RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Jim Hightower Brings the Lowdown on 'Poopgate' and 'Tinkle-Down' Economics

Texas populist gadfly Jim Hightower at the studios of KOOP-FM in Austin, Texas, September 13, 2013. Photos by Roger Baker / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio podcast:
Famed Texas populist commentator
and political gadfly, Jim Hightower

In 30 years, we’ve gone from Ronald Reagan’s ‘trickle-down’ to the Koch Brothers’ ‘tinkle down’ economics. We are resurrecting the robber barons and imposing a plutocracy over our democracy.

By Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / September 26, 2013

Texas populist writer, commentator, and political gadfly Jim Hightower was our guest on Rag Radio, Friday, September 13, 2013.

Rag Radio with Thorne Dreyer is a weekly syndicated radio program recorded at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas.

Listen to or download the podcast of our September 13 interview with Jim Hightower here:


Texas progressive populist writer, public speaker, humorist, radio commentator, and political gadfly Jim Hightower was twice elected Texas Agriculture Commissioner and is a former editor of the Texas Observer.

He is the New York Times best-selling author of seven books including Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow; Thieves In High Places: They've Stolen Our Country And It's Time To Take It Back; If the Gods Had Meant Us To Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates; and There's Nothing In the Middle Of the Road But Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos.

Jim Hightower broadcasts daily radio commentaries that are carried on more than 150 commercial and public stations, on the web, and on Radio for Peace International. He publishes a populist political newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown, which now has more than 135,000 subscribers, is the fastest growing political publication in America, and has received both the Alternative Press Award and the Independent Press Association Award for best national newsletter. His newspaper column is distributed nationally by Creators Syndicate.

'Tinkle-down' economics

Jim Hightower told the Rag Radio audience that “we have a greater share of our wealth going to the tiniest portion of our people than any time in the last century.”

“In 30 years,” he said, “we’ve gone from Ronald Reagan’s ‘trickle-down’ to the Koch Brothers’ ‘tinkle down’ economics.” According to Jim, “We are resurrecting the robber barons and imposing a plutocracy over our democracy.”

“This is a structural change,” he says. “this isn’t a recession, this isn’t a technical glitch in the system. Thie is deliberate. We’ve enthroned the corporate powers to rewrite the rules.”

And we have a Congress “that is so ideological that they don’t care. And so many of them really don’t know regular workaday people. They’re millionaires, most of them,” he said. “You’ve got both parties that are tied to the corporate money.”

Thanks to gerrymandering and the dominance of big money in electoral politics, the politicians “rig the system so that they keep getting elected.” The Republicans, who “have voted 40 times to repeal Obamacare," play to a “Republican tea party fringe that doesn’t represent 10 percent of the American people.”

They “ignore the real problems” like “joblessness and rampant underemployment,” and “play games with these phony political issues.”

Hightower faulted the corporate-run media. (“A reporter used to be a working stiff. They worked in rumpled clothes, went home to a working class neighborhood, drank at a bar named Joe.”)

We do have some strong progressive media, he said, citing the country’s numerous independent community radio stations, many of which air Hightower's commentary -- with special praise for Austin’s KOOP and Rag Radio -- and the Texas Observer. “And we’ve got voices like Rachel Maddow and Paul Krugman,” he said.

Texas pols -- and 'Poopgate'

On the show, Jim talked about the recent “flapdoodle” in the Texas legislature over abortion and women’s health that drew thousands of activists to the Texas Capitol and was highlighted by State Sen. Wendy Davis’ remarkable filibuster.

“It’s about abortion,” Jim said, “but it really is about power. Mostly men, wanting to go back to ‘Father Knows Best’ years, the 1950s, before women got uppity...” In this case, the dramatic citizen activism “defeated the Republican leadership and embarrassed them. And, quite honestly, frightened them.”

“It was a hoot,” Jim says, “to hear Rick Perry say, ‘It was a mob. Mob rule! Mob rule!' And (Lt. Gov. David) Dewhurst saying, ‘Socialists, socialists!’ One representatives even said we had terrorists in the Capitol.”

Jim wrote about the events at the Capitol in the Hightower Lowdown: “If you’ve never seen a pack of pompous state legislators fall into a panic, you’ve missed a scene of truly uproarious low comedy.”

And then there was ”Poopgate!”

According to Hightower, Lt. Gov. Dewhurst (“he’s such a prissy guy anyway, a multi-millionaire public servant who doesn’t like the public...) got spooked by all the women in the State Capitol building.

Dewhurst “had heard that they were going to bring tampons and other ‘feminine projectiles’ into the Senate chamber, to toss down on the floor,” Jim says. So he had the state troopers search ladies’ purses at the Capitol entrances and confiscate anything resembling a tampon.

And then, as if that wasn't enough, “Dewhurst claimed that they had also confiscated some 19 jars of feces and urine.” But, when pressed by the media, he couldn’t come up with any evidence. So the reporters asked the troopers at the Capitol gates, and they didn’t have a clue what Dewhurst was talking about. “They said, No, that they hadn’t seen any excrement -- except what was in the Lt. Governor’s memo!”

“It’s just astonishing,” Jim said. “The extremism that is loose. And they seem to think that this is leadership.” But, “not only the women who were there, but just people of good will recognize that and think, maybe we can do something. Because there was such a force there that can’t be denied.”

“Throughout our history, we’ve had to do a little screaming, and confrontation, and rebelling -- when the skids are greased and the system is rigged against people. Because that’s what happened that night.”

Whether or not Wendy Davis runs for governor, Hightower believes that real change is in the works for Texas politics. The long-dormant state Democratic Party is alive and kicking, he says, under the “vigorous and vibrant” leadership of new party chair Gilberto Hinojosa, who is committed to returning the party to grassroots organizing.

The Texas Democrats “got way too cozy with the lobbyists and with the money,” Jim says. “We had people sitting in the office down by the Capitol, just talking to each other.” Now the party has 20 organizers working in the field.

Concerning efforts at voter suppression, Hightower asked, “Why don’t Republicans want people to vote?” “We should make it an issue,” he said, “that these bozos are trying to keep people from voting in the United States of America!”

From left, Rag Radio host Thorne Dreyer, populist commentator Jim Hightower, and Rag Radio's Tracey Schulz.

Corporate trade scams and NSA eavesdropping

One issue that raises Hightower’s hackles is the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (a secretive and very controversial “nuclearized and supersized NAFTA” that would involve 11 nations, including China and Japan). “It’s not about free trade,” Jim Says. “It’s a corporate coup d’etat. Against us… It’s about enthroning corporate power.”

Jim says there’s strong opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership that's being organized by Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, a "wonderful project that's been battling these issues for years." “We’ve defeated 10 of these kind of trade scams just in the last decade,” Jim says. “So people really will make a difference.”

“You know, Lyndon Johnson said, ‘You can’t make chicken salad out of chicken manure.' So, the more people know about this thing, the more that they’re smelling that manure.”

Jim is also enraged about the NSA’s massive eavesdropping program. “This is not just another entity that’s poking into our personal privacy and lives... this is a comprehensive violation of at least the first and fourth amendments, and possibly the fifth and sixth as well. And a violation of the privacy laws of the United States.”

“It’s one thing to use spooks to go chase down terrorists, which we certainly want them to do, but to then decide that the entire 330 million people of the United States of America are suspects, that’s another thing altogether.”

“There are 3 billion phone calls made in the United States every day. They get them all... These are not metadata, as they call them, these are profiles. They’re little pieces of us. And they draw a picture.”

They are “using these super-supercomputers, and using this fog of fear that was generated by the powers that be, using 9-ll, to take away our core rights.”

“Snowden, to me, has done a tremendous public service by revealing all this,” Jim said.

Also read "Jim Hightower and the 'Populist Moment'" on The Rag Blog from April 11, 2012, and listen to our earlier Rag Radio interview with Jim Hightower here.


Rag Radio is hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer; Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas. Rag Radio is broadcast live every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EDT) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA. Rag Radio is now also aired on KPFT-HD3 90.1 -- Pacifica radio in Houston -- on Wednesdays at 1 p.m.

The show is streamed live on the web and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive Internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

[Thorne Dreyer, a pioneering Sixties underground journalist, edits The Rag Blog, hosts Rag Radio, and is a director of the New Journalism Project. Dreyer was an editor of The Rag in Austin and Space City! in Houston, was on the editorial collective of Liberation News Service (LNS) in New York, was general manager of Pacifica's KPFT-FM in Houston, and was a correspondent for the early Texas Monthly magazine. Dreyer can be contacted at editor@theragblog.com. Read more articles by and about Thorne Dreyer on The Rag Blog.]

Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, September 27, 2013: In their first father/daughter interview, newsman Dan Rather and Austin-based environmentalist Robin Rather.
Friday, October 4, 2013: Novelist Thomas Zigal, author of Many Rivers to Cross, set in post-Katrina New Orleans.

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Jim Hightower : Best Little Chicken Sanctuary in Texas

"Me and my Gal." Painting of Farm Street chickens in Bastrop by Jo Knoblach Castillo. Inset photo below: Free-ranging Bastrop chickens. Photo by Terry Hagerty / Bastrop Advertiser.
The Best Little Chicken Sanctuary in Texas

A flock of feral chickens has lived for years on (the appropriately named) Farm Street in the town of Bastrop.

By Jim Hightower / OtherWords / July 4, 2012

BASTROP, Texas -- Some people complain that their town has gone to the dogs. Bastrop, Texas has gone to the chickens -- and Bastropians are proud of it.

Well, most Bastropians.

While other cities might boast of their historic sites or cultural offerings, the good folks of this easy going, free-spirited community near Austin have chosen to highlight a flock of feral chickens that has lived for years on (the appropriately named) Farm Street. No one owns these roosters, hens, and chicks. They take care of themselves, eating bugs and clucking contentedly from yard to yard. Yes, they cross the road for no apparent reason.

It's a quirky phenomenon that fits right in with this town of delightfully quirky folks. Three years ago, some of them got the city council to enshrine the quirkiness by designating their area "The Farm Street Historical Chicken Sanctuary." This proclamation provides protected status for the flock. Everyone smiled, the chickens clucked, and all was well.

Until this spring, when Beverly Hoskins raised a ruckus in the henhouse, figuratively speaking. As the owner of several rental houses along Farm Street, she wants the council to consider repealing the proclamation, complaining that "a lot of chicken waste" was being spread by the daily promenade.

The denizens of Farm Street, however, flocked to defend the fowls, asserting that wild chickens are an integral part of "Bastrop culture." One lady who rents one of Hoskins' houses said of the chickens that roost in a tree in her yard: "I welcome them." Another neighbor pointed out that "Hey, the chickens were here first... And it is 'Farm Street'!"

The flock's fate is still up in the air, but the council recently hinted at its sentiments by authorizing some banners on Farm Street telling motorists to slow down. After all, they're driving through a chicken sanctuary.

[Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker. He's also editor of the populist newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown. This article was first published by OtherWords and was distributed byTruthout. Read more articles by and about Jim Hightower on The Rag Blog.]

• Go here to read "Jim Hightower and the 'Populist Moment'" by Thorne Dreyer on The Rag Blog and to listen to the podcast of our April 6, 2012, hour-long Rag Radio interview with Jim Hightower.

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RAG RADIO / Thorne Webb Dreyer : Jim Hightower and the 'Populist Moment'

Jim Hightower in the KOOP studios in Austin, Friday, April 6, 2012. Photo by Alan Pogue / The Rag Blog.
Rag Radio:
Jim Hightower and the 'populist moment'

By Thorne Webb Dreyer / The Rag Blog / April 11, 2012

Jim Hightower will headline a "Spring Song Fiesta" at Scholz Beer Garten in Austin on Sunday, April 15, from 1-9 p.m. Hightower will speak at 7, following a live KOOP-sponsored debate among Austin mayoral candidates starting at 6. Bands will include the Therapy Sisters, Paper Moon Shiners, Bill Oliver, Son y No Son, Barbara K, Floyd Domino, and Ted Roddy and the Hit Kickers. It all benefits community radio KOOP-FM.

According to Jim Hightower, “even the smallest dog can lift its leg on the tallest building.”

Progressive Texas populist author, commentator, and orator Hightower -- perhaps our country's most celebrated champion of the common folk -- was our guest on Rag Radio, Friday, April 6, on Austin’s community radio station, KOOP 91.7-FM, and streamed live on the Internet.

You can listen to the show here:


We discussed populism as a political movement -- and what Jim Hightower sees as a “populist moment” existing in this country today.

“Populism is about confronting money and power in our society and realizing that too few people control too much money,” Hightower told the Rag Radio audience. “The few are doing extremely well, but they seem to think that they can separate their well-being from the good fortunes of the many.”

Hightower, who served two terms as Texas Agriculture Commissioner, is a New York Times bestselling author. His weekly newsletter, the Hightower Lowdown, goes out to 135,000 subscribers, he writes a weekly newspaper column for Creators Syndicate, and his radio commentaries air on stations around the country, including Austin’s KOOP.

A former editor of the Texas Observer, Hightower has been involved in progressive politics for decades and has established himself as one of the country’s most influential consumer advocates, especially focusing on corporate power in the food economy.

Jim Hightower’s latest book is Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow.

Rag Radio, hosted by longtime alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, editor of The Rag Blog and a pioneer of the Sixties underground press, features hour-long in-depth interviews and discussion about progressive politics, history, and culture.

The show is broadcast on Austin’s KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run community radio station, on Fridays, 2-3 p.m. (CST) and is rebroadcast on WFTE-FM in Mt. Cobb and Scranton, PA, on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EST). It also has a widespread internet audience and podcasts of all shows can be downloaded at the Internet Archive.


Populist moment

Jim Hightower said on Rag Radio that he thinks “we have a strong populist moment, a strong populist possibility, to make fundamental change.”

He says that the Wall Street bailout “was the initial spark for the Tea Party movement,” but that it got captured by former Texas Congressman and Koch-funded Washington lobbyist Dick Armey, and was turned into a “right-wing hugging organization.”

But Hightower believes that the Occupy movement could connect with the Tea Party rank and file, and “turn into something real, something that does try to decentralize power down to the grassroots level for ordinary working people.”

He sees lots of things going on in the country that make him hopeful.

He believes that all the Republican anti-union activity has reinvigorated the labor movement. AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka “declared that he was going to make [Wisconsin Gov.] Scott Walker the ‘organizer of the year.’” All the anti-union rhetoric “has given them their own sense of history back, and their own spirit back, and the recognition that the public is with them.”

Hightower spoke before 150,000 people in 20-degree weather last February in Madison, at a rally opposing the Wisconsin anti-union legislation. There were people “just as far as you could see.”

“It was just a beautiful, spirited moment.”

And he sees more positive signs.

People are working on a grassroots level for a “bevy of new and good candidates running for office all across the country” -- like Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts, Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, Norman Solomon in Northern California, and Eric Griego in Albuquerque -- and to overturn Citizens United (“the grotesque absurdity that a corporation is a person”).

“As we say here,” Hightower reminds us, “a corporation is not a person until Texas executes one.”

Jim Hightower supports a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling.

“We don’t have to convince people that Citizens United's unleashing unlimited amounts of secret corporate money into our elections is a bad idea.”

“If we get that to a vote, we win.”

“There’s a movement, and the Occupy people are involved in this, to confront every candidate for every office in the country, at their public forums… at their political rallies… or just go to their office, and say, ‘Do you think a corporation is a person? We want you on record.”

From left, Rag Radio host Thorne Dreyer, Jeff Zavala and Grace Alfar of ZGrafix, and guest Jim Hightower during Rag Radio broadcast, Friday, April 6, 2012, at KOOP-FM in Austin. Photo by Alan Pogue / The Rag Blog.

Coops and food economy

Hightower also believes that the fast-growing coop movement “is extraordinary in this country [and] there’s very little coverage of it.”

“[It gives us] models that we can go to… and say, here’s another way to organize it. It doesn’t have to be the CEO getting $50 million a year and workers having their wages knocked down and their health care and other benefits taken away.”

Another -- and related -- area of encouraging activity, Hightower said, is in the food economy. “We’ve had a revolution in food in America… It came from farmers saying, there’s gotta be a better way than all these pesticides… and making bad food and poisoning our animals and genetically manipulating our animals.”

And the consumers are saying, “We don’t like industrialized, conglomeratized, globalized, capitalized food. We want real food.”

“And the two found each other.”

“It began with ex-hippies selling bad tomatoes out of broken-down VW buses in the 70’s.” But then came the food coops and the farmers’ markets. “We helped to establish more than 100 of them [in Texas], just by putting the tools in the hands of local people.”

