[Dialogue] Bill Moyers

[Wilson Priscilla]

Bill Moyers speech this month to the United Church of Christ national  
gathering in Conn.

Moyers challenges UCC: 'Drive out the money changers'





Written by Bill Moyers (transcribed)
June 23, 2007

Thank you.  Thank you for that extraordinary welcome, and thank you,  
Bob, for that very generous introduction.  As you were speaking,  
however, I was reminded of three incidents that happened in my life a  
few years ago, all on the same day.  I had been the CBS Evening News  
Analyst with Dan Rather, and I was also producing a summer series of  
CBS News with my old friend, one of the great journalists of my time,  
the late Charles Kuralt.  The series ended, and as often happened in  
August, I would fly home to see my parents in East Texas.  On this  
particular day, I came out of CBS News on West 54th Street, and put  
my bag in the back of the cab, and went to La Guardia Airport.  At  
the airport, the porter opened the trunk of the cab, and reached in  
and pulled out the bag.  It had the CBS logo on it.  Not my name,  
just the logo.  You know the logo, the famous black and blue eyes - a  
lot more black and blue today than it was then.... But.. but the  
porter looked at it, and looked up at me, and looked at it and looked  
back up at me, and he said ... "Aren't you in a soap opera?"  I  
started to say "Yes, the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather, but, I  
didn't think Dan would appreciate that.

I went on and checked in, was sitting there reading a paper, and a  
lady came up, with a bun of white hair, and looked over the logo of  
the paper, and she was looking right into my eye, and she looked at  
me and said, "I know you.  Who are you?"

Flew on the plane to Shreveport, Louisiana, which is the airport  
nearest my home town, was waiting for that same bag at the baggage  
claim, and another lady came up to me and said, "Oh, oh my goodness,  
ohhh my goodness, oh!  I can't tell you how much I enjoy your work,  
Mr. Kuralt."  "But you look different in person than you do on  
television."  And I said, "Yes, ma'am.  On television, I'm fatter and  
balder.  And she said, (so help me, these all) she said, "Oh, we love  
you both ways."

The moral... the moral is, so much for notoriety.

What a joy it is for me to be here; to see in person, leaders I have  
long admired from afar, John Thomas and Paul Sherry among them.  To  
see Everett Parker sitting there: so early a pioneer where faith,  
democracy and communications converge; so long an advocate of access  
to the media for all Americans, so that everyone's story has a chance  
to be heard.  My wife Judith, who is also the CEO and Executive  
Editor of our independent production company, is the proud recipient  
of the coveted award in Everett Parker's name, and I see it every day  
when I go into her study.

And to see Bob Chase in action, Everett's successor in his own right,  
a towering figure, no pun intended... a towering figure in the fight  
to hold media accountable to the public interest, and the man who  
invited me here today.  You can hold him accountable for that.

Thank you for including me in this General Synod, for inviting me to  
participate with you in this remarkable celebration of witness, and  
for the fellowship my family and I have shared with you through the  
years.  We joined the UCC Community Church forty years ago this year,  
when we moved to Long Island from Washington.  We had, as Bob said,  
been Baptists, but we found a new and welcoming home among the UCC  
congregation on Stewart Avenue in Garden City.  Our children grew up  
in that church.  The friendships we made there nurtured our lives.    
We  sang together, prayed together, mourned together, downed steaming  
cups of coffee at Sunday morning forums together, went through  
weddings and funerals and confirmations and ordinations, and came to  
a deeper experience of grace, and a greater understanding of what it  
means to be brothers and sisters in the faith.  Some of those old  
friends from that church are here today.  I probably haven't seen  
them all: Ann Maloog, Lois and Jim McCartney, Joan Custer...  So are  
Helen Durer and Virginia Crier, who are being honored by this Synod.   
Whitney Brown and Dean Allberg are here – they were just children  
then, and both are now UCC ministers.  I think Jim Edelman is here.   
Jim was the young Assistant Minister back then, and is the Senior  
Pastor now, skillfully and lovingly leading the congregation to a new  
level of hospitality and inclusion.  Ralph and Beverly Allberg are  
here.  I spent the evening, the night with them last night.  Ralph  
was our Pastor during our time there.  Sunday after Sunday we arrived  
in need of a word from the Lord, and Ralph never failed to deliver  
it.  I have sat at the feet of some powerful preachers in my life,  
Carlyle Marney, James Stewart, J.P. Adams, James Forbes, but Ralph  
Allberg is unique in his gift for meeting the needs of the heart,  
with language of today and wisdom of the ages.  A collection of his  
sermons occupies a strategic place in my study.  It is heavily  
underlined and worn with use, for I've gone to it often for  
inspiration and insight at hard turns in my own pilgrimage.  I must  
also confess that it's been the answer to a professional plagiarist's  
desperate prayers. ... The Lord does provide.

