by Bill Moyers
There’s a revealing story involving Mississippi Senator John Stennis. It’s a real signal of what was happening. In the early 1980s, John Stennis is running for his seventh term in the Senate. He’s never spent more than $5,000 on a campaign before. You knew Stennis, although I imagine a lot of your viewers don’t remember him. He was a vicious racist, a bad guy on the race issue, but on other things a very serious, very smart man. And interestingly, the first chairman of an Ethics Committee in the Senate. He actually believed in ethics.
He was in trouble in Mississippi because a young guy called Haley Barbour, then thirty-four years old [now governor of Mississippi after years of lucrative lobbying in Washington] was running against him. It was the first time Stennis had a serious opponent, and his friends in the Senate were scared, Russell Long of Louisiana and Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, particularly. They actually hired a political consultant for Stennis, something he would never have dreamed of, and they sent this guy down to Mississippi to check out the situation. He’s a charming southerner named Ray Strother. And he comes back and explains to Stennis that it’s going to be an ugly campaign; this Barbour is going to make a lot of TV commercials accusing Stennis of being too old and too feeble to run for another term. Strother says, “We’re going to have to respond to him. We’re going to have to make our own TV commercials. It’s going to cost $2 or $3 million.”
Stennis was shocked. He said, “How could I raise so much money?” And Ray started to explain, “You’re going to go to the defense contractors, the companies you’ve helped as the chairman of the Armed Services Committee for so long, and you’re going to ask them for contributions.” And Stennis utters this memorable line, which I love. He looks at Strother and says, “Young man? Would that be proper?” And then he answers it himself: “No, it wouldn’t be proper. I hold life-and-death power over those companies. I will not solicit their money.” But he did. He did, and they got the money. The commercials were made, and Stennis won the election. I think that was 1982. And I think that’s when we lost the war in Washington. From then on, “Would that be proper?” became a question we don’t hear very often.
What about the argument that with Roosevelt’s New Deal, when Washington began throwing money at so many problems, it became a fact of life that there was money to be made by connecting people who wanted money to people who were spending it—giving lobbyists their opening?
There’s no avoiding this. And it’s also important for a couple of journalists like us to acknowledge that lobbying is protected in the same First Amendment to the Constitution that you and I like for its journalistic implications. The right to petition the government for the redress of grievances is right there in the First Amendment. And that’s lobbying. And it’s true that big government means big spending, means big opportunities, means business for lobbyists. It’s inevitable. I see no way to stop it. But it can be much more transparent than it’s been. We should be able to see what people are doing much more clearly than we’ve been able to do so far. There are reforms that are possible. But we’re never going to make “pure Christian gentlemen” out of these people. It doesn’t happen that way.
Can the process be tamed?
Obviously, public financing of elections would have the most dramatic impact. It’s very hard to imagine how that would come to pass.
It has in some states. Maine and Arizona, for example.
Exactly. Our new secretary of homeland security, the former governor of Arizona, has talked very articulately about what a difference it made to her to be able to run for reelection using public funding. She didn’t feel indebted to anybody, and that’s a liberating thing.
I have an idea that would be fun, and I think could be very significant. If you required every official in the government to report, on the Internet, at the end of the business day, every day: “Here are the lobbyists I met with today. And here’s what we talked about.” Just a daily file of real transparency. That could have a huge impact.
Do you think Obama gets this—understands the game?
He does, remarkably well. In a recent piece for The Washington Post I credit him for being a good cultural anthropologist. He only spent two years in the Senate before he started to run for president. But he did figure it out. He’s the one who said, “Politics has become a business, not a mission.”
So there is hope for renewing democracy?
Well, I’m a believer. I’m an optimistic person. But boy, it won’t be easy.
BARBARA EHRENREICH
When the predators of high finance spot their prey, they can move with a terrible swiftness. In 2007, Wall Street Journal reporter Ianthe Jeanne Dugan described how the private equity firm Blackstone Group swooped down on a travel reservation company in Colorado, bought it, laid off 841 employees, and recouped their entire investment in just seven months, one of the quickest returns on capital ever for such a deal.
Blackstone made a killing while ordinary workers were left to sift through the debris of their devastated lives. They sold their homes to make ends meet, lost their health insurance, took part-time jobs making sandwiches and coffee. That fall, Blackstone’s chief executive, Stephen Schwarzman, reportedly worth billions of dollars, rented a luxurious resort in Montego Bay, Jamaica, to celebrate the marriage of his son. The bill reportedly came to $50, 000, plus thousands more to sleep 130 guests. Add to that drinks on the beach, dancers and a steel band, marshmallows around the fire, and the following day an opulent wedding banquet with champagne, jazz band, and a fireworks display that alone cost $12,500. Earlier in the year Schwarzman had rented out the Park Avenue Armory in New York (his thirty-five-room apartment couldn’t hold the five hundred guests) to celebrate his sixtieth birthday. Cost: $3 million.
