in which

they gloat about ripping off " those poor

grandmothers. " Read how they talk about political

contributions to politicians like " Kenny Boy " Lay's

best friend George W. Bush. Go on line and read how

Citigroup has been fined $70 Million for abuses in

loans to low-income, high risk borrowers - the largest

penalty ever imposed by the Federal Reserve. A few

clicks later, you can find the story of how a

subsidiary of the corporate computer giant NEC has

been fined over $20 million after pleading guilty to

corruption in a federal plan to bring Internet access

to poor schools and libraries. And this, the story

says, is just one piece of a nationwide scheme to rip

off the government and the poor.

 

Let's face the reality: If ripping off the public

trust; if distributing tax breaks to the wealthy at

the expense of the poor; if driving the country into

deficits deliberately to starve social benefits; if

requiring states to balance their budgets on the backs

of the poor; if squeezing the wages of workers until

the labor force resembles a nation of serfs -- if this

isn't class war, what is?

 

It's un-American. It's unpatriotic. And it's wrong.

 

But I don't need to tell you this. You wouldn't be

here if you didn't know it. Your presence at this

gathering confirms that while an America with liberty

and justice for all is a broken promise, it is not a

lost cause. Once upon a time I thought the mass media

-- my industry -- would help mend this broken promise

and save this cause. After all, the sight of police

dogs attacking peaceful demonstrators forced America

to recognize the reality of racial injustice. The

sight of carnage in Vietnam forced us to recognize the

war was unwinnable. The sight of terrorists striking

the World Trade Center woke us from a long slumber of

denial and distraction. I thought the mass media might

awaken Americans to the reality that this ideology of

winner-take-all is working against them and not for

them. I was wrong. With honorable exceptions, we can't

count on the mass media.

 

What we need is a mass movement of people like you.

Get mad, yes -- there's plenty to be mad about. Then

get organized and get busy. This is the fight of our

lives.