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2002 CWA Legislative-Political Conference: "Agitation Is What Made America"
Editor’s Note: Political humorist and grassroots activist Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator and writer who’s been called “America’s most popular populist.” His latest campaign is the “Rolling Thunder Democracy Tour,” a nationwide drive to “reawaken a great American tradition of asserting the power of regular people to fight for their rights.” Read more at www.rollingthundertour.org and www.jimhightower.com. Below is an abbreviated version of Hightower’s folksy, funny and fervent breakfast address at the close of CWA’s Legislative-Political Conference March 6.
It’s a real joy to join you rowdy and raucous CWAers, you champions of working families, you corporate butt-kickers, you agitators for fairness, justice and the democratic way.
It makes me happier than a flea at a dog show to see you organizing and strategizing to take power back from the downsizers and globalizers, the Enroners and Global Crossers who’ve been running roughshod over the workaday majority. Sometimes they get to thinking they’re top dogs and the rest of us are just a bunch of fire hydrants.
I referred to you as agitators. The powers that be try to make that a pejorative: "Oh those agitators. Our workers at the factory were perfectly happy until those union agitators came in and stirred things up. The poor people didn’t mind living up against a toxic waste dump until those agitators came in."
Horse hockey to all that. Agitation is what made America. Were it not for agitators we’d all be sitting here in white powdered wigs singing "God Save the Queen." Agitation is what America is. I’m talking about Pamphleteers and Sons of Liberty, Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglas, abolitionists and suffragists, Populists and Wobblies, Mother Jones and Joe Hill,
John L. Lewis and A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez. And, now, you and me.
We’re in one of those "when in the course of human events" moments when the powers that be have separated themselves from the great majority of people in this country. We’ve got to assert our democratic rights again, take charge back at the grassroots level. Be an agitator.
What’s at work in the White House, on Capitol Hill and on Wall Street is the abandonment of something fundamental, the concept of "the common good," the notion that we’re all in this together.
This ethic of the common good is the social glue that binds us together as one people. But the powers that be displaced America’s time-honored ethic of the common good with a new, pernicious ethic of greed: "I got mine."
You want greed? Of all the economic gains produced by We the People in the past 15 years, 70 percent of the gains went to the wealthiest 1 percent. Money magazine declared "Everyone is Getting Rich." Hello? Everyone? In that period of unprecedented economic prosperity, eight out of 10 people saw their income go flat or go down. Wages today in real buying power are below what they were when Richard Nixon was president. This is progress? This is greed.
CEOs, of course, are getting fatter than butchers’ dogs. Let’s have a show of hands. Any of you make $287,000 last year? One person who did is Disney’s Michael Eisner. But not for a year. Not for a month. Not for a week or even a day. That’s what he made an hour — plus a car. At the same time, he’s reaching out to take back the health care benefit from the minimum-wage workers he dresses up as Goofy and Pluto and all the gang at Disney World.
Some of these guys are so rich they could afford to air-condition Hell. I tell you what: They’d better be setting aside money for that project.
Oh, but I’m told, "Hightower, you can’t talk like that anymore. You’ve got to set political agendas aside." It’s "United We Stand," they tell us. Even some of our own progressive leaders tell us to "tone it down, lay low, don’t rock the patriotic boat, be quiet."
Be quiet? Holy Thomas Paine! Since when do patriotic freedom-loving Americans cower in quietude? Be quiet? President Bush’s corporate buddies on K Street aren’t quiet. In fact, they’re quite noisy, shouting "Terrorism, Patriotism, God Bless America" at the top of their lungs, while unscrewing the Capitol dome and reaching in with both hands to loot We the People.
Here’s some looting: You heard about the $15 billion bailout of the airlines. What you might not have heard is that there was a special provision to guarantee that the CEOs could keep getting their fat salaries, bonuses and pensions. There was another special provision that not one dime of the $15 billion should go to the 140,000 workers that the airline industry punted right after Sept. 11.
Then, when Dick Gephardt suggested that there should at least be some extended unemployment benefits for these workers, suddenly the Republican Majority Leader Dick Armey was up on his hind legs to say, and I quote: "That would not, I believe, be commensurate with the American spirit."
Be quiet, they tell us. But we can’t be quiet. We have no right to be quiet. Too many democracy fighters and union fighters before us have fought, bled and died to make speaking out, organizing, protesting and agitating possible today.
The opposite of courage is not cowardice. It’s conformity. Even a dead fish can go with the flow. Our challenge is to agitate, but especially to organize. Agitation without organization equals frustration. But agitation with organization equals victory.
I’m lucky. I get to travel America and I get to visit with folks at the chat-and-chew cafes, the salons and saloons and kitchen tables and I find that just about every place that’s got a zip code there’s someone or some group of someones fighting against the economic and political exclusion being pressed down upon us. What I find is that regular folks want exactly what you and I want. We want our country back, back from the greedheads, the speculators, the spoilers and bigshots.
