The American Crisis Deepens

The Supreme Court decision that essentially gives corporations unlimited power through campaign spending is a danger to American democracy and a danger to every citizen. It is no joke.

I was tempted to title this post: The GOP Sells the United States to the Chinese Communist Party. The consequences of unlimited campaign spending by corporations means the person with the most money wins. Since anyone outside the United States can invest in our corporations, it will now be legal for the Chinese, Saudis and Russians to influence American elections. Even Osama bin Laden, if he uses enough corporate shells, can now influence American politics directly.

George W. Bush appointed two corporatist judges to the Supreme Court. If we're not careful, the legacy of the worst president in our nation's history will now be intact.

I expect many posts around the country to focus on today's judicial fiasco. Here's a post from Firedoglake:

If you had any doubt about the corruption that has infected the very bloodstream of American politics, look at today’s ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court said corporations can spend unlimited amounts to influence the outcome of elections.

(snip)

Teabaggers, do you get it now? You are outraged by your powerlessness. Can you now see the real source of that powerlessness? It is not government. Government has been turned into the handmaiden of the corporate oligarchs.

I’m compelled to repeat something else: I’m a fan of entrepreneurship and responsible capitalism. But it’s not the so-called heavy hand of government that is the enemy. It’s the corporate monopolists.

Here's a post from Kevin Drum who almost always has some of the most thoughtful posts:

I confess that I've become more sensitive to First Amendment concerns about the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law over the years. But treating corporations as mere "associations of citizens"? Color me skeptical. That's just not what they are, and this is a decision that we're probably going to live to regret. After all, it's not as if lack of ability for corporations to influence the political process has historically been a major problem in the United States.

I've been saying it for some time now and I'll say it again: something has to change.

American Business and the Forgotten Adam Smith

I don't have a problem with the concept of competition and free enterprise. My problem with American business is the tendency sometimes of the executive suite to work against the American people instead of for the American people. We're clearly in one of those periods now. The biggest problem with American business these days is its unwillingness to look very far down the road. Couple the shortsightedness of business with its blind faith in unlimited growth and it's not hard to figure out we're headed for trouble.

In my last post, S.W. Anderson of Oh!Pinion wrote a thoughtful comment that ended with these two paragraphs:

Owing to our national psychology, tradition and the bedrock belief of our financiers, entrepreneurs and business-executive class, greed is accepted as good. Growth is seen as imperative and potentially limitless, the only real brakes on it being the lack of ambition some exhibit and the contrariness of others.

You mentioned illusion. Well here's my candidate for the root cause of our dangerous illusion: Every one of the notions in the previous paragraph is not only untrue but dangerous if accepted uncritically and blindly acted upon.

Anderson's comment overlaps something I read three nights ago. I just finished a book by biologist Bernd Heinrich called, The Snoring Bird (I recommend it, by the way). The book is largely a biographical account of the author's father and the author's own development as a biologist. The book becomes a kind of history of how science, particularly biology, has changed over the years and there's a considerable weaving back and forth between the events of the day, including World War I and World War II, the personal biography of the father and son, and the lifelong scientific passion and work of these two capable people.

Near the end of the book (pages 373-374) is a surprising passage on economics that came out of a long study of bees in the early 1970s:

.... I learned how bees sample a variety of flowers on their life's first trips out of the hive, and then they specialize in "majors" and "minors" much as students do in college, or as people do in choosing a profession. I was electrified by my results and felt they were so interesting that they could indeed be read by nonspecialists. ...

In one [op-ed article] titled "What Bees and Flowers Know," I took the undoubtedly unpopular position that we were using too much energy. Did more make us happier? What is the limit when we occupy every square inch of soil? If we build up our population on the energy base of coal and oil or nuclear power, we would be likely to end up exceeding our ecological bounds and destroying our natural environment; and to think only in terms of decades or centuries is shortsighted. Paul Landon, editor of a journal I had never heard of called Business and Society Review, read the op-eds and then wrote to me—"I was very impressed by your article in the 21 January 1974 NYT Op-Ed 'What Bees and Flowers Know'"—and asked if I would write an article titled "The Limits of Adam Smith's Theory of Greed" for his journal.

Adam who? I was one of the last persons in the world to have any concern or concept of economics and had never read anything about it. So I went to the library and was very surprised that this Adam Smith was none other than the "father of capitalism" who had published a very famous 1,097-page book (in 1776) titled Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (or Wealth of Nations, for short).

