This
isn't the speech I expected to give today.I intended
something else. For the last several years I've been
taking every possible opportunity to talk aboutthe
soul of democracy- about the essence of the word
itself- government of, by, and for the people. The
soul of democracy has been dying, drowning in a
rising tide of big money contributed by a
narrow,unrepresentative elite that has betrayed the
faith of citizens in self-government. I intended to
talk about this. That's the speech I was working on
six weeks ago. But I'm notthe same man I was six
weeks ago. And you're not the same audience for whom
I was preparing those remarks. We've all been changed
by what happened on September 11- the worst act of
terrorism in our nation's history. It has changed the
country. That's what terrorists intend. Terrorists
are not after tangible property.Sure, they aim to
annihilate the targets they strike. But their real
goal is to get inside our heads, our psyche, and to
deprive us, the survivors, of peace of mind, of
trust; they aim to prevent us from believing again in
a world of mercy, justice, and love, and from working
to bring that better world to pass. But Americans
have rallied together in a way that I cannot remember
since World War II. Those planes the terrorists
turned into suicide bombers cut through a complete
cross-section of America. Great and low alike, we
have been humbled by a renewed sense of our common
mortality.
We have been reminded that the great mass of
Americans have not yet given up on the idea of 'We,
the People.' and they have refused to accept the
notion, promoted so diligently by our friends at the
Heritage Foundation and by Grover Norquist and his
right-wing ilk,that government, the public service,
should be shrunk to a size where they can drown it in
the bathtub (that's what Norquist said is their
goal.) These right-wingers at Heritage and elsewhere,
by the way, earlier this year teamed up with the
deep-pocket bankers who finance them,to stop the
United States from cracking down on terrorist money
havens. As TIME Magazine reports, thirty industrial
nations were ready to tighten the screws on offshore
financial centers whose banks have the potential to
hide and often help launder billions of dollars for
drug cartels, global crime syndicates and groups like
Osama bin Laden's Al-Quaeda organization. Not all
off-shore money is linked to crime or terrorism;much
of it comes from wealthy people who are hiding money
to avoid taxation. And right-wingers believe in
nothing if not in avoiding taxation. So they and the
bankers' lobbyists went to work to stop the American
government from participating in the crackdown on
dirty money. I am not kidding; it's all on the
record. The president of the Heritage Foundation
spent an hour, according to the New York Times, with
Treasury Secretary O'Neill, and Texas bankers pulled
their strings at the White House, and presto, the
Bush administration folded and pulled out of the
international campaign against tax havens. How about
that for patriotism? Better terrorists get their
dirty money than tax cheaters be prevented from
hiding their money. And that from people who wrap
themselves in the flag and sing the Star Spangled
Banner with gusto. There are, alas, other sightings
to report. It didn't take long for the war time
opportunists, the mercenaries of Washington, the
lobbyists, lawyers, and political fund-raisers to
crawl out of their offices on K street determined to
grab what they can for their clients. While the
President calls for patriotism, prayers and piety,
the predators of Washington are up to their old
tricks in the pursuit of private plunder at public
expense. In the wake of this awful tragedy wrought by
terrorism, they are cashing in. How do they propose
to fight the long and costly war on terrorism America
must now undertake?
* * * *
What else can America do to strike at the terrorists?
Why, slip in a special tax break for poor General
Electric, and slip inside the Environmental
Protection Agency while everyone's distracted and
torpedo the recent order to clean the Hudson river of
PCBs.Don't worry about NBC, CNBC, or MSNBC reporting
it; they're all in the GE family.
It's time for Churchillian courage, we're told. So
how would this crowd assure that future generations
will look back and say "This was their
finesthour"? That's easy. Give those coal
producers freedom to pollute. And shovel generous tax
breaks to those giant energy companies; and open the
Alaskan wilderness to drilling- that's something to
remember the 11th of September for. And while the
red, white and blue waves at half-mast over the land
of the free and the home of the brave why, give the
President the power to discard democratic debate and
the rule-of-law concerning controversial trade
agreements, and setup secret tribunals to run
roughshod over local communities trying to protect
their environment and their health. It's happening as
we meet.
If I sound a little bitter about this, I am; the
President rightly appeals every day for sacrifice.
But to these mercenaries, sacrifice is for suckers. .
. .
Just one day after the attack, one day into the
maelstrom of horror, loss, and grief, Republican
senators called for prompt consideration of the
President's proposal to subsidize the country's
largest and richest energy companies. One congressman
even suggested that eco-terrorists might be behind
the attacks. And with that smear he and his kind went
on the offensive in Congress, attempting to attach to
a defense bill massive subsidies for the oil, coal,
gas and nuclear companies.