But as much as Ralph's preaching touched me, it was the Allberg  
family's friendship that indelibly marked us.  When our own family  
needed consolation and courage, Beverly and Ralph were there for us,  
arms outstretched and hearts open.  Our years together remain a  
landmark in our journey.  And consider yourself fortunate if you can  
say of your Pastor what I can say of mine, that the best shepherd is  
a good friend.

So you can see why I am grateful to be in your company this morning,  
to be among so many kindred spirits.  I am at home in this church.   
You believe in the democracy of the pew, in the authority and power  
of the local congregation, and so do I.  You believe in a witness  
based on the historic tradition of scripture but also the lived  
experience of today, and so do I.  You believe, as Anselm said in  
Faith Seeking Understanding, the old story reconciled with the new  
discoveries of science and reason, and so do I.  And you believe in  
the power and the promise of democracy, and so do I.  I thank God ...  
I thank God for your witness and for the storied heritage of this  
Church.  This United Church has the lineage that has influenced the  
American Experiment far beyond its numbers and its treasures.  You  
have raised the prophetic voice against the militarism, the  
materialism and the racism that chokes America's arteries.  You have  
placed ... you have yourself in the thick of the fight for social  
justice.  You have aligned yourself on the side of liberty, equality  
and compassion, a church of prominent firsts, first to ordain an  
African American, the first to ordain a woman, the first to ordain an  
openly gay person, and the first to have a Baptist to deliver your  
keynote address.  Justice Brandeis might have been speaking of this  
Church when he said the secret of liberty is courage.  For this  
courage, you have been attacked.  Like other mainstream churches  
across the land, you have been in the bull's eye of a highly  
organized and heavily funded campaign by corporate, political and  
religious forces who would stifle the prophetic voices that speak  
truth to power and call the Empire to repentance.

Fifty years ago when this UCC fellowship was forged, mainline  
churches were part of the progressive awakening that put the force of  
law behind civil rights and spread opportunity and wealth further  
than ever before in our history.  Think about it.  Half a century  
ago, America seemed on the verge of at last getting it right.  Fewer  
than 150 years had passed since our Declaration of Independence had  
let loose in the world the radical notion of equality in the sight of  
God and under the rule of law.  Eleven signers of that Declaration  
were members of UCC predecessor churches.  Those words can still  
cause the heart to race:

We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created  
equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain  
inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the  
pursuit of happiness.

Once those words were abroad, every human being who could hear them,  
could imagine another world possible.  They could think differently  
about the value that society had assigned their life.  Yes, it's  
true.  Slavery still exercised a malignant hold over our young  
generation, but that couldn't last long, once those words were loose  
in the land.  The man who wrote those words knew it couldn't last.   
As a Southerner, Thomas Jefferson saw no political or social  
alternative to the peculiar institution, but he knew well that  
slavery degraded master and slave alike, and that any society that  
permitted half of its citizens to be despots over the other half was  
doomed.

