Tucson Weekly: High Time For Hightower (April 29

High Time For Hightower

Our Favorite 'Kitchen-Table Populist' Is Coming To Town.
By Tim Vanderpool
JIM HIGHTOWER IS Thomas Paine in a Stetson, Michael Moore with a drawl, a bona- fide populist for modern times who lacerates corporate greed and political corruption with down-home humor.
This week the tall Texan brings his bulls-eye perspective to Tucson for a special dinner benefiting the Pima County Democratic Party and Southern Arizona Central Labor Council. He'll also attend a reception sponsored by the National Writer's Union.
He's also the host of a syndicated show, Hightower Radio (broadcast until recently on Tucson station KMRR). Hightower also writes a syndicated column appearing in the Tucson Weekly (see below), edits The Hightower Lowdown newsletter, and has authored several books, including There's Nothing in the Middle of the Road But Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos, and his soon-to-be-published If the Gods Had Meant Us To Vote, They Would Have Given Us Candidates.
Currents He's witnessed the power structure from inside-out, having served as editor of The Texas Observer from 1976 to 1979, and as Texas Agriculture Commissioner from 1982 to 1990. During his stint in office, he turned the formerly do-nothing post into a hotbed for "percolate up economics," raising Texas livestock exports from $6 million to $77.6 million, and pissing off the petro-chemical and agri-business potentates by pushing organic farming.
His politics are purely kitchen table, and his goal is helping Ma and Pa America "take our country back from the Big Shots and Bastards who've been running roughshod over us."
Jim Hightower spoke to the Tucson Weekly by phone from his offices in Austin. He highlighted his keynote message for Tucson, Kickass Populism--and the Democratic Party. "My basic point is that we need to return to our populist roots," he says. "It's not a matter of right-to-left--the real political spectrum is top-to-bottom. The vast majority of folks are no longer in shouting distance of those powers at the top, even when those powers turn out being Democrats.
"We certainly don't need to move to the right, as the Bill Clinton regime would have us believe. It's not even really a matter of moving to the left. It's a matter of moving out to Tucson, and to Tupelo, and to Tyler, where the people actually are, and getting on the side of working people's interest. And that means a willingness to confront and challenge the corporate powers. This is quite the opposite of what the national Democratic party is pursuing now."
He blames Democratic missteps on plain old greed. "I was elected as agricultural commissioner here on the Democratic ticket, and I was proud to have been a Democrat," he says. "But I look now at my national party, and even at the state party here in Texas, and see that they've taken off the Sears and Roebuck work boots, and strapped on the same Guccis the Republicans strut around in."
He says his party hoped to gain slopping rights alongside Republicans at the fat corporate trough, and "get away from those tacky old labor unions, environmentalists, middle-class families, family farms and all that."
As a result, the two parties are nearly indistinguishable. In turn, that's allowed for smokescreen shenanigans like the "compassionate conservatism" of Texas Governor and presidential hopeful George W. Bush Jr.--"or 'Shrub,' as we like to call him," Hightower says. "He's quite compassionate to his contributors."
Meanwhile, Texas remains at the bottom of the heap in providing medical care for children, or addressing income inequality. "And this from a guy who now wants to be president on the basis of his gubernatorial record, and is campaigning on compassionate conservatism?
"Yet he did express great concern last month. He said 'Many people are hurting.' But he wasn't referring to those children, because he's pushing through legislation that would deny healthcare to 200,000 Texas children. He was referring to the owners of Texas oil wells. He pushed through a $46 million tax break for Exxon and other oil well owners. That gives a pretty clear picture of him as a compassionate man."
Hightower nails the mainstream media for not hammering such blatant arrogance. "The clearest measure of the media's performance," he says, "is that its representatives rank just above politicians among the American people. And politicians are just one notch above mad cow disease. That's why it's so important to have alternative voices around the country.
"The most common reaction I get on my radio show is from people saying, 'My God, these are the things we want to talk about, but we never get a chance to. The media doesn't talk about it, the politicians don't talk about it. But this is what's happening to us at the kitchen table level.'"
