Tomgram: Bill Moyers, Money and Power in America
By Bill Moyers
Posted on September 11, 2016, Printed on September 11, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176184/ ;
Hope: its in short supply in America this year. I was reminded of that
recently when I spoke at a kick-off event for the school year hosted by the
Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas. The Institutes
namesake is, of course, Bob Dole, the war hero turned Republican
congressman, senator, minority and then majority leader, and finally
presidential nominee in 1996. On a beautiful summer evening, on the front
lawn of the Institute, my host, a KU senior named Cody, and I discussed --
what else is there to talk about this year? -- The Donald, Hillary, and
Bernie. Then we plunged into the perilous topic of the media and its curious
future and the life of a journalist (me) covering the gravity-defying
spectacle commonly known as election 2016. More than 100 students showed up
-- nothing to do, Im sure, with the free burgers and soda -- and when it
came time for the Q-and-A portion of the event, I couldnt help but be
struck by the acuity and thoughtfulness of their questions.
Afterward, I met a smaller group of them at a nearby basement bar. During my
five years as an undergraduate, I cant recall having a conversation as
substantive as that evenings. Kansass state government, led by its
governor, Sam Brownback, has plunged into a radical experiment in
conservative governing, and it was on their minds. We talked about a
variety of depressing topics, including the devastating effects of the
legislatures repeated budget cuts to higher education and another grim
signature legislative issue: the open carry of guns on campus. No gun
signs were ubiquitous there, but everyone wondered: For how long? The
students spoke eloquently and knowledgeably. More than that, they spoke with
passion and in detail about how such problems might be dealt with and even
fixed, and they did so with the Dole Institutes bipartisan ethos in mind.
Some of it may have been the youthful idealism of the undergraduate but,
believe me, it was refreshing.
I say all this because, as a journalist in this crazy year of our lord 2016,
on a good day the temptation is to tilt toward cynicism. Its our job to
rake the muck and expose the trolls, to cast light on the wrongdoing and the
failings in our society, but its up to others to set them right. Today, at
this site, Bill Moyers writes about the greatest failing, the true disaster,
of our time: the scourge of growing inequality, economic and political. He
describes it as a despicable blot on American politics, as the very
wealthy convert their financial might into political power to guard that
wealth while exacerbating inequality further. The statistics Moyers deploys
are chilling. Consume enough of them and youre liable to feel a bit gloomy.
But like those undergraduates, Moyers (very distinctly a post-graduate of
our difficult political world) holds onto the hope, as todays piece
suggests, that Americans can still fix our world, make it a better place.
Those students I met gave me hope and Moyers does the same -- hope for a
more equitable future brought on by the hard work of Americans, whether as
journalists, legislators, or activists, as lawyers, doctors, engineers, or
teachers. These are strange, often grim, times, and such bursts of hope are
what keep us going. Andy Kroll
We, the Plutocrats vs. We, the People
Saving the Soul of Democracy
By Bill Moyers
Sixty-six years ago this summer, on my 16th birthday, I went to work for the
daily newspaper in the small East Texas town of Marshall where I grew up. It
was a good place to be a cub reporter -- small enough to navigate but big
enough to keep me busy and learning something every day. I soon had a
stroke of luck. Some of the papers old hands were on vacation or out sick
and I was assigned to help cover what came to be known across the country as
the housewives' rebellion.
Fifteen women in my hometown decided not to pay the social security
withholding tax for their domestic workers. Those housewives were white,
their housekeepers black. Almost half of all employed black women in the
country then were in domestic service. Because they tended to earn lower
wages, accumulate less savings, and be stuck in those jobs all their lives,
social security was their only insurance against poverty in old age. Yet
their plight did not move their employers.
The housewives argued that social security was unconstitutional and imposing
it was taxation without representation. They even equated it with slavery.
They also claimed that requiring us to collect [the tax] is no different
from requiring us to collect the garbage. So they hired a high-powered
lawyer -- a notorious former congressman from Texas who had once chaired the
House Un-American Activities Committee -- and took their case to court. They
lost, and eventually wound up holding their noses and paying the tax, but
not before their rebellion had become national news.
The stories I helped report for the local paper were picked up and carried
across the country by the Associated Press. One day, the managing editor
called me over and pointed to the AP Teletype machine beside his desk.
Moving across the wire was a notice citing our paper and its reporters for
our coverage of the housewives' rebellion.
I was hooked, and in one way or another Ive continued to engage the issues
of money and power, equality and democracy over a lifetime spent at the
intersection between politics and journalism. It took me awhile to put the
housewives' rebellion into perspective. Race played a role, of course.
Marshall was a segregated, antebellum town of 20,000, half of whom were
white, the other half black. White ruled, but more than race was at work.
Those 15 housewives were respectable townsfolk, good neighbors, regulars at
church (some of them at my church). Their children were my friends; many of
them were active in community affairs; and their husbands were pillars of
the towns business and professional class.
So what brought on that spasm of rebellion? They simply couldnt see beyond
their own prerogatives. Fiercely loyal to their families, their clubs,
their charities, and their congregations -- fiercely loyal, that is, to
their own kind -- they narrowly defined membership in democracy to include
only people like themselves. They expected to be comfortable and secure in
their old age, but the women who washed and ironed their laundry, wiped
their childrens bottoms, made their husbands beds, and cooked their
familys meals would also grow old and frail, sick and decrepit, lose their
husbands and face the ravages of time alone, with nothing to show from their
years of labor but the crease in their brow and the knots on their knuckles.
In one way or another, this is the oldest story in our countrys history:
the struggle to determine whether we, the people is a metaphysical reality
-- one nation, indivisible -- or merely a charade masquerading as piety and
manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life
at the expense of others.
I Contain Multitudes
There is a vast difference between a society whose arrangements roughly
serve all its citizens and one whose institutions have been converted into a
stupendous fraud, a democracy in name only. I have no doubt about what the
United States of America was meant to be. Its spelled out right there in
the 52 most revolutionary words in our founding documents, the preamble to
our Constitution, proclaiming the sovereignty of the people as the moral
base of government:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union,
establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common
defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to
ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for
the United States of America.
What do those words mean, if not that we are all in the business of
nation-building together?
Now, I recognize that weve never been a country of angels guided by a
presidium of saints. Early America was a moral morass. One in five people
in the new nation was enslaved. Justice for the poor meant stocks and
stockades. Women suffered virtual peonage. Heretics were driven into exile,
or worse. Native people -- the Indians -- would be forcibly removed from
their land, their fate a trail of tears and broken treaties.
No, Im not a romantic about our history and I harbor no idealized notions
of politics and democracy. Remember, I worked for President Lyndon Johnson.
I heard him often repeat the story of the Texas poker shark who leaned
across the table and said to his mark: Play the cards fair, Reuben. I know
what I dealt you. LBJ knew politics.
Nor do I romanticize the people. When I began reporting on the state
legislature while a student at the University of Texas, a wily old state
senator offered to acquaint me with how the place worked. We stood at the
back of the Senate floor as he pointed to his colleagues spread out around
the chamber -- playing cards, napping, nipping, winking at pretty young
visitors in the gallery -- and he said to me, If you think these guys are
bad, you should see the people who sent them there.
And yet, despite the flaws and contradictions of human nature -- or perhaps
because of them -- something took hold here. The American people forged a
civilization: that thin veneer of civility stretched across the passions of
the human heart. Because it can snap at any moment, or slowly weaken from
abuse and neglect until it fades away, civilization requires a commitment to
the notion (contrary to what those Marshall housewives believed) that we are
all in this together.
American democracy grew a soul, as it were -- given voice by one of our
greatest poets, Walt Whitman, with his all-inclusive embrace in Song of
Myself:
Whoever degrades another degrades me,
and whatever is done or said returns at last to me...
