Moyers on America: A Journalist and His Times - Couverture souple

Two New Essays from the Paperback Edition

"A Time for Anger"

We arrived early at New York’s Riverside Church one recent morning for a memorial service in tribute to an old friend. In the quietness of the hour I picked up a Bible from the pew and opened it randomly to the Gospel of Matthew where the story of Jesus of Nazareth unfolds chapter by chapter: The birth at Bethlehem. The baptism in the River Jordan. The temptation in the wilderness. The Sermon on the Mount. The healing of the sick and feeding of the hungry. The parables. The calling of disciples. The journey to Jerusalem. And always, embedded like pearls throughout the story, the teachings of compassion, forgiveness, and reconciliation: “Love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you.” “Whoever slaps you on the right cheek, turn the other to him also. . . . And whoever compels you to go one mile, go with him two.” “If you bring your gift to the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar, and go your way. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.” “Judge not, lest ye be judged.”

In these pages we are in the presence of one who clearly understands the power of love, mercy, and kindness—the “gentle Jesus” so familiar in art, song, and Sunday school.

But then the tale suddenly turns. Jesus’ demeanor changes; the tone and temper of the narrative shift, and the Prince of Peace becomes a disturber of the peace: Then Jesus went into the temple of God and drove out all those who bought and sold in the temple, and overturned the tables of the moneychangers . . . and he said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer but you have made it a den of thieves.’”

No cheek turned there. No second mile traveled. On the contrary, Jesus grows angry. He passes judgment. And he takes action.

I closed the Bible and sat quietly, turning the text over and again in my head, absorbing the image of Jesus striding through the holy precincts, excoriating strangers (who earlier in the day had been asking, “Who is this man?”), upsetting their transactions, scattering their money across the floor, bouncing them forcefully from the temple. Indignant at a profane violation of the sacred, Jesus threw the rascals out!

Anyone who happened down the aisle at that moment would have found me smiling. It was good to be reminded there is a place for anger in the world. Good to remember some things are worth getting mad about.

Here’s one: Under a headline stretching six columns across the page, the New York Times reported on March 10 that tuition in the city’s elite private schools, kindergarten as well as high school, would hit $26,000 for the coming school year. On the same page, under a two-column headline, the Times reported on a school in nearby Mount Vernon, just across the city line from the Bronx, with a student body that is 97 percent black. It is the poorest school in the town: Nine out of ten children qualify for free lunches; one out of ten lives in a homeless shelter. During black history month this past February, a sixth grader who wanted to write a report on Langston Hughes could not find a single book about Hughes in the library—nothing about the man or his poems. There is only one book in the library on Frederick Douglass. None on Rosa Parks, Josephine Baker, Leontyne Price, or other path breakers like them in the modern era. Except for a few Newbery Award books bought by the librarian with her own money, the books are largely from the 1950s and ’60s, when all the students were white. A child’s primer on work begins with a youngster learning how to be a telegraph delivery boy. All the jobs described in the book—the dry cleaner, the deliveryman, the cleaning lady—are white. There’s a 1967 book about telephones with the instruction: “When you phone you usually dial the number. But on some new phones you can push buttons.” The newest encyclopedia dates from 1991, with two volumes—“B” and “R”—missing. There is no card catalog in the library—no index cards or computer.

Something to get mad about.

Here’s something else: Caroline Payne’s face and gums are distorted because her Medicaid-financed dentures don’t fit. Her appearance has caused her to be continuously turned down for jobs. Caroline Payne is one of the people in David Shipler’s new book, The Working Poor: Invisible in America. She was born poor; although she once owned her own home and earned a two-year college degree, Caroline Payne has bounced from one poverty-wage job to another all her life, equipped with the will to move up, but lacking the resources to deal with such unexpected and overlapping problems as a mentally handicapped daughter, a broken marriage, and a sudden layoff that forced her to sell her few assets, pull up roots, and move on. “In the house of the poor . . .” Shipler writes, “the walls are thin and fragile, and troubles seep into one another.”

Something else: A few months ago the House of Representatives—now a wholly owned subsidiary of the corporate, political, and religious right—approved new tax credits for children. Not for poor children, mind you, but for families earning as much as $309,000 a year—families that already enjoy significant benefits from earlier tax cuts. The editorial page of the Washington Post called this “bad social policy, bad tax policy, and bad fiscal policy. You’d think they’d be embarrassed,” said the Post, “but they’re not.”

Nothing seems to embarrass the political class in Washington today. Not the fact that more children are growing up in poverty in America than in any other industrial nation, not the fact that millions of workers are actually making less money today in real dollars than they did twenty years ago, not the fact that working people are putting in longer and longer hours and still falling behind, not the fact that while we have the most advanced medical care in the world, nearly 44 million Americans—eight out of ten of them in working families—are uninsured and cannot get the basic care they need.

Astonishing as it seems, official Washington appears in no way embarrassed by the fact that inequality in America is greater than it’s been in fifty years—the worst inequality among all Western nations. You can’t even get them to acknowledge that we are experiencing a shift in poverty. For years we were told that those people down there at the bottom were single, jobless mothers. For years they were told they would move up the economic ladder if they would only go to school, work hard, and get married. But now poverty is showing up where we didn’t expect it—among families that include two parents, a worker, and a head of the household with more than a high school education. These are the newly poor, whom our political elites expect to climb out of poverty on a downward-moving escalator.

The Stanleys and the Neumanns come to mind. The two Milwaukee families—one black, one white—lost their breadwinners in the first wave of downsizing in 1991 as corporations began moving jobs out of the city and out of the country. In a series of documentaries over the next decade my colleagues and I chronicled their efforts to cope with the wrenching changes in their lives and find a place for themselves in the new global economy. They’re the kind of people my mother would have called “the salt of the earth.” They love their children, care about their communities, go to church every Sunday, and work hard all week.

