Populist Passion Is Antidote to Bankster Greed

It is hard to imagine a better setting for Jim Hightower to
renew the populist call to action than Fighting Bob Fest, the
county-fair-style outdoor gathering of 10,000 progressives where
the agitator from Austin will appear Sept. 11.

And it is hard to imagine a better time.

Hightower has for almost three decades -- since his election as
Texas agriculture commissioner in the second year of the
Reagan/Bush era -- been America's best-known and most ardent
progressive populist.

Along the way, he has defended family farmers and factory
workers, small-business owners and teachers, neglected rural
communities, and inner cities from the ravages of the Wall Street
speculators and their political handmaidens in Washington. During
the farm crisis of the 1980s, it was Hightower who rallied
activists across the country and forced Democrats to get serious
about tackling the abuses of big agribusiness. That initiative
spawned a renewed rural populism that produced a new generation of
candidates in the Hightower mold: Minnesota's Paul Wellstone,
Wisconsin's Ed Garvey, Iowa's Tom Harkin. In the 1990s, he warned
that trade agreements like NAFTA would devastate farm country and
factory towns, and, like Wellstone and Wisconsin Sen. Russ
Feingold, he condemned not just the Republicans but Democrats like
Bill Clinton for selling out America's economic future.

Of course, Hightower was a critic of bailouts for Wall Street
and, with Feingold, he was a critic of the so-called banking reform
that Congress passed this summer. Of that legislation, Hightower
observed: "The regulatory reforms were hailed by Democrats as
possessing powerful cleansing power, while Republicans wailed that
the new rules were overly caustic, imposing such a heavy-handed
governmental scrub that the delicate layers of Wall Street
innovation, competitiveness and profitability will be rubbed away.
Meanwhile, the big bankers were grinning from ear to ear, for the
bill requires no restructuring and decentralizing of the
monopolistic grip that these giants have on America's credit
system. Thus, they still retain the power to rip off consumers,
gamble with depositors' money, haul in exorbitant profits and pay
themselves ungodly bonuses -- all while remaining 'too big to fail.'
"

That's the truth, not the spin.

We will need more of that if we are to stand a chance in the
great wrestling match over how the banking bill will be implemented
-- with real regulators or toothless tigers in charge of key
agencies, with consumers calling the shots or lobbyists continuing
to define things, with Wall Streeters forced to take responsibility
for their greed or with taxpayers facing the threat of another
"bailout" raid on the treasury.

When Hightower appears at Fighting Bob Fest events (Sept. 10
with Feingold at the Barrymore in Madison; Sept. 11 with the Rev.
Jesse Jackson and others at the Sauk County Fairgrounds in Baraboo)
he won't tell anyone to trust the Democrats or the Republicans.
He'll do what progressive populists going back to Robert M. La
Follette have done: shine a light on the honest players and shine
an even brighter light on the banksters and the unindicted
co-conspirators in both parties.