I speak the pass-word primeval -- I give the sign of democracy;
By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on
the same terms...
(I am large -- I contain multitudes.)
Author Kathleen Kennedy Townsend has vividly described Whitman seeing
himself in whomever he met in America. As he wrote in I Sing the Body
Electric:
-- the horseman in his saddle,
Girls, mothers, house-keepers, in all their performances,
The group of laborers seated at noon-time with their open dinner-kettles and
their wives waiting,
The female soothing a child -- the farmers daughter in the garden or
cow-yard,
The young fellow hoeing corn --
Whitmans words celebrate what Americans shared at a time when they were
less dependent on each other than we are today. As Townsend put it, Many
more people lived on farms in the nineteenth century, and so they could be a
lot more self-reliant; growing their own food, sewing their clothes,
building their homes. But rather than applauding what each American could
do in isolation, Whitman celebrated the vast chorus: I hear America
singing. The chorus he heard was of multitudinous voices, a mighty choir
of humanity.
Whitman saw something else in the soul of the country: Americans at work,
the laboring people whose toil and sweat built this nation. Townsend
contrasts his attitude with the way politicians and the media today -- in
their endless debates about wealth creation, capital gains reduction, and
high corporate taxes -- seem to have forgotten working people. But Whitman
wouldnt have forgotten them. She writes, He celebrates a nation where
everyone is worthy, not where a few do well.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood the soul of democracy, too.
He expressed it politically, although his words often ring like poetry.
Paradoxically, to this scion of the American aristocracy, the soul of
democracy meant political equality. Inside the polling booth, he said,
every American man and woman stands as the equal of every other American
man and woman. There they have no superiors. There they have no masters save
their own minds and consciences.
God knows it took us a long time to get there. Every claim of political
equality in our history has been met by fierce resistance from those who
relished for themselves what they would deny others. After President Abraham
Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation it took a century before Lyndon
Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 -- a hundred years of Jim Crow
law and Jim Crow lynchings, of forced labor and coerced segregation, of
beatings and bombings, of public humiliation and degradation, of courageous
but costly protests and demonstrations. Think of it: another hundred years
before the freedom won on the bloody battlefields of the Civil War was
finally secured in the law of the land.
And heres something else to think about: Only one of the women present at
the first womens rights convention in Seneca Falls in 1848 -- only one,
Charlotte Woodward -- lived long enough to see women actually get to vote.
We Pick That Rabbit Out of the Hat
So it was, in the face of constant resistance, that many heroes -- sung and
unsung -- sacrificed, suffered, and died so that all Americans could gain an
equal footing inside that voting booth on a level playing field on the
ground floor of democracy. And yet today money has become the great
unequalizer, the usurper of our democratic soul.
No one saw this more clearly than that conservative icon Barry Goldwater,
longtime Republican senator from Arizona and one-time Republican nominee for
the presidency. Here are his words from almost 30 years ago:
The fact that liberty depended on honest elections was of the utmost
importance to the patriots who founded our nation and wrote the
Constitution. They knew that corruption destroyed the prime requisite of
constitutional liberty: an independent legislature free from any influence
other than that of the people. Applying these principles to modern times,
we can make the following conclusions: To be successful, representative
government assumes that elections will be controlled by the citizenry at
large, not by those who give the most money. Electors must believe that
their vote counts. Elected officials must owe their allegiance to the
people, not to their own wealth or to the wealth of interest groups that
speak only for the selfish fringes of the whole community.
About the time Senator Goldwater was writing those words, Oliver Stone
released his movie Wall Street. Remember it? Michael Douglas played the
high roller Gordon Gekko, who used inside information obtained by his
ambitious young protégé, Bud Fox, to manipulate the stock of a company that
he intended to sell off for a huge personal windfall, while throwing its
workers, including Buds own blue-collar father, overboard. The younger man
is aghast and repentant at having participated in such duplicity and
chicanery, and he storms into Gekkos office to protest, asking, How much
is enough, Gordon?
Gekko answers:
The richest one percent of this country owns half our countrys wealth,
five trillion dollars
You got ninety percent of the American public out
there with little or no net worth. I create nothing. I own. We make the
rules, pal. The news, war, peace, famine, upheaval, the price per paper
clip. We pick that rabbit out of the hat while everybody sits out there
wondering how the hell we did it. Now, youre not naïve enough to think
were living in a democracy, are you, Buddy? Its the free market. And
youre part of it.
That was in the high-flying 1980s, the dawn of todays new gilded age. The
Greek historian Plutarch is said to have warned that an imbalance between
rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of a Republic. Yet as
the Washington Post pointed out recently, income inequality may be higher at
this moment than at any time in the American past.
When I was a young man in Washington in the 1960s, most of the countrys
growth accrued to the bottom 90% of households. From the end of World War
II until the early 1970s, in fact, income grew at a slightly faster rate at
the bottom and middle of American society than at the top. In 2009,
economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez explored decades of tax data and
found that from 1950 through 1980 the average income of the bottom 90% of
Americans had grown, from $ 17,719 to $ 30,941. That represented a 75%
increase in 2008 dollars.
Since 1980, the economy has continued to grow impressively, but most of the
benefits have migrated to the top. In these years, workers were more
productive but received less of the wealth they were helping to create. In
the late 1970s, the richest 1% received 9% of total income and held 19% of
the nations wealth. The share of total income going to that 1% would then
rise to more than 23% by 2007, while their share of total wealth would grow
to 35%. And that was all before the economic meltdown of 2007-2008.
Even though everyone took a hit during the recession that followed, the top
10% now hold more than three-quarters of the countrys total family wealth.
I know, I know: statistics have a way of causing eyes to glaze over, but
these statistics highlight an ugly truth about America: inequality matters.
It slows economic growth, undermines health, erodes social cohesion and
solidarity, and starves education. In their study The Spirit Level: Why
Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson
and Kate Pickett found that the most consistent predictor of mental illness,
infant mortality, low educational achievement, teenage births, homicides,
and incarceration was economic inequality.
So bear with me as I keep the statistics flowing. The Pew Research Center
recently released a new study indicating that, between 2000 and 2014, the
middle class shrank in virtually all parts of the country. Nine out of ten
metropolitan areas showed a decline in middle-class neighborhoods. And
remember, we arent even talking about over 45 million people who are living
in poverty. Meanwhile, between 2009 and 2013, that top 1% captured 85%
percent of all income growth. Even after the economy improved in 2015, they
still took in more than half of the income growth and by 2013 held nearly
half of all the stock and mutual fund assets Americans owned.
Now, concentrations of wealth would be far less of an issue if the rest of
society were benefitting proportionally. But that isnt the case.
Once upon a time, according to Isabel Sawhill and Sara McClanahan in their
2006 report Opportunity in America, the American ideal was one in which all
children had a roughly equal chance of success regardless of the economic
status of the family into which they were born.
Almost 10 years ago, economist Jeffrey Madrick wrote that, as recently as
the 1980s, economists thought that in the land of Horatio Alger only 20
percent of ones future income was determined by ones father's income. He
then cited research showing that, by 2007, 60 percent of a sons income
[was] determined by the level of income of the father. For women, it [was]
roughly the same. It may be even higher today, but clearly a child's chance
of success in life is greatly improved if hes born on third base and his
father has been tipping the umpire.
This raises an old question, one highlighted by the British critic and
public intellectual Terry Eagleton in an article in the Chronicle of Higher
Education:
Why is it that the capitalist West has accumulated more resources than
human history has ever witnessed, yet appears powerless to overcome poverty,
starvation, exploitation, and inequality?... Why does private wealth seem to
go hand in hand with public squalor? Is it... plausible to maintain that
there is something in the nature of capitalism itself which generates
deprivation and inequality?