"I tremble for my country," he wrote, "when I reflect that God is  
just, and that His justice cannot sleep forever."  Jefferson knew  
from his own experience the perversity of owning another person as  
chattel.  For the hand that wrote those words, "All men are created  
equal" also stroked the breasts and caressed the thighs of a slave  
woman named Sally Hemings.  It is no longer a secret: this learned,  
philosophical and far-seeing founder had a long-term sexual  
relationship with his slave, who bore him several children.  DNA  
confirms it, and even the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation in  
Virginia accepts it.  One guest at Monticello looked up at a dinner  
one evening and was startled to see a young servant who was the  
spitting image of the master at the head of the table.  Jefferson  
never acknowledged those children as his own.  And as he grew older,  
he relied more and more on slavery to keep him financially afloat.   
When he died, his slaves were sold to satisfy his creditors - all  
except for Sally.  His probaters found in Jefferson's will an obscure  
passage, setting her children free.  None of the others.  Just the  
children of Sally Hemings.  Two of them, of the descendants of those  
children, settled in Ohio, where their own descendants today have  
increased, some living as Blacks, and some as Whites.  And two  
centuries later, despite their common parenting, race still divides  
them.

But here's the point.  Jefferson could not really think that the  
words on that parchment were markers solely for white men of  
privilege and property who liked port and politics.  He had to  
know.  ... That the flesh and blood woman in his arms was his equal.   
In her desire for life, her longing for liberty, and her passion for  
happiness.

But the law ... but the law had been fashioned by white men of wealth  
privilege to keep her outside the gate of promise opened by the  
Declaration of Independence.  She lay in his arms, the arms of its  
author, but could not travel with him to the Promised Land.

The philosopher and educator Mortimer Adler once told me in a series  
I did on PBS called Six Great Ideas, that whatever things are really  
good for any human being, are really good for all other human  
beings.  The happy and good life is essentially the same for all, he  
said, the satisfaction of the same needs inherent in human nature.

So all that Sally Hemings asked from her long sufferance was that her  
master let her children go.  The oldest and most plaintive of human  
petitions: Let my children go.

And he did.  But only upon his death.  Thomas Jefferson got it right,  
you see.  But he lived it wrong.  He got it right for the same reason  
he lived it wrong: he was embedded in the human condition.  Addicted  
to his own place and privilege, he could send the noblest sentiments  
winging around the world, but refused to let them lodge in his own  
home.  So much a creature of his time, he could not rise above his  
times.  He knew the truth, and he lived the lie.

As we are, today.

It is the oldest war of all, the war of the self.  Saul of Tarsus  
understood this when he wrote, "I do not what I want to do, and what  
I detest, I do."

Emily Dickinson understood it, too:

   I felt a cleaving in my mind, as if my brain had split.

   I tried to match it seam by seam, but could not make it fit.

So the authors of our freedom produced the Constitution that  
tolerated slavery and the cruel dispossession of Native Peoples who  
had been here all along.  And we've been wrestling with the  
contradiction in our nation's soul ever since, the conflict between  
power and justice.

Recall with me, Job's incredible argument with God, that has come  
down to us through the ages, is one of the most wrenching of protests  
against the world where the wicked prosper and the innocent suffer.   
Drawn from the facts on the ground as any journalist should do, from  
the life he sees all around him, Job's outcry defines evil and  
innocence as socially ordained arrangements of power.

Listen:

Where are the days of judgement, the times when the wicked are  
tried?  They steal land from their neighbors, and walk away with  
their flocks.  They drive off the orphan's donkey, and impound the  
widow's bull.  They push the weak from the pathway and force the  
wretched to hide.  The poor, [Job goes on] like herds of cattle,  
wander across the plains, searching all day for food, picking up  
scraps for their children.  They carry grain for the wicked and break  
their backs for the rich.  They press olives and starve.  They crush  
grapes and go thirsty.

In these ancient words, we have the earliest indictment of poverty  
and injustice as intentional, willed priorities.  Not the result of  
natural scarcity, not the consequences of disparities in I.Q., not  
the inevitable triumph of some immutable economic principle – no,  
Job saw that poverty and injustice were prescribed by the powers that  
be who arranged to serve their own self-interest and called upon  
obliging priests to bless it as God's will.

It has been a long struggle to put the world right.  And you and I  
are the heirs of spiritual forebears who joined that struggle, who  
proved over and again that courage is the secret of liberty.

My friends and fellow congregants, this has been the prologue.  Now  
comes the argument.

