Bill Moyers Likens Washington to the Mob

I began my public journalism the same year you began your public advocacy, in
1971. Our paths often paralleled and sometimes crossed. Over these 40 years
journalism for me has been a continuing course in adult education, and I came
early on to consider the work you do as part of the curriculum – an open seminar
on how government works – and for whom. Your muckraking investigations – into
money and politics, corporate behavior, lobbying, regulatory oversight, public
health and safety, openness in government, and consumer protection, among others
– are models of accuracy and integrity. They drive home to journalists that
while it is important to cover the news, it is more important to uncover the
news. As one of my mentors said, “News is what people want to keep hidden;
everything else is publicity.” And when a student asked the journalist and
historian Richard Reeves for his definition of “real news”, he answered: “The
news you and I need to keep our freedoms.” You keep reminding us how crucial
that news is to democracy. And when the watchdogs of the press have fallen
silent, your vigilant growls have told us something’s up.

So I’m here as both citizen and journalist to thank you for all you have
done, to salute you for keeping the faith, and to implore you to fight on during
the crisis of hope that now grips our country. The great American experience in
creating a different future together – this “voluntary union for the common
good” – has been flummoxed by a growing sense of political impotence – what the
historian Lawrence Goodwyn has described as a mass resignation of people who
believe “the dogma of democracy” on a superficial public level but who no longer
believe it privately. There has been, he says, a decline in what people think
they have a political right to aspire to – a decline of individual self-respect
on the part of millions of Americans.

You can understand why. We hold elections, knowing they are unlikely to
produce the policies favored by the majority of Americans. We speak, we write,
we advocate – and those in power turn deaf ears and blind eyes to our deepest
aspirations. We petition, plead, and even pray – yet the earth that is our
commons, which should be passed on in good condition to coming generations,
continues to be despoiled. We invoke the strain in our national DNA that attests
to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as the produce of political
equality – yet private wealth multiplies as public goods are beggared. . . .

. . . And the property qualifications for federal office that the framers of
the Constitution expressly feared as an unseemly “veneration for wealth” are now
openly in force; the common denominator of public office, even for our judges,
is a common deference to cash.

So if belief in the “the dogma of democracy” seems only skin deep, there are
reasons for it. During the prairie revolt that swept the Great Plains a century
after the Constitution was ratified, the populist orator Mary Elizabeth Lease
exclaimed: “Wall Street owns the country…Our laws are the output of a system
which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags. The [political] parties lie
to us and the political speakers mislead us…Money rules.”

That was 1890. Those agrarian populists boiled over with anger that
corporations, banks, and government were ganging up to deprive every day people
of their livelihood.

She should see us now.

John Boehner calls on the bankers, holds out his cup, and offers them total
obeisance from the House majority if only they fill it.

That’s now the norm, and they get away with it. GOP once again means
Guardians of Privilege.

Barack Obama criticizes bankers as “fat cats”, then invites them to dine at a
pricey New York restaurant where the tasting menu runs to $195 a person.

That’s now the norm, and they get away with it. The President has raised more
money from banks, hedge funds, and private equity managers than any Republican
candidate, including Mitt Romney. Inch by inch he has conceded ground to them
while espousing populist rhetoric that his very actions betray.

Let’s name this for what it is: Democratic deviancy defined further downward.
Our politicians are little more than money launderers in the trafficking of
power and policy – fewer than six degrees of separation from the spirit and
tactics of Tony Soprano.

Why New York’s Zuccotti Park is filled with people is no mystery. Reporters
keep scratching their heads and asking: “Why are you here?” But it’s clear they
are occupying Wall Street because Wall Street has occupied the country. And
that’s why in public places across the country workaday Americans are standing
up in solidarity. Did you see the sign a woman was carrying at a fraternal march
in Iowa the other day? It read: “I can’t afford to buy a politician so I bought
this sign.”

We know what all this money buys. Americans have learned the hard way that
when rich organizations and wealthy individuals shower Washington with millions
in campaign contributions, they get what they want. They know that 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 it approval. If
they want to kill legislation that is intended for the public, it gets
killed.

I didn’t crib that litany from Public Citizen’s muckraking investigations
over the years, although I could have. Nor did I lift it from Das Kapital by
Karl Marx or Mao Tse-tung’s Little Red Book. No, I was literally quoting Time
Magazine, long a tribune of America’s establishment media. From the bosom of
mainstream media comes the bald, spare, and damning conclusion: We now have
“government for the few at the expense of the many.”

