Perhaps you’ve noticed from the shrinkage (or total elimination) of your local newspaper that this source of hometown journalism has become monopolized, nationalized and trivialized by conglomerate owners.
How uplifting, then, to see a national consortium of saviors rallying to reestablish a “thriving news media” for our democracy. How? Well, say the saviors, by promoting “brand stability” for potential advertisers. Huh? Who are these “saviors”? Unfortunately, they are predatory media giants such as the USA Today chain and other national news conglomerators and shrivelizers. Hello — they are the cause of the real instability in local news! These powers are using the people’s cry for media decentralization and localization as a ruse to goose up their own ad revenue, allowing them to further monopolize and trivialize print journalism.
But here’s a better idea: Advance true media democracy by creating your own local, noncorporate newspaper. Ha, scoff the barons of Big Media, that’s impossible! But as an activist friend of mine puts it: “Those who say it can’t be done should not interrupt those who’re doing it.”
Across the country, communities are taking charge. Here in Texas, the Caldwell/Hays Examiner was launched in 2022, with a focus on rural issues up and down the I-35 corridor. In western Iowa, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Art Cullen has cofounded a nonprofit that supports local news efforts through grants. And in Colorado, a group of folks mobilized to buy a local newspaper chain before a hedge fund operation could sweep in and snatch it up.
This is Jim Hightower saying ... To learn more about how you can rebuild your local news outlets, visit the Institute for Nonprofit News at inn.org.
Oh, swell — here it comes again. nnIt’s the “Great Man” theory of history, trotted out periodically by plutocrats, patricians, royalists and assorted other proponents of an elitist social order. They insist that great progress does not come from political movements, unions and other grassroots forces but from the genius and benevolence of individual, derring-do, capitalist innovators.
In a declaration this month, for example, a group of laissez-fairyland hucksters asserted that it wasn’t labor’s long bloody struggle that advanced worker rights, but industrial America’s generous bosses! These befuddled revisionists of corporate history proclaimed that “unions did not create weekends, the 8-hr work day (or) a ‘living wage.’” No? Who, then? “Henry Ford did (it) in 1926,” they say, adding emphatically that “CAPITALISM & COMPETITION creates higher wages and better working conditions.”
Excuse me, boss, but capitalism constantly tries to destroy any competitive market, and it thrives by holding down wages, repressing worker rights and eliminating jobs.
Forget the right wing’s cartoonish portrayal of Henry the Great as a working-class savior. He was a Nazi-admiring, antisemitic business magnate. Contrary to the revisionists, unions did indeed create their own progress, having fought for wage and hour protections since the 1860s. They rallied popular support with this slogan: “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will.”
This is Jim Hightower saying ... And here’s an inconvenient fact that causes the hair of today’s corporate mythmakers to burst into flames: It was not some genius capitalist who first established the eight-hour day as our national standard — it was government! President Ulysses Grant instituted it for all federal workers in 1869 - over half a century before Ford finally trailed behind.
An iconic Texas band, the Austin Lounge Lizards, has a song that nails the absurd self-righteousness of Christian supremacists: “Jesus Loves Me (But He Can’t Stand You).”
I think of this refrain when I behold today’s right-wing proselytizers wailing that the blessed rich should not be taxed to assure that everyone has the most basic human needs. Seems very un-Jesusy to me.
One bizarre focus of their religious wrath is a wholly sensible and biblically sound national policy: subsidizing school districts to assure that every child has healthy meals to fuel their daily learning. Yes, in the Christian nationalists’ book of public abominations, government feeding of children is a holy no-no. Project 2025, the Republican blueprint to impose theocratic rule over America, proclaims school meals a socialist/Marxist evil to be eradicated.
The extremists cry that if there is any free lunch “giveaway,” it must be narrowly restricted to truly destitute students. But wait — publicly singling out those children would stigmatize them. Plus, how odd to hear Republicans demanding an intrusive, absurdly expensive bureaucratic process empowering government to decide who’s eligible to eat!
In fact, the student lunch subsidy runs as low as 42 cents a meal, so it’s far cheaper, fairer and (dare I say it?) more Christian simply to offer it to all. Indeed, the program is akin to the biblical story of Jesus providing fishes and loaves to the multitude. He imposed no income test —everyone got a fish.
Interestingly, the same lawmakers opposing 42-cent meals for kiddos today routinely and enthusiastically feed billions of our tax dollars to corporate, ethically challenged profiteers who love money above all. As I recall, Jesus couldn’t stand people like that.
Woody Guthrie’s prescription for inequality in America was straightforward: “Rich folks got your money with politics. You can get it back with politics.”
For Guthrie, “politics” meant more than voting, since both parties routinely cough up candidates who meekly accept the business-as-usual system of letting bosses and bankers control America’s wealth and power. It’s useless, he said, to expect change to come from a “choice” between Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber. Instead, common folks must organize into a progressive movement with their own bold change agenda, become their own candidates and create a politics worth voting for.
Pie in the sky? No! Periodic eruptions of progressive grassroots insurgencies have literally defined America, beginning with that big one in 1776. Indeed, we could take a lesson today from another transformative moment of democratic populism that surged over a century ago, culminating in the Omaha Platform of 1892. This was in the depths of the Gilded Age, a sordid period much like ours, characterized by both ostentatious greed and widespread poverty, domination by monopolies, rising xenophobia, institutional racism — and government that ranged from aloof to insane.
But lo — from that darkness, a new People’s Party arose, created by the populist movement of farm and factory mad-as-hellers. They streamed into Omaha to hammer out the most progressive platform in U.S. history, specifically rejecting corporate supremacy and demanding direct democracy.
That platform reshaped America’s political agenda, making the sweeping reforms of the Progressive Era and New Deal possible. As one senator said of the Omaha rebellion, it was the start of robber baron wealth flowing “to all the people, from whom it was originally taken.” And that’s what Guthrie meant by “politics.”
Jim Hightower is a former Texas Observer editor, former Texas agriculture commissioner, radio commentator and populist sparkplug, a best-selling author and winner of the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship. Write him at info@jimhightower.com or see www.jimhightower.com.
From The Progressive Populist, November 1, 2024
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