"If we condone political theft . . . our civilization itself cannot endure" (Bill Moyers)

Great moments in Great Society history: the birth of Medicare. Sept. 1, 1965: HEW Secretary John W. Gardner (later the founder of Common Cause, second from left) and President Lyndon B. Johnson (far right, with Social Security Commissioner Robert M. Ball at left) formally accept the first Medicare Part B application received, from Tony Palcaorolla of Baltimore.

"The founder of Common Cause was a prophet in seeing money as the dagger directed at the heart of democracy. Like his fellow Republican Teddy Roosevelt, he opposed the ‘naked robbery’ of the public’s trust. A century ago, in one of the most powerful speeches in American political history, Roosevelt said: 'It is not a partisan issue; it is more than a political issue; it is a great moral issue. If we condone political theft, if we do not resent the kinds of wrong and injustice that injuriously affect the whole nation, not merely our democratic form of government but our civilization itself cannot endure.'”

-- Bill Moyers, in remarks on Common Cause founder John Gardner at the 40th-anniversary gala, Oct. 6

by Ken

Thanks to The Nation's Katrina vanden Heuvel, not just for a spirited and incisive Washington Post column today, "Predator's ball," which we'll come back to, but for calling attention to this remarkable speech of Bill Moyers', which reviews some of the best and worst times in 20th-century American governance, taking off from one of the last books by one of my favorite writers, Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land.

Judt described a time when "the public" was no fiction and the word wasn’t even a term of opprobrium. Public schools, public libraries, public parks, public highways, public goods and services were the means of creating a fair society for people who weren’t rich. At its heart was an ethical compact without which society is a war of all against all and the free market for wolves becomes a slaughter for the lambs.

Guess where the historian Judt located the closest America came to that notion of social democracy? In Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Much of what was best in the legislation and social policy of the 20th century, he said, was social democracy in all but name.

As Moyers notes, from his view inside the Johnson White House, LBJ's Great Society -- in pursuit of which he appointed Republican John Gardner as secretary of health, education, and welfare -- was undone by his catastrophic Vietnam blunder. And by 1980, "the social democratic climate that Judt thought so promising," and had so quickly come "to seem plain common sense," "abruptly vanished from sight." And Moyers provides a masterful survey of the process by which corporate powers took off the gloves and established a stranglehold on our political system, with a final cheering-on from "the activist reactionary majority on the Supreme Court," which --

has opened the floodgates for oligarchs and plutocrats to secretly buy our elections and consolidate their hold on the corporate state. One of the greatest of our Supreme Court justices, Louis Brandeis, warned that "you can have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, or democracy, but you cannot have both." The pro-corporate Roberts majority looked at both options and declared, ‘OK. We’ll take the former.”

Vanden Heuvel, in her column today, covers some familiar post-Citizens United ground: the delusion of some Democratic Party money people that they could hold their own against right-wing cash, which by now, still in its early days, is coming to look even more overwhelming than our worst fears suggested when you factor in the unlimited cash pouring into those supposedly "independent expenditures."

"This flood of conservative money isn't an accident," vanden Heuvel notes, calling attention to Eric Lichtblau's recent NYT tracing ("Long Battle by Foes of Campaign Finance Rules Shifts Landscape") of the relentless and strategically masterful campaign pursued by conservatives going back to the late '90s to free corporate money from the shackles of government regulation.

And she comes to rest on the crucial point that all this money that's overwhelming our political process is being spent only partly on ideological grounds.

The money flooding into Republican coffers isn't for small government or balanced budgets. It's for retaining profitable subsidies, rolling back consumer or worker protections, sustaining anti-trust exemptions, reopening the financial casino, thwarting efforts to tax the wealthy. The respected economist Jamie Galbraith described this as the "predator state," where powerful corporate interests profit by creating and defending lavish government benefits. The Tea Party protest has been sparked in part by the widespread sense that government serves the powerful, not the middle class -- that it bailed out Wall Street, not Main Street. But the Republican campaign is bankrolled in no small measure by money from those intent on maintaining their government privileges and subsidies.

What I originally set out to write about will have to wait till tomorrow: a specific case of how this process of right-wing moguls spending huge quantities of money on ideology for profit works in practice, in the form of the billionaire Koch brothers' funding of a right-wing think tank, the Mercatus Institute, at a public university, Virginia's George Mason. I will be expressing the sincere hope that everyone connected with the once-reputable George Mason U be tarred with the brush of the Kochs' power-mongering corruption.


Bill Moyers addresses Common Cause's 40th-anniversary gala.

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