 Good afternoon and welcome to the Longmont Museum's Steward Auditorium. My name is Justin Veach. I'm the manager of the Steward Auditorium. So glad to have you here. Welcome. Who's never been here before? Wow. We love new faces. What do you think so far? We're not always the most punctual space in town, but one of the nicer, maybe. Anyway, we're really glad to have you here. The Longmont Museum does one whole heck of a lot of stuff. We have art shows. We have two galleries. We have a contemporary art show up right now featuring the work of Colorado-based contemporary artist Terry Maker. We also have a permanent exhibition up called Front Range Rising. It's kind of a history of the Front Range told through the lens of Longmont, Colorado, which is where you are right now, by the way. Longmont. That's right. We are so glad to have our media sponsor in the house tonight, KGNU. We simply can't do all that we do without the support of KGNU, our members and sponsors and donors. So thank you. If we have any members in the audience, thank you especially. Thank you. I see those hands. Thanks. Anyway, if you don't have one of these, please grab it on your way out the door. This is chock full of everything we do through the spring. Anyway, without further ado, I'd like to introduce to you the man, the founder and publisher of the Colorado Springs Independent, or as he calls it, the Colorado Springs Codependent. He worked for Nader for 10 years and he's on the board of Jim Hightower's nonprofit. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome John Weiss to the Stuart Auditorium. Thank you. Boy, all of a sudden it's dark in here. I want to thank Justin in this beautiful space. I want to thank Joe Ritchie and David Barsame from Alternative Radio. I knew Joe when he worked at the main poets, no, he didn't work at it. That was his life, the main poets and writers association. We lived in Portland, Maine together for a long time and I called Joe and said, Hightower's coming to Colorado Springs and then he's going to keynote our revolution event in Denver. You want to bring anybody here and he said, we got to bring two people in. One was KGNU and the other one was Boulder Weekly. The publisher of Boulder Weekly, friends and Kowskies right here, I'd have them stand, but it's in the dark so you can't see it. We also want to thank Avery Brewing Company for their generous donation and the Boulder Arts Commission, an agency of the Boulder City Council for helping sponsor this event. I first met Jim Hightower via his writing. I was a freshman at Colorado College and I was reading a class and I was reading, doing a book on economics of agriculture and you know what used to go in the library and used to look at the books and you just, I came across this book saying hard times, hard tomatoes and I had never, all the other books were like boring titles so I just picked it off the shelf and it was an expose on how the agribusiness lobby which was, went and they wanted to make foods that could ship long distance that look good. They didn't care how they tasted, they didn't care the nutritional value so they spent literally tens of thousands of dollars on campaign contributions. Things were cheap back in the days and they got hundreds of millions of dollars of federal government research to Cornell, probably to Fort Collins, all the ag industry to start making hard tomatoes, hard times that you could ship across the country and Jim's book outlined exactly how the money went from the agribusiness to the lobbyists to the senators and the house members on the ag committee to then fund these projects and so taxpayer money, instead of supporting local organic farms, supported big business and trying to make hard tomatoes that could be shipped across the country. The next time I met Jim is when I was an organizer for Fred Harris for president. He was an Oklahoma senator, he was lack of anything else than Bernie Sanders of his day and Jim was the campaign manager for that presidential bid and after that presidential bid in 1976 Fred Harris became a university of New Mexico political science professor so Jim helped him do that, do that transition. Then I met Jim again in Boulder at an event organized by KGNU and I was so, he's always been one of my heroes and I had just launched The Independent and we had carried his column since the beginning just like the Boulder Weekly has in 1995 and I asked him to come to Colorado Springs and so we brought him to Colorado Springs and he was a breath of fresh air and he came again last, spoke yesterday, we had 750 people and I don't want to make Jim's head too big but it was also to see the Molly Ivins movie and Jim and Molly go way back so it was a twofer. So Jim, most of you know Jim so I'm not going to do much more of an introduction to say he and Ann Richards were the last two state Democrats elected statewide in Texas and Jim served two terms as Texas Agricultural Commission and he got defeated by a guy named Carl Rove who ran dirty tricks on him and guess who defeated him, Rick Perry. So with no further ado because you all know Jim I'm going to turn it over to him. Jim Hightower. Hello, thank you. Thank you. Very nice. What a joy. Thanks so much. Great to be here in Sonny Longmont and right here at the Museum of History in this agricultural area which it formerly was and still has a lot of that going here so it just makes me, well I think the group for allowing Scruffy Texas populace to come in here and be a part of this KGNU Boulder Weekly political palooza that