Bill Moyers — CBS and PBS journalist, ordained minister, Peace Corps director, press secretary and closest adviser to President Lyndon Johnson, Newsday publisher, documentarian, investigative reporter, incisive interviewer — gave a weighty but little-mentioned speech at the 2003 Take Back America conference.

I rediscovered it doing a long-overdue job – cleaning out old boxes of stuff stored over the decades for one reason or another.

For most of those things, it couldn’t be recalled why they were deemed important at the time. That sense of amnesia doesn’t apply here. This writer considers Moyers a mentor he never met.

He presciently foresaw today.

The excerpts below are his words. My annotations are italicized.

For context and clarity, the entire speech deserves thoughtful reading.

(Find it at: https://www.commondreams.org/views/2003/06/10/your-story-progressive-story-america-pass-it)

“This is Your Story - The Progressive Story of America. Pass It On.”

“There is nothing idealized or romantic about the difference between a society whose arrangements roughly serve all its citizens and one whose institutions have been converted into a stupendous fraud. That difference can be the difference between democracy and oligarchy…

“The founding convention of the People’s Party — better known as the Populists — in 1892 [said]… ‘We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political and material ruin...

“Corruption dominates the ballot box, the state legislatures, and the Congress and touches even the bench...

“The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few.’”

Sound familiar in 2025?

“… It wasn’t enough simply to curb........

© The Leader Herald