On this Saturday morning, June 23rd, 2007, in the opening ceremony of  
this Church's 50th anniversary, I've come to say, that America's  
revolutionary heritage, and America's revolutionary spirit, life,  
liberty and the pursuit of justice, for government of, by and for the  
people – is under siege.  And if churches of conscience don't take  
the lead in their rescue and their revival, we can lose our democracy.

Hear me out on this... hear me out on this.  It may take a little  
longer than I intended.  I am – or was – a Baptist, after all.   
But you know, no matter how many of you stay around for these five  
days, this is the last time all of us will be together again.  I  
mean, everyone who is here right now.  And we have to connect on  
this, or the opportunity is lost.

"The world may be flat," as Thomas Friedman writes, "but it is  
increasingly marked by great gulfs that separates the people who live  
on it."  Flying over Southern California recently, I could look down  
and see what I'm talking about most dramatically.  You see a jigsaw  
puzzle of affluent walled communities, often contiguous with low  
income areas, choking them off.  In California today, forty percent  
of all the new housing development is in the form of gated  
communities, a nearly fourteen percent rise since 2001.  In some  
cases, developers make deals with government, literally to confiscate  
formerly public resources and amenities, parkland, lakes, beachfront,  
access, and use it exclusively for gated homeowners.

You see this flying over the capitol of Buenos Aires, of Buenos  
Aires, the capitol of Argentina.  After the financial meltdown in  
1999, there has been an economic recovery, but the main evidence of  
it is hundreds of new gated communities, barrios cerrados, springing  
up outside the city, with walls topped by razor wire and watchtowers,  
by armed guards with walkie-talkies.  The wealthiest ones are  
actually called "countries,"  requiring I.D. and authorization to  
cross their "borders."  And one resident said, "You can't see the  
poor here.  That's part of the appeal."

But the realities on the ground don't disappear.  Here's one: under a  
headline stretching six columns across the page, the New York Times  
reported 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% 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 in 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's only  
one book in the library on Frederick Douglass, none on Rosa Parks,  
Josephine Baker, Leontyne Price, or other path breakers like them in  
our modern era.  Except for a few Newbery Award Books bought by the  
librarian with her own money, the books were largely from the 1950s  
and the 1960s when all the students were White.  A child's primer on  
work in the library begins with a youngster learning how to be a  
telegraph delivery boy, and all the jobs described in the book, the  
dry cleaner, delivery man, the cleaning lady, are White.  There's a  
1967 book about telephones in the library, with the instruction,  
"When you phone, you usually dial the number, but on some new phones,  
you can push buttons."  The newest encyclopedia in the library dates  
from 1991, with two volumes, B and R missing.  And there is no card  
catalog in the library, no index cards, and no computer.

Reality.  On the ground.

Here's another: Carolyn Paine's face and gums are distorted because  
her Medicaid finance dentures don't fit.  Her appearance has caused  
her to be continuously turned down for jobs.  Carolyn Paine is one of  
the people in David Shipler's marvelous book, The Working Poor:  
Invisible in America.  She was born poor.  Although she once owned  
her home and earned a two-year college degree, Carline Paine 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, a sudden layoff that forced her to sell  
her few assets, pull up her roots, and move on.  "In the house of the  
poor," David Shipler writes, "the walls are thin and fragile and  
troubles seep into one another."

We could ask Carol Ann Reyes about reality if we could find her.   
She's 63, lives in Los Angeles, suffers from dementia, and is  
homeless.  Somehow, she made her way to a hospital with serious  
untreated ailments.  The newspaper story that I read about her wasn't  
certain what happened to her there, except that the hospital, which  
is part of the largest HMO in the country, called a cab and sent her  
back to Skid Row.  True, they phoned workers at a rescue shelter to  
let them know that 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.  Dying alone ... in America.

