E-Mail This Article to a Friend High and mighty In a corporate-centered nation, legendary Texan Jim Hightower spreads his message of progressive populism BY TAMARA WIEDER

YOU CAN CALL Jim Hightower all kinds of things: former Texas agriculture commissioner; national radio commentator; columnist; public speaker; modern-day Johnny Appleseed; founder of the nationwide "Rolling Thunder Down-Home Democracy Tour"; author of books such as If the Gods Had Meant Us To Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates (HarperCollins, 2000) and the recently published Thieves in High Places: They’ve Stolen Our Country and It’s Time To Take It Back (Viking); America’s most popular populist. But when it comes to the hell-raising Hightower, it’s best simply to let him do the talking.

Q: What initially started you down the political path?

A: I grew up in a small town north of Dallas called Dennison, in a populist milieu, without knowing that at the time. My family all had come off of tenant farms, some were still on those farms; my mother and father were small businesspeople in that town; people I ran around with were working-class kids; and in a family and community like that, there’s a natural anti-establishment attitude. My father thought he was a conservative, but if you talked to him about the power of the bank holding companies to squeeze small businesspeople like him, if you talked to him about the fact that the oil companies ran the state government, and about the power of the chain stores to squeeze him out, then you had scratched William Jennings Bryan. He wasn’t a liberal, but neither was he a Bushite corporatist conservative. He was a good old American radical, a maverick. So I grew up in that kind of atmosphere.

And then the other thing that happened was rock and roll, the civil-rights movement, and then the anti-Vietnam movement. All of that happened in my teen years and college years. It was at college that I first learned from a history professor that there was thing called populism, but I had actually grown up in it.

Q: What made you decide to stay in this field for a living?

A: First of all, the desire not to have to actually work for a living. Or at least to be able to sort of say what I wanted to and as much as possible do what I wanted to without technically having a boss who could stop me from it. A large part of my politics is fueled by outrage at what I see, of ordinary people whom I know to be the strength of this country rendered insignificant by the political and economic powers. And so I have always wanted to fight that.

Q: Do you feel like the rendering of ordinary people insignificant has accelerated?

A: Yes.

Q: When do you think that acceleration started?

A: I think a particular point was with the 1970-whatever Supreme Court decision [Buckley v. Valeo, issued in 1976] that said that money equals speech. And that essentially enthroned the money interests, and particularly the corporate interests, above the rest of us, the 99.6 percent of us who don’t make substantial campaign contributions. The real line in the sand for me was in 1982, I believe it was, when Tony Coelho was chair of the House Congressional Campaign Committee for the Democrats, the money-raising arm of the House of Representatives, and told the Democratic hierarchy at the time that the Democrats could get the same money that Republicans were getting, and that all we had to do was adjust our agenda a bit. And so the Democrats, which were the party of opposition, then suddenly became the party of "me too," going along with a corporate agenda, though wanting to be social liberals. And that, coupled with all kinds of other factors, including the rise of television in politics and all that, that basically meant that the ordinary working stiffs in the country had nobody standing up for them, nobody waving the old flag of populist Democratic politics. So they began not to participate.

Q: What’s a Wobblycrat?

A: A Wobblycrat is a Democrat turned to Jell-O, without the spine to stand up to corporate interests and, in the last couple of years, to the Bushites. As I note in the book, the Democratic congressional campaign of last year had a bumper sticker that amounted to "We’re for Bush’s war on Iraq, and we also support that homeland-security thing, and we did vote for those tax cuts for the rich, but we’re not quite as enthusiastic about it as the Republicans are, so vote for us." And so, big surprise, people didn’t. Mostly, people didn’t vote. So this selling out of the workaday majority, as I said, I can trace it back to the Supreme Court decision, the ’82 shift of the Democrats to money, but certainly with a vengeance, that shift has accelerated with Bush’s seizure of power.

Q: The book is called Thieves in High Places. Do you consider Bush the biggest thief of all?

