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Published on Wednesday, June 16, 2004
by Inequality.org
This is the Fight of Our Lives
by Bill Moyers
Keynote speech
Inequality Matters Forum
New York University
June 3, 2004
"The middle class and working poor are told that
what's happening to them is the consequence of Adam
Smith's 'Invisible Hand.' This is a lie. What's
happening to them is the direct consequence of
corporate activism, intellectual propaganda, the rise
of a religious orthodoxy that in its hunger for
government subsidies has made an idol of power, and a
string of political decisions favoring the powerful
and the privileged who bought the political system
right out from under us."
-- Bill Moyers, Keynote speech, June 3, 2004
It is important from time to time to remember that
some things are worth getting mad about.
Here's one: On March 10 of this year, on page B8, with
a headline that stretched across all six columns, The
New York Times reported that tuition in the city's
elite private schools would hit $26,000 for the coming
school year -- for kindergarten as well as high
school. On the same page, under a two-column headline,
Michael Wineraub wrote about a school in nearby Mount
Vernon, the first stop out of the Bronx, with a
student body that is 97 percent black. It is the
poorest school in the town: nine out of ten children
qualify for free lunches; one out of 10 lives in a
homeless shelter. During black history month this past February, a sixth grader wanted to write a report on Langston Hughes. There were no books on Langston Hughes in the library -- no books about the great poet, nor any of his poems. There is only one book in the library on Frederick Douglass. None on Rosa Parks, Josephine Baker, Leontyne Price, or other giants like them in the modern era. In fact, except for a few Newberry Award books the librarian bought with her own money, the library is mostly old books -- largely from the 1950s and 60s when the school was all white. A 1960 child's primer on work begins with a youngster learning how to be a telegraph delivery boy. All the workers in the book -- the dry cleaner, the deliveryman, the cleaning lady -- are white. There's a 1967 book about telephones which says: "when you phone you usually dial the number. But on some new phones you can push buttons." The newest encyclopedia dates from l991, with two volumes -- "b" and "r" -- missing. There is no card catalog in the library -- no index cards or computer.
Something to get mad about.
Here's something else: Caroline Payne's face and gums
are distorted because her Medicaid-financed dentures
don't fit. Because they don't fit, she is continuously
turned down for jobs on account of her appearance.
Caroline Payne is one of the people in David Shipler's
new book,' The Working Poor: Invisible in America'.
She was born poor, and in spite of having once owned
her own home and having earned a two-year college
degree, Caroline Payne has bounced from one
poverty-wage job to another all her life, equipped
with the will to move up, but not the resources to
deal with unexpected and overlapping problems like a
mentally handicapped daughter, a broken marriage, a
sudden layoff crisis that forced her to sell her few
assets, pull up roots and move on. "In the house of
the poor," Shipler writes "...the walls are thin and
fragile and troubles seep into one another."
Here's something else to get mad about. Two weeks ago,
the House of Representatives, the body of Congress
owned and operated by the corporate, political, and
religious right, approved new tax credits for
children. Not for poor children, mind you. But for
families earning as much as $309,000 a year --
families that already enjoy significant benefits from
earlier tax cuts. The editorial page of The Washington
Post called this "bad social policy, bad tax policy,
and bad fiscal policy. You'd think they'd be
embarrassed," said the Post, "but they're not."
And this, too, is something to get mad about. Nothing
seems to embarrass the political class in Washington
today. Not the fact that more children are growing up
in poverty in America than in any other industrial
nation; not the fact that millions of workers are
actually making less money today in real dollars than
they did twenty years ago; not the fact that working
people are putting in longer and longer hours and
still falling behind; not the fact that while we have
the most advanced medical care in the world, nearly 44
million Americans -- eight out of ten of them in
working families -- are uninsured and cannot get the
basic care they need.
Astonishing as it seems, no one in official Washington
seems embarrassed by the fact that the gap between
rich and poor is greater than it's been in 50 years --
the worst inequality among all western nations. Or
that we are experiencing a shift in poverty. For years
it was said those people down there at the bottom were
single, jobless mothers. For years they were told
work, education, and marriage is how they move up the
economic ladder. But poverty is showing up where we
didn't expect it -- among families that include two
parents, a worker, and a head of the household with
more than a high school education. These are the newly
poor. Our political, financial and business class
expects them to climb out of poverty on an escalator
moving downward.
Let me tell you about the Stanleys and the Neumanns.
During the last decade, I produced a series of
documentaries for PBS called "Surviving the Good
Times." The title refers to the boom time of the '90s
when the country achieved the longest period of
economic growth in its entire history. Some good
things happened then, but not everyone shared equally
in the benefits. To the contrary. The decade began
with a sustained period of downsizing by corporations
moving jobs out of America and many of those people
never recovered what was taken from them. We decided
early on to tell the stories of two families in
Milwaukee -- one black, one white -- whose
breadwinners were laid off in the first wave of
layoffs in 1991. We reported on how they were coping
with the wrenching changes in their lives, and we
stayed with them over the next ten years as they tried
to find a place in the new global economy. They're the
kind of Americans my mother would have called "the
salt of the earth." They love their kids, care about
their communities, go to church every Sunday, and work
hard all week -- both mothers have had to take
full-time jobs.