So? It’s his money, isn’t it? Yes, but consider this: the stratospheric income of private-equity partners is taxed at only 15 percent. That’s less than the rate paid by the struggling middle class. When Congress considered raising the rate paid on their Midas-like compensation, these financial titans sent their lobbyist mercenaries swarming over Washington and brought the “ debate” to an end in less time than it had taken Schwarzman to fire 841 workers.
Our ruling class had won another round in a fight that Barbara Ehrenreich has been documenting for years. After studying theoretical physics at Reed College and earning a doctorate from Rockefeller University, Ehrenreich joined a small nonprofit in the late 1960s, advocating for better health care for the poor. She began researching and writing investigative stories for the organization’s monthly bulletin, and went on to journalistic prominence with articles and essays for Ms., Mother Jones, The Atlantic Monthly, and Harper’s, among others.
Ehrenreich reports on inequality in America by stepping into the real-life shoes of the people who experience it. For her bestselling book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, she worked as a waitress, cleaning woman, and a Walmart sales clerk, testing what it’s like to live on $7 an hour. (Damned near impossible.) She went undercover again, looking for a white-collar job and writing about it in Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream. She saw so many professional people falling to the bottom rung of jobs that she launched an organization—unitedprofessionals. org—to fight back against the war on the middle class “that is undermining so many lives.”
—Bill Moyers
Now even The Economist magazine agrees with you: “A growing body of evidence suggests that the meritocratic ideal is in trouble in America. Income inequality is going to levels not seen since the Gilded Age.... America is increasingly looking like Imperial Britain, with ... a gap widening between the people who make the decisions and shape the culture and the vast majority of ordinary working stiffs.” The Economist says we’re becoming a European-style “class-based society.”
Well, I would say, not a European style, but a third world style. We are the most class-divided of the industrialized countries, the most polarized, in a different rank from France or Germany or Britain, where there’
s actually more social mobility. What we’re coming to resemble is something more like Brazil, which has always had its wealthy, and then has extremely poor people.
The first book of yours I read was Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class. And that was before the safety net was fraying. The loss of pensions, the loss of insurance, the loss of upward mobility—how do you measure the pain of the middle class in America today?
Some of the things are hard to get an exact fix on. Take the woman working part-time making sandwiches—probably in the $7-to-$9-or-less-an-hour range of pay. Now, she’s counted as employed, so her pain is not going to show up in the unemployment statistics. White-collar people are driven out of their jobs, churned out of their jobs by reorganizations, mergers, by buyouts. After a few months, they’ll take something, but it will usually be at a lot less pay than they got. The majority of people who get laid off come out at a lot lower pay. But if they get anything, they’re counted as employed.
How do these women—the maids, the waitresses—how do they keep going, day in and day out? You met so many of them when you were gathering material for Nickel and Dimed.
You begin not to see a lot of alternatives when you are just faced with expenses, when you have to keep moving to keep a roof over your head or to feed your children. I would keep thinking, “Hmmm, I should look for another job.” You know, the typical middle-class thing, like, “Well, I should look for something better.” And then I began to figure out, if you’re paid very little, it could be a disaster to change jobs, because you might have to go one, two, three weeks without any paycheck at all. And that’s not doable.
There was one woman who said something to me that was so poignant, it’s painful to repeat. Speaking of her hopes for the future, she said, “My big wish would be to have a job, where if I missed work one day, a child home sick or something, I would still be able to buy groceries for the next day.” And I thought, yeah, that’s quite a hope.
Don’t people call you a Marxist for writing as you do? The Wall Street Journal says you’re trying to stoke a class war.
Yeah, well, look, I didn’t start the class war that’s going on here. The class war that’s been coming from the side of the extremely wealthy, it’s been happening for a while. But it’s a class war that has been very one-sided. Unions are weak in our country. They should be leading the charge against this. But the squeezing of people on wages and then on benefits—that’s a big thing in the middle class, you know, that your health insurance package, your pension is gone. College tuitions are rising. Despite that kind of squeeze there has not been enough fightback.
You gave the commencement address at Haverford College. And your last line in that speech was, “Go out there and raise some hell.” What, practically, can people do about this issue?
The first thing to remember is that there are ways of making change by working together. We sort of lose that idea, that this American culture has been full of wonderful examples of people working together—collectively is the old word—to make change. The civil rights movement, it wasn’t just a couple of, you know, superstars like Martin Luther King. It was thousands and thousands, millions I should say, of people taking risks, becoming leaders in their communities. The women’s movement wasn’t only Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan. It was, again, millions of women coming together and saying, “We’re going to make change here. We’re going to march. We’re going to demand different legislation.”
You have been not only a journalist but an activist. I’ve seen you marching with poor people in Michigan, handing out leaflets on the living wage, demonstrating with immigrants. Why did you decide to cross the line between explaining the world and trying to change the world?
I can’t really distinguish these things. If I get incensed about some injustice, I will not just sit at my desk. I might want to march. I learn a lot in those situations. A year ago I was at the picket line of janitors at the University of Miami. These were janitors earning $6 and change, and now they were on a hunger strike. I listened to them, I took notes, and that’s part of me as a journalist.
