Tired of running into Rush on the radio? At last, there's a liberal alternative to cookie-cutter conservatives. Jim Hightower, former Texas agricultural commissioner, runs a hard-hitting and often hilarious talk show every weekday from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. CST, skewering Big Business, Little George Bush and the big waffle himself, President Bill. You can pick him up in over 100 markets nationwide.
Like some cross between Tom Lehrer and Phil Ochs, Steve's writing a new song every week about something in the news and doing it live on the air. From the past few weeks, here's all the news that's fit to sing:
 September 9, 1998 | The Greenspan Effect |
He's the man behind the curtain. You didn't elect him, and neither did I, but you'd better pay attention. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's decisions affect our lives at least as much as those of Bill Clinton or any other elected official. He believes, for example, that too much employment is a bad thing, so when unemployment drops, he threatens to raise interest rates and choke off wages from rising too fast.
At the moment, though, he's more worried about the economic tsunami that's heading over from Asia. So, after weeks of dropping hints, he voted Tuesday to drop interest rates - one quarter of one percent. Investors were hoping for more, and promptly sunk the stock market 500 points. The Greenspan Effect strikes again.
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August 5, 1998 | Database |
Oops! Faithful subscribers, I have fallen behind on mailing you my Hightower lyrics. I know you wouldn't want to miss a beat, so I'm going to try and catch up this week, one at a time.
This little number ran Aug 5. It was inspired by two stories. One is a proposal to create a medical ID number that will follow each of us through life. The other is a provision of the last immigration "reform" bill that will use your driver's license number as a national ID. If Big Brother's not watching too closely, it's only because he's in a hallway off the Oval Office and preoccupied.
I don't usually steal tunes, but it was too perfect to set this to the melody of "Baby Face."
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August 2, 1998 | Get Rich Quick |
Lottery fever swept the nation. People stood in line for hours for a chance at a chance - at the $250 million Powerball jackpot. As the old-fashioned American virtues of an honest day's pay for an honest day's work fall by the wayside, can you blame them?
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July 28, 1998 | Singing to Cambodia |
This is the type of story that would prompt Dave Barry to say I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP. It's a tribute to a fellow songwriter, who also happens to be a vicious dictator. It's well-known that Hun Sen took over the government of Cambodia in a coup last year. What's not so well-known is that when he's not plotting tortures and assassinations, he's writing lyrics. "There are times when I compose with tears in my eyes," he told a New York Times reporter.
An aide sets his words to music, whereupon they're played nightly on government-controlled radio stations. Thanks for sharing, Hun Sen. And apologies to Spalding Gray.
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July 21, 1998 | Napalm Caravan |
A tale of the dregs of war. Twenty-five years after pulling out of Vietnam, the Navy still has 3 million tons of napalm sitting in leaky casks outside San Diego. The new disposal plan is to "recycle" the jellied gasoline by burning it as fuel for cement kilns. I guess that's a better use than its original intended purpose.
But it leaves a burning question: Who wants to live next door? The first trainload was on its way to Chicago back in April, but locals raised enough stink to turn it around in its tracks. Guess which state volunteered next? For the next two years, daily shipments will be headed to the petrochemical wonderland of the Houston Ship Channel. The natives aren't very happy about it, but then, neither were the natives in Indochina.
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July 14, 1998 | Hot Property |
Who says you can't go home again? Especially if home is an aging nuclear reactor on an island in the Susquehanna River. I grew up not far from Three Mile Island, and my life was changed when it partially melted down on March 28, 1979. Now comes the news that the owner, General Public Utilities, wants to ditch the reactor business and has put TMI up for sale. They're even planting flowers to beautify the sterile concrete.
Philadelphia Electric, which already owns two troubled nukes, is said to be a potential buyer, but I tried to imagine what a creative realtor might do with this baby.
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July 9, 1998 | Chiquita Subpoena |
It's been a bad month for the free press. First CNN retracted its story about nerve gas and fired the two reporters involved. (Higher-ups, who presumably reviewed and approved the story, got to keep their jobs.) Then the Cincinnati Enquirer publicly retracted an expose on hometown company Chiquita Brands Inc. To make the apology even more abject, they settled with Chiquita for $10 million, before Chiquita had even filed a lawsuit.
Why the sudden turnaround? The Enquirer announced that the reporter (who's also been fired) had stolen 2,000 voice mails from Chiquita. But the paper's not saying how he did it or what was illegal about it. To make matters even more interesting, the paper hasn't retracted the facts in the articles, only the manner in which they were gathered.