During our time with them, the fathers in both
families became seriously ill. One had to stay in the
hospital two months, putting his family $30,000 in
debt because they didn't have adequate health
insurance. We were there with our camera when the bank
started to foreclose on the modest home of the other
family because they couldn't meet the mortgage
payments after dad lost his good-paying manufacturing
job. Like millions of Americans, the Stanleys and the
Neumanns were playing by the rules and still getting
stiffed. By the end of the decade they were running
harder but slipping behind, and the gap between them
and prosperous America was widening.
What turns their personal tragedy into a political
travesty is that they are patriotic. They love this
country. But they no longer believe they matter to the
people who run the country. When our film opens, both
families are watching the inauguration of Bill Clinton
on television in 1992. By the end of the decade they
were no longer paying attention to politics. They
don't see it connecting to their lives. They don't
think their concerns will ever be addressed by the
political, corporate, and media elites who make up our
dominant class. They are not cynical, because they are
deeply religious people with no capacity for cynicism,
but they know the system is rigged against them. They
know this, and we know this. For years now a small
fraction of American households have been garnering an
extreme concentration of wealth and income while large corporations and financial institutions have obtained unprecedented levels of economic and political power over daily life. In 1960, the gap in terms of wealth between the top 20% and the bottom 20% was 30 fold. Four decades later it is more than 75 fold.
Such concentrations of wealth would be far less of an
issue if the rest of society were benefiting
proportionately. But that's not the case. As the
economist Jeff Madrick reminds us, the pressures of
inequality on middle and working class Americans are
now quite severe. "The strain on working people and on
family life, as spouses have gone to work in dramatic
numbers, has become significant. VCRs and television
sets are cheap, but higher education, health care,
public transportation, drugs, housing and cars have
risen faster in price than typical family incomes. And
life has grown neither calm nor secure for most
Americans, by any means." You can find many sources to
support this conclusion. I like the language of a
small outfit here in New York called the Commonwealth Foundation/Center for the Renewal of American Democracy. They conclude that working families and the poor "are losing ground under economic pressures that deeply affect household stability, family dynamics, social mobility, political participation, and civic life."
Household economics is not the only area where
inequality is growing in America. Equality doesn't
mean equal incomes, but a fair and decent society
where money is not the sole arbiter of status or
comfort. In a fair and just society, the commonwealth
will be valued even as individual wealth is
encouraged.
Let me make something clear here. I wasn't born
yesterday. I'm old enough to know that the tension
between haves and have-nots are built into human
psychology, it is a constant in human history, and it
has been a factor in every society. But I also know
America was going to be different. I know that because
I read Mr. Jefferson's writings, Mr. Lincoln's
speeches and other documents in the growing American
creed. I presumptuously disagreed with Thomas
Jefferson about human equality being self-evident.
Where I lived, neither talent, nor opportunity, nor
outcomes were equal. Life is rarely fair and never
equal. So what could he possibly have meant by that
ringing but ambiguous declaration: "All men are
created equal"? Two things, possibly. One, although
none of us are good, all of us are sacred (Glenn
Tinder), that's the basis for thinking we are by
nature kin.
Second, he may have come to see the meaning of those
words through the experience of the slave who was his
mistress. As is now widely acknowledged, the hands
that wrote "all men are created equal" also stroked
the breasts and caressed the thighs of a black woman
named Sally Hennings. She bore him six children whom
he never acknowledged as his own, but who were the
only slaves freed by his will when he died -- the one
request we think Sally Hennings made of her master.
Thomas Jefferson could not have been insensitive to
the flesh-and-blood woman in his arms. He had to know
she was his equal in her desire for life, her longing
for liberty, her passion for happiness.
In his book on the Declaration, my late friend
Mortimer Adler said Jefferson realized that whatever
things are really good for any human being are really
good for all other human beings. The happy or good
life is essentially the same for all: a satisfaction
of the same needs inherent in human nature. A just
society is grounded in that recognition. So Jefferson
kept as a slave a woman whose nature he knew was equal
to his. All Sally Hennings got from her long
sufferance -- perhaps it was all she sought from what
may have grown into a secret and unacknowledged love
-- was that he let her children go. "Let my children
go" -- one of the oldest of all petitions. It has long
been the promise of America -- a broken promise, to be
sure. But the idea took hold that we could fix what
was broken so that our children would live a bountiful
life. We could prevent the polarization between the
very rich and the very poor that poisoned other
societies. We could provide that each and every
citizen would enjoy the basic necessities of life, a
voice in the system of self-government, and a better
chance for their children. We could preclude the vast
divides that produced the turmoil and tyranny of the
very countries from which so many of our families had
fled.
We were going to do these things because we understood
our dark side -- none of us is good -- but we also
understood the other side -- all of us are sacred.
From Jefferson forward we have grappled with these two
notions in our collective head -- that we are worthy
of the creator but that power corrupts and absolute
power corrupts absolutely. Believing the one and
knowing the other, we created a country where the
winners didn't take all. Through a system of checks
and balances we were going to maintain a safe, if
shifting, equilibrium between wealth and commonwealth.
We believed equitable access to public resources is
the lifeblood of any democracy. So early on [in Jeff
Madrick's description,] primary schooling was made
free to all. States changed laws to protect debtors,
often the relatively poor, against their rich
creditors. Charters to establish corporations were
open to most, if not all, white comers, rather than
held for the elite. The government encouraged
Americans to own their own piece of land, and even
supported squatters' rights. The court challenged
monopoly -- all in the name of we the people.
In my time we went to public schools. My brother made
it to college on the GI bill. When I bought my first
car for $450 I drove to a subsidized university on
free public highways and stopped to rest in
state-maintained public parks. This is what I mean by
the commonwealth. Rudely recognized in its formative
years, always subject to struggle, constantly
vulnerable to reactionary counterattacks, the notion
of America as a shared project has been the central
engine of our national experience.
