That old country saying has a newly-urgent relevance to us today, for Big Tech, Big Finance, and Big Government are colluding to dig us into the unfathomable hole of artificial intelligence. All across the country, entire communities are in an uproar as they learn that thousands of massive, billionaire-financed data centers are quietly being approved by their government officials, usurping farmland, local water supplies, and each area’s electric grid. Why? So über-rich prigs like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos can impose their grandiose, zillion-dollar schemes to displace us human workers with super-intelligent bots.

What’s not to like about that?

🕵️ Back the Reporting Big Tech Hates

But wait… there are other major problems, including the sickening drone of gigantic cooling systems in each data center, running non-stop year-round, destroying community tranquility and people’s sanity; the sudden rise of global warming emissions caused by data center use of fossil fuels; the creation of easy targets for drone attacks on these sprawling interconnected computer networks; and the wholesale diversion of America’s research funding and talent to the private projects of billionaires.

Far worse, though, is that AI is the key for Musk, Bezos, and whoever to impose a feudal, fascist, technocratic, rule over the rest of us – all in the name of progress.

Maybe we should question this “future” before surrendering to it! To help guide us, New York Times columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom recommends such useful books as “The Nerd Reich,” “Technofeudalism,” and “End Times Fascism” – plus Pope Leo’s encyclical letter on AI. Follow Tressie’s series on battling Big Tech at JimHightower.com/TMC.

Do something!

Here are some organizations and coalitions that are fighting this technofascist/feudalist future:

• AI Now: An independent research institute providing expert analysis on AI in the public interest

• Athena Coalition: Originally focused on fighting Amazon, this huge coalition is taking on AI invasions and data center exploitation

Leave a comment

Share

The great thing about “art towns” is, of course, the artists who live there and their art. So why are so many art town officials deliberately and stupidly driving artists out of town?

I live in such a place: Austin, Texas. For beaucoup years, it welcomed and nurtured a blessing of creators – from buskers to tap dancers, muralists to neon sign artists.

Neon Signs? Yes, magical artisans who can bend glass tubes into delightful expressive shapes that light-up to identify a community and culture as something more than just another concrete-and-steel erection of corporate power. One such creative is Todd Sanders, an Austin pop artist who for three decades has preserved and advanced this eclectic community’s proud claim to be “Keeping Austin Weird.”

Keep Hightower weird →

I was personally plugged into that identity when Susan DeMarco, Floyd Domino, and I broadcast a two-hour daily radio talk-show across America from a down-home Austin restaurant named Threadgill’s. Behind us on the stage, was a Todd Sanders gem – a 3x5 foot neon sign, flashing “Hightower Radio… On the Air.”

But multimillion-dollar developers – backed by a city council now promoting Austin as a mecca for high-tech billionaires – have no room for funky grassroots “weirdness.” They’ve jacked-up city property taxes and artists rents in a corporate gentrification frenzy that has squeezed Sanders’ neon shop and others out of Austin. The good news is that art perseveres, so Sanders’ studio and art gallery found a welcoming spot 80 miles east of us in the small town of Round Top.

But Round Top artisans will be next if we keep letting profiteers, with no values beyond money, define who we are, restricting who we can become.

Do something!

When we had an office in east Austin, we shared it with Austin Creative Alliance—check them out to help keep Austin’s arts scene thriving.

Leave a comment

Share

It’s no secret that voters are increasingly disgusted by today’s extremist, right-wing Republican lawmakers. But less known is the fact that extremist GOP lawmakers are even more disgusted by you voters!

They’re so disgusted that a top legislative priority of Republican leaders in the White House, Congress, and state legislatures is to rig election rules, literally to rule-out issues and voters they don’t like. For example, Republicans in Missouri (the “Show Me” State) showed us what they’re made of by attempting to kill the people’s right to amend their state’s constitution. Missouri and 25 other states have long provided a citizen-led initiative process so the people can propose and pass their own laws, rather than always depending on politicians to “do what’s right.” Yes – it’s direct democracy!

Support truth that beats the scam →

But the people (damn them!) have been passing things like providing health care for the poor and raising the minimum wage. So, “No-no!” screeched Republican leaders and corporate lobbyists, who otherwise control the entire state government. In a perversion of people power, they wrote a ballot initiative that, effectively, would leave direct democracy “dead” in Missouri.

Clever, huh? Use the initiative process to kill the initiative process.

But the people rallied, exposed the fraud, and in a massive turnout of voters in last week’s elections 80 percent – 80 percent! – rejected the establishment’s anti-democracy ploy.

Missourians showed ‘em – but anti-democracy elites are now pushing direct-voter bans in 15 other states, including Arizona, Florida, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Utah. To keep track and shove back against these plutocratic power grabs, connect with the nationwide monitoring and grassroots campaigns of the Fairness Project: thefairnessproject.org.

More from Missouri

Want to keep up with Missourians who are fighting the good fight? Here are some rabble rousers whose work we love:

• and her newsletter,

• - his newsletter is here!

Leave a comment

Share

So, to appease the vengeful Republican, obsequious CEOs rushed to dump their green principles. Except for one especially verdant area of the corporate culture: CEO compensation. As widely reported, top executive pay has surged during the Trump regime.

Fuel the Fight →

But wait, they want more, so other tendrils of executive pay have sprouted and grown like Jack’s beanstalk, further separating those at the top from the rest of us. Wall Street Journal reporters have uncovered some $600 million in executive perks that big corporations shelled out to their honchos last year.

For example, investors in Apollo, the avaricious Wall Street huckster, laid out nearly a million for luxury limo and chauffeur services so their billionaire CEO wouldn’t have to open the car door by himself. For tax purposes, Apollo called this a “security measure,” rather than the pompous plutocratic perk it is.

Already overpaid, these royals have come to expect all of life’s needs and whims to be covered, including:

• $121,000 in free tickets to ballgames to please the multimillionaire chief of Roto-Rooter, who is said to be “a huge sports fan.”

