The following is a portion of the transcript of Thom Hartmann talking about the Founders on his radio program, on election day, November 7, 2006:
“A dozen of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence were politicians, doctors or ministers. Eleven were merchants, nine were farmers. Ben Franklin was hard to define. I always called him the ADD one – 36 different careers in his life. He was in his 80s; Jefferson was 33 – about the average age – some of them were in their 20s. The men who signed the Declaration of Independence were the most idealistic and determined among the colonists, while the conservatives of their day said America should remain a colony of England forever. These liberal radicals believed in both individual liberty and societal obligations …
“A nation must care for the lives of its own, guarantee liberty and ensure its citizens’ happiness – a word in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution – a radical concept that had never before appeared in any nation’s founding documents. The signers wrote in the Declaration, ‘We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.’ And it was a simple statement of fact. The day they signed that document each legally became a traitor and was sentenced to death for treason by the legal government that controlled their lands and their homes. As Ben Franklin pointed out, they stood at a point of no return, and ‘Indeed we must all hang together’, he said, ‘Otherwise, we shall most assuredly hang separately.’
“John Hancock signed his name. He said he was signing his name large enough that the king can read it without glasses and now double the reward. The reward, the king had put a £500 reward on John Hancock’s head for sedition. What happened to John Hancock from signing the Declaration of Independence, just six months later his newborn daughter died from complications of childbirth arising from his wife’s fleeing the oncoming British army. Although the richest of the founders, wealthy by the standards of the day, he would hardly qualify as rich by today’s standards.He founded no dynasty. No foundation today dispenses money. John Hancock’s legacy: our nation.
“Robert Morris, who signed it, from Philadelphia, lost his entire shipping fleet, wiping out his modest fortune. Thomas Nelson of Virginia ordered his own home destroyed because it had been taken by General Cornwallis as headquarters. He died in poverty at the age of 50 as a result of signing the Declaration of Independence. William Ellery of Rhode Island lost everything as a result of signing the Declaration of Independence, as did Virginia’s Carter Braxton, Benjamin Harrison, Pennsylvania’s George Clymer, New York’s Philip Livingston, Georgia’s Lyman Hall, and New Jersey’s Francis Hopkinson.
“The British destroyed New York’s Francis Lewis’s property and threw his wife into such a hellhole of a jail that she died two years later. Three of South Carolina’s four signers, Edward Rutledge Thomas Heyward, Jr. and Arthur Middleton were captured by the British and held in a filthy unheated prison and brutally tortured for over a year before George Washington freed them in a prisoner exchange. George Washington, who refused to allow the American soldiers to torture the British, he said we will not sink to their level. New Jersey farmer John Hart’s wife died shortly after he signed the Declaration of Independence and his thirteen children were scattered among sympathetic families to hide them from conservative loyalists. He never saw them again, dying alone and wracked with grief 3 years later.
“Altogether seventeen of 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence were entirely wiped out by the war they declared and died in poverty. New Jersey State Supreme Court Justice Richard Stockton took his wife and children into hiding after he signed the Declaration but conservatives loyal to the crown turned him in. He was so badly beaten and starved that he died in prison. His home was looted and his wife and children lived the rest of their lives as paupers. Altogether nine of the men in that room died. Four lost all their children as a direct result of putting their names to the Declaration of Independence. Every single one had to flee his home and after the war 12 returned to find only rubble.
“After the war was over and the conservatives had fled to Canada and England, the survivors of the new American nation met to put into final form the legal structure of the nation that they had just birthed. It was not to be a nation of cynical selfish Libertarians who believe the highest value is ‘individual freedom and independence from society’ where the greatest motivator was greed. It was not to be a kingdom ruled by a warlord or leader. It was not to be a theocracy where religious leaders made the rules as had been the case in several states, particularly Massachusetts. And it was not to be a feudal nation ruled by the rich.
“This new nation, the United States of America, founded as a result of the sacrifice that these men and women, these families, that today we can take back to its ideals as Benjamin Franklin told Philadelphia’s Mrs. Powell as he was walking out of the constitutional convention after they had pulled together the Constitution in 1787. She said, ‘What sort of nation has been conceived?’ Ben Franklin: ‘It’s a Republic, madam, if you can keep it.’ ”
Thanks to John Munro of jmDigitalStudio for sending me the links to the video (in 6 parts) which he recorded of Dave Comstock’s recent talk at the Nevada County Historical Society. Dave called his talk “Ruminations of an Accidental Historian.”
