Americans have learned the hard way that when rich organizations and wealthy individuals shower Washington with millions in campaign contributions, they get what they want.

Moyers gave the keynote speech at the 40th Anniversary celebration of    Public Citizen, the legendary nonprofit consumer advocacy organization founded in 1971 to represent consumer interests in government. The entire speech is too long to repost as a blog entry, but in sum he argues that although most of us pay lip service to the traditional ideals of the American dream we have largely given up the notion that it’s possible for us. The oligarchs have won.

The great American experience in creating a different future together this voluntary union for the common good has been flummoxed by “a growing sense of political impotence, what the historian Lawrence Goodwyn has described as a mass resignation of people who believe “the dogma of democracy on a superficial public level but who no longer believe it privately. There has been, he says, a decline in what people think they have a political right to aspire to, a decline of individual self-respect on the part of millions off Americans.

You can understand why. We hold elections, knowing they are unlikely to produce the policies favored by the majority of Americans. We speak, we write, we advocate,  and those in power turn deaf ears and blind eyes to our deepest aspirations. We petition, plead, and even pray, yet the earth that is our commons, which should be passed on in good condition to coming generations, continues to be despoiled. We invoke the strain in our national DNA that attests to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as the produce of political equality, yet private wealth multiplies as public goods are beggared. . . .

. . . And the property qualifications for federal office that the framers of the Constitution expressly feared as an unseemly “veneration for wealth” are now openly in force; the common denominator of public office, even for our judges, is a common deference to cash.

It is not hard, Moyers says, to understand what Occupy Wall Street is all about. It is about the sign he saw being carried by a woman at an OWS march: “I can’t afford to buy a politician so I bought this sign.”

Moyers goes on to quote from a surprising source:

We know what all this money buys. Americans have learned the hard way that when rich organizations and wealthy individuals shower Washington with millions in campaign contributions, they get what they want. 

They know that if you don’t contribute to their campaigns or spend generously on lobbying, you pick up a disproportionate share of America’s tax bill. You pay higher prices for a broad range of products from peanuts to prescriptions. You pay taxes that others in a similar situation have been excused from paying. You’re compelled to abide by laws while others are granted immunity from them. You must pay debts that you incur while others do not. You’re barred from writing off on your tax returns some of the money spent on necessities while others deduct the cost of their entertainment. You must run your business by one set of rules, while the government creates another set for your competitors. 

In contrast the fortunate few who contribute to the right politicians and hire the right lobbyists enjoy all the benefits of their special status. Make a bad business deal; the government bails them out. If they want to hire workers at below market wages, the government provides the means to do so. If they want more time to pay their debts, the government gives them an extension. If they want immunity from certain laws, the government gives it. If they want to ignore rules their competition must comply with, the government gives it approval. If they want to kill legislation that is intended for the public, it gets killed.

I didn’t crib that litany from Public Citizen’s muckraking investigations over the years, although I could have. Nor did I lift it from Das Kapital by Karl Marx or Mao Tse-tung’s Little Red Book. No, I was literally quoting Time Magazine, long a tribune of America’s establishment media. From the bosom of mainstream media comes the bald, spare, and damning conclusion: We now have: “a government for the few at the expense of the many.”

Moyers goes on to to say:

But let me call another witness from the pro-business and capitalist- friendly press. In the middle of the last decade, four years before the Great Collapse of 2008, the editors of The Economist warned:

    A growing body of evidence suggests that the meritocratic ideal is in trouble in America. Income inequality is growing to levels not seen since the (first) Gilded Age. But social mobility is not increasing at anything like the same pace

Everywhere you look in modern America, in the Hollywood Hills or the canyons of Wall Street, in the Nashville recording studios or the clapboard houses of Cambridge, Massachusetts’ you see elites mastering the art of perpetuating themselves. America is increasingly looking like imperial Britain, with dynastic ties proliferating, social circles interlocking, mechanisms of social exclusion strengthening, and a gap widening between the people who make decisions and shape the culture and the vast majority of working stiffs.

Hear the editors of The Economist: “The United States is on its way to becoming a European-style class-based society.”

 

Read the full speech here.

Cold weather and clean-up sweeps by armored riot police are shifting the Occupy Wall Street movement from literal occupation of public spaces to other forms of political action.

On balance the literal occupation of public space has been successful. The focus of public attention has been shifted from the single issue of national debt to the fact that our financial and political systems have become so dysfunctional  that they are resistant to reform or problem solving.

A commenter to an earlier post observed that the number of people actually in tents was a vanishingly small percentage of the nation’s population. True enough, but immaterial. The same was true of marchers for women’s suffrage, active protestors to the Viet Nam war, Mahatma Gandhi or Rosa Parks.

Those protestors were symptoms of a dis-satisfaction with underlying social and political conditions and they would soon become the centers  for general protest and reform.