• $20,000 in booze for the head of a liquor conglomerate, which insists the freebie is awarded to enhance the boss’ “knowledge of the product.”

• And a $492 payout to cover the maintenance cost on a home generator for the chief of Hewlett Packard – who is paid $23 million a year.

An old adage claims that it’s the little things that matter… and these CEO entitlements show just how little corporate “leaders” have become.

Do something!

To stay on top of all-things-CEO-pay, check out Inequality.org’s work on the topic and take action with the organizations they recommend here.

Leave a comment

Share

I doubt it, since introspection doesn’t seem to be in the DNA of hubristic AI demigods like Bezos, Musk, and Zuckerberg. Nor are they programming such qualities into their “superintelligent bots.”

So, let me help them see themselves. First, today’s eruptions of public hatred toward them are not, as they want us to believe, just petty jealousy by people who want to be like them. Really… be like Musk? His ugliness is not just skin-deep – it emanates from his inner core.

Such aloof AI profiteers have sparked a nationwide prairie fire of anger by plundering local water supplies, farmland, electric power, and tax subsidies. They’re callously treating our communities as nothing more than a series of financial transactions for them to be consummate. But people’s rebellion is not merely about monetary prices and property. Fundamentally, it’s fueled by corporate elites’ total disregard for the basic human value of Fairness.

Fund the Fight Back →

Even pre-school children comprehend the moral implication of “That’s not fair!” The corporate gold rush to an AI future is not about the mystical possibilities of technology, but old-fashioned greed – moneyed elites grabbing more profits and control. And there’s nothing fair about either.

The spreading rebellion against AI arrogance is raising a politically explosive moral question: “Who the Hell elected you selfish screw-ups to dictate our future?” Musk & Co. say they don’t even believe in democracy, so why would We the People let them remake society in their totalitarian image? To join your local rebellion, go to jimhightower.com/datacenters.

Do something!

There are more and more groups forming around the country to fight this exploitation— so many that we’re having a hard time keeping track of them all! Here are a few hubs that will help you find your way to join the rebellion:

• Data Center Opposition Report: A regularly-published comprehensive report on the numbers of fights out there, with case studies for inspiration

• The Stop Data Centers Coalition has a list of member organizations who are calling for a national data center moratorium

• The Coalition for Responsible Data Center Development, a Minnesota based organization, has published a map of Facebook groups all over the country fighting data centers

• One of our top go-to resources are the toolkits that MediaJustice has created

• Kairos Fellowship also has a slew of guides and is developing a hotline that local groups can call for advice.

Leave a comment

Share

Not Medicare for All. Not a wealth tax. Farmers markets. The kind with watermelons and a guy selling tomatoes off a folding table.

Hightower ran for Texas Agriculture Commissioner with the idea as a key part of his platform anyway. He won. And in his first year in office, he and a staff of six built a hundred of them across the state.

Forty-some years later, Democratic strategists are still having the same panic attack about socialism. Turns out the “radical” thing was never the label itself; it was whether the guy delivered on campaign promises.

Here, Hightower tells the story himself: the watermelon stand outside Weatherford that started it all, how Hightower’s staff created the market access for the farmers, and the line he used to shut the haters up for good — “the word ‘free’ in ‘free enterprise’ is not an adjective. It is a verb.”

Last day to upgrade for $40/year

Leave a comment

Read more

Which brings us to… well, us. We bipedal, far-ranging, Homo sapien primates have certainly established our dominance over modern-day Mother Earth. And even though our reign has only lasted about 200,000 years, we 21st Century humans grandly assume that we’re ordained by the gods to rule ad infinitum over our planet (and beyond).

Outlast the Billionaires 💪

But – oops! – unfortunately we’ve based our preeminence on the unsustainable consumption of our domain, rather than on stewardship for the ages. Under the global misguidance of corporate, political, religious, academic, and other Powers That Be, our large-brained species has ended up making an awful mess of the nest we inherited. Elite plunderers and profiteers have imposed an ethic of greed, inequality, and even inhumanity that is devouring everything from Earth’s climate to our basic human values of fairness and justice.

Leading this careless assault is a clique of arrogant and abusive high-tech gabillionaires who consider themselves geniuses because, well… they’re rich! Consider Elon Musk, presently the richest of the world’s richest, who postures as an uber-brained deep thinker, social engineer, and whirling corporate dervish. He presently runs not one, but three mega-corps (Tesla, X, and SpaceX) while also rewriting the rules of free speech, telling American’s how to vote, and claiming he’ll save humanity by colonizing Mars.

But wait – strip away the hype, and Musk is just another self-serving plutocratic ravager, a cartoonish robber baron whose “genius” lies in (1) taking credit (and profit) from other people, (2) demanding subsidies and special breaks from government, (3) cheating workers and customers, and (4) suing everyone for his failures.

If billionaire humanoids like Elon really wanted to save us from extinction, they should do the honorable thing… by going first.

Leave a comment

Share

Big-name billionaires – like Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg – literally flaunt their irrepressible jerkism, but the disease seems to inflict their entire class of über-rich corporate royals. Its telltale symptoms are not their grandiose mansions and yachts, but their sudden impulse to instruct us regular people on how to think. In particular, they’re now demanding that we get out of their way so they can remake society in their image.

Support the Spit-Back 😤

Jensen Huang, for example, a Silicon Valley techno-whiz who heads Nvidia, now the world’s richest corporation. He’s demanding that we transform our economy and social structure into a new order of AI dominance, piously chiding those of us who’re angry about AI’s destruction of our jobs, communities, water, farmland, and democracy itself. Tut-tut, the gabillionaire scolds, you petty people must “create new social norms” to advance AI.

Then there’s the little-known honcho of SoftBank, a multi-trillion-dollar Japanese tech powerhouse trying to impose AI supremacy worldwide. He’s now asserting a corporate “morality” of wealth, calling people who question AI “foolish.” He philosophizes that TechWorld “will transform our lives completely and do so in a way that generates profits.”