AN OPEN LETTER TO THE MEMBERS OF THE PLANNING COMMISSION:
Thank you for allowing additional time, at least until your next meeting on May 27th, before deciding on the vested rights application from the Blue Lead Mine. I have read all of the written materials and letters that were posted on the Commission’s website. I stayed through the entire meeting on April 22nd, and listened carefully to verbal comments from the lawyers and from members of the public.
This much is abundantly clear:
BURDEN OF PROOF: Blue Lead has not met its burden of proof. It is not up to the Planning Commission to show that the former owners had or lost a vested right. Rather, it is up to Blue Lead to prove that the legal right to mine existed in 1954 for each parcel (this is still an open question), what kind of mining and, further, that the right if it existed was not lost when the former owners were unable, for whatever reason, to “get it (their mining project) off the ground” to quote Blue Lead’s lawyer, Mr. Chadwick.
… OFFICE OF MINE RECLAMATION: The representatives from OMR were correct in saying that Blue Lead can’t have it both ways: if there was continuous legal mining at the site, even allowing for idle periods, but the required procedures including annual reporting were not followed then big fines have accrued and are payable now. If, however, the vested right was lost due to inactivity by the former owners, and Tucker White started a new, unpermitted operation in 2007, then big fines have accrued and are payable now. OMR has received many complaints from Nevada County residents about the Blue Lead Mine since 2007. If Nevada County enforcement of mining regulations is lacking, the State Office of Mine Reclamation can and will step in.
… ZONING: The site is not zoned for mining, a further indication that legal mining was not occurring at that site. Attorney Robert Joehnck points out that “future mining activity was prohibited when the zoning classification was applied to the property by the County, unless a conditional use permit was first obtained by someone wanting to pursue mining activities”. There is no indication that such a permit was ever obtained.
MINERAL RIGHTS: Attorney Ellison Folk points out that the property title conveyed in the quiet title judgment in 1966 excludes mineral deposits that were known to exist prior to 1878.
How many of today’s headlines will matter in 100 years? 1000? Kirk Citron’s “Long News” project collects stories that not only matter today, but will resonate for decades — even centuries — to come. At TED2010, he highlights recent headlines with the potential to shape our future.
New research shows that, among developed countries, the healthiest and happiest aren’t those with the highest incomes but those with the most equality. Epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson discusses why.
We live in a world of deep inequality, and the gap between the rich and the poor is widening. We in the rich world generally agree that this is a problem we ought to help fix—but that the real beneficiaries will be the billions of people living in poverty. After all, inequality has little impact on the lives of those who find themselves on top of the pile. Right?
Not exactly, says British epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson.
For decades, Wilkinson has studied why some societies are healthier than others. He found that what the healthiest societies have in common is not that they have more—more income, more education, or more wealth—but that what they have is more equitably shared.
In fact, it turns out that not only disease, but a whole host of social problems ranging from mental illness to drug use are worse in unequal societies. In his latest book, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, co-written with Kate Pickett, Wilkinson details the pernicious effects that inequality has on societies: eroding trust, increasing anxiety and illness, encouraging excessive consumption.
The good news is that increased equality has the opposite effect: statistics show that communities without large gaps between rich and poor are more resilient and their members live longer, happier lives.
YES! Magazine web editor Brooke Jarvis sat down with Richard Wilkinson to discuss the surprising importance of equality—and the best ways to build it.
Richard: Oh, all of them. In fact, the relationship is weaker for health than for many other problems—we looked at life expectancy, mental illness, teen birthrates, violence, the percent of populations in prison, and drug use. They were all not just a little bit worse, but much worse, in more unequal countries. If I’d known how strong those connections would be, I would have looked for them a decade earlier. In fact, I’m still surprised that no one did look at them earlier.
There’s nothing complicated in what we’ve done. Epidemiologists and people working in public health have been doing this work for some time, not only controlling for relative poverty, but for all the income levels within, for instance, an American state. So once you know the relationship between income and death rates, for example, you should be able to predict what a state’s death rate will be. Actually, though, that doesn’t produce a good prediction; what matters aren’t the incomes themselves but how unequal they are. If you’re a more unequal state, the same level of income produces a higher death rate.