Is this a case of an overzealous reporter or a spineless editor? I'm waiting for more facts. But I shudder to think what would have happened in Watergate if the Enquirer had broken the story.
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July 2, 1998 | The New China Syndrome |
A few weeks back, I wrote about The Amazing Kreskin and his offer to read Bill Clinton's mind. This week, I did a Vulcan mind-meld with the Prez himself, gathering his thoughts as he prepared for his junket foo young.
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June 25, 1998 | Chainsaw Al |
How bittersweet it is! Through the downsizing craze of the 1990s, "Chainsaw Al" Dunlap became the sultan of slash-and-burn. In 18 months as CEO of Scott Paper, he laid off 11,200 of the company's 29,000 workers, closed plants and shut down the headquarters building. Wall Street loved it. Scott's stock increased 220%, Dunlap made about $100 million and Scott's other shareholders made over $6 billion.
He moved on to appliance giant Sunbeam Corp., where he used the same tactics but didn't produce the same results. Sales kept falling, despite buying and gutting three other companies. Finally, his hand-picked board of directors, which was being paid in company stock, decided they'd lost enough of their investment. Al was felled by his own chainsaw.
"Just because I don't talk about feeling bad about having to fire people doesn't mean that I like having to do it," Dunlap has said. Don't feel bad for him, though. He gets $6 million in severance pay over the next three years, while he keeps his country club membership and benefits - a much better deal than the one received by 12,000 former employees of Sunbeam. So long, Al. It's been bad to know you.
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June 18, 1998 | Sierra Blanca |
Here's a song I had in the can - so to speak - awaiting the right moment to play it on the air. I wrote it a couple of months ago, when folk impresario and anti-nuclear activist Dave Pyles emailed to ask if I knew any songs about the Sierra Blanca waste dump. Up in Vermont, one of two states that have contracted to ship their glowing crud to West Texas, some folks were staging a rally to support the idea of dealing with their own toxic trash.
I wanted to support Yankees supporting Texans (having a foot in each camp), so I wrote a singalong and emailed it back to Dave. They sang it at the rally.
Lo and behold, this Wednesday, our guest on the Hightower Show was a Senator from Mexico, who was in town to lobby Governor Bush against the dump. It sits right on the border, and any radioisotopes that leak into the groundwater may end up in a Mexican child's drinking glass. Gives a new meaning to the expression, "Don't drink the water."
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June 11, 1998 | The New World Order Waltz |
This song actually aired Thursday, June 4, but I was in a hurry to get back to Kerrville. So you're getting it this week, when Hightower Radio is on vacation.
Not content with two weeks of songs about bank mergers, I thought I'd tackle a *really* complicated subject this time: the International Monetary Fund and the fall of President Suharto of Indonesia.
I predict historians will record Suharto as the first casualty of the New World Order, i.e., of unfettered global capitalism. In the good old days, we overthrew rulers by sending in the CIA. Guatemala, Chile, Iran, Nicaragua - the list goes on.
Today, Viagra couldn't help the CIA. The real power has moved to investors and currency speculators, who can move billions around the world at the click of a mouse. As they proved in Mexico in 1994, they can bring a country to its knees in a matter of days. Suharto lasted three decades as a genocidal dictator, but when foreign investors cashed in their chips, the game was abruptly over.
For Indonesians, the devastation dwarfs anything El Nino could wreak. They're suddenly reduced to beans and rice for years to come. Think of the Great Depression over here. You have to wonder whether we could be next in line. Then you read of the latest plant closing and realize it's been happening here for the past twenty years. Shall we dance?
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May 20, 1998 | (I Wanna Get a) Nuclear Weapon |
Some weeks, there's an event that so dominates the news that I feel obliged to write about it, whether I want to or not. Remember Monica who?
So it was this week, when the newly-installed Hindu nationalist government in India tested five nuclear "devices," threatening to engulf the subcontinent in a nuclear arms race. U.S. diplomats are trying to stuff the genie back in the bottle, but since we already have the bomb, we don't exactly occupy the moral high ground.
It's hard to make nuclear proliferation funny, especially since Tom Lehrer did it brilliantly thirty years ago with "Who's Next?" I had to look for a new angle, and found one when I wondered how an NRA member might view the debate.
