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开 本: 16开纸 张: 胶版纸包 装: 平装是否套装: 否国际标准书号ISBN: 9780307387738
People know Bill Moyers from his many years of path-breaking
journalism on television. But he is also one of America’s most
sought-after public speakers. In this collection of speeches,
Moyers celebrates the promise of American democracy and offers a
passionate defense of its principles of fairness and justice.
Moyers on Democracy takes on crucial issues such as economic
inequality, our broken electoral process, our weakened independent
press, and the despoiling of the earth we share as our common
gift.
1. FOR AMERICA’S SAKE
A New Story for America
December 12, 2006
My father dropped out of the fourth grade and never returned to
school because his family needed him to pick cotton to help make
ends meet. The Great Depression knocked him down and almost out.
When I was born he was making $2 a day working on the highway to
Oklahoma City. He never took home more than $100 a week in his
working life, and he made that only when he joined the union in the
last job he held. He voted for Franklin Roosevelt in four straight
elections and would have gone on voting for him until kingdom come
if he’d had the chance. I once asked him why, and he said, “Because
he was my friend.” My father of course never met FDR; no politician
ever paid him much note. Many years later when I wound up working
in the White House my parents came for a visit and my father asked
to see the Roosevelt Room. I don’t quite know how to explain it,
except that my father knew who was on his side. When FDR died my
father wept; he had lost his friend. This man with a fourth-grade
education understood what the patrician in the White House meant
when he talked about “economic royalism” and how private power no
less than public power can bring America to ruin in the absence of
democratic controls. When the president said “the malefactors of
great wealth” had concentrated into their own hands “an almost
complete control over other people’s property, other people’s
money, other people’s labor, and other people’s lives,” my father
said amen; he believed the president knew what life was like for
people like him. When the president said life was no longer free,
liberty no longer real, men could no longer follow the pursuit of
happiness against “economic tyranny such as this,” my father
nodded. He got it when Roosevelt said that a government by money
was as much to be feared as a government by mob, and that the
political equality we once had was meaningless in the face of
economic inequality. Against organized wealth, FDR said that “the
American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of
government.” My father knew the president meant him.
Today my father would be written out of America’s story. He would
belong to what the sociologist Katherine Newman calls the “missing
class”*–the fifty-seven million Americans who occupy an obscure
place between the rungs of our social ladder, earning wages above
the minimum but below a secure standard of living. They work hard
for their $20,000 to $40,000 a year, and they are vital to the
functioning of the country, as transit workers, day-care providers,
hospital attendants, teachers’ aides, clerical assistants. They
live one divorce, one pink slip, one illness away from a free fall.
Largely forgotten by the press, politicians, and policy makers who
fashion government safety nets, they have no nest egg, no income
but the next paycheck, no way of paying for their children to go to
college. Over the years I have chronicled the lives of some of
these people in my documentaries. Now, a few days after the
election of 2006, I was asked to speak at a conference sponsored by
The Nation, the Brennan Center for Justice, the New Democracy
Project, and Demos to discuss the prospects of democracy. Those
prospects are dim, I realized, unless we write a story of America
that includes those people who are living on the edge, with no
friend in the White House.
You could not have chosen a better time to gather. Voters have
provided a respite from a right-wing radicalism predicated on the
philosophy that extremism in the pursuit of virtue is no vice. It
seems only yesterday that the Trojan horse of conservatism was
hauled into Washington to disgorge Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Ralph
Reed, Grover Norquist, and their band of ravenous predators
masquerading as a political party of small government, fiscal
restraint, and moral piety and promising “to restore accountability
to Congress…(and) make us all proud again of the way free people
govern themselves.”
Well, the long night of the cabal is over, and Democrats are
ebullient as they prepare to take charge of the
multitrillion-dollar influence racket that we used to call the U.S.