In fact, in more unequal societies, these problems aren’t higher by ten or twenty percent. There are perhaps eight times the number of teenage births per capita, ten times the homicide rate, three times the rate of mental illness. Huge differences. If social mobility were a perfect sorting system and everyone was sorted by ability, that wouldn’t make the number of problems in the society greater. It wouldn’t change the overall IQ of the population; it would just change the social distribution of IQ. We know from the findings that it’s the status divisions themselves that create the problems. We’re not making a great leap to say that this is causal. We, I think, show that it’s almost impossible to find any other consistent explanation.
Brooke: It seems possible that this link hasn’t been explored because we’re so used to thinking of these problems as linked to poverty. To find out that they’re tied not to the level of income but to the stratification of income—it’s sort of an unexpected conclusion.
Richard: We show that these problems aren’t affected by rich countries getting still richer. There are problems that we think of as problems of poverty because they’re in the poorest areas of society, but a country like the U.S. can be twice as rich as Greece, Portugal, or Israel—the poorer of the rich, developed countries we look at—and the problems are no better even though Americans are able to buy twice as much of everything as the poorer developed societies. That doesn’t make any difference; it’s only the gaps between us that matter now. And that’s really quite a striking thing to learn about ourselves and the effects of the social structure on us.
Brooke: How does thinking about these problems in terms of inequality rather than poverty change how we grapple with them?
Richard: I think people have been worried by the scale of social problems in our societies—feeling that though we’re materially very successful, a lot of stuff is going wrong, and we don’t know why. The media are always full of these social problems, and they blame parents or teachers or lack of religion or whatever. It makes an important difference to people to have an analysis that really fits, not only in a sort of academic way, but also that fits intuitions that people have had. People have intuited for hundreds of years that inequality was divisive and socially corrosive. In a way, that’s all the data shows. It shows that that intuition is much truer than any of us expected.
Brooke: Your findings related to crime and imprisonment rates seem to be particularly illustrative of the way inequality can lead to social corrosion.
Richard: We quote a prison psychiatrist who spent 25 years talking to really violent men, and he says he has yet to see an act of violence which was not caused by people feeling disrespected, humiliated, or like they’ve lost face. Those are the triggers to violence, and they’re more intense in more unequal societies, where status competition is intensified and we’re more sensitive about social judgments.
We also found very big differences in the proportion of the population that’s in prison in different countries and American states. But the differences aren’t driven by the amount of crime, they’re driven by the fact that people in unequal societies have more punitive attitudes about crime. It may have to do with fear across classes, lack of trust, and lack of involvement in community life. If you’ve got to go to prison, go to prison in Japan or one of the Scandinavian countries. You might get some rehabilitation. If you go to prison in some of the more unequal countries, you are very likely to come out a good deal worse than you went in.
Brooke: When I first heard about your work, I expected the book to deal with the material impacts of inequality. But your focus is different.
Richard: Yes. This is about the psychosocial effects of inequality—the impact of living with anxiety about our feelings of superiority or inferiority. It’s not the inferior housing that gives you heart disease, it’s the stress, the hopelessness, the anxiety, the depression you feel around that. The psychosocial effects of inequality affect the quality of human relationships. Because we are social beings, it’s the social environment and social relationships that are the most important stressors. For individuals, of course, if you’re going to lose your home, or if you’re terribly in debt, those can be more powerful stressors. But amongst the population as a whole, it looks as if these social factors are the biggest stressors because so many people are exposed to them.
Brooke: What psychological impact does living in an unequal society have on people who are at the top of the scale?
Richard: Status competition causes problems all the way up; we’re all very sensitive to how we’re judged. Think about Robert Frank’s books Luxury Fever or Falling Behind, or the great French sociologist Bourdieu—they show how much of consumption is about status competition. People spend thousands of pounds on a handbag with the right labels to make statements about themselves. In more unequal countries, people are more likely to get into debt. They save less of their income and spend more. They work much longer hours—the most unequal countries work perhaps nine weeks longer in a year.
