MOYERS ON DEMOCRACY(ISBN=9780307387738) 英文原版 下载 mobi 免费 pdf 百度网盘 epub 2025 在线 电子书

　　People know Bill Moyers from his many years of path-breaking

journalism on television. But he is also one of America's most

sought-after public speakers. In this collection of speeches,

Moyers celebrates the promise of American democracy and offers a

passionate defense of its principles of fairness and justice.

Moyers on Democracy takes on crucial issues such as economic

inequality, our broken electoral process, our weakened independent

press, and the despoiling of the earth we share as our common

gift.

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　　Bill Moyers was one of the organizers of the Peace Corps,

Press Secretary under President Lyndon Johnson from 1965 until

1967, publisher of Newsday, senior correspondent for CBS

News, and producer of many of public television's groundbreaking

series. He is the winner of more than thirty Emmy Awards, and the

author of the bestselling books Listening to America, A

World of Ideas, Healing and the Mind, and Moyers on

America. In April 2007 Bill Moyers returned to PBS with his

weekly show Bill Moyers' Journal.

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　　1. FOR AMERICA'S SAKE

　　A New Story for America

　　December 12, 2006

　　My father dropped out of the fourth grade and never returned to

school because his family needed him to pick cotton to help make

ends meet. The Great Depression knocked him down and almost out.

When I was born he was making $2 a day working on the highway to

Oklahoma City. He never took home more than $100 a week in his

working life, and he made that only when he joined the union in the

last job he held. He voted for Franklin Roosevelt in four straight

elections and would have gone on voting for him until kingdom come

if he'd had the chance. I once asked him why, and he said, "Because

he was my friend." My father of course never met FDR; no politician

ever paid him much note. Many years later when I wound up working

in the White House my parents came for a visit and my father asked

to see the Roosevelt Room. I don't quite know how to explain it,

except that my father knew who was on his side. When FDR died my

father wept; he had lost his friend. This man with a fourth-grade

education understood what the patrician in the White House meant

when he talked about "economic royalism" and how private power no

less than public power can bring America to ruin in the absence of

democratic controls. When the president said "the malefactors of

great wealth" had concentrated into their own hands "an almost

complete control over other people's property, other people's

money, other people's labor, and other people's lives," my father

said amen; he believed the president knew what life was like for

people like him. When the president said life was no longer free,

liberty no longer real, men could no longer follow the pursuit of

happiness against "economic tyranny such as this," my father

nodded. He got it when Roosevelt said that a government by money

was as much to be feared as a government by mob, and that the

political equality we once had was meaningless in the face of

economic inequality. Against organized wealth, FDR said that "the

American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of

government." My father knew the president meant him.

　　Today my father would be written out of America's story. He would

belong to what the sociologist Katherine Newman calls the "missing

class"*--the fifty-seven million Americans who occupy an obscure

place between the rungs of our social ladder, earning wages above

the minimum but below a secure standard of living. They work hard

for their $20,000 to $40,000 a year, and they are vital to the

functioning of the country, as transit workers, day-care providers,

hospital attendants, teachers' aides, clerical assistants. They

live one divorce, one pink slip, one illness away from a free fall.

Largely forgotten by the press, politicians, and policy makers who

fashion government safety nets, they have no nest egg, no income

but the next paycheck, no way of paying for their children to go to

college. Over the years I have chronicled the lives of some of

these people in my documentaries. Now, a few days after the

election of 2006, I was asked to speak at a conference sponsored by

The Nation, the Brennan Center for Justice, the New Democracy

Project, and Demos to discuss the prospects of democracy. Those

prospects are dim, I realized, unless we write a story of America

that includes those people who are living on the edge, with no

friend in the White House.

　　You could not have chosen a better time to gather. Voters have

provided a respite from a right-wing radicalism predicated on the

philosophy that extremism in the pursuit of virtue is no vice. It

seems only yesterday that the Trojan horse of conservatism was

hauled into Washington to disgorge Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Ralph

Reed, Grover Norquist, and their band of ravenous predators

masquerading as a political party of small government, fiscal

restraint, and moral piety and promising "to restore accountability

to Congress…(and) make us all proud again of the way free people

govern themselves."

　　Well, the long night of the cabal is over, and Democrats are

ebullient as they prepare to take charge of the

multitrillion-dollar influence racket that we used to call the U.S.