It's been exactly a dozen years this summer, since Chicago  
experienced that devastating heat wave between July 14th and July  
20th in 1995.  Hundreds of people died, mostly poor and elderly, died  
of heatstroke, died of dehydration, died of kidney failure.  Died  
alone!  Behind locked doors and sealed windows.  Out of contact with  
friends, family and neighborhood.  Unassisted by public agencies or  
community groups.  So many died.  A local meat packer volunteered his  
fleet of refrigerated trucks to handle the overflow of corpses.  A  
young journalist I know named Eric Klinenberg wrote a book about that  
summer.  He called the book Heat Wave.  It's worth your time, even  
now.  Because like Hurricane Katrina nine years later, the heat that  
summer had the appearance of an act of God.  And the official story  
tried to keep up the appearances.  City officials ... actually blamed  
the dead, for not being prepared.  But as you read in Klinenberg's  
book, "These fatal conditions actually reflected the hard reality of  
the City's social environment, a large population of isolated  
elderly, living in under-serviced, crime-ridden neighborhoods, with  
weakened social ties due to suburban flight.  And without those  
commercial or community activities that make them able to go out and  
feel safe."

In the medical autopsies of political reports that established the  
official record for the disaster, Klinenberg wrote, "None of these  
common urban conditions show up as causes of death, but these  
extremes create the kind of slow motion emergency that can be fatally  
accelerated by a sudden event that becomes the tipping point."

Until then, the poor and the lonely are invisible.  The Mayor of  
Chicago didn't seem embarrassed by what happened.  He even quipped,  
that "Well, of course Chicago is a city of extremes."

Walled off.

You know, nothing seems to embarrass the political class today.  Not  
the war in Iraq that bleeds dry so many lives.  The Washington Post  
had another astonishing revelation this week, of troops returning  
from the battlefield with psychological wounds who are then lost in  
the mental health system that is supposed to heal them.  By this  
Spring, the number of veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq who have  
sought help for post-traumatic stress would fill four Army  
divisions.  Some 45,000 in all, and they occupy every rank, uniform,  
and corner of the Country.

  It's not embarrassing to our political class.

They're not embarrassed that more children are growing up in poverty  
in America than in any other industrial nation.  They're not  
embarrassed that millions of workers are actually making less money  
today in real dollars than they did twenty years ago, despite the  
fact that they're putting in longer and longer hours.  They're not  
embarrassed by the fact that we have the most advanced care in the  
world, and yet nearly 44 million Americans, eight out of ten of them  
in working families, are uninsured and cannot get care they need.

Astonishing as it seems, our political elite appear in no way  
embarrassed by the fact that the gap between the rich and poor in  
America today is greater than it's been since 1929, when the economy  
collapsed and America fell into depression.  We have the worst  
inequality in the world among industrial democracies.  You can't even  
get them to acknowledge that we're experiencing a shift in poverty.   
For years, the people at the bottom of our ladder 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.  And our political elites expect them to climb out of  
poverty on a downwardly escalating moving escalator.

I have to confess to you here.  It's a mystery to me!  Jesus said,  
"Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for the  
Kingdom of God belongs to such as these."  Then you have to wonder,  
how the self-declared Christian nation leaves so many children to  
suffer?

According to UNICEF's report card for 2007, our country ranks near  
the bottom in child well-being in the developed world, far beyond  
even former Communist countries like Poland and the Czech Republic.   
We are dead last among 21 countries in measures of health and safety  
for children.  And close to bottom even in material  well-being,  
despite vastly greater wealth per capita.

What's going on?

I started to come and talk about the media, my business.  But I  
decided I couldn't.  That I had to talk to you about what your media  
are not telling you.  Because they're not telling you what's going on.

For years now, our political and economic system has been fixed to  
favor people at the top.  A small fraction of American households  
have been guarding a huge concentration of wealth and income while  
large corporations and financial institutions have obtained more and  
more power over who wins and who loses.

Now I'm going to quote some statistics.  And I know the eyes glaze  
over when statistics are mentioned – but a great mentor of mine at  
the University of Texas once told me when I was in school there many  
years ago, that it's the mark of a deeply educated person to be  
deeply moved by statistics.  I want to see ... if you are moved by  
these statistics.

In 1960 the gap in terms of wealth between the top 20% and the bottom  
20% was 30-fold.  Now it's 75-fold.  Since 1979, the share of pre-tax  
income going to the top 1% of American households has risen by 7  
percentage points.  At the same time, the share of income going to  
the bottom 80% has fallen by 7%.

