BILL MOYERS: Welcome.
On this Fourth of July weekend, think about the authors of the Declaration of Independence
who had the courage and nerve to stand up to the British crown and say, enough.
And think of the everyday people, regular people, who then put themselves on the line
to back up that Declaration.
Those patriots have their counterparts today in the fight against the modern tyranny of
organized money and its chokehold on our government.
These champions of grass roots action are fighting for a rearrangement of power not
from the left or from the right but from the bottom up.
They, too are saying, enough.
No one speaks more powerfully for them than they do for themselves.
One of their best known has been agitating for ordinary people for most of his life.
Like the circuit riders of old, spreading the word, Jim Hightower is forever on the
road, speaking, riding the electronic rails of the Internet, appearing on radio and TV,
preaching the grassroots gospel.
He's had first-hand experience of politics and government, both as a legislative assistant
on Capitol Hill and as the two-term agriculture commissioner of his native Texas, where he
fought for small farmers against the giants of agribusiness.
In addition to his books he publishes this political newsletter, "The Hightower Lowdown,"
which many of us consider so essential I once raised money to help make people more aware
of its wit and wisdom.
Welcome back, Jim.
JIM HIGHTOWER: Thank you, Bill.
Great to be with you.
BILL MOYERS: You have been sounding the populist trumpet
ever since we first met 30 or more years ago.
But the walls of Jericho are still standing.
Corporate power is, practically has the lease on Congress, the rich are richer, Wall Street
is back on top, and politics at almost every level is overwhelmed by money.
The robber barons have won, wouldn't you acknowledge that?
JIM HIGHTOWER: Well, the robber barons are certainly atop.
And they, but I believe is this populist fervor that is challenging that robber barony that
we have dominating pretty much every aspect of our lives.
You know, politics, the economy, whether you get a job or not and whether that job comes
with any pay, much less health care.
And, you know, the media, you know, right on down the line.
Yet in every one of those segments there is a growing rebellion and an increasing awareness
among different groups fighting different battles that they are connected to the other
groups.
It's not a movement, yet.
But it's beginning to connect up.
There's now this group called the United Workers Congress.
And these are ten different very low income employee sectors; they're farm workers; they're
nannies; they're taxicab drivers; they're day laborers; and they're adjunct professors.
BILL MOYERS: Adjunct professors?
JIM HIGHTOWER: Professors.
BILL MOYERS: That's an unusual participant in a coalition
like that.
JIM HIGHTOWER: They're paid a poverty wage, no health benefits,
no security, job security you know, just like fast-food workers, in fact.
BILL MOYERS: What does that suggest to you?
JIM HIGHTOWER: It suggests that people are beginning to get
together and see their common interests.
So here are some of the, here are the highest educated poverty workers in America with the
lowest educated poverty workers and seeing that they're in the same boat now.
And that realization is a powerful political potential.
I'll give you another example.
We had a world protest against McDonald's.
There were 30 countries involved in it.
That takes organization.
Again, it's not high visibility yet, but neither was Civil Rights until it popped up.
To me, these things have a dynamic of their own, a life of their own, and there comes
a point at which the people are pushing and more and more politicians begin to respond
Elizabeth Warren in the Senate makes a difference.
BILL MOYERS: Do you know about the NewDEAL?
JIM HIGHTOWER: Yes.
BILL MOYERS: I'm not talking about Franklin Roosevelt's
political platform.
I'm talking about a new organization in Washington, led by Wall Street Democrats like Cory Booker
of New Jersey, they formed recently a group that can raise campaign cash secretly from
anonymous donors.
And so far, they've raised it from some of the same big corporations that are also contributing
to Republicans: Wal-Mart, Pfizer, big pharma, Comcast and others, friendly corporate lobbyists
help run this.
One of its board members is a lobbyist for the US Chamber of Commerce and they call themselves
the NewDEAL.
JIM HIGHTOWER: That is exactly what's wrong and why people
are sick of politics that you would think that the answer, that a Democratic organization
would think that the answer is for them to get corporate money as well.
That's what happened in Texas.
The people didn't turn right wing.
They quit voting because the Democrats quit being Democrats for exactly the reason that,
of what Cory Booker is doing there.
They went out and got the corporate money.
And you take that check, you know, you're not going to be talking populist old Democratic
rallying the troops and going at the bastards and big shots and BS'ers.
You're not going to be talking about good jobs at good wages, not just jobs.
Good, you know, jobs that have wages attached to them, living wages.
You're not going to be talking about Medicare for all, you know, not Medicare through the,
or health care, through the insurance companies, but just you're born, you get Medicare.
That's it.
People would've understood that.
Well, we need to change the system.
So our politics are not dependent on a handful of rich people putting the money up to have
a real politics.
Instead, getting back to that grassroots politics, and that again, is what I see happening around
the country.
There's, as you know, this fracking movement across the country, mostly apolitical people
often conservative people, Republicans, who now are just astonished and appalled that
corporations are doing this to them, and that their own, political people of their own political
belief are doing this to them, they're not helping them.
So they're in rebellion.
You got four cities in Colorado last fall, passed ordinances against fracking in their
towns.
There's going to, I think, be a, not settled yet, but looks like there'll be a constitutional
amendment on the ballot in Colorado to allow cities to set their own terms of whether a
fracker can come into town, or a Wal-Mart can come into town; that a community, a city
itself, has rights that are superior to corporate rights.
BILL MOYERS: You know as well as I do that most members
of congress are not even trying anymore, not listening to everyday people, not talking
their language, not even knowing the regular folks.
I don't even think they're scared anymore of not pleasing the people.
They're more scared of not pleasing their donors.
