Hands up, America

Bill Moyers opened the last day of the Take Back America conference in D.C. to a cheering crowd. He began his speech with tales of ordinary Americans struggling with financial setbacks. "My world-view has been a work-in-progress, molded by the stories I’ve heard from the people I’ve met," said Moyers, displaying a clip from one of his documentaries, titled Minimum Wages: The New Economy in which a family grapples with job loss and forclosure. "Seeing those people again, I was reminded of what turns their personal trauma into a political travesty," he said. "They are deeply patriotic. They love this country, but they no longer believe that they matter to the people who run this country." He expounded on one of the conference's much-repeated themes: that of the ever-widening gap between rich and poor households. "Consider the prognosis," said Moyers. "On the eve of George W. Bush’s second inauguration, the Economist-- not exactly a Marxist rag--produced a sobering analysis of what is happening to the old notion that any American can get to the top. With income inequality not seen since the first Gilded Age, 'an education system increasingly stratified with fewer resources than those of their richer contemporaries and great universities increasingly reinforcing rather than reducing these educational inequalities,' with corporate employees finding it harder 'to start at the bottom and rise up the company hierarchy by den of hard work and self improvement,' with the yawning gap between incomes at the top and the bottom, the editors of the Economist-- all friends of business and advocates of capitalism and free markets--concluded that the United States 'risks calcifying into a European-style class-based society.' ” "That knocks the American dream flat on its back," Moyers said. "Like millions of us," he continued after several more wrenching stories from everyday life in this country, "I was an heir to what used to be called the commonwealth, the notion of America as a shared project. It’s in our DNA. You know--we the people, in order to create a more perfect union?" But now, he suggested, America belongs not to the people, but to corporate interests and their lobbyists. "This is an occupied town, a company town," said Moyers, "a wholly owned subsidiary of the powerful and privileged who have hired the influence industry to run it for them." As a result, credit card companies have been able to convince Congress to curtail personal bankruptcies; Wal-Wart, the pharmaceutical companines, gun manufacturers and asbestos makers conspire with the White House to reduce class-action suits; wealthy oil companies simultaneously raise prices and demand tax breaks; and tax cuts benefit the rich while taking a bite out of working people's incomes. "One of the president’s enduring legacies will be to have replaced estate taxes on the wealthy with a sweat tax on their gravediggers," Moyers said. "You’re seeing the mugging of the American dream right in front of your face."