Progressive Populist 11/97 Fight Freebooters

[J Cullen <reporter@xxxxxxxx>]

___________________________________________________________
THE PROGRESSIVE POPULIST:
A MONTHLY JOURNAL OF THE HEARTLAND
November 1997 -- Volume 3, Number 11
___________________________________________________________

EDITORIAL
Fight the Freebooters,
Get the Word Out

This issue marks the second anniversary of the Progressive Populist as a
publication. It is said that less than 10 percent of periodicals survive
two years and we are proud to have made the cut. We undoubtedly have
surprised a few skeptics as we have published every month and slowly built
our paid circulation to a little more than 2,000.
	We appreciate all our subscribers. We particularly thank those
charter subscribers who not only took a chance on our new Journal from the
Heartland but now have chosen to renew for another year or two. For those
who have held off on subscribing, wondering if we would last, let the word
go forth: We're here to stay.
	Not everybody has been happy with our work. Occasionally we get a
note from somebody who thinks we are too liberal, or even socialist. About
as often we get a note from somebody who thinks we are not radical enough.
But the great majority of our correspondence is appreciative of our efforts
to revive democratic political debate, and that is gratifying.
	Some enquiring minds wonder why we started a journal of politics
and economics. Lord knows, starting a political magazine that starts off by
alienating corporations is a good way to lose a bundle and we're not
wealthy. But we grew up believing that in America individuals can make a
difference, and if you believe in something you should go for it.
	We also grew up in a relatively small Iowa town that reflects the
changes going on in rural America. Storm Lake, Iowa, in the 1960s, when I
was growing up there, was probably as close to an egalitarian community as
you're likely to find. We knew the grocer, the butcher, the banker, the
hardware store owner, the newspaper publisher, the radio station manager
and the local meatpacking plant executive. Anybody who tried to put on airs
likely would be ridiculed for their pretension. Some of the wealthiest
people in the county, at least on paper, were farmers and you wouldn't want
to put on their airs, particularly if they raised hogs. But in the
businesses along the main street, Lake Avenue, everybody pitched in for the
community. If a business manager laid somebody off, he or she would have to
look that person and their families in the eye when they passed on the
street.
	The town still looks the same, but chains have turned the groceries
into supermarkets; they took over the newspaper and radio station; they're
moving in on the local banks; they've placed the discount stories on the
outskirts of town and driven the dime stores and hardware stores out of
business. You still know who works at the chain stores but you don't have a
clue who owns them or who issues the order to "downsize." The phone company
is diversifying its services in more lucrative markets and cutting its
local staff. The meatpacking plant changed hands, drove out the union and
cut wages to the point where they had to bring in workers from out of
state. They include immigrants from Mexico, Asia and Africa who make more
in an hour there than they made in a day or even a week back home. Storm
Lake has a lot more colorful festivals than we used to have, but it also
has the state's largest share of students taking English as a second
language - and growing ethnic hostility.
	Now the factory farms are moving in, threatening to replace the
family-owned farms, feed stores and stockyards that have served small towns
in the Midwest for generations. Change is inevitable; it's progress, we are
told. But in the new integrated agribusiness, farmers will grow crops from
seeds sold by the gene-altering bioengineers and they'll raise livestock to
specifications set by the meatpacking corporation. If the farmers balk, the
bank will call in their loans and sell the farm to somebody who will be
more cooperative. Everybody will work for Wall Street. The Company Store
will be Walmart. Vertically integrated sharecroppers will end up owing
their souls to Master Card.
	This is progress? More importantly, how did we come to this in the
span of one generation?
	In the case of the farmer, first we ran him into debt in the 1970s.
We made him dependent on credit and chemicals in the 1980s. Then we exposed
him to global competition in the 1990s and replaced the local bankers with
executives from Minneapolis, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles.
	The New Deal, coming out of the Great Depression, helped small
farmers climb out of their sharecropping condition and put some stability
into agriculture. It has taken 50 years for big business to put farmers
back "in their place."
	As the independent farmer goes, so goes the small towns. There's
still nothing wrong with Storm Lake that $5-a-bushel corn and $60 a cwt
hogs couldn't cure. But when Wall Street owns the crop from seed to cereal
and the hogs from birth to bacon, Storm Lake won't see those premium
prices. It will only see the minimum-wage jobs of the farmhands,
meatpackers and the fly-by-night industries looking for cheap labor and tax
breaks. It is time to stand up and demand social responsibility in
corporations toward workers, small businesses and family farmers.

