This is a great interview. How I wish there were hundreds more journalists like Bill Moyers.

Here Peter Dreier of Occidental College interviews Bill Moyers, who is our greatest living journalist.

Here is a small sample of a fascinating exchange:

“Q: We’ve always had an upper class in America. What’s different now?

“Moyers: The rich today are richer, there are more of them, they have round-the-clock propaganda factories in Rupert Murdoch’s empire and rightwing talk radio, and corporate media have their back. The massive upward distribution of wealth engineered by our political class over the last few decades has solidified the plutocratic control of the rule-making machinery in Washington and state capitals. The Supreme Court consistently favors organized money and the political privileges of the corporate class. We have a Senate that is more responsive to affluent constituents than to middle-class constituents, while the opinions of constituents in the bottom third of income distribution have no apparent effect at all on the Senate’s roll call votes.

“One of our two major parties is dominated by extremists dedicated to destroying the social contract, and the other party has been so enfeebled by two decades of collaboration with the donor class it can offer only feeble resistance to the forces that are devastating everyday people. Our economy is a plantation run for the aristocrats—the CEOs, hedge funds, private equity firms—while the field hands are left with the scraps. Go see Robert Reich’s documentary Inequality for All. It’s all right there.”