To a defense bill! What a shameless insult to
patriotism. To pile corporate welfare totaling
billions of dollars onto a defense bill in an
emergency like this is repugnant to the nostrils and
a scandal against democracy!
But this is their game. They're counting on your
patriotism to distract you from their plunder.
They're counting on you to be standing at attention
with your hand over your heart, pledging allegiance
to the flag, while they pick your pocket!
Let's face it: they present citizens with no options
but to climb back in the ring. We are in what
educators call "a teachable moment." And
we'll lose it if we roll over and shut up. What's at
stake is democracy. Democracy wasn't canceled on the
11th of September, but democracy won't survive if
citizens turn into lemmings. Yes, the President is
our Commander-in-chief, and in hunting down and
destroying the terrorists who are trying to destroy
us, we are "all the President's men" as
Henry Kissinger put it after the bombing of Cambodia.
But we are not the President's minions. If in the
name of the war on terrorism President Bush hands the
state over to the energy industry, it's every
patriot's duty to join the local opposition. Even in
war, politics is about who gets what and who doesn't.
If the mercenaries in Washington try to exploit the
emergency and America's good faith to grab what they
wouldn't get through open debate in peace time, the
disloyalty will not be in our dissent but in our
subservience. The greatest sedition would be our
silence.
Yes, there's a fight going on against terrorists
around the globe, but just as certainly there's a
fight going on here at home, to decide the kind of
country this will be during and after the war on
terrorism. What should our strategy be? How do we
renew our economy and safeguard our nation? If you
want to fight for the environment, don't hug a tree;
hug an economist. Hug the economist who tells you
that the most efficient investment of a dollar is not
in fossil fuels but in renewable energy sources that
not only provide new jobs but cost less over time.
Hug the economist who tells you that the price system
matters; it's potentially the most potent tool of all
for creating social change. Look what California did
this summer in responding to its recent energy crisis
with a price structure that rewards those who
conserve and punishes those who don't. Californians
cut their electric consumption by up to 15%.
Do we want to send the terrorists a message? Go for
conservation. Go for clean, home-grown energy. And go
for public health. If we reduce emissions from fossil
fuel, we will cut the rate of asthma among children.
Healthier children and a healthier economy- how about
that as a response to terrorism?
As for national security, well, it's time to expose
the energy plan before Congress for the dinosaur it
is. Everyone knows America needs to reduce our
reliance on fossil fuel. But this energy plan is more
of the same: more subsidies for the rich, more
pollution,more waste, more inefficiency. Let's get
the message out. Start with the wake up call from
John Adams, head of the National Resource Defense
Council,who says the terrorist attacks spell out in
frightful terms that America's unchecked consumption
of oil has become our Achilles heel. It constrains
our military options in the face of terror. It leaves
our economy dangerously vulnerable to price shocks.
It invites environmental degradation, ecological
disasters,and potentially catastrophic climate
change. . . .
Harvey Wassermann has spent years studying these
issues and writing about America's experience with
atomic radiation. He tells us that one or both planes
that crashed into the World Trade Center could easily
have obliterated the two atomic reactors now
operating at Indian Point, about 40 miles up the
Hudson River. The radioactive clouds would then
enshroud New York, New Jersey, New England,and carry
deep into the Atlantic and up into Canada and across
to Europe and around the globe again and again.
The immediate damage would render thousands of the
world's most populous and expensive square miles
permanently uninhabitable. All five boroughs of New
York City would be an apocalyptic wasteland.Who knows
how many people would die? And remember there are 103
of these potential bombs of the apocalypse now
operating in the United States. 103. . . .
Your adversaries will call you unpatriotic for
speaking the truth when conformity reigns. Ideologues
will smear you for challenging the official view of
reality. Mainstream media will ignore you, and those
gasbags on cable TV and the radio talk shows will
ridicule and vilify you. But I urge you to hold to
these words: "In the course of fighting the
present fire, we must not abandon our efforts to
create fire-resistant structures of the future."
Those words were written by my friend Randy Kehler
more than ten years ago, as America geared up to
fight the Gulf War. They ring as true today. Those
fire-resistant structures must include an electoral
system that is no longer dominated by big money,
where the voices and problems of average people are
attended on a fair and equal basis.They must include
an energy system that is more sustainable, and less
dangerous. And they must include a media that takes
its responsibility to inform us as seriously as its
interest in entertaining us.
The above is
an excerpt from Bill Moyers' Keynote Address to the
Environmental Grantmakers Association, Brainerd, MN,
October 16, 2001. Bill Moyers hosts the Bill Moyers
programs on PBS.
