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.

Some Thoughts on a Free and Responsible Press

One of the first journalists to talk specifically about the Nixonian qualities of George W. Bush was Jules Witcover, formerly of The Baltimore Sun. I started reading Witcover because he had a knack for noticing things other journalists kept missing. So it was something of a shock one day when his column simply disappeared. I checked around on the internet and found out that he apparently had been 'fired,' 'let go' or was unable to 'get his contract renewed.' As far I can tell, and it's not always easy to tell in this odd era, Witcover was apparently the victim of a cost-saving move largely because, as a senior journalist, he was earning more than the other journalists on the paper.

I bring up the story of Witcover simply to point out that there are multiple reasons the media has not being doing a good job of covering and analyzing the news in recent years. Glenn Greenwald of Unclaimed Territory has a post on the need for journalists and newspapers to be more than stenographers for government officials:

The Iranian President convened a convention this week to "debate" whether the Holocaust occurred, whether it is exaggerated, etc. In reporting on this event, The New York Times did not simply convey the views of both sides, but instead, declares definitively that one side of the "debate" -- the side of the Holocaust deniers -- ignores evidence, uses discredited sources, and relies upon false claims...

(snip)

By pointing out the reality that the Holocaust denialists are making false and unsupportable claims, the Times is not reporting this incident in a "biased" or subjective way. It is not being unfair to the holocaust deniers by siding against them. To the contrary, even though it is clearly siding with one side over the other in terms of whose statements are truthful, the article is reporting on this issue objectively, because it reports the objectively verifiable fact that the arguments advanced by holocaust denialists are simply false.

That is what objective and meaningful reporting requires -- not merely uncritically conveying what statement a person makes, but scrutinizing that statement for accuracy and clearly reporting if it is false. That is what the Times did here by labelling the denialists' claims "fantasy" and pointing out the fact that their claims are contradicted by abundant documentation. ...

If anyone thinks this is an abstract or even obscure argument, I saw a cartoon this morning which reminds us of the problem with Holocaust deniers: if one ignores history and the obvious moral lessons one can learn from it, one is free to repeat the mistake. Nor, by the way, is the problem currently only restricted to Iran's leaders or a few Muslims. In his book, Ethics During and After the Holocaust, the philosopher John K. Roth criticizes Mel Gibson's movie, The Passion of the Christ, for ignoring the distorted history and conditions that led to the Holocaust in the first place: "The problem is that Gibson's film has much more in common with pre-Holocaust Christian animosity toward Jews than it does with post-Holocaust reconciliation between Christianity and Judaism. (p. 49)." Christianity did not cause the Holocaust (Nazism had little to do with Christianity), but the point is that it was the distortion of facts and history through the centuries that clearly led to an environment that facilitated the Holocaust.

Journalism can never be simply a recording of what other people say, even if those people represent our government. Even a president can be wrong (yes, we need to say that). Without a press that challenges his assumptions and challenges his facts, a president can make major blunders.

Among others, we have seen two kinds of errors in journalism in the last six years. One type of error is to record the predictions of government officials or 'experts' who support them without noticing how often they get it wrong. If a government offical says a missile will intercept another missile and destroy it in a test, he can be forgiven if he is wrong the first time; it's a no-brainer that a journalist needs to inform the reader that the official has been wrong three times when three tests fail and the official is now making a prediction of a successful fourth test. In the last five years, the neoconservatives have frequently been wrong about terrorism, Iraq and a number of other issues and journalists have frequently failed to point it out; the same neoconservatives continue to be appear on TV as if their advice should still be taken seriously.

The second error has to do with accepting the word of government officials when it comes to the accuracy of information that is given to reporters; during the Bush years, the failure to test the accuracy of information, to investigate reports that contradict the government, and, in some cases, simply recording major, outright lies of the government went on until well after the 2004 election and continues in some quarters.

Recent history should have put more journalists on guard during the last six years. Some of the players in the Bush Administration were players in the Reagan Administration during the 1980s when isolated reports of death squads in El Salvador were reaching The New York Times; some of those tips were from doctors who worked for Doctors without Borders and ought to have been considered reliable (certainly worth more than a phone call or two). The story I hear is that one or two reporters from The New York Times decided to check out the stories by calling... our State Department. It took another year or two before the story of the death squads was confirmed.

When a president and his advisers lie to the American people and it takes years for mainstream journalists to 'uncover' the story despite abundant evidence early on, we need to think long and hard about where journalism stands these days and exactly what kind of creature American journalism has become. I strongly suspect that without the blogs and the internet message boards, a great deal might have fallen through the cracks that appeared in obscure places like the Knight-Ridder Washington Bureau or the British paper, The Guardian— or even the back pages of The Washington Post or The New York Times, particularly on Saturday mornings, the black hole of mainstream journalism.