“It’s a tremendous movement,” he says. In Austin, “we have a dozen farms… linking up with chefs and linking up directly with restaurants and directly with government institutions to buy food.”


Privatization and the commons

An issue that Jim Hightower is especially concerned about is the alarming spread of privatization and the resulting impact on the public sector, on the commons.

He has recently written in his Hightower Lowdown about the move to privatize the post office, about the “corporate foreign legion” that "has taken over America’s intelligence and military functions,” and about the closing of state parks around the country. (“By axing parks, politicos are stealing the people’s property,” he wrote.)

“It’s dangerous. It’s dangerous for our democracy, it’s dangerous for our health, it’s dangerous for our economy,” he said on Rag Radio. “Because it allows a few profit-seeking organizations to take charge.”

They’re saying that the post office is “wasteful, they’re broke, they’re bankrupt… and that they can’t compete with the internet and Fedex, etc… Well, as we say out in Lubbock, that’s bovine excrement. The post office last year had… an operating profit of 700 million dollars.”

“This is about the common good… The post office is in every community in America… They deliver by pack mule. They deliver by planes, they deliver by boats.”

“They get the job done.”

“And it is the most popular federal agency in all of government. People feel an attachment to their post office… because it is a community center.”

Hightower says that the move to privatize parks is happening all over the country.

“The workaday people… don’t fly to Aspen when they need a weekend. They don’t summer in France. They go to their parks.”

“These parks are jewels. And yet, we’re abandoning them. [Gov. Rick] Perry and the legislature just whacked the hell out of them” in Texas. The state parks director has been forced to make public appeals for support of the park system. “We’re out there with a tin cup on the side of the street saying, anybody got a nickel for a state park?”

“It’s a complete abdication of long-term responsibility to the people of this state and future generations.”

And now, Hightower says, privatization has moved, with almost no public notice or discussion by lawmakers, into the military and into the military intelligence agencies.

He says he was “stunned” when he researched the issue for the Hightower Lowdown. “I had no idea it was this big, this extensive.”

“We have roughly 80,000 troops in Afghanistan. And now we’ve got 113,00 contractors… And they’re not there just to do administrative chores. They’re doing war planning, they are targeting the enemy, they are killing.”

Hightower says we are giving up “the government’s most sensitive activities to corporations” whose “loyalty is not to the United States of America. It is to the bottom line, to the profit of the shareholders.”


Texas and the populist movement

Jim Hightower reminded Rag Radio listeners that the populist movement actually started in Texas -- in Lampasas -- “with four farmers sitting around a kitchen table over there in 1868, saying, this is killing us -- [with] the railroad monopolies, and the bankers putting the squeeze on them.”

“They had to find some other way.”

“So they established what became the Farmers Alliance.” It failed at first but eventually, it “spread through Texas, all up through the Plains states, went through the South, went all the way to New York State, all the way out to California.”

“They created cooperatives, the financing mechanisms so farmers could get capital without being gouged by the banks, and then a holding mechanism for their crops, storage facilities, so that they could be in charge. And then a market mechanism.”

“And all of it was cooperatively-run.”

"And it was also a cultural movement," Hightower added. "Because rural people were illiterate. They didn’t know how to write. They hadn’t read history. So they had educational courses, they had cultural programs, they created choirs, and concerts, and they had parades, and fun.

“Everybody could join it. And 'everybody' included African-Americns. Back in that day, in the 1870s.”

“It was a huge people’s movement.”

“In fact, Thorne, the original Texas constitution outlawed banks… They hated ‘em. Because we were settled by debtors, people fleeing out of Tennessee and Alabama and Mississippi.”


We concluded by asking Jim Hightower if he plans to ever run for office again.

His firm "No" came with a satisfied smile. He's having too much fun just being Jim Hightower.


Rag Radio is produced in the KOOP studios, in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.

Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

After broadcast, all episodes are posted as podcasts and can be downloaded at the Internet Archive.

[Thorne Dreyer, a pioneering Sixties underground journalist, edits The Rag Blog, hosts Rag Radio, and is a director of the New Journalism Project. He can be contacted at editor@theragblog.com. Read more articles by and about Thorne Dreyer on The Rag Blog.]

Coming up on Rag Radio:

THIS FRIDAY, April 13, 2012: Sustainability activist Bill Neiman of Native American Seeds.
April 20, 2012: David P. Hamilton on the upcoming French elections, and Philip Russell on the coming elections in Mexico.


VIDEO: Jim Hightower on Rag Radio

Video of Thorne Dreyer's Rag Radio interview with Jim Hightower, produced by Jeff Zavala of ZGrafix.org. The video can also be seen on Jeff's Blip TV channel.
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Jim Hightower : The Keystone XL Flim-Flam

Valero refinery in Port Arthur, Texas. Image from Nation of Change.
The Keystone XL flim-flam

The dirty little secret that those pushing so urgently for building Keystone XL don't want you to know is that the tar sands oil producers are in cahoots with Texas refineries to move the product onto the lucrative global export market...

By Jim Hightower / Reader Supported News / March 4, 2012

For Rep. Allen West, the skyrocketing price of gasoline is not just a policy matter, it's a personal pocketbook issue. The Florida tea-party Republican (who, of course, blames President Obama for the increase) recently posted a message on Facebook wailing that it's now costing him $70 to fill his Hummer H3.

It's hard to feel the pain of a whining, $174,000-a-year Congress-critter, but millions of regular Americans really are feeling pain at the pump -- especially truck drivers, cabbies, farmers, commuters,and others whose livelihoods are tethered to the whims of Big Oil.

It's an especially cynical political stunt, then, for congressional Republicans, GOP presidential wannabes, and a chorus of right-wing mouthpieces to use gas price pain as a whip for lashing out at Obama's January decision to reject the infamous Keystone XL pipeline.

This friendly Canadian corporation, they cried, would send 700,000 barrels of "tar sands crude" oil per day through the 2,000-mile-long pipeline that it would build from Alberta, Canada, to Texas refineries on the Gulf Coast. "Less dependence on OPEC," they chant like a mantra, "more gasoline for America, lower prices for consumers."

What's not to like?

Well, aside from inevitable environmental damage from pipeline leaks, and the fact that this foreign-owned corporation would use the autocratic power of eminent domain to take land from unwilling sellers along the 2,000 mile route, here's something not to like: The gasoline and diesel that would be made from this Canadian crude would not go to American gas pumps, but to foreign markets.

The dirty little secret that those pushing so urgently for building Keystone XL don't want you to know is that the tar sands oil producers are in cahoots with Texas refineries to move the product onto the lucrative global export market, selling it to buyers in Europe, Latin America and China -- not to you and me.

The pipeline and the toxic crude it would carry across six states would do absolutely nothing to shave even a penny off of the price we pay at the pump.

Already, U.S. refineries are exporting record amounts of the gasoline they make. For the first time in 62 years, America is now a net petroleum exporter. Valero Energy Corp., the largest U.S. exporter of refined petroleum products, is a major lobbyist for Keystone XL.

Along with Motiva (an oil refiner jointly owned by Shell and Saudi Aramco) and Total (a French refinery), Valero has signed secret, long-term contracts with Keystone's owner (TransCanada Corp.) and several tar sands oil producers to bring this crude to Port Arthur, Texas. All three have upgraded their refineries there to process diesel for export.

Adding to Big Oil's enjoyment is the fact that the Port Arthur refineries of Valero, Motiva, and Total are within a Foreign Trade Zone, giving them special tax breaks for shipping gasoline and diesel out of our country.

And adding to the dismay of some U.S. consumers, TransCanada has quietly boasted that Keystone XL would cut gasoline supplies in our Midwestern states, thus raising prices at the pump and siphoning more billions of dollars a year from consumers pockets into the vaults of multinational oil interests.

So, lets tally the score in this Keystone pipeline deal: The American people's environment would be put at risk, foreign nations would get the fuel, pipeline and oil investors would get the tax-subsidized profits, and we'd all stay hooked on deadly polluting oil.

Meanwhile, the financial speculators and supply manipulators who are artificially causing our gasoline prices to rise escape scrutiny, while self-serving politicians (tanked up on Big Oil's and Wall Street's campaign cash) divert attention to the bugaboo of Obama's pipeline decision.

And, yet again, our nation has an excuse to postpone the necessary investments in conservation, alternative fuels, and mass transit that would actually solve the gas-gouging problem.

What's not to like?

[Jim Hightower, a radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and former Texas Agriculture Commissioner, edits the populist newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown. This article was published by Creators Syndicate and distributed by Reader Supported News. Read more articles by and about Jim Hightower on The Rag Blog.]