Until now. I don't have to tell you that a profound transformation is occurring in America: the balance between wealth and the commonwealth is being upended. By design. Deliberately. We have been subjected to what the Commonwealth Foundation calls "a fanatical drive to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that have shaped public responsibility for social harms arising from the excesses of private power." From land, water and other natural resources, to media and the broadcast and digital spectrums, to scientific discovery and medical breakthroughs, and to politics itself, a broad range of the American commons is undergoing a powerful shift toward private and corporate control. And with little public debate. Indeed, what passes for 'political debate' in this country has become a cynical charade behind which the real business goes on -- the not-so-scrupulous business of getting and keeping power in order to divide up the spoils.
We could have seen this coming if we had followed the
money. The veteran Washington reporter, Elizabeth
Drew, says "the greatest change in Washington over the
past 25 years -- in its culture, in the way it does
business and the ever-burgeoning amount of business transactions that go on here -- has been in the preoccupation with money." Jeffrey Birnbaum, who covered Washington for nearly twenty years for the Wall Street Journal, put it more strongly: "[campaign cash] has flooded over the gunwales of the ship of state and threatens to sink the entire vessel. Political donations determine the course and speed of many government actions that deeply affect our daily lives." Politics is suffocating from the stranglehold of money. During his brief campaign in 2000, before he was ambushed by the dirty tricks of the religious right in South Carolina and big money from George W. Bush's wealthy elites, John McCain said elections today are nothing less than an "influence peddling scheme in which both parties compete to stay in office by selling the country to the highest bidder."
Small wonder that with the exception of people like
John McCain and Russ Feingold, official Washington no
longer finds anything wrong with a democracy dominated
by the people with money. Hit the pause button here,
and recall Roger Tamraz. He's the wealthy oilman who
paid $300,000 to get a private meeting in the White
House with President Clinton; he wanted help in
securing a big pipeline in central Asia. This got him
called before congressional hearings on the financial
excesses of the 1996 campaign. If you watched the
hearings on C-Span you heard him say he didn't think
he had done anything out of the ordinary. When they
pressed him he told the senators: "Look, when it comes
to money and politics, you make the rules. I'm just
playing by your rules." One senator then asked if
Tamraz had registered and voted. And he was blunt in
his reply: "No, senator, I think money's a bit more
(important) than the vote."
So what does this come down to, practically?
Here is one accounting:
"When powerful interests shower Washington with
millions in campaign contributions, they often get
what they want. But it's ordinary citizens and firms
that pay the price and most of them never see it
coming. This is what happens if you don't contribute
to their campaigns or spend generously on lobbying.
You pick up a disproportionate share of America's tax
bill. You pay higher prices for a broad range of
products from peanuts to prescriptions. You pay taxes
that others in a similar situation have been excused
from paying. You're compelled to abide by laws while
others are granted immunity from them. You must pay
debts that you incur while others do not. You're
barred from writing off on your tax returns some of
the money spent on necessities while others deduct the
cost of their entertainment. You must run your
business by one set of rules, while the government
creates another set for your competitors. In contrast,
the fortunate few who contribute to the right
politicians and hire the right lobbyists enjoy all the
benefits of their special status. Make a bad business
deal; the government bails them out. If they want to
hire workers at below market wages, the government
provides the means to do so. If they want more time to
pay their debts, the government gives them an
extension. If they want immunity from certain laws,
the government gives it. If they want to ignore rules
their competition must comply with, the government
gives its approval. If they want to kill legislation
that is intended for the public, it gets killed."
I'm not quoting from Karl Marx's Das Kapital or Mao's
Little Red Book. I'm quoting Time magazine. Time's
premier investigative journalists -- Donald Bartlett
and James Steele -- concluded in a series last year
that America now has "government for the few at the
expense of the many." Economic inequality begets
political inequality, and vice versa.
That's why the Stanleys and the Neumanns were turned
off by politics. It's why we're losing the balance
between wealth and the commonwealth. It's why we can't
put things right. And it is the single most
destructive force tearing at the soul of democracy.
Hear the great justice Learned Hand on this: "If we
are to keep our democracy, there must be one
commandment: 'Thou shalt not ration justice.' "
Learned Hand was a prophet of democracy. The rich have
the right to buy more homes than anyone else. They
have the right to buy more cars than anyone else, more
gizmos than anyone else, more clothes and vacations
than anyone else. But they do not have the right to
buy more democracy than anyone else.
I know, I know: this sounds very much like a call for
class war. But the class war was declared a generation
ago, in a powerful paperback polemic by William Simon,
who was soon to be Secretary of the Treasury. He
called on the financial and business class, in effect,
to take back the power and privileges they had lost in
the depression and new deal. They got the message, and
soon they began a stealthy class war against the rest
of society and the principles of our democracy. They
set out to trash the social contract, to cut their
workforces and wages, to scour the globe in search of
cheap labor, and to shred the social safety net that
was supposed to protect people from hardships beyond
their control. Business Week put it bluntly at the
time: "Some people will obviously have to do with
less....it will be a bitter pill for many Americans to
swallow the idea of doing with less so that big
business can have more."
The middle class and working poor are told that what's happening to them is the consequence of Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand." This is a lie. What's happening to them is the direct consequence of corporate activism, intellectual propaganda, the rise of a religious orthodoxy that in its hunger for government subsidies has made an idol of power, and a string of political decisions favoring the powerful and the privileged who bought the political system right out from under us.