But let me call another witness from the pro-business and capitalist-
friendly press. In the middle of the last decade – four years before the Great
Collapse of 2008 – the editors of The Economist warned:

A growing body of evidence suggests that the meritocratic ideal is in trouble
in America. Income inequality is growing to levels not seen since the (first)
Gilded Age. But social mobility is not increasing at anything like the same
pace….Everywhere you look in modern America – in the Hollywood Hills or the
canyons of Wall Street, in the Nashville recording studios or the clapboard
houses of Cambridge, Massachusetts – you see elites mastering the art of
perpetuating themselves. America is increasingly looking like imperial Britain,
with dynastic ties proliferating, social circles interlocking, mechanisms of
social exclusion strengthening, and a gap widening between the people who make
decisions and shape the culture and the vast majority of working
stiffs.

Hear the editors of The Economist: “The United States is on its way to
becoming a European-style class-based society.”

Can you imagine what would happen if I had said that on PBS? Mitch
McConnell and John Boehner would put Elmo and Big Bird under house arrest. Come
to think of it, I did say it on PBS back when Karl Rove was president, and there
was indeed hell to pay. You would have thought Che Guevara had run his motocryle
across the White House lawn. But I wasn’t quoting from a radical or even liberal
manifesto. I was quoting – to repeat – one of the business world’s most
respected journals. It is the editors of the The Economist who are warning us
that “ The United States is on its way to becoming a European-style class-based
society.”

And that was well before our financiers, drunk with greed and high on the
illusions and conceits of laissez faire (“leave us alone”) fundamentalism, and
humored by rented politicians who do their bidding, brought America to the edge
of the abyss and our middle class to its knees.

How could it be? How could this happen in the country whose framers spoke of
“life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” in the same breath as political
equality? Democracy wasn’t meant to produce a class-ridden society. When that
son of French aristocracy Alexander de Tocqueville traveled through the bustling
young America of the 1830s, nothing struck him with greater force than “the
equality of conditions.” Tocqueville knew first-hand the vast divisions between
the wealth and poverty of Europe, where kings and feudal lords took what they
wanted and left peasants the crumbs. But Americans, he wrote, “seemed to be
remarkably equal economically.” “Some were richer, some were poorer, but within
a comparative narrow band. Moreover, individuals had opportunities to better
their economic circumstances over the course of a lifetime, and just about
everyone [except of course slaves and Indians] seemed to be striving for that
goal.” Tocqueville looked closely, and said: “I easily perceive the enormous
influence that this primary fact exercises on the workings of the society.”

And so it does. Evidence abounds that large inequalities undermine community
life, reduces trust among citizens, and increases violence. In one major study
from data collected over 30 years [by the epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and
Kate Pickett in their book: The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes
Societies Stronger] the most consistent predictor of mental illness, infant
mortality, educational achievements, teenage births, homicides, and
incarceration, is economic inequality. And as Nobel Laureate Kenneth Arrow has
written, “Vast inequalities of income weakens a society’s sense of mutual
concern…The sense that we are all members of the social order is vital to the
meaning of civilization.”

The historian Gordon Wood won the Pulitzer Prize for his book on The
Radicalism of the American Revolution: If you haven’t read it, now’s the time.
Wood says that our nation discovered its greatness “by creating a prosperous
free society belonging to obscure people with their workaday concerns and their
pecuniary pursuits of happiness.” This democracy, he said, changed the lives “of
hitherto neglected and despised masses of common laboring people.”

Those words moved me when I read them. They moved me because Henry and Ruby
Moyers were “common laboring people.” 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. Mother managed to finish the eighth grade before she
followed him into the fields. They were tenant farmers when the Great Depression
knocked them down and almost out. The year I was born my father 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 made that only when he joined the union in the
last job he held. I was one of the poorest white kids in town, but in many
respects I was the equal of my friend who was the daughter of the richest man in
town. I went to good public schools, had use of a good public library, played
sand-lot baseball in a good public park, and traveled far on good public roads
with good public facilities to a good public university. Because these public
goods were there for us, I never thought of myself as poor. When I began to
piece the story together years later, I came to realize that people like the
Moyers had been included in the American deal: “We, the People” included us.

It’s heartbreaking to see what has become of that bargain. These days it’s
every man for himself; may be the richest and most ruthless predators win!

How did this happen?

You know the story, because it begins the very same year that you began your
public advocacy and I began my public journalism. 1971 was a seminal year.

On March 29 of that year, Ralph Nader bought ads in 13 publications and sent
out letters asking people if they would invest their talents, skills, and yes,
their lives, in working for the public interest. The seed sprouted swiftly that
spring: By the end of May over 60,000 Americans responded, and Public Citizen
was born.