When I read this book I was surprised and pleased to discover that Smith's description of the labor of people and the economic organization of society has some uncanny resemblances to what I had been learning about bumblebees. To the bee, time is honey [sic]. It is their work distilled from flowers, and in the hive the honey is "exchanged" to allow different skill specializations of different individuals. Some of the analogies of humans specializing for a diversity of jobs and bumblebees specializing for a diversity of flowers that resulted in energy economy and the common good were apt, and striking. Yet what Smith was describing also included vast differences from what people now refer to as "capitalism." In Smith's model of capitalism, as in the bees' economy, every individual has an equal and fair chance to compete; everybody gets the same pay for the same amount of product resulting from his or her labor; and most important, no costs of the competition can be foisted onto the shoulders of a competitor or spectator. The last item seemed to me to be one of Smith's major points, because without it, capitalism would be like having a marathon where the competitors try to get ahead of each other not by their merits by by their demerits: strewing banana peels, withholding food and water, etc. To protect the common good would require restraints, and these could come only from government to channel the competition for equal opportunity. Competition is a great thing, but it has to be fair. Stealing natural resources that belong to everyone clearly cannot be allow.

It's a fascinating analogy, though it's worth pointing out that humans are not bees. Bees, for example, aren't capable of thinking in terms of decades or centuries. Then again, given the behavior of today's corporations, most executives can't think too far down the road either. There are exceptions. Ironically, the oil business, which can be criticized for many of its business practices, has no choice but to think in terms of ten to twenty years since that's how long it often takes to develop some of its larger projects these days. Nevertheless, today's businesses are driven by expediency. An insane form of that expediency is saving labor costs by sending jobs overseas in order to make products that are sold to Americans who are finding fewer and fewer good-paying jobs to pay for those goods in the first place. Ah, but real estate prices have been climbing for twenty years (thanks partly to foreign investments) and American are encouraged to take out mortgates for those goods—mortgages they might not necessarily be able to afford. The illusions of our times are not few.

Utah Coal Mine Troubles

The strange saga of Robert Murray and the coal mining disaster in Utah continues. It got my undivided attention when I heard the claims that the disaster was caused by an earthquake. The seismic activity in most of the Rocky Mountains is relatively quiet but a manmade disaster can be big enough to show up on seismographs. Somebody seemed to be pushing the argument for what happened backwards. Nine people died and the families deserve the facts, and not the usual spin that seems prevalent in the current Bush era.

The Salt Lake Tribune has been covering the disaster closely and here's an article by Robert Gehrke that raises a number of questions:

Robert Murray insists that his company did not change the mining plan at Crandall Canyon after purchasing a joint interest in the mine last August.

But documents obtained by The Salt Lake Tribune clearly contradict Murray's assertion, and show that Murray's company sought and received approval from federal regulators to make a significant, and, experts say, risky change to the mining strategy.

Records of the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) show that, after Murray acquired a 50 percent ownership in the mine on Aug. 9, 2006, his company repeatedly petitioned the agency to allow coal to be extracted from the north and south barriers - thick walls of coal that run on both sides of the main tunnels and help hold up the mine.

That stands in stark contrast to statements Murray made Monday asserting that his company's mine plan, and that of the previous owner, were one and the same.

(snip)

Documents on file with the Utah Division of Oil Gas and Mining show Andalex [the previous owner] had previously decided not to mine those barriers, determining it posed a risk to worker safety.

The article doesn't let the Bush Administration off the hook either. The MSHA took only seven business days to approve Murray's plan; given the serious safety issues involved and previous concerns, that seems rather quick. I'm also puzzled by the term, 'bump.' I don't know if that's a term used by miners or a euphemism used by owners. If my car tire suddenly goes flat, that's not a bump, it's a blowout.

In an era of high energy prices and high demands, we are going to see people push safety issues to the limit. We are going to see it in our country and we're going to see it elsewhere. I know enough about industry to know how safety can easily be chipped away so that people are put in increasing danger until somebody blows a whistle or disaster strikes. Business owners may not like regulation but there's usually a sad history behind the regulations and when it comes to safety, there are no excuses.

David Gregory Campaigning for 8-Figure Salary

I've never been impressed with David Gregory's reporting which says something about the times because I consider him one of the better big name reporters of this era. It's a pathetic era for journalism and most of the finest journalism in the last five years has been by reporters who are considerably less well-paid than network darlings like David Gregory. In other words, the finest reporting has often been by people who are not big names (feel free to list in the comments section some of the better known reporters who manage to do a fine job). One of the ironies about David Gregory is that he is not well-liked by the right or well-liked by the left. Somehow that seems to make him, what?, an even-handed reporter?

But the reality of network and cable news is that nobody watches you unless you're controversial. Perhaps David Gregory figures his chances for a good eight figure salary will come if he utters ridiculous points on the news.

Think Progress has a David Gregory gem from the Chris Matthews show:

On the Chris Matthews Show this morning, NBC White House correspondent David Gregory said that Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) will need to have “her ‘Sister Souljah’ moment” and distance herself from the “hatred over Iraq” on “the left.”

“The left” needs to “think about how they’re going to engage the war on terror in a very serious and tough way,” said Gregory.

(snip)

...68 percent of Americans support withdrawal from Iraq within a year.