To create the intellectual framework for this takeover
of public policy they funded conservative think tanks
-- The Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution,
and the American Enterprise Institute -- that churned
out study after study advocating their agenda.
To put political muscle behind these ideas they
created a formidable political machine. One of the few journalists to cover the issues of class -- Thomas Edsall of The Washington Post -- wrote: "During the 1970s, business refined its ability to act as a class, submerging competitive instincts in favor of joint, cooperate action in the legislative area." Big business political action committees flooded the political arena with a deluge of dollars. And they built alliances with the religious right -- Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority and Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition -- who mounted a cultural war providing a smokescreen for the class war, hiding the economic plunder of the very people who were enlisted as foot soldiers in the cause of privilege.
In a book to be published this summer, Daniel Altman
describes what he calls the "neo-economy -- a place
without taxes, without a social safety net, where rich
and poor live in different financial worlds -- and
[said Altman] it's coming to America." He's a little
late. It's here. Says Warren Buffett, the savviest
investor of them all: "My class won."
Look at the spoils of victory:
Over the past three years, they've pushed through $2
trillion dollars in tax cuts -- almost all tilted
towards the wealthiest people in the country.
Cuts in taxes on the largest incomes.
Cuts in taxes on investment income.
And cuts in taxes on huge inheritances.
More than half of the benefits are going to the
wealthiest one percent. You could call it trickle-down economics, except that the only thing that trickled down was a sea of red ink in our state and local governments, forcing them to cut services for and raise taxes on middle class working America.
Now the Congressional Budget Office forecasts deficits
totaling $2.75 trillion over the next ten years.
These deficits have been part of their strategy. Some
of you will remember that Senator Daniel Patrick
Moynihan tried to warn us 20 years ago, when he
predicted that President Ronald Reagan's real strategy
was to force the government to cut domestic social
programs by fostering federal deficits of historic
dimensions. Reagan's own budget director, David
Stockman, admitted as such. Now the leading rightwing
political strategist, Grover Norquist, says the goal
is to "starve the beast" -- with trillions of dollars
in deficits resulting from trillions of dollars in tax
cuts, until the United States Government is so anemic
and anorexic it can be drowned in the bathtub.
There's no question about it: The corporate
conservatives and their allies in the political and
religious right are achieving a vast transformation of
American life that only they understand because they
are its advocates, its architects, and its
beneficiaries. In creating the greatest economic
inequality in the advanced world, they have saddled
our nation, our states, and our cities and counties
with structural deficits that will last until our
children's children are ready for retirement, and they
are systematically stripping government of all its
functions except rewarding the rich and waging war.
And they are proud of what they have done to our
economy and our society. If instead of practicing
journalism I was writing for Saturday Night Live, I
couldn't have made up the things that this crew have
been saying. The president's chief economic adviser
says shipping technical and professional jobs overseas
is good for the economy. The president's Council of
Economic Advisers report that hamburger chefs in fast
food restaurants can be considered manufacturing
workers. The president's Federal Reserve Chairman says
that the tax cuts may force cutbacks in social
security - but hey, we should make the tax cuts
permanent anyway. The president's Labor Secretary says
it doesn't matter if job growth has stalled because
"the stock market is the ultimate arbiter."
You just can't make this stuff up. You have to hear it
to believe it. This may be the first class war in
history where the victims will die laughing.
But what they are doing to middle class and working
Americans -- and to the workings of American democracy
-- is no laughing matter. Go online and read the
transcripts of Enron traders in the energy crisis four
years ago, discussing how they were manipulating the
California power market in telephone calls in which
they gloat about ripping off "those poor
grandmothers." Read how they talk about political
contributions to politicians like "Kenny Boy" Lay's
best friend George W. Bush. Go on line and read how
Citigroup has been fined $70 Million for abuses in
loans to low-income, high risk borrowers - the largest
penalty ever imposed by the Federal Reserve. A few
clicks later, you can find the story of how a
subsidiary of the corporate computer giant NEC has
been fined over $20 million after pleading guilty to
corruption in a federal plan to bring Internet access
to poor schools and libraries. And this, the story
says, is just one piece of a nationwide scheme to rip
off the government and the poor.
Let's face the reality: If ripping off the public
trust; if distributing tax breaks to the wealthy at
the expense of the poor; if driving the country into
deficits deliberately to starve social benefits; if
requiring states to balance their budgets on the backs
of the poor; if squeezing the wages of workers until
the labor force resembles a nation of serfs -- if this
isn't class war, what is?
It's un-American. It's unpatriotic. And it's wrong.
But I don't need to tell you this. You wouldn't be
here if you didn't know it. Your presence at this
gathering confirms that while an America with liberty
and justice for all is a broken promise, it is not a
lost cause. Once upon a time I thought the mass media
-- my industry -- would help mend this broken promise
and save this cause. After all, the sight of police
dogs attacking peaceful demonstrators forced America
to recognize the reality of racial injustice. The
sight of carnage in Vietnam forced us to recognize the
war was unwinnable. The sight of terrorists striking
the World Trade Center woke us from a long slumber of
denial and distraction. I thought the mass media might
awaken Americans to the reality that this ideology of winner-take-all is working against them and not for them. I was wrong. With honorable exceptions, we can't count on the mass media.
What we need is a mass movement of people like you.