But something else was also happening. Five months later, on August 23, 1971,
a corporate lawyer named Lewis Powell – a board member of the death-dealing
tobacco giant Philip Morris and a future Justice of the United States Supreme
Court – sent a confidential memorandum to his friends at the U. S. Chamber of
Commerce. We look back on it now as a call to arms for class war waged from the
top down.

Let’s recall the context: Big Business was being forced to clean up its act.
It was bad enough to corporate interests that Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal had
sustained its momentum through Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy,
and Lyndon Johnson. Suddenly this young lawyer named Ralph Nader arrived on the
scene, arousing consumers with articles, speeches, and above all, an expose of
the automobile industry, Unsafe at Any Speed. Young activists flocked to work
with him on health, environmental, and economic concerns. Congress was moved to
act. Even Republicans signed on. In l970 President Richard Nixon put his
signature on the National Environmental Policy Act and named a White House
Council to promote environmental quality. A few months later millions of
Americans turned out for Earth Day. Nixon then agreed to the creation of the
Environmental Protection Agency. Congress acted swiftly to pass tough new
amendments to the Clean Air Act and the EPA announced the first air pollution
standards. There were new regulations directed at lead paint and pesticides.
Corporations were no longer getting away with murder.

And Lewis Powell was shocked – shocked! – at what he called “an attack on the
American free enterprise system.” Not just from a few “extremists of the left,”
he said, but also from “perfectly respectable elements of society,” including
the media, politicians, and leading intellectuals. Fight back, and fight back
hard, he urged his compatriots. Build a movement. Set speakers loose across the
country. Take on prominent institutions of public opinion – especially the
universities, the media, and the courts. Keep television programs under
“constant surveillance.” And above all, recognize that political power must be
“assiduously (sic) cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used
aggressively and with determination” and “without embarrassment.”

Powell imagined the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as a council of war. Since
business executives had “little stomach for hard-nose contest with their
critics” and “little skill in effective intellectual and philosophical debate,”
they should create new think tanks, legal foundations, and front groups of every
stripe. It would take years, but these groups could, he said, be aligned into a
united front (that) would only come about through “careful long-range planning
and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years,
in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the
political power available only through united action and united
organizations.”

You have to admit it was a brilliant strategy. Although Powell may not have
seen it at the time, he was pointing America toward plutocracy, where political
power is derived from the wealthy and controlled by the wealthy to protect their
wealth. As the only countervailing power to private greed and power, democracy
could no longer be tolerated.

While Nader’s recruitment of citizens to champion democracy was open for all
to see – depended, in fact, on public participation – Powell’s memo was for
certain eyes only, those with the means and will to answer his call to arms. The
public wouldn’t learn of the memo until after Nixon appointed Powell to the
Supreme Court and the enterprising reporter Jack Anderson obtained a copy,
writing that it may have been the reason for Powell’s appointment.

By then his document had circulated widely in corporate suites. Within two
years the board of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce formed a task force of 40
business executives – from U.S. Steel, GE, GM, Phillips Petroleum, 3M, Amway,
and ABC and CBS (two media companies, we should note). Their assignment was to
coordinate the crusade, put Powell’s recommendations into effect, and push the
corporate agenda. Powell had set in motion a revolt of the rich. As the
historian Kim Phillips-Fein subsequently wrote, “Many who read the memo cited it
afterward as inspiration for their political choices.”

Those choices came soon. The National Association of Manufacturers announced
it was moving its main offices from New York to Washington. In 1971, only 175
firms had registered lobbyists in the capital; by 1982, nearly twenty-five
hundred did. Corporate PACs increased from under 300 in 1976 to over twelve
hundred by the middle of the l980s. From Powell’s impetus came the Business
Roundtable, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the Heritage
Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Manhattan Institute, Citizens for a Sound
Economy (precursor to what we now know as Americans for Prosperity) and other
organizations united in pushing back against political equality and shared
prosperity.* They triggered an economic transformation that would in time touch
every aspect of our lives.

Powell’s memo was delivered to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce at its
headquarters across from the White House on land that was formerly the home of
Daniel Webster. That couldn’t have been more appropriate. History was coming
full circle at 1615 H Street. Webster is remembered largely as the most eloquent
orator in America during his years as Senator from Massachusetts and Secretary
of State under three presidents in the years leading up to the Civil War. He was
also the leading spokesman for banking and industry nabobs who funded his
extravagant tastes in wine, boats, and mistresses. Some of them came to his
relief when he couldn’t cover his debts wholly from bribes or the sale of
diplomatic posts for personal gain. Webster apparently regarded the merchants
and bankers of Boston’s State Street Corporation – one of the country’s first
financial holding companies – very much as George W. Bush regarded the high
rollers he called “my base.” The great orator even sent a famous letter to
financiers requesting retainers from them that he might better serve them. The
historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wondered how the American people could follow
Webster “through hell or high water when he would not lead unless someone made
up a purse for him.”