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Jim Hightower : Obama is Waltzing With the Devil

Dancing with the devil. Drawing from Decoded Stuff.
Obama, Inc.:
With Daley and Immelt on board,
our president is waltzing with the devil.

By Jim Hightower / CommonDreams / February 9, 2011

When you dance with the devil, never fool yourself into thinking that you're leading.

That would be my 50-cents-worth of advice to President Barack Obama as he remakes his presidency into a Clintonesque corporate enterprise. Following last fall's congressional elections, he immediately began blowing kisses to CEOs and big business lobbyists, and he's now filled his White House dance card with them.

First came Bill Daley, the Wall Street banker and longtime corporate lobbyist. In early January, Obama brought him to the White House ball to be his chief-of-staff, gatekeeper, and policy coordinator.

Then Obama tapped Jeffery Immelt to lead his Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, which is supposed to "encourage the private sector to hire [Americans] and invest in American competitiveness." This is a bizarre coupling, for as General Electric's CEO, Immelt was a leader in shipping American factories and jobs to Asia and elsewhere. Today, fewer than half of GE's workers are in our country.

As an AFL-CIO official notes, "Highly globalized companies don't have the same interests as the United States. There is no company more emblematic of this than GE."

In his recent State of the Union speech, Obama offered only cold comfort to the millions of Americans who are unemployed or barely employed, saying blandly that "The rules have changed." Well, yes -- and who changed them? Self-serving CEOs like Jeffrey Immelt, that's who.

America's working families -- our endangered middle class -- have a right to expect Obama to fight for rules that are fair to them and our country, not meekly accept rules that have been skewed by an elite corporate class to profit them alone. Instead, our president is waltzing with the devil.

He's rebranding his presidency, all right. It's becoming Obama, Inc.

[Jim Hightower, a radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and former Texas Agriculture Commissioner, edits the populist newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown. This article was posted to OtherWords and distributed by CommonDreams.

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Jim Hightower : British Petroleum as Global Corporate Criminal

British Petroleum: the many faces of corporate crime. Photo from BP 50 years in Pictures / TLAXCALA.
British Petroleum:
Recidivist corporate criminal

By Jim Hightower / June 18, 2010

Gosh, how quickly things turn. One day, you're a strutting peacock -- the next day, you're just another gasping, oil-covered bird.

In early April, BP was strutting about in full corporate splendor, showing off the $9 billion in profits that it had soaked up in just the first three months of this year. It was also basking in a corporate re-imaging campaign, depicting itself as a clean-energy pioneer and declaring that BP now stood for "Beyond Petroleum."

Since its Gulf of Mexico well blew out on April 20, however, BP has proven to be beyond belief. The wider and deeper that this catastrophe spreads, the more we discover just how oily this giant is.

From the time it was known as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company [later renamed the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company] and set out to grab and control the rich petroleum reserves owned by what is now Iran, BP has been a recidivist global criminal. In the past three decades, it grew huge by swallowing such competitors as Standard Oil of Ohio, Amoco, and Arco. Along the way, it has been implicated in bribery, overthrowing governments, plunder and money laundering, plus having established one of the worst safety and environmental records in an industry that is notoriously reckless on both counts.

And now, its rap sheet grows almost daily. In fact, the Center for Public Integrity has revealed that the oil giant's current catastrophic mess should come as no surprise, for it has a long and sorry record of causing calamities.

In the last three years, the center says, an astonishing "97 percent of all flagrant violations found in the refining industry by government safety inspectors" came at BP facilities. These included 760 violations rated as "egregious" and "willful." In contrast, the oil company with the second-worst record had only eight such citations.

While its CEO, Tony Hayward, claims that its gulf blowout was simply a tragic accident that no one could've foreseen, internal corporate documents reveal that BP itself had been struggling for nearly a year with its inability to get this well under control. Also, it had been willfully violating its own safety policies and had flat out lied to regulators about its ability to cope with what's delicately called a major "petroleum release" in the Gulf of Mexico.

"What the hell did we do to deserve this?" Hayward asked shortly after his faulty well exploded. Excuse us, Tony, but you're not the victim here -- and this disaster is not the work of fate. Rather, the deadly gusher in the gulf is a direct product of BP's reckless pursuit of profits. You waltzed around environmental protections, deliberately avoided installing relatively cheap safety equipment, and cavalierly lied about the likelihood of disaster and your ability to cope with it.

"It wasn't our accident," the CEO later declared, as oil was spreading. Wow, Tony, in one four-word sentence, you told two lies. First, BP owns the well, and it is your mess. Second, the mess was not an "accident," but the inevitable result of hubris and greed flowing straight from BP's executive suite.

"The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean," Hayward told the media, trying to sidestep the fact that BP's mess was fast becoming America's worst oil calamity. Indeed, Tony coolly explained that the amount of oil spewing from the well "is tiny in relation to the total water volume." This flabbergasting comment came only two weeks before it was revealed that the amount of gushing oil was 19 times more than BP had been claiming.

Eleven oil workers are dead, thousands of Gulf Coast people have had their livelihoods devastated and unfathomable damage is being done to the gulf ecology. Imagine how the authorities would be treating the offender if BP were a person. It would've been put behind bars long ago -- if not on death row.

[National radio commentator, writer, public speaker, former Texas Agriculture Commissioner, and author of the book, Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow, Jim Hightower has spent three decades battling the Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be -- consumers, working families, environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plain-folks.]

Copyright 2010 Creators.com

Source / Truthout

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Populist Pundit : Lowdown on Hightower

Jim Hightower. Image from Rolling Thunder.
The lowdown:
The Texas populism of Jim Hightower

By Michael Winship / April 2, 2010

I first became aware of Jim Hightower more than 20 years ago, during the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta. The Democrats were nominating Massachusetts Governor Mike Dukakis to run for president against Reagan's vice president, George H.W. Bush, and at the time Dukakis looked like he had a pretty good chance at the White House.

This was before a series of events did him in, including the notorious Willie Horton ad that attacked Dukakis for a Massachusetts weekend furlough prison program that allowed a convicted murderer back on the street, where he robbed and raped.

And it was before Dukakis bobbled a harsh debate question about what he would do if his own wife Kitty was raped and murdered. And it was before he was photographed atop an Abrams tank wearing a helmet that made him look like he was starring in Snoopy III: This Time It's Personal.

All of that misery lay ahead. The Democrats were still in giddy spirits during the convention and had a high old time poking fun at Bush, Sr. That was when the late Ann Richards, then the Texas state treasurer, famously lamented, "Poor George! He can't help it -- he was born with a silver foot in his mouth!"

But it was the convention speech by Hightower that I especially remember. He was the Texas agriculture commissioner in those days -- an important job in the Lone Star State -- and described Bush as a "toothache of a man," a cruel but remarkable metaphor. And he said that Bush behaved like someone who was "born on third base and thought he hit a triple... He is threatening to lead this country from tweedle-dum to tweedle-dumber."

Maybe Hightower didn't originate those lines (as Milton Berle used to say, "When you steal from me, you steal twice"), but he delivered them with a gusto akin to genuine authorship and over the years has come up with enough original material of his own to absolve him -- mostly -- from the sin of occasional joke-filching.

Now others steal from him. It was Jim, I believe, who came up with the notion that all elected officials be required to wear brightly colored, NASCAR-like jumpsuits with the corporate logos of their biggest campaign contributors, an idea I've heard appropriated by several others without proper attribution.

And I think it was Jim who first said of George W. Bush, "If ignorance ever reaches $40 a barrel, I want the drilling rights to his head." (On hearing that another politician was learning Spanish, Hightower is supposed to have remarked, "Oh good. Now he'll be bi-ignorant.")

These days, Jim Hightower broadcasts daily radio commentaries and edits "The Hightower Lowdown," an invaluable monthly newsletter. With the passing of both Ann Richards and Molly Ivins, he has became the funniest person in Texas politics -- intentionally, that is. But it is his steadfast advocacy of progressive politics, his unyielding embrace of the old time gospel of populism, that made him an especially appropriate guest on the final edition of the PBS series, Bill Moyers Journal.

"Here's what populism is not," he told my colleague Bill Moyers. "It is not just an incoherent outburst of anger. And certainly it is not anger that is funded and organized by corporate front groups, as the initial tea party effort [was], and as most of it is still today -- though there is legitimate anger within it, in terms of the people who are there. But what populism is at its essence is just a determined focus on helping people be able to get out of the iron grip of the corporate power that is overwhelming our economy, our environment, energy, the media, government.

