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They're Stealing Our Country, and It's Time to Take It Back

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They're Stealing Our Country, and It's Time to Take It Back 04-179 (36a) Ch 36 6/17/04 6:51 AM Page 411 • 36 • Thieves in High Places: They’re Stealing Our Country, and It’s Time to Take It Back Jim Hightower A bout a year ago, I saw a bumper sticker on a pickup truck in Austin, Texas,that said: “Where are we going, and what am I doing in this handbasket?” Most people in the country, I find, have a strong sense that something funda- mental is happening here, something that is bad for them and bad for our country. I think we’re in another of those “when in the course of human events” moments that Jefferson wrote about, a moment in which it’s not King George III in England, it’s not royalty, but global corporate power that is usurping our democracy and usurp- ing decision-making over every aspect of our lives. The founding ethic of the common good is the idea that we’re all in this to- gether. But the conservatives are supplanting the ethic with a new ethic of greed that says: I’ve got mine; you get yours; never give a sucker an even break; caveat emptor; I’m rich and you’re not; adios, chump. That’s pretty much what it comes down to. They’re separating the good fortune of the few from the needed fortune of the many. We see it in plutocratic actions that they take: There is the tax giveaway, more than a trillion dollars now to the top one percent of wealth-earners in our country, at the same time they provide zero to the twelve million children of working fami- lies who do indeed pay income tax. Meanwhile, while they’re shoveling money up to the very top, there was a net loss of more than two million jobs from 2001 to the end of 2003. Ten million people are presently unemployed, and there was a 184 percent increase in long-term unemployment from 2001 to the end of 2003. I mean, imag- ine what they would have been doing if they had actually won the 2000 election. Then of course there is the growing autocracy: The Homeland Security Act, Patriot I, and now Patriot II. It’s not a very pretty sight at all. We see it in a lot of other ways: The new imperial presidency,the executive au- thority that’s being asserted and, I’m ashamed to say,that the Congress is going along with, allowing it to happen. Those are the edicts and directives that are coming out 411 04-179 (36a) Ch 36 6/17/04 6:51 AM Page 412 412 Jim Hightower of the White House, many of them late in the evening on Friday, when the media doesn’t get a hold of them and there’s no chance for other people to react. In my book Thieves in High Places, I wrote a little section in which I took the sum of the environmental edicts that occurred from March of 2001 when they came into office to March 2003, just a two-year period of time. It’s not the individual items that are significant here. It’s the impact of the whole volume of this. The edicts com- ing out of the White House are fundamentally changing the rules of the game, which are being bent more and more in favor of the plunderers and the spoilers and the speculators out there. THE WOBBLYCRATS AND AUNT EULAH The rich need representation too, so they have it in the White House. But where’s my party? Where’s the Democratic Party? I was elected to two terms in the state of Texas on the Democratic ticket, much to the amusement of the people down there, but nonetheless there I was, and proud to have been so, and proud to be a Democrat in the old Democratic tradition. But now it’s become the Wobblycrat Party, too willing to go along with the corporate interests. I’ll tell you a personal story. My old Aunt Eulah used to farm up in northeast Texas in Bonham,on the Red River. The congressional districts of Carl Albert, Sam Rayburn, and Wright Patman were adjacent there, back in the old pop- ulist days, right along that river. So we do have a history that we can look back at with some pride. My Aunt Eulah’s husband, Ernest, died early, about fifty years of age, and Eulah had to leave the farm. She moved in with her daughter, Velma, down at Maude, Texas, and worked as a waitress in the Maude Cafe there. Well suddenly, much to our amaze- ment, Eulah disappeared. She just up and poof, she was gone. We didn’t know what had happened. But we finally learned that a Mr. Green (we never did learn his first name), a traveling salesman and an apparently dazzling figure, came through to the Maude Cafe, swept Eulah right off her feet, and just hauled off with her. We finally got a postcard from Cheyenne, Wyoming. Mr. Green had taken Eu- lah to the Cheyenne Rodeo and Eulah was just giddy beyond belief. She had never seen such a thing, and she was just filled with romance and said that they were next going to Oregon. Just a few days later we got a mournful telephone call from Eulah, late at night. In Oregon, Mr. Green had come to understand that Eulah did not in- herit any money from husband Ernest and the farm. They were tenant farmers. So Mr. Green took off and we had to send bus money to bring Eulah home with us. I think of my Democratic Party in terms of Eulah and Mr. Green. Mr. Green has run off with the Democratic Party and I’m wondering, if we sent bus money would they come home? They have been swept off by lobbyists and corporate 04-179 (36a) Ch 36 6/17/04 6:51 AM Page 413 Thieves in High Places 413 money, the same money that the Republicans take. And they’ve taken off their old Sears Roebuck work boots and strapped on the same Guccis and Puccis that the Re- publicans are strutting around in. LET’S BLOW THE FOAM OFF THAT BEER Not too long ago, Tom Daschle was asked on one of the Sunday morning yackety- yak shows why the Democrats didn’t offer some sort of bold alternative to President Bush’s latest tax cut for the wealthy, and Daschle said: “Well, you have to take one step at a time.” And you think: Really? I mean, is this an AA program? In recent years, the White House didn’t take one step at a time. It took great kangaroo leaps out there, changing our country. If the meek ever inherit the Earth, Daschle and gang are going to be land barons. Then we heard from the Democratic Leadership Council types: Oh well, Bush was so strong, we couldn’t fight him; we had to be more like him, in fact. He had all the money. He had the popularity. The media were behind him. He was the War President. And he had a mandate. All right, he didn’t win the presidency actually in 2000, but in 2002, with the congressional off-year elections, he got a mandate. He won both houses of Congress. Well, let’s blow the foam off that beer about that 2002 “mandate.” This is really important. I’m not big on numbers, but follow this briefly with me. These are num- bers that Curtis Gans assembled in his great electoral research on the congressional elections of 2002. Some 33 percent of eligible voters voted in congressional elections in 2002—33 percent. Of those, 17 percent of the eligible voters chose Republican can- didates, 15 percent chose Democrats, and 1 percent chose “other.” So there’s the Re- publican mandate. That’s it—17 percent of the eligible voters in America represent the Republican mandate, with which they now are trying to undo our democracy. That is not a political juggernaut, 17 percent of the eligible voters. They can’t get any more than that. In fact, that’s the same 17 percent that the Republicans got in 1982, in the first off-year election under Reagan. Newt got a little better than that. He got 19 percent of eligible voters in 1994, when he swept to power and imploded under the force of his own ego. And that’s as much as they’re going to get, because they have a policy that Americans do not agree with. They’re not going to increase their total above 19 percent of eligible voters. Yet they won in 2002 essentially because the Democrats didn’t run. George Washington Plunkett, a Tammany Hall boss at the turn of the last century,said:“The Democratic Party of the nation ain’t dead, though it has been giving a lifelike imi- tation of a corpse for several years.” That’s where I think we are right now. What was the bumper sticker for Democratic congressional candidates in 2002? It was: “Well, we support the tax cut for the rich too; and, yeah, we’re behind the 04-179 (36a) Ch 36 6/17/04 6:51 AM Page 414 414 Jim Hightower homeland-security thing; and by the way, we’re for the Iraq war, too, but we’re not quite as enthusiastic as the White House is about it all. So vote for us.” That didn’t work.
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