For whom? For billionaires, of course. So there you have a clear statement of the values and goals of AI profiteers: More for them, no matter the cost to everyone else. SoftBank’s imperious boss laughs at those of us who dare question his vision of an AI plutocracy, calling us fools who are “spitting upward.”

No sir, look again. We are spitting straight at you.

Do something!

Want to join the rebellion against AI billionaires? Check out Public Citizen’s work on Big Tech and other corporate monsters: https://www.citizen.org/topic/consumer-worker-safeguards/big-tech/

Leave a comment

Share

In the June 2003 Hightower Lowdown issue below, the mechanics he lays out (the rigged boards, the SERPs, the “long-term compensation” nobody can define) are still exactly how it works. Swap in Tom Siebel’s name for whichever tech CEO is currently cutting his salary to a dollar for the headlines while cashing out stock options in the back room, and you’ve got this year’s story instead of 2003’s.

For the numbers: the average S&P 500 CEO pulled in $22.98 million in 2024, a 285-to-1 pay ratio against the typical worker. Work that out hourly and it’s about $11,000. Adjust the 2003 figure for inflation and it’s not actually that different in real terms. What’s different is that nobody in the business press calls it “cartoonish greed” on a magazine cover anymore. The media just got quiet about it— but we don’t have to. The AFL-CIO’s Executive Paywatch is on the case, as is IPS’s Inequality.org. Check them out!

Upgrade for just $40/year →

Read more

Periodically, Trump discovers a new pejorative that he considers clever, so he wears it out attacking his endless list of enemies. His current favorite is “lunatic,” hurling the slur at women reporters, most foreign leaders, all Democrats, protestors, and… well, everyone who offends him.

Back Real Journalism, Not Mirrors

But if he wants some real lunatics to belittle, why not that menagerie he’s appointed to top government positions? Such as Brendan Carr, Trump’s FCC attack dog who keeps yapping that he’s gonna abolish NPR.

Failing at that, Carr has now gone from silly to ridiculous, pushing a phantasmagoric scheme that truly is lunacy. It comes from some Elon Musk protégés who apparently noticed that our planet gets dark as night falls. Eureka, they exclaimed, we need to “light the night!”

Why? Well, they say, to illuminate all city streets and rural roads, make crops grow faster, and stuff like that. But how to generate the light? Easy, the geniuses explain: Mirrors.

They want government support to deploy a global network of orbiting space mirrors that could reflect sunlight onto Earth’s rotating dark areas. Lots of mirrors – the schemers propose to put 50,000 in our skies by 2030, with each of the largest ones shining as bright as 100 full moons!

Nothing could go wrong with that, right? Bedazzled, Carr didn’t ask. Instead, with no public input, he just rubber-stamped an initial launch of this “novel technology,” blandly assuring us that “harms are unlikely to occur.”

To oppose this lunacy, connect with the American Astronomical Society: aas.org.

Leave a comment

Share

That might explain why John Deere’s top corporate bosses have imposed an astonishingly stupid policy on America’s farmers. For years, they’ve decreed that while a farmer “technically owns” a tractor or other John Deere product, the owner is prohibited from making any repairs when the machinery breaks down, stalls out, etc. Instead, owners must call an authorized Deere dealer to fix what most farmers could handle by themselves.

🚜 Back the Farmers' Fight

The monopolistic profiteer refuses to make its repair manuals available to customers or local repair shops, so… gotcha!

But in 2020, Walter Schweitzer rallied with other mad-as-hell farmers and ranchers to rebel. The Montana rancher’s tractor had gone kaput in hay baling season – but, “no,” said a Deere dealer, a technician is not available; and “no,” you can’t have access to the diagnostic computer to do it yourself. So, he had to wait weeks before Deere finally got his tractor running – a fairly basic job worth about $600… but they billed Walter nearly $4,000.

That’s what’s called “a monopoly fix.” But they messed with the wrong farmer. Schweitzer, president of the Montana Farmers Union, mobilized grassroots pressure from five states, forcing federal officials to sue Deere. This month, Deere’s aloof executives settled that suit, finally letting its farm customers take charge of the equipment that – hello! – they own!

Schweitzer points out that this landmark win over the arrogance of Deere executives is just one stepping stone to a right-to-repair law for all products. To help push this right forward, go to repair.org.

Leave a comment

Share

by Joel Bleifuss & Justin Perkins, July 4, 2026

Texas is the birthplace of populism, and it may be one of the few states big and untrammeled enough to contain a figure as lively, clever and visionary as Jim Hightower. He has been called “America’s most popular populist,” and with good reason.

Born in Denison, Texas, in Grayson County, Hightower first got into politics in the late 1960s when he worked in Washington, D.C., as a legislative aide to U.S. Senator Ralph Yarborough, a progressive Democrat from Texas and staunch defender of the era’s civil rights reforms.

He’s also been an editor of The Texas Observer, president of the Texas Consumer Association, national radio commentator, columnist, and bestselling author. He currently publishes Jim Hightower’s Lowdown on Substack. Today, at 83, Hightower is still on the campaign trail, throwing his support behind the next generation of Texas populists like Clayton Tucker, who is running as a Democrat for Texas Agriculture Commissioner in November.

Here is how he put it at the Texas Democratic Party Convention in June:

This November fight is a landmark populist battle, pitting the greedheads and boneheads who are the powers that be against the powers that ought to be, the ordinary workaday people of our state. Who are the powers that be? Well, I call ’em the six Bs. They are the bosses, the bankers, the billionaires, the big shots, bastards and bullshitters.

On the eve of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Barn Raiser sat down with Hightower to get his thoughts on the political landscape of rural America today and the populist strain of American life that he believes is central to preserving our democracy. Hightower continues to make us laugh instead of cry, fight instead of surrender and demand more instead of give in.

You were elected Texas agricultural commissioner in 1982 in the middle of the farm crisis. Some people would say we are in the middle of another farm crisis, or that the farm crisis never ended, with the increasing monopolization of our food systems. What do you think?