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May 12, 1998 | Hail to CoreStates Bank |
Some pundit once said there were three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and public relations. Here's a marvelous example. When CoreStates Bank of Philadelphia merged itself out of existence a few weeks back, some flack had the bright idea of printing up a yearbook for the 7,000 employees who were getting downsized as a result. As a Wall Street Journal reporter noted, it's probably the first yearbook in history that doesn't name anyone most likely to succeed.
Imagine this to the tune of your favorite college alma mater song.
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May 6, 1998 | The Weaver |
When I was 15 and picked up a guitar for the first time, it was with the help of a how-to record by Pete Seeger. Several years later, I got to share a stage with him. It was at a rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on the first anniversary of the Three Mile Island accident. I had written some TMI verses to "This Land is Your Land," and Pete called me up on stage to sing them with him, while 18,000 people sang along.
Since I started writing these Hightower songs, I've been reminded a lot about Pete and his influence - not just on what I do, not just on the ups and downs of folk music over six decades, but on our very idea of what folk music means.
He's always insisted that music be connected to people's everyday lives and work, and he's championed the collective genius of the "folk process" - the way that lyrics and melodies are polished and rewritten as they pass from singer to singer and century to century. The arrival of phonographs and radio disrupted that oral tradition, but it still goes on in jam sessions and places like the Kerrville campfires. You could even argue that the digital age has brought new life to whole process, with fresh lyrics and parodies spilling over the virtual campfires of the Internet.
We owe so much of that to Pete. His early '50s group, The Weavers, wove together folk songs from around the world, from South Africa to Israel to the Appalachian banjo and the Scottish ballad. Their career was cut short by the McCarthy era, when Pete was blacklisted for refusing to name names before the House Unamerican Activities Committee. But The Weavers' harmony format was the basis for Peter, Paul & Mary and all the commercial folk groups that came after. And some of their biggest hits - "If I Had a Hammer" and "Where Have All the Flowers Gone," were penned by none other than Pete Seeger.
Sunday, May 3 was Pete's 79th birthday. Today I got to play this song on the air, while he called in and listened from his home by the Hudson - a river he helped clean up by launching the sloop Clearwater. Thanks for everything, Pete, and Happy Birthday.
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April 29, 1998 | Urge to Merge |
Bang, bang, bang came the news of three mergers that will transform megabanks into gigabanks. Citicorp and Travelers didn't even worry they were breaking antitrust law. Within a couple of days, Senate Banking Committee chairman Orrin Hatch had announced he was sure the laws could be changed.
While the mergers will be convenient for shareholders and people with large accounts, they'll be decidedly inconvenient for the rest of us. Gigabanks don't really want our business, anyway, so we'll face less choice, more branch closings and ever more fees to nickel and dime us to death.
Okay, YOU try to write a funny song about bank mergers. I was feeling pretty uninspired, until I remembered Woody Guthrie's classic line: "Some men will rob you with a six-gun, some with a fountain pen."
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April 22, 1998 | Just Plain Bill |
As the Cambodian army closed in on his jungle stronghold, the reclusive Pol Pot suddenly began giving interviews to the press, hoping to soften his image as a genocidal maniac and convince international justice to treat him gently.
Microsoft Corp. is only engaged in monopoly, not genocide, but it seems to have adopted the same tactic. Ever since the Justice Department filed suit, Bill Gates is suddenly all over the media. He's been doing everything from talking with Barbara Wawa to appearing in an ad for golf clubs. Since I use some of Bill's fine products on my PC, I was moved to write this theme song.
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April 15, 1998 | Social Insecurity |
With Paula Jones out of the way, Bill Clinton is free to work on his legacy, which he hopes will be saving the Social Security system from the onslaught of the baby boomers. In the meantime, those of us a few decades from retirement are wondering what legacy we'll have left when we get there.
The way the job market's going, with workers being deep-sixed at younger and younger ages in favor of new grads who don't have families or mortgage payments, retirement may not be that far off.
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April 1, 1998 | April Fool |
I've made a career of swimming against the current, so it's only natural that when April Fool's happened to fall on the very day I play Hightower, I didn't write a satirical song. I wrote an inpspirational one instead.
Besides, I've always had a soft spot for fools, and been one myself a time or twelve. In the Tarot deck, The Fool is often considered the happiest card, denoting the sweet state of innocence just before it steps over the cliff and plummets headlong into experience. Fools fall in love.
Fools hit bottom. Fools dust themselves off and, like the Eveready bunny, just keep on going.