To make ends meet after the layoffs, both mothers had to take full-time jobs. Both fathers became seriously ill. When one father had to stay in the hospital two months the family went $30,000 in debt because they didn’t have adequate health care. We were present with our camera when the bank began foreclosure on the modest home of the other family because they couldn’t meet the mortgage payments. Like millions of Americans, the Stanleys and the Neumanns were playing by the rules and still getting stiffed. By the end of the decade they were slipping further behind while running harder, and the gap between them and prosperous America was widening.

What turns their personal tragedy into a political travesty is that they are patriotic. They love America. But they no longer believe they matter to the people who run the country. When our film opens, both families are watching the inauguration of Bill Clinton on television. By the end of the decade they were paying little attention to politics; they simply didn’t think their concerns would ever be addressed by our governing class. They are not cynical—they are too religious to be cynical—but they know the system is rigged against them.

They know this, and so do we. For years now a small fraction of American households has been garnering an extreme concentration of wealth and income, while large corporations and financial institutions have obtained unprecedented power over who wins and who loses. In 1960, the gap in terms of wealth between the top 20 percent and the bottom 20 percent was 30-fold. Four decades later it is more than 75-fold. Such concentrations of wealth would be far less of an issue if the rest of society were benefiting proportionately. But that’s not the case. The pressures of inequality on middle- and working-class Americans have grown more severe despite the general prosperity (which is why we called our documentaries about the Stanleys and Neumanns Surviving the Good Times). The economist Jeffrey Madrick writes, “The strain on working people and on family life, as spouses have gone to work in dramatic numbers, has become significant. VCRs and television sets are cheap, but higher education, health care, public transportation, drugs, housing, and cars have risen faster in price than typical family incomes. Life has grown neither calm nor secure for most Americans, by any means.” 

It is a marked turn of events for a country saturated by paeans to the American Dream. America was not meant to be a country where the winner takes all. Through a system of checks and balances we were going to maintain a healthy equilibrium in how power works—and for whom. As Madrick points out, because equitable access to public resources is the lifeblood of any democracy, Americans made primary schooling free to all. Because everyone deserves a second chance, debtors, especially the relatively poor, were protected by state law against their rich creditors. Charters to establish corporations were open to most if not all (white) comers, rather than held for the elite. Government encouraged Americans to own their own piece of land, and even supported squatters’ rights. Equal access, long a hope, began to become reality for millions of us. Although my parents were knocked down and almost out by the Depression and were poor all their lives, I went to good public schools. My brother made it to college on the GI bill. When I bought my first car with a borrowed loan of $450 I drove to a subsidized university on free public highways and rested in state-maintained public parks. I was one more heir of a growing public legacy that shaped America as a shared project and became the central engine of our national experience.

Until now. 

A profound transformation is occurring in America. It has been documented in a series of recent studies. One—by the American Political Science Association—finds that “increasing inequalities threaten the American ideal of equal citizenship and that progress toward real democracy may have stalled in this country and even reversed (“American Democracy in an Age of Rising Inequality”). A second study by two independent researchers describes how the radical political elite who have gained ascendancy over politics has inequality as its mission and has organized “a fanatical drive to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that have shaped public responsibility from social harms arising from the excesses of private power.” From land, water, and other natural resources, to media and the broadcast and digital spectrums, to scientific discovery and medical breakthroughs, a broad range of America’s public resources is undergoing a powerful shift toward elite control, contributing substantially to those economic pressures on ordinary Americans that “deeply affect household stability, family dynamics, social mobility, political participation, and civic life.”

You could have seen it coming by following the money. As a relative few have concentrated more and more of America’s wealth in their own hands, they have gained a power to be heard in politics that is denied to most citizens. Only 12 percent of American households had incomes over $100,000 in 2000, but they made up 95 percent of the substantial donors to political campaigns and have been the big winners in Washington since.

After a long career covering Washington, the veteran reporter Elizabeth Drew concludes that “the greatest change in Washington over the past twenty-five years—in its culture, in the way it does business and the ever-burgeoning amount of business transactions that go on here—has been in the preoccupation with money.” Jeffrey Birnbaum, who covered Washington for nearly twenty years for the Wall Street Journal, writes that “[campaign cash] has flooded over the gunwales of the ship of state and threatens to sink the entire vessel. Political donations determine the course and speed of many government actions that deeply affect our daily lives.” John McCain concurs. During his brief campaign in 2000, when he was ambushed by dirty tricks from the religious right in South Carolina and a flood of cash from George W. Bush’s wealthy cronies, Senator McCain said elections are nothing less than an “influence peddling scheme in which both parties compete to stay in office by selling the country to the highest bidder.” As I write, President Bush is being sworn in for a second term under a canopy of cash—$40 to 50 million—supplied for his inauguration by the very interests waiting offstage for the payback.

And such payback it is!

Hear this:
When powerful interests shower Washington with millions in campaign contributions, they often get what they want. But it’s ordinary citizens and firms that pay the price and most of them never see it coming. This is what happens 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...

During the fifty years he has been variously a reporter, a political spokesperson, and a broadcaster, Bill Moyers has demonstrated a deep commitment to understanding the workings of our government and the role of the individual in society. His essays and commentaries, such as the recent “Shivers Down the Spine,” “A Time for Anger,” and “Journalism Under Fire,” are argued over and passed along as soon as they appear in print or on the Internet. Identifying what he sees as a political system increasingly at the mercy of a corporate ruling class, he urges a reengagement with the spirit of community that makes the work of democracy possible. Not only a trenchant critique of what is wrong, Moyers on America is also a call to arms for the progressive promise of the people of America, in whom his faith is strong.