People, as I said, are working harder.  Productivity has been  
growing.  You're doing a harder job at work, working harder.  But  
wages have been stagnating.  Even the bargaining power of the once- 
privileged White college graduates has declined significantly in the  
last 30 years, along with those of male high school graduates.  This  
left 80% of all income gains over these 30 years in the hands of that  
1%.

It's like inviting a hundred people over for some pie.  (I'm glad  
Beverly Allberg didn't do this last night.)  But it's like inviting a  
hundred people over for some pie, cutting the pie into 5 slices,  
giving 4 of the slices to just one person, and leaving one slice for  
the remaining 99.  You don't be surprised if they fight over it.   
Which is exactly what's happening when people look at their wages and  
then their taxes, and end up hating the government for everything it  
does!

And yes, as at places like at Walmart, they say, "But we do this for  
the consumer."  And it's true: television sets, and cell phones, and  
iPods are cheap.  But higher education, health care and public  
transportation, drugs, housing and cars have risen in price faster  
than typical family incomes, and Walmart produces none of those.

Listen.  We don't need Karl Marx to analyze where this is taking us.   
Just read The Economist.  That's right, the pro-business magazine  
considered to be one of the most influential defenders of capitalism  
in publishing today.  On the eve of President Bush's second  
inauguration – I have this still posted these 3 years later on the  
bulletin board in my study – on the eve of President Bush's second  
inauguration, The Economist produced a sobering analysis of what is  
happening to the American Dream.  The editors looked at the yawning  
gap between incomes.  Thirty years ago the average real compensation  
of the top 100 chief corporate executives in America was 39 times the  
pay of the average worker.  Today it's 1000 times.

The Economist examined our education system, which they said is  
increasingly stratified by social class, in which, as I said, poor  
children attend schools with fewer resources of their richer  
contemporaries.  They looked at how our great universities are  
increasingly reinforcing rather than reducing these educational  
inequalities.

They looked at great corporations and found it harder and harder for  
people to start at the bottom and rise up in the hierarchy.

And the editors of The Economist, no socialist rag, looked at all the  
evidence and concluded, "The United States risks calcifying into a  
European style class-based society."

About the same time, the Wall Street Journal, no enemy of capitalism,  
concluded that the typical child starting out in poverty in Europe or  
Canada has a better chance of climbing out of it than a child born in  
poverty in the United States.

And about the same time, The American Political Science Association  
concluded in a major study of its own, that increasing inequalities  
threaten the American ideal of equal citizenship, and that progress  
toward real democracy may have stalled in this country, and even  
regressed.

What's happening?

It's not right.

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.  Because equitable access to public resources is  
the life blood of any democracy, Americans made primary schooling  
free to all.  Because everyone deserves a second chance, debtors,  
especially the relative poor, were protected by state law against  
their rich creditors.  Charters to establish corporations were open  
to most if not all – white – comers at the time, 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, became a reality for millions of us.

Although my parents were knocked down and almost out by the  
depression, and were poor all their lives – my dad's last paycheck  
after taxes was $96.25 (I still have that, too.) – Although my  
parents were knocked down and almost out by the depression, I went to  
good public schools.  My brother made it to college on the G.I.  
bill.  When I bought my first car with a borrowed loan, I drove to a  
public university on free public highways and rested in public  
parks.  I was one more heir of a growing public legacy that shaped  
America as a shared project, and became the central engine, about the  
time of your merger, the central engine of our national experience.

Not now.  In the early 1970s, Richard Nixon's Attorney General, who  
like this one may, wound up in jail, disgraced...  Richard Nixon's  
Attorney General, John Mitchell, said "This country is going so far  
to the right, you won't recognize it."  And thirty years ago, a class  
war was declared from the top down against the idea and ideal of  
equality.  It has been driven ever since by a radical elite, seeking  
to gain ascendancy over politics and to dismantle the political  
institutions, the legal and statutory canons and the intellectual and  
cultural frameworks that check the excesses of private power.

 From land, water, and other natural resources, to the 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.

