Bill Moyers Journal

by Bill Moyers

  Help me understand what Jimmy meant when he wrote this letter to the philosopher Bertrand Russell: “Negroes in the United States still think they are struggling for democracy, when in fact, democracy is what they are struggling against.”

  Folks don’t understand, for example, how the Democratic Party was a coalition of labor and liberals from the North, and racists like Senator Bilbo and Senator Eastland and all those Ku Klux Klanners down South. That was American democracy. People lived under awful conditions and that was called democracy. Fortunately, we broke through that in the ’60s.

  In the summer of 1967, you were living in Detroit when a police raid exploded into violence. You saw fires rage across the city, including in your own neighborhood. President Johnson called out the U.S. Army, and the nation watched on television, horrified as the city burned. The press called it a violent spasm of riots and lawlessness. But you saw something in those flames that many outsiders missed. Your neighborhood was suffering the slow bleed of manufacturing jobs from the city. Twice as many blacks were out of work as whites. You have objected to descriptions of what happened as “a riot.”

  We in Detroit called it “the rebellion” because we understood there was a righteousness about the young people rising up.

  Against?

  Against both the police, which they considered an occupation army, and against what they sensed had become their expendability because of high tech. Black people had been valued, over hundreds of years, for their labor, and their labor was now being taken away from them.

  And this question of work was at the heart of what happened in Detroit that summer?

  I don’t think that they were conscious of it. What I saw happen was that young people who recognized that working in the factory was what had allowed their parents to buy a house, to raise a family, to get married, to send their kids to school—that was eroding. They felt that no one cared anymore. What we tried to do is explain that a rebellion is righteous, because it’s the protest by a people against injustice, but it’s not enough. You have to go beyond rebellion. And it was amazing, a turning point in my life, because until that time, I had not made a distinction between a rebellion and revolution. And it forced us to begin thinking, what does a revolution mean? How does it relate to evolution?

  That’s when you began to take a closer look at the teachings of Martin Luther King Jr., right? He was wrestling with how to go beyond the civil rights movement to a profound transformation of society, and he came to New York’s Riverside Church in the spring of 1967 to challenge inequality throughout America and to call for an end to America’s war in Southeast Asia. But the war continued another seven years. His moral argument did not take hold with the powers that be.

  I don’t expect moral arguments to take hold with the powers that be. They are in their positions of power. They are part of the system. They are part of the problem.

  Then do moral arguments have any force if they can be so heedlessly ignored?

  Of course they do. I think because we depend too much on the government to do it, we’re not looking sufficiently at what is happening at the grassroots in the country. We have not emphasized sufficiently the cultural revolution that we have to make among ourselves in order to force the government to do differently. Things do not start with governments.

  But Martin Luther King was ignored on the war. In fact, the last few years of his life, as he was moving beyond the protest in the South, he was largely ignored, if not ridiculed, for his position on economic inequality. Many civil rights leaders, as you remember, Grace, condemned him for mixing foreign policy with civil rights. They said that’s not what we should be about.

  But see, he was talking about a radical revolution of values. And that radical revolution of values has not been pursued in the last forty years. The consumerism, materialism, has gotten worse. The militarism has continued, while people are just using their credit cards to get by. All that’s been taking place. Would he have continued to challenge those? I think he would.

  He said that the giant triplets of America were racism, consumerism or materialism, and militarism. And you’re saying those haven’t changed.

  I’m saying that not only have those not changed, but people have isolated the struggles against each of these from the other. They have not seen that they’re part of one whole, of a radical revolution of values that we all must undergo.

  Whose failing is that?

  I’m not sure I would use the word failing. I would say that people who have engaged in one struggle tend to be locked into that struggle.

  When you look back, who do you think was closer to the truth, Karl Marx or Martin Luther King? The truth about human society.

  King was an extraordinary thinker. He read Marx. He was serious about reading Marx. He was also serious about reading Hegel, about reading Gandhi, about Jesus Christ and Christianity. Marx belongs to a particular period. King was a man of our time.

  Where is the movement today?

  I believe that we are at the point now, in the United States, where a movement is beginning to emerge. I think that the calamity, the quagmire of the Iraq War, the outsourcing of jobs, the dropout of young people from the education system, the monstrous growth of the prison-industrial complex, the planetary emergency in which we are engulfed at the present moment—demand that instead of just complaining about these things, instead of just protesting about these things, we begin to look for, and hope for, another way of living. I see a movement beginning to emerge, because I see hope beginning to trump despair.

  But where do you see signs of it?

