This morning, I happened upon an essay by iconic journalist Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, President of the Writers' Guild of America. It set my mind ablaze again with the thought that, politically speaking, absolutely nothing else matters--not abortion, not gay rights, not tax rates, not environmental regulation, not 'saving social security'--nothing else matters until we wrest control of our political and social systems away from the moneyed interests who have hijacked them for personal and financial gain.
The last paragraph of the essay fairly sums it up (but read the whole thing anyway):
These gargantuan super PAC contributions are not an end in themselves. They are the means to gain control of government – and the nation state -- for a reason. The French writer and economist Frederic Bastiat said it plainly: "When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living in society, they create for themselves, in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it." That’s what the super PACs are bidding on. For the rest of us, the ship may already have sailed. (emphasis mine)
Almost poetically, Moyers and Winship have set the agenda for anyone who cares about our world not becoming even more harsh, unfair, skewed, corrupt, and evil than it already is: we must break the cycle of governments' sale to the highest bidder and restore control of the world's resources and of society to the people. Everything else is secondary. Everything.
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