This is the Fight of Our Lives
By Bill
Moyers
Keynote Speech
Inequality
Matters Forum
New York University
Thursday 3 June 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."
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.
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