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Now Barack Obama, Who Campaigned For Transparency, Is The President Defending Secret Negotiations On New Trade Agreements That Are Largely Being Written By Corporate Lawyers And Lobbyists. He Would Give Corporations The Key To The Treasury While He Gets The Authority To Fast Track Another Hammering Of Working People And The Environment. Yet The Only People Who Get A Real Tongue-lashing From This President's White House Are Progressives Around Town Who Dare To Call Him On The Carpet For Abandoning His Promises.

-Bill Moyers

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Now Barack Obama, Who

Bill Moyers

...

Now Barack Obama, Who Campaigned For Transparency, Is The President Defending Secret Negotiations On New Trade Agreements That Are Largely Being Written By Corporate Lawyers And Lobbyists. He Would Give Corporations The Key To The Treasury While He Gets The Authority To Fast Track Another Hammering Of Working People And The Environment. Yet The Only People Who Get A Real Tongue-lashing From This President's White House Are Progressives Around Town Who Dare To Call Him On The Carpet For Abandoning His Promises.

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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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When I Was Growing Up, I Never Heard Anyone Pray, "give Me This Day My Daily Bread." It Was Always, "give Us This Day Our Daily Bread." That Stuck. We're All In This Together.

Big Money And Big Business, Corporations And Commerce, Are Again The Undisputed Overlords Of Politics And Government. The White House, The Congress And, Increasingly, The Judiciary, Reflect Their Interests. We Appear To Have A Government Run By Remote Control From The U.s. Chamber Of Commerce, The National Association Of Manufacturers And The American Petroleum Institute. To Hell With Everyone Else.

I'm The Front Man, I'm The Man On Camera, But There's A Whole Team Beyond Me.

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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As A Student I Learned From Wonderful Teachers And Ever Since Then I've Thought Everyone Is A Teacher.

If Being Tolerant Of Differing Opinions, If Believing That America Has To Make It As A Pluralistic Nation, If Being Civil, If That Makes You A Liberal, I Plead Guilty.

When Ideology And Theology Couple, Their Offspring Are Not Always Bad But They Are Always Blind.

A Free Press Is One Where It's Okay To State The Conclusion You're Led To By The Evidence. One Reason I'm In Hot Water Is Because My Colleagues And I At Now Didn't Play By The Conventional Rules Of Beltway Journalism. Those Rules Divide The World Into Democrats And Republicans, Liberals And Conservatives, And Allow Journalists To Pretend They Have Done Their Job If Instead Of Reporting The Truth Behind The News, They Merely Give Each Side An Opportunity To Spin The News.

Having Lost Faith In All Else, Zealots Have Nothing Left But A Holy Cause To Please A Warrior God. They Win If We Become Holy Warriors, Too; If We Kill The Innocent As They Do; Strike First At Those Who Had Not Struck Us; Allow Our Leaders To Use The Fear Of Terrorism To Make Us Afraid Of The Truth; Cease To Think And Reason Together, Allowing Others To Tell What's In God's Mind.

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In Tracking Down And Eliminating Terrorists, We Need To Change Our Metaphor From A "war On Terror" - Exactly What, Pray Tell, Is That? - To The Mind-set Of Interpol Tracking Down Master Criminals Through Intense Global Cooperation Among Nations, Or The Fbi Stalking The Mafia, Or Local Police Determined To Quell Street Gangs Without Leveling The Entire Neighborhood In The Process.

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For The First Time In Our History, Ideology And Theology Hold A Monopoly Of Power In Washington.

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We Have To Face The Unpleasant As Well As The Affirmative Side Of The Human Story, Including Our Own Story As A Nation, Our Own Stories Of Our Peoples. We Have Got To Have The Ugly Facts In Order To Protect Us From The Official View Of Reality. Otherwise, We Are Squeezed Empty And Filled With What Other People Want Us To Think And Feel And Experience.

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.

Scientists Investigate That Which Already Is; Engineers Create That Which Has Never Been. Creativity Is Piercing The Mundane To Find The Marvelous.

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I Believe Democracy Requires A 'sacred Contract' Between Journalists And Those Who Put Their Trust In Us To Tell Them What We Can About How The World Really Works.

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American History

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Charity Depends On The Vicissitudes Of Whim And Personal Wealth; Justice Depends On Commitment Instead Of Circumstance. Faith-based Charity Provides Crumbs From The Table; Faith-based Justice Offers A Place At The Table.

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I Can Tell You That The Job Of Trying To Tell The Truth About People Whose Job It Is To Hide The Truth Is About As Complicated And Difficult As Trying To Hide It In The First Place.

When We Were Covering The 2008 Campaign I Told My Young African American Colleagues That Despite The Historical Significance Of Victory, Barack Obama Was Going To Break Their Hearts. They Didn't Want To Hear That, And They Refused To Believe It. Eighteen Months Later They Started Dropping By One By One To Say, Sadly: "he Broke Our Hearts." A Couple Of Them Even Wept.

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I Really Believe That Coincidence Is God's Way Of Remaining Anonymous.