The answer, to me, is self-evident. Capitalism produces winners and losers
big time. The winners use their wealth to gain political power, often
through campaign contributions and lobbying. In this way, they only
increase their influence over the choices made by the politicians indebted
to them. While there are certainly differences between Democrats and
Republicans on economic and social issues, both parties cater to wealthy
individuals and interests seeking to enrich their bottom lines with the help
of the policies of the state (loopholes, subsidies, tax breaks,
deregulation). No matter which party is in power, the interests of big
business are largely heeded.
More on that later, but first, a confession. The legendary broadcast
journalist Edward R. Murrow told his generation of journalists that bias is
okay as long as you dont try to hide it. Heres mine: plutocracy and
democracy dont mix. As the late (and great) Supreme Court Justice Louis
Brandeis said, We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in
the hands of a few, but we cant have both. Of course the rich can buy more
homes, cars, vacations, gadgets, and gizmos than anyone else, but they
should not be able to buy more democracy. That they can and do is a
despicable blot on American politics that is now spreading like a giant oil
spill.
In May, President Obama and I both spoke at the Rutgers University
commencement ceremony. He was at his inspirational best as 50,000 people
leaned into every word. He lifted the hearts of those young men and women
heading out into our troubled world, but I cringed when he said, Contrary
to what we hear sometimes from both the left as well as the right, the
system isnt as rigged as you think...
Wrong, Mr. President, just plain wrong. The people are way ahead of you on
this. In a recent poll, 71% of Americans across lines of ethnicity, class,
age, and gender said they believe the U.S. economy is rigged. People
reported that they are working harder for financial security. One quarter
of the respondents had not taken a vacation in more than five years.
Seventy-one percent said that they are afraid of unexpected medical bills;
53% feared not being able to make a mortgage payment; and, among renters,
60% worried that they might not make the monthly rent.
Millions of Americans, in other words, are living on the edge. Yet the
country has not confronted the question of how we will continue to prosper
without a workforce that can pay for its goods and services.
Who Dunnit?
You didnt have to read Das Kapital to see this coming or to realize that
the United States was being transformed into one of the harshest, most
unforgiving societies among the industrial democracies. You could instead
have read the Economist, arguably the most influential business-friendly
magazine in the English-speaking world. I keep in my files a warning
published in that magazine a dozen years ago, on the eve of George W. Bushs
second term. The editors concluded back then that, with income inequality
in the U.S. reaching levels not seen since the first Gilded Age and social
mobility diminishing, the United States risks calcifying into a
European-style class-based society.
And mind you, that was before the financial meltdown of 2007-2008, before
the bailout of Wall Street, before the recession that only widened the gap
between the super-rich and everyone else. Ever since then, the great sucking
sound weve been hearing is wealth heading upwards. The United States now
has a level of income inequality unprecedented in our history and so
dramatic its almost impossible to wrap ones mind around.
Contrary to what the president said at Rutgers, this is not the way the
world works; its the way the world is made to work by those with the money
and power. The movers and shakers -- the big winners -- keep repeating the
mantra that this inequality was inevitable, the result of the globalization
of finance and advances in technology in an increasingly complex world.
Those are part of the story, but only part. As G.K. Chesterton wrote a
century ago, In every serious doctrine of the destiny of men, there is some
trace of the doctrine of the equality of men. But the capitalist really
depends on some religion of inequality.
Exactly. In our case, a religion of invention, not revelation, politically
engineered over the last 40 years. Yes, politically engineered. On this
development, you cant do better than read Winner Take All Politics: How
Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class by
Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, the Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson of
political science.
They were mystified by what had happened to the post-World War II notion of
shared prosperity; puzzled by the ways in which ever more wealth has gone
to the rich and super rich; vexed that hedge-fund managers pull in billions
of dollars, yet pay taxes at lower rates than their secretaries; curious
about why politicians kept slashing taxes on the very rich and handing huge
tax breaks and subsidies to corporations that are downsizing their work
forces; troubled that the heart of the American Dream -- upward mobility --
seemed to have stopped beating; and dumbfounded that all of this could
happen in a democracy whose politicians were supposed to serve the greatest
good for the greatest number. So Hacker and Pierson set out to find out how
our economy stopped working to provide prosperity and security for the broad
middle class.
In other words, they wanted to know: Who dunnit? They found the culprit.
With convincing documentation they concluded, Step by step and debate by
debate, Americas 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: the winners bought off the gatekeepers, then gamed the
system. And when the fix was in they turned our economy into a feast for
the predators, saddling Americans with greater debt, tearing new holes in
the safety net, and imposing broad financial risks on Americans as workers,
investors, and taxpayers. The end result, Hacker and Pierson conclude, is
that 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 larger and larger with
everyone in between just barely getting by.
Bruce Springsteen sings of the country we carry in our hearts. This isnt
it.
Gods Work
Looking back, you have to wonder how we could have ignored the warning
signs. In the 1970s, Big Business began to refine its ability to act as a
class and gang up on Congress. Even before the Supreme Courts Citizens
United decision, political action committees deluged politics with dollars.
Foundations, corporations, and rich individuals funded think tanks that
churned out study after study with results skewed to their ideology and
interests. Political strategists made alliances with the religious right,
with Jerry Falwells Moral Majority and Pat Robertsons Christian Coalition,
to zealously wage a cultural holy war that would camouflage the economic
assault on working people and the middle class.
To help cover-up this heist of the economy, an appealing intellectual gloss
was needed. So public intellectuals were recruited and subsidized to turn
globalization, neo-liberalism, and the Washington Consensus into a
theological belief system. The dismal science of economics became a
miracle of faith. Wall Street glistened as the new Promised Land, while few
noticed that those angels dancing on the head of a pin were really
witchdoctors with MBAs brewing voodoo magic. The greed of the Gordon Gekkos
-- once considered a vice -- was transformed into a virtue. One of the high
priests of this faith, Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, looking in
wonder on all that his company had wrought, pronounced it Gods work.
A prominent neoconservative religious philosopher even articulated a
theology of the corporation. I kid you not. And its devotees lifted
their voices in hymns of praise to wealth creation as participation in the
Kingdom of Heaven here on Earth. Self-interest became the Gospel of the
Gilded Age.
No one today articulates this winner-take-all philosophy more candidly than
Ray Dalio. Think of him as the King Midas of hedge funds, with a personal
worth estimated at almost $16 billion and a company, Bridgewater Associates,
reportedly worth as much as $154 billion.
Dalio fancies himself a philosopher and has written a book of maxims
explaining his philosophy. It boils down to: Be a hyena. Attack the
Wildebeest. (Wildebeests, antelopes native to southern Africa -- as I
learned when we once filmed a documentary there -- are no match for the
flesh-eating dog-like spotted hyenas that gorge on them.) Heres what Dalio
wrote about being a Wall Street hyena:
when a pack of hyenas takes down a young wildebeest, is this good or bad?
At face value, this seems terrible; the poor wildebeest suffers and dies.
Some people might even say that the hyenas are evil. Yet this type of
apparently evil behavior exists throughout nature through all species...
like death itself, this behavior is integral to the enormously complex and
efficient system that has worked for as long as there has been life... [It]
is good for both the hyenas, who are operating in their self-interest, and
the interests of the greater system, which includes the wildebeest, because
killing and eating the wildebeest fosters evolution, i.e., the natural
process of improvement... Like the hyenas attacking the wildebeest,
successful people might not even know if or how their pursuit of
self-interest helps evolution, but it typically does.
He concludes: How much money people have earned is a rough measure of how
much they gave society what it wanted...
Not this time, Ray. This time, the free market for hyenas became a
slaughterhouse for the wildebeest. Collapsing shares and house prices
destroyed more than a quarter of the wealth of the average household. Many
people have yet to recover from the crash and recession that followed. They
are still saddled with burdensome debt; their retirement accounts are still
anemic. All of this was, by the hyenas accounting, a social good, an
improvement in the natural process, as Dalio puts it. Nonsense. Bull.