David Gregory's stereotypes about those who oppose Bush's fiasco in Iraq don't help the debate. In fact, it makes Gregory look rather uninformed. President Bush has, in fact, united rational conservatives, moderates (real moderates not the network faux brand), liberals and even people to the left of this blogger (I'm a liberal Democrat who traces his beliefs to FDR, Truman and Kennedy). A majority of Americans are disgusted with the fiasco in Iraq and Bush's arrogant, incompetent and stubborn behavior. That's really not too difficult to understand, not even for a reporter.

So many Washington reporters and pundits have made gaffes in the last five years that I usually leave it to other bloggers to cover them. It's a fulltime job to keep up with the nonsense coming out of Washington that tries to pass itself off as 'conventional wisdom.'

Our nation, however, is in constitutional crisis, and David Gregory is either in denial or too busy working on that eight figure salary. And it's not Gregory's only offense in the last month.

Last month, Gregory interviewed Elizabeth Edwards and made some bizarre assertions as he interviewed her; here's the story from Americablog:

... According to NBC's David Gregory we're all missing the very important points that Ann Coulter makes because we get caught up in her hate speech. He just said to Elizabeth Edwards "if you strip away some of the inflammatory rhetoric against your husband and other Democrats, the point she's trying to make about your husband, Senator Edwards, running for the White House is in effect that he's disingenuous..."

Okay, so much wrong with the way Gregory defends Coulter. Her hateful, inflammatory rhetoric can't be stripped away -- and let's be honest, that's why NBC and ABC put her on their t.v. shows. In typical fashion, he also tries to paint everyone with the same kind of hate speech. So, instead of putting Coulter on, NBC now has one of their top reporters defending her approach. Because, you know, if you strip away the fact that Coulter advocated the assassination of a leading presidential candidate, and mocked his dead son, there's really such an important message buried inside.

Huh? Says so much.

Elizabeth Edwards handled it well, pretty much laughing at him -- and made the key point -- this is not about stripping away hateful rhetoric. The hate speech is the issue. ...

Both Think Progress and Americablog have video of David Gregory making his ridiculous assertions. Click on the links and they'll take you to the videos. Seeing and hearing is believing. It's just a shame that the process of pointing out poor news reporting may help Gregory reach that eight figure salary. But these are, of course, absurd times.

Bill Moyers on Recovering Democracy

Most Americans still have little idea how much our democracy is under threat by right wing Republicans and a class of wealthy people who have little interest in the rest of us.

The current era began with Ronald Reagan. Now Reagan was not a deep man, though one can loosely argue that there was a decent core to him even if his policies were not particularly compassionate. He was at one time a Democrat but became a Republican later in life.

It seems Reagan's political perspective began to change during World War Two when taxes went sky high as our nation fought all out war on two fronts with two very aggressive and capable nations, Nazi Germany and a militarized, fascist Japan. It was a tall order and the consequences of failure were grim. Sacrifices were required of everyone, even those on the home front.

At the time, Ronald Reagan was one of the highest paid actors in Hollywood for a series of largely forgettable pictures. His income put him in the highest income bracket and he didn't like the tax rate. Keep in mind that he was of military age and Americans older than him were dying in the Pacific, North Africa and Europe. But he didn't like the tax rate and was offended. There have been worse right wingers than Ronald Reagan but he shares with many of them the tendency they have of putting themselves at the center of the universe at the exclusion of others, except perhaps those who are like-minded. Reagan's tax rate was very high during the 1940s, but he was still living very comfortably. Apparently, not comfortably enough.

There are any number of images from recent years that carry the clear message that there is trouble in the Republican Party and that it has lost its way. But two stick in my mind. The first image is of Ronald Reagan trying to look like an aristocrat with his long black boots, tails, and riding crop while sitting on a horse like a 19th century gentleman. When I saw that image, I went uh-oh....we have a powerful man trying to resurrect the aristocracy. Keep in mind that Ronald Reagan is now something of a political moderate compared to some of the right wingers now in our government.

The second powerful image of what's wrong with the Republican Party is George W. Bush strutting on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln in his flight suit; here I thought was a man who loves illusions, one-upmanship and the trappings of power. In other words, an authoritarian and a fraud. Our nation indeed has a problem.

Bill Moyers has been writing a series of brilliants speeches about the state of our nation and our democracy for some time now. Here's his latest by way of Truthout:

I've been spending time with Woodrow Wilson and others of his era because my colleagues and I are producing a documentary series on the momentous struggles that gripped America a century or so years ago at the birth of modern politics. Woodrow Wilson clearly understood the nature of power. In his now-forgotten political testament called The New Freedom, Wilson described his reformism in plain English no one could fail to understand: "The laws of this country do not prevent the strong from crushing the week." He wrote: "Don't deceive yourselves for a moment as to the power of great interests which now dominate our development... There are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States. They are going to own it if they can." And he warned: "There is no salvation in the pitiful condescensions of industrial masters... prosperity guaranteed by trustees has no prospect of endurance."