It is hard to ignore the fact that OWS quickly spread from coast to coast. The conservative press tried to characterize the occupiers as a kind of children’s crusade aided by drummers, pot smokers and the unwashed. It is certainly true that a majority of the tenters were young…although not all…but there were plenty of older folks on hand, too.

Some conservative pundits are apparently heaving a sigh of relief now that OWS is “dead.” They equate the removal of the physical occupations with a removal of the movement. They are, of course, wrong; and apparently blind and deaf to the impact of the social media.

OWS has simply moved to another level of political action and different bits of real estate. We should expect to see flash mobs, organized protests, marches, and other forms of guerrilla consciousness raising keeping on the pressure for reform.

These actions will be very annoying to the establishment. Good.

Less annoying, and possible more effective, will be a technique borrowed from a more traditional campaign book: The campaign  coffee gatherings in private homes.

Occupy Your Living Room is a way to take part in OWS without camping in the park. Simply invite your friends and neighbors to your home for an “Occupy Coffee.” Explain why you are sympathetic to the movement and be ready to point out facts about the way (for instance) the financial industry, left unsupervised, was responsible for the nation’s economic near collapse.

There’s no telling what you might learn. At a recent social gathering a friend mentioned something that he thought was outrageous: Apparent legal insider trading by members of Congress. It was new to me. Is it new to you?

Have a look.

I’m not keen on the word ‘vision.’ It’s a word  frequently used by  politicians who don’t have one. I’m embarrassed to be using it here, but I can’t think of a better one. The word ‘plan’ is a good workmanlike alternative, but perhaps too workmanlike. It suggests a specific project in hand, an end agreed upon for which we need only specify the means; something like building a bookcase or providing for the orderly repair of  a system of streets.

If  I say I have a plan for my house, you understand one thing; if I say I have a vision of what my house will be you understand something different. My vision is more than a scheme for the mechanical arrangement of rooms and utilities, it suggests how it might fit with the world around it, and the sort of life I will live within it.

City planning that is not also informed by some less mechanical, some wider-reaching vision of what the city is, or is to become, plans for a body without a soul.  A city not anchored by some vision of itself is nothing more than a developers’ town.

There was a time when thinking of ourselves as the Old Pueblo was enough to impose, on what we built and how we lived, a certain character and style of life that made Tucson distinctive. Our public buildings, like the old courthouse and the veterans’ hospital were built in an exaggerated  Spanish Colonial style.

The interior decoration of our homes reflected the Southwest, Native American and Hispanic traditions. We wore boots and bolo ties, and gentlemen were excused by the mayor from wearing suit coats or jackets during the summer. Our sense of ourselves was that we were a vacation place, a dude ranch place, a place where Spanish was spoken as well as English, a place that was part of the cowboy west  and its traditions.

As we grew in size we outgrew the Old Pueblo sense of who we were. Does rodeo week still express to ourselves and others what we are? I think not. Rodeo is still fun, but it used to be downtown, when there was a downtown, and it was somehow at the heart of things, a culturally defining event. Now it’s banished to the south side and many families use the rodeo week school holiday to take the kids to Disney Land.

Tucson needs a new sense of itself if it is not to be just another sprawling, boring builders’ town.

There’s plenty to build on, including the Spanish accented cowboy west of the Old Pueblo, and the deep cultural traditions and touching cultural pretension that would build a theater and then call it The Temple of Music and Art.

We have made a start in a small way by redefining ourselves, on the electronic billboards  that welcome travelers arriving at the airport, as “Optics Valley.” Corny, derivative, commercial, but not bad. Beats “five dollar town” or “phone center central.”

If we’ve decided to be  the center of  a high tech, well-paid industry, attractive to an intelligent and well educated work force we’ve gone a long way toward redefining who we are.

But we should also aspire to become the artistic and creative center of the southwest. We invest money to bring businesses here, we should also invest money to attract, support, and encourage  the arts. We should make Tucson a place where young artists and intellectuals want to come because it is a center of creative energy.

We could use more studio space, rehearsal space, and above all  a well designed outdoor venue for  all of the performing arts. We should  build a regional art complex, with a mix of  studios, apartments, theaters, and public patio gardens; built at public expense if need be, or with the same sort of tax benefits and subsidies that we offer manufacturers and failing hotel keepers.

Let’s invite young architects and designers of all sorts, too. Let’s  start to think of ourselves as a place where all  the crafts flourish and are supported; a place too proud of its intellectual and artistic traditions to be nothing more than a developers’ town.

The Greek city of Athens was the center of its world. Athens was a great business and commercial power as well a  center of the artistic and intellectual  life of its time. There is no reason why we should not aspire to become the Athens of The Southwest.

It could be a transforming vision… and it would make excellent economic sense.