He says the brightest spot for change may come from computer screens: "Down the road, the Internet becomes such an important tool, which is why the forces of evil are trying to put a meter on it, and lock it up for themselves. But if it works right, it could be a real democratic tool."
Campaign reform is another lever for progress. Hightower calls it the "issue that crosses all other progressive issues. It's the old adage of following the money, because money is the force that is choking off our democracy."
Lawmakers are blundering when they dismiss its importance to the public, he says. Still, "The people don't push because they know nothing's going to happen. They know both parties are butt-deep in that corrupt money, and have no interest in reforming the campaign system. In the meanwhile, every time people get a chance to go for campaign finance--in the cases of Arizona, Massachusetts, Vermont or Maine--they've done it by good margins."
In Austin, for example, a reform measure landed on the city-wide ballot, sponsored by a group humbly named "Austinites For a Little Less Corruption." The initiative won by 73 percent, Hightower says.
Opponents claim that limiting campaign funding likewise limits free speech. But Hightower calls that a rhetorical red herring. "It's not exactly free when you have to pay to have a voice in government," he says. "I don't think that's what Thomas Jefferson and James Madison had in mind when they were doing the First Amendment--that there would be free speech for those who could afford to buy it."
At the same time, he also sees encouraging signs of change, particularly on the labor front. "Unions are back and being more aggressive, being focused on the need to organize, paying attention to independent political action, and doing a little of this kick-ass populism," he says.
Hightower describes growing international ties between labor unions--particularly NAFTA-era links among workers in the United States and Mexico--as "an essential step. The same thing is taking place in Asia and in other parts of Latin America. If the economy is going to be global, then the organizing and the people connections have to be global as well. And NAFTA is one galvanizing reality."
He says the only way to stop the hemorrhaging of American jobs to low-paying, labor-rich nations "is by getting wages up in those countries so that corporations are not free to hop around the world and exploit workers. I mean, they're not going to Indonesia or Vietnam because they love the climate."
Subsequently, on issues ranging from environmentalism to immigration, Hightower's views always land firmly back on the kitchen table.
An example: The nation's most powerful environmental forces aren't the Sierra Club or the National Resource Defense Council, he says, "but instead groups called 'Ouch,' and 'Wow,' and 'Uh-Huh,' and 'No.'--what I call spontaneous combustion environmental groups that usually leap up because of some local outrage. People find that their children are being poisoned in one way or another, and there's nothing that quite rivets the political attention of families like their children being poisoned. And Mr. Pollution is most often the neighbor of working folks and poor folks and rural folks, people without power."
As a Texan, Hightower is especially well-versed in problems along the United States/Mexico line. He calls the current anti-immigration putsch truly frightening. "All the beefing up of the Border Patrol has meant intrusion into civil liberties of people on both sides of the border," he says. "I'm sure it's true in Arizona, and it certainly is here in Texas. They're just willy-nilly stopping cars, and searching cars, in a blatant violation of people's civil liberties."
On the flipside, "Immigration in Texas has been a boon. That's not to say there haven't been real problems with it. But the real problem is not that people out of Mexico or Guatemala or wherever else are taking good jobs away from Americans, but that there is a knockdown of good jobs in America for all people.
"The powers that be have gone too far," he says. "They've knocked down too many people. It's no longer just poor people who are getting stomped on, it's that middle class making less than $50,000 a year. That's 80 percent of the American people.
"The next question becomes, 'What are they gonna do about it?' Are they going to have a political channel? Right now, they don't. Some people say we need a third party. I wish we had a second one."
Jim Hightower will broadcast on KTKT-AM 990 at 9 a.m. on Friday, May 7. At 5:30 p.m., he'll appear at a reception, forum and booksigning in the Viscount Hotel, 4855 E. Broadway. A $5 donation is requested. On Saturday, May 8, Hightower will appear at a benefit dinner and reception at 6 p.m. in the Community Hall of the St. Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church, 1145 E. Fort Lowell Road. Dinner is $60, and provided by Jack's Original Barbeque. For reservations and other information, call 326-3716.

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