Bill Moyers: Grassroots Pro-Democracy Movement Must Rise to Challenge Corporate Control
Last edited Sun Oct 26, 2014, 09:14 AM - Edit history (1)
Ahead of final sign-off, veteran journalist tells viewers that reaching out to their fellow citizens and neighbors is the essential task in creating the transformation so desperately needed
by
Jon Queally, staff writer
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The Q&A's lead-off question got straight to the point, with a participant asking Moyers to identify the three most important issues now facing the nation and to explain their significance.
Moyers responded: "
1) We have to figure out how to have a morally-based conversation about politics and economics. If it's all about money and return on investment and stock shares and all that, instead of what kind of society works best for those who don't have such "goods", we're finished as a democracy, because some people will be able to buy anything they want and vast numbers of others will be unable to afford what they need. (2) The corruption of power and money is so pervasive and systemic that we have to take it on at every level, which requires that (3) There has to be a broad-based movement for democracy that mirrors and exceeds what Bill McKibben, 350.org and kindred spirits like Naomi Klein have built to reverse global warming."
A follow-up question targeted the familiar question among many progressives, asked if it was time to do away with the two-party system that dominates U.S. domestic politics.
"Even if it were time, it's not going to happen," Moyers wrote. "The two parties are too entrenched in the rule-making process that enables them to make their own elimination impossible. Both parties have lost their footing, however, in the everyday experience of real people and they have to be challenged without remorse or retreat. Someone has said Left and Right have lost their footing, but the Right is more certain about what it wants. It wants control of the Republican Party. The Left is too content just to rent space in the attic from the Democrats. Until that changes, the Republican Party is going to be too extreme and the Democrats too enfeebled. Neither will change voluntarily because the people in charge have too great a stake in the status quo."
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THIS...
"Either we reverse Citizens United and insist democracy is about equal representation, or we might as well close up shop."
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2014/10/24/bill-moyers-grassroots-pro-democracy-movement-must-rise-challenge-corporate-control
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