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Ideas Are Great Arrows, But There Has To Be A Bow.

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Secrecy Is The Freedom Tyrants Dream Of.

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Our Very Lives Depend On The Ethics Of Strangers, And Most Of Us Are Always Strangers To Other People.

We Seem To Prefer A Comfortable Lie To The Uncomfortable Truth. We Punish Those Who Point Out Reality, And Reward Those Who Provide Us With The Comfort Of Illusion. Reality Is Fearsome .. But Experience Tells Us That More Fearsome Yet Is Evading It.

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.

I've Lived Long Enough To See The Triumph Of Zealots And Absolutists, To Watch Money Swallow Politics, To Witness The Rise Of The Corporate State. See The Party Of Working And Poor People Become A Sycophant Of Crony Capitalism. Watch The Union Of Church And State Become Fashionable Again. Witness The Coupling Of News And Entertainment. See Everyday People Cast Overboard As The Pirates And Predators Of Wall Street Seized The Ship Of State. I Didn't Drift; I Moved Left Just By Standing Still.

In One Way Or Another, This Is The Oldest Story In America: The Struggle To Determine Whether “we, The People” Is A Moral Compact Embedded In A Political Contract Or Merely A Charade Masquerading As Piety And Manipulated By The Powerful And Privileged To Sustain Their Own Way Of Life At The Expense Of Others.

Although I Was Brought Up In A Culturally And Religious Conservative Culture, As A Baptist I Was Taught That No One Has The Right To Subpoena Your Conscience.

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We See More And More Of Our Presidents And Know Less And Less About What They Do.

When The Public Loses Faith In Democracy's Ability To Solve The Problems It Has Created For Itself, The Game's Almost Over. And I Think We Are This Close To Losing Democracy To The Mercenary Class.

Our Media And Political System Has Turned Into A Mutual Protection Racket.

The Consensual Seduction Of The Mainstream Media By And With The Government Is One Of The Most Dangerous Toxins At Work In America Today.

I Have Seen Hate Born Of Fear, Hate Speaking In The Name Of God And Truth, Hate Holding Up A Distorting Mirror To Fellow Human Beings.

When All Our Efforts Have Come To Nothing, We Naturally Tend To Doubt Not Just Ourselves, But Also Whether God Is Just. At Those Moments, Our Only Hope Is To Seek Every Evidence That God Is Just, By Communing With The People We Know Who Are Strongest In Faith.

It's The People Who Are Doing The Nonviolent Organizing At The Grassroots That Make Me Think There's Still Hope.

The Thing About War Is That Once It's Triggered, It Is Unyielding In Its Appetite. And The More It Consumes And Gorges, The More It Wants.

I'm Angry At What's Happening To America And Angry With Myself That I Can't Do More. I Would Be Miserable If I Couldn't Bear Witness.

A Profound Transformation Is Happening Here. The Framers Of Our Nation Never Envisioned These Huge Media Giants; Never Imagined What Could Happen If Big Government, Big Publishing And Big Broadcasters Ever Saw Eye-to-eye In Putting The Public's Need For News Second To Their Own Interests. I Approach The End Of My Own Long Run Believing More Strongly Than Ever That The Quality Of Journalism And The Quality Of Democracy Are Inextricably Joined ... .

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?

If You Think There Is Freedom Of The Press In The United States, I Tell You There Is No Freedom Of The Press... They Come Out With The Cheap Shot. The Press Should Be Ashamed Of Itself. They Should Come To Both Sides Of The Issue And Hear Both Sides And Let The American People Make Up Their Minds

Conservatism Is Less A Set Of Ideas Than It Is A Pathological Distemper, A Militant Anger Over The Fact That The Universe Is Not Closed And Life Is Not Static.

I Was Not A Public - I Was Not A Thinker. I Was A Doer.

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.

We Don't Care Really About Children As A Society And Television Reflects That Indifference To Children As Human Beings.

I Take "we, The People" Seriously Because I Don't Know How We Build A Civilization Without Reciprocity.

When Certain Causes Become Prairie Fires, Politicians Make Difficult Choices, And Often At The Expense Of Someone Like Jeremiah Wright And Walter Jenkins. That's The Cruel Nature Of American Politics, Where The End Becomes The Consummate Objective, And Sometimes The Means To Get There Come At A Great Price.

Difficult Choices

Barack Obama Seemed To Think He Could Win Over His Enemies. He Certainly Seemed To Believe Too Much In His Own Powers Of Persuasion. One Thing's For Sure - He Misunderstood The Nature Of His Adversaries.

When I Learn Something New - And It Happens Every Day - I Feel A Little More At Home In This Universe, A Little More Comfortable In The Nest.

There Are Honest Journalists Like There Are Honest Politicians - They Stay Bought.

Sure Enough, As Merger Has Followed Merger, Journalism Has Been Driven Further Down The Hierarchy Of Values In The Huge Conglomerates That Dominate What We See, Read And Hear. And To Feed The Profit Margins Journalism Has Been Directed To Other Priorities Than "the News We Need To Know To Keep Our Freedoms"

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