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Zusatztext “Electricity puls[es] through this collection. . . . Bill Moyers is engaged in truth telling! saying what cannot be said! but must be said.” — The Washington Post “Bill Moyers has been my North Star! in his eloquence! his quiet passion and courage! and in the way he presents me and millions of others with the ideals of our nation! from our past to our present to our uncertain future. Always he offers the gifts of thoughtfulness and of hope.”—Studs Terkel“Moyers is! simply! a national treasure! a reminder that we redeem the promise of America more through the morality! humanity and insights of unelected visionaries than insider politicians.” —Mark Green! The Huffington Post “Personal and reflective.... Bespeaks significant personal integrity.”— Los Angeles Times “Moyers seems to have been born with unusual wisdom. . . . He feels deeply! he knows language well and he tells true stories that stun the listener.” — Deseret News (Salt Lake City)“Bill Moyers speaks for! and to! the conscience of our nation.”—Walter Cronkite Informationen zum Autor Bill Moyers was one of the organizers of the Peace Corps, Press Secretary under President Lyndon Johnson from 1965 until 1967, publisher of Newsday , senior correspondent for CBS News, and producer of many of public television's groundbreaking series. He is the winner of more than thirty Emmy Awards, and the author of the bestselling books Listening to America , A World of Ideas , Healing and the Mind , and Moyers on America . In April 2007 Bill Moyers returned to PBS with his weekly show Bill Moyers' Journal . Klappentext People know Bill Moyers from his many years of path-breaking journalism on television. But he is also one of America's most sought-after public speakers. In this collection of speeches, Moyers celebrates the promise of American democracy and offers a passionate defense of its principles of fairness and justice. Moyers on Democracy takes on crucial issues such as economic inequality, our broken electoral process, our weakened independent press, and the despoiling of the earth we share as our common gift. 1. FOR AMERICA'S SAKE A New Story for America December 12, 2006 My father dropped out of the fourth grade and never returned to school because his family needed him to pick cotton to help make ends meet. The Great Depression knocked him down and almost out. When I was born he was making $2 a day working on the highway to Oklahoma City. He never took home more than $100 a week in his working life, and he made that only when he joined the union in the last job he held. He voted for Franklin Roosevelt in four straight elections and would have gone on voting for him until kingdom come if he'd had the chance. I once asked him why, and he said, "Because he was my friend." My father of course never met FDR; no politician ever paid him much note. Many years later when I wound up working in the White House my parents came for a visit and my father asked to see the Roosevelt Room. I don't quite know how to explain it, except that my father knew who was on his side. When FDR died my father wept; he had lost his friend. This man with a fourth-grade education understood what the patrician in the White House meant when he talked about "economic royalism" and how private power no less than public power can bring America to ruin in the absence of democratic controls. When the president said "the malefactors of great wealth" had concentrated into their own hands "an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor, and other people's lives," my father said amen; he believed the president knew what life was like for people like him. When the president said life was no longer free, liberty no longer real, men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness against "economic tyranny such a...
