Bill Moyers and Howard Zinn

A nephew of mine, who is on the staff of Boston University, sent me an extraordinary video. I tell you, as I introduce it, I know I have never written a more important blog!
by Charlie Leck

Bill Moyers and Howard Zinn are two of a few guys who, during my life, I have admired so very much!

Certainly you are all familiar with Bill Moyers and his extraordinary accomplishments as a journalist! Moyers mixes wisdom and remarkable humor as well as any man I’ve ever read or listened to. He writes and lectures as well as any journalist and much better than most. I know no man or woman in broadcast journalism who is as committed to integrity. Moyers has a passion for justice and truth that is totally immense!

If you are a regular reader of my blog, you know about my deep respect for Zinn, the author of The Peoples History of the United States. I’ve written here about the book a couple of times and quoted from it often. It always stays at the ready on my desk.

Recently, a nephew of mine, who is the Director of Foreign Student Affairs and Studies at Boston University, emailed me a video that he thought I might appreciate and enjoy. It was of Bill Moyers’ appearance last week as a speaker at the Howard Zinn Memorial Lecture at Boston University, where Zinn had been a professor of Political Science before his death.

It is not a short video clip. It is a thorough and complete reproduction of Moyer’s lecture at Boston University just last week. In the spirit of Zinn, Moyers deals with the current American economy and looks at its causes and continuing devastating effect on ordinary people as Howard Zinn might have looked at the subject – from the view point of the people impacted by these hard times.

If you want to understand a new possibility about this economic crash and how the American business community might not be all that interested in ending these problems, you might want to watch and listen to this lecture.

Moyers raises the question: “Do the super-rich need the rest of America?” Do they even care? Do they need to end economic bad times?

Has America become a plutocracy? If you don’t know what that is, pull out your dictionary because it vitally important we understand what is happening in America and what this last election was very much about. If you can’t spare the entire time to listen to Moyers, at least go to about the 28 minute mark and listen for 10 or 15 minutes about what has happened in America. Then, please understand that the only way we shall deal with these plutonomists is to rise up as a people and retake our nation through the ballot box – throwing out the selfish and cruel politicians who represent, in reality, only the wealthy.

Radical? You will call it that UNLESS you go ahead and listen to the argument that Moyers makes: “Plutocracy and Democracy don’t mix!”

He introduces us to the book, The Mendacity of Hope, by Roger D. Hodges, who, in this book, explains what happens when “…the private ends of a narrow faction succeed in capturing the engines of democracy.” I know I am going out to purchase that book today. Here’s a Washington Post review of it.

The lecture and Bill Moyers held me spell-bound for 70 minutes. If you care to understand the frightening plutocratic movement that has taken over America, you really ought to listen to it and then, as Howard Zinn might say, rise up! For, we are the people!

Here’s where you’ll find it…

Have a note pad at the ready as you listen and watch, and take notes. Then, put the notes somewhere where you’ll constantly see them. They will move you to get involved in the 2012 election.

At the beginning of his lecture, Moyers quotes the closing words from Howard Zinn’s last book, The Bomb.

“We must act on what we feel and think, here and now, for human flesh and sense, against the abstractions of duty and obedience.”

I know I must! I cannot stand aside and allow what the founders of modern conservative politics plan for America. The shadow party, invented by Karl Rove and his disciples, has taken over America and democracy is endangered.

“We are losing our democracy to a different system,” warns Moyers.

Now, if for a second, you think you’ve not got 70 minutes (a 45 minute Q&A follows it) to sit and watch such a lecture, I will beg you to give up a couple of television shows or a football or basketball game and come to grips with what is happening to America. You will never be politically the same. You will understand how America has been fooled and how it has lost its sense of government “for, by and of the people.”

“…even the Tea Partiers, when they wake up and realize they have been sucker-punched by the very people who have funded them, are going to be madder than hell.”

If you do watch this lecture, I beg for your comments about it!

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Bill Moyers

My most important recommendation to you!
by Charlie Leck

Bill Moyers is d’man, you know! Reading his entries at Bill Moyers Journal is one of my absolute must-do items. I’m rather religious about it and I guess I’d send you there regularly if I had to limit my recommendations to you to just one habitual reading item. The posting on the day following Thanksgiving, about Doctor Jane Goodall, was nothing short of wondrous. [click here to read] Moyers presents his reader with an enormous amount of information about Doctor Goodall and links us to even more information about her and her life.

Jane Goodall is a hero to many. And, that’s good! If my children and grandchildren need to choose heroes in their lives, I’d rather they choose someone like Doctor Goodall than a sports figure or rock star. Her contributions to the planet are astonishing.

Is Our Democracy in Danger?

