Jim Hightower

Betsy DeVos is Donald Trump’s multi-billionaire education secretary who hates the very idea of public education and loves the plutocratic idea of corporate rule over democracy. DeVos presently holds first place in the contest for worst member of Donald Trump’s cabinet. Her claim to be first among the worst has been buttressed by her bizarre […]

Today’s captains of corporate capitalism like to think of themselves not as mere businesspeople, but as modern society’s genius “innovators.” Sounds positive … until you ask the key question: Innovation for what purpose? After all, some of society’s most inventive minds are flimflammers, Ponzi-schemers, gamers and embezzlers. The latest of these is a hustle called […]

My father, W.F. “High” Hightower, was a populist. Only, he didn’t know it – didn’t know the word, much less the history or anything about populism’s rich democratic ethos. But he knew about bankers who regularly squeezed small-business families like ours with usurious interest rates. He knew how rough it was for a local business […]

Last year’s grassroots progressive runs for office laid to rest much of the Democratic Party’s orthodoxy about who is “electable” and how it’s essential that candidates – in hopes of attracting moderate “swing” voters – run big-money campaigns on small-bore, middle-of-the-road issues. For example, meet these eight big-issue/low-dollar candidates who rejected party orthodox and won: […]

From the start of his White House tenure, the Trumpsters have plotted, stalked and serially killed vibrant members of the English language. The word “fact” was the first to go. Robust and universally respected, fact was assassinated last year when one of Trump’s hired killers poisoned it with an unknown substance nicknamed: “alternative facts.” Their […]

A fresh “Reclaim the South” movement of young African-American populists is emerging, kindling long-suppressed hope in the racially scarred Deep South and offering the possibility of real economic and cultural progress. Guess who’s mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, the state’s capital city? Chokwe Antar Lumumba – a black, 34-year-old lawyer who was raised in Jackson in […]

Donald Trump, never lacking in self-esteem, bragged in 2016: “I know words – I have the best words.”Well, sometimes he does put together a coherent sentence using some very fine words that convey great promise, such as this one: “I’m going to fight for every person in this country who believes government should serve the […]

Last June, after Democratic candidates had lost four straight special Congressional elections, America’s purveyors of conventional political wisdom simultaneously jumped to the conclusion that the policies and message of Democrats were just too progressive for our nation of moderate-right voters. The Washington cognoscenti expressed dismay that, despite Trump’s dismal public approval ratings and the nationwide […]

Even in this country of grand egalitarian aspirations, the U.S. actually had no broad middle class until one was created in the 1930s and ‘40s. And, yes, “created” is the correct term for how our middle class came to be, with two historic forces of social transformation pushing it. First, the widespread economic devastation of […]