Now Wilson took his stand at the center of power - the presidency itself - and from his stand came progressive income taxation, the federal estate tax, tariff reform, the challenge to great monopolies and trusts, and, most important, a resolute spirit "to deal with the new and subtle tyrannies according to their deserts."

How we need that spirit today! When Woodrow Wilson spoke of democracy releasing the energies of every human being, he was declaring that we cannot leave our destiny to politicians, elites, and experts; either we take democracy into our own hands, or others will take democracy from us.

(snip)

In one way or another, this is the oldest story in America: the struggle to determine whether "We, the People" is a spiritual idea embedded in a political reality - one nation, indivisible - or merely a charade masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life at the expense of others.

We seem to be holding our breath today, trying to decide what kind of country we want to be. But in this state of suspension, powerful interests are making off with the booty. They remind me of the card shark in Texas who said to his competitor in the poker game: "Now play the cards fairly Reuben. I know what I dealt you."

(snip)

"Things have reached such a state of affairs," the journalist George Orwell once wrote, "that the first duty of every intelligent person is to pay attention to the obvious." The editors of The Economist have done just that. The pro-business magazine considered by many to be the most influential defender of capitalism on the newsstand, produced a sobering analysis of what is happening to the old notion that any American child can get to the top. A growing body of evidence - some of it I have already cited - led the editors to conclude that with "income inequality growing to levels not seen since the Gilded Age and social mobility falling behind, the United States risks calcifying into a European-style class-based society." The editors point to an "education system increasingly stratified by social class" in which poor children "attend schools with fewer resources than those of their richer contemporaries" and great universities that are "increasingly reinforcing rather than reducing these educational inequalities." They conclude that America's great companies have made it harder than ever "for people to start at the bottom and rise up the company hierarchies by dint of hard work and self-improvement."

(snip)

...let me say: I have been a journalist too long to look at the world through rose-colored glasses. I believe the only way to be in the world is to see it as it really is and then to take it on despite the frightening things you see. The Italian philosopher Gramschi spoke of the "the pessimism of the intellect and the optimism of the will." With this philosophy your generation can bring about the Third American Revolution. The first won independence from the Crown. The second won equal rights for women and for the sons and daughters of slavery. This third - the revolution of the 21st Century - will bring about a democracy that leaves no one out....

It's a long speech and my excerpts hardly do it justice. Give it a read. I don't know if an age of reform is coming or not, but there is a powerful need for reform. The winds are shifting and we'll soon know whether Americans can take back their democracy....or not.

Remembering Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

In and out of government since the 1940s, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. died a few days ago at age 89; even within his last two years, he understood America, the world and the cycle of politics far better than most members of Congress, including those thirty to forty years younger. The American Prospect has republished one of Schlesinger's article from late 2005; here's an excerpt:

The Republican combination of hubris and incompetence creates great opportunity for the Democrats. ...

In the longer run, the problem is to deal with Ronald Reagan’s excommunication of affirmative government. "Government is not the solution to our problem," Reagan said in his first inaugural address. "Government is the problem." Reaganism rested on two propositions: that government was the root of evil and that, once government was “off the people’s backs,” the free market would solve our problems.

Now it is evident that the free market does not provide health care for millions of our people, does not ensure full employment, does not protect the natural environment, does not improve our schools, does not clean up our inner cities, and does not stop global warming. The very character of these problems calls for a larger measure of public action. ...

Schlesinger despised communism but he also despised the rigidity and authoritarianism of the far right. During his career, he fought for a healthy capitalism that worked together with the goverrnment; he felt the real key to America's strength was a strong middle class and opportunities for all Americans.

The one thing Democrats need to do for the next twenty years is hammer away at the mythologies Republicans have been inventing about Ronald Reagan. For example, two things helped Reagan enormously and he had nothing much to do with either issue. First, the price of oil collapsed during the early 1980s; there's no getting around the fact that low energy prices foster healthy economies (though we knew we had a long-term energy problem and refused to start thinking about the future). Second, the CIA in the late 1970s had predicted that internal inconsistencies within the Soviet Union could lead to a collapse within ten to twenty years; the Soviet Union was already in deep trouble before Reagan became president. Invading Afghanistan was a clumsy attempt by a fossilized leadership to address some growing problems in the Soviet Union. Like other presidents, Reagan facilitated the containment of the Soviet Union and maintained pressure on the regime but he did not singlehandedly 'win' the Cold War.

It also shouldn't be forgotten that Reagan, though not directly touched by scandal, had a number of high officials in his administration who went to jail or were indicted or were forced to resign; it was a very corrupt era and the most corrupt part of the era was the savings and loan scandals that came about as a direct result of actions by the Reagan Administration. We also had the Iran/Contra scandal. And we also had the fiasco in Lebanon that was a direct result of hubris and highly flawed diplomacy by Alexander Haig that claimed more agreement among the participants than existed before sending American troops into a dangerous situation without adequate protection and resources.