Have we become a Corporate State?
by Charlie Leck

Over the last several decades, there have been a number of outstanding historians, political scientists and sociologists, whose works I have read, who have expressed warnings about our democracy. They have cautioned us that a democratic state is a fragile, delicate object and always in danger of becoming what it did not intend.

How so?

A democracy is a government of the people, controlled by them and their choices at the ballot box. What happens if they choose very unwisely?

Let me use as a very simple analogy as an actual case in point that I had premonitions about as a small boy. I became fascinated, as a child, with the polity of the church as an institution. How could a boy become obsessed with such a subject? It's simply explained. I was attending a Protestant Sunday School program in my home town Congregational Church. My sister, with whom I was very close, was a Roman Catholic. She wanted to save me and I wanted to save her. I began comparing the two systems of church jurisdiction and administration. I observed how incredibly democratic the Congregational system was (is) and began thinking about how easy it would be to take over and control a local church in such a democratic system if the local entity was not ever vigilant against such a takeover.

A local Congregational Church controls its own facility and its own religious or faith perspective. It establishes its own credo and no outside force can object to what it does. In a small church, like the one I attended as a boy, it would be very easy to take control of everything that happens there. The members of the congregation vote on every matter and establish the administrative control of the church and could also vote on questions of faith. Move 100 new members into such a situation – let's say very conservative, evangelical and fundamentalist members – and they could wrest control from the liberal members who had previously established all policy matters. Suddenly the physical and spiritual church, with all its assets and holdings, would be controlled by the new group.

In fact, as I feared as small boy, such an event actually occurred at this small Congregational Church in Chester, New Jersey. It was not an instant transformation, but it happened over a number of years. On a recent, quiet visit to the church, sitting in worship, I was struck by the fact that the wonderful church of my childhood – a liberal, intellectual, conversant and dialectical group of people – had utterly disappeared. It had been replaced by a group who spouted verses of the Bible from memory without understanding anything about their historic context or their roots in mythology. It was a bland, empty-headed sense of faith that had totally replaced the extraordinary community of thought that I remembered as a boy. The congregation, on a very democratic basis, had simply been taken over by people with other and very simple viewpoints. The grand history of an important church has disappeared.

This is the danger that a democracy must also face. An entire democratic system – an entire nation – can be transformed if its people do not remain diligent, disciplined and wise in their voting practices.

There is no one I admire more than Bill Moyers. I pay attention to him and I learn from him. I read everything by him. He has a new book, Moyers on Democracy, and it contains the warning I have expressed above.

"We have fallen under the spell of money, faction, and fear, and the great American experience in creating a different future together has been subjugated to individual cunning in the pursuit of wealth and power -and to the claims of empire, with its ravenous demands and stuporous distractions." (Moyers, Bill: Moyers on Democracy [Doubleday, New York, 2008])

An enormous group of Americans have fallen under the spell of Corporate America and have bought into the idea that our hope for the future is intrinsically bound to the future of the corporate and wealthy class. The group listens intently to the babble of the corporate class and buys into their dream.

The following two, long sentences serve as a warning call to us about where America seems to be going – and, it is frightening.

"When the state becomes the guardian of power and privilege to the neglect of justice for the people as a whole, it mocks the very concept of government as proclaimed in the preamble to our Constitution; mocks Lincoln's sacred belief in "government of the people, by the people, and for the people"; mocks the democratic notion of government as 'a voluntary union for the common good' embodied in the great wave of reform that produced the Progressive Era and the two Roosevelts. In contrast, the philosophy popularized in the last quarter century that 'freedom' simply means freedom to choose among competing brands of consumer goods, that taxes are an unfair theft from the pockets of the successful to reward the incompetent, and that the market will meet all human needs while government itself becomes the enabler of privilege -- the philosophy of an earlier social Darwinism and laissez-faire capitalism dressed in new togs -- is as subversive as Benedict Arnold's betrayal of the Revolution he had once served."

It is time to reclaim America and reestablish it as a government of, by and for the people. Corporate American may not have America. The small ultra-wealthy class may not run the show here. Their enormous incomes shall not be sheltered from the same taxes paid by the rest of the American people.

There is a ray of hope and those of you who are thinking that I am unduly pessimistic, please know that I believe Americans will understand wherein that hope lies.

Go to the library and, for my sake, your sake and the sake of our nation and its hard-working people, get Bill Moyers book into your hands and read it cover to cover. Then tell you friends to get it. America must hear this clarion call that Moyers is issuing.

We must make sure America votes wisely this November. You must do your part in that.

I will write more about Moyers' warnings in the coming days. Next: the gaping hole in contemporary America journalism.