we're having here, a palooza for independent media for common sense and an era of senseless activity and for free beer. I mean who else will bring you free beer? As John indicated almost from the start of my radio commentaries began back in 1993, KGNU has been right there and it's been a joy for me to be a part of their community which is really what it is. Community radio puts the unity in community and they have all kinds of gatherings not just in Boulder but obviously here in Longmont and all around and then many stations that now airs their programs. They are what I call radioactive radio and they do a tremendous, tremendous job. I think of KGNU in terms of a motel that's kind of an iconic motel from back in the 1930s in Austin Texas right near where I live called the Austin Motel but it had a marquee sign that said no additives, no preservatives, corporate free since 1938. That is KGNU didn't quite go back to 1938 but it certainly is corporate free because it doesn't need preservatives because you are its preservatives, the listeners to the radio station are the preservatives and it doesn't need any additives because it knows what it stands for, it knows what it's trying to do and the democracy mission that it has is so fulfilled. Then Boulder Weekly as John indicated also carried my little electric column from the start and these weeklies including John's and the Boulder Weekly are so essential in our country today and they are actually doing the real journalism in America these days because of course the hedge funds and the billionaires have taken over. The media, my newspaper, the Austin American Statesman in the daily in my hometown is now a product of GANET but you've got to go, really you've got to follow the bouncing ball on this. The American Statesman was owned by the Cox chain out of Atlanta. It sold it a few years ago, a couple of years ago, to Gate House which is a hedge fund operation off of Wall Street except Gate House doesn't really exist. Gate House is owned by something called the New Media Investment Group which is financed and managed by something called the Fortress Investment Group which is owned by a fracking baron, a billionaire and New Media was bought by Softbank Group last year, the Japanese huge bank operation over there which also owns Sprint, the new media Fortress Softbank Group was bought late last year by GANET which was financed by the Apollo Global Management Group which financed it with a 11.5% interest loan that 11.5% is really important because it means that they're taking all the profit out of the top to pay for the financing and that means that they're firing the reporters and shrinking the paper down to nothing and that is exactly what is happening. You know, Lily Tomlin once said no matter how cynical you get, it's almost impossible to keep up. So the antidote to cynicism is you. Coming out into the countryside, I'm a lucky duck, I do a lot of traveling and I've been about just about every place that's got a zip code, visiting with people like you who are doing things, people, groups of people, coalitions of groups of people that you don't hear about in the national media or from the politicians, but you are the source of the democratic hope in our country. So it just makes me happier than a chigger at a nudist colony to be standing up here looking out at all of you right-wing butt-kickers and corporate greed-whackers, you grassroots agitators, and indeed you are agitators and the powers to be try to make that a pejority of don't they? All those agitators, our workers were perfectly happy in this factory until those union agitators came in and the poor people didn't mind living up against that toxic waste dump until those environmental agitators came in. Well, horse hockey, agitation is what built America. We're not for agitators. And I don't mean just the founding fathers as useful as they were, but the real agitators were Thomas Paine and Daniel Shays. They were the abolitionists and the suffragists, Frederick Douglass and populists and unionists, the bonus brigade and the conscientious objectors, Mother Jones and Woody Guthrie, Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez, Karen Silkwood and Harvey Milk, and now down to you and me to be the agitators again. And that is a good thing, as Jesse Jackson used to put it, the agitator is the center post in the washing machine that gets the dirt out. So I come to you tonight, not just from Austin, Texas, but from South Austin. And things are a little different over there. We have a little more irreverent attitude. Molly Ivins lived over there in my neighborhood. John Henry Falco was out of there and so many other mavericks and malcontents and mutts. And our unofficial slogan on the south side is we're all here because we're not all there. Well, I think we're all here because the powers that be are not at all there in terms of understanding what America is all about. Understanding that the essential glue of our society is the notion that we're all in this together. My old daddy, you've got to be aware of Texans telling daddy stories, but I had a pretty good one. And he didn't know he had a political philosophy, but he did. And the expression of it periodically in these terms, he said, Jim, everybody does better when everybody does better. And that's what's missing in our society of the day. So here we are in a big time for America, a big time for democracy and for you and me and our progeny. An historic time, another of those when in the course of human events moments that Thomas