  I see signs in the various small groups that are emerging all over the place to try and regain our humanity in very practical ways. For example in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Will Allen, who is a former basketball player, has purchased two acres of land, with five greenhouses on it, and is beginning to grow food, healthy food, for his community. And communities are growing up around that idea. That’s a huge change in the way that we think of the city. I mean, the things we have to restore are so elemental. Not just food, and not just healthy food, but a different way of relating to time and history and to the earth.

  And a garden does that for you?

  Yes. A garden does all sorts of things. It helps young people to relate to the earth in a different way. It helps them to relate to their elders in a different way; it helps them to think of time in a different way.

  How so?

  Well, if we just press a button and you think that’s the key to reality, you’re in a hell of a mess as a human being.

  Our economic system doesn’t reflect the values you espouse—you know that. Outsourcing of jobs, the flight of capital, capital’s grip on workers. The system isn’t catching up with you.

  Well, don’t expect the system to catch up—the system is part of the system! What I think is that, not since the ’30s have American people, ordinary Americans, faced such uncertainty with regard to the economic system. In the ’30s, we confronted management and were able thereby to gain many advantages, particularly to gain a respect for the dignity of labor. That’s no longer possible today because of the ability of corporations to fly all over the place and begin setting up all this outsourcing. So people are finding other ways to regain control over the way they make their living.

  A lot of young people out there would agree with your analysis. And then they will say, “What can I do that’s practical? How do I make the difference that Grace Lee Boggs is talking about?”

  I would say do something local. Do something real, however, small. There was a time when we believed that if we just achieved political power it would solve all our problems. And I think what we learned from the experience of the Russian Revolution, all those revolutions, is that those who try to get power in the state become part of the state. They become locked into its practices. And we have to begin creating new practices. Right where we live.

  Do you see any leaders who are advocating such change?

  I don�
�t see any leaders, and I think we have to rethink the concept of “leader.” We need to embrace the idea that we are the leaders we’ve been looking for.

  JAMES K. GALBR AITH

  Perhaps we’ll never know how much Ayn Rand influenced Alan Greenspan all those years ago when they were close friends in New York City. She was, of course, one of the notable fantasists of the twentieth century, writing two famous books—The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged—based on the ideology of radical self-interest and an unblinking acceptance of unregulated capitalism. In the Gospel according to Rand, the business world was constantly beleaguered by evil forces practicing—gasp—altruism! Yes, the unselfish regard for the welfare of others was a menace to greed, and Rand would have none of it; she advocated the abolition of all government regulation except what might be needed to deal with crime.

  Greenspan has since downplayed her influence on him, but as chairman of the Federal Reserve for almost twenty years, he seemed quite the faithful disciple as he observed Wall Street’s “irrational exuberance” with the detachment of a bored nanny on a park bench watching her young charges squabble over candy.

  Then, after that “irrational exuberance” had brought down Wall Street, cratered the economy, and cost millions of Americans their homes, jobs, and pensions, Atlas—I mean, Greenspan—shrugged. On October 23, 2008, he confessed to Congress.

  ALAN GREENSPAN: I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms. ...

  CHAIRMAN HENRY WAXMAN: In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working.

  ALAN GREENSPAN: Absolutely. Precisely. You know, that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for forty years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.

  Blindsided by reality, if Alan Greenspan had wanted to do penance and himself some good, he could have curled up with economist James K. Galbraith’s book, The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too. Galbraith served as executive director of the U.S. Congress’s Joint Economic Committee. He now holds the Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas and directs the university’s Inequality Project, which analyzes wages and earnings and patterns of industrial change around the world. Galbraith asks questions that seem never to have occurred either to Ayn Rand as she journeyed deep into fantasyland or to her many wide-eyed acolytes: “If conservatives no longer take free markets seriously, why should liberals? ... Why not build a new economic policy based on what is really happening?”

  Or, as I theorized when we began our conversation, perhaps irrational exuberance had been overtaken by existential dread.

  —Bill Moyers

  Could the adrenaline of fear push us over the brink into panic so that we stop acting rationally or deliberately?

  Fear is a factor. But we have an enormous advantage over our predecessors in 1929. We have the fact that the New Deal happened. And we have the institutions of the New Deal. Though they have been badly damaged in the last decade, they are still with us. We have deposit insurance. We have Social Security. We have a government that is capable of acting as the lender of last resort, which can borrow and spend as needed to deal with this crisis.

  So here in the United States the capacity to handle the crisis exists. What we need is a government that’s willing to use that capacity, that believes in it. And that’s where the collapse of the old objectivism of Alan Greenspan is such a fundamental feature of the present situation, and very timely. With the collapse of that system of ideas, perhaps the way will be cleared for thinking afresh and clearly about the problems that we face and how to solve them.

