[wordup] Which America Will We Be Now?

[Adam Shand]

the over all message of this is good once you wade throught the overly
sentimental crap at the beginning which is designed to convince us all
that he's really on "our side" and is a "true american".  my only other
real gripe is that a lot of the abuses he lists are ones that i haven't
heard of, i wish he would cite sources so i could learn more about this
stuff rather then just have to take him at his word.

Via: erica <erica at spack.org>
From: http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20011119&s=moyers

Which America Will We Be Now?
by Bill Moyers
November 19, 2001

For the past several years I've been taking every possible opportunity to
talk about the soul of democracy. "Something is deeply wrong with politics
today," I told anyone who would listen. And I wasn't referring to the
partisan mudslinging, the negative TV ads, the excessive polling or the
empty campaigns. I was talking about something fundamental, something
troubling at the core of politics. The soul of democracy--the essence of
the word itself--is government of, by and for the people. And the soul of
democracy has been dying, drowning in a rising tide of big money
contributed by a narrow, unrepresentative elite that has betrayed the
faith of citizens in self-government.

But what's happened since the September 11 attacks would seem to put the
lie to my fears. Americans have rallied together in a way that I cannot
remember since World War II. This catastrophe has reminded us of a basic
truth at the heart of our democracy: No matter our wealth or status or
faith, we are all equal before the law, in the voting booth and when death
rains down from the sky.

We have also been reminded that despite years of scandals and political
corruption, despite the stream of stories of personal greed and pirates in
Gucci scamming the Treasury, despite the retreat from the public sphere
and the turn toward private privilege, despite squalor for the poor and
gated communities for the rich, the great mass of Americans have not yet
given up on the idea of "We, the People." And they have refused to accept
the notion, promoted so diligently by our friends at the Heritage
Foundation, that government should be shrunk to a size where, as Grover
Norquist has put it, they can drown it in a bathtub.

These ideologues at Heritage and elsewhere, by the way, earlier this year
teamed up with deep-pocket bankers--many from Texas, with ties to the Bush
White House--to stop America from cracking down on terrorist money havens.
How about that for patriotism? Better that terrorists get their dirty
money than tax cheaters be prevented from hiding theirs. And these people
wrap themselves in the flag and sing "The Star-Spangled Banner" with
gusto.

Contrary to right-wing denigration of government, however, today's heroes
are public servants. The 20-year-old dot-com instant millionaires and the
preening, pugnacious pundits of tabloid television and the crafty
celebrity stock-pickers on the cable channels have all been exposed for
what they are--barnacles on the hull of the great ship of state. In their
stead we have those brave firefighters and policemen and Port Authority
workers and emergency rescue personnel--public employees all, most of them
drawing a modest middle-class income for extremely dangerous work. They
have caught our imaginations not only for their heroic deeds but because
we know so many people like them, people we took for granted. For once,
our TV screens have been filled with the modest declarations of average
Americans coming to each other's aid. I find this good and thrilling and
sobering. It could offer a new beginning, a renewal of civic values that
could leave our society stronger and more together than ever, working on
common goals for the public good.

Already, in the wake of September 11, there's been a heartening change in
how Americans view their government. For the first time in more than
thirty years a majority of people say they trust the federal government to
do the right thing at least "most of the time." It's as if the clock has
been rolled back to the early 1960s, before Vietnam and Watergate took
such a toll on the gross national psychology. This newfound respect for
public service--this faith in public collaboration--is based in part on
how people view what the government has done in response to the attacks.
To most Americans, government right now doesn't mean a faceless bureaucrat
or a politician auctioning access to the highest bidder. It means a
courageous rescuer or brave soldier. Instead of our representatives
spending their evenings clinking glasses with fat cats, they are out
walking among the wounded.

