Who's In Charge Here?

Readers will laugh at the choice one-liners in Jim Hightower's latest book, If The Gods Had Meant Us To Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates, but the author hopes readers will be angry enough to do something about the deplorable state of American politics rather than merely laughing through their pain.

The former agriculture commissioner of Texas and author of There's Nothing in the Middle of the Road but Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos, Hightower has developed something of a cult following through his nationally syndicated "Chat and Chew" radio program. Instead of passively accepting the choices our nominal two-party system has offered for president, Hightower insists that the national election should be a kitchen-table consultation with the "real-world majority," the 80 percent of Americans who earn less than $50,000 a year. This conversation, the author believes, would create an agenda based on the values of economic fairness, social justice, and equal opportunity as opposed to the agenda of the corporate elite, who, Hightower believes, control both parties and have already bought the 2000 election.

This "corporatocracy," as he refers to it, is in his view the greatest current threat to our democracy. If you want to know the nature of contemporary political campaigns, follow the money trail, but as Hightower notes most Americans don't send money down that path. Ninety-six percent don't contribute to political campaigns and less than one-half of 1 percent contribute more than $1,000, which makes 99 percent irrelevant to the process.

Hightower spares no one in his scathing critique of both parties. A Democrat, he is particularly harsh on his party's standard bearer, President Clinton. It was the '96 Clinton campaign that perfected the art of raising soft money, he says; Clinton's legacy will be "raw political cynicism." But Hightower spreads the blame further. Referring to the scandal that ultimately led to Newt Gingrich's demise as the Speaker of the House - when he was censored for using funds from his "nonprofit organization" for partisan political purposes - the author writes, "If you're a corporate executive, getting a tax deduction for buying a politician is about as much fun as you can have with your clothes on."

THE NEW ECONOMIC world order - promoted and protected by politicians - of Wall Street, mega-mergers, globalization, NAFTA, and the WTO is the chief force keeping the real-world majority from organizing themselves effectively. And the new economy, Hightower argues, hasn't created the unprecedented prosperity that politicians, investment bankers, and the media have celebrated.

The top 20 percent of the population own 96 percent of the stocks, 85 percent of the net worth, and 89 percent of the stock gains, he says. For most Americans (the 75 percent who don't have a college degree and the majority who earn $30,000 or less) wages have gone down from $13.61 a hour in 1973 to $12.77 a hour today, when figures are adjusted for inflation.

"Who the hell is in charge?" will be the defining political question in the next century, Hightower believes. He sees signs of hope, such as the Living Wage campaigns and the emergence of the New Party, but change has to begin at the local level, with city councils, county commissions, and the like. Hightower also believes the majority will unite in their distaste for corporate greed and abuses and create a new politics that is bottom-up and not Left to Right. An analysis of how divisions on cultural issues such as guns, abortion, and gay rights could derail efforts to unite the Left and Right against a common corporate enemy is absent from his critique. Moreover, Hightower should have offered more details to flesh out his vision for a new populist movement.

Nonetheless, If The Gods Had Meant Us To Vote will be welcomed by those who believe the new world order isn't what it's claimed to be.

CHRIS BYRD, a native of Washington, D.C., is a veteran social justice activist and freelance writer. He lived in Texas for four years during Hightower's tenure as agriculture commissioner.

If The Gods Had Meant Us To Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates. Hightower, Jim. HarperCollins, 01/01/00.