One of the unlearned lessons about the Reagan era was how dissatisfied some right wingers were that Reagan did not go far enough. Those right wingers are now in government and demonstrate how too much conservativism, or rather reactionary policies, can deeply damage our nation. Schlesinger sometimes talked about the cycles of history. This nation has had far too much of right wing conservatism in recent years. The problem we face now is the arrogance of the Republican leadership and a business community that too often lately has forgotten its contract with the American people. It's time to move in a new direction and renew our nation and our democratic values. I wish Schlesigner was still talking about these things. He'll be missed.

Why the Libby Trial Matters

The Libby trial is important in ways that the Washington media has avoided to some extent. It is first of all about a corrupt process that led to war, an unncessary war, and then later led to lies, specific lies, by Scooter Libby that are the reasons he is on trial. The smearing of Joe Wilson was designed to hide a corrupt process and, in some respects, what was done by outing Valerie Plame/Wilson has succeeded largely because of the second element that the Libby trial exposes: the complicity of the mainstream press in furthering the aims of the Bush Administration.

What I have said in my first paragraph should not be controversial. Not after everything that has come out in the Scooter Libby trial and elsewhere. But the media and the American public still have a long ways to go to understand what a catastrophe and what a crooked little operation the Bush presidency has been for the last six years and how Congress, particularly under the Republicans, has been subverted far more than at any time since the 1920s. It's worse than that though. It's been obvious for more than 25 years that the media has slowly been falling down on the job and that the Republican Noise Machine has done an effective job of allowing our institutions to erode and to be corrupted even more than usual, far more than usual, over the last twenty-five years, inch by inch by inch.

The American economy is a powerful engine. That is largely a blessing but having such a powerful economy can obscure the growing rot in our corporations, our system of entrenched privilige, and even the manner in which a wink and nod is given to all kinds of behavior that ought not to be accepted (tobacco companies, to mention just one example of many, just won a case based on a ruling that is designed to do nothing more than protect the powerful even when they are quite clearly wrong). I believe in competition and a reasonable free enterprise: it is a shame that too many powerful people do not—they prefer a system that is rigged. And that rigging has been steadily damaging our nation and our future for a number of years now, though George W. Bush and his friends have clearly accelerated the process.

I believe in a government that can help us achieve common aims, that works for the common good, that has a capacity at times to solve problems and I believe that there have been times our government has been able to find very competent people to make sure things get done. However, for more than twenty-five years, we have had people consciously work to undermine, inhibit, obstruct and obscure the effectiveness and even the knowledge that the government needs to function reasonably well. Our government, even in the best of times, is not perfect and it is important to have multiple agencies literally compete with one another to show who can do the best job. Private industry, as run by Republicans, does not qualify though there is no good reason why an honest business can't perform some functions that government would otherwise perform. But outsourcing and privatization in the hands of Republicans and even some Democrats is just an excuse to scam the taxpayer. We have seen and still see it in Iraq. We saw it after Hurricane Katrina, even to the point that the people devastated by the hurricane were just an afterthought while others used the occassion to make obscene profits.

We have a problem in our nation, and the mainstream is no longer the bright shining light on the nation's rot that it once was. Sure, the media has lights, bright lights to scatter on the trivial and to flash back and forth on things irrelevant while more crucial matters remain unknown and unexposed. Sure, the media on occassion does shine a flickering and wavering light on our nation's problems and then it becomes painfully clear most reporters doing those stories barely understand what it is they are covering. There are exceptions but not often.

I'm far from where I began: the Libby trial. Let me quote from Dan Froomkin of White House Watch:

"What is this case about?" special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald asked in his rebuttal to the defense's closing arguments yesterday in the Scooter Libby perjury trial.

"Is it about something bigger?"

And while Fitzgerald never directly answered that second question, he at long last made it quite clear that the depth of Vice President Cheney's role in the leaking of the identity of a CIA operative is one of the central mysteries that Libby's alleged lies prevented investigators from resolving.

"There is a cloud over the vice president . . . And that cloud remains because this defendant obstructed justice," Fitzgerald said.

"There is a cloud over the White House. Don't you think the FBI and the grand jury and the American people are entitled to straight answers?" Fitzgerald asked the jury.

Libby, Fitzgerald continued, "stole the truth from the justice system."

After literally years of keeping his public pronouncements about the case to an absolute minimum, Fitzgerald yesterday finally let slip a bit of the speculation that many of us have long suspected has lurked just beneath the surface of his investigation.

Suddenly it wasn't just the defendant alone, it was "they" who decided to tell reporters about Wilson's wife working for the CIA. "To them," Fitzgerald said, "she wasn't a person, she was an argument."

Valerie Plame was serving her country and the Bush Administration used her to cover up a lie. And they destroyed her career.

