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Plutocracy too long tolerated leaves democracy on the auction block, subject to the highest bidder.

Bill Moyers

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Bill Moyers
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: June 5
Former White House Press Secretary
Journalist
Hugo
Oklahoma
Billy Don Moyers
Billy Moyers
Democracy
Plutocracy
Long
Auctions
Tolerated
Block
Leaves
Subject
Subjects
Bidder
Highest
Auction

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Although our interests as citizens vary, each one is an artery to the heart that pumps life through the body politic, and each is important to the health of democracy.
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The Supreme Court consistently favors organized money and the political privileges of the corporate class. We have a Senate that is more responsive to affluent constituents than to middle-class constituents, while the opinions of constituents in the bottom third of income distribution have no apparent effect at all on the Senate's roll call votes.
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[Martin Luther] King subpoened the nation's conscience. He was killed for it.
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Fox News and Rush Limbaugh have raised ignorance to ideology and stupefied an entire political party. No more roguish and rowdy band of predators ever did more to demean and despoil the democracy on whose carcass they feed.
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A journalist is basically a chronicler, not an interpreter of events. Where else in society do you have the license to eavesdrop on so many different conversations as you have in journalism? Where else can you delve into the life of our times?
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America is the longest argument in the world.
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Democracy may not prove in the long run to be as efficient as other forms of government, but it has one saving grace: it allows us to know and say that it isn't.
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Capitalism is out of control, thanks in no small part to Citizens United, the Supreme Court decision which said that a corporation is a person, even though it doesn't eat, drink, make love, sing, raise children or take care of aging parents. You can't have a people's democracy as long as corporations are considered people.
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In fact, so much of life, as you know, is serendipitous. That's why you better be prepared at any time for anything, because it may happen to you.
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How do we protect the soul of democracy against bad theology in service of an imperial state?
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War, except in self-defense, is a failure of moral imagination.
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Our great progressive struggles have been waged to make sure ordinary citizens, and not just the rich and privileged, share in the benefits of a free society.
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Democracy doesn't begin at the top it begins at the bottom, when flesh-and-blood human beings fight to rekindle what Arlo Guthrie calls 'The Patriot's Dream.
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If the watchdog doesn't bark, how do you know there's a burglar in the basement? And the press is supposed to be a watchdog.
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Television can stir emotions, but it doesn't invite reflection as much as the printed page.
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The printed page conveys information and commitment, and requires active involvement. Television conveys emotion and experience, and it's very limited in what it can do logically. It's an existential experience - there and then gone.
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These are the now-endangered markers of a civilized society: legally ordained minimum wages, child labor laws, workers safety and compensation laws, pure foods and safe drugs, Social Security, Medicare and rules that promote competitive markets over monopolies and cartels.
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The property qualifications for federal office that the framers of the Constitution expressly chose to exclude for demonstrating an unseemly veneration of wealth are now de facto in force and higher than the Founding Fathers could have imagined.
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...there is no more effective public interest watchdog in Washington, D.C.
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Barack Obama strikes me as a man of strong principles and weak convictions - the kind of guy who would rather teach constitutional law than practice it, or who'd rather watch the match alone on TV than arm-wrestle his opponents.
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