And so what's going to happen when, if there is a convergence of this popular agitation
and discontent and it runs into the walls of Jericho?
JIM HIGHTOWER: Well, as, there will be blood, I think.
There will be heads bludgeoned.
BILL MOYERS: You're not saying to people, take up your
guns and--
JIM HIGHTOWER: No, no, no, no.
But take up yourself and get on the front lines, get in the face of power, and that
power will have guns, and will have clubs and dogs, and they will unleash that on us.
But we've got to be brave enough to do that.
It's been inevitable in every big movement, even the women's suffrage movement had violence
against those women.
And we certainly saw it in the Civil Rights movement.
We see it in the environmental movement.
The movements that have come along and succeeded have had to put their, not just their selves
on the line, they had to put their heads on the line.
And more and more people are doing it.
Again, something like the fracking movement.
People are taking abuse and under arrest.
BILL MOYERS: But, Jim, the Occupy movement, for example,
started in 2011, spread around the world, it had wall-to-wall coverage from some 24
hour networks.
Everyone was talking about it, and then it disappeared.
JIM HIGHTOWER: Well, one, it didn't disappear.
It went into the countryside.
There's a group called Occupy Our Homes that has helped to save at least hundreds, if not
thousands, of people from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs and--
BILL MOYERS: It gets no press.
JIM HIGHTOWER: JPMorgan Chase.
No, it gets, well, it gets local press, but very little press.
But they are still out there, but what Occupy did was to change the discussion.
You can ask Mitt Romney about that.
It put inequity, the one percent versus 99 percent smack dab in the middle of the 2012
presidential election.
It made it possible for media everywhere to begin to talk about that or in fact have to
talk about it because people were talking about it.
It's not just the kids and the people who are at those camps around the country of Occupy,
but the public support for it was overwhelming.
And that generates a momentum.
BILL MOYERS: I agree with you and yet people have kept
talking about it and as you know the inequality gap, the income gap, the wealth gap gets wider
and wider like the Grand Canyon.
JIM HIGHTOWER: Well, yes, but you can't just wait for it
to, you can't just give up.
That's your choice.
I mean, do we just quit?
No.
You double down and go back at it and become more disobedient and seek new avenues and
cleverer ways to go at it.
And people are, again, are doing that.
In all sorts of movements including taking on big money and politics.
You know, we have an actual grassroots movement now, I think it's 13 states have called, officially
called on congress, the state legislatures have, to send to their states, to their people,
a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United.
You get, you know, 13 more states that's going to be even bigger.
And that movement is growing every single day.
And these are real people and groups of people and increasingly forging coalitions in their
towns, in their states focused, as I say, squarely on the issue of corporate power,
not just a particular abuse by a corporation but the power of the corporation itself.
And think about that, Bill, Wall Street and the CEOs have turned corporation into a four-letter
word.
People no longer take great pride in a corporation in their town, because they've seen what these
entities do.
There is a greater power that is building up in the countryside, simmering, bubbling
in different places and that's going to come together because you can't hold the middle
class down.
You know, poor people, they're good at holding down poor people.
They've had decades and centuries of experience.
But now you're trying to hold down the American middle class and succeeding at the moment.
But those people know that they, you know, even a dog knows the difference between being
stumbled over and being kicked.
And these people who've now been knocked out of the middle class, and by the way since
the 2008 recession, collapse of Wall Street crashed on our economy, 90 percent of the
American people have lost income and lost wealth, nine out of ten of us.
That's a lot of people to hold down and think that those people are not going to rebel.
They're beginning to rebel, that's what I'm saying.
BILL MOYERS: You know, Ralph Nader is out with a new book
called "Unstoppable," in which he says, there could be a coalition of left and right, united
around such common interests as ending corporate bailouts, military overreach, and even the
minimum wage.
There are people on the right who support the minimum wage.
JIM HIGHTOWER: And that's what I'm saying is out there in
a number of different issues.
And a transition begins to happen when they see that they are working together and that
this corporate power is really what they're battling, or the concentration of money and
power that wants to stomp on them, no matter what their voter registration card says.
That then, they begin to think, well, maybe some of these other issues, too, are related
to this, and that's when the movement begins to weave together, and become something more
than just a scatter shot of protest groups.
BILL MOYERS: The Fourth of July, 2014.
Thomas Jefferson who drafted the Declaration of Independence as you know, would also warn
against what he called, "Aristocracy founded on banking institutions and monied in corporations...riding
and ruling over the plundered ploughman and beggared yeomanry."
What do you think Thomas Jefferson would say of our system today?
JIM HIGHTOWER: I think he would say that this is the exact
opposite of what we were talking about.
Now, you know, there wasn't much democracy in the first US Government, 1789, I guess,
when it took power.
Only four percent of the people were even eligible to vote, you know.
You had to own land if you were a white man to be able to vote, and of course, if you're
African-American, Native American, woman, you know, no, you couldn't vote.
So there wasn't a lot of democracy there.
But their vision, their ideals were there, of a greater democracy and they understood
about corporate power, even in that day.
Because you've got to remember that the, you know, the original Boston Tea Party was not
just about King George III's government.
It was about the East India Trading Company, and the way that they were treating the merchants
and the consumers in the colonies.
And people hated them.
And in fact, that's the tea that they were throwing overboard was East India Trading
Company's tea.
That spirit has been a part of America from the very beginning.
So, you know, people are ready for that kind of politics.
And if they see it beginning to work somewhere, then they take greater heart and they make
a bigger effort and other people join with them.
That's to me how you build a movement
BILL MOYERS: Jim Hightower, thanks for joining me.
JIM HIGHTOWER: My pleasure.