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March 17, 1998 | The Amazing Kreskin |
I was sipping a latte at Schlotzsky's, desperately scanning the Sunday paper for a song idea for this week, when I happened on this item. It seems that showbiz psychic The Amazing Kreskin has offered a way to wrap up the Whitewater case in a hurry. For a lousy buck, he wrote Janet Reno, he'll read the minds of Bill Clinton, Kenneth Starr and all the other characters in this Russian novel of an investigation. While he's at it, perhaps he could get some posthumous testimony from James McDougall.
The Justice Department, regrettably, turned down Kreskin's services. A flack explained, "He knows our response."
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March 12, 1998 | Killer Asteroid |
Talk about Social Security being endangered! One group of NASA scientists predicted this mile-wide chunk of rock is due to pass within 30,000 miles of earth about the year 2030. A fraction of a degree off, and there go higher forms of life. Not to worry, said another group of NASA scientists the next day. The asteroid will wave howdy at the dark side of the moon from a comfortable distance of 600,000 miles.
Still, I suspect we've not heard the last of this space grit. After all, we know it's all happened before - else our species would not be here. Besides, Hollywood's got two asteroid disaster flicks coming out this summer. As Bruce Willis would say, old asteroids die hard.
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March 5, 1998 | Jesus Loves You (Even If You're Gay) |
A rousing tribute to the folks at University Baptist Church. Last week, they were expelled from the Baptist General Convention of Texas for supporting homosexual parishioners and ordaining a gay deacon. Said one official, "We believe homosexuality and homosexual practice is contrary to Scripture." I'm no Biblical expert, but what I recollect is that Christ said "love one another" would be "the whole of the law."
Floyd Domino points out that University Baptist is no stranger to the lashes of bigotry. In 1948, it broke ranks by welcoming black worshippers. In 1970, it ordained a female deacon. I like to think they're on the right side of both history and theology.
In your mind's ear, imagine this song with a full Gospel choir.
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February 25, 1998 | Go For The Gold |
The Winter Olympics wrapped up this past weekend in Nagano, Japan. From a truth-in-advertising standpoint, this games ripped away any remaining pretense that the Olympics have anything to do with amateur athletics. And the increasing gap in fortune and fame between gold-medalists and runners-up makes a dandy metaphor for the winner-take-all American economy of the 1990s.
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February 18, 1998 | The Great Divide |
This week Hightower and gang are off on a fair trade tour (opposite of free trade) through the Southeast, with House Minority Whip David Bonior. I sent them off with this song I wrote last year. There are all kinds of divides springing up across our great country, as the rich get richer and the poor get workfare, but in the end, they all seem to meld together into one great one.
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February 11, 1998 | Fever |
I didn't steal the melody from the R&B classic, but I stole the beat. Remember the Maine? This song's about war fever and the mindless way our media are drumming it up. The Statesman's Op-Ed page this morning had lurid descriptions of dead bodies on the NYC subway. I don't think that neocon columnist has volunteered to fly a bomber, or to be one of the Iraqi civilians who will die when one of those smart bombs turns dumb.
There are passing references to the current flick, "Wag the Dog," in which White House spin doctors concoct a phony war to divert attention from a president's sexual misdeeds.
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February 4, 1998 | Immoral Fibers |
This story tells itself. While writing this song, I kept thinking of the old George Carlin routine about the seven dirty words you can't say on the radio. I skirted as close as I could.
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January 28, 1998 | What Did the President Do? |
Some weeks I don't have a choice as to what to write about. When the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, other news ground to a halt. I borrowed a slogan from the Nike campaign and tried to put the Oral Office into a broader context.
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January 21, 1998 | Let Her Live |
It's fascinating to see right-wing Christians belatedly discover the principles of Christianity. I wanted to encourage them to apply those principles more broadly. Karla Faye Tucker's crime and her execution were both tragedies, but I hold out the prayer that in dying, she might pave the way for others to live.
I prefer not to steal melodies for my Hightower songs, but this one was too perfect: that morbid traditional favorite, "St. James Infirmary."
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January 14, 1998 | Beef About Beef |
By now, you've probably read about the Oprah Winfrey trial. Up in Amarillo, she's become the sacrificial lamb for Texas' new "veggie libel" law, which makes it a crime to disparage agricultural products. The case would be every bit as ridiculous as it sounds, except that there are some deeper issues at stake here.