Some think we are too hard on President Clinton. We get no satisfaction out
of blasting the President, but we have seen little to cheer him on lately.
He rode a populist campaign into the White House, only to end up looking
like an Eisenhower Republican and a cheerleader for a brand of capitalism
that has more to do with freebooters than free markets. He has embraced the
global trade policies advocated by multinational corporations and offered
little more than lip service to the workers and small businesses who have
the most to lose from globalized trade. He has accepted the Republican
ideology that government spending must be reduced so that the wealthy can
have tax cuts. Even what may have been a well-meaning attempt to reform
health care was botched by his attempt to appease insurance companies, of
all things. When his or other Democrats' policies favor big business over
the workers, small businesses and family farmers, we will call them on it.
	As the Democratic Party has strayed from its populist roots, it
seems to us that progressive populists have two options: organize a third
party or take back the Democratic Party. The two courses are not
necessarily exclusive.
	We believe progressives should support initiatives to open ballots
to alternative parties, both on the left and the right. We believe in
proportional representation, which would do away with winner-take-all
elections, as well as the need to gerrymander election districts, and would
give minority political movements a voice in local, state and national
government. And we believe in public funding of campaigns to eliminate the
need for candidates to scrounge for money from special interest groups.
	In the meantime, progressives should take back the Democratic Party
from the monied interests. The corporations may spend their millions to
control the American political debate, and neither Congress nor the courts
will do anything to stop them, but we don't have to lie down. The
corporations may rent our legislators, but they can't buy our votes. They
may shut us out of TV, radio and the monopoly daily newspapers, but they
can't stop us from putting our newspaper on the street and on the Internet.
	Cynicism and despair are poison to democracy, but that is what the
corporations pour into the American debate via the daily news and
infotainment. Fifty-one percent of the American electorate voted with their
butts in 1996, in dissatisfaction with the choices they were offered. If we
can give them better choices we can declare independence from corporatized
plutocracy. It will take a guerilla operation to mobilize them, but that's
the way of all revolutions.
	Nowadays, deregulation has allowed huge corporations to gobble up
TV and radio stations - in some cases allowing one corporation to control
every major radio station in a metropolitan area - and broadcasters have
dropped even the pretense of a public service responsibility. A few of the
smaller markets remain in the hands of independent operators and Jim
Hightower can be heard on more than 100 of them through the United
Broadcasting Network. If he isn't on in your area, but Rush Limbaugh and
other right-wingers are, demand that your local radio station give
Hightower a try.
	Also, you can give us a hand in getting out the word about the
Progressive Populist. We are about half-way to the break-even point and you
can get us there either by buying a friend (or your public library) a gift
subscription for $12 or sending us the addresses of five friends who might
be interested in our Journal from the Heartland. We'll send each of them a
free sample. Just call 1-800-205-7067 or email populist@xxxxxxx for
details. Ultimately the success of the Progressive Populist is up to you.
We appreciate your support.
	- Jim Cullen

TABLE OF CONTENTS, November 1997:
(Articles marked with * are available at our web site,
http://www.eden.com/~reporter.)

* EDITORIAL
Fight the Freebooters, Get the Word Out
JIM HIGHTOWER
Malden Mills is Back!
'Miscellaneous' Bank Fees
Bosses Who Spy
Predictive Genetic Tests
Hoggish Insurance Companies
A Monument to Monstrous Pollution
* LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Junk Science
A Strange Country
Only Give to Union Telefunders
Reward Voters
Criticize Everything
* DISPATCHES
Heading South Sans Fast Track
PROGRESSIVE CHALLENGE
Fairness Agenda for America
RURAL ROUTES/Linda Blackford
Land Trusts Preserve Cherished Areas
* FEATURE/Craig McGrath
'Boss' Pat Robertson's Tammany Christians
CALAMITY HOWLER/A.V. Krebs
Bill Gates' Bills
Raising the Window on Microsoft
The Gap Grows Ever Larger
* BUSINESS ETHICS/Marjorie Kelly
Why all the Fuss About Stockholders?
AN AMERICAN'S STORY/Phillip Farrugio
Blue Collar/Green Collar
LABOR TALK/Harry Kelber
Government Attack on Teamsters
GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Building a Movement in Baltimore
* SPEECH/Jim Hightower
'If we can get it loose we can move it'
WORK IN PROGRESS
* COVER STORY
Fencing Out Factory Farms
By Robert Bryce
Corporate Outlaw: Home on the Range
By A.V. Krebs
BOOKS/Bill Knight
'They were expendable'
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Fraud & Abuse: So Easy to Hate
DAVID MORRIS
Trade is Good; Democracy is Better
PROGRESSIVE REVIEW/Sam Smith
NYT Notices Foster Case
NEWSPEAK/Wayne Grytting
Of Human Bondage
TALES FROM EAST TEXAS/Carol Countryman
DA Desperate for Death
PRIMAL SCREED/James McCarty Yeager
Money is Still Speech
GLOBAL CITIZEN/Donella Meadows
Left and Right and Power
MEDIA BEAT/Norman Solomon
A Big Story Goes Unreported
TED RALL
Homelessness is Where the Heart is
LATINO SPECTRUM / Roberto Rodriguez and Patrisia Gonzales
Taking a Stand in San Joaquin
JESSE JACKSON
A Global Market, Ready or Not
IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST/Ralph Nader:
Bank Monsters
NATIVE GROUND/Randolph Holhut
Demonizing Government
HAL CROWTHER
Unteachables
CHARLES LEVENDOSKY
Senate Slows Justice
COMMENT/Frank Lingo
Pot Prohibition:
Still Crazy After All These Years
MOLLY IVINS
The Breast Cancer Industry
Hold Your Nose and Cover Your Eyes
Wall Street Eats Its Own
CHARLIE WILSON
The Misery of Elective Office
COMMENT/John Buell
The Truly Wealthy:
 Just Like the Rest of Us?

To get a special, one-year introductory subscription to the PROGRESSIVE
POPULIST, send a check for $12 by Dec. 15 to the PROGRESSIVE POPULIST, P.O.
Box 487, Storm Lake, IA 50588. Please note whether you prefer the Email
version or a newsprint version. Free samples of the newsprint version are
available to residents of the United States. Email samples are available
everywhere.

Entire contents are copyrighted 1997 by the PROGRESSIVE POPULIST, but you
are encouraged to distribute this notice to relevant newsgroups and email
lists and reprint for noncommercial use.