Human beings have struggled long and hard to build civilization; his
doctrine of progress is taking us back to the jungle.
And by the way, theres a footnote to the Dalio story. Early this year, the
founder of the worlds largest hedge fund, and by many accounts the richest
man in Connecticut where it is headquartered, threatened to take his firm
elsewhere if he didnt get concessions from the state. You might have
thought that the governor, a Democrat, would have thrown him out of his
office for the implicit threat involved. But no, he buckled and Dalio got
the $22 million in aid -- a $5 million grant and a $17 million loan -- that
he was demanding to expand his operations. Its a loan that may be forgiven
if he keeps jobs in Connecticut and creates new ones. No doubt he left the
governors office grinning like a hyena, his shoes tracking wildebeest blood
across the carpet.
Our founders warned against the power of privileged factions to capture the
machinery of democracies. James Madison, who studied history through a
tragic lens, saw that the life cycle of previous republics had degenerated
into anarchy, monarchy, or oligarchy. Like many of his colleagues, he was
well aware that the republic they were creating could go the same way.
Distrusting, even detesting concentrated private power, the founders
attempted to erect safeguards to prevent private interests from subverting
the moral and political compact that begins, We, the people. For a while,
they succeeded.
When the brilliant young French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville toured
America in the 1830s, he was excited by the democratic fervor he witnessed.
Perhaps that excitement caused him to exaggerate the equality he celebrated.
Close readers of de Tocqueville will notice, however, that he did warn of
the staying power of the aristocracy, even in this new country. He feared
what he called, in the second volume of his masterwork, Democracy in
America, an aristocracy created by business. He described it as already
among the harshest that ever existed in the world and suggested that, if
ever a permanent inequality of conditions and aristocracy again penetrate
the world, it may be predicted that this is the gate by which they will
enter.
And so it did. Half a century later, the Gilded Age arrived with a new
aristocratic hierarchy of industrialists, robber barons, and Wall Street
tycoons in the vanguard. They had their own apologist in the person of
William Graham Sumner, an Episcopal minister turned professor of political
economy at Yale University. He famously explained that competition... is a
law of nature and that nature grants her rewards to the fittest,
therefore, without regard to other considerations of any kind.
From Sumners essays to the ravenous excesses of Wall Street in the 1920s to
the ravings of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Fox News, to the business
presss wide-eyed awe of hyena-like CEOs; from the Republican war on
government to the Democratic Partys shameless obeisance to big corporations
and contributors, this law of nature has served to legitimate the yawning
inequality of income and wealth, even as it has protected networks of
privilege and monopolies in major industries like the media, the tech
sector, and the airlines.
A plethora of studies conclude that Americas political system has already
been transformed from a democracy into an oligarchy (the rule of a wealthy
elite). Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, for instance, studied data from
1,800 different policy initiatives launched between 1981 and 2002. They
found that economic elites and organized groups representing business
interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy
while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no
independent influence. Whether Republican or Democratic, they concluded,
the government more often follows the preferences of major lobbying or
business groups than it does those of ordinary citizens.
We can only be amazed that a privileged faction in a fervent culture of
politically protected greed brought us to the brink of a second Great
Depression, then blamed government and a dependent 47% of the population
for our problems, and ended up richer and more powerful than ever.
The Truth of Your Life
Which brings us back to those Marshall housewives -- to all those who simply
cant see beyond their own prerogatives and so narrowly define membership in
democracy to include only people like themselves.
How would I help them recoup their sanity, come home to democracy, and help
build the sort of moral compact embodied in the preamble to the
Constitution, that declaration of Americas intent and identity?
First, Id do my best to remind them that societies can die of too much
inequality.
Second, Id give them copies of anthropologist Jared Diamonds book
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed to remind them that we are
not immune. Diamond won the Pulitzer Prize for describing how the damage
humans have inflicted on their environment has historically led to the
decline of civilizations. In the process, he vividly depicts how elites
repeatedly isolate and delude themselves until its too late. How,
extracting wealth from commoners, they remain well fed while everyone else
is slowly starving until, in the end, even they (or their offspring) become
casualties of their own privilege. Any society, it turns out, contains a
built-in blueprint for failure if elites insulate themselves endlessly from
the consequences of their decisions.
Third, Id discuss the real meaning of sacrifice and bliss with them.
That was the title of the fourth episode of my PBS series Joseph Campbell
and the Power of Myth. In that episode, Campbell and I discussed the
influence on him of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who believed
that the will to live is the fundamental reality of human nature. So he
puzzled about why some people override it and give up their lives for
others.
Can this happen? Campbell asked. That what we normally think of as the
first law of nature, namely self-preservation, is suddenly dissolved. What
creates that breakthrough when we put anothers well-being ahead of our
own? He then told me of an incident that took place near his home in
Hawaii, up in the heights where the trade winds from the north come rushing
through a great ridge of mountains. People go there to experience the force
of nature, to let their hair be blown in the winds -- and sometimes to
commit suicide.
One day, two policemen were driving up that road when, just beyond the
railing, they saw a young man about to jump. One of the policemen bolted
from the car and grabbed the fellow just as he was stepping off the ledge.
His momentum threatened to carry both of them over the cliff, but the
policeman refused to let go. Somehow he held on long enough for his partner
to arrive and pull the two of them to safety. When a newspaper reporter
asked, Why didnt you let go? You would have been killed, he answered: I
couldnt... I couldnt let go. If I had, I couldnt have lived another day
of my life.
Campbell then added: Do you realize what had suddenly happened to that
policeman? He had given himself over to death to save a stranger.
Everything else in his life dropped off. His duty to his family, his duty to
his job, his duty to his own career, all of his wishes and hopes for life,
just disappeared. What mattered was saving that young man, even at the cost
of his own life.
How can this be, Campbell asked? Schopenhauers answer, he said, was that a
psychological crisis represents the breakthrough of a metaphysical reality,
which is that you and the other are two aspects of one life, and your
apparent separateness is but an effect of the way we experience forms under
the conditions of space and time. Our true reality is our identity and
unity with all life.
Sometimes, however instinctively or consciously, our actions affirm that
reality through some unselfish gesture or personal sacrifice. It happens in
marriage, in parenting, in our relations with the people immediately around
us, and in our participation in building a society based on reciprocity.
The truth of our country isnt actually so complicated. Its in the moral
compact implicit in the preamble to our Constitution: were all in this
together. We are all one anothers first responders. As the writer Alberto
Rios once put it, I am in your family tree and you are in mine.
I realize that the command to love our neighbor is one of the hardest of all
religious concepts, but I also recognize that our connection to others goes
to the core of lifes mystery and to the survival of democracy. When we
claim this as the truth of our lives -- when we live as if its so -- we are
threading ourselves into the long train of history and the fabric of
civilization; we are becoming we, the people.
The religion of inequality -- of money and power -- has failed us; its gods
are false gods. There is something more essential -- more profound -- in
the American experience than the hyenas appetite. Once we recognize and
nurture this, once we honor it, we can reboot democracy and get on with the
work of liberating the country we carry in our hearts.
Bill Moyers has been an organizer of the Peace Corps, a top White House
aide, a publisher, and a prolific broadcast journalist whose work earned 37
Emmy Awards and nine Peabody Awards. He is president of the Schumann Media
Center, which supports independent journalism. This essay is adapted from
remarks he prepared for delivery this past summer at the Chautauqua
Institutions week-long focus on money and power. He is grateful to his
colleagues Karen Kimball and Gail Ablow for their research and fact
checking.
