Hightower Lowdown

SUSAN DEMARCO AND I WANT TO GIVE YOU LOWDOWNERS A SPECIAL PREVIEW of our new book, for it personalizes the positive grassroots message that the Lowdown keeps hammering. Titled Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow, our book encourages people to break away from conventional wisdom and live their progressive values. We've written it by telling stories of more than 50 individuals and groups all across the country that are showing the way for all of us.

These are commonsense people who are choosing to buck the system and make their escape from the given order in such areas as business, politics, health care, food, banking, and religion. None are Einsteins, heirs to Rockefeller fortunes, or people who just got lucky. They're regular Americans who've decided to exit the corporate interstate, define success for themselves, and do exactly what the established powers want you to believe can't be done--forge new paths toward richer lives, happiness... and a better world.

The institutions of power use everything from the lure of money to punitive threats to keep us hitched to their plows, but the wonderful thing about Americans is that we have a healthy rebellious streak and the freedom to make choices. The kinds of rebels you'll read about in our book are the great hope and true leaders of America. Here are excerpts from the stories of just a few of these folks. [ read more ]

By the fifth day—with New Orleans under 20 feet of toxic water, with federal help still nowhere to be seen, and with 100,000 or so poor people trapped in unbelievable misery and danger—some of the locals still were able to muster enough of the Big Easy's irreverent humor to crown their drowning city with an apt new name: "Lake George." What happened in Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi was not merely the abject failure of the Bushite presidency (both in preparedness and response), but also a deep moral failure, reflecting the bankruptcy of their extremist ruling ideology. They have a blind hatred of the idea that government exists to serve the common good, instead insisting that people should be on their own.

In New Orleans, they were. To help pay for tax cuts for the rich, Bush had cut the money to shore up the levees...so people drowned. If you ever wondered what George W's "ownership society" would look like, there it was. Step right up if you want to own a casket. What Bush & Company don't get is that the great majority of us Americans simply do not share such a callous ideology, and we are totally embarrassed that federal officials failed to be there for the people of the Gulf Coast from day one. Whatever else people think about government, ordinary folks (including the conservativeminded who are not partisan ideologues) expect government to respond hard and fast in times of real need — and the aftermath of Katrina has to be the absolute definition of real need.

Yet Washington dawdled for days (George went on a meandering political trip out west, Cheney was out on Maryland's Eastern Shore buying a $2.4 million vacation home, Condi Rice took off for some shoe shopping in New York City, and Bush's homeland emergency team was locked inside the Beltway doing a terrific impersonation of the Three Stooges). Americans were appalled, for the Bushites' indifference and ineptitude reflected on our sense of ourselves and our nation. "Is this America?" That was the question I heard being almost shouted out everywhere I went, asked in a combination of disbelief and outrage. We are a can-do, roll-up-our-sleeves people (as demonstrated amply by the gusher of grassroots charity and volunteerism that immediately followed the storm), and it was deeply offensive to our core values of fairness and justice that the Bushites were such clueless slugs.
The third disaster

Katrina should be known as K3, for it brought three disasters. The first two—the storm itself and Bush's non-response—have been widely covered. But there's a third disaster that's still unfolding: the reconstruction of New Orleans and other ravaged areas. Rushing to make up for their tardiness and incompetence, the White House and Congress are airdropping massive sackloads of taxpayer cash on their political problem. The first delivery was $62 billion (with $50 billion going through those comical bunglers at FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency), and the best guesses are that the final toll will top $200 billion. Two important questions about this bundle are not being addressed by the politicos in charge: One, where's it coming from? Two, who's getting it?

Funding the relief and reconstruction. George is up to his usual fiscal hocus-pocus, delivering federal largesse without being honest or accepting political accountability for it. Just as with his $210 billion tab (so far) for his Iraq attack, he is refusing to assess us taxpayers for the bill for his Katrina project. Instead, he's putting every dime of it on the federal credit card, passing the actual payout to our grandchildren, who'll have their taxes hiked to pay off the ever-ballooning debt. Of course, Bush will be long gone by then, so he and his GOP congress will pay no political price.

As usual, some of the right-wing congress critters are calling for more cuts in Head Start, job training, college grants, and other "social programs" to finance both the war and Katrina. But these cuts would hurt the very families fighting the war and the ones devastated by the storm. A better way has been suggested in numerous letters to the editor I've seen in papers all across the country: Cut corporate welfare and pork-barrel spending!

Take the recently passed highway bill, bloated by $24 billion in boondoggle projects stuffed into it by lawmakers wanting political credit for bringing home the bacon. There are a record 6,371 of these projects in the bill—nearly all of which could easily be sacrificed to free up funds for the urgent needs on the Gulf Coast. For example: [ read more ]

Okay, my election projections were slightly off. I said that there would be the biggest turnout in many years, which there was; that there would be a tremendous mobilization of progressives, which there was; and that this would carry Kerry to victory, which—oops—it did not. In this case, two out of three is not good enough. Still, I come away from the election with mixed emotions (I'm told that mixed emotions are what you feel when your 16-year old daughter comes home from the prom sober, but with a Gideon Bible under her arm).

On the one hand, assuming the electoral count holds, there's the depressing reality that we didn't win. Indeed, there's George W. strutting around with a Viagra-size smirk on his face and smugly saying, "Bring 'em on!"—by which he means bring on more neocon warmongering, a greedy corporate grab for our Social Security funds, Patriot Act II, a national sales tax, more assaults on our environment and...well, Four More Years of W.

But on the other hand, we didn't lose. Yes, Kerry lost, but he was always the weak link in this big campaign. After all, there's not a populist bone in his lanky body, he was lackadaisical and lackluster on the campaign trail and he couldn't connect with America's working stiffs if he was handing out free Budweisers and Slim Jims. Yet, get this: Kerry still got nearly half of the popular vote! Fifty-five million people voted for him—more than any other presidential candidate in history...except, of course, for Bush.

It was not the Kerry campaign or the moribund Democratic party that created this turnout. It was you grassroots agitators! Tens of thousands of volunteers, many of them getting politically involved for the first time or getting reinvolved after a long lapse, provided the energy, creativity and sheer will that propelled so many to the polls.

Working through MoveOn, ACORN, SEIU, League of Pissed Off Voters, Voter Virgin, League of Conservation Voters and so many more determined groups, folks like you rallied 49 percent of voters to shout an emphatic "no" at the regime of King George the W— including 9 out of 10 African-American voters, 2 of 3 Latinos and nearly two-thirds of Asian- Americans, as well as strong majorities of people making under $50,000 a year, union families, young voters and first-time voters. The turnout of young people was especially heartening—it was up by nearly a fourth (4.6 million new voters) over the 2000 election. And in the top 10 battleground states, 64 percent of eligible young people voted!

The grassroots were on fire with progressive activism in this campaign, and the fire will not be dampened even by four more awful years of Bush —indeed, it'll spread. As a result of people's efforts, the progressive force now has more skills, talent, connections, experience...and determination than ever. These people didn't "lose" ...and won't go away.

Moral values

The political pros and pundits, of course, instantly concocted a new conventional wisdom to explain what happened on November 2. ... [ read more ]