Jefferson wrote about. You see it in inequality that is rending our nation. You see it in the rise of autocracy and plutocracy. You see it in the health care crisis. You see it in the climate change crisis, etc. They're exterminating the whole idea of the common good. And that means that we have to step forward bolder than we ever have before. And there's a detcho in South Texas, a grandest malice, a remedious grandest, for great melodies need great remedies. And it's not enough for us progressives to just point to Trump and say, and his government of goofy, sleepy, sleazy, creepy, Larry Curley and Moe, it's not enough for us to point to them and say, well, we're not them. People rightly want to know, well, who are you? And they're looking for a little de-populist answer to that. Here's the core reality that we face in our country. Folks know that the real powers are not the politicians, but the Wall Street elites and the corporate chieftains who've been funding and controlling the elections and the agendas of both parties. You don't have to be in who's who to know what's what, do you? I mean, corporate power is why the economic and political systems in our country are rigged, rigged to knock down the middle class, to hold down the poor, and to tear down our democratic rights. Economists actually have a technical term for what powers of beard are doing to us. It's called stealing. Faster than a hall gate supper, they're stealing from us. Stealing our very little de-democratic possibilities. I think of that song that Woody Guthrie had about Pretty Boy Floyd, The Outlaw, had a verse in it that said, through this world I travel, I see lots of funny men. Some will rob you of a six gun, some with a fountain pen. It's the fountain pens who are doing the serious stealing in our society today. We see it throughout our culture. Walmart, the typical Walmart employee, makes $22,000 a year. The five Walmart heirs, the Walton family, make $25,000 a minute. That is inequality by its very definition. The three richest people in America now hold more wealth than the bottom half of the American people. Three people have more wealth than 165 million people have. That is inequality. Some of these guys are getting so rich they can afford to air condition hell. I tell you, what they better be setting some money aside for that project, I think. I love it when they come out these billionaires. Now there's a new term, centi-billionaires. That's people who have more than $100 billion. Jeff Bezos is one of those of Amazon. They come out and say, well, of course, we give to charity because that's our way of giving back. If you're giving back, that means you took too much to start with. Let us not be swayed by that. In fact, they say, well, yes, we do make a lot of money. We haul in a ton of money, but we are philanthropists. Mark Zuckerberg even complained about Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax because he said, that's going to impinge on my philanthropy. I'll tell you a quick story of what the gods think about charity. It comes from Earl Long, Huey Long's brother, when Earl was governor of Louisiana back in the 1950s. He told about a rich man who died and tried to get into heaven. But if you'd gone to that little Methodist church that I did growing up in Denison, Texas, you'd know that you just don't march into heaven. You've got to appear at the pearly gates and there's an angel outside going to look over your life. Then St. Peter back here is going to render judgment about whether you get to come in or not. Here comes this rich man. The angel looks over his life and says, oh my God, you never did no good for nobody. No way. What are you doing here? The rich man said, well, that's not entirely true. There was that time in 1924 when a beggar man was on the street and I put a nickel in his cup. The angel said, so? The rich man said, well, then in 1934, with a woman, needing car fare home and I gave her a nickel. And the angel said, that didn't make up for life of greed. And the rich man said, well, now hold it because I've got a consistent pattern of philanthropy in 1944. I was coming out of my bank at Christmastime Salvation Army Kettle and I put a nickel in there. And the angel turns back to St. Peter and says, what were we going to do with this man? And St. Peter said, give him back his 15 cents and tell him to go to hell. Because it's not charity we want. We want America's founding populist values, economic fairness, social justice, equal opportunity for all people. That's what we stand for. That's what America represents right there. Yet we're in a battle, inequality throughout our economy. And inequality is just another way of saying injustice. Take the food economy as I referred to at the top. We're in an agricultural area here. Our food economy is a wreck. The people who produce the food get, not only the least, but practically nothing. You buy a $29 bucket of fried chicken. The farmer gets 58 cents. $29.58. All the money goes to the Tyson's and the Pilgrim Pride and the giant processors of it and marketers of it. Milk economy. Dairy farmers are just being wiped out right and left across this country, including in this state. And it's because we've got monopolies controlling it. 60% of the raw milk produced in America is controlled by two corporations. But you don't market milk nationally. You market it regionally. And one of those corporations, Dean Foods, which is based here in Denver, I believe, but here in Colorado, Dean Foods controls 90% of the milk market in Wisconsin, in