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and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2016 Bill Moyers
© 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176184
Tomgram: Bill Moyers, Money and Power in America
By Bill Moyers
Posted on September 11, 2016, Printed on September 11, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176184/ ;
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Its an honor to have a remarkable piece
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Anger and Mourning on the American Right. Tom]
Hope: its in short supply in America this year. I was reminded of that
recently when I spoke at a kick-off event for the school year hosted by the
Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas. The Institutes
namesake is, of course, Bob Dole, the war hero turned Republican
congressman, senator, minority and then majority leader, and finally
presidential nominee in 1996. On a beautiful summer evening, on the front
lawn of the Institute, my host, a KU senior named Cody, and I discussed --
what else is there to talk about this year? -- The Donald, Hillary, and
Bernie. Then we plunged into the perilous topic of the media and its curious
future and the life of a journalist (me) covering the gravity-defying
spectacle commonly known as election 2016. More than 100 students showed up
-- nothing to do, Im sure, with the free burgers and soda -- and when it
came time for the Q-and-A portion of the event, I couldnt help but be
struck by the acuity and thoughtfulness of their questions.
Afterward, I met a smaller group of them at a nearby basement bar. During my
five years as an undergraduate, I cant recall having a conversation as
substantive as that evenings. Kansass state government, led by its
governor, Sam Brownback, has plunged into a radical experiment in
conservative governing, and it was on their minds. We talked about a
variety of depressing topics, including the devastating effects of the
legislatures repeated budget cuts to higher education and another grim
signature legislative issue: the open carry of guns on campus. No gun
signs were ubiquitous there, but everyone wondered: For how long? The
students spoke eloquently and knowledgeably. More than that, they spoke with
passion and in detail about how such problems might be dealt with and even
fixed, and they did so with the Dole Institutes bipartisan ethos in mind.
Some of it may have been the youthful idealism of the undergraduate but,
believe me, it was refreshing.
I say all this because, as a journalist in this crazy year of our lord 2016,
on a good day the temptation is to tilt toward cynicism. Its our job to
rake the muck and expose the trolls, to cast light on the wrongdoing and the
failings in our society, but its up to others to set them right. Today, at
this site, Bill Moyers writes about the greatest failing, the true disaster,
of our time: the scourge of growing inequality, economic and political. He
describes it as a despicable blot on American politics, as the very
wealthy convert their financial might into political power to guard that
wealth while exacerbating inequality further. The statistics Moyers deploys
are chilling. Consume enough of them and youre liable to feel a bit gloomy.
But like those undergraduates, Moyers (very distinctly a post-graduate of
our difficult political world) holds onto the hope, as todays piece
suggests, that Americans can still fix our world, make it a better place.
Those students I met gave me hope and Moyers does the same -- hope for a
more equitable future brought on by the hard work of Americans, whether as
journalists, legislators, or activists, as lawyers, doctors, engineers, or
teachers. These are strange, often grim, times, and such bursts of hope are
what keep us going. Andy Kroll
We, the Plutocrats vs. We, the People
Saving the Soul of Democracy
By Bill Moyers
Sixty-six years ago this summer, on my 16th birthday, I went to work for the
daily newspaper in the small East Texas town of Marshall where I grew up. It
was a good place to be a cub reporter -- small enough to navigate but big
enough to keep me busy and learning something every day. I soon had a stroke
of luck. Some of the papers old hands were on vacation or out sick and I
was assigned to help cover what came to be known across the country as the
housewives' rebellion.
Fifteen women in my hometown decided not to pay the social security
withholding tax for their domestic workers. Those housewives were white,
their housekeepers black. Almost half of all employed black women in the
country then were in domestic service. Because they tended to earn lower
wages, accumulate less savings, and be stuck in those jobs all their lives,
social security was their only insurance against poverty in old age. Yet
their plight did not move their employers.
The housewives argued that social security was unconstitutional and imposing
it was taxation without representation. They even equated it with slavery.
They also claimed that requiring us to collect [the tax] is no different
from requiring us to collect the garbage. So they hired a high-powered
lawyer -- a notorious former congressman from Texas who had once chaired the
House Un-American Activities Committee -- and took their case to court. They
lost, and eventually wound up holding their noses and paying the tax, but
not before their rebellion had become national news.
The stories I helped report for the local paper were picked up and carried
across the country by the Associated Press. One day, the managing editor
called me over and pointed to the AP Teletype machine beside his desk.
Moving across the wire was a notice citing our paper and its reporters for
our coverage of the housewives' rebellion.
I was hooked, and in one way or another Ive continued to engage the issues
of money and power, equality and democracy over a lifetime spent at the
intersection between politics and journalism. It took me awhile to put the
housewives' rebellion into perspective. Race played a role, of course.
Marshall was a segregated, antebellum town of 20,000, half of whom were
white, the other half black. White ruled, but more than race was at work.
Those 15 housewives were respectable townsfolk, good neighbors, regulars at
church (some of them at my church). Their children were my friends; many of
them were active in community affairs; and their husbands were pillars of
the towns business and professional class.
So what brought on that spasm of rebellion? They simply couldnt see beyond
their own prerogatives. Fiercely loyal to their families, their clubs, their
charities, and their congregations -- fiercely loyal, that is, to their own
kind -- they narrowly defined membership in democracy to include only people
like themselves. They expected to be comfortable and secure in their old
age, but the women who washed and ironed their laundry, wiped their
childrens bottoms, made their husbands beds, and cooked their familys
meals would also grow old and frail, sick and decrepit, lose their husbands
and face the ravages of time alone, with nothing to show from their years of
labor but the crease in their brow and the knots on their knuckles.
In one way or another, this is the oldest story in our countrys history:
the struggle to determine whether we, the people is a metaphysical reality
-- one nation, indivisible -- or merely a charade masquerading as piety and
manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life
at the expense of others.
I Contain Multitudes
There is a vast difference between a society whose arrangements roughly
serve all its citizens and one whose institutions have been converted into a
stupendous fraud, a democracy in name only. I have no doubt about what the
United States of America was meant to be. Its spelled out right there in
the 52 most revolutionary words in our founding documents, the preamble to
our Constitution, proclaiming the sovereignty of the people as the moral
base of government:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union,
establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common
defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to
ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for
the United States of America.
What do those words mean, if not that we are all in the business of
nation-building together?
Now, I recognize that weve never been a country of angels guided by a
presidium of saints. Early America was a moral morass. One in five people in
the new nation was enslaved. Justice for the poor meant stocks and
stockades. Women suffered virtual peonage. Heretics were driven into exile,
or worse. Native people -- the Indians -- would be forcibly removed from
their land, their fate a trail of tears and broken treaties.
No, Im not a romantic about our history and I harbor no idealized notions
of politics and democracy. Remember, I worked for President Lyndon Johnson.
I heard him often repeat the story of the Texas poker shark who leaned
across the table and said to his mark: Play the cards fair, Reuben. I know
what I dealt you. LBJ knew politics.
Nor do I romanticize the people. When I began reporting on the state
legislature while a student at the University of Texas, a wily old state
senator offered to acquaint me with how the place worked. We stood at the
back of the Senate floor as he pointed to his colleagues spread out around
the chamber -- playing cards, napping, nipping, winking at pretty young
visitors in the gallery -- and he said to me, If you think these guys are
bad, you should see the people who sent them there.
And yet, despite the flaws and contradictions of human nature -- or perhaps
because of them -- something took hold here. The American people forged a
civilization: that thin veneer of civility stretched across the passions of
the human heart. Because it can snap at any moment, or slowly weaken from
abuse and neglect until it fades away, civilization requires a commitment to
the notion (contrary to what those Marshall housewives believed) that we are
all in this together.
American democracy grew a soul, as it were -- given voice by one of our
greatest poets, Walt Whitman, with his all-inclusive embrace in Song of
Myself:
Whoever degrades another degrades me,
and whatever is done or said returns at last to me...