"...One big difference between real populism and... the tea party thing is that real populists understand that government has become a subsidiary of corporations. So you can't say, 'Let's get rid of government.' You need to be saying, 'Let's take over government.'" 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?"

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..."

This weekend, Jim is being honored at Texas State University-San Marcos with an exhibition celebrating his life's work as a populist journalist, historian, and advocate. They're calling the event "Swim Against the Current" because, as Moyers says, "That's what he does." In fact, Swim Against the Current also is the title of Hightower's most recent book, subtitled, Even a Dead Fish Can Go with the Flow.

He comes from a long history of flow resisters, a critical, American political tradition. "I go all the way back to Thomas Paine," he said. "I mean, that was kind of the ultimate rebellion, when the media tool was a pamphlet." The men who wrote the Bill of Rights, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence "didn't create democracy. [They] made democracy possible.

"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."

With this week's edition, Bill Moyers Journal has gone off the air. But we'll be continuing the conversation via our web site at PBS.org/moyers. These weekly columns will be continuing for the foreseeable as well.

It has been a delight and honor collaborating with Bill -- and the entire production team -- so intensely over the last two years. I am always improved in their presence and thank them all, especially Bill and executive editor Judith Davidson Moyers, executive producers Judy Doctoroff and Sally Roy and Diane Domondon and Jesse Adams, the two of whom every week have made sure these scratchings make it out alive, with alacrity and accuracy.

[Michael Winship is senior writer of the weekly public affairs program. Bill Moyers Journal, which concluded Friday night on PBS. Watch online or comment at The Moyers Blog.]

Source / truthout

• See Bill Moyers' interview with Jim Hightower at truthout.
• Go to Jim Hightower's Hightower Lowdown.

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Jim Hightower : Republican Hypocrites Rag on the Poor

Image from Grub Street.
Madcap schtick of Bauer and Linder:
Republicans out of touch as middle class sinks

By Jim Hightower / February 4, 2010

American politics is a hoot! Where else can raw ignorance rise to such high places -- and then flaunt itself shamelessly for all to see?

For example, who needs Jay Leno or Conan O'Brien for comic relief, when we've got Andre Bauer? He's the Lieutenant governor of South Carolina (a state, by the way, that really is a comer on the political comedy circuit -- especially after Gov. Mark Sanford's madcap schtick last year involving his disappearance, the Appalachian Trail and an Argentine mistress.

But Sanford is leaving office, and Bauer, who is now a Republican contender for governor, is the state's new star joker. He had 'em rolling in the aisles recently when he did a wild, slapstick routine on food stamps at a town hall meeting. Andre proclaimed that much of his political thinking was shaped by his grandmother and that he had learned a valuable lesson from her.

"She told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why?" he asked, pausing for comedic effect. "Because they breed! You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce."

I tell you, Andre Bauer is an absolute scream!

But here's the real punch line: The need for food stamps has been soaring as more and more Americans are falling out of the middle class into poverty. From 2000 to 2008, 5 million more were added to the poverty rolls, and that was before the economic collapse of the last two years. In fact, check this out Andre, and laugh if you feel like it: About 6 million Americans today are living entirely on food stamps -- they've lost their jobs and have no other income. That's one out of every 50 of us, and their numbers are growing rapidly. Now, isn't that a hoot?

Georgia Congressman John Linder: irked about food stamps.
Well, one who's not laughing is Republican member of Congress John Linder. This far-out Georgia right-winger is irked that America's food stamp program will grow to more than $60 billion this year. "This is craziness," Linder barked to a New York Times reporter. "We're at risk of creating an entire class, a subset of people, just comfortable getting by living off the government."

Comfortable? When was the last time this pampered lawmaker experienced the "comforts" of the food stamp life? Linder himself has been "living off the government" for 18 years, but at the high end -- drawing $174,000 a year in pay, plus subsidized health care, a fat pension and generous perks of office.

Hypocrisy aside, Linder is an anti-government, laissez-faire extremist who buys into Bauer's fantasies about lazy, good-for-nothing strays getting food stamps.

"You don't improve the economy by paying people to sit around and not work," he grumps, adding, "You improve the economy by lowering taxes."

Really? Perhaps the gentleman from Georgia has forgotten that he and the whole Washington insider crowd tried that scam again and again throughout the past decade, slashing all sorts of taxes for corporations and the wealthy. Since Linder is a multimillionaire, that economic "plan" undoubtedly worked out splendidly for him.

For the middle class, however, the 10 years since January 2000 are known as "the lost decade." In that period, the U.S. economy lost more jobs than it created -- zero job growth. That's the first decade since the end of the Depression that our country has had less than a 20 percent rise in job creation.

Also, after the 10-year frenzy of tax-cutting, middle-class families are earning less today, in real dollars, than they did in 1999. Add in skyrocketing health care costs and the plummeting value of people's homes, and we get the harsh reality of mushrooming poverty.

So that "subset of people" on food stamps whom Linder so callously denigrates are his own spawn! The food stamp program has had to grow because the tinkle-down economy that he pushed has wrecked America's middle class.

Does knocking poor people make these guys feel better about themselves? How pathetic. Bauer and Linder are living proof that when it comes to leadership, America has too many 5-watt bulbs screwed into 150-watt sockets.

Copyright 2010 Creators.com.

Source / truthout

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Jim Hightower : Texas' Governor Goodhair is One Pandering Goober

Texas' Panderer-in-Chief, Gov. Rick Perry, covers his lovely locks with a gimme cap at the Texas tea party rally April 15, 2009 at the state capitol. With him is Michael Quinn Sullivan of Texans for Fiscal responsibility. Photo by Harry Cabluck / AP.

The Governor of Texas is one bad haircut away from Blagojevichian levels of gubernatorial gooberness.

By Jim Hightower / April 25, 2009.

Texas politics has long been a source of great amusement for the people of our state, but it's often a source of bafflement for people beyond our borders. So, sometimes there's a need to explain what's going on here, and this is one of those times. In this case, the explanation is simple: Our governor is a goober.

Texans have known this for some time, but Rick Perry -- whose chief claim to fame had been that he has a spectacular head of hair -- was unknown outside the state, so he was our little secret. Now, however, Perry's gooberness has gone viral. He's a YouTube phenomenon and a new darling of the GOP kingmaker, Rush Limbaugh.

He broke into national consciousness on April 15, when he spoke at one of the many "teabag" rallies that Republican operatives set up around the country to protest Barack Obama's deficit spending. Appearing in Austin before a boisterous crowd of about a thousand people who were fuming about everything from gun control to the Wall Street bailout, the governor opened with this shot: "I'm sure you're not just a bunch of right-wing extremists. But if you are, I'm with you."

Then came the thought that earned him YouTuber-of-the-Day and a favorable mention from Lord Limbaugh: Texas just, By God, might secede from the union if Washington keeps messing with us.

No doubt many people in the other 49 states burst into applause at this notion, but it caused quite a bit of consternation among home folks, who rather like being both Texans and Americans. Was he serious? Apparently so. When reporters asked afterward about the legality of such a rash move, Perry pointed out that Texas had entered the union under a unique agreement that gave us the right "to leave if we decided to do that." Good line, but utterly untrue. No such agreement ever existed.

Facts aside, what's going through Perry's perfectly coiffed head is that polls presently show him losing his re-election bid in next year's Republican primary. Thus, he's scrambling to excite the most rabid of the Texas GOP fringe by posing as a courageous defender of Texas sovereignty against meddlers from Washington. His chief target is $555 million in federal money that would come to our state under Obama's economic stimulus program. This is desperately needed money that would go straight into our nearly broke unemployment compensation fund, but he asserts that he will reject it, claiming that the federal dollars come with strings attached.

The "strings" are actually simple and sensible threads of reform that would help the hard-hit workaday people of our state. For example, the federal stimulus program requires that part-time workers also be eligible for unemployment comp. In today's harsh economy, when part-time work is all that many people can get, they ought to be covered, too. But common sense has never met Perry, much less befriended him, so he continues to posture: "We think it's time to draw the line in the sand and tell Washington that no longer are we going to accept their oppressive hand in the state of Texas," he recently spewed.

