As I read Bill Moyers‘ newest book, Moyers on America: A Journalist and His Times, I feel a need to print some quotes from the early chapters in the book.  He has already struck me with a certain pride for what a man can do and a certain disgust for the path on which our country has been taken.

Apparently, President William McKinley (1897-1901) was led to the White House by a caretaker (much like Karl Rove) named Mark Hanna.  Karl Rove used Mark Hanna as a model for his tyrannical take over of our government by using George W. Bush.  Bill Moyers examines this and says:

Conservatives–or, better, pro-corporate apologists–hijacked the vocabulary of Jeffersonian liberalism and turned words such as progress, opportunity, and individualism into tools for making the plunder of America sound like divine right.

Sounds somewhat like the demonization of the words liberal and intellectual.

Also, Bill Moyers goes over the basic interests and deep opinions of the American people:

- That a Social Security card is not a private portfolio statement but a membership ticket in a society where we all contribute to a common treasury so that none need face the indignities of poverty in old age.

- That tax evasion is not a form of conserving investment capital but a brazen adandonment of responsibility to the country.

- That income inequality is not a sign of freedom of opportunity at work, because if it persists and grows, then unless you believe that some people are naturally born to ride and some to wear saddles, it’s a sign that opportunity is less than equal.

- That self interest is a great motivator for production and progress but is amoral unless contained within the framework of social justice.

- That the rich have the right to buy more cars than anyone else, more homes, vacations, gadgets, and gizmos, but they do not have the right to buy more democracy than anyone else.

- That public services, when privatized, serve only those who can afford them and weaken the sense tat we all rise and fall together as “one nation, indivisible.”

- That concentration in the production of goods may sometimes be useful and efficient, but monopoly over the dissemination of ideas is tyranny.

- That prosperity requires good wages and benefits for workers.

- That our nation can no more survive as half democracy and half oligarchy than it could survive half slave and half free, and that keeping it from becoming all oligarchy is steady work–our work.

Please do yourselves a favor and find this book.  Enlighten yourselves to the true nature of democracy.  I will end as Moyers ends his first chapter, “This is our story, the Progressive story of America.  Pass it on.”

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