A: Well, he’s the face of the theft, and I do point out in the book that it’s stupid to keep calling Bush stupid. True, he doesn’t have the brain muscle for any heavy lifting, but he knows that that’s not his role. He is the affable face of the kleptocracy, and he always has been; in his oil years, he was not the manager, he was the rainmaker, the guy with the bankable name who could attract investors. That’s what he was at the Texas Rangers baseball team; he had the title of general manager, but he didn’t manage anything, he was the PR guy. And that’s what he was as governor, and having served the kleptocrat interests so nicely there, he had an eager group wanting to put him into the presidency. If Cheney was president and doing all this, it wouldn’t be happening, because he’s got a smile like a landlord who’s just evicted another widow. It’s not sellable. Bush has that sellable persona.

Q: Talk to me about the situation in Iraq. What’s gone wrong and what, if anything, has gone right?

A: Well, the one thing that went right is that Saddam Hussein is not in power. The things that have gone wrong are that we went into that war under false pretenses, having lied to the world and to our own people and especially to the men and women who have had to fight the war that this was about something that it turns out it wasn’t, or about something that isn’t there, weapons of mass destruction, and that it was urgent, which it clearly was not. There are a lot of despots in the world that need to be gone, and that’s not our role, that is not what the founders had in mind, that’s not what the majority of the people have in mind of what America represents. We’re not the bully; we’re supposed to be the beacon. So fundamentally, the Bushites have sold American values and principle in order to get into a war that they now can’t seem to get out of.

Q: How do you think Wal-Mart has affected the country?

A: Wal-Mart’s got this yellow-smiley-face image of "Aw, shucks, we’re just regular folks from Arkansas wanting to sell you some stuff cheap." When in fact it has become not only the largest corporation in the world, the largest employer in the world, but a bully, amassing monopoly power that old John D. Rockefeller and the robber barons of that day could only dream about. Having now the power not only to be a wage-busting entity through its own employees but also being the leading force to ship its own manufacturing and the manufacturing of its suppliers to low-wage hellholes around the world. Then also having the bullying power to crush independent businesses in our towns and businesses through an arcane practice known as predatory pricing. And then also using its political and financial clout to cut behind-the-scenes deals with local developers and public officials, and then spring a big surprise on local neighborhoods, that, congratulations, you’ve now got a super-center next door to you.

Q: You talk about Wal-Mart being a bully. When kids are growing up and there’s a bully in the neighborhood, they’re told to ignore him and he’ll go away. What do you do about Wal-Mart?

A: Well, this bully won’t go away, and of course what you finally learn is that the bully has to be backed down. That’s the good news, that all across the country, including a whole lot right there in the New England area, local folks have risen up in odd-fellow coalitions involving Republican neighborhoods with labor unions with small businesses, to defeat Wal-Mart, to drive them out of town, and the bully doesn’t want other people knowing this, because it gives other people ideas. But folks are figuring it out, are learning about it, and therefore are having greater and greater success against it.

Q: You talk about giving people ideas; do you feel like that’s your job, to give people ideas, to light the flame?

A: I feel like it’s my job to give people hope, and information, for agitation and for literally taking their country back. The power establishment today, political, economic, media, essentially wants people to feel powerless, that there’s nothing they can do: oh, just lay back, you can’t beat Wal-Mart, and besides, you get cheap prices there, so why bother? And don’t bother trying to get upset by the political process — you don’t even have to vote, really. And if you are upset about something, write to your member of Congress! And in fact, that’s not the American people.

I’m lucky because I get to travel a lot, and my perception of America doesn’t come through the New York Times or the television networks. I’m able to be out there and talk with just regular folks, including people who don’t consider themselves political. And to see the anger, but also the aspiration, and to see the creativity and spirit of fun that is really the essence of Americans — we’re a big, brawling, boisterous country that’s not made up of people who cower in safe rooms with rolls of duct tape, but are rebels — that’s what built America, right there with Sam Adams and the Sons of Liberty and the great spirit of rebellion, not only among the founders, but among the Daniel Shays and the Thomas Paines that are even truer to the rebellious American spirit. What I find is that folks are not that fooled. We had an example of it last week, when the three Cabinet officials, [Treasury secretary John] Snow, [Labor secretary Elaine L.] Chao, and [Commerce secretary Don] Evans, went out on that bus tour to Wisconsin and Minnesota, spreading the "good news" that the economy is "picking up!" It’s like Winkin, Blinkin, and Nod going out there. I don’t know if they really think they’re fooling anybody but themselves, but they certainly are not. Because even a dog knows the difference between being stumbled over and being kicked, and folks know they’re being kicked.