Yes, comandante, but what about that other $16 billion or so in Obama's stimulus money that you are going accept? For example, while you slap away funds to help working folks, you're eagerly reaching out with your other hand to grab $1.2 billion of those filthy federal dollars to put into your pet project of saddling Texans with a network of privatized toll roads. If it's a matter of principle, why not reject all federal money? Indeed, you used to be a cotton farmer who benefited from Washington's crop subsidy programs -- how oppressive was that for you?

OK, our governor has not quite attained the Blagojevichian level of gubernatorial gooberness, but he's a striver, and he's only one bad haircut away from getting to the top. Illinois, we feel your pain.

Copyright 2009 Creators Syndicate Inc.

[Texan Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the new book, Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow(Wiley, March 2008). He publishes the monthly "Hightower Lowdown," co-edited by Phillip Frazer.]

Source / AlterNet

Thanks to David Hamilton / The Rag Blog

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Jim Hightower : 'Too Big to Fail' Is Too Big, Period.

Too big to fail. Photo by Jennifer Szymaszek / AP / Noise Between Stations.

The 'too big' claim forms the rationale for the diversion of regular people's money into rich people's pockets.

By Jim Hightower / April 4, 2009.

As skiers and backcountry hikers know, a whiteout is a blizzard that's so intense that those caught in it can't even see the blizzard.

That's how I think of the Wall Street bailout now swirling around us. So many trillions of our tax dollars are being blown at the financial giants that we're blinded by the density of it, unable to see where we are or know what direction we're headed.

However, one way to get your bearings in this bailout blizzard is to focus on the central point that both the bailors (Washington) and the bailees (Wall Street) keep pounding as an irrefutable truth that everyone simply has to accept -- namely, the institutions being rescued are too big to fail.

Even sheep know to flee when coyotes howl in unison -- and we commoners need to confront the absurdity of this "too big" claim, which forms the rationale for the entire diversion of regular people's money into rich people's pockets.

Wachovia, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Bank of America, AIG -- omigosh, cried the Powers That Be, these behemoths are linked to every other behemoth, so if we don't stuff them with tax dollars ... well, we have no choice, because they're just too big for the government to let fail.

Point No. 1: They have failed. They are kaput. It costs more to buy a snickerdoodle than to buy a share of Citigroup stock. AIG is 80 percent owned by you and me, the taxpayers. These once-haughty outfits are insolvent -- wards of the state.

Point No. 2: If they're too big, why should we sustain them? Let's be clear about something the establishment doesn't want you and me to understand -- these giants did not get so big and interconnected because of natural market forces and free-enterprise efficiencies. They amassed power the old-fashioned way: They got the government to give it to them. In the past 20 years or so, they lobbied furiously to get Washington to rig the rules so they could latterly bloat ... and float out of control.

A new report by Wallstreetwatch.org reveals that from 1998 to 2008, the finance industry made $1.7 billion in contributions to Washington politicians (55 percent to Repubs, 45 percent to Dems), spent $3.4 billion on lobbyists (3,000 of them on the industry payroll in 2007 alone) and won a dozen key deregulatory victories that led directly to today's financial meltdown.

Inherent in the industry's push for unbridled expansion was the unstated goal of guaranteeing that they would get taxpayer bailouts if things went badly. So many investors, businesses, employees and others would be hooked into these multitentacled blobs that government would be compelled to rescue the banks from their own excesses.

Knowing that they could privatize all of the profits from quick-buck schemes and socialize the losses, bankers were unleashed to do their damnedest. Which they did.

What to do now? Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is calling on Congress to create a "super regulator" to control the irrational risks that the too-big boys take. Immodestly, Bernanke suggests that the Fed be this overseer. He is backed up by Timothy Geithner, President Barack Obama's treasury secretary and point man on rescuing the giants. He has just outlined a new regulatory regime that he suggests we entrust to the Fed.

Bad idea all around. First, the Fed already has far-reaching watchdog authority that it refused to use as today's crisis built up. We heard no bark and got no bite because, while the Fed has enormous public authority to regulate America's money supply, interest rates and banks, it is governed by -- guess who? -- bankers, and it operates essentially as a private banking cartel.

Second, and most important, too big to fail is too big to regulate. And too big to regulate means they are too big to tolerate. Period.

The answer is to split their investment, banking and insurance functions into separate companies and reinvigorate America's antitrust laws to restore competition in each of the three sectors of finance.

As Newsweek columnist Michael Hirsh put it in an online column in February, "We can't have a free-market economy dominated by institutions so huge that they don't have to play by free-market rules."

Copyright 2009, Creators Syndicate Inc.

[Texan Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator, writer, public speaker and author of the new book, Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow (Wiley, March 2008). He publishes the monthly Hightower Lowdown, co-edited by Phillip Frazer.]

Source / AlterNet

Thanks to David Hamilton / The Rag Blog

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Jim Hightower : Stop Taking Bull From Wall Street

'As a consequence of their avaricious grab for outrageous personal enrichment during the past decade, these arrogant titans of financial gimmickry have caused a vast economic collapse...'

Why Is the Government Hell-Bent on Rewarding Greed, Incompetence and Narcissism?

By Jim Hightower / February 5, 2009.

Washington shouldn't reward Wall Street's culture of excess. Instead, it should insist that those who wrecked the economy be fired.

Bankers have never been much loved, but gollies, this Wall Street bunch seems hell-bent on being loathed.

As a consequence of their avaricious grab for outrageous personal enrichment during the past decade, these arrogant titans of financial gimmickry have caused a vast economic collapse that is presently costing million of Americans their homes, jobs, pensions and dreams -- while also bringing down the banks themselves.

As you would expect, the Wall Streeters who did this to us are now humbled and filled with deep remorse. HA! Just kidding.

Instead, the perpetrators keep grasping for all they can get, taking no responsibility for the damage they've done. Obtuse? Self-indulgent? Narcissistic? What's with these people? A few examples of their bloated sense of entitlement:

• While Merrill Lynch was imploding last year, requiring a $25 billion salvage job from us taxpayers, CEO John Thain was merrily spending $1.2 million to redecorate his office, including buying a $13,000 "custom" coffee table, a $1,400 wastebasket and a $35,000 antique commode (add your own toilet joke here).

In such tough times, why didn't he just make do with the perfectly luxurious office of his predecessor?

"Well ... his office was very different than the ... the general decor of Merrill's offices," Thain told a CNBC interviewer. "It really would have been ... very difficult ... for ... me to use it in the form it was in."

• Citigroup, which lost $28 billion in the past 15 months, has now received a $345 billion bailout from Washington. Time to cut nonessential spending, right? Yes -- as long as "essential" includes a new $50 million Dassault Falcon 7X jet for top executives.

Never mind that the bank already has five executive jets in its fleet. It took a public expression of outrage from President Barack Obama to get Citigroup's honchos to back off this extravagance, and it's said that they're still sulking about it.

• Despite their historically disastrous year in 2008, Wall Street investment bankers awarded themselves a total of $18.4 billion in bonuses -- the sixth-largest payout on record! Shouldn't they be embarrassed, you ask? Of course, but a January poll of the bankers found that 46 percent of them felt they deserved a bigger bonus.

By the way, the Street's rationalization for such giveaways is that top bankers must be showered with treasure in order to keep them hitched to the corporate plow. "Retention bonuses," they're called. Merrill Lynch's Thain, for example, doled out $4 billion in bonuses last fall while the firm was awaiting its bailout check, explaining that it's essential to "pay your best people," or they'll leave.

Shouldn't he have to wear a clown costume when saying silly stuff like that? Leave to where? The whole Street is on fire. Besides, these are the geniuses who lit the match -- who would want them?

Which brings us to the "Obama stage" of the banker bailout. At its core, his plan looks like more of the same. The government (you and I) will buy the bad loans now held by the banks, paying an inflated value for them. This gift will make us by far the biggest investor in Wall Street -- yet, even though we're putting up the capital, Obama's team does not require a commensurate decision-making role for the public.

One decision in particular needs our say-so: Who's going to manage the money? Under Obama's plan, the same old obtuse, self-indulgent, narcissistic -- and failed -- bankers would keep their jobs and control the bailout. It seems the president's top economic advisors, Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers, don't have the stomach for the real housecleaning needed to set Wall Street right. Instead, they cower behind knee-jerk ideological platitudes, scoffing that "governments make poor bank managers."

Hello? It's hard to be a poorer manager of America's financial system than the current group of greed-headed "free marketers." They lost hundreds of billions of dollars in bank assets during the past year or so, wrecking our economy in the process, and now they want to be rescued.