That class war was declared in a powerful polemic I read at the time,  
by the wealthy right-winger William Simon, who had been Nixon's  
Secretary of the Treasurer.  In the book called Time for Truth, he  
declared "that funds generated by business must rush by the multi- 
millions to conservative causes."  It was a trumpet sounded for the  
financial and business elites to take back the power and privileges  
they had lost as a result of the depression and the New Deal.

They got the message.  Business Week put it bluntly: "Some people  
will obviously have to do with less.  It will be a bitter pill for  
many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big  
business can have more."

Their long range strategy – this is all spelled out – was to cut  
work forces and wages, scowl the globe in search of cheap labor,  
trash the social contract and the safety net that was supposed to  
protect people from hardships beyond their control, deny ordinary  
citizens the power to sue rich corporations for malfeasance and  
malpractice, and eliminate the ability of government to restrain what  
the editorial writers for the Wall Street Journal admiringly called  
the "animal spirits of business."

Returning us to the law ... of the jungle.

Looking back, it all seems so clear that we wonder that we could have  
ignored the warning signs at the time.  What has been happening to  
working people is not the result of Adam Smith's invisible hand, but  
the direct consequence of corporate activism, intellectual  
propaganda, the rise of a political religion of fundamentalism  
opposed to civil and human rights that threaten its paternalism, and  
a string of political decisions favoring wealthy elites, who bought  
the political system right out from under us.

It's been a ruthless war.  You can still go online and read those  
emails and transcripts of those Enron traders in the energy crisis  
some years ago, discussing how they were manipulating the California  
power market, and gloating over ripping off "those poor  
grandmothers."  They loved it.  Read how they talk about political  
contributions to politicians like Kenny Lay, who was George W. Bush's  
best friend and biggest contributor.

Listen.  The unmitigated plunder of the public trust has spread a  
spectacle of political corruption across America that has no  
equivalent, except for the first Gilded Age.  Back then, privilege  
controlled politics and the purchase of votes, the corruption of  
elections officials, the bribing of legislatures, the lobbying of  
special bills and the flagrant disregard of laws, threatened the very  
foundations of democracy, as it does now.  And without the help of  
Walter Rauschenbusch, and without the help of our forebears, and  
without those people of conscience who got out and fought, the Gilded  
Age would have triumphed, and we would not have had the egalitarian  
reforms of the first part of the twentieth century.

Back then, Frederick Townsend Martin...  – I know this because I'm  
doing a series to air next year on PBS on the Gilded Age, the first  
Gilded Age – back then one of the captains of finance could say, "We  
are rich.  We own America.  We got it God knows how.  But we intend  
to keep it."

How do they keep it?  Listen, and I'll close.  I want you to hear  
something.

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 are 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 return 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 its  
approval.  If they want to kill legislation that is intended for the  
public interest, it gets killed.

This is not a quote from Karl Marx's Das Kapital.  It's not a quote  
from Mao's Little Red Book.  I'm quoting from Time Magazine.  From  
the heart of America's media establishment comes the judgement, that  
America now has "government for the few at the expense of the many."   
And you begin to understand why Franklin Delano Roosevelt feared a  
government of money as much as he feared a government by the mob.

That ... that's the argument.  Now for the altar call.  You can take  
the boy out of the Baptist, but you can't take the Baptist out of the  
boy.

One morning, Judith and I arrived early outside New York's Riverside  
Church where we attend.  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 the hungry, the parables, the calling of the disciples,  
the journey to Jerusalem and always embedded like pearls throughout  
the story, the teachings of compassion, forgiveness and  
reconciliation.  In these pages, we are in the presence of one who  
clearly understands the power of love, the joy of mercy, and the  
healing of kindness.

But suddenly, as I was reading ... the story turned.  Jesus' demeanor  
changes.  The tone and temper of the narrative shifts, and the Prince  
of Peace suddenly becomes a Disturber of the Peace.  "Then Jesus went  
into the temple of God, and drove out all those who had bought and  
sold in the temple, and overturned the tables of the money changers,  
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 turns angry. He passes judgement.  And he takes action.