Get mad, yes -- there's plenty to be mad about. Then
get organized and get busy. This is the fight of our
lives.
by Inequality.org
This is the Fight of Our Lives
by Bill Moyers
Keynote speech
Inequality Matters Forum
New York University
June 3, 2004
"The middle class and working poor are told that
what's happening to them is the consequence of Adam
Smith's 'Invisible Hand.' This is a lie. What's
happening to them is the direct consequence of
corporate activism, intellectual propaganda, the rise
of a religious orthodoxy that in its hunger for
government subsidies has made an idol of power, and a
string of political decisions favoring the powerful
and the privileged who bought the political system
right out from under us."
-- Bill Moyers, Keynote speech, June 3, 2004
It is important from time to time to remember that
some things are worth getting mad about.
Here's one: On March 10 of this year, on page B8, with
a headline that stretched across all six columns, The
New York Times reported that tuition in the city's
elite private schools would hit $26,000 for the coming
school year -- for kindergarten as well as high
school. On the same page, under a two-column headline,
Michael Wineraub wrote about a school in nearby Mount
Vernon, the first stop out of the Bronx, with a
student body that is 97 percent black. It is the
poorest school in the town: nine out of ten children
qualify for free lunches; one out of 10 lives in a
homeless shelter. During black history month this past February, a sixth grader wanted to write a report on Langston Hughes. There were no books on Langston Hughes in the library -- no books about the great poet, nor any of his poems. There is only one book in the library on Frederick Douglass. None on Rosa Parks, Josephine Baker, Leontyne Price, or other giants like them in the modern era. In fact, except for a few Newberry Award books the librarian bought with her own money, the library is mostly old books -- largely from the 1950s and 60s when the school was all white. A 1960 child's primer on work begins with a youngster learning how to be a telegraph delivery boy. All the workers in the book -- the dry cleaner, the deliveryman, the cleaning lady -- are white. There's a 1967 book about telephones which says: "when you phone you usually dial the number. But on some new phones you can push buttons." The newest encyclopedia dates from l991, with two volumes -- "b" and "r" -- missing. There is no card catalog in the library -- no index cards or computer.
Something to get mad about.
Here's something else: Caroline Payne's face and gums
are distorted because her Medicaid-financed dentures
don't fit. Because they don't fit, she is continuously
turned down for jobs on account of her appearance.
Caroline Payne is one of the people in David Shipler's
new book,' The Working Poor: Invisible in America'.
She was born poor, and in spite of having once owned
her own home and having earned a two-year college
degree, Caroline Payne has bounced from one
poverty-wage job to another all her life, equipped
with the will to move up, but not the resources to
deal with unexpected and overlapping problems like a
mentally handicapped daughter, a broken marriage, a
sudden layoff crisis that forced her to sell her few
assets, pull up roots and move on. "In the house of
the poor," Shipler writes "...the walls are thin and
fragile and troubles seep into one another."
Here's something else to get mad about. Two weeks ago,
the House of Representatives, the body of Congress
owned and operated by the corporate, political, and
religious right, approved new tax credits for
children. Not for poor children, mind you. But for
families earning as much as $309,000 a year --
families that already enjoy significant benefits from
earlier tax cuts. The editorial page of The Washington
Post called this "bad social policy, bad tax policy,
and bad fiscal policy. You'd think they'd be
embarrassed," said the Post, "but they're not."
And this, too, is something to get mad about. Nothing
seems to embarrass the political class in Washington
today. Not the fact that more children are growing up
in poverty in America than in any other industrial
nation; not the fact that millions of workers are
actually making less money today in real dollars than
they did twenty years ago; not the fact that working
people are putting in longer and longer hours and
still falling behind; not the fact that while we have
the most advanced medical care in the world, nearly 44
million Americans -- eight out of ten of them in
working families -- are uninsured and cannot get the
basic care they need.
Astonishing as it seems, no one in official Washington
seems embarrassed by the fact that the gap between
rich and poor is greater than it's been in 50 years --
the worst inequality among all western nations. Or
that we are experiencing a shift in poverty. For years
it was said those people down there at the bottom were
single, jobless mothers. For years they were told
work, education, and marriage is how they move up the
economic ladder. But poverty is showing up where we
didn't expect it -- among families that include two
parents, a worker, and a head of the household with
more than a high school education. These are the newly
poor. Our political, financial and business class
expects them to climb out of poverty on an escalator
moving downward.
Let me tell you about the Stanleys and the Neumanns.
During the last decade, I produced a series of
documentaries for PBS called "Surviving the Good
Times." The title refers to the boom time of the '90s
when the country achieved the longest period of
economic growth in its entire history. Some good
things happened then, but not everyone shared equally
in the benefits. To the contrary. The decade began
with a sustained period of downsizing by corporations
moving jobs out of America and many of those people
never recovered what was taken from them. We decided
early on to tell the stories of two families in
Milwaukee -- one black, one white -- whose
breadwinners were laid off in the first wave of
layoffs in 1991. We reported on how they were coping
with the wrenching changes in their lives, and we
stayed with them over the next ten years as they tried
to find a place in the new global economy. They're the
kind of Americans my mother would have called "the
salt of the earth." They love their kids, care about
their communities, go to church every Sunday, and work
hard all week -- both mothers have had to take
full-time jobs.
During our time with them, the fathers in both
families became seriously ill. One had to stay in the
hospital two months, putting his family $30,000 in
debt because they didn't have adequate health
insurance. We were there with our camera when the bank
started to foreclose on the modest home of the other
family because they couldn't meet the mortgage
payments after dad lost his good-paying manufacturing
job. Like millions of Americans, the Stanleys and the
Neumanns were playing by the rules and still getting
stiffed. By the end of the decade they were running
harder but slipping behind, and the gap between them
and prosperous America was widening.