I speak the pass-word primeval -- I give the sign of democracy;
By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on
the same terms...
(I am large -- I contain multitudes.)
Author Kathleen Kennedy Townsend has vividly described Whitman seeing
himself in whomever he met in America. As he wrote in I Sing the Body
Electric:
-- the horseman in his saddle,
Girls, mothers, house-keepers, in all their performances,
The group of laborers seated at noon-time with their open dinner-kettles and
their wives waiting,
The female soothing a child -- the farmers daughter in the garden or
cow-yard,
The young fellow hoeing corn --
Whitmans words celebrate what Americans shared at a time when they were
less dependent on each other than we are today. As Townsend put it, Many
more people lived on farms in the nineteenth century, and so they could be a
lot more self-reliant; growing their own food, sewing their clothes,
building their homes. But rather than applauding what each American could do
in isolation, Whitman celebrated the vast chorus: I hear America singing.
The chorus he heard was of multitudinous voices, a mighty choir of humanity.
Whitman saw something else in the soul of the country: Americans at work,
the laboring people whose toil and sweat built this nation. Townsend
contrasts his attitude with the way politicians and the media today -- in
their endless debates about wealth creation, capital gains reduction, and
high corporate taxes -- seem to have forgotten working people. But Whitman
wouldnt have forgotten them. She writes, He celebrates a nation where
everyone is worthy, not where a few do well.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood the soul of democracy, too.
He expressed it politically, although his words often ring like poetry.
Paradoxically, to this scion of the American aristocracy, the soul of
democracy meant political equality. Inside the polling booth, he said,
every American man and woman stands as the equal of every other American
man and woman. There they have no superiors. There they have no masters save
their own minds and consciences.
God knows it took us a long time to get there. Every claim of political
equality in our history has been met by fierce resistance from those who
relished for themselves what they would deny others. After President Abraham
Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation it took a century before Lyndon
Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 -- a hundred years of Jim Crow
law and Jim Crow lynchings, of forced labor and coerced segregation, of
beatings and bombings, of public humiliation and degradation, of courageous
but costly protests and demonstrations. Think of it: another hundred years
before the freedom won on the bloody battlefields of the Civil War was
finally secured in the law of the land.
And heres something else to think about: Only one of the women present at
the first womens rights convention in Seneca Falls in 1848 -- only one,
Charlotte Woodward -- lived long enough to see women actually get to vote.
We Pick That Rabbit Out of the Hat
So it was, in the face of constant resistance, that many heroes -- sung and
unsung -- sacrificed, suffered, and died so that all Americans could gain an
equal footing inside that voting booth on a level playing field on the
ground floor of democracy. And yet today money has become the great
unequalizer, the usurper of our democratic soul.
No one saw this more clearly than that conservative icon Barry Goldwater,
longtime Republican senator from Arizona and one-time Republican nominee for
the presidency. Here are his words from almost 30 years ago:
The fact that liberty depended on honest elections was of the utmost
importance to the patriots who founded our nation and wrote the
Constitution. They knew that corruption destroyed the prime requisite of
constitutional liberty: an independent legislature free from any influence
other than that of the people. Applying these principles to modern times, we
can make the following conclusions: To be successful, representative
government assumes that elections will be controlled by the citizenry at
large, not by those who give the most money. Electors must believe that
their vote counts. Elected officials must owe their allegiance to the
people, not to their own wealth or to the wealth of interest groups that
speak only for the selfish fringes of the whole community.
About the time Senator Goldwater was writing those words, Oliver Stone
released his movie Wall Street. Remember it? Michael Douglas played the high
roller Gordon Gekko, who used inside information obtained by his ambitious
young protégé, Bud Fox, to manipulate the stock of a company that he
intended to sell off for a huge personal windfall, while throwing its
workers, including Buds own blue-collar father, overboard. The younger man
is aghast and repentant at having participated in such duplicity and
chicanery, and he storms into Gekkos office to protest, asking, How much
is enough, Gordon?
Gekko answers:
The richest one percent of this country owns half our countrys wealth,
five trillion dollars
You got ninety percent of the American public out
there with little or no net worth. I create nothing. I own. We make the
rules, pal. The news, war, peace, famine, upheaval, the price per paper
clip. We pick that rabbit out of the hat while everybody sits out there
wondering how the hell we did it. Now, youre not naïve enough to think
were living in a democracy, are you, Buddy? Its the free market. And
youre part of it.
That was in the high-flying 1980s, the dawn of todays new gilded age. The
Greek historian Plutarch is said to have warned that an imbalance between
rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of a Republic. Yet as
the Washington Post pointed out recently, income inequality may be higher at
this moment than at any time in the American past.
When I was a young man in Washington in the 1960s, most of the countrys
growth accrued to the bottom 90% of households. From the end of World War II
until the early 1970s, in fact, income grew at a slightly faster rate at the
bottom and middle of American society than at the top. In 2009, economists
Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez explored decades of tax data and found that
from 1950 through 1980 the average income of the bottom 90% of Americans had
grown, from $ 17,719 to $ 30,941. That represented a 75% increase in 2008
dollars.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608466485/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608466485/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20Since 1980,
the economy has continued to grow impressively, but most of the benefits
have migrated to the top. In these years, workers were more productive but
received less of the wealth they were helping to create. In the late 1970s,
the richest 1% received 9% of total income and held 19% of the nations
wealth. The share of total income going to that 1% would then rise to more
than 23% by 2007, while their share of total wealth would grow to 35%. And
that was all before the economic meltdown of 2007-2008.
Even though everyone took a hit during the recession that followed, the top
10% now hold more than three-quarters of the countrys total family wealth.
I know, I know: statistics have a way of causing eyes to glaze over, but
these statistics highlight an ugly truth about America: inequality matters.
It slows economic growth, undermines health, erodes social cohesion and
solidarity, and starves education. In their study The Spirit Level: Why
Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson
and Kate Pickett found that the most consistent predictor of mental illness,
infant mortality, low educational achievement, teenage births, homicides,
and incarceration was economic inequality.
So bear with me as I keep the statistics flowing. The Pew Research Center
recently released a new study indicating that, between 2000 and 2014, the
middle class shrank in virtually all parts of the country. Nine out of ten
metropolitan areas showed a decline in middle-class neighborhoods. And
remember, we arent even talking about over 45 million people who are living
in poverty. Meanwhile, between 2009 and 2013, that top 1% captured 85%
percent of all income growth. Even after the economy improved in 2015, they
still took in more than half of the income growth and by 2013 held nearly
half of all the stock and mutual fund assets Americans owned.
Now, concentrations of wealth would be far less of an issue if the rest of
society were benefitting proportionally. But that isnt the case.
Once upon a time, according to Isabel Sawhill and Sara McClanahan in their
2006 report Opportunity in America, the American ideal was one in which all
children had a roughly equal chance of success regardless of the economic
status of the family into which they were born.
Almost 10 years ago, economist Jeffrey Madrick wrote that, as recently as
the 1980s, economists thought that in the land of Horatio Alger only 20
percent of ones future income was determined by ones father's income. He
then cited research showing that, by 2007, 60 percent of a sons income
[was] determined by the level of income of the father. For women, it [was]
roughly the same. It may be even higher today, but clearly a child's chance
of success in life is greatly improved if hes born on third base and his
father has been tipping the umpire.
This raises an old question, one highlighted by the British critic and
public intellectual Terry Eagleton in an article in the Chronicle of Higher
Education:
Why is it that the capitalist West has accumulated more resources than
human history has ever witnessed, yet appears powerless to overcome poverty,
starvation, exploitation, and inequality?... Why does private wealth seem to
go hand in hand with public squalor? Is it... plausible to maintain that
there is something in the nature of capitalism itself which generates
deprivation and inequality?
