Bill Moyers Interview

Bill Moyers continues to be a voice that needs to be heard. On Truthout is an interview of Bill Moyers by The Christian Century; Moyers has much to say but here's a brief excerpt:

If the Bush administration were to ask you for your advice, what would you say to them?

(snip)

What would I say now? Fire the ideologues and assign them to scrub the floors at Guantánamo for penitence. Stop confusing neocon pundits with Old Testament prophets. Read the Bible for humility's sake, but for policy's sake commit to memory the report of the Iraq Study Group. Don't sacrifice any more soldiers to prove you're in charge; get the soldiers out of the line of fire between Sunnis and Shi'ites. And remind your hirelings of Winston Churchill's definition of democracy as the occasional necessity of deferring to the opinions of other people.

What kind of response did you get from your speech to cadets at West Point, in which you spoke about the limitations and liabilities of war making?

For 30 seconds after I finished there was just silence in that large auditorium, and I thought: "You really blew it this time. You not only lost them, you insulted them." Then one by one, cluster by cluster, row by row, the cadets started standing up and applauding. I had to struggle to contain my emotions. I would like to tell you it was because they agreed with me. The truth is, I think, that they appreciated hearing a civilian talk openly about what they constantly wrestle with privately - the conflict of conscience required in obeying orders from leaders who have taken leave of reality. They listened like no audience I've had in a long time. And afterward they kept me up late in a lively give-and-take.

Earlier in the day I met for over two hours with a score of top cadets who were on their way to compete for Rhodes and Marshall scholarships and the like. They wanted to talk about the environment, science, philosophy, politics, history. The cadets are smart, disciplined and sophisticated people. One just hopes they get the civilian leadership they deserve.

(snip) [Answer to different question:]

Sometimes I think there are too many voices inside my head. Maybe I read too much. But they make sure I never think a matter settled. I'm with Mark Twain on this: "Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul."

What do you think of the success of satirists like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert?

There can be more truth in a flash of wit than in a full-throated pronouncement by a pundit. I once told Stewart that if Mark Twain were alive today, he would be on Comedy Central. Stewart looked at me as if he wouldn't welcome the competition.

As always, it's difficult to cover Bill Moyers thinking with a a few excerpts. Read the full interview. And click here for a link and thoughts on his West Point speech.

I enjoyed his quote of Mark Twain. I should have a Mark Twain post up in a few days that I've been meaning to do.

There's a striking difference between the words of Bill Moyers and those of George W. Bush. Even when Moyers returns to some of his common themes, he always finds ways to keep the material fresh and to find new ways to makes his ideas accessible. Bush merely turns himself into a parody of a president, parroting the same tired lines over and over without adding insight, facts or reason into his ridiculous statements.

When you hear Bush for fifteen minutes, he encapsulates completely the foolishness of his presidency; there's no need to hear more because every new speech or press conference is the same material over and over—essentially propaganda. It's why we're floundering in Iraq: Bush and his closest advisers don't understand what they're doing and they have no ideas. But, by God, they're determined to put on better photo ops! Karl Rove likes to criticize Hollywood but he has worked hard to turn Bush into a Hollywood product: John Wayne strutting on an aircraft carrier. I grew up liking John Wayne movies and still do but the characters he played were fantasies; there is a place for fantasy in our lives but not in the White House. In the meantime, the nation has been missing a real president for over six years. Somebody like Bill Moyers would have been the real thing. He wouldn't have strutted; he simply would have gotten the job done.

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.

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.

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.