Rescue the system, yes. But not those who wrecked it. Wall Street's culture of excess should not be rewarded, and any bailout should begin by insisting that all of those who did this to America be fired.

[To find out more about Jim Hightower, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.]

Copyright 2009 Creators Syndicate Inc.

Source / Creators Syndicate / AlterNet

Thanks to David Hamilton / The Rag Blog

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Jim Hightower : Diminishing the Stench in Congress

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid: 'In the summer, because of the heat and high humidity, you could literally smell the tourists coming into the Capitol.'
By Jim Hightower / December 19, 2008

Perhaps you are as excited as I am that, at long last, our Congress critters have delivered for us!

Health care for all, you ask? No, not that. A real economic recovery program? Uh… no. An end to the Iraq war? No, again. Instead, what the lawmakers have produced for us is (hold on to your hat, now) a new Capitol Visitor Center!

Yes, if you and your family go to Washington to absorb a bit of the majesty of our country’s democratic institutions, a brand spanking new, 580,000-square-foot facility is now open for you and me – America’s hoi polloi. So, instead of standing in line outside the Capitol building to take a tour, we can stand in line inside the center. At least it’s air-conditioned.

And having AC turns out to have been a big selling point to get congressional leaders to spend $621 million for this tourist holding pen. It’s not that they’re concerned about the creature comfort of the 3 million hometown folks who trek through the Capitol each year – it’s that they don’t want to have to smell us.

Smell us? Yes, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced that the center solves one of our country’s most pressing problems: stinky constituents. At the opening ceremony for the facility, Reid offered this homage to the common citizen: “My staff tells me not to say this, but I’m going to say it anyway. In the summer, because of the heat and high humidity, you could literally smell the tourists coming into the Capitol. Well, that is no longer going to be necessary.”

It’s good to know that the sweaty masses will no longer be quite so offensive to our finicky salons – but wouldn’t it have been cheaper just to have the guards hose us down as we enter the marble halls? Besides, with all the stench that constantly comes out of Congress, who knew that a senator’s nostrils can even detect BO?

Source /Jim Hightower

Jim's sources:

Reid: We won’t smell the tourists anymore By Jeff Dufour and Patrick Gavin / DC Examiner / Dec. 2, 2008.

And Congress Won’t Have to 'Smell the Tourists' Anymore by Scott Ross / NBC Washington / Dec. 3, 2008

And Reid: Capitol Visitor Center Will Minimize 'Smell' of Tourists / Fox News / Dec. 2, 2008

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Jim Hightower : The Five Most Wanted Men from Wall Street and Washington

Our economy didn’t melt down, it was taken down by ideological extremists.
By Jim Hightower / November 3, 2008

What the hell's happening here?

Why is my bank in the tank? And my house and job? And my retirement money? Even my state's teetering on the brink of broke! Who did this to us?

Fair questions, but we're not getting honest answers. Last year, at the first signs of the global financial slide toward the abyss, we were told that it's just a little hiccup caused by something called subprime mortgages. Not to worry, the Powers That Be declared confidently, for we have the damage contained. And rest assured that "the fundamentals of our economy are sound."

Then, this spring, Bear Stearns cratered, requiring an emergency federal subsidy to cover billions in bad loans. Okay, admitted those in charge, that subprime stuff actually is leveraged on up the financial system, and maybe there's been a bit of greed among a few of the big players, but we really do have the problem contained now, and, hey, "the fundamentals of our economy are sound."

But in September--Omigosh!--there went Lehman Brothers, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, AIG, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, WaMu, Wachovia, and others. Well, yes, conceded the now-frazzled financial establishment, but gollies, we're throwing hundreds of billions of your tax dollars into sandbags to contain the problem, and remember: "The fundamentals of our economy are sound."

In October, the contagion rolled through Britain, Canada, and Europe; it spread to Brazil and across to China and Japan; and--Holy Schmoly--suddenly all of Iceland was melting in bankruptcy! Stay calm, cried an openly panicked chorus of Washington officials, for we're holding some big summit meetings soon and consulting our Ouija boards, and...uh...ah...um...y'all just keep clinging to the thought that "the fundamentals of our economy are sound."

Laissez Fairies

You don't have to be in Who's Who to know What's What, do you? The fundamentals are NOT sound.

Wall Street and Washington (excuse the redundancy there) want us commoners to believe that this viral spread of economic grief was caused by those lower-income homeowners who couldn't pay their subprime loans--merely an unforeseeable glitch in a complex and otherwise healthy financial system. Hogwash. The source of today's pain is the same as it was in America's previous financial collapses: the unbridled greed of economic elites, enabled by their political courtesans in Washington.

This unbridling has been the long-sought goal of a cabal of deregulation ideologues who dwell in laissez-fairyland. During the past two decades, they have relentlessly pushed their economic fantasies into law. Their theory was that (to use Ronald Reagan's simple construct) "the magic of the marketplace" would create an eternal rainbow of prosperity through financial "innovation"--if only the market was unshackled from any pesky public regulations. What the dereg theorists missed, however, is that magicians don't perform magic. They perform illusions.

Let's meet some of the illusionists who are directly responsible for hurling you, me, America, and most of the world into this dark and as-yet unplumbed economic hole.


Snide, sour, and sanctimonious, this former senator from Texas is now head lobbyist for the Swiss-based banking giant, UBS, as well as chief economic adviser for his old chum John McCain. A bathed-in-the-blood, footwashing, free-market absolutist, Gramm advocates a virulent brand of antigovernment, market-knows-best, Rambo capitalism.

In 1999, as chair of the Senate Banking Committee, he had the power to implement some of his cockamamie dogmas. First, he pushed through a bill to dissolve the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, a New Deal reform that prohibited banks, investment houses, and insurance companies from combining into one corporation. By keeping these components of our financial system separate, Glass-Steagall made sure that the crash of one of them would not bring down the other two. But a number of Wall Street banks, led by what would become Citigroup, saw a profit windfall for themselves if only they could scuttle the old law and merge banking, investment, and insurance into huge financial conglomerates. The senator was their ideological soul mate, and he was delighted to rig the system for them.

On November 12, 1999, a gloating Gramm celebrated having sledgehammered the regulatory walls that separated the three financial functions:

"We are here today to repeal Glass-Steagall because we have learned that government is not the answer. We have learned that freedom and competition are the answers. We have learned that we promote economic growth and we promote stability by having competition and freedom. I am proud to be here because this is an important bill; it is a deregulatory bill. I believe that's the wave of the future, and I am awfully proud to have been a part of making it a reality."

But repealing Glass-Steagall was only step one for this free-market holy roller. In literally the dead of night, just before Congress's Christmas break in 2000, Chairman Gramm snuck a short provision into an 11,000-page appropriations bill. The item, which only a few lobbyists and lawmakers knew had been inserted, became law when the larger bill was signed by then-President Bill Clinton. Gramm's little legislative sticky note decreed that a relatively new, exotic, and inherently risky form of investments called "derivatives" were not to be regulated--or even monitored--by the government.

It should be noted here that Democrats were also butt-deep in the dereg orthodoxy. Such Wall Street sycophants as Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) had drunk deeply from the holy cup of derivatives deregulation, and Clinton's top economic advisors Robert Rubin (formerly with Goldman Sachs and now with Citigroup) and Lawrence Summers (also a veteran of Wall Street) were in harness with the Republicans on this effort.

By 2008, the freewheeling derivatives market, including derivatives based on those lowly subprime housing loans, bloated to a stunning $531 trillion. That's 531 followed by 12 zeroes! These little-understood, essentially secret investment schemes came to dominate our entire financial system--and when thousands of regular folks began defaulting on their subprime loans, the derivatives based on them essentially became worthless. Investment houses, which were up to their corporate keisters in these funny-money subprime derivatives, began collapsing, and the now-interlocked banks and insurance companies began tumbling down with them. Gramm's deregulatory "wave of the future" had become a financial tsunami.


This guy's mug should be on wanted posters in every post office in America. As Federal Reserve chairman from 1987 to 2006, he held the regulatory power to prevent the irrational inflation of the huge derivatives bubble that has now burst-- yet he fought fiercely through four presidencies to prevent even the meekest oversight by the Fed or any other agency. Nicknamed "The Oracle," Chairman Greenspan was inscrutable and arrogant, but he also possessed a detailed knowledge of financial minutiae and an air of superiority that simultaneously bedazzled and intimidated presidents, lawmakers, and other public officials.