If you grow up in an unequal society, your actual experience of human relationships is different. Your idea of human nature changes. If you grow up in a consumerist society, you think of human beings as self-interested. In fact, consumerism is so powerful because we’re so highly social. It’s not that we actually have an overwhelming desire to accumulate property, it’s that we’re concerned with how we’re seen all the time. So actually, we’re misunderstanding consumerism. It’s not material self-interest, it’s that we’re so sensitive. We experience ourselves through each other’s eyes—and that’s the reason for the labels and the clothes and the cars.
Brooke: What’s the effect of inequality on the way we perceive our communities—and how does that perception affect how they function?
Richard: Inequality affects our ability to trust and our sense that we are part of a community. In a way, that is the fundamental mediator between inequality and most of these outcomes, through the damage it does to social relations. For instance, in more equal countries or more equal states, two-thirds of the population may feel they can trust others in general, whereas in the more unequal countries or states, it may drop as low as 15 percent or 25 percent.
Let me tell you what I think is perhaps at the very bottom of all this. If you think of almost any animal species, there is a huge potential for conflict amongst members of the same species, because they have all the same needs. They eat the same food stuffs, they need the same nesting sites, they value the same feeding grounds or territories, they compete for sexual partners. It was that recognition in human populations that made the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century say that human beings, without a sovereign power to keep the peace, would war against each other and have “nasty, brutish, and short” lives. Amongst monkeys, inequality takes the form of dominance hierarchies, based on power and coercion and privileged access to resources: “I get it first because I’m stronger, and I don’t care if you’re hungry.” Human hierarchies are similar—it’s why power, status, and wealth all go together at the top and why powerlessness, hunger, and poverty go together at the bottom.
But human beings also have the opposite potential. We can be the best source of love and learning and cooperation and assistance of every kind. In a sense, Hobbes was wrong about people in a state of nature. He was right about the potential for conflict, but people have avoided conflict through food sharing, gift exchange, and great social equality (for example, in hunter-gatherer societies). The gift in a sense is a symbol that you and I don’t compete for the necessities of life. We don’t need to fight each other for them. You feel a sense of indebtedness and you reciprocate the gift, which anthropologists have suggested is a sort of basic social contract. That symbolism is still really important: You invite your friends over, sit around the same table, and share food, the basic necessity of life. The symbolism is also there in religious services and communion—these things are very fundamental, very deep.
Inequality is a reflection of how strong hierarchies are, how much we share or how much we don’t. It shows us which part of our potential we’re developing. What game do I play? Have I got to fend for myself? Or have I got to get people to trust me and cooperate with me? Is my survival dependent on good relationships? Are you my rival? Are you going to steal from me? Have I got to keep what I’ve got, defend it? Or can we share? Human beings can do both. We’ve lived in the most egalitarian and the most awful, hierarchical, tyrannical societies. It’s very interesting that we can measure how unequal societies are and how that can elicit more of certain kinds of behavior.
Brooke: Once we become aware of the impact of inequality on all of these social ills, what do we do about it?
Richard: Countries seem to get their greater equality in quite different ways. Sweden, for example, uses the big government way: There are very big differences in earnings, which are redistributed through taxes and benefits. It has a large welfare state. Japan, on the other hand, has smaller income differences to start with, does much less redistribution, and doesn’t have such high social expenditure. But both countries do very well—they’re amongst the more equal countries and their health and social outcomes are very good.
What we’ve learned is that the real quality of life for all of usnow depends on improving the social environment, and that we have a policy handle on how to do that. It’s not that we all need to have more therapy to try and make us nicer people. Income distribution, an issue government or big corporations can do something about, really affects the psychosocial well-being of the whole society. But we can’t just rely just on taxes and benefits to increase equality—the next government can undo them all at a stroke. We’ve got to get this structure of equality much more deeply embedded in our society. I think that means more economic democracy, or workplace democracy, of every kind. We’re talking about friendly societies, mutual societies, employee ownership, employee representatives on the board, cooperatives—ways in which business is subjected to democratic influence. The bonus culture was only possible because the people at the top are not answerable to the employees at all.
Changing workplaces can have an enormous effect—not only is that where wealth is created, it’s where income from production is initially divided up. It’s also where we’re most subjected to hierarchy and authority. Employee ownership turns a company into a community. The chief executive becomes answerable to employees. You might vote for your boss to have, I don’t know, three times as much income as you—not 300 or 400 times more. Embedding greater equality and more democratic accountability in our institutions does much more than just changing income distribution or wealth distribution. And, a number of studies show that if you combine an even partial employee ownership, you get quite reliable increases in productivity. This is about how we work better together.
