Bill Moyers stuns conference with speech

Catholic New Times, June 29, 2003

WASHINGTON -- Condemning "the unholy alliance between government and wealth" and the compassionate conservative spin that tries to make "the rape of America sound like a consensual date," Bill Moyers, former press secretary to Lyndon Johnson and well-respected television documentarian, charged that "right-wing wrecking crews" assembled by the Bush administration and its congressional allies were out to bankrupt government.

Then, he said, they would privatize public services in order to enrich the corporate interests that fund campaigns and provide golden parachutes to pliable politicians. If unchecked, Moyers warned, the result of these machinations will be the dismantling of "every last brick of the social contract."

The soft-spoken Texan was speaking at "Take Back America" conference sponsored by the Campaign for America's Future on June 4, 2003 in Washington D.C.

"I think this is a deliberate, intentional destruction of the United States of America," said Moyers, as he called for the progressives gathered in Washington last week and for their allies across the United States, to organize not merely in defence of social and economic justice, but in order to preserve democracy itself. Paraphrasing the words of Abraham Lincoln as the 16th president rallied the nation to battle against slavery, Moyers declared, "Our nation can no more survive as half democracy and half oligarchy than it could survive half slave and half free."

In the face of what he described as "a radical assault" on American values by those who seek to redistribute wealth upward from the many poor to the few wealthy, Moyers said he could not understand "why the Democrats are afraid to be labelled class warriors in a war the other side started and is winning."

Author and activist Frances Moore Lappe said she was close to tears as she thanked Moyers for providing precisely the mixture of perspective and hope that progressives need as they prepare to challenge the right in 2004.

Moyers concluded "the social dislocations and the meanness of the 19th century" were being renewed by a new generation of politicians who, like their predecessors, seek to strangle the spirit of the American revolution "in the hard grip of the ruling class."

To break that grip, Moyers said, progressives of today must learn from the revolutionaries and reformers of old, recalling the progressive movement that rose up in the first years of the 20th century to "restore the balance between wealth and commonwealth," as well as the successes of the New Dealers who turned progressive ideals into national policy.