There are people in Washington who don't take the American people seriously. They take their privileged friends seriously—and their wealth, they want to be part of the supposed movers and shakers of our society, or even just part of those who hold the conventional wisdom and are in the know when they roast one another on those lame C-Span shows.

Admittedly, there are some, a different crowd, particularly right wing ideologues, who focus their hate and rage on particular groups, maybe because they believe in their rage, maybe because the rage is profitable and good for votes. And that too is evidence that people in Washington can't see 300 million individuals, who according to the US Constitution, are the people and therefore, the government, the nation, and the real source of America's strength and greatness. Ordinary Americans are not abstractions. Very capable people like Valerie Plame are not abstractions. The 300 million people in these United States are real. Not lives to be ruined. Not people to be ignored because they aren't campaign contributors. Not 'resources' for corporate cronies to exploit. Not honorees for a feel good speech that covers up a cynical do-nothing policy.

It's time for the American people to be heard again. It won't be the first time or even the second time that Americans have needed to renew their country and have done so. But the time has come. Whether Cheney's aide, Scooter Libby, is convicted or not, the time has come.

Bill Moyers Speaks on Ideas and Democracy

There's no getting around that I'm under the weather. I cheered myself up tonight by reading Bill Moyers. He has a decent way of simply laying out the reality of where our country is today. Here's a part of his speech from Truthout:

Jesus would not be crucified today. The prophets would not be stoned. Socrates would not drink the hemlock. They would instead be banned from the Sunday talk shows and op-ed pages by the sentries of establishment thinking who guard against dissent with the one weapon of mass destruction most cleverly designed to obliterate democracy - the rubber stamp.

A stock broker who makes bad picks doesn't last too long. A baseball player in an extended slump gets traded. A worker made redundant by cheaper labor abroad or by a new machine - well, she's done for, too. But four years after the invasion of Iraq - the greatest blunder in foreign policy since Vietnam - the public apologists and advocates of the war flourish in the media, while the costs of their delusions accrue in body counts and lost treasure. A public that detests the war is relegated to the bleachers, fated to watch from afar the playing out by political and media elites of a game that has been rigged.

Yet the salvation of democracy requires a public aroused by the knowledge of what is being done to them in their name. Here is the crisis of the times as I see it: We talk about problems, issues, policies, but we don't talk about what democracy means - what it bestows on us - the revolutionary idea that it isn't just about the means of governance but the means of dignifying people so they become fully free to claim their moral and political agency. "I believe in Democracy because it releases the energies of every human being." So spoke Woodrow Wilson...

If we can't elect Bill Moyers to be our president, then somebody ought to make him vice president, or the UN ambassador, or even philosopher laureate would do. Actually I have a better idea. Instead of that media illusion, Rudy Giuliani, I nominate Bill Moyers to be America's mayor: he would never bore us with his speeches, he wouldn't pretend to be something he isn't and he might actually be able to fight city hall better than any of the rest of us.

Bill Moyers: State of the Union

I'm bone tired tonight. Sometimes my body doesn't quite do what it's supposed to do and this is one of those times. But I got a lift tonight reading Bill Moyers. In his speech, there were a couple of times when Moyers mentioned Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense, a tract too little read by the powerful in Washington in recent years. I've been thinking about Paine recently, thinking of how he must be turning over in his grave at the betrayal of democracy in the last couple of decades, but after reading yet another eloquent exposition by Moyers I rather suspect Paine may be sitting up on his elbow listening closely to Moyer's recent speeches. Moyers isn't the only one speaking up these days but his is a voice that has been with us for many decades, as American as they come and a part of a history too many Americans have forgotten.

President Bush will be giving his State of the Union address on Tuesday but I'm tired of being lied to, I'm tired of the real issues of American being ignored or trampled. Here's Moyers speech, Life on the Plantation, in Truthout; although I offer excerpts below, give the full speech a good read because Moyers is speaking the truth and giving the real state of the union:

...over the previous two decades a series of mega-media mergers had swept the country, each deal even bigger than the last. The lobby representing the broadcast, cable, and newspaper industry is extremely powerful, with an iron grip on lawmakers and regulators alike. Both parties bowed to their will when the Republican Congress passed and President Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996. That monstrous assault on democracy, with malignant consequences for journalism, was nothing but a welfare giveaway to the largest, richest and most powerful media conglomerates in the world - Goliaths whose handful of owners controlled, commodified and monetized everyone, and everything, in sight.

Call it the "plantation mentality" in its modern incarnation. Here in Memphis they know all about that mentality. Even in 1968, the Civil Rights movement was still battling the plantation mentality based on race, gender, and power that permeated Southern culture long before and even after the groundbreaking legislation of the mid-1960s. When Martin Luther King came to Memphis to join the strike of garbage workers in 1968, the cry from every striker's heart - "I am a man" - voiced the long-suppressed outrage of a people whose rights were still being trampled by an ownership class that had arranged the world for its own benefit. The plantation mentality was a phenomenon deeply insulated in the American experience early on, and has it permeated and corrupted our course as a nation. ...