It’s one of the biggest issues that both parties essentially try to ignore in rural America. You do not have to explain monopoly to farmers because they live it. Everything that they buy to produce their crops—their seed, their machinery, their fertilizer—is controlled by monopolies.

And then when they go to market, they’re faced by another form of monopolies. Monopsonies, they’re called, where a single buyer controls the market, but let’s not get into detailed rhetoric here.

It’s the same thing. It is a concentrated form of corporate power that sets the prices on both sides of the farmer and then charges high prices to consumers. Wonderful system if you’re a monopolist.

What has changed and what has remained the same in Texas politics in the 54 years since you were elected agricultural commissioner?

Well, Texas politics, like elsewhere, is a continuum. And we have ups and we have downs. We’re presently in a deep down, but we’ve periodically been extraordinarily progressive.

The Populist movement itself started in Lampasas County, Texas, about 130 miles from where I sit right now, a rural area that was settled by tenant farmers out of the South who came to Texas thinking that they could make a go of it here. But they couldn’t get the good land. It was already bought, already controlled by previous residents and aristocrats.

So they bought land out there and nobody told them that, by the way, you have already crossed west of the 30-inch rain line that it takes to make a crop in our state. So four farmers in Lampasas County, meeting in a farmer’s home said, “You know, we’re going bankrupt. The bankers overcharge us, gouge us, and the railroad monopolies control our market.”

They were faced with these very powerful monopolies, but they were smart people. Most of them were not educated, but they were highly intelligent and very aggressive.

And so they were not going to take it. In 1875, they organized what became the Farmers Alliance. And that alliance later merged with the industrial unions in our state. As Stump Ashby, one of the progressive populist leaders, referring to the plight of white and black farmers, said at the time, “They’re in the ditch just like we are.”

It was a multiracial movement of ordinary people battling enormous and totally repressive corporate power. And they adopted a process that they called the cooperative commonwealth, where they could control the seeds and the fertilizer and materials that they needed and where they could also then control the marketing of the crops.

They could build cooperative silos and that sort of thing to store crops and to get a better price down the road. And then they became political through the People’s Party, as they called the Populist Party, which became a powerful movement that spread all across the country. Forty-three states from New York to California had the populist movement within it, and they were electing state legislators and members to Congress.

Even United States senators were responsive to it, as well as presidential candidates. And it created a people’s movement that was the most progressive in our political history in America. They were the first party to support women’s suffrage, the first to oppose monopolies, the first to outlaw lobbying, etc., right down the line.

And as a result, of course, the bankers and the monopolists conspired with both political parties to squeeze out the People’s Party. And they crushed the party, but they could not crush the idea.

That’s the important thing to remember, not just about Texas politics, but our nation’s politics, is that the idea of populism has persevered through thick and thin. And the central thought of populism that motivates populism is that too few people control too much of the money and power, and they use that control to get more for themselves at our expense.

After the populist party got squashed then came the progressive movement led by finding “Fighting Bob” La Follette up in Wisconsin. When that got squashed, then came the New Deal. And then came, you know, in the 1950s, Joe McCarthy and the right-wing movement that was after the New Deal.

But the idea persevered. The civil rights movement, the women’s movement, all of this was centered around that central thought that too few people control too much of the money and power. And that is an enormously motivating political thought in our history. I think it’s the dominant political thought.

It’s not theory, it’s very much real life. Populism has a political theory attached to it. But fundamentally, it’s your zip code where you live, and that tells you who you are and what you’ve got to do, and who you’ve got to unite with to battle the bastards.

The party of the New Deal and Franklin Delano Roosevelt is the Democratic Party. How do you think the party has misstepped in rural America since you were agriculture commissioner? And what can Democrats do to win back voters in small town and rural Texas?

It’s pretty straightforward. For one, you have got to get on their side.

And the truth is the Democratic Party, during much of the time that I’ve been in politics, has been on the side of the monopolists. We have an anti-monopoly law, the Robinson-Patman Act. The Patman in that act was Wright Patman, a Democratic member of Congress up in Texarkana, Texas.

And that outlawed the conspiracy of supermarkets to purchase farmers’ commodities at lower prices than small retailers and sell it for a greater profit to consumers. That act, passed in 1936, is still on the books. But the Democratic Party, following along with the Republican Party, has in the last 40 years refused to enforce that law at all. And so that’s why food prices skyrocket, even as farm prices plummet.

It’s a matter of the old labor song, “Which Side Are You On?” The Democratic Party largely left rural America—physically left.

It’s not a matter of going to the right or going to the left politically to win votes of rural people. It’s a matter of going to the people themselves. And it can’t literally be in the last three weeks of an election with a get-out-the-vote program. It’s about living there and recruiting organizers from there and showing up, just being present.

It’s the same as anywhere else, if you’re not there, then you’re not there. And people notice that. You don’t know them anymore and they don’t know you. And that’s what happened to the Democratic Party.

Looking at Texas today, you have Clayton Tucker, a 35-year-old organizer from central Texas, running for agriculture commissioner. What do you think his candidacy signifies?

He’s a bright hope for the whole Democratic Party. But certainly for agriculture and rural people generally.

Clayton Tucker—sounds like a country song, doesn’t it? But he’s the genuine thing. He’s a rancher from up in Lampasas County, Texas, of all things. He raises goats and cattle and a little bit of everything there, which is what you have to do in agriculture today. You’ve got to piece together a living.

And Clayton is a very bright young guy. He was an organizer for Our Revolution, and a big backer of Bernie Sanders. And Sanders is a big backer of his now.

Clayton became active in the Texas Democratic Party, which was a sham, basically. And he formed the Progressive Caucus in the state party, which is now under his leadership and has helped elect many other progressive Democrats over the last few years.

It is now the largest caucus in the state party. And he has become a true leader of saying, “Here’s what we have to do to take a stand.” And among the stands he’s taking, for example, is against the data centers that are sprawling and crawling all across our country.

These monstrous, industrial creations owned by literally a handful of billionaires exist to provide the physical power for artificial intelligence that will bless us with supplanting our jobs. The American people are discovering data centers in their own communities, and they are outraged about it.