There are, alas, less heartening signs to report. It didn't take long for
the wartime opportunists--the mercenaries of Washington, the lobbyists,
lawyers and political fundraisers--to crawl out of their offices on K
Street determined to grab what they can for their clients. While in New
York we are still attending memorial services for firemen and police,
while everywhere Americans' cheeks are still stained with tears, while the
President calls for patriotism, prayers and piety, the predators of
Washington are up to their old tricks in the pursuit of private plunder at
public expense. In the wake of this awful tragedy wrought by terrorism,
they are cashing in. Would you like to know the memorial they would offer
the thousands of people who died in the attacks? Or the legacy they would
leave the children who lost a parent in the horror? How do they propose to
fight the long and costly war on terrorism America must now undertake?
Why, restore the three-martini lunch--that will surely strike fear in the
heart of Osama bin Laden. You think I'm kidding, but bringing back the
deductible lunch is one of the proposals on the table in Washington right
now. And cut capital gains for the wealthy, naturally--that's America's
patriotic duty, too. And while we're at it, don't forget to eliminate the
corporate alternative minimum tax, enacted fifteen years ago to prevent
corporations from taking so many credits and deductions that they owed
little if any taxes. But don't just repeal their minimum tax; refund to
those corporations all the minimum tax they have ever been assessed.

What else can America do to strike at the terrorists? Why, slip in a
special tax break for poor General Electric, and slip inside the EPA while
everyone's distracted and torpedo the recent order to clean the Hudson
River of PCBs. Don't worry about NBC, CNBC or MSNBC reporting it; they're
all in the GE family. It's time for Churchillian courage, we're told. So
how would this crowd assure that future generations will look back and say
"This was their finest hour"? That's easy. Give those coal producers
freedom to pollute. And shovel generous tax breaks to those giant energy
companies. And open the Alaska wilderness to drilling--that's something to
remember the 11th of September for. And while the red, white and blue
waves at half-mast over the land of the free and the home of the
brave--why, give the President the power to discard democratic debate and
the rule of law concerning controversial trade agreements, and set up
secret tribunals to run roughshod over local communities trying to protect
their environment and their health. If I sound a little bitter about this,
I am; the President rightly appeals every day for sacrifice. But to these
mercenaries sacrifice is for suckers. So I am bitter, yes, and sad. Our
business and political class owes us better than this. After all, it was
they who declared class war twenty years ago, and it was they who won.
They're on top. If ever they were going to put patriotism over profits, if
ever they were going to practice the magnanimity of winners, this was the
moment. To hide now behind the flag while ripping off a country in crisis
fatally separates them from the common course of American life.

Some things just don't change. When I read that Dick Armey, the Republican
majority leader in the House, said "it wouldn't be commensurate with the
American spirit" to provide unemployment and other benefits to laid-off
airline workers, I thought that once again the Republican Party has lived
down to Harry Truman's description of the GOP as Guardians of Privilege.
And as for Truman's Democratic Party--the party of the New Deal and the
Fair Deal--well, it breaks my heart to report that the Democratic National
Committee has used the terrorist attacks to call for widening the
soft-money loophole in our election laws. How about that for a patriotic
response to terrorism? Mencken got it right when he said, "Whenever you
hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sign that he expects
to be paid for it."

Let's face it: These realities present citizens with no options but to
climb back in the ring. We are in what educators call "a teachable
moment." And we'll lose it if we roll over and shut up. What's at stake is
democracy. Democracy wasn't canceled on September 11, but democracy won't
survive if citizens turn into lemmings. Yes, the President is our
Commander in Chief, but we are not the President's minions. While firemen
and police were racing into the fires of hell in downtown New York, and
now, while our soldiers and airmen and Marines are putting their lives on
the line in Afghanistan, the Administration and its Congressional allies
are allowing multinational companies to make their most concerted effort
in twenty years to roll back clean-air measures, exploit public lands and
stuff the pockets of their executives and shareholders with undeserved
cash. Against such crass exploitation, unequaled since the Teapot Dome
scandal, it is every patriot's duty to join the loyal opposition. Even in
war, politics is about who gets what and who doesn't. If the mercenaries
and the politicians-for-rent in Washington try to exploit the emergency
and America's good faith to grab what they wouldn't get through open
debate in peacetime, the disloyalty will not be in our dissent but in our
subservience. The greatest sedition would be our silence. Yes, there's a
fight going on--against terrorists around the globe, but just as certainly
there's a fight going on here at home, to decide the kind of country this
will be during and after the war on terrorism.

