In a speech in 2004, Bill Moyers laid out exactly what's happening to us now

[starroute]

I was sorting through some old notes and found this speech that Moyers delivered in 2004. This is the background to ALEC and a great deal more that is coming to fruition right now. (The article starts at http://www.alternet.org/story/18954?page=1 but the part I quote is on page 5.)

The Fight of Our Lives

Some things are worth getting mad about. Case in point: the growing, vast equality gap between the richest and the poorest Americans. If this isn't class war, what is?

June 16, 2004

Time's premier investigative journalists -- Donald Bartlett and James Steele -- concluded in a series last year that America now has "government for the few at the expense of the many." Economic inequality begets political inequality, and vice versa. ...

I know, I know: this sounds very much like a call for class war. But the class war was declared a generation ago, in a powerful paperback polemic by William Simon, who was soon to be Secretary of the Treasury. He called on the financial and business class, in effect, to take back the power and privileges they had lost in the depression and new deal. They got the message, and soon they began a stealthy class war against the rest of society and the principles of our democracy. They set out to trash the social contract, to cut their workforces and wages, to scour the globe in search of cheap labor, and to shred the social safety net that was supposed to protect people from hardships beyond their control. Business Week put it bluntly at the time: "Some people will obviously have to do with less....it will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more."

The middle class and working poor are told that what's happening to them is the consequence of Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand." This is a lie. What's happening to them is the direct consequence of corporate activism, intellectual propaganda, the rise of a religious orthodoxy that in its hunger for government subsidies has made an idol of power, and a string of political decisions favoring the powerful and the privileged who bought the political system right out from under us. ...

To put political muscle behind these ideas they created a formidable political machine. One of the few journalists to cover the issues of class -- Thomas Edsall of The Washington Post -- wrote: "During the 1970s, business refined its ability to act as a class, submerging competitive instincts in favor of joint, cooperate action in the legislative area."

[pnorman]

1. K & R!

n/t

[bvar22]

2. K&R for Bill Moyers.

A Patriot and a Hero.
I really miss his weekly show on PBS.
Here is a Commentary from 2002 that I still remember:

"The vast inequality of this new Gilded Age didn't just happen.
Nature didn't ordain it, the market didn't require it, and Adam Smith's invisible hand doesn't sustain it.
What happened is the rich declared class war and spent what it took to win.


Not exactly a new story, of course, but the extraordinary new concentration of wealth and power created a juggernaut that makes it harder and harder for democracy to work for all.
The rich buy the laws and loopholes they want from Congress, and from the White House, they buy executive protection of their privileges.
So government winds up promoting the extremes instead of moderating them.

<snip>

Yes, the rich declared class war and won.
All that's left is for politics to divide up the spoils."---Bill Moyers, Sept 3, 2002

http://www.pbs.org/now/commentary/moyers7.html

[Hart2008]

3. K & R

:kick:

[Uncle Joe]

4. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, starroute.

[Octafish]

5. The Stanleys and the Neumanns ''no longer believe they matter to the people who run the country.'

Moyers is great.