Brooke: Which is more important than ever, given that solving many of our major problems—global climate change, for example—will require unprecedented levels of cooperation.
Richard: Global warming, more than almost any other problem you can imagine, involves acting for the common good. It involves public spiritedness. And in more equal societies, where there’s a stronger community life, less violence, and more trust, people give higher priority to the common good.
To test this out, we looked at the proportion of their income that countries give in foreign aid, and it’s higher in the more equal countries. We looked at the proportion of different waste materials that are recycled, and that’s higher in more equal countries. You don’t do those things for yourself; they both depend on an idea of the greater good. An international survey of business leaders included the question, “How important do you think it is that your government abides by international environmental agreements?” In the more equal countries, business leaders rate that as more important than in the less equal countries. Inequality changes our perceptions—are you out for yourself, or do you recognize that we’re in this together, that we’ve got to do these things for the common good?
Brooke Jarvis interviewed Richard Wilkinson for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Brooke is YES! Magazine’s web editor.
On Nov. 5, Rep. John Boehner of Ohio, the House minority leader, took the podium at a Republican rally, waved a document defiantly and declared:”This is my copy of the Constitution, and I’m going to stand here with the Founding Fathers who wrote in the Preamble, We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness ” Mr. Boehner was encouraging participants to protest the pending House vote for health care reform by demanding their constitutional right to make medical decisions.
Pop quiz: What’s wrong with this picture?
If you said that there is no explicit constitutional right to make medical decisions, you score some points. If you said that the passage Mr. Boehner quotes is from the Declaration of Independence you get an A. If you also noted that the quotation is not even from the Declaration’s preamble, you earn extra credit.
Mr. Boehner is not the first opinion leader to confuse the Constitution with the Declaration, nor is he apt to be the last. Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell, for example, said, “As our Constitution declares, we are endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights ” Of course, Mr. Boehner, unlike Mr. Falwell, entered the profession by promising to protect the Constitution.
Mr. Boehner noted his 19 years of public service, yet how could he protect the Constitution when he can’t distinguish it from the Declaration? Indeed, how many public servants, for whom an oath to the Constitution is an entrance requirement, know the document well enough to protect it? Judging from the foregoing, from political rhetoric in media and from many anecdotes, one suspects that constitutional literacy is too low. This is a problem for sworn professionals who cannot protect what they don’t know, and it is a problem for the ordinary citizen who, in a democracy, is supposed to be running the country through informed voting and participation in public conversations.
The value of constitutional literacy and the lack of it are obvious, the nature of it less so. What are the minimum conditions for constitutional literacy? This should be the topic of public conversation and consensus. To that end, here are some preliminary suggestions that distinguish eight levels of constitutional literacy. At each level, one should know:
* The basic difference between the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. One establishes a government, the other doesn’t. One rests on man-made law, the other on natural law; one posits only conferred rights, the other posits inalienable rights.
* The age and basic anatomy of the Constitution. When was it ratified? (1788.) How many articles are there? (Seven.) How many Amendments? (27.) What, in general, is each about?
* Certain significant details from the articles and the amendments, such as the basic requirements for being elected to, appointed to, or removed from federal office.
* Most details of each article and amendment and the history surrounding its creation and ratification, including the history of democracy and republicanism.
* The more important arguments for the various elements of the Constitution, such as those found in the Federalist Papers.
* The more famous court cases and their implications for public policy, such as Marbury v. Madison (1803), Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and Roe v. Wade (1973).
* Key disagreements about the nature of law, rights and justice, and which theories about each are reflected in the Constitution as opposed to the Declaration or other important American documents — such as Marbury v. Madison, which has led some to conclude that judges make law.
* The history of and theories about constitutional interpretation. At this level, disagreement may be due to philosophical or political differences, rather than constitutional illiteracy. Thus, it is fair to call both JusticeAntonin Scalia and Justice Stephen Breyer constitutional scholars, yet they frequently disagree on the meaning of key constitutional passages or of their application to a specific court case.
From the opening of the constitutional convention to the present, political conversation in the U.S. has been raucous, robust and often significant in its impact on public policy and on individuals’ lives. How much better would things be if a majority of the participants in this conversation were constitutionally literate?
