By Marsha Coleman-Adebayo
The
late Marjorie Williams who wrote on Washington and its passing leaders noted
once about Richard Darman, who was an aide to five Republican presidents, the
views of a former colleague: "I think he would do anything to advance himself."
"If the cavalry is winning, he's for Custer, " says another. "And if the
Indians are winning, he's for Sitting Bull."
It feels as though everyone in politics at present is in it for him or herself. How else can you explain the Republicans defeating a bill that would have allowed wage parity for women? Equal pay for equal work is enforced in most countries of the world, and yet here, a nation built on promises of equal opportunity we vote against it? And in a further remarkable action against worker rights, Governor Scott Brown saw Wisconsin affirm its support of him this week. This is in a country with high unemployment, no real wage increases in a decade, and workers who are putting in an average of 500 hours more a year than a decade ago, according to researchers at Harvard - with the cost that entails to stable family relationships and health.
I recently reread Bill Moyers: Moyers on America: A Journalist and His Times by Bill Moyers, The New Press, New York/London, 2004 - and I underscored these words: "Taking on political scandal is nothing compared to what can happen if you raise questions about corporate power in Washington" I believe the power of money in politics has tipped the balance against our democratic institutions" Theodore Roosevelt believed the central fact of his era was that big business had become so dominant it would chew up democracy and spit it out" Mighty corporations are again the undisputed overlords of politics and government, their influence permeating the White House, Congress, and, increasingly, the judiciary."
Remember,
this is what he was writing in 2003, how much more potent then are his words
now as the greed that caused the global economic crisis remains unpunished and
administration executives feel emboldened to mislead.
He
wrote too: "Mark Hanna saw to it that first Ohio then Washington were, in his
words, "ruled by business " by bankers, railroads, and public utility
corporations." Any who opposed the oligarchy were smeared as disturbers of the
peace, socialists, anarchists, or worse. Back then they didn't bother with
hollow euphemisms such as "compassionate conservatism' to disguise the raw
reactionary politics that produced government of, by, and for the ruling
corporate class. They just saw the loot and went for it. " Pro-corporate
apologists -- hijacked the vocabulary of Jeffersonian liberalism and turned
words such as progress, opportunity and
individualism into tools for making the plunder of America sound like
divine right."
It
is when we ignore history that we allow lessons to go unlearned. Turning to my
bookshelves I found something else, Selling
the Great War: The Making of American Propaganda by Alan Axelrod, Palgrave
MacMillan, New York, 2009. Axelrod wrote that America's first propagandist
was probably Ivy Lee who told John D. Rockefeller, "Tell the truth, because
sooner or later the public will find out anyway. And if the public doesn't like
what you're doing, change your policies and bring them into line with what
people want." He was, as George Creel, came to realize in 1914, a master of propaganda
and Creel emulated him. Creel, a former journalist and head of the Committee on
Public Information began selling the people on the very war President Woodrow
Wilson had sought to avoid. In April 1917, Wilson and Creel would present U.S.
entry into the First World War as an idealistic and ideological imperative, a
fight to "make the world safe for democracy." Doesn't that remind you of another war and
another president closer to these times?
By
the end of 1917, 100,000 were working with Creel. He created a Division of News
that would send out carefully orchestrated reports of the war. It made me think of Homeland Security and
what journalists traded by becoming embedded in war zones and wearing military
uniforms.
Truth-telling
requires a certain distancing. When I blew the whistle at the Environmental
Protection Agency I did not do it because I disliked my colleagues, or did not
support the aims of the organization. I did. I liked my colleagues; some
testified for me, one went to jail. Defending the environment is one of the
greatest tasks of our time, I spoke out because that is what I believe is
necessary to sustain democracy.
In
the final words of my book, No Fear: A
Whistleblower's triumph over corruption and retaliation at the EPA I
note: "We had opened our hearts to
fellow human beings. We had heard of their pain, their struggle, and embraced
it as our own. It is the sound freedom makes.
Grasshoppers no longer looked like giants. We had mastered what my mom
had long ago identified as the most imposing grasshopper of all: fear."