What turns their personal tragedy into a political
travesty is that they are patriotic. They love this
country. But they no longer believe they matter to the
people who run the country. When our film opens, both
families are watching the inauguration of Bill Clinton
on television in 1992. By the end of the decade they
were no longer paying attention to politics. They
don't see it connecting to their lives. They don't
think their concerns will ever be addressed by the
political, corporate, and media elites who make up our
dominant class. They are not cynical, because they are
deeply religious people with no capacity for cynicism,
but they know the system is rigged against them. They
know this, and we know this. For years now a small
fraction of American households have been garnering an
extreme concentration of wealth and income while large corporations and financial institutions have obtained unprecedented levels of economic and political power over daily life. In 1960, the gap in terms of wealth between the top 20% and the bottom 20% was 30 fold. Four decades later it is more than 75 fold.
Such concentrations of wealth would be far less of an
issue if the rest of society were benefiting
proportionately. But that's not the case. As the
economist Jeff Madrick reminds us, the pressures of
inequality on middle and working class Americans are
now quite severe. "The strain on working people and on
family life, as spouses have gone to work in dramatic
numbers, has become significant. VCRs and television
sets are cheap, but higher education, health care,
public transportation, drugs, housing and cars have
risen faster in price than typical family incomes. And
life has grown neither calm nor secure for most
Americans, by any means." You can find many sources to
support this conclusion. I like the language of a
small outfit here in New York called the Commonwealth Foundation/Center for the Renewal of American Democracy. They conclude that working families and the poor "are losing ground under economic pressures that deeply affect household stability, family dynamics, social mobility, political participation, and civic life."
Household economics is not the only area where
inequality is growing in America. Equality doesn't
mean equal incomes, but a fair and decent society
where money is not the sole arbiter of status or
comfort. In a fair and just society, the commonwealth
will be valued even as individual wealth is
encouraged.
Let me make something clear here. I wasn't born
yesterday. I'm old enough to know that the tension
between haves and have-nots are built into human
psychology, it is a constant in human history, and it
has been a factor in every society. But I also know
America was going to be different. I know that because
I read Mr. Jefferson's writings, Mr. Lincoln's
speeches and other documents in the growing American
creed. I presumptuously disagreed with Thomas
Jefferson about human equality being self-evident.
Where I lived, neither talent, nor opportunity, nor
outcomes were equal. Life is rarely fair and never
equal. So what could he possibly have meant by that
ringing but ambiguous declaration: "All men are
created equal"? Two things, possibly. One, although
none of us are good, all of us are sacred (Glenn
Tinder), that's the basis for thinking we are by
nature kin.
Second, he may have come to see the meaning of those
words through the experience of the slave who was his
mistress. As is now widely acknowledged, the hands
that wrote "all men are created equal" also stroked
the breasts and caressed the thighs of a black woman
named Sally Hennings. She bore him six children whom
he never acknowledged as his own, but who were the
only slaves freed by his will when he died -- the one
request we think Sally Hennings made of her master.
Thomas Jefferson could not have been insensitive to
the flesh-and-blood woman in his arms. He had to know
she was his equal in her desire for life, her longing
for liberty, her passion for happiness.
In his book on the Declaration, my late friend
Mortimer Adler said Jefferson realized that whatever
things are really good for any human being are really
good for all other human beings. The happy or good
life is essentially the same for all: a satisfaction
of the same needs inherent in human nature. A just
society is grounded in that recognition. So Jefferson
kept as a slave a woman whose nature he knew was equal
to his. All Sally Hennings got from her long
sufferance -- perhaps it was all she sought from what
may have grown into a secret and unacknowledged love
-- was that he let her children go. "Let my children
go" -- one of the oldest of all petitions. It has long
been the promise of America -- a broken promise, to be
sure. But the idea took hold that we could fix what
was broken so that our children would live a bountiful
life. We could prevent the polarization between the
very rich and the very poor that poisoned other
societies. We could provide that each and every
citizen would enjoy the basic necessities of life, a
voice in the system of self-government, and a better
chance for their children. We could preclude the vast
divides that produced the turmoil and tyranny of the
very countries from which so many of our families had
fled.
We were going to do these things because we understood
our dark side -- none of us is good -- but we also
understood the other side -- all of us are sacred.
From Jefferson forward we have grappled with these two
notions in our collective head -- that we are worthy
of the creator but that power corrupts and absolute
power corrupts absolutely. Believing the one and
knowing the other, we created a country where the
winners didn't take all. Through a system of checks
and balances we were going to maintain a safe, if
shifting, equilibrium between wealth and commonwealth.
We believed equitable access to public resources is
the lifeblood of any democracy. So early on [in Jeff
Madrick's description,] primary schooling was made
free to all. States changed laws to protect debtors,
often the relatively poor, against their rich
creditors. Charters to establish corporations were
open to most, if not all, white comers, rather than
held for the elite. The government encouraged
Americans to own their own piece of land, and even
supported squatters' rights. The court challenged
monopoly -- all in the name of we the people.
In my time we went to public schools. My brother made
it to college on the GI bill. When I bought my first
car for $450 I drove to a subsidized university on
free public highways and stopped to rest in
state-maintained public parks. This is what I mean by
the commonwealth. Rudely recognized in its formative
years, always subject to struggle, constantly
vulnerable to reactionary counterattacks, the notion
of America as a shared project has been the central
engine of our national experience.