And it’s no longer, "Oh, don’t worry about losing those manufacturing jobs because this is going to free you up to get one of those high-tech jobs or white-collar jobs." Now we find, of course, that those companies are shifting those jobs over to Pakistan and Russia and places to bust the income scale in this country. So what’s being destroyed, it’s not a matter of a job here, an industry there — the middle-class opportunity is being trampled on here, and that’s not going to stand. The American people, particularly the middle class that now finds themselves rudely downsized, economically and politically, are people who got a taste of it and are not going to just meekly subside into the political rhetoric. They’re going to be looking for alternatives. And we want those to be political alternatives, not violent, but they can become violent.

Q: How do you keep from getting depressed? What keeps you optimistic?

A: Well, it is the people themselves. It’s just remarkable what people are doing, and their spirit and their humor. I would be miserably depressed if I was like most folks, having to absorb the reality from television, rather than actually being out in the communities and learning what people are doing and finding not only that they are taking action, but more often than not are actually winning. So I see that it is possible to take our country back.

Q: You’ve been called "equal parts Will Rogers, Franklin Roosevelt, and P.T. Barnum." Do you think that’s an accurate description?

A: Oh, I guess so. I have very passionate political principles, beliefs, and I certainly have a feisty spirit, but I also believe that you can fight the gods and still have fun. Politics shouldn’t be about boring meetings; it oughta be a celebration, and a joyous scrapping for democratic power, for grassroots power. And you can’t have grassroots power without grassroots. And that means not just having meetings but having potluck suppers and having festivals; it means not just having salons but going into the saloons, you know, rubbing up against each other. As I say, putting the party back in politics.

Q: What’s your take on the California recall election?

A: Besides falling into fits of hilarity? A cynical perversion of the democratic process that some millionaire former thief and now burglar-alarm salesman could put up a couple of million bucks of his own money and undo an election just on whim is not what the initiative process was meant to do, and not what the electoral process is supposed to be about. It’s the opposite of democracy; it lets a moneyed elite control.

Q: Who inspires you?

A: Again, just the ordinary folks. I have people I greatly admire in history and even today, but I don’t believe in the "great man" theory of history. What really makes democracy work, what makes our republic function, is that ordinary folks have stood up throughout our history to extend our democratic possibilities, and so it’s the four farmers who sat around a kitchen table less than 100 miles from where I’m sitting now, in Lampasas, Texas, that led to the formation of the populist movement in the 1870s and 1880s. It’s the folks in those backwater black churches throughout the South in the ’40s and ’50s that created a civil-rights movement that could then sustain Martin Luther King. Those are the real heroes, the people who really put it on the line and fight and bleed and die to make it possible for us to try to achieve our ideals.

Q: How many newspapers do you read a day?

A: I read three, at least.

Q: How many do you trust?

A: I don’t trust any paper, but I find very useful information and some insights in just about all of them, either due to particular reporters or due to serendipity, that some story has revealed information that the paper has taken one slant on, but the same information can be used to make my points. Or insights mostly gained through the editorial cartoonists and the funny papers. And occasionally the sports pages.

Q: So you’re going on a book tour now?

A: It’s less of a book tour than it is a sort of rallying of folks to that theme of taking back our country. Having organizational meetings and rallies and fundraisers for local groups and that sort of thing along the way. Having been in politics, and to the amusement of the people of Texas, gotten elected a couple of times, I know that world, but I’m much happier being this sort of Johnny Appleseed of populism, and instead of running for office, running my mouth, with my radio commentaries and my newsletter, columns, books, and speeches that I do. So I see myself essentially as a messenger, not unlike the pamphleteers were.

Q: So we’re not going to see your name on any ballot anytime soon?

A: No. I promise not to do that to people. I’ve taken the cure.

Jim Hightower talks about and signs copies of Thieves in High Places at WordsWorth Books, in Cambridge, on August 21, at 7 p.m. Call (617) 354-5201. He appears at a luncheon to benefit TrueMajority at One Beacon Street, 30th floor, in Boston, on August 22, at noon. Admission is $50, which includes a copy of the book. Call (212) 243-3416. Tamara Wieder can be reached at twieder[a]phx.com