Jim Hightower--The Progressive Interview---great piece!!! [View All]

[Gloria]

http://www.progressive.org/nov03/intv1103.html

November 2003 Issue
Jim Hightower
The Progressive Interview by Matthew Rothschild



SNIP

Question: How are your Rolling Thunder events going?

Jim Hightower: We're drawing thousands of people, almost despite our inept organizing. Our slogan is let's put the party back in politics. Politics ought to be fun. It shouldn't be just boring meetings.

Q: But the mainstream media looks across the land and sees apathy. What's going on?

Hightower: The media's asleep. The media is also corporate. It doesn't get this. When we started Rolling Thunder, the first one we had was in my hometown of Austin, Texas, and the daily newspaper, a Cox tentacle, didn't cover it. They didn't get it. Why would people come to this? But 6,000 people did come, the biggest political event in the history of Austin. And yet they still couldn't figure it out.

The media isn't only asleep; it doesn't want to know this news, that the people are revolting, in the very best sense of the term, revolting against the thieves in high places and reaching out to each other, which is our great strength. When you can draw that many people, you've got something going. You don't have to worry if the guys in suits are going to put it on the front page or not.
(SNIP)

Q: What's behind this revolt?

Hightower: Bush and the corporate kleptocrats have stomped on too many people and left too many people out of the system, and those people are now in rebellion. It's not just poor people they are holding down but the middle class, as well. I have a favorite bumper sticker I saw on a pickup truck last year in Austin. It said, "Where are we going? And what am I doing in this hand basket?"

Most people have a sense that things have gone terribly wrong. It's not just some giveaways to the rich and the rigging of regulatory rules. It's something fundamental. The very idea of America is being stolen, and people are sensing that with a tremor within their hearts. They are taking away this core notion of the common good, this idea that we are all in it together. They are diverting America from our historic striving towards egalitarianism, which is why America exists. It's the thing that makes us unique in history. That's what people are sensing. We are going down the wrong path.

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