Clayton has been very important in spreading the word about data centers and suggesting what to do about it. That has earned him support of people across party lines. He’s getting substantial support, including from the current agriculture commissioner of our state, Sid Miller, who is a diehard right-wing Republican, who was defeated in the primary by another right-wing contender Nate Sheets.

It turns out that most rural people don’t like data centers coming in because they’re taking the water in this water-short state. They’re taking the electric power and raising people’s utility rates.

But they’re doing something else, too. They’re taking political power because they’re buying off the county commissioners to get taxpayer subsidies to put these intrusive institutions on our land and over our people. It’s controlled by an oligarchy: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and these titans of God-like corporations who think that they are entitled to do this, who think they’re doing us a favor, wanting us to applaud them.

Well, people are not applauding them. And its building a new moment in politics in our state and all across the country of people who are rethinking that maybe we don’t hate our neighbors, maybe we need our neighbors and maybe we need to come together across stupid ideological lines and see what it is that we do have in common and join together and beat the bastards.

You have another candidate in Texas, James Talarico, who’s literally campaigning on the issue of not hating your neighbors. How is his race against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton shaping the political discourse in Texas these days?

It’s completely remaking it. Talarico’s strength is not only that he’s taking unabashedly progressive positions on what we need to do as a state and as a country to really rebuild “little d” democracy, but he is couching it in his religious belief.

He graduated seminary and studied to be a Presbyterian minister. So this isn’t a new, political thing. He emerged in a red county north of Austin to become state representative in District 50 where he stood up for workaday people.

And that led him to build support to run for the U.S. Senate, and dared to run, I would say, because the Republicans are a money juggernaut in Texas. Gov. Greg Abbott has, I don’t know, more than $100 million set aside for his election. Paxton is getting millions and millions of dollars from special interests to send his corrupt soul to the U.S. Senate.

And so Talarico is confronting that by quoting the New Testament, saying, the love of money is the root of all evil. And so he’s getting support from across the political spectrum all over the country, as is Clayton, because of his stance.

But then also we have Gina Hinojosa running for governor here, another state representative, a terrific state representative in District 49 and a progressive leader. She began her political career on the school board in Austin, Texas.

In the state legislature where she carried a bill to create health care for all in our state, making Texas the first state legislature to actually even have a hearing on universal health care. She’s a tiger and she comes out of the Rio Grande Valley originally. And so she’s going to energize a lot of votes in that area.

So this coalition is coming together. It’s a coalition that we had, for example, when I ran in 1982 for agriculture commissioner. I didn’t just run for myself. Ann Richards was running for state treasurer at that time. Jimmy Maddox, a member of Congress from Dallas, ran for attorney general. Garry Mauro ran for land commissioner in our state.

So we combined in a unity ticket—not unity for big money. But unity around the idea that we raise more money together than we could separately, as a form of political organization. So I could go into Waco, Texas, and say, by the way, let’s not only elect this guy named Hightower to be agriculture commissioner, but let’s also elect Maddox and elect Richards and get Mauro in there, too. We’re going to elect a government, not just one or two people.

And that conveys a real message to people that things could change. It’s not one person against the whole establishment. It’s at least four. And we might have others. And if the four of us get elected, that means there’s a constituency electing us.

And we can build on that and help other people get elected, too. That’s the way you build a government. Too many people in the Democratic Party, and nearly all of them in the other party, run for their own good.

They don’t even know why they’re running. They say, “Well, I want to hold the office.” Well, it’s not yours to hold. You’re supposed to use the office, put it to work for the ordinary people of our state. And that is a powerful, longtime populist political message deep within the ethic of the people of Texas. And so I think it’s going to be successful again.

It sounds like you can envision a blue Texas?

A blue Texas, but also a populist Texas.

A Texas that really does unite the workaday people, which is what Texans are. And, by the way, we’re not a right-wing state. We’re not a Republican state.

What we are is a non-voting state. Even today. We consistently rank either first or second to last in voter turnout. And that is because the Democratic Party quit being a Democratic Party. People were left with a party they didn’t want to be a part of. And so they quit voting.

As we approach the United States’ 250th anniversary, how are you reflecting on that anniversary, the state of our democracy and what it means for rural people across the country?

Well, the anniversary has been hijacked by Trump into a partisan show for himself—essentially his whole presidency is that. And so the anniversary as a physical event is almost unimportant. But it is extremely important in terms of what America is.

Because, again, you go back to the founding itself. The revolution of 1776 was not, despite what the little cartoonish history books tell us, a rebellion against tea from England. It was, in fact, a rebellion against the British East India Company, which was the monopolistic corporation of the British empire. And so the rebellion was against monopoly power.

Most governments at the time were autocratic, monarchical for the most part. But we had thinkers at that time, including particularly Thomas Paine, who said that the people are able to govern themselves. And by the people, he didn’t just mean, as John Adams did, that rich elites should be the governing party. In fact, they were appalled at the idea ordinary working stiffs could have a say in government.

So there was Thomas Paine and others, including, eventually, Thomas Jefferson, who said, “Yes, we need an actual democracy, and it needs to include the pursuit of happiness as our goal.” You don’t hear many people running for office today asking: “Are you happy? Could you be happy? What would it take? Maybe we should work for that.”

Talarico represents a return to that thinking, that all people should be the governing authorities, as opposed to those today in the Republican Party, with the acquiescence of the Democratic Party leaders, who want to exclude people. We have an electoral policy today that is driven by a desire to keep people from voting, which is a strange concept for a country that prides itself, at least rhetorically, on the fact that all people matter.

Oligarchs like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, etc., are saying overtly they don’t believe in democracy, that democracy is against the human norm. And that those of us who are extraordinarily rich should be the ones to determine public policy.

Speaking of public policy, the farm bill is up for debate again. What would you say to Members of Congress who claim to be supporting the interest of farmers, but are really, through the farm, supporting a system of industrialized agriculture? What do you see as the best chance for rural people to fight back against this system that has crippled rural communities?

