Jim Hightower

Put A Pitchfork In It

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“In the past 30 years, power elites (including you) drastically increased your share of America’s income by taking income from the middle class and the poor. Did you think we wouldn’t notice?” J Hightower

jimHightowerLloyd Blankfein is very concerned about income inequality. With his face reflecting both worry and perplexity, he recently called inequality “very destabilizing.”

Blankfein’s concern doesn’t come from the perspective of one experiencing inequality from the bottom of the income ladder — he’s certainly not an Occupy Wall Street sort of guy. In fact, he basically is Wall Street.

Having amassed a personal fortune of nearly half-a-billion bucks during his years at Goldman, he’s literally become a gold man. But in a June 13 CBS interview, Blankfein wrinkled his brow and uttered a very un-Wall Street, populist-like thought: “Too much of the (wealth) of the country has gone to too few people,” he said, adding that when that happens, “you’ll have an unstable society.”As the big banana at the financial gambling house Goldman Sachs, Blankfein raked in a stunning $23 million for his wheeling and dealing last year. Under his leadership, the bank grabbed a $13 billion bailout from us taxpayers in 2008. Continue reading →

Jim Hightower ~ Save Wall Street! Congress Passes JO(BS) Act

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(Common Dreams) | RS_News | April 5 2012

OPINION ~ Hallelujah, Washington has finally heard the people’s cries for jobs! In an urgent bipartisan push, Democrats and Republicans have joined hands across the aisle to pass the JOBS Act. In this time of “The Great Hurt” – with widespread unemployment, middle-class incomes tumbling and the price of gasoline skyrocketing – we can all applaud our stalwarts in the capital city for meeting the No. 1 need of America’s hard-hit economy: deregulating Wall Street.

Huh? I thought this was a jobs bill?

We’ll get to that, but first (as always) Wall Street bankers must be served. Yes, them. The same priests of unmitigated arrogance who caused the disastrous financial crash that continues to rumble across our land. The same Wall Streeters we bailed out with trillions of public dollars. That Wall Street is now sulking and skulking around the U.S. Capitol, insisting that it is an economic victim, held back from its profiteering potential by government regulations to protect the public from finaglers and fraudsters. “Free Wall Street,” is their cry!

Clucking with sympathy, Congress’ tea party Republicans have rushed to the side of these poor, rich financiers, pledging to unshackle them from “burdensome” regulations. Serving Wall Street is not all that popular these days with voters, however, so the Repubs and their Democratic allies have committed their own fraud in order to pass this bill, deceptively titled it the “JOBS Act” (even though it doesn’t actually create any jobs).

Then they pushed it in the name of small businesses (even though they quietly defined “small” as a billion dollars a year in sales). In fact, the accent on the JOBS acronym should be on “B.S.” Will it surprise you to learn that the word “jobs” isn’t even included in the title? Instead, JOBS stands for “Jump-start Our Business Start-ups.”

Alarmingly, the so-called “onerous” regulations that Congress eliminated primarily are the extremely useful financial disclosure rules passed a decade ago to prevent another Enron scandal.

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Jim Hightower ~ Banker Hubris Knows No Bounds

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Nation of Change | March 21 2012

Have you heard about the earthquake that has shaken Wall Street to its very core? Well, brace yourself, for this really is a shocker: Bonus payments are down.

GoldmanYes, the exorbitant bonus checks pocketed each year by the Goldman Sachers, Citigropers and other financial tinkerers have been cut by about 25 percent this year, and — oh! — you should hear the Wall Streeters moaning the hard-times, down-and-out banker blues.

“It’s a disaster,” sobbed one. “The entire construct of compensation has changed.”

Many Americans, of course, will say … “Good! About time!” And it is difficult in these times of middle-class collapse and rising poverty to get teary-eyed over a few financial swells getting a trim. But, come on, Wall Street bankers are human, too (aren’t they?) — so open your hearts to their pain.

A hedge-fund manager, for example, says he’ll now have to strain to pay his $7,500 annual dues to remain a member of the Trump National Golf Club in Westchester. Plus, he worries about food, health care and boarding. Not for him and his family, but for his two dogs — he’s been laying out $17,000 a year for upkeep of his labradoodle and bichon frise, including around $5,000 to hire a dog-walker to take them out each day. He might resort to walking them himself a couple times a week.

