Bill Moyers
Saving Democracy
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0224-20.htmBill Moyers is President of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy. This is the prepared text of his remarks on an eight-day speaking trip in California on the issue of money and politics.
This is the link to the petition that Bill Moyers talks about in his speech below, in case you dont' have time to read the speech.
http://ga3.org/campaign/cleanupcongressnowAh, yes, the quickest and surest way to the American dream remains to choose your parents well.
As great wealth has accumulated at the top, the rest of society has not been benefiting proportionally. In 1960 the gap between the top 20% and the bottom 20% was thirtyfold. Now it is seventy-five fold. Thirty years ago the average annual compensation of the top 100 chief executives in the country was 30 times the pay of the average worker. Today it is 1000 times the pay of the average worker. A recent article in The Financial Times reports on a study by the American economist Robert J. Gordon, who finds ?little long-term change in workers? share of U.S. income over the past half century.? Middle-ranking Americans are being squeezed, he says, because the top ten percent of earners have captured almost half the total income gains in the past four decades and the top one percent have gained the most of all ? ?more in fact, than all the bottom 50 percent.?
No wonder working men and women and their families are strained to cope with the rising cost of health care, pharmaceutical drugs, housing, higher education, and public transportation ? all of which have risen faster in price than typical family incomes. The recent book, Economic Apartheid in America: A Primer on Economic Inequality and Insecurity, describes how ?thirty zipcodes in America have become fabulously wealthy? while ?whole urban and rural communities are languishing in unemployment, crumbling infrastructure, growing insecurity, and fear.?