Well, those legislators, including Democrats who support the industrial model, are just simply on the wrong side of history.

The people themselves in the countryside, in small towns, in rural counties, and on farms and ranches want an honest system of democratic agriculture. And, first of all, that means taking on the monopolies. And then it means uniting with the workers in meatpacking factories who are horribly exploited, uniting with the environmental interests and the communities being poisoned by the runoff of synthetic fertilizers and then demanding accountability for the anti-environmental actions of the corporate powers who don’t live anywhere near these huge concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs).

The biggest landholder in rural America is Bill Gates. I don’t think he has any dirt under his fingernails, but he has more to say about making agriculture policy than all the farmers in the country lined up. But those farmers, if they join with those workers, as used to happen in the Populist Movement, and if they join with the environmentalists, and if they join with the rural communities and Main Street businesses, and if they join with the consumers, and if they join with people of color, then you have a majority movement going in the country.

So that is our challenge, is to pull it all back together again. We did that when I ran for agriculture commissioner. That was our goal.

And by we, I mean not just me, but the people around me and then the larger coalition that we brought together. We had the power to help form cooperatives to where they could take over their local economies and run it in a way that was little-d democratic. And we did that.

We had the authority to be able to focus. I was actually the pesticide supervisor of the state of Texas, a state that had more pesticides produced here and more pesticides used here than any other state. It was, and is, an enormously powerful economic entity, a corporate entity. We took them on and we enacted the most progressive pesticide rules in the country at that time.

And of course, that pissed off the pesticide corporations and their lobbyists. Nationally, as well as statewide. And so they came after us.

One of my aides told me, “I’m afraid the odds are against us on this fight.” And I said, “Some of the evens are against us, too. So we’ve got to rally the evens and the odds to a progressive program.”

The industry responded by getting Bill Clements, the Republican governor at the time, to endorse two bills, one that would make my office appointed by the governor rather than elected by the people, and a second that would move pesticide authority out of the agriculture department. But we beat them. And we beat them because we did not do the usual liberal thing, which is to fight inside, saying, “Let us reason together here and come up with a sensible policy that everybody can agree on.”

No, we went to the countryside, and we organized people, farmers, workers, consumers and labor together. And we took these outsiders inside. And when they held their hearing, their first hearing to pass these two bills, it was to be held in a small hearing room in the capitol complex.

But they had to move it to the House chamber, the biggest room in the Texas capitol building. And they had to do that because my lead off witness was Willie Nelson. My second witness was Barbara Jordan. And my third witness was the chairwoman of the Dallas Republican Women’s Organization, because it turns out Republican women don’t want their babies eating pesticides either.

We rallied a coalition, brought the people inside, huge turnout of people at that hearing, so much so that none of the members of the committee would make a motion to adopt the two bills that the governor was pushing. And that’s how you fight.

What words of inspiration do you have for people organizing today who are facing similar long odds?

Persevere.

You don’t win the first time out. You certainly don’t win every fight. But even well, again, Willie Nelson said to me once that the early bird might get the worm, but it’s the second mouse that gets the cheese.

You have to ponder that a little bit, but that’s what it takes is a long-term vision and a long-term organizing theory and principle, and a willingness to stick with it and keep expanding.

Even when you lose a political race, you win because you create organization and you create new people to run for office on your program, on your progressive ideas. You build, you lose, you build some more, you win. You build on that win to win some more.

But the powers that be always come back and they keep fighting and then they find ways to divide your movement. So that’s what you have to fight. But you have to realize that in the long term, the people are on your side and the progressive movement is what the people want because it’s not an ideology.

It’s results. It’s health care for all. It’s affordable housing. It’s having our community work together again.

And, by the way, it’s also a cultural movement. The original Populist Movement had bands, marching bands, and they held festivals all the time. They held dances. They had picnics constantly because people were isolated. They were not together. And so to get them together, you started with music and food culture.

Just to drop a name, Pete Seeger told me once that when he was young, he went to the Chautauquas in Chautauqua, New York, and his parents were active in progressive politics. He said, “I went for the girls and for the music. But then I got to listen to the speeches.” And so that changed him and that he changed other people with the power of his music.

To me, that is what a movement is. It’s not committee meetings. Spare me. It’s getting together and getting to know each other.

That’s what won the civil rights movement. I grew up in a totally segregated school system all the way through high school. And then I went to the University of North Texas that had integrated in 1954.

And there I met black kids from Denison, Texas, where I was raised in a segregated school. But North Texas was integrated. And so I got to know people, and you can’t hate somebody you know.

What’s the role of independent media in bringing people together?

Well, it’s essential what Barn Raiser does, what I do on Hightower Lowdown on Substack and on radio programs, what Judd Legum does on his Popular Information Substack, etc.

There’s a thousand flowers blooming. I know that’s an old hippie phrase, but they are. The legacy media has been eaten up by the monopolists and the MAGA crowd, but you can’t suppress independent voices. The original media of our democracy were the pamphleteers, like Thomas Paine, but there were many more than Thomas Paine.

The Populist Movement itself had their own publications, all very local. They had a speaker’s bureau, called lecturers. On any given night, 42,000 people could go out and give the message of the day. Just like you can’t suppress the Progressive Movement itself, because it’s based on ideas and ideals and passion, you can’t suppress the media, the progressive media, because it is that media of compassion and passion and ideas and ideals.

And so that kind of thinking about media is part and parcel of the progressive movement we’re trying to create.

What gives you hope these days?

What gives me hope is hope.

The people themselves. If I was stuck in a senatorial or congressional office or something like that, I would be despairing. And if I got all my information from the nightly news and big web media, then I would be depressed. But if you go anywhere in America, as you all do with Barn Raiser, you find people who are tenacious and thoughtful and creative and fun.

And that is what a movement is. And a movement is not a word. It’s not an organization. It’s not an ideology. It is a people ordinary people trying to figure things out. And you can’t stop that.