A janitor, I understand, is the fastest-growing job in America, right?
Yeah, it is. And that’s something to think about when we’re told, “Oh, don’t worry about the class polarization in America and the shrinking middle class and things like that. You just have to get an education to get ahead.” Get an education to get ahead when the fastest-growing jobs have been in things like janitorial services and food services and home health.
It’s been said the mark of a truly educated person is to be deeply moved by statistics. You are very educated. Let me read you a statistic and you tell me if this moves you and why. Since 1979, the share of pretax income going to the top 1 percent of American households has risen by seven percentage points, to 16 percent. At the same time the share of income going to the bottom 80 percent has fallen by seven percentage points.
The polarization is accelerating. The people at the top are getting an evergreater share of the wealth.
They drive everybody’s prices.
Yeah, they’re also in a better position to control the electoral process, the political process.
Contributions to candidates, right?
You are talking about families who can buy a congressman or households that can buy a congressman compared to households that can barely put dinner on the table. We don’t have democracy anymore. What some of us have been saying, at least to the Democratic candidates, is, “Cut that bond. Cut that bond to the wealthy. Try being a populist. We don’t have the money on our side. We have the numbers—people. That top 1 percent may have a huge disproportionate share of wealth but their numbers are small. We still count.” Well, I was going to say we still count votes. I hope we still count votes here.
You majored in science. You went to Rockefeller University and were doing graduate work with cell biology as your focus. How did you start getting involved with poor people?
It partly has to do with my own personal family background. I came from a blue-collar family that was quite poor when I was born and remained so even as my father became upwardly mobile and made it possible for me to go to college.
What did you bring from science to journalism?
To me it was sort of a natural. Because science is about asking questions, getting to the bottom of things, investigating. And so I immediately took to investigative journalism, which was the first kind of journalism I did.
And your last book, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, is fascinating. You did amazing research into festivals, celebrations, carnivals—all the ways human beings collaborate to have fun. What did you learn about collective joy?
I’m interested in what bonds people together, what brings us together in good ways. And there’s not a lot known about that. We spend a lot of time, scholarly time, thinking about love and sex, but very little about the kind of joy that can take over a crowd of people or a group of people, in festivity, in ecstatic ritual of some kind, in celebration. So that drove me into this book. Because I think we have to recapture that joy if we are going to make positive change together.
MARTÍN ESPADA
Martín Espada grew up in the tough, racially mixed neighborhood of East New York in Brooklyn, where, as he recalls in one of his poems, “There were roaches between the bristles of my toothbrush.”
Roaches were a mere nuisance compared to the racists he encountered when the family moved to a suburb on Long Island. The teenage son of the only Puerto Rican family in the community, “I caught absolute hell. It was much more traumatic than anything that ever happened to me on the so-called mean streets of East New York.”
He began writing poetry at an early age and kept at it as he studied history as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin and earned a law degree from Northeastern University. Discovering poetry and politics to be “all in the same spectrum,” Espada vowed to use both to speak “on behalf of those who don’t have an opport
unity to be heard.” He worked in bilingual education law and became a legal advocate for tenants in Boston, explaining to an interviewer, “While waiting for my cases to be called, I would sit on a staircase in the courthouse, scratching poems on a yellow legal pad.”
In 1982, Espada published his first collection, The Immigrant Iceboy’s Bolero. Sixteen books of poems, essays, and translations would follow—including Imagine the Angels of Bread, A Mayan Astronomer, and The Republic of Poetry—winning for him honors and acclaim as “the Latino poet of his generation.” His latest collection is called The Trouble Ball.
Espada now teaches poetry and English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, but because he has never forgotten what it means to love a country that isn’t sure what it thinks about you, he can often be found helping the children of new immigrants find the poetry in their own experience. When I heard that he was coaxing poems from ninth graders at DreamYard Prep, a small public school in the South Bronx, we sent a crew to film the experience, and I asked Martín to join me for this conversation.
—Bill Moyers
How do you explain all that energy that feeds you and those kids?
Behind it, I think, is all the hope that most young people have regardless of circumstance; that if they make themselves heard somehow things will change, somehow they will be empowered by this experience. It seems to be an extraordinary statement, given the way poetry in this culture is so often mocked and marginalized, and designated as trivial or meaningless. But the fact is, I meet people all the time who tell me, “Poetry saved my life. Were it not for poetry, were it not for this poem, were it not for this poet, I would be somewhere else. I would have made other choices. I was in prison when I read your work. I was a dropout when I read your work. And I decided to become a poet myself. I decided to go back to school. I decided to get a job.” There are very tangible outcomes as a result of feeling inspired. And we have no way of knowing this, as poets, when we put our words into the air. Paradoxically, even the most political poem is an act of faith, because you have no way of quantifying its impact on the world. The fact is, we write these poems and put them into the environment, into the atmosphere, and we have no idea where they’re going to land. We have no idea who’s going to breathe them in, have no idea what effect it’s going to have on an individual life unless that person materializes and says, “Poetry saved my life.”