No wonder the U.S. Chamber of Commerce feels right as home with the landmark
designation of its headquarters. 1615 H Street now masterminds the laundering of
multi-millions of dollars raised from captains of industry and private wealth to
finance – secretly – the political mercenaries who fight the class war in their
behalf.

Even as the Chamber was doubling its membership and tripling its budget in
response to Lewis Powell’s manifesto, the coalition got another powerful jolt of
adrenalin from the wealthy right-winger who had served as Nixon’s secretary of
the treasury, William Simon. His polemic entitled A Time for Truth argued that
“funds generated by business” must “rush by multimillions” into conservative
causes to uproot the institutions and “the heretical strategy” [his term] of the
New Deal. He called on “men of action in the capitalist world” to mount “a
veritable crusade” against progressive America. Business Week magazine somberly
explained that “…it will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea
of doing with less so that big business can have move.”

I’m not making this up.

And so it came to pass; came to pass despite your heroic efforts and those of
other kindred citizens; came to pass because those “men of action in the
capitalist world” were not content with their wealth just to buy more homes,
more cars, more planes, more vacations and more gizmos than anyone else. They
were determined to buy more democracy than anyone else. And they succeeded
beyond their own expectations. After their 40-year “veritable crusade” against
our institutions, laws and regulations – against the ideas, norms and beliefs
that helped to create America’s iconic middle class – the Gilded Age is back
with a vengeance.

You know these things, of course, because you’ve been up against that
“veritable crusade” all these years. But if you want to see the story pulled
together in one compelling narrative, read this – perhaps the best book on
politics of the last two years: Winner Take All Politics: How Washington Made
the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class. Two accomplished
political scientists wrote it: Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson – the Sherlock
Holmes and Dr. Watson of political science, who wanted to know how America had
turned into a society starkly divided into winners and losers.

Mystified by what happened to the notion of “shared prosperity” that marked
the years after World War II;

puzzled that over the last generation more and more wealth has gone to the
rich and superrich, while middle-class and working people are left barely
hanging on;

vexed that hedge-fund managers pulling down billions can pay a lower tax rate
than their pedicurists, manicurists, cleaning ladies and chauffeurs;

curious as to why politicians keep slashing taxes on the very rich even as
they grow richer, and how corporations keep being handed huge tax breaks and
subsidies even as they fire hundreds of thousands of workers;

troubled that the heart of the American Dream – upward mobility – seems to
have stopped beating;

astounded that the United States now leads in the competition for the gold
medal for inequality;

and dumbfounded that all this could happen in a democracy whose politicians
are supposed to serve the greatest good for the greatest number, and must
regularly face the judgment of citizens at the polls if they haven’t done
so;

Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson wanted to find out “how our economy stopped
working to provide prosperity and security for the broad middle class.” They
wanted to know: “Who dunnit?”

They found the culprit: “It’s the politics, stupid!” Tracing the clues back
to that “unseen revolution” of the 1970s – the revolt triggered by Lewis Powell,
fired up by William Simon, and fueled by rich corporations and wealthy
individuals – they found that ‘Step by step and debate by debate America’s
public officials have rewritten the rules of American politics and the American
economy in ways that have benefitted the few at the expense of the many.”

There you have it: they bought off the gatekeepers, got inside, and gamed the
system. And when the fix was in, they let loose the animal spirits. turning our
economy into a feast for predators. And they won – as the rich and powerful got
richer and more powerful – they not only bought the government, they “saddled
Americans with greater debt, tore new holes in the safety net, and imposed broad
financial risks on workers, investors, and taxpayers.” Until – write Hacker and
Pierson – “The United States is looking more and more like the capitalist
oligarchies of Brazil, Mexico, and Russia where most of the wealth is
concentrated at the top while the bottom grows later and larger with everyone in
between just barely getting by.”

The revolt of the plutocrats has now been ratified by the Supreme Court in
its notorious Citizens United decision last year. Rarely have so few imposed
such damage on so many. When five pro-corporate conservative justices gave
“artificial entities” the same rights of “free speech” as living, breathing
human beings, they told our corporate sovereigns “the sky’s the limit” when it
comes to their pouring money into political campaigns. The Roberts Court
embodies the legacy of pro-corporate bias in justices determined to prevent
democracy from acting as a brake on excessive greed and power in the private
sector. Wealth acquired under capitalism is in and of itself no enemy of
democracy, but wealth armed with political power – power to shake off
opportunities for others to rise – is a proven danger. Thomas Jefferson had
hoped that “we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed
corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of
strength and [to] bid defiance to the laws of our country.” James Madison feared
that the “spirit of speculation” would lead to “a government operating by
corrupt influence, substituting the motive of private interest in place of
public duty.”

