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When Kumi Naidoo's mother urged him to see God in the eyes of every human being that you meet, she was echoing a sentiment once expressed by Saint Ignatius of Loyola, who told the devout to "seek and find God in all things." You may recall that Ignatius founded the Jesuits, and now there is a Jesuit pope, the first in Catholic Church history.

Last weekend, Pope Francis visited Sardinia, the Mediterranean island known for its white sand beaches and deluxe vacation homes owned by the rich and famous. Now Sardinia is blighted by closed factories and mines operating at low capacity. Thousands are out of work, including 50 percent of its young people.

Last year, in an effort to keep their jobs, workers in Sardinia barricaded themselves in front of a mine packed with almost 700 kilograms of explosives. One miner told the cameras, "We cannot take it anymore. We cannot. We cannot ... Is this what we have to do?" And slit his wrist on live TV.

The pope met with some of those unemployed workers, including Francesco Mattana; 45 years old, married, father of three children, unemployed now for four years after losing his job with an alternative energy company.

Mattana told Pope Francis how unemployment, "oppresses you and wears you out to the depths of your soul."

The pope was so moved, he put aside his prepared speech and talked spontaneously of the suffering he was seeing, suffering that "weakens" and "robs you of hope," he said.

"Where there's no work, there's no dignity." The consequence, the pope said, of a system that has at its center an idol called money.

The crowd of 20,000 cheered. And when the pope told them, you must fight for work, they cheered again, and broke into a chant that the pope heard as a prayer for work, work, work.

At that moment, Pope Francis was not just the head of the Catholic Church. Rather, he embodied the heart of a catholic cry for justice, small "c" catholic, a universal aspiration expressed in our country by the promise that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is the birthright of every citizen.

Surely, that's not hard to understand. What the richest parents want for their children is what the poorest parents want for theirs. Measure their aspiration, however, against the fact that more than 21 million Americans are still in need of full time work, many of them running out of jobless benefits.

The richest 400 Americans are now worth a combined $2 trillion, while new figures from the Census Bureau show that the typical middle class family makes less, less than it did in 1989, with roughly 46 million people living at or below the poverty line. With the exception of Romania, no developed country has a higher percentage of kids in poverty than we do. Yet the House of Representatives has just cut food stamps for people who don't have enough money to feed themselves.

Listen. That sound you hear is the shredding of the social contract. And look at this heading above a piece in the current Columbia Journalism Review, "The line between democracy and a darker social order is thinner than you think." If that doesn't send a shiver down the spine, I don't know what it will take to wake us up.

So Pope Francis and Kumi Naidoo speak the truth, in different accents and with different metaphors, but their message boils down to this, capitalism is like fire, a good servant but a bad master. If we don't dethrone our present system of financial capitalism that rewards those at the top who then use it to rig the rules against even the most reasonable check on their excesses, It will consume us. And that fragile, thin line between democracy and a darker social order will be extinguished.

Moyers & Company airs weekly on public television. Explore more at

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A Russian court has ordered that 10 Greenpeace activists, including an American ship captain, be held in custody for two months while the Russian authorities determine whether a protest last week at an offshore oil rig in the Arctic was an act of piracy....

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Right now, the government of Russia is holding in custody the Arctic Sunrise, a ship crewed by 30 environmental activists from Greenpeace International. They attempted to board a Russian offshore oil platform to demonstrate against drilling for fossil fuels in the fragile Arctic environment....

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On Moyers & Company, economic analyst and former Clinton cabinet member Robert Reich talked about his new film Inequality for All. Opening in theaters this week, the film explains why America's widening income gap is a threat -- not only to the...

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The historian Bernard Weisberger writes that it's time retire the outworn American creed of exceptionalism. Its hidden core of arrogance has often turned it into a kind of nationalism-on-steroids.

In the speech last week that put on hold his request to Congress to...

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Ahead of Moyers & Company's interview with economic analyst Robert Reich about Inequality for All, a new documentary that explores America's widening income gap, we asked our smart, engaged community on Facebook what questions they had for Reich. We received...

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This week marks both the fifth anniversary of the fiscal meltdown that almost tanked the world economy and the second anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, the movement that sparked heightened public awareness of income inequality. Yet the crisis is worse than ever --...

When Thomas Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal, his Monticello farm team was obviously not what he had in mind. They were chattel, possessions toiling in his fields. So it's not lightly -- or unreasonable -- to invoke the plantation mentality to describe the National Football League.