I closed the Bible, and sat there, and that morning, I didn't hear  
what Jim Forbes was saying.  Because I was turning the text over and  
again in my head, absorbing the image of Jesus striding through the  
Holy Precinct that had been transformed into a market place or stock  
exchange, upsetting the dealers, 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

And sitting ... sitting in the pew that morning, I thought of what  
I've been saying to you today, how in the past generation as the  
number of the poor has increased, wages fell, health and housing  
costs exploded, and wealth and media became more and more  
concentrated, prophetic religion lost its voice and the religious  
right drowned out everyone else, and they hijacked Jesus.  The very  
Jesus who stood in his hometown and proclaimed, "The Lord has  
anointed me to preach the Good News to the poor."  The very Jesus who  
told 5000 hungry people that all, that not just the people in the box  
seats, would be fed.  The very Jesus who challenged the religious  
orthodoxy of the day by feeding the hungry on the Sabbath, who  
offered kindness to the prostitute and hospitality to the outcast,  
who said "The Kingdom of Heaven belongs to little children," who  
raised the status of women, and treated even the hated tax collector  
like a citizen of the Kingdom.

The indignant Jesus who drove the money changers from the temple has  
been hijacked, and turned from the friend of the dispossessed into a  
guardian of privilege, a militarist, a hedonist, a lobbyist... sent  
prowling the halls of Congress in Guccis seeking tax breaks and  
loopholes for the powerful, costly new weapons systems and punitive  
public policies for people without political power.

Yet it was this very Jesus, the Jesus aroused by indignation when the  
sacred was profaned.  It was this Jesus who inspired a Methodist ship  
caulker named Edward Rogers to crusade across New England for an  
eight hour day; who called Frances Williams to rise up against the  
sweatshop; who sent Dorothy Day to march alongside auto workers in  
Michigan, brewery workers in New York and marble cutters in Vermont;  
who roused E.B. McKinney and Owen Whitfield to stand against the  
Mississippi oligarchy that held sharecroppers in servitude; who  
summoned the young priest named John Ryan ten years before the New  
Deal to champion child labor laws, unemployment insurance, a minimum  
wage and decent housing for the poor; and summoned Martin Luther King  
to Memphis to march with the Sanitation Workers, the garbage workers,  
in their search for justice.

My friends, they say your church is ... dying.  1.2 million against  
the Southern Baptists, 16 million and growing.  They say your church  
is ... lame, and limp, and liberal.  And they're coming after you.   
Read the book recently done about how the Institute for Religion and  
Democracy is after your local congregations.  But you know ... they  
don't take on people they're not afraid of.  And it is a small,  
committed, determined People of Conscience who can turn this country  
around!

Please, please ...  listen ... And listen, this new struggle for a  
just world – it's not a partisan affair.  God is not a liberal or  
conservative.  God is not a Democrat or Republican.  She may be a  
Baptist, I don't know.  But to see whose side God is on, just go to  
the record.  It's the widow and the orphan, the stranger and the poor  
who are blessed in the eyes of God.  It is kindness and mercy that  
prove the power of faith, and it's justice that measures the worth of  
the state, not empire.  Kings are held accountable for how the poor  
fare under their reign; Presidents, too.  Prophets speak to the gap  
between rich and poor as a reason for God's judgement.  Poverty and  
justice are religious issues, and Jesus moves among the disinherited.

For I was hungry and you gave me food.  I was naked and you gave me  
clothing.  I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink.  I was a  
stranger and you welcomed me.  I was sick and you took care of me.  I  
was in prison and you visited me.

Then the righteous will answer him, "Lord, when was it we saw you  
hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to  
drink?  And when was it we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or  
naked and gave you clothing?  And when was it that we saw you sick or  
in prison and visited you?

And the Lord will answer them, "Truly I tell you, just as you did it  
to one of the least of these, who are members of my family, you did  
it to me.

This is the Jesus who drove the money changers out of the temple of  
Jerusalem, and it is this Jesus called back to duty who will drive  
the money changers out of the temples of democracy.

Thank you very much.

Priscilla Wilson
TeamTech Press
Mission Hills, KS 66208
pwilson at teamtechinc.com



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