  We’ve seen a breakdown of an entire system. The consequence of deregulation, of failing supervision of the banking system, has been to cause a collapse of trust, a poisoning of the well.

  Banks no longer trust each other because they no longer know whether their counterparties are solvent. Customers no longer trust the banking system. Banks no longer trust the people who would like to borrow from them for commercial purposes. This is a poisoned well. It is going to take a fair amount of time for it to be cleaned up.

  What’s the worst-case scenario you think about late at night?

  Right now the thing that troubles me most is not the United States. The thing that troubles me most is that the same ideas of deregulation, of free markets, were applied in the construction of modern Europe. And the Europeans don’t have the institutions of the New Deal, a central bank that can lend as necessary.

  Mercifully, we have the institutions of government in this country that can act. The Europeans are winging it. They have to go against their charter of the Central Bank, against the Maastricht Treaty and its restrictions on government spending, government deficits. Their problem is a systemic problem. Our problem is a policy problem. We can solve our problem.

  The other calamity is that people nearing retirement and the elderly have really been hit hard in their pension plans. What happens to them?

  Well, you can’t make people whole individually because everybody made different portfolio choices. Some were more in the stock market, some less. Those who were more in the stock market have been hurt harder. What you can do is protect the population as a whole. And we have a system for doing that. It’s called Social Security.

  Today, it supports about 40 percent of the American elderly population that basically has no other income. It’s more than half of the retirement income of maybe 50 or 60 percent of that population. Social Security benefits, except for inflation adjustment, haven’t been raised in a generation. We ought to think about replacing the losses to some degree in the aggregate that have occurred in the markets by raising Social Security benefits and particularly raising them for the poorest and most vulnerable.

  But you and others have been calling for more spending because that’s the only way you say to get capital into the system. Critics ask, where’s that money going to come from?

  The government has no problem with money. What we’re learning, first of all, is that the dollar remains the anchor currency of the world. Uncle Sam’s credit is excellent. Uncle Sam can borrow short-term for practically nothing these days. Everybody wants to have Treasury bills and bonds because they’re safe. Uncle Sam can borrow for twenty years at 4.3 percent. That’s the same rate that the United States could borrow at for twenty years in the last month of the Eisenhower administration. So from our point of view, we’re actually well placed—I mean, the government of the United States—is well placed to take the lead in pulling the country and the world out of crisis.

  The deficit isn’t beyond sight. The deficits in the Bush administration in relation to the size of the economy were never all that large. They were certainly larger than they were under Clinton, but that was in part necessary because of the changed economic situation, the collapse of the dot-com bubble in 2000. The United States government’s credit is good. The deficit is a financial number that people are going to have to get used to because there is no way in these circumstances of avoiding an increase in the deficit.

  One of two things can happen. The government can take action and help stabilize the economy, in which case we will have more spending but also more employment. Or the government cannot take action and let the economy collapse, in which case we will have much less tax revenue. The deficit is going to be larger either way. There is no way of avoiding that. The only question is, do you work to have a good economy or do you accept a terrible economy?

  What are the negative effects of a soaring deficit?

  Well, the one thing I would have worried about is that we might not find lenders who are willing to provide funds to the U.S. government, that the Chinese or the Japanese might decide that they would rather be i
n some other currency and that we’d then have trouble with inflation. But that’s not going to happen, because, as it turns out, the major alternative, the euro, simply isn’t viable as a reserve asset for the rest of the world. It’s the dollar or nothing. So the United States basically can finance itself to the extent necessary to deal with this crisis.

  You call your book The Predator State. Why that title?

  What I mean is the people who took over the government were not interested in reducing the government and having a small government, the conservative principle. They were interested in using these great institutions for private benefit, to place them in the control of their friends and to put them to the use of their clients. They wanted to privatize Social Security. They created a Medicare drug benefit in such a way as to create the maximum profit for pharmaceutical companies. They used trade agreements to extend patent protections for various interests or to promote the expansion of corporate agriculture’s markets in the third world, a whole range of things that were basically political and clientelistic. That’s the predator state.

  You call it a “corporate republic.” Which means that the purpose of government is to divert funds from the public sector to the private sector?

  I think it’s very clear. They also turned over the regulatory apparatus to the regulated industries, they turned over the henhouse to the foxes in every single case. And that is the source of the abandonment of environmental responsibility, the source of the collapse of consumer protection, and the source of the collapse of the financial system. They all trace back to a common root, which is the failure to maintain a public sector that works in the public interest, that provides discipline and standards, a framework within which the private sector can operate and compete. That’s been abandoned.