Congress. Let them rejoice while they can, as long as they remember
that they have arrived at this moment mainly because George W. Bush
started a war most people have come to believe should never have
been fought in the first place. Let them remember that although
they are reveling in the ruins of a Republican reign brought down
by stupendous scandals, their own closet is stocked with skeletons
from an era when they were routed from office following ABSCAM
bribes and savings and loan swindles that plucked the pockets and
purses of hardworking Americans. As they rejoice Democrats would be
wise to be mindful of Shakespeare’s counsel: “Merit doth much, but
fortune more.” For they were delivered from the wilderness not by
their own goodness but by the hubris of the party in power–a
recurring phenomenon of American democracy.
Whatever one might say about the 2006 election, the real story is
one that our political and media elites are loath to acknowledge or
address. I am not speaking of the lengthy list of priorities that
progressives and liberals are eager to put on the table now that
Democrats hold the cards in Congress. The other day a message
popped up on my computer from a progressive advocate who is
committed to movement building from the ground up and has results
to show for his labors. His request was simple: “With changes in
Congress and at our state capitol, we want your input on what top
issues our lawmakers should tackle. Click here to submit your top
priority.”
I clicked. Up came a list of thirty-four issues—an impressive
list that began with “African American” and ran alphabetically
through “energy” and “guns,” to “higher education”
“transportation,” “women’s issues,” and “worker’s rights.” It
wasn’t a list to be dismissed by any means, for it came from an
unrequited thirst for action after a long season of fierce
opposition to every aspiration on the agenda. I understand the
mind-set. Here’s a fellow who values allies and appreciates what it
takes to build coalitions; who knows that although our interests as
citizens vary, each one is an artery to the heart that pumps life
through the body politic, and each is important to the health of
democracy. This is an activist who knows political success is the
sum of many parts.
But America needs something more right now than a “must-do” list
from liberals and progressives. America needs a different
story.
The very morning I read the message from the progressive
activist, The New York Times reported on Carol Ann Reyes. She is
sixty-three, lives in Los Angeles, suffers from dementia, and is
homeless. Somehow she made her way to a hospital with serious,
untreated needs. No details were provided as to what happened to
her there, except that the hospital called a cab and sent her back
to skid row. True, they phoned ahead to workers at a rescue shelter
to let them know she was coming. But some hours later a
surveillance camera picked her up “wandering around the streets in
a hospital gown and slippers.” Dumped in America.
Here is the real political story, the one most politicians won’t
even acknowledge: the reality of the anonymous, disquieting daily
struggle of ordinary people, including not only the most
marginalized and vulnerable Americans but also young workers,
elders and parents, families and communities, searching for dignity
and fairness against long odds in an amoral market world.
Everywhere you turn you’ll find people who believe they have been
written out of the story. Everywhere you turn there’s a sense of
insecurity grounded in a gnawing fear that freedom in America has
come to mean the freedom of the rich to get richer even as millions
of Americans are thrown overboard. So let me say what I think up
front: the leaders and thinkers and activists who honestly tell
that story and speak passionately of the moral and religious values
it puts in play will be the first political generation since the
New Deal to win power back for the people.
There’s no mistaking America is ready for change. One of our
leading analysts of public opinion, Daniel Yankelovich, reports
that a majority want social cohesion and common ground based on
pragmatism and compromise, patriotism and diversity. But because of
the great disparities in wealth the “shining city on the hill” has
become a gated community whose privileged occupants, surrounded by
moats of money and protected by a political system seduced with
cash into subservience, are removed from the common life of the
country.
The wreckage of this revolt of elites is all around us.
Corporations are shredding the social compact, pensions are
disappearing, medium incomes are flattening, and health-care costs
are soaring. In many ways, the average household is generally worse
off today than it was thirty years ago, and the public sector that
improved life for millions of Americans across three generations is
in tatters. For a time, stagnating wages were somewhat offset by
more work and more personal debt. Both political parties craftily
refashioned those major renovations of the average household as the
new standard, shielding employers from responsibility for anything
Wall Street would not reward. Now, however, the more acute major
risks workers have been forced to bear as employers reduce their
health and retirement costs have reveal that gains made by people
who live paycheck to paycheck are being reversed. Polls show a
majority of American workers now believe their children will be
worse off than they were. In one recent survey, only 14 percent of
workers said that they have obtained the American dream.
It is hard to believe that less than four decades ago a key
architect of the antipoverty program, R…
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