Ever heard of the SLAPP? Stands for "Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation." It's a tactic, used increasingly by corporations, to try and silence their critics by bleeding their pocketbooks dry in court. It backfires when the critics refuse to back down - as in the fabled McLibel suit in England, when a couple of penniless Greenpeace activists made Ronald McDonald look like the clown he is.
Oprah probably has the resources to carry the day, too. But it's ominous that agribusiness is trying to silence public debate, while people are literally dying from eating hamburgers and radiation is touted as the cure. And it exposes the whole "tort reform" movement for the farce that it is. Business lobbyists are hot to curtail frivolous lawsuits, except when they're doing the frivolous suing.
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January 7, 1998 | Blue Swoosh Shoes |
We had a campaign this week called, "Bring Nike Home." The general thrust was for our listeners to write the swooshmeisters to reopen some assembly plants stateside. Some interesting numbers: on a $70 Nike shoe, the labor cost comes to $2.75, or 4 percent of what you pay retail. Promotion and advertising (Michael Jordan's slice) come to $4.00. So who really won the Vietnam War?<>
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December 17, 1997 | Merry Christmas on Wall Street |
It's a happy holiday on the frontlines of the class war. The Wall Street Journal reports that the stock market's record-breaking year is translating to a record $10 billion in year-end bonuses on the Street, with more than 1,000 traders making $1 million or more. The market's continued health is due in no small part to the dozen or more firms that have announced end-of-year layoffs, affecting some 30,000 workers.
Same storie's playing out in the global economy. The International Monetary Fund is ponying up more than $100 billion to bail out banks and currency speculators in Asia. It's not going to help the folks sewing sneakers, though. Much of that money will come right back to the states, to pay off bad loans from American banks.
December 10, 1997 Radiation
The Food and Drug Administration has approved the process of sterilizing red meat for sale by zapping it with gamma rays from radioactive cobalt and cesium. Since I write for a restaurant magazine, I'm well aware of the dangers of contaminated meat and the need to improve standards at meatpackers. Nevertheless, the prospect of more radioactive material around our highways and our neighborhoods seems like a really bad idea.
Most consumers seem to agree. It was legal to zap chicken years before the FDA approved red meat, but little irradiated poultry seems to be on the market, because the radiation symbol that must be prominently displayed on the package frightens buyers off. That's why Congress, while directing a hesitant FDA to legalize beef-nuking, is also doing away with the symbol. Now, packagers can just list irradiation in the fine print, along with sodium bisulfate and other fine ingredients.
December 3, 1997 Seven Babies
The McCaughey septuplets were born November 19, and Americans opened up their hearts and pocketbooks. The parents were showered with gifts ranging from free Pampers and baby food to a free house and college scholarships for all seven kids. In the meantime, the Children's Defense Fund reports that 15 million American children are living below the poverty line. Let's hope the next round of charity reaches them.
November 26, 1997 Buy Nothing Day
An Estonian immigrant who spent his career in the advertising business has been atoning for his sins by attacking consumerism. One of his pet projects is Buy Nothing Day. It's a shopaholic's version of the Great American Smokeout. The day after Thanksgiving is traditionally the busiest shopping day of the year. What if we just said no and stayed home?
Fittingly, all three TV networks refused to run his ad for Buy Nothing day, which netted him tons of free publicity in other media - including the Jim Hightower show.
November 19, 1997 American Underpants
Fruit of the Loom announced it was laying off 2,900 workers, closing all its American assembly plants and moving the work offshore. Another victory for free trade.
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November 12, 1997 | The Kinder, Gentler Presidential Library |
It was the ultimate Aggie joke. The George Bush Presidential Library opened up at Texas A&M. Making fun of it was like shooting ducks in a barrel, but hey, somebody had to do it.
November 5, 1997 Fast Track
This was my first song for the Hightower show. Wrote it while working a booth with the producer at the Texas Book Fair. He thought he'd give it a try on the air, and when it worked, he thought we should keep on trying.
The topic: Son of NAFTA. This was the week Congress was supposed to vote on giving Bill Clinton "Fast Track" authority to negotiate the next free trade agreement. "Fast Track" means that Clinton signs the treaty and Congress can't amend it to add things like labor and environmental protections. As a result of hammering by Hightower and millions of others, fast track was derailed. Clinton counted heads and saw he didn't have the 67 votes he needed, so he withdrew the bill.
And now you can hear 13 of these songs performed by Steve on his new CD,
Sex Lies and Videotape.
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