BILL MOYERS:"If They Let Us Down & Sell Us Out, They Should Be Fired"

[kpete]

(This piece by Bill Moyers is SO SO SO Inspiring ---I had a difficult time picking these snippets. Feel free to add more & as Moyers says, "It IS time to fight" ---Kpete)

Restoring the Public Trust
By Bill Moyers
TomPaine.com
Friday 24 February 2006


Bill Moyers is President of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy. This is the prepared text of his remarks on an eight-day speaking trip in California on the issue of money and politics.



I will leave to Jon Stewart the rich threads of humor to pluck from the hunting incident in Texas. .............

At the heart of this story is a metaphor of power. The Vice President turned his host, the lobbyist who is also the ranch owner, into his de facto news manager. She would disclose the shooting only when Cheney was ready and only on his terms. Sure enough, nothing was made public for almost 20 hours until she finally leaked the Authorized Version to the local newspaper. Ms. Armstrong suggested the blame lay with the victim, who, she indicated, had failed to inform the Vice President of his whereabouts and walked into a hail of friendly fire. Three days later Cheney revised the story and apologized. Don't you wonder what went back and forth with the White House that long night of trying to agree on the official line?

.................

It is a Dick Cheney world out there - a world where politicians and lobbyists hunt together, dine together, drink together, play together, pray together and prey together, all the while carving up the world according to their own interests.

.............

The fact that liberty depended on honest elections was of the utmost importance to the patriots who founded our nation and wrote the Constitution. They knew that corruption destroyed the prime requisite of Constitutional liberty, an independent legislature free from any influence other than that of the people...representative government assumes that elections will be controlled by the citizenry at large, not by those who give the most money. Electors must believe their vote counts. Elected officials must owe their allegiance to the people, not to their own wealth or to the wealth of interest groups who speak only for the selfish fringes of the whole community.

.................


It is time to fight again. These people in Washington have no right to be doing what they are doing. It's not their government, it's your government. They work for you. They're public employees - and if they let us down and sell us out, they should be fired. That goes for the lowliest bureaucrat in town to the senior leaders of Congress on up to the President of the United States.

a LONG but BEAUTIFUL & INSPIRING Article:

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/022406A.shtml

[MindPilot]

1. Fired?

How about indicted, convicted and sentenced?

[valerief]

2. Don't forget tortured

It's part of their legacy.

[Hissyspit]

3. Here's a good one:

"But let's be realistic here. When the notorious Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he answered, "Because there is where the money is." If I seem to be singling out the Republicans, it's for one reason: that's where the power is. They own the government lock, stock, and barrel. Once they gained control of the House of Representatives in 1994, their self-proclaimed revolution has gone into overdrive with their taking of the White House in 2000 and the Senate in 2002. Their revolution soon became a cash cow and Washington a one party state ruled by money."