What should our strategy be? Here are a couple of suggestions, beginning
with how we elect our officials. As Congress debates new security
measures, military spending, energy policies, economic stimulus packages
and various bailout requests, wouldn't it be better if we knew that
elected officials had to answer to the people who vote instead of the
wealthy individual and corporate donors whose profit or failure may depend
on how those new initiatives are carried out?

That's not a utopian notion. Thanks to the efforts of many hardworking
pro-democracy activists who have been organizing at the grassroots for the
past ten years, we already have four states--Maine, Arizona, Vermont and
Massachusetts--where state representatives from governor on down have the
option of rejecting all private campaign contributions and qualifying for
full public financing of their campaigns. About a third of Maine's
legislature and a quarter of Arizona's got elected last year running
clean--that is, under their states' pioneering Clean Elections systems,
they collected a set number of $5 contributions and then pledged to raise
no other money and to abide by strict spending limits.

These unsung heroes of democracy, the first class of elected officials to
owe their elections solely to their voters and not to any deep-pocketed
backers, report a greater sense of independence from special interests and
more freedom to speak their minds. "The business lobbyists left me alone,"
says State Representative Glenn Cummings, a freshman from Maine who was
the first candidate in the country to qualify for Clean Elections funding.
"I think they assumed I was unapproachable. It sure made it easier to get
through the hallways on the way to a vote!" His colleague in the
Statehouse, Senator Ed Youngblood, recalls that running clean changed the
whole process of campaigning. "When people would say that it didn't matter
how they voted, because legislators would just vote the way the money
wants," he tells us, "it was great to be able to say, 'I don't have to
vote the way some lobbyist wants just to insure that I'll get funded by
him in two years for re-election.'"

It's too soon to say that money no longer talks in either state capital,
but it clearly doesn't swagger as much. In Maine, the legislature passed a
bill creating a Health Security Board tasked with devising a detailed plan
to implement a single-payer healthcare system for the state. The bill
wasn't everything its sponsor, Representative Paul Volenik, wanted, but he
saw real progress toward a universal healthcare system in its passage. Two
years ago, he noted, only fifty-five members of the House of
Representatives (out of 151) voted for the bill. This time eighty-seven
did, including almost all the Democrats and a few Republicans. The bill
moved dramatically further, and a portion of that is because of the Clean
Elections system they have there, Volenik said.

But the problem is larger than that of money in politics. Democracy needs
a broader housecleaning. Consider, for example, what a different country
we would be if we had a Citizens Channel with a mandate to cover real
social problems, not shark attacks or Gary Condit's love life, while
covering up Rupert Murdoch's manipulations of the FCC and CBS's ploy to
filch tax breaks for its post-terrorist losses. Such a channel could have
spurred serious attention to the weakness of airport security, for
starters, pointing out long ago how the industry, through its
contributions, had wrung from government the right to contract that
security to the lowest bidder. It might have pushed the issue of
offshore-banking havens to page one, or turned up the astonishing deceit
of the NAFTA provision that enables secret tribunals to protect the
interests of investors while subverting the well-being of workers and the
health of communities. Such a channel--committed to news for the sake of
democracy--might also have told how corporations and their alumni in the
Bush Administration have thwarted the development of clean, home-grown
energy that would slow global warming and the degradation of our soil, air
and water, while reducing our dependence on oligarchs, dictators and
theocrats abroad.

Even now the media elite, with occasional exceptions, remain indifferent
to the hypocrisy of Washington's mercenary class as it goes about the
dirty work of its paymasters. What a contrast to those citizens who during
these weeks of loss and mourning have reminded us that the kingdom of the
human heart is large, containing not only hatred but courage. Much has
been made of the comparison to December 7, 1941. I find it apt. In
response to the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, Americans waged and won a
great war, then came home to make this country more prosperous and just.
It is not beyond this generation to live up to that example. To do so, we
must define ourselves not by the lives we led until September 11 but by
the lives we will lead from now on. If we seize the opportunity to build a
stronger country, we too will ultimately prevail in the challenges ahead,
at home and abroad. But we cannot win this new struggle by military might
alone. We will prevail only if we lead by example, as a democracy
committed to the rule of law and the spirit of fairness, whose corporate
and political elites recognize that it isn't only firefighters, police and
families grieving their missing kin who are called upon to sacrifice.