Bias is OK, as long as you don’t try to hide it. I agree with Bill Moyers on that one! I don’t always agree with him but I have certainly learned much from watching his programs over the years. He is about to turn 76 and Bill Moyers Journal on PBS has now aired its last installment and I find myself fighting back tears as I type this.
With those of Bill Moyers’ era retiring left and right, I’m just feeling the enormity of what we lose with them gone from the airwaves. No matter what side of the issues one is on, without these journalists who had some sense of public obligation, we may lose the airwaves themselves. When I’ve done writing and posting this, I will cry and mourn properly but, for now, I will urge you to watch a few of Bill Moyers’ last segments.
For a bit of history and so much more on the populist movement we should all be participating in, listen to Bill and Jim Hightower. In 1877, the farmers rose up to collectively fight back about the 20% interest rates eating them into further debt; rapidly taking all their profits. Some industries have always had to run somewhat on credit and now life runs on credit. Is your credit card charging you 20%? If so, you should be getting involved and fighting back. Are increasing taxes eating all the equity in your home? You should get involved and fight back! Is the government dictating how you handle your property and business to the extent that you no longer really own your property? You MUST get involved and FIGHT BACK!
On an example of getting involved, watch this segment on the Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement. It’s about speaking truth to power; about taking back our governments. It’s about face to face, in person, and around tables. Clicking “paypal” just isn’t enough because it’s about boots on the ground, our boots, us getting organized and together and speaking out up close and personally with our representatives.
How many of you now get your information and do much of your organizing via the Internet? Comcast just won a court ruling that may permit internet access providers to effectively censor our access via the Internet by charging differently and/or restricting access altogether and/or by manipulating your access speeds based upon what website you are using/viewing. Watch the segment with FCC Commissioner Michael J. Copps for more information.
And the last entry on the Wall Street debacle is rather brilliant in my opinion. William K. Black speaks the F word, FRAUD, clearly and plainly.
- WILLIAM K. BLACK “In the last three weeks, we have finally done a half-baked investigation, mind you. Not -- nothing like we did in the Savings & Loan days -- of Washington Mutual (WaMu), Citicorp, Lehman, and Goldman. And we have found strong evidence of fraud at all four places.”
- “There's a huge part that is economic ideology. And neoclassical economists don't believe that fraud can exist… Do you want to look at these seemingly respectable huge financial institutions, which are your leading political contributors as crooks?”
- BILL MOYERS: Bill, are you describing a political culture, that
is criminogenic?
WILLIAM K. BLACK It's deeply criminogenic… We now have the entitlement generation as CEOs. They just plain feel entitled to being wealthy as Croesus with no responsibility, no accountability. They have become literal sociopaths. So one of the things is, you clean up business schools, which right now are fraud factories…They create the new monsters that take control and destroy massive enterprises and cause global economic crises, cause the great recession. And very, very close to causing the second Great Depression. We just barely missed that. And there's no assurance that we've missed it five years out.
Folks, it isn’t about Democrats and Republicans, this mess was a long time being built; both parties and all of us helped to build it. We’ve raised and trained a generation largely of “literal sociopaths” in both parties and society at large. That tends to happen when we reward people for lying, cheating, and stealing. It started with rewarding them for simply showing up. Now we need to put our boots on the ground, get organized, and fix this mess that we all helped to create with our complacency the last few decades.
Perhaps it is all about having become an I/it society instead of the I/thou society. We are a part of a living earth that is more than the sum of its parts. However, I will certainly not make an attempt to compete with the wonderful words of Barry Lopez in the last conversation on the Bill Moyers Journal.
- “I like to root for humanity. And I want to see a place where this great dream in whatever epistemology you find it in, whatever religion that you find this idea, it's all over the world, that we can come to a state of grace. We can come to a state in which we do better than we're doing now. I believe fiercely in that. And I meet people in every corner of the world who affirm it.”
- “You must put all that aside and step onto the stage with other men and women. And say, we're in this together. And we need to find an arrangement how-- in order to take care of each other.”
- “The things that
make us uncomfortable in public are a person who wishes to speak of what is
beautiful. That makes everybody a little bit nervous, because many of us keep
this jaded, cynical separateness with the world, because we're cautious. We're
cautious. How many people do you know whose crying out is for intimacy? They
want to be known. They want to be touched. But they can't make that intimate
connection without being vulnerable. You have to be vulnerable in order to
achieve this exchange of intimacy. And you can't be vulnerable unless you can
trust the situation. And what we're learning, many of us, is the world is not
trustworthy enough for you to be vulnerable to it and gain that intimacy.
“Another thing that makes people nervous is if you speak of faith, because immediately people think, Christian faith? Or Islamic faith? Or what kind of faith are you talking about? I'm not talking about any of those. I am talking about the belief in other people. The faith-- when I have been in situations that are dangerous, physically dangerous, you know, in Antarctica or, you know, diving underneath ice down there, for example, which I did for awhile.
“My faith is in my colleagues. And when I meet other writers, journalists, who've been doing this for a long time, trying to make us aware of what it is that we're living in, I put my faith in those people. And so, the word that has come alive for me in recent months is to have faith in each other.” - “BARRY LOPEZ: Humanity. And, you know,
what Charles Taylor or Idi Amin did, or Hitler or Stalin or any of these
reprehensible human beings. What they did is-- we should condemn. Humanity is
also Michelangelo. Or humanity is also Darwin. Humanity is Epictetus or anybody
that you want to pull out of the fabric. I mean, if you have the Bach cello
suites in your head at the same moment that you're looking at a gas chamber at
Auschwitz. Then to me you've got some hope of being fully aware of what it is
that we're enmeshed in.
BILL MOYERS: Well, this, of course, is the puzzle, isn't it? I mean, in that quote, high civilization of Germany at the time. The generals walked in the garden, listening to Bach and Beethoven, while a mile away, the gas chambers were working overtime.
BARRY LOPEZ: There was no capacity to imagine their own humanity was being destroyed there. The way in which they were ethically compromised by what they were doing.”
We are a part of the universe and must not ignore the ethical compromises around us. “Every single person, somewhere in their life, is driven to a point of despair, where they just want to quit. And they don't quit.”
Farewell Bill Moyers Journal. I will miss you and I will try not to quit.