Jefferson and Madison didn’t live to see reactionary justices fulfill their
worst fears. In 1886 a conservative court conferred the divine gift of life on
the Southern Pacific Railroad. Never mind that the Fourteenth Amendment
declaring that no person should be deprived of “life, liberty or property
without due process of law” was enacted to protect the rights of freed slaves.
The Court decided to give the same rights of “personhood” to corporations that
possessed neither a body to be kicked nor a soul to be damned. For over half a
century the Court acted to protect the privileged. It gutted the Sherman
Antitrust Act by finding a loophole for a sugar trust. It killed a New York
state law limiting working hours. Likewise a ban against child labor. It wiped
out a law that set minimum wages for women. And so on: one decision after
another aimed at laws promoting the general welfare.” The Roberts Court has
picked up the mantle: Moneyed interests first, the public interest second, if at
all.

The ink was hardly dry on the Citizens United decision when the U.S. Chamber
of Commerce organized a covertly funded front and rained drones packed with cash
into the 2010 campaigns. According to the Sunlight Foundation, corporate front
groups spent $126 million in the fall of 2010 while hiding the identities of the
donors. Another corporate cover group – the American Action Network – spent over
$26 million of undisclosed corporate money in just six Senate races and 26 House
elections. And Karl Rove’s groups – American Crossroads/Crossroads GPS – seized
on Citizens United to raise and spend at least $38 million that NBC News said
came from “a small circle of extremely wealthy Wall Street hedge fund and
private equity moguls”– all determined to water down financial reforms designed
to prevent another collapse of the financial system. Jim Hightower has said it
well: Today’s proponents of corporate plutocracy “have simply elevated money
itself above votes, establishing cold, hard cash as the real coin of political
power.”

No wonder so many Americans have felt that sense of political impotence of
the historian Lawrence Goodwyn described as “the mass resignation” of people who
believe in the “dogma of democracy” on a superficial public level but whose
hearts no longer burn with the conviction that they are part of the deal.
Against such odds, discouragement comes easily.

But if the generations before us had given up, slaves would still be waiting
on these tables, on Election Day women would still be turned away from the
voting booths, and workers would still be committing a crime if they
organized.

So once again: Take heart from the past and don’t ever count the people out.
During the last quarter of the 19th century, the industrial revolution created
extraordinary wealth at the top and excruciating misery at the bottom. Embattled
citizens rose up. Into their hearts, wrote the progressive Kansas journalist
William Allen White, “had come a sense that their civilization needed recasting,
that their government had fallen into the hands of self-seekers, that a new
relation should be established between the haves and have-nots.” Not content to
wring their hands and cry “Woe is us” everyday citizens researched the issues,
organized to educate their neighbors, held rallies, made speeches, petitioned
and canvassed, marched and marched again. They ploughed the fields and planted
the seeds – sometimes in bloody soil – that twentieth century leaders used to
restore “the general welfare” as a pillar of American democracy. They laid down
the now-endangered markers of a civilized society: legally ordained minimum
wages, child labor laws, workmen’s safety and compensation laws, pure foods and
safe drugs, Social Security, Medicare, and rules that promote competitive
markets over monopolies and cartels. Remember: Democracy doesn’t begin at the
top; it begins at the bottom, when flesh-and-blood human beings fight to
rekindle the patriot’s dream.

The Pariot’s Dream? Arlo Guthrie, remember? He wrote could be the unofficial
anthem of Zucotti Park. Listen up:

Living now here but for fortune
Placed by fate’s mysterious
schemes
Who’d believe that we’re the ones asked
To try to rekindle the
patriot’s dreams

Arise sweet destiny, time runs short
All of your patience has heard their
retort
Hear us now for alone we can’t seem
To try to rekindle the
patriot’s dreams
Can you hear the words being whispered

All along the American stream
Tyrants freed the just are imprisoned
Try
to rekindle the patriot’s dreams

Ah but perhaps too much is being asked of too few
You and your children
with nothing to do
Hear us now for alone we can’t seem
To try to rekindle
the patriot’s dreams

Who, in these cynical times, when democracy is on the ropes and the blows
of great wealth pound and pound and pound again against America’s body politic –
who would dream such a radical thing?