BILL MOYERS: Waking up is right. Waking up to the reality that inequality matters. It matters because what we're talking about is what it takes to live a decent life. If you get sick without health coverage, inequality matters. If you're the only breadwinner and out of work, inequality matters. If your local public library closes down and you can't afford to buy books on your own, inequality matters. If budget cuts mean your child has to pay to play on the school basketball team or to sing in the chorus or march in the band, inequality matters. If you lose your job as you're about to retire, inequality matters. And if the financial system collapses and knocks the props from beneath your pension, inequality matters.
I grew up in a working class family. We were among the poorest in town, but I was rich in public goods.
I went to a good public school, played sandlot ball in a good public park, had access to a good public library, drove down a good public highway to a good public college, all made possible by people I never met. There was an unwritten bargain among the generations -- we didn't all get the same deal, but we did get civilization.
That bargain's being shredded. The occupiers of Wall Street understand this. You could tell from their slogans. A fellow young enough to be my grandson wore a t-shirt emblazoned with the words: "The system's not broken. It's fixed." That's right. Rigged. And that's why so many are so angry. Not at wealth itself, but at the crony capitalists who resorts to tricks, loopholes, and hard, cold cash for politicians to make sure insiders prosper and then pull up the ladder behind them.
Yes, Americans are waking up. To how they're being made to pay for Wall Street's malfeasance and Washington's complicity. Paying with stagnant wages and lost jobs, with slashing cuts to their benefits and to their social services. And waking up to the grotesque Supreme Court decision defining a corporation as a person, although it doesn't eat, breath, make love or sing, or take care of children and aging parents. Waking up to how campaign contributions corrupt our elections; to the fact that if speech is money, no money means no speech.
So the collective cry has gone up loud and clear: enough's enough. We won't, as I said, know for a while if this is just a momentary cry of pain; or whether it's a movement that, like the Abolitionists and Suffragettes, the populists and workers of another era, or the Civil Rights movement of our time, gathers force until the powers-that-be can no longer sustain the inequality, the injustice and yes, the immorality of winner-take-all politics.
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