The answer, to me, is self-evident. Capitalism produces winners and losers
big time. The winners use their wealth to gain political power, often
through campaign contributions and lobbying. In this way, they only increase
their influence over the choices made by the politicians indebted to them.
While there are certainly differences between Democrats and Republicans on
economic and social issues, both parties cater to wealthy individuals and
interests seeking to enrich their bottom lines with the help of the policies
of the state (loopholes, subsidies, tax breaks, deregulation). No matter
which party is in power, the interests of big business are largely heeded.
More on that later, but first, a confession. The legendary broadcast
journalist Edward R. Murrow told his generation of journalists that bias is
okay as long as you dont try to hide it. Heres mine: plutocracy and
democracy dont mix. As the late (and great) Supreme Court Justice Louis
Brandeis said, We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in
the hands of a few, but we cant have both. Of course the rich can buy more
homes, cars, vacations, gadgets, and gizmos than anyone else, but they
should not be able to buy more democracy. That they can and do is a
despicable blot on American politics that is now spreading like a giant oil
spill.
In May, President Obama and I both spoke at the Rutgers University
commencement ceremony. He was at his inspirational best as 50,000 people
leaned into every word. He lifted the hearts of those young men and women
heading out into our troubled world, but I cringed when he said, Contrary
to what we hear sometimes from both the left as well as the right, the
system isnt as rigged as you think...
Wrong, Mr. President, just plain wrong. The people are way ahead of you on
this. In a recent poll, 71% of Americans across lines of ethnicity, class,
age, and gender said they believe the U.S. economy is rigged. People
reported that they are working harder for financial security. One quarter of
the respondents had not taken a vacation in more than five years.
Seventy-one percent said that they are afraid of unexpected medical bills;
53% feared not being able to make a mortgage payment; and, among renters,
60% worried that they might not make the monthly rent.
Millions of Americans, in other words, are living on the edge. Yet the
country has not confronted the question of how we will continue to prosper
without a workforce that can pay for its goods and services.
Who Dunnit?
You didnt have to read Das Kapital to see this coming or to realize that
the United States was being transformed into one of the harshest, most
unforgiving societies among the industrial democracies. You could instead
have read the Economist, arguably the most influential business-friendly
magazine in the English-speaking world. I keep in my files a warning
published in that magazine a dozen years ago, on the eve of George W. Bushs
second term. The editors concluded back then that, with income inequality in
the U.S. reaching levels not seen since the first Gilded Age and social
mobility diminishing, the United States risks calcifying into a
European-style class-based society.
And mind you, that was before the financial meltdown of 2007-2008, before
the bailout of Wall Street, before the recession that only widened the gap
between the super-rich and everyone else. Ever since then, the great sucking
sound weve been hearing is wealth heading upwards. The United States now
has a level of income inequality unprecedented in our history and so
dramatic its almost impossible to wrap ones mind around.
Contrary to what the president said at Rutgers, this is not the way the
world works; its the way the world is made to work by those with the money
and power. The movers and shakers -- the big winners -- keep repeating the
mantra that this inequality was inevitable, the result of the globalization
of finance and advances in technology in an increasingly complex world.
Those are part of the story, but only part. As G.K. Chesterton wrote a
century ago, In every serious doctrine of the destiny of men, there is some
trace of the doctrine of the equality of men. But the capitalist really
depends on some religion of inequality.
Exactly. In our case, a religion of invention, not revelation, politically
engineered over the last 40 years. Yes, politically engineered. On this
development, you cant do better than read Winner Take All Politics: How
Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class by
Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, the Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson of
political science.
They were mystified by what had happened to the post-World War II notion of
shared prosperity; puzzled by the ways in which ever more wealth has gone
to the rich and super rich; vexed that hedge-fund managers pull in billions
of dollars, yet pay taxes at lower rates than their secretaries; curious
about why politicians kept slashing taxes on the very rich and handing huge
tax breaks and subsidies to corporations that are downsizing their work
forces; troubled that the heart of the American Dream -- upward mobility --
seemed to have stopped beating; and dumbfounded that all of this could
happen in a democracy whose politicians were supposed to serve the greatest
good for the greatest number. So Hacker and Pierson set out to find out how
our economy stopped working to provide prosperity and security for the broad
middle class.
In other words, they wanted to know: Who dunnit? They found the culprit.
With convincing documentation they concluded, Step by step and debate by
debate, Americas 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: the winners bought off the gatekeepers, then gamed the
system. And when the fix was in they turned our economy into a feast for the
predators, saddling Americans with greater debt, tearing new holes in the
safety net, and imposing broad financial risks on Americans as workers,
investors, and taxpayers. The end result, Hacker and Pierson conclude, is
that 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 larger and larger with
everyone in between just barely getting by.
Bruce Springsteen sings of the country we carry in our hearts. This isnt
it.
Gods Work
Looking back, you have to wonder how we could have ignored the warning
signs. In the 1970s, Big Business began to refine its ability to act as a
class and gang up on Congress. Even before the Supreme Courts Citizens
United decision, political action committees deluged politics with dollars.
Foundations, corporations, and rich individuals funded think tanks that
churned out study after study with results skewed to their ideology and
interests. Political strategists made alliances with the religious right,
with Jerry Falwells Moral Majority and Pat Robertsons Christian Coalition,
to zealously wage a cultural holy war that would camouflage the economic
assault on working people and the middle class.
To help cover-up this heist of the economy, an appealing intellectual gloss
was needed. So public intellectuals were recruited and subsidized to turn
globalization, neo-liberalism, and the Washington Consensus into a
theological belief system. The dismal science of economics became a
miracle of faith. Wall Street glistened as the new Promised Land, while few
noticed that those angels dancing on the head of a pin were really
witchdoctors with MBAs brewing voodoo magic. The greed of the Gordon Gekkos
-- once considered a vice -- was transformed into a virtue. One of the high
priests of this faith, Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, looking in
wonder on all that his company had wrought, pronounced it Gods work.
A prominent neoconservative religious philosopher even articulated a
theology of the corporation. I kid you not. And its devotees lifted their
voices in hymns of praise to wealth creation as participation in the Kingdom
of Heaven here on Earth. Self-interest became the Gospel of the Gilded Age.
No one today articulates this winner-take-all philosophy more candidly than
Ray Dalio. Think of him as the King Midas of hedge funds, with a personal
worth estimated at almost $16 billion and a company, Bridgewater Associates,
reportedly worth as much as $154 billion.
Dalio fancies himself a philosopher and has written a book of maxims
explaining his philosophy. It boils down to: Be a hyena. Attack the
Wildebeest. (Wildebeests, antelopes native to southern Africa -- as I
learned when we once filmed a documentary there -- are no match for the
flesh-eating dog-like spotted hyenas that gorge on them.) Heres what Dalio
wrote about being a Wall Street hyena:
when a pack of hyenas takes down a young wildebeest, is this good or bad?
At face value, this seems terrible; the poor wildebeest suffers and dies.
Some people might even say that the hyenas are evil. Yet this type of
apparently evil behavior exists throughout nature through all species...
like death itself, this behavior is integral to the enormously complex and
efficient system that has worked for as long as there has been life... [It]
is good for both the hyenas, who are operating in their self-interest, and
the interests of the greater system, which includes the wildebeest, because
killing and eating the wildebeest fosters evolution, i.e., the natural
process of improvement... Like the hyenas attacking the wildebeest,
successful people might not even know if or how their pursuit of
self-interest helps evolution, but it typically does.
He concludes: How much money people have earned is a rough measure of how
much they gave society what it wanted...