My message is, go to the grassroots level. That’s where our strength is. We’re going to forge a coalition of people power and we’ll overwhelm their coalition of money power. I know it’s not easy to get the coalition together. It’s kind of like loading frogs into wheelbarrow. But once we do it, we win.
It’s a real joy to join you rowdy and raucous CWAers, you champions of working families, you corporate butt-kickers, you agitators for fairness, justice and the democratic way.
It makes me happier than a flea at a dog show to see you organizing and strategizing to take power back from the downsizers and globalizers, the Enroners and Global Crossers who’ve been running roughshod over the workaday majority. Sometimes they get to thinking they’re top dogs and the rest of us are just a bunch of fire hydrants.
I referred to you as agitators. The powers that be try to make that a pejorative: "Oh those agitators. Our workers at the factory were perfectly happy until those union agitators came in and stirred things up. The poor people didn’t mind living up against a toxic waste dump until those agitators came in."
Horse hockey to all that. Agitation is what made America. Were it not for agitators we’d all be sitting here in white powdered wigs singing "God Save the Queen." Agitation is what America is. I’m talking about Pamphleteers and Sons of Liberty, Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglas, abolitionists and suffragists, Populists and Wobblies, Mother Jones and Joe Hill,
John L. Lewis and A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez. And, now, you and me.
We’re in one of those "when in the course of human events" moments when the powers that be have separated themselves from the great majority of people in this country. We’ve got to assert our democratic rights again, take charge back at the grassroots level. Be an agitator.
What’s at work in the White House, on Capitol Hill and on Wall Street is the abandonment of something fundamental, the concept of "the common good," the notion that we’re all in this together.
This ethic of the common good is the social glue that binds us together as one people. But the powers that be displaced America’s time-honored ethic of the common good with a new, pernicious ethic of greed: "I got mine."
You want greed? Of all the economic gains produced by We the People in the past 15 years, 70 percent of the gains went to the wealthiest 1 percent. Money magazine declared "Everyone is Getting Rich." Hello? Everyone? In that period of unprecedented economic prosperity, eight out of 10 people saw their income go flat or go down. Wages today in real buying power are below what they were when Richard Nixon was president. This is progress? This is greed.
CEOs, of course, are getting fatter than butchers’ dogs. Let’s have a show of hands. Any of you make $287,000 last year? One person who did is Disney’s Michael Eisner. But not for a year. Not for a month. Not for a week or even a day. That’s what he made an hour — plus a car. At the same time, he’s reaching out to take back the health care benefit from the minimum-wage workers he dresses up as Goofy and Pluto and all the gang at Disney World.
Some of these guys are so rich they could afford to air-condition Hell. I tell you what: They’d better be setting aside money for that project.
Oh, but I’m told, "Hightower, you can’t talk like that anymore. You’ve got to set political agendas aside." It’s "United We Stand," they tell us. Even some of our own progressive leaders tell us to "tone it down, lay low, don’t rock the patriotic boat, be quiet."
Be quiet? Holy Thomas Paine! Since when do patriotic freedom-loving Americans cower in quietude? Be quiet? President Bush’s corporate buddies on K Street aren’t quiet. In fact, they’re quite noisy, shouting "Terrorism, Patriotism, God Bless America" at the top of their lungs, while unscrewing the Capitol dome and reaching in with both hands to loot We the People.
Here’s some looting: You heard about the $15 billion bailout of the airlines. What you might not have heard is that there was a special provision to guarantee that the CEOs could keep getting their fat salaries, bonuses and pensions. There was another special provision that not one dime of the $15 billion should go to the 140,000 workers that the airline industry punted right after Sept. 11.
Then, when Dick Gephardt suggested that there should at least be some extended unemployment benefits for these workers, suddenly the Republican Majority Leader Dick Armey was up on his hind legs to say, and I quote: "That would not, I believe, be commensurate with the American spirit."
Be quiet, they tell us. But we can’t be quiet. We have no right to be quiet. Too many democracy fighters and union fighters before us have fought, bled and died to make speaking out, organizing, protesting and agitating possible today.
The opposite of courage is not cowardice. It’s conformity. Even a dead fish can go with the flow. Our challenge is to agitate, but especially to organize. Agitation without organization equals frustration. But agitation with organization equals victory.
I’m lucky. I get to travel America and I get to visit with folks at the chat-and-chew cafes, the salons and saloons and kitchen tables and I find that just about every place that’s got a zip code there’s someone or some group of someones fighting against the economic and political exclusion being pressed down upon us. What I find is that regular folks want exactly what you and I want. We want our country back, back from the greedheads, the speculators, the spoilers and bigshots.
My message is, go to the grassroots level. That’s where our strength is. We’re going to forge a coalition of people power and we’ll overwhelm their coalition of money power. I know it’s not easy to get the coalition together. It’s kind of like loading frogs into wheelbarrow. But once we do it, we win.