By Marie Pfeifer
The plutocrats want to own our vote.
That’s the warning from veteran broadcaster Bill Moyers, who spoke recently at a Bernardsville Library benefit.
“Democracy has become a commercial-for-profit venture. There is an extraordinary gap between the very rich and us. Most of the money has come from Super PACs, secret donors who expect to get a return on their money,” he said.
The end result won’t be good for the United States, Moyers said.
“Studies indicate the divide may stifle job and economic growth for years to come. At no time in modern history has the top one-hundredth-of-one-percent owned more of our wealth or paid so low a tax rate.”
Moyers served in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and has been a television commentator for four decades. As host of the weekly Moyers & Company on PBS, he interviews noted guests about democracy, politics, U.S. history and the media’s influence on public opinion, among other topics.
BIG WHOPPERS
In his talk, Moyers cited an essay by Tom Engelhardt, who wrote on TomDispatch.com that “American politics are being supersized and no one is saying it.”
Our politics reflect our society’s bigger-is-better mentality of giant-sized drinks, over-sized SUVs and big Whoppers.
“Democracy is on steroids,” Moyers said. “This is the longest and most expensive election ever. More than $3 billion for TV Ads, alone. Staggering the imagination is the near-billion dollars that each of the Obama and Romney crews have already raised.”
He noted mega-millions pouring into Republican Super PACs from casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam, and the billionaire Koch brothers, who support “Americans for Prosperity,” an organization funneling $6 billion into anti-Obama attack ads.
This controversial issue has not been confronted in the presidential campaign, Moyers said.
“Not by Mitt Romney, who is the embodiment of the predatory world of financial capitalism,” he said. “And not even by Barack Obama, whose party once fought for working men and women against the economic royalists.”
Moyers said he has chosen to stay in public-funded television to do work that he believes benefits all the people.
“When you put a price tag on democracy and campaigns, democracy is changed,” he said.
When the Supreme Court made its 2010 “Citizens United” decision, paving the way for Super PACs, the justices may have overturned rules that kept bosses from ordering employees to do political work on company time, Moyers said.
Only a grass-roots movement can save our democracy, the broadcaster said. “The answer is public funding – if each person would pay $5 or $10 a year we would have clean elections. It is the only way we will get democracy back” and have nonpartisan politics, Moyers asserted. For more information see: www.publiccampaign.org.
IN PRAISE OF LIBRARIES
“The future of democracy hinges on smart people,” Moyers said. And those smarts start in places like the Bernardsville Library, which has a $1 million budget and more than 200,000 annual visitors.
Moyers remembered discovering Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days in his library as a boy in Texas. He was hooked, and continues using public libraries for research.
He also credited much of his success to Judith Davidson Moyers, his wife of 58 years and president of Public Affairs Television (PAT).