Not this time, Ray. This time, the free market for hyenas became a
slaughterhouse for the wildebeest. Collapsing shares and house prices
destroyed more than a quarter of the wealth of the average household. Many
people have yet to recover from the crash and recession that followed. They
are still saddled with burdensome debt; their retirement accounts are still
anemic. All of this was, by the hyenas accounting, a social good, an
improvement in the natural process, as Dalio puts it. Nonsense. Bull. Human
beings have struggled long and hard to build civilization; his doctrine of
progress is taking us back to the jungle.
And by the way, theres a footnote to the Dalio story. Early this year, the
founder of the worlds largest hedge fund, and by many accounts the richest
man in Connecticut where it is headquartered, threatened to take his firm
elsewhere if he didnt get concessions from the state. You might have
thought that the governor, a Democrat, would have thrown him out of his
office for the implicit threat involved. But no, he buckled and Dalio got
the $22 million in aid -- a $5 million grant and a $17 million loan -- that
he was demanding to expand his operations. Its a loan that may be forgiven
if he keeps jobs in Connecticut and creates new ones. No doubt he left the
governors office grinning like a hyena, his shoes tracking wildebeest blood
across the carpet.
Our founders warned against the power of privileged factions to capture the
machinery of democracies. James Madison, who studied history through a
tragic lens, saw that the life cycle of previous republics had degenerated
into anarchy, monarchy, or oligarchy. Like many of his colleagues, he was
well aware that the republic they were creating could go the same way.
Distrusting, even detesting concentrated private power, the founders
attempted to erect safeguards to prevent private interests from subverting
the moral and political compact that begins, We, the people. For a while,
they succeeded.
When the brilliant young French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville toured
America in the 1830s, he was excited by the democratic fervor he witnessed.
Perhaps that excitement caused him to exaggerate the equality he celebrated.
Close readers of de Tocqueville will notice, however, that he did warn of
the staying power of the aristocracy, even in this new country. He feared
what he called, in the second volume of his masterwork, Democracy in
America, an aristocracy created by business. He described it as already
among the harshest that ever existed in the world and suggested that, if
ever a permanent inequality of conditions and aristocracy again penetrate
the world, it may be predicted that this is the gate by which they will
enter.
And so it did. Half a century later, the Gilded Age arrived with a new
aristocratic hierarchy of industrialists, robber barons, and Wall Street
tycoons in the vanguard. They had their own apologist in the person of
William Graham Sumner, an Episcopal minister turned professor of political
economy at Yale University. He famously explained that competition... is a
law of nature and that nature grants her rewards to the fittest,
therefore, without regard to other considerations of any kind.
From Sumners essays to the ravenous excesses of Wall Street in the 1920s to
the ravings of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Fox News, to the business
presss wide-eyed awe of hyena-like CEOs; from the Republican war on
government to the Democratic Partys shameless obeisance to big corporations
and contributors, this law of nature has served to legitimate the yawning
inequality of income and wealth, even as it has protected networks of
privilege and monopolies in major industries like the media, the tech
sector, and the airlines.
A plethora of studies conclude that Americas political system has already
been transformed from a democracy into an oligarchy (the rule of a wealthy
elite). Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, for instance, studied data from
1,800 different policy initiatives launched between 1981 and 2002. They
found that economic elites and organized groups representing business
interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy
while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no
independent influence. Whether Republican or Democratic, they concluded,
the government more often follows the preferences of major lobbying or
business groups than it does those of ordinary citizens.
We can only be amazed that a privileged faction in a fervent culture of
politically protected greed brought us to the brink of a second Great
Depression, then blamed government and a dependent 47% of the population
for our problems, and ended up richer and more powerful than ever.
The Truth of Your Life
Which brings us back to those Marshall housewives -- to all those who simply
cant see beyond their own prerogatives and so narrowly define membership in
democracy to include only people like themselves.
How would I help them recoup their sanity, come home to democracy, and help
build the sort of moral compact embodied in the preamble to the
Constitution, that declaration of Americas intent and identity?
First, Id do my best to remind them that societies can die of too much
inequality.
Second, Id give them copies of anthropologist Jared Diamonds book
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed to remind them that we are
not immune. Diamond won the Pulitzer Prize for describing how the damage
humans have inflicted on their environment has historically led to the
decline of civilizations. In the process, he vividly depicts how elites
repeatedly isolate and delude themselves until its too late. How,
extracting wealth from commoners, they remain well fed while everyone else
is slowly starving until, in the end, even they (or their offspring) become
casualties of their own privilege. Any society, it turns out, contains a
built-in blueprint for failure if elites insulate themselves endlessly from
the consequences of their decisions.
Third, Id discuss the real meaning of sacrifice and bliss with them. That
was the title of the fourth episode of my PBS series Joseph Campbell and the
Power of Myth. In that episode, Campbell and I discussed the influence on
him of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who believed that the
will to live is the fundamental reality of human nature. So he puzzled about
why some people override it and give up their lives for others.
Can this happen? Campbell asked. That what we normally think of as the
first law of nature, namely self-preservation, is suddenly dissolved. What
creates that breakthrough when we put anothers well-being ahead of our
own? He then told me of an incident that took place near his home in
Hawaii, up in the heights where the trade winds from the north come rushing
through a great ridge of mountains. People go there to experience the force
of nature, to let their hair be blown in the winds -- and sometimes to
commit suicide.
One day, two policemen were driving up that road when, just beyond the
railing, they saw a young man about to jump. One of the policemen bolted
from the car and grabbed the fellow just as he was stepping off the ledge.
His momentum threatened to carry both of them over the cliff, but the
policeman refused to let go. Somehow he held on long enough for his partner
to arrive and pull the two of them to safety. When a newspaper reporter
asked, Why didnt you let go? You would have been killed, he answered: I
couldnt... I couldnt let go. If I had, I couldnt have lived another day
of my life.
Campbell then added: Do you realize what had suddenly happened to that
policeman? He had given himself over to death to save a stranger. Everything
else in his life dropped off. His duty to his family, his duty to his job,
his duty to his own career, all of his wishes and hopes for life, just
disappeared. What mattered was saving that young man, even at the cost of
his own life.
How can this be, Campbell asked? Schopenhauers answer, he said, was that a
psychological crisis represents the breakthrough of a metaphysical reality,
which is that you and the other are two aspects of one life, and your
apparent separateness is but an effect of the way we experience forms under
the conditions of space and time. Our true reality is our identity and unity
with all life.
Sometimes, however instinctively or consciously, our actions affirm that
reality through some unselfish gesture or personal sacrifice. It happens in
marriage, in parenting, in our relations with the people immediately around
us, and in our participation in building a society based on reciprocity.
The truth of our country isnt actually so complicated. Its in the moral
compact implicit in the preamble to our Constitution: were all in this
together. We are all one anothers first responders. As the writer Alberto
Rios once put it, I am in your family tree and you are in mine.
I realize that the command to love our neighbor is one of the hardest of all
religious concepts, but I also recognize that our connection to others goes
to the core of lifes mystery and to the survival of democracy. When we
claim this as the truth of our lives -- when we live as if its so -- we are
threading ourselves into the long train of history and the fabric of
civilization; we are becoming we, the people.
The religion of inequality -- of money and power -- has failed us; its gods
are false gods. There is something more essential -- more profound -- in the
American experience than the hyenas appetite. Once we recognize and nurture
this, once we honor it, we can reboot democracy and get on with the work of
liberating the country we carry in our hearts.
Bill Moyers has been an organizer of the Peace Corps, a top White House
aide, a publisher, and a prolific broadcast journalist whose work earned 37
Emmy Awards and nine Peabody Awards. He is president of the Schumann Media
Center, which supports independent journalism. This essay is adapted from
remarks he prepared for delivery this past summer at the Chautauqua
Institutions week-long focus on money and power. He is grateful to his
colleagues Karen Kimball and Gail Ablow for their research and fact
checking.
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Copyright 2016 Bill Moyers
© 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
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