Tom Van...

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Let us now praise common sense. Once again a president was about to plunge us into the darkest waters of foreign policy where the ruling principle becomes: "When in doubt, bomb someone." Strategists in the White House, militarists in the think tanks, the powerful pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, and arm-chair warriors of all stripes -- neo-conservatives and liberal humanitarians alike -- were all telling Barack Obama to strike Syria, no matter the absence of any law or treaty to justify it, no matter the chaos to follow. Do it, they said, to show you can, or what's a super power for?

But they hadn't reckoned on public opinion. The people said no! Not this time. Not after more than ten years of soldiers coming home broken in body, screaming nightmares in their brains, their families devastated. Not when our politics is an egregious fraud, unable to accomplish anything except enable the rich, while everyday people struggle to make ends meet. Jeannette Baskin, who lives on Staten Island not far from the Statue of Liberty, who describes herself as neither Republican nor Democrat, told The New York Times: "We invest all this money in foreign countries and fixing their problems, and this country is falling apart."

Don't think these people callous -- those pictures of children gassed in Syria sicken them. But there are limits to military power when religious rivalries and secular passions come armed with blowtorches. A retired educator named Alice Ridinger in Hanover, Pennsylvania, spoke for multitudes when she also told the Times that while she finds the use of chemical weapons "terrible." She fears the deeper involvement that could follow a military strike. "I don't think that would be the end of it," she said. Truth is, no one knows what would happen once the missiles fly. Not the White House or Pentagon; not the CIA or NSA; not even the all-seeing oracles of cable television, the editorial writers of the Wall Street Journal, or the seers of such influential publications as The Economist -- hawkish now on Syria despite having been wrong on Iraq.

In time, the White House, Congress, and the punditry could all be grateful to a suddenly attentive and stubborn public. They may have been spared a folly, thanks to this collective common sense that became so palpable it was a force in its own right. Now politics and diplomacy have a chance. Perhaps only a slight chance -- the Washington Post reports that the CIA has just begun delivering weapons to rebels in Syria -- deepening America's stake in the civil war. But we can't know if politics and diplomacy work unless we give them a try. Meanwhile, give a cheer for common sense.

Moyers & Company airs weekly on public television. Explore more at

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We are so close to losing our democracy to the mercenary class, it's as if we are leaning way over the rim of the Grand Canyon and all that's needed is a swift kick in the pants. Look out below.

The predators in Washington...

And you thought the government didn't have a jobs program. It does. The problem is that the pay and benefits are lousy, and in many cases the working conditions ain't so great either.

We're not talking about the civil service. No, as one of two recent reports notes, "Hundreds of...

When gun industry analyst Tom Diaz joined me on TV to talk about gun laws that make Americans more vulnerable, our substantial conversation lasted so long, we needed to extend it online.

In this web-only continuation, Diaz explores Florida's role as a testing ground for laws that...

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When it comes to keeping our food supply safe and our humane values intact, sometimes there's nothing like a whistleblower -- someone who will show or tell us the truth that someone else wants to keep hidden.

In 2011, McDonald's fired a producer of...

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The Nuns on the Bus have hit the road again. Last year, we hitched a ride with a group of Catholic sisters as they traveled the country by tour bus, dropping in on towns to spotlight growing poverty in America and to protest...

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Lawrence Lessig, director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University and founder of Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society, explains how our government -- given all the ways it can spy on us -- should just as determinedly...

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At the end of a week that reminds us to be ever vigilant about the dangers of government overreaching its authority, whether by the long arm of the IRS or the Justice Department, we should pause to think about another threat -- from too...

We were struck this week by one response to our broadcast last week on gun violence and the Newtown school killings. A visitor to the website wrote, "It is interesting to me that Bill Moyers, who every week describes the massive levels of corruption in our government... [and] the advocates...

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In my conversation with Marshall Ganz, the veteran activist and organizer challenges the notion of the 'free market' as an effective way to address our economic, political, and moral issues. Instead, he proposes more collaborative solutions.

"We need a new story, a new way...

This week, we spent time with Francine and David Wheeler, parents of six-year-old Ben Wheeler, one of the 20 children and six educators shot and killed at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Francine and David moved from New York City to Newtown to raise a family...

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If you want to see why the public approval rating of Congress is down in the sub-arctic range -- an icy 15 percent by last count -- all you have to do is take a quick look at how the House and Senate...