Bill Moyers speech outlining what should be new D message

[mburbank]

You don't need the whole speech, the middle three paragraphs lay it out.

I think this is where our national future lies, and that any Democrat who can't embrace this theme and mean it should be voted out next time they run. I'll expand and say any Republican who adopts that theme and means it, I'll vote for over any Democrat who doesn't.

You all now there's a whole lot of other things I grind my axe on. Foreign policy, civil liberties, etc. But I think a lot of the trouble we're in right ow stems from the fact that America has been kidnapped by a very shallow pool of people rich beyond the dreams of avarice. No one, no one has any need or any right to be as much richer than their fellow citizens as some people have become today. It gives them the power to corrupt, bend, seduce and in many cases even craft the laws fo the land. Yeah, yeah, it's been ever thus, but it's out of control, and the only power the vast majority of Americans have is the vote and I think this is a message a majority of people are prepared to hear and follow.
Anyway, here's three paragraphs I offer with my fingers crossed.




"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 dumped from the Dream. 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 that 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 a moat 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 abdication by elites is all around us.

Corporations are shredding the social compact, pensions are disappearing, median incomes are flattening and healthcare 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 was a support system and safety net 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 didn't care about. Now, however, the more acute major risks workers have been forced to bear as employers reduce their health and retirement costs-on orders from Wall Street-have made it clear that our fortunes are being reversed. Polls show that a majority of US workers now believe their children will be worse off than they are. In one recent survey, only 14 percent of workers said that they have obtained the American Dream."