(snip)

Nobel laureate economist Robert Solow - not someone known for extreme political statements - characterizes what is happening as nothing less than elite plunder: "the redistribution of wealth in favor of the wealthy and of power in favor of the powerful." Indeed, nearly all of the wealth America created over the past 25 years has been captured by the top 20 percent of households, and most of the gains went to the wealthiest. The top one percent of households captured more than 50 percent of all gains in financial wealth. These households hold more than twice the share their predecessors held on the eve of the American Revolution. Of the early American democratic creeds, the anti-Federalist warning that government naturally works to "fortify the conspiracies of the rich" has proved especially prophetic. So it is this that we confront today.

America confronts a choice between two fundamentally different economic visions. As Norton Garfinkle writes in his new book The American Dream vs. The Gospel of Wealth, the historic vision of the American Dream is that continuing economic growth and political stability can be achieved by supporting income growth and the economic security of middle-class families, without restricting the ability of successful businessmen to gain wealth. The counter-belief is that providing maximum financial rewards to the most successful is the way to maintain high economic growth. The choice cannot be avoided: What kind of economy do we seek, and what kind of nation do we wish to be? Do we want to be a country in which the "rich get richer and the poor get poorer?" Or do we want to be a country committed to an economy that provides for the common good, offers upward mobility, supports a middle-class standard of living, and provides generous opportunity for all? In Garfinkle's words, "When the richest nation in the world has to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars to pay its bill, when its middle-class citizens sit on a mountain of debt to maintain their living standards, when the nation's economy has difficulty producing secure jobs or enough jobs of any kind, something is amiss."

(snip)

...For years the media marketplace for "opinions about public policy" has been dominated by a highly disciplined, thoroughly networked ideological "noise machine," to use David Brock's term. Permeated with slogans concocted by big corporations, their lobbyists, and their think-tank subsidiaries, public discourse has effectively changed how American values are perceived. Day after day, the ideals of fairness and liberty and mutual responsibility have been stripped of their essential dignity and meaning in people's lives. Day after day, the egalitarian creed of our Declaration of Independence is trampled underfoot by hired experts and sloganeers who speak of the "death tax," the "ownership society," the "culture of life," the "liberal assault" on God and family, "compassionate conservatism," "weak on terrorism," the "end of history," the "clash of civilizations," "no child left behind." They have even managed to turn the escalation of a failed war into a "surge" - as if it were a current of electricity charging through a wire, instead of blood spurting from a soldier's ruptured veins. We have all the Orwellian filigree of a public sphere in which language conceals reality and the pursuit of personal gain and partisan power is wrapped in rhetoric that turns truth to lies and lies to truth.

So it is that "limited government" has little to do with the Constitution or local autonomy any more; now it means corporate domination and the shifting of risk from government and business to struggling families and workers. "Family values" now means imposing a sectarian definition on everyone else. "Religious freedom" now means majoritarianism and public benefits for organized religion without any public burdens. And "patriotism" now means blind support for failed leaders. It's what happens when an interlocking media system filters, through commercial values or ideology, the information and moral viewpoints that people consume in their daily lives. ...

(snip)

I think what's happened is not indifference or laziness or incompetence but the fact that most journalists on the plantation have so internalized conventional wisdom that they simply accept that the system is working as it should. I'm working on a documentary about the role of the press in the run-up to the war, and over and again reporters have told me it just never occurred to them that high officials would manipulate intelligence in order to go to war. [Moyers has a generous spirit at times and I wouldn't underestimate its value, but clearly we have seen indifference, laziness and incompetence in the media. Still, he's largely right: those who internalize 'conventional wisdom' invariably go far in the media.]

(snip)

...The greatest challenge to the plantation mentality of the media giants is the innovation and expression made possible by the digital revolution. I may still prefer the newspaper for its investigative journalism and in-depth analysis, but we now have in our hands the means to tell a different story than big media tells. Our story. The other story of America that says free speech is not just corporate speech, that news is not just chattel in the field, living the bossman's story. This is the real gift of the digital revolution. The Internet, cell phones and digital cameras that can transmit images over the Internet, make possible a nation of story tellers ... ...

(snip)

Meanwhile, be vigilant about what happens in Congress. Track it day by day and post what you learn far and wide. Because the decisions made in this session of Congress will affect the future of all media - corporate and non commercial - and if we lose the future now, we'll never get it back.

So you have your work cut out for you. I'm glad you're all younger than me, and up to it. ...

When Moyers talks about the plantation mentality, broaden the definition. Keep in mind the way Irish immigrants were jammed into early New York tenements in the 1840s, or how California ranchers in the late 19th century used cheap labor provided by the Chinese, the Japanese and Mexican migrant workers who were treated by law as second-class citizens. Keep in mind the way union workers in Chicago were once shot down in cold blood or the way globalization has been distorted into another kind of plantation mentality where major corporations are resisting rising labor issues in the third world.