However, not everyone was sanguine about the chairman's reliance on derivatives [see below] as the pillar of Wall Street's financial strength. Many wise heads viewed these financial "products" as speculative mumbo-jumbo. Billionaire financier George Soros says his firm never invested in them "because we don't really understand how they work." Investment banker Felix Rohatyn described them as "hydrogen bombs." Back in 2003, investment guru Warren Buffett called them "financial weapons of mass destruction" that were "potentially lethal" for our economy.

But Greenspan's voice was the most powerful, and he was both a determined bureaucratic protector and an exuberant cheerleader for derivatives. Meanwhile, wealthy investors worldwide were making a killing from their investments in these bizarre pieces of paper, and few in Washington were willing even to question The Oracle.

"I always felt that the titans of our legislature didn't want to reveal their own inability to understand some of the concepts that Mr. Greenspan was setting forth," said Arthur Levitt, a well-regarded Wall Street regulator under Clinton. "I don't recall anyone ever saying, 'What do you mean by that, Alan?'"

So the bubble kept expanding.

Why was Greenspan so insistent on no regulation? Because he is the hardest of hardcore laissez-faire ideologues, holding a blazing disdain for government. An avowed worshiper of libertarian novelist Ayn Rand, he views public oversight of business as an evil force that deters the creativity of smart elites. He is so psyched by his religious-like faith in the "free market" that he fervently believes in what he considers to be the innate good will and moral superiority of investors and bankers. He asserts that these self-interested individuals can simply be trusted to do the right thing, and that government should not second-guess their decisions.

Even the faith of snake handlers is not as devout as Greenspan's. Unfortunately, however, he was able to hitch our nation's economic well-being to his own absurdist ideological fancy. The guy who was lionized as the smartest, most- stable economic thinker in the land essentially turns out to have been a quasi-religious nut.


A GOP member of Congress for 17 years, Cox was another deregulation diehard and a reliable advocate for Wall Street's pampered CEO class--a role he continued to play after Bush chose him in 2005 to succeed Donaldson as SEC chair. At the commission, he weakened the ability of the enforcement staff even to investigate securities violations by Wall Street firms, much less prosecute them. Also, in an act of pure ideological folly, he eliminated an office that had been set up specifically to watch out for future problems with such high-risk investments as derivatives.

In essence, he took the cops off the beat at the very time more cops were needed. In October, when the stuff was hitting the fan, a chagrined Cox offered this brilliant insight: "The last six months have made it abundantly clear that voluntary regulation does not work." Thanks, Chris.


The Securities and Exchange Commission supposedly regulates investment banks, and in 2004 it was headed by--guess who?--a Wall Street investment banker, Bill Donaldson. On April 28 of that year, he presided over a little-noticed SEC meeting held in the commission's basement to consider an obscure rule change urgently requested by the Big Five investment banks (including Goldman Sachs, then headed by Henry Paulson--yes, the same treasury secretary who just designed George W's Wall Street bailout). The bankers wanted an exemption from a sensible requirement that they keep a sizeable pool of money on hand to cover potential losses. Turn these reserve funds loose, pleaded the bankers, so we can put more of our investors' money into this opaque but lucrative area known as derivatives.

After less than an hour of discussion, Donaldson and his four SEC colleagues voted unanimously to do this favor for the bankers. As a bonus, the generous commissioners also decided to let the banks themselves monitor the level of risk they were putting on investors--and ultimately on the backs of taxpayers.

In this one meeting, which was not covered by the media, the dereg geniuses had struck another major blow for banker recklessness, and the likes of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and others were sent further down the giddy path to their--and our--ruin. "The problem with such voluntary [regulations]," said Roderick Hills, Gerald Ford's former SEC chairman, "is that, as we've seen throughout history, they often don't work." Duh!


As honcho of Goldman Sachs, Hank drew a $37 million paycheck the year before Bush waved him into the Treasury Department to oversee the whole U.S. economy. At Goldman, he was considered one of Wall Street's "smart guys" who had figured out how to make billions in brokerage fees by packaging and selling these wondrous pieces of wizardry called derivatives, and he came into government as an unquestioning believer in deregulatory doctrine. Now that deregulated derivatives have turned out to be so much hokum, Hank's in charge of the bailout--and his former firm is in line to get at least $10 billion from it.

The Paulson bailout plan is flawed in many awful ways, but start with this basic one: the money (some estimates now put the total taxpayer cost above $2 trillion) is being handed to the same schemers and finaglers who caused the crash. The public gets to contribute the funds, but it gets no seat at the table to decide how the system (and who in it) will be "rescued."

With typical antigovernment extremism, Paulson's plan makes the public passive investors in the banks we're saving, leaving all the say-so to the banks' current executives and directors. Our money is being given away by the Bush ideologues with no strings attached--not even a requirement that it go into new loans so credit can quickly flow into the American economy again! Excuse me? Unclogging that credit flow was Paulson's rationale for giving $125 billion to nine giant banks (Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of New York, and State Street). He now says he "hopes" the banks will use the money to make loans, but he refuses to require them to do so.

Meanwhile, bankers themselves say they are more likely simply to sit on the money for awhile or--get this--use it to buy up smaller competitors! Yes, that means that our tax dollars will go toward eliminating competition in America's banking market. Not only will this leave consumers and businesses with fewer choices, but this will also increase the size of poorly managed megabanks that have already been designated by the Bush-Paulson regime as "too big to fail."

Laissez-faire follies

One positive to come from this collapse is that it exposes the bankruptcy of several core ideas that have been pushed by free-market illusionists. For example, market infallibility--the notion that Wall Street investors, analysts, and bankers know more than anyone else, and the government (aka the public) should just get the hell out of the way and behold unfettered genius at work. So, behold. (And, by the way, these are the exact same people who only months ago were insisting that Americans would be so much better off if they would move their Social Security money from government hands to the more adventuresome wizards of Wall Street.)

Yet, those bankers and politicos who pushed this antigovernment ethos to today's disastrous conclusion remain delusional. They cry for trillions of our tax dollars, but they insist that the profiteers must control the bailout and remain free of public supervision. George W himself still sticks with fantasy over reality, claiming that the fundamentals of the system are sound and that it is "essential" that any reforms not interfere with the "free market."

It's been a scream to hear these devout market ideologues explain how they've just become Wall Street socialists. Having big, bad government buy up the failed investments, then partially nationalize America's financial system, is an unwelcome choice for Bush. "I frankly don't want the government involved," he said. "It was necessary." Bailout chief Paulson (dubbed "King Henry" by Newsweek) said, "We regret having to take these actions"--but they're necessary.

Why necessary? Because laissez-faire ideology is a crock. It failed. Americans are not being told the blunt truth, which is that the financial mess we're in today is a direct result of the laissez-faire fraud that Wall Street and Washington willfully imposed on our nation. CEOs and banking lobbyists, presidents and treasury secretaries, regulators and lawmakers (of both parties) failed to protect America from money-grubbing bankers, hedge-fund speculators, and other big players.

As we've learned in the past few weeks, there is no "free" market. Indeed, it's quite pricey when it trips and falls over the inevitable outcroppings of greed. That's why strong, vigilant, and aggressive public regulation is essential. Don't be fooled by claims that just throwing money at the hucksters will fix the problem. The only way to make America's financial system trustworthy is to return to the sound fundamentals of public oversight--starting with the bailout itself.

Derivatives: What are these things?

Derivatives amount to a casino game. They are pieces of paper whose only real value is derived from the anticipated value of some other tangible asset--such as mortgages on people's homes. Wall Street banks buy up millions of these pieces of paper from local lenders, package them into inscrutable securities called derivatives, add a nice profit margin, and sell them to wealthy individuals, foreign governments, pension funds, etc.

The derivatives sold by Wall Street are actually bets that something will happen. Thus, in the case of mortgage-based derivatives, investors placed bets that the value of the homes underlying the pieces of paper they had bought would keep increasing and that homeowners would keep making their monthly mortgage payments. Millions weren't able to, and BLAMMO!--the bubble burst.

But the financial crash wasn't the fault of struggling, low-wage working folks who weren't able to meet their obligations. That's a cynical lie now being pushed by right-wing corporate apologists. Note also that the derivatives game created by Wall Street smarties is based not only on mortgages, but also--and much more--on the future value of everything from commodities like oil and pork bellies to shares of stock and the weather (yes, there are even derivatives based on which way the wind will blow).

Jim Hightower

Source / Hightower Lowdown

Thanks to David Hamilton / The Rag Blog

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