He has a way of cutting through the BS that politicians of both parties tend to toss out to the public thinking we won't notice.
He sure was right about the middle of the road and the yellow stripes. It's often a cowardly way to stick to the middle when our survival as a country depends on strong stances.
From a recent interview of Hightower by Michael Winship on Bill Moyers Journal website. I believe this was the week Moyers went off the air. Typical of what happens to voices that differ with the status quo.
The Lowdown from HightowerSome random comments on pertinent topics.
As Hightower's fond of saying, the water won't clear up until we get the hogs out of the creek. "I see the central issue in politics to be the rise of corporate power," he reiterated. "Overwhelming, overweening corporate power that is running roughshod over the workaday people of the country. They think they're the top dogs, and we're a bunch of fire hydrants, you know?"
And this one about how you can't govern progressively from the "inside."
Of President Obama he said, "It's odd to me that we've got a president who ran from the outside and won, and now is trying to govern from the inside. You can't do progressive government from the inside. You have to rally those outsiders and make them a force... Our heavyweight is the people themselves. They've got the fat cats, but we've got the alley cats..."
I have noticed that lately there is a tendency to shout down our agitators who speak their mind on current issues. A tendency to warn them of dire things in the future if they upset folks too much.
Hightower had this to say about that:
"What created democracy was Thomas Paine and Shays Rebellion, the suffragists and the abolitionists and on down through the populists and the labor movement, including the Wobblies. Tough, in your face people... Mother Jones, Woody Guthrie... Martin Luther King and Caesar Chavez. And now it's down to us.
"These are agitators. They extended democracy decade after decade. You know, sometimes we get in the midst of these fights. We think we're making no progress. But... you look back, we've made a lot of progress... The agitator after all is the center post in the washing machine that gets the dirt out. So, we need a lot more agitation....
"We can battle back against the powers. But it's not just going to a rally and shouting. It's organizing and it's thinking. And reaching out to others. And building a real people's movement."
Here are more of his words, this time on fighting back about the banksters.
Jim Hightower: Fighting Back Against the BankstersHe advocates for Elizabeth Warren. And he has strong words for financial giants.
Just recently, we learned from Kenneth Feinberg, the government’s special investigator of banker pay, that top executives of 17 financial giants shoveled $1.6 billion in excess compensation to themselves in 2008 — at the very moment their failing banks began to draw billions of bailout dollars from us taxpayers. Among the pranksters pocketing eye-popping amounts were the high-rolling bank bosses at American Express, Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, PNC and Wells Fargo.
So, what’s the punishment these self-serving money manipulators can expect from Washington’s arbiter of excessive executive pay? None. In a stunning show of soft-on-crime leniency, Feinberg declared that he will not even attempt to recoup any of the $1.6 billion the money-grubbers grubbed from us. Declaring that he thought shaming these bad boys was enough, Feinberg asked plaintively, “At what point are you piling on and going beyond what’s warranted?”
Shaming them? They’re Wall Street executives — they were born without the shame gene! Piling on? They imploded their banks, crashed our economy, got Washington politicos of both parties to save their jobs, paid themselves a looter’s level of taxpayer booty and now are getting a free pass to continue their flimflammery. Feinberg even refuses to release their names. Some shame!
And right now I really like this column about how we are spending on the rich and ignoring the poor.
Jim Hightower..Spending on the Rich, Cutting Back on the Rest of UsRegular folks must pay the price for the decade of excess that politicos lavished on the rich.
July 19, 2010 - Deficit hawks are on the fly in Washington, madly screeching that America can no longer afford...well, the American people.
Having slashed taxes for the wealthiest 1 percent of our society, having lavished gabillions of dollars on unnecessary wars that enrich politically connected government contractors, having laid out trillions of dollars to bail out Wall Street's casino banksters who crashed our real economy -- Washington's brave fighters for extending more of our nation's wealth to the already-rich have suddenly turned into born-again budget whackers.
Are they cutting back on any of the above elites, you ask? What a joker you are! No, no -- it's regular folks who must pay the price for the decade of excess that these politicos lavished on the rich.
In recent weeks, for example, Republican senators have repeatedly blocked an extension of jobless benefits for America's hardest-hit families. They've also denied aid that would keep states and cities from firing hundreds of thousands of teachers, police officers, and other essential public employees. "Can't afford it," bellow these newly minted spendthrifts, even as their failure to act is intentionally increasing unemployment and economic pain across our land.
And here's what he has to say about Social Security.
Surprise! The people speak Those who think that the hoi polloi don't notice, much less care, about America's growing income disparity, should take a peek at a recent opinion survey run by the right-wing, corporate-funded Peter Peterson Foundation. This outfit intended to show that the general public backs the teabag agenda slashing of government spending, including balancing the federal budget by putting Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block.
But – woopsie-daisy – the survey of thousands of Americans went badly wrong for the Peterson ideologues. For example, far from wanting to gut Social Security payments, 85 percent of the people favored extending the program by the making rich pay into the fund, like all the rest of us do.
And – hey, Mike – this one's for you: nearly six out of 10 of the folks involved in the foundation's "America Speaks" survey want a new, higher tax bracket to make millionaires pay their fair share of providing for the common good.
The foundation tried to bury these surprisingly progressive results, but you can see a good analysis of them at the Center for Economic Policy and Research: www.cepr.net.
In 2003 during the march to the Iraq invasion by too many in both parties, a lot of people had a true awakening.
We were excited about politics for a couple of years. Now we are being asked to accept too much in the name of peace in the party. We are not supposed to gripe about the fact that the very worst annoying advocates of privatizing Social Security were appointed to the fiscal commission.
We are not supposed to be concerned over how women's rights have been weakened under the new health care plan.
We are not supposed to notice that the DOE is packed with Gates and Broad and Walmart foundations folks who have little respect for classroom teachers.
Hightower is a refreshing voice. We used to have a lot more like that. But some are not around anymore, like Molly Ivins for example. Some have left the political scene. And at least one of our strongest voices has said he will do nothing to criticize the president.
I am not sure where that leaves us.
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