Time and time again, Americans have eventually come around to doing the right thing but it takes work and it takes time and it means, above everything else, having your eyes open. We are currently living in a Gilded Age, an age of greed and me-ism and it is not America at its best. Our country needs major reforms and we have seen a little of that reform in just the last few months—but there is so much more that has to be done.

Barack Obama and the 1960s

Barack Obama, for the most part, has a wonderful gift for cutting the Gordian knot of the political rhetoric that has dominated our nation for some 35 years. Jonathan Alter of Newsweek did an interview with Barack Obama and here's a section that caught my interest:

[Barack Obama:]Our politics has very much been grounded in debates over the '60s. There's the '60s, the backlash against the '60s, the counter-backlash within the Democratic Party against the '60s. We've been effectively talking about Vietnam, the sexual revolution, the civil-rights movement for a generation now, and it doesn't adequately describe the challenges we face today. My peer group, I think, finds many of those divisions unproductive. We see many of these problems differently, on race, faith, the economy, foreign policy and the role of the military.

Part of the reason the next generation can see things differently is because of the battles that the previous generation fought. But the next generation is to some degree liberated from what I call the either/or arguments around these issues. So on race, the classic '60s formulation was, "Is it society and institutional racism that's causing black poverty or is it black pathology and a culture of poverty?" And you couldn't choose "All of the above." It looks to me like both. [The younger generation] is much less caught up in these neatly packaged orthodoxies.

To some extent, these are wise words and yet I worry that Barack Obama is chasing something of a chimera. First of all, much of the 1960s over the last thirty-five years have been defined by an increasingly conservative media; and ultraconservatives have quite literally spent millions on creating a black and white image of the 1960s. There is no easy way to define the 60s and I'm not going to do so here except to say the range of ideas and politics and efforts extended over a very wide range of issues across the political spectrum and consequently no group from that era—or this one, for that matter—should ever be used as a broad brushstroke to define another group. We still see this with major protest demonstrations: fifty thousand people can peacefully show up for a protest but the media will define them by a few dozen violent people with their own agenda and the broad audience at home is often none the wiser.

Obama also yields to a myth that those who were part of the 60s are stuck in that era. Some are, though I would argue most of them are on the right. Most people who were concerned about the issues of the 60s moved on and many developed a much more nuanced view of the world (Bush doesn't like the word 'nuanced' which is equivalent to saying he's not a pragmatist and has no interest in the broad issues of the real world and prefers the rigid ideological black/white framing that gets everyone into trouble whether on the far right or the far left). One thing that evolved out of the 60s over the years was a style of politics summarized by the phrase, 'politics is local.' Barack Obama, as a community activist for church groups early in his career, exemplified that very thing.

Again, I appreciate Barack Obama reframing how we look at things and I appreciate his attempt to get people more focused on what we have in common and focused on a whole new range of problems that need to be dealt with in the terms of this era. But in an attempt to define a new agenda, one can get caught up in a fuzzy breeziness and forget to focus accurately on the lessons of the past; George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are proof of that—none of the three learned a damn thing from Vietnam or the 1960s and the fiasco in Iraq is the result.

All I would say to Barack Obama is keep up the good work, but keep it real.

Bill Moyers' West Point Speech

I just read the kind of speech Americans need to hear more. The website, Tom Paine, has a speech given by Bill Moyers a couple of weeks ago at West Point (big hat tip to Susie Madrak of Suburban Guerilla who catches these things); it's a long speech that covers issues from Iraq to military history to the needs of veterans and to the core issues of our nation—this is just one excerpt:

...no one in uniform did more to help us define freedom in a profoundly American way—than the man whose monument here at West Point I also asked to visit today—Thaddeus Kosciuszko. ...

(snip)

Kosciuszko had been born in Lithuania-Poland, where he was trained as an engineer and artillery officer. Arriving in the 13 colonies in 1776, he broke down in tears when he read the Declaration of Independence. The next year, he helped engineer the Battle of Saratoga, organizing the river and land fortifications that put Americans in the stronger position. George Washington then commissioned him to build the original fortifications for West Point. Since his monument dominates the point here at the Academy, this part of the story you must know well.

But what many don’t realize about Kosciuszko is the depth of his commitment to republican ideals and human equality. One historian called him “a mystical visionary of human rights.” Thomas Jefferson wrote that Kosciuszko was “as pure a son of liberty as I have ever known.” That phrase of Jefferson’s is often quoted, but if you read the actual letter, Jefferson goes on to say: “And of that liberty which is to go to all, and not to the few and the rich alone.”

There is the clue to the meaning of freedom as Thaddeus Kosciuszko saw it.

That's the America that's getting lost. That's the America Franklin Roosevelt understood and fought for.

Read the speech. There aren't many people out there who understand the current situation better than Bill Moyers.