Congress. Let them rejoice while they can, as long as they remember

that they have arrived at this moment mainly because George W. Bush

started a war most people have come to believe should never have

been fought in the first place. Let them remember that although

they are reveling in the ruins of a Republican reign brought down

by stupendous scandals, their own closet is stocked with skeletons

from an era when they were routed from office following ABSCAM

bribes and savings and loan swindles that plucked the pockets and

purses of hardworking Americans. As they rejoice Democrats would be

wise to be mindful of Shakespeare's counsel: "Merit doth much, but

fortune more." For they were delivered from the wilderness not by

their own goodness but by the hubris of the party in power--a

recurring phenomenon of American democracy.

　　Whatever one might say about the 2006 election, the real story is

one that our political and media elites are loath to acknowledge or

address. I am not speaking of the lengthy list of priorities that

progressives and liberals are eager to put on the table now that

Democrats hold the cards in Congress. The other day a message

popped up on my computer from a progressive advocate who is

committed to movement building from the ground up and has results

to show for his labors. His request was simple: "With changes in

Congress and at our state capitol, we want your input on what top

issues our lawmakers should tackle. Click here to submit your top

priority."

　　I clicked. Up came a list of thirty-four issues—an impressive

list that began with "African American" and ran alphabetically

through "energy" and "guns," to "higher education"

"transportation," "women's issues," and "worker's rights." It

wasn't a list to be dismissed by any means, for it came from an

unrequited thirst for action after a long season of fierce

opposition to every aspiration on the agenda. I understand the

mind-set. Here's a fellow who values allies and appreciates what it

takes to build coalitions; who knows that although our interests as

citizens vary, each one is an artery to the heart that pumps life

through the body politic, and each is important to the health of

democracy. This is an activist who knows political success is the

sum of many parts.

　　But America needs something more right now than a "must-do" list

from liberals and progressives. America needs a different

story.

　　The very morning I read the message from the progressive

activist, The New York Times reported on Carol Ann Reyes. She is

sixty-three, lives in Los Angeles, suffers from dementia, and is

homeless. Somehow she made her way to a hospital with serious,

untreated needs. No details were provided as to what happened to

her there, except that the hospital called a cab and sent her back

to skid row. True, they phoned ahead to workers at a rescue shelter

to let them know she was coming. But some hours later a

surveillance camera picked her up "wandering around the streets in

a hospital gown and slippers." Dumped in America.

　　Here is the real political story, the one most politicians won't

even acknowledge: the reality of the anonymous, disquieting daily

struggle of ordinary people, including not only the most

marginalized and vulnerable Americans but also young workers,

elders and parents, families and communities, searching for dignity

and fairness against long odds in an amoral market world.

　　Everywhere you turn you'll find people who believe they have been

written out of the story. Everywhere you turn there's a sense of

insecurity grounded in a gnawing fear that freedom in America has

come to mean the freedom of the rich to get richer even as millions

of Americans are thrown overboard. So let me say what I think up

front: the leaders and thinkers and activists who honestly tell

that story and speak passionately of the moral and religious values

it puts in play will be the first political generation since the

New Deal to win power back for the people.

　　There's no mistaking America is ready for change. One of our

leading analysts of public opinion, Daniel Yankelovich, reports

that a majority want social cohesion and common ground based on

pragmatism and compromise, patriotism and diversity. But because of

the great disparities in wealth the "shining city on the hill" has

become a gated community whose privileged occupants, surrounded by

moats of money and protected by a political system seduced with

cash into subservience, are removed from the common life of the

country.

　　The wreckage of this revolt of elites is all around us.

Corporations are shredding the social compact, pensions are

disappearing, medium incomes are flattening, and health-care costs

are soaring. In many ways, the average household is generally worse

off today than it was thirty years ago, and the public sector that

improved life for millions of Americans across three generations is

in tatters. For a time, stagnating wages were somewhat offset by

more work and more personal debt. Both political parties craftily

refashioned those major renovations of the average household as the

new standard, shielding employers from responsibility for anything

Wall Street would not reward. Now, however, the more acute major

risks workers have been forced to bear as employers reduce their

health and retirement costs have reveal that gains made by people

who live paycheck to paycheck are being reversed. Polls show a

majority of American workers now believe their children will be

worse off than they were. In one recent survey, only 14 percent of

workers said that they have obtained the American dream.

　　It is hard to believe that less than four decades ago a key

architect of the antipoverty program, R...

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书籍介绍

People know Bill Moyers from his many years of path-breaking journalism on television. But he is also one of America's most sought-after public speakers. In this collection of speeches, Moyers celebrates the promise of American democracy and offers a passionate defense of its principles of fairness and justice. Moyers on Democracy takes on crucial issues such as economic inequality, our broken electoral process, our weakened independent press, and the despoiling of the earth we share as our common gift.