The crunch is so bad that one financier confesses that he now shops for discounted salmon for dinner and has had to give up his annual ski trip to Aspen, Colo. And a high-dollar accountant who does financial planning for the wealthy practically weeps for clients who are having to cut back.

Empathizing with the stress of it all, he asks: “Could you imagine what it’s like to say, ‘I got three kids in private school, I have to think about pulling them out?’ How do you do that?” Dabbing his eyes with tissues, he adds that these people have been raking in around $500,000 a year, and they never dreamed “that they’d be broke.”

Broke? We should all be as “broke” as they are.

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Jim Hightower ~ Standing Up For Common Sense

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Nation of Change | March 19 2012

BearcatDuring a recent city council meeting, the mayor of Keene, New Hampshire leaned over to a council member and whispered excitedly: “We’re going to have our own tank.”

Yes, the tank (or, more specifically, the “armored personnel vehicle”) is the latest must-have toy for mayors and police departments. Even in this picture-perfect and tranquil New England town of about 23,000 residents, officials hurl common sense to the wind at the very thought of having such a cool ride parked in front of town hall. Maybe they’ll even get to drive it in the next 4th of July parade! Never mind that Keene has no crime that would warrant rolling out a tank.Nonetheless, thanks to such richly funded boondoggles as the “war on drugs” and the “war on terrorism,” the federal government is throwing money at cities and states to militarize their various police forces. Thus, Keene was granted $285,000 by the Department of Homeland Security to buy its very own “Bearcat,” an eight-ton combat vehicle.

Of course, corporations that peddle such pricey hardware testily insist that Keene needs a tank. A sales executive for Lenco Industries, which makes the Bearcat, snapped to an inquiring reporter: “I don’t think there’s any place in the country where you can say, ‘That isn’t a likely terrorist target.’ Wouldn’t you rather be prepared?”

The sensible people of Keene, however, aren’t swallowing the fearmonger pill, and they’ve forced the town council to reconsider. Local businesswomen Dorrie O’Meara says she hasn’t met a single person who’s in favor of having “this militaristic thing in Keene.” She calls the tank “completely unnecessary. But it’s more than that,” she adds. “It’s just not who we are. It’s about what kind of town we want to be.”

Wherever you live, take heart in the Keene example. Reject the corporate nonsense and insist on being the town you want to be.

This article was published at Nation of Change. All rights are reserved.

Jim Hightower ~ Cooperatives Over Corporations

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Jim Hightower | Nation of Change | February 22 2012

Evergreen CooperativesWe’re being told by today’s High Priests of Conventional Wisdom that everyone and everything in our economic cosmos necessarily revolves around one dazzling star: the corporation.

This heavenly institution, the HPCW explain, has such financial and political mass that it is the optimal force for organizing and directing our society’s economic affairs, including the terms of employment and production. While other forces are in play (workers, consumers, the environment, communities and so forth), they are subordinate to the superior gravitational pull of the corporate order. Profits, executive equanimity and a healthy Wall Street pulse rate are naturally the economy’s foremost concerns.

How nice. For the wealthy few. Not nice for the rest of us, though. We’re presently seeing the effect of this enthronement of self-serving corporate elites. Millions of Americans are out of work, underemployed and tumbling from the middle class down toward poverty. Yet excessively paid and pampered CEOs (recently rebranded as “job creators” by fawning GOP politicians) are idly sitting on some $2 trillion in cash, refusing to put that enormous pile of money to work on job creation.

The Powers That Be keep us tethered to this unjust system of plutocratic rule only by constantly ballyhooing it as a divine perpetual wealth machine that showers manna on America. Any tampering with the hierarchical control of the finely tuned machinery of trickle-down corporate capitalism, they warn, will cause a collapse and crush American prosperity.

Ha! Prosperity for whom? The corporate order itself has come crashing down on the prosperity of America’s workaday majority — and the people are no longer fooled about the system’s “divinity.” From the Wisconsin rebellion to the outing of the Koch brothers’ efforts to impose their plutocratic regime on us, from the Occupy movement to the spreading grassroots campaign to get corporate cash out of our elections, we commoners have finally peeked behind the curtain to see the fraud being perpetrated by the wizards of wealth inequality.

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