Christopher Dreisbach is chairman of the Department of Applied Ethics and Humanities in the Division of Public Safety Leadership at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education. His e-mail is cdreisbach@jhu.edu.
There’s a small discussion going on about Obama’s State of the Union speech over on Jeff Pelline’s Blog. One of the commenters repeated the old canard about the United States being a “center/right-of-center nation,” and also made the claim that no one can successfully govern here from the left.
On the contrary, when US citizens are polled on issues, we are definitely a center-left — or liberal/progressive — nation.
Obama, if he hopes to win a second term, should study those who have successfully governed from the center-left, like FDR, and he should take a lesson from someone like Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a European-style social democrat — a liberal progressive socialist in our parlance — who (both as a congressman and as a senator) has won huge majorities in a mostly red state that also gave huge majorities to George Bush.
Obama should look closely at the kind of Democrats who are now in trouble. They are mostly of the center-right variety.
Obama should recall Harry Truman’s warning that “when given a choice between a Republican and a Democrat imitating a Republican, voters would not hesitate to vote for the real thing.”
What I was hoping — but not expecting — to hear last night from Obama was something more akin to the following sentiments, expressed by our most successful center-left president, Franklin Roosevelt (whom Obama purports to admire) in his famous 1936 Madison Square Garden speech:
For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up.
We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace: business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.
They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.
Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me … and I welcome their hatred.”
Much of the film consists of the words of ordinary Americans who became extraordinary and changed our history. Their words are spoken again by contemporary actors and actresses, such as Matt Damon, Josh Brolin, Viggo Mortensen, Marissa Tomei and others.
Here’s a moving excerpt (because Zinn becomes visibly choked up) from the transcript of Moyers’ interview with Zinn:
BILL MOYERS: One of my favorite sequences is in here, is when we meet Genora Dollinger. Tell me about her.
HOWARD ZINN: She was a woman who got involved in sit-down strikes of the 1930s. Those very dramatic moments when workers occupied the factories of General Motors and wouldn’t leave, and therefore left the corporations helpless. But this was a time when strikes all over the country galvanized people and pushed the New Deal into the reforms that we finally got from the New Deal. And Genora Dollinger represents the women who are very often overlooked in these struggles, women so instrumental in supporting the workers, their men, their sweethearts. And Genora Dollinger just inspires people with her words.
BILL MOYERS: She was only 23 when she organized.
HOWARD ZINN: Amazing. Yes.
[MARISSA TOMEI as GENORA DOLLINGER]: Workers overturned police cars to make barricades. They ran to pick up the fire bombs thrown at them and hurl them back at the police. The men wanted to me to get out of the way. You know the old “protect the women and children” business. I told them, “Get away from me.” The lights went on in my head. I thought I have never used a loud speaker to address a large crowd of people but I’ve got to tell them there are women down here. I called to them, “Cowards! Cowards! Shooting into the bellies of unarmed men and firing at the mothers of children.” And then everything became quiet. I thought, “The women can break this up.” So I appealed to the women in the crowd, “Break through those police lines and come down here and stand beside your husbands and your brothers and your uncles and your sweethearts.” I could barely see one woman struggling to come forward. A cop had grabbed her by the back of her coat. She just pulled out of that coat and she started walking down to the battle zone. As soon as that happened there were other women and men who followed. That was the end of the battle. When those spectators came into the center of the battle and the police retreated, there was a big roar of victory.
BILL MOYERS: That’s Marisa Tomei as Genora Dollinger. What do you think when you hear those words?
HOWARD ZINN: First, I must say this, Bill. When my daughter saw this she heard Marisa Tomei shout to the police, “Cowards, cowards.” My daughter said a chill, a chill went through her. She was so moved. And so, when I see this, and I’ve seen this so many times, and each time I am moved because what it tells me is that just ordinary people, you know, people who are not famous, if they get together, if they persist, if they defy the authorities, they can defeat the largest corporation in the world.
The following is a portion of the 
Richard: We quote a prison psychiatrist who spent 25 years talking to really violent men, and he says he has yet to see an act of violence which was not caused by people feeling disrespected, humiliated, or like they’ve lost face. Those are the 
There’s a small discussion going on about Obama’s State of the Union speech over on 
Tonight from 8 to 10 PST, the 