Again, four farmers sitting around a kitchen table in Lampasas County, Texas, launched an incredibly progressive, powerful movement. Those components are still out there, and I believe are coming together today to do it again.

Leave a comment

Share

Plutocratic elites and their anti-government ideologues periodically erupt in outrage that elderly Americans who’ve earned retirement benefits are depleting the Social Security Trust Fund. So, they exclaim, government must cut the payments these old folks are getting.

Fund The Fight, Not Billionaires

But wait – it’s not “the government’s money.” It belongs to the retirees themselves. They’ve paid monthly payroll taxes into the fund for years on the guarantee that they would later draw benefits out.

Maybe so, bark opponents, but the money well is going dry, so the only way to “save” the program is to chop payments owed to beneficiaries.

In three words: That’s a lie.

What the superwealthy don’t want us to notice is that the Social Security tax is spectacularly unfair. If your yearly income is less than $185,000 (which includes 95% of us) – every penny of your earnings is subject to retirement tax. But if you’re paid a million a year, or a billion, or even more – everything over $185,000 is tax free. Sweet!

Wait, there’s more. Instead of being paid wages, most über-wealthy people draw their annual income from a Wall Street scheme called “unrealized capital gains.” Big surprise – those gains are totally exempted from our nation’s retirement tax.

This is Jim Hightower saying… So, let’s make Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and other tax-dodging billionaires pay on all of their income like the rest of us do. That’s only fair. Then America can increase benefits so everyone can have a dignified retirement. Now that’s true fairness!

Do something!

To get involved with the fight to make sure Social Security and other social safety net programs stay strong, check out Social Security Works at socialsecurityworks.org.

Leave a comment

Share

But it amounted to a Firecracker of Hypocrisy, for many of these showboat patriots have been backroom funders of the Trump regime’s repression of our people’s democratic rights.

Also, there’s an internal level of cynical dishonesty in their flashy show-of-support for egalitarian values. In the past few years, a clique of these Silicon Valley and Wall Street giants have been monkeywrenching the rules of their own corporate governance to crush the very idea of “shareholder democracy.”

Fund the fight against plutocrats →

Yes, such a concept has existed, at least in theory. For decades, big business profiteers have been given special privileges over the rest of us by claiming to be “democratic enterprises,” governed by masses of common shareholders who get one vote for each share of stock they own. (Actually, that makes a corporation more of a plutocracy, since the more stock you own, the more votes you get.)

Today, though, even plutocracy is too democratic for monarchial billionaire bosses like Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX. So, they’ve invented a super-class of shareholders – mostly themselves and their cronies. These elite owners get domineering voting power, exceeding all other investors combined. For example, Musk owns about 40 percent of the stock in SpaceX, but in his self-created system, he gets more than 80 percent of shareholder votes. Among other advantages, his skewed voting power makes Musk “unfireable” -- unless he votes to fire himself.

This is Jim Hightower saying… Beware of billionaires professing any allegiance to America’s democratic values. In fact, just beware of billionaires, period.

Leave a comment

Share

When I was down visiting with Hightower in May, I asked him a question that I’ve always wanted to know the answer to, but never put directly to him: Why did he decide to run for office? Before he became Agriculture Commissioner, he had been a legislative aide to Sen. Ralph Yarborough in Washington, the founder and co-director of the Agribusiness Accountability Project (which produced Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times), then a journalist and editor at the Texas Observer. What brought on the desire to become an elected official? And why this office?

His answer took us through an adventure of what activism can look like when you take the outside inside, and you run a real grassroots campaign based on the values of the people you’re hoping to represent.

Upgrade! $40/year sale til July 30

Leave a comment

Transcript:

Well, for me, I was born a populist. I didn’t know it. And I was taught about populism.

The essential political essence of populism is that too few people control too much of the money and power, and they use that control against the rest of us to get more money and power for themselves. So that’s the great fight of American politics, in the big scale, but also in the very local scale.

Read more

But if a fabricated, inanimate, corporate thing can have enforceable rights to legal protections and life privileges – why not natural beings like… well, nature? Not just favored animals, but all complex, living, breathing, sentient, cooperative, reproductive beings. Trees, for one obvious example. Or rivers, prairies, marshes, and other organic bodies that have a life of their own and a reason to exist beyond our exploitation of them.

Back Jim, back the trees →

That’s why the townspeople of Vaudreuil in Quebec, Canada, have unanimously approved a “Declaration of the Rights of Trees,” proclaiming that these beneficial and beautiful neighbors have an inherent right to exist, thrive, and enjoy the protections of law. This is the latest advance of the “Rights of Nature” movement. It maintains that forests, waterways, and other interconnected living beings of nature are not mere “property” of human profiteers to be poisoned, clearcut, excavated, and otherwise destroyed. Rather, they must be regarded as full-citizens of our world, with essential, legally-enforceable rights of their own – especially the most basic right: The right to exist.

Corporate opponents to the Rights of Nature movement cry that the very idea is unnatural – a tree can’t even speak, so there is no way it can exercise a legal right.

Excuse me, but corporations can’t speak either, for they are mere paper constructs. So, lawyers are hired to speak for them. The same system of representation can and should apply to nature. For information and action, go to CenterForEnvironmentalRights.org and Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (garn.org).

Leave a comment

Share

But don’t let their goofiness obscure the fact that there is indeed a very real plot to rig America’s economic and political system, causing wealth and power to flow uphill – from the workaday majority to moneyed elites.

Fund the fight, not the rig →

This rigging is not done by some cartoonish cabal of ogres in a secret lair, but by prominent AI tech barons and other Poo-Bahs of America’s corporate royalty. They are soft-handed thieves, discreetly robbing us from the cozy confines of corporate boardrooms, ornate courtrooms, and legislative backrooms. Why should they dirty their hands in public scuffles with workers, consumers, local communities, and others “pests” when they can deploy public officials to do their grub work.

