I'm Bill Moyers. It's good to have your ear.

Historian Steve Frazier on falling through the cracks of the new gilded age.

I think we underestimate the degree to which the politics of fear operates in our society and in our economy.

The dominant form of employment, or what is becoming the dominant

form of employment in our economy today is contingent, casual, precarious labor without

any protections, no security at the job, no fringe benefits. You are at the mercy of your

employer and an economy that's in chronic flux.

Pensions have been stripped away. The social safety net has been shredded to a very significant

degree. When you're faced with that kind of situation, naturally you have to think twice

about whether you're going to fight back.

Thanks for joining us. What happened in Washington

over the past several days sent me back a century in time to the gilded age when senators

and representatives were owned by Wall Street and big business and did the bidding of their

moneyed masters by passing favorable laws that increased

their already fabulous wealth.

We've just watched the Senate and the House aided and abetted by President Obama reward

financial interests that poured almost half a billion dollars into the midterm elections.

They did it by slipping into the omnibus spending bill, signed this

week by the president, a provision permitting Wall Street to resume the predatory practice

of making risky bets with our deposits and sticking us to taxpayers with the bill if the

gambles failed. And guess what? That provision was drafted by lobbyists for the huge

banking conglomerate Citigroup. Lo and behold, the Citigroup language turns up in the

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