Bill Moyers Essay: 'On The Sabotage Of Democracy'

Here.

AFTERTHOUGHT:  After you watch Bill Moyers, you may want to read a related post by Robert Parry at truthout, on the subject, "The White Man's Last Tantrum?" Here's a sample from the beginning:

American pundits are missing the bigger point about the Republican shutdown of the U.S. government and the GOP’s threatened default on America’s credit. The real question is not what policy concessions the Tea Partiers may extract, but rather can a determined right-wing white minority ensure continuation of white supremacy in the United States?

For years, political scientists have been talking about how the demographic changes in the United States are inexorably leading to a Democratic majority, with Hispanics and Asian-Americans joining African-Americans and liberal urban whites to erode the political domains of white conservatives and white racists.

But those predictions have always assumed a consistent commitment to the democratic principle of one person, one vote – and a readiness of Republicans to operate within the traditional standards of democratic governance. But what should now be crystal clear is that those assumptions are faulty.

...

The suggestion is that the battle is changing in both scope and nature, from an intense political battle in the American tradition to nothing less than a takeover attempt by the philosophical descendants of the Old South, trying to restore what they see themselves as having lost after the Civil War. It's scary stuff; don't read it late at night unless you have steady nerves.

AFTERTHOUGHT: Norman Solomon's post "The NSA Deserves a Permanent Shutdown" is also worth your attention. Solomon's approach is different, but the topic is still the survival of representative government and fundamental civil liberties in the United States. That really is what we're contending for, isn't it? Nothing less than that...