Until now. I don't have to tell you that a profound transformation is occurring in America: the balance between wealth and the commonwealth is being upended. By design. Deliberately. We have been subjected to what the Commonwealth Foundation calls "a fanatical drive to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that have shaped public responsibility for social harms arising from the excesses of private power." From land, water and other natural resources, to media and the broadcast and digital spectrums, to scientific discovery and medical breakthroughs, and to politics itself, a broad range of the American commons is undergoing a powerful shift toward private and corporate control. And with little public debate. Indeed, what passes for 'political debate' in this country has become a cynical charade behind which the real business goes on -- the not-so-scrupulous business of getting and keeping power in order to divide up the spoils.
We could have seen this coming if we had followed the
money. The veteran Washington reporter, Elizabeth
Drew, says "the greatest change in Washington over the
past 25 years -- in its culture, in the way it does
business and the ever-burgeoning amount of business transactions that go on here -- has been in the preoccupation with money." Jeffrey Birnbaum, who covered Washington for nearly twenty years for the Wall Street Journal, put it more strongly: "[campaign cash] has flooded over the gunwales of the ship of state and threatens to sink the entire vessel. Political donations determine the course and speed of many government actions that deeply affect our daily lives." Politics is suffocating from the stranglehold of money. During his brief campaign in 2000, before he was ambushed by the dirty tricks of the religious right in South Carolina and big money from George W. Bush's wealthy elites, John McCain said elections today are nothing less than an "influence peddling scheme in which both parties compete to stay in office by selling the country to the highest bidder."
Small wonder that with the exception of people like
John McCain and Russ Feingold, official Washington no
longer finds anything wrong with a democracy dominated
by the people with money. Hit the pause button here,
and recall Roger Tamraz. He's the wealthy oilman who
paid $300,000 to get a private meeting in the White
House with President Clinton; he wanted help in
securing a big pipeline in central Asia. This got him
called before congressional hearings on the financial
excesses of the 1996 campaign. If you watched the
hearings on C-Span you heard him say he didn't think
he had done anything out of the ordinary. When they
pressed him he told the senators: "Look, when it comes
to money and politics, you make the rules. I'm just
playing by your rules." One senator then asked if
Tamraz had registered and voted. And he was blunt in
his reply: "No, senator, I think money's a bit more
(important) than the vote."
So what does this come down to, practically?
Here is one accounting:
"When powerful interests shower Washington with
millions in campaign contributions, they often get
what they want. But it's ordinary citizens and firms
that pay the price and most of them never see it
coming. This is what happens if you don't contribute
to their campaigns or spend generously on lobbying.
You pick up a disproportionate share of America's tax
bill. You pay higher prices for a broad range of
products from peanuts to prescriptions. You pay taxes
that others in a similar situation have been excused
from paying. You're compelled to abide by laws while
others are granted immunity from them. You must pay
debts that you incur while others do not. You're
barred from writing off on your tax returns some of
the money spent on necessities while others deduct the
cost of their entertainment. You must run your
business by one set of rules, while the government
creates another set for your competitors. In contrast,
the fortunate few who contribute to the right
politicians and hire the right lobbyists enjoy all the
benefits of their special status. Make a bad business
deal; the government bails them out. If they want to
hire workers at below market wages, the government
provides the means to do so. If they want more time to
pay their debts, the government gives them an
extension. If they want immunity from certain laws,
the government gives it. If they want to ignore rules
their competition must comply with, the government
gives its approval. If they want to kill legislation
that is intended for the public, it gets killed."
I'm not quoting from Karl Marx's Das Kapital or Mao's
Little Red Book. I'm quoting Time magazine. Time's
premier investigative journalists -- Donald Bartlett
and James Steele -- concluded in a series last year
that America now has "government for the few at the
expense of the many." Economic inequality begets
political inequality, and vice versa.
That's why the Stanleys and the Neumanns were turned
off by politics. It's why we're losing the balance
between wealth and the commonwealth. It's why we can't
put things right. And it is the single most
destructive force tearing at the soul of democracy.
Hear the great justice Learned Hand on this: "If we
are to keep our democracy, there must be one
commandment: 'Thou shalt not ration justice.' "
Learned Hand was a prophet of democracy. The rich have
the right to buy more homes than anyone else. They
have the right to buy more cars than anyone else, more
gizmos than anyone else, more clothes and vacations
than anyone else. But they do not have the right to
buy more democracy than anyone else.
I know, I know: this sounds very much like a call for
class war. But the class war was declared a generation
ago, in a powerful paperback polemic by William Simon,
who was soon to be Secretary of the Treasury. He
called on the financial and business class, in effect,
to take back the power and privileges they had lost in
the depression and new deal. They got the message, and
soon they began a stealthy class war against the rest
of society and the principles of our democracy. They
set out to trash the social contract, to cut their
workforces and wages, to scour the globe in search of
cheap labor, and to shred the social safety net that
was supposed to protect people from hardships beyond
their control. Business Week put it bluntly at the
time: "Some people will obviously have to do with
less....it will be a bitter pill for many Americans to
swallow the idea of doing with less so that big
business can have more."
The middle class and working poor are told that what's happening to them is the consequence of Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand." This is a lie. What's happening to them is the direct consequence of corporate activism, intellectual propaganda, the rise of a religious orthodoxy that in its hunger for government subsidies has made an idol of power, and a string of political decisions favoring the powerful and the privileged who bought the political system right out from under us.
To create the intellectual framework for this takeover
of public policy they funded conservative think tanks
-- The Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution,
and the American Enterprise Institute -- that churned
out study after study advocating their agenda.
To put political muscle behind these ideas they
created a formidable political machine. One of the few journalists to cover the issues of class -- Thomas Edsall of The Washington Post -- wrote: "During the 1970s, business refined its ability to act as a class, submerging competitive instincts in favor of joint, cooperate action in the legislative area." Big business political action committees flooded the political arena with a deluge of dollars. And they built alliances with the religious right -- Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority and Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition -- who mounted a cultural war providing a smokescreen for the class war, hiding the economic plunder of the very people who were enlisted as foot soldiers in the cause of privilege.
In a book to be published this summer, Daniel Altman
describes what he calls the "neo-economy -- a place
without taxes, without a social safety net, where rich
and poor live in different financial worlds -- and
[said Altman] it's coming to America." He's a little
late. It's here. Says Warren Buffett, the savviest
investor of them all: "My class won."
Look at the spoils of victory:
Over the past three years, they've pushed through $2
trillion dollars in tax cuts -- almost all tilted
towards the wealthiest people in the country.
Cuts in taxes on the largest incomes.
Cuts in taxes on investment income.
And cuts in taxes on huge inheritances.
More than half of the benefits are going to the
wealthiest one percent. You could call it trickle-down economics, except that the only thing that trickled down was a sea of red ink in our state and local governments, forcing them to cut services for and raise taxes on middle class working America.
Now the Congressional Budget Office forecasts deficits
totaling $2.75 trillion over the next ten years.
These deficits have been part of their strategy. Some
of you will remember that Senator Daniel Patrick
Moynihan tried to warn us 20 years ago, when he
predicted that President Ronald Reagan's real strategy
was to force the government to cut domestic social
programs by fostering federal deficits of historic
dimensions. Reagan's own budget director, David
Stockman, admitted as such. Now the leading rightwing
political strategist, Grover Norquist, says the goal
is to "starve the beast" -- with trillions of dollars
in deficits resulting from trillions of dollars in tax
cuts, until the United States Government is so anemic
and anorexic it can be drowned in the bathtub.
There's no question about it: The corporate
conservatives and their allies in the political and
religious right are achieving a vast transformation of
American life that only they understand because they
are its advocates, its architects, and its
beneficiaries. In creating the greatest economic
inequality in the advanced world, they have saddled
our nation, our states, and our cities and counties
with structural deficits that will last until our
children's children are ready for retirement, and they
are systematically stripping government of all its
functions except rewarding the rich and waging war.
And they are proud of what they have done to our
economy and our society. If instead of practicing
journalism I was writing for Saturday Night Live, I
couldn't have made up the things that this crew have
been saying. The president's chief economic adviser
says shipping technical and professional jobs overseas
is good for the economy. The president's Council of
Economic Advisers report that hamburger chefs in fast
food restaurants can be considered manufacturing
workers. The president's Federal Reserve Chairman says
that the tax cuts may force cutbacks in social
security - but hey, we should make the tax cuts
permanent anyway. The president's Labor Secretary says
it doesn't matter if job growth has stalled because
"the stock market is the ultimate arbiter."
You just can't make this stuff up. You have to hear it
to believe it. This may be the first class war in
history where the victims will die laughing.
But what they are doing to middle class and working
Americans -- and to the workings of American democracy
-- is no laughing matter. Go online and read the
transcripts of Enron traders in the energy crisis four
years ago, discussing how they were manipulating the
California power market in telephone calls in which
they gloat about ripping off "those poor
grandmothers." Read how they talk about political
contributions to politicians like "Kenny Boy" Lay's
best friend George W. Bush. Go on line and read how
Citigroup has been fined $70 Million for abuses in
loans to low-income, high risk borrowers - the largest
penalty ever imposed by the Federal Reserve. A few
clicks later, you can find the story of how a
subsidiary of the corporate computer giant NEC has
been fined over $20 million after pleading guilty to
corruption in a federal plan to bring Internet access
to poor schools and libraries. And this, the story
says, is just one piece of a nationwide scheme to rip
off the government and the poor.
Let's face the reality: If ripping off the public
trust; if distributing tax breaks to the wealthy at
the expense of the poor; if driving the country into
deficits deliberately to starve social benefits; if
requiring states to balance their budgets on the backs
of the poor; if squeezing the wages of workers until
the labor force resembles a nation of serfs -- if this
isn't class war, what is?
It's un-American. It's unpatriotic. And it's wrong.
But I don't need to tell you this. You wouldn't be
here if you didn't know it. Your presence at this
gathering confirms that while an America with liberty
and justice for all is a broken promise, it is not a
lost cause. Once upon a time I thought the mass media
-- my industry -- would help mend this broken promise
and save this cause. After all, the sight of police
dogs attacking peaceful demonstrators forced America
to recognize the reality of racial injustice. The
sight of carnage in Vietnam forced us to recognize the
war was unwinnable. The sight of terrorists striking
the World Trade Center woke us from a long slumber of
denial and distraction. I thought the mass media might
awaken Americans to the reality that this ideology of winner-take-all is working against them and not for them. I was wrong. With honorable exceptions, we can't count on the mass media.
What we need is a mass movement of people like you.
Get mad, yes -- there's plenty to be mad about. Then
get organized and get busy. This is the fight of our
lives.