Consider the gabillionaire huckster, Elon Musk. He barged into Mississippi to build a massive AI data center that would have 57 gas turbines spewing toxic pollution over several Black neighborhoods – without even bothering to get required environmental permits.

It was a gross violation of the Clean Air Act – so the endangered families sued in April to stop the imperious profiteer.

But instead of facing the perp himself – Surprise! – the locals were confronted by federal lawyers deployed by Trump to kill the people’s lawsuit and protect Musk’s toxic project. Going further, Trump’s “Justice” department asserted that we citizens have no legal right to pursue Clean Air enforcement if the federal government objects.

Did I mention that Musk gave $157 million to Trump’s last election campaign? And that’s how the system gets rigged against us.

Do something!

Support the people fighting Musk in this lawsuit:

• NAACP

• Southern Environmental Law Center

• Earthjustice

Leave a comment

Share

Friends—

You may have seen the clip. The “six Bs” excerpt from my speech from the Texas Democratic Convention has been bouncing around the internet all week now, and boy, did it feel good watching all of you share it.

But here’s what I want you to know: that speech wasn’t really about me. It was about handing the mic to Clayton Tucker, a goat rancher out of Lampasas who’s picking up a fight that started at a kitchen table in his own county a hundred and fifty years ago. I’ve spent decades trying to make sure that fight doesn’t end with me. Watching Clayton take the stage, getting to call him the People’s Agitator in front of thousands of Democrats — that’s the work, and that’s my reward.

This past month, we opened the gates a little. You got the pesticide hearing story — Willie Nelson, Barbara Jordan, and a fight we won by building a movement before we ever needed the movie stars. You got the Lampasas story. You got the speech. That’s usually paid-subscriber-only territory, and we wanted you to see what you’ve been missing.

So here’s the deal, plain and simple. I’ve been doing this work for over 50 years. No corporate sponsors. No PAC money. No billionaire sugar daddy funding this operation. The people who chip in $5 a month are the reason this newsletter exists. Period.

I’m not going to give you a hard sell. You know what we do. You’ve been reading it, and this summer you got an extra taste of it.

Upgrade now for $40/year

Right now, we’re offering annual subscriptions at $40 a year — that’s $10 off the regular price. Less than a dollar a week to keep independent, populist, corporate-free commentary coming to your inbox, plus the Friday posts, the live Happy Hours, and whatever other trouble Laura, Deanna and I cook up.

The Powers That Be have got their megaphones, their billionaires, their six Bs. We’ve got our own power: you.

If you’re in a position to join us, we’d be glad to have you. If you’re not, keep reading — that’s what the free tier is for, and it’s not going anywhere.

Either way — let’s keep agitating, together.

— Hightower

P.S. If you’re already a paid subscriber — thank you. Seriously. We cannot do this without you!

Leave a comment

Share

The radical rise of inequality in our society is a function of the vast political inequality separating the working class from the power structure. The elite rich have many friends in high places paying close attention to their needs, but the further one tumbles down the economic ladder the lonelier you are when your interests conflict with the bosses and big shots. As Ray Charles sang, “Them that’s got is them that gets.”

Back the fight 💪

Consider waiters, bartenders, and other restaurant workers. Generally these jobs are poorly paid and routinely abusive, yet lawmakers mostly ignore all that, cozying up to the abusers, because… well, they’re rich and politically connected. As a result, most of today’s restaurant workers are paid a sub-minimum wage that was set 32 years ago at $2.13 an hour! That’s not a wage, it’s an insult. Yet most lawmakers refuse to raise it, bowing to the piles of campaign cash they get through a lobbying front called the National Restaurant Association, dominated by multibillion-dollar food chains.

Worse, in the past decade, this consortium of greedy wage suppressors even devised a diabolical scheme to make restaurant workers pay for the industry’s lobbying campaigns to hold down wages! The Association bought an outfit that provides hokey food safety training to workers, then it lobbied to get California, Florida, Illinois, Texas, and other states to require that all employees not only undergo the silly on-line training course, but also making them pay $15 each for the training.

Guess what? NRA then uses those worker training fees to fund its lobbying efforts that let restaurants pay poverty wages. And that, kids, is how inequality happens.

Do something!

One Fair Wage is on the front lines of organizing service industry workers, minimum wage workers, and other working class people to get the pay these workers deserve.

Extra credit: the history of tipping in the US is entirely rooted in racist antebellum culture as a way to exploit the labor of formerly enslaved people.

Leave a comment

Share

Likewise, calling a small group of partisan lawyers a “supreme” court doesn’t make it one. There’s nothing supreme about the six-pack of far-right-wing political activists who are presently soiling our people’s ideals of justice by proclaiming their own anti-democratic biases to be the law of the land. On issues of economic fairness, women’s rights, racial justice, corporate supremacy, environmental protection, theocratic rule, and other fundamentals, these unelected, black-robed extremists are imposing an illegitimate elitist agenda on America that the people do not want and ultimately will not tolerate.

Back real justice →

Indeed, the imperiousness of the six ruling judges has already caused the court’s public approval rating to plummet, to a mere 38 percent, an historic low that ranks down there with Trump, and threatens to go as low as Congress.

This has led to a flurry of officials attesting to the honesty and political impartiality of the reigning supremes. Unfortunately for the court, these ardent defenders were the six culprits themselves.

The “integrity of the judiciary is in my bones,” pontificated Neil Gorsuch, who now stands accused of having lied to senators to win his lifetime appointment.

“[We are not] a bunch of partisan hacks,” wailed Amy Coney Barrett, a partisan extremist jammed onto the court in a partisan ploy by Trump in the last few hours of his presidency.

“Judges are not politicians,” protested John Roberts, who became Chief Justice because he was a rabid political lawyer who pushed the Supreme Court in 2000 to reject the rights of voters and install George W. Bush as president.

Remember, in America, The People are supreme! We don’t have to accept rule by an illegitimate court. For reform, go to FixTheCourt.com.

PS— The most recent season of Slate’s Slow Burn podcast traces the rise of Neil Gorsuch. Recommended!

Leave a comment

Share