Jim Hightower
Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the book, Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow. 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.
Articles by this author
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Views Wednesday, January 01, 2020 What If You Were to Own Your Own Power Company? About 40 years ago, a right-wing codger named Eddie Chiles became a momentary political celebrity in my state by buying airtime on hundreds of radio stations to broadcast his daily political rants. Having made a fortune in the Texas oil fields, he pitched himself as a rags-to-riches, self-made... Read more |
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Views Wednesday, December 18, 2019 Can 'Powerless Nobodies' Fight the Corporate Powers? The many sparkling bays along the Texas coastline of the Gulf of Mexico have long provided both a working-class living and a valued lifestyle for generations of shrimpers, oysterers and other fishing families. People and seafood, however, are not the only creatures here, for such wildlife as... Read more |
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Views Wednesday, December 11, 2019 'Tax the Rich' Is No Longer Just a Political Slogan There's nothing inevitable about inequality. It's an injustice that the moneyed powers and their political hirelings have chosen. We the People can choose a brighter path, one that bends toward justice, starting with a wealth tax such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren's plan to apply a 2% per annum wealth... Read more |
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Views Thursday, November 28, 2019 Eating Is Profoundly Political. Which Food Future Will You Choose? It's time to talk turkey! No, not the Butterball sitting in the Oval Office. I'm talking about the real thing, the big bird, 46 million of which we Americans will devour on this Thanksgiving Day. It was the Aztecs who first domesticated the gallopavo , but leave it to the Spanish explorers to "foul... Read more |
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Views Sunday, November 24, 2019 How Trump's Poverty Subsidy Enriches the Rich Years ago, a Texas legislator who was occasionally known to take lobbyists' cash in exchange for a vote, explained his ethical framework as opportunistic: "I seen my chances, and I took 'em." Likewise, such hustlers as Dan Gilbert (the billionaire founder of Quicken Loans), Michael Milken (the... Read more |
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Views Wednesday, September 11, 2019 Why Would We Trust Plutocrats to Save Us From Plutocracy? Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote of being leery of a loud-talking huckster who visited his home: "The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons," Emerson exclaimed. Likewise, today's workaday families should do a mass inventory of their silverware as an integrity check on a mess... Read more |
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Views Wednesday, September 04, 2019 Here's the Real Deal on 'Medicare for All' What do we want our health care system to do? Care for our health! Yours, mine, our families', our country's. But don't look for such straightforward logic or ethics in the labyrinthian industrial complex that now controls the "care" we get — or are denied. The structure itself must be changed if... Read more |
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Views Wednesday, August 28, 2019 The Problem With Health Care Is 'The System' The British people have been widely admired for their steady demeanor in times of adversity — stiff upper lip and all that. Until Donald Trump, that is. In June, our presidential popinjay descended on London with a bombastic proposition that caused the upper lips of the entire British population to... Read more |
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Views Saturday, August 24, 2019 Just Who Got Trump's Farm Bailouts? Donald Trump loves farmers. We know this because he says so. “Farmers, I LOVE YOU!” he declared in December. But he’s been “loving” them to death, with policies that are causing farm prices to tumble, miring our ag economy in the ditch and creating a rising tsunami of farm bankruptcies. Then came... Read more |
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Views Thursday, August 15, 2019 Government for the Rich, the Poor Be Damned Donald Trump loooooves farmers. We know this because he says so. "Farmers, I LOVE YOU!" he declared in December. And we've learned that whenever The Donald says something, it's true—even when it's not. These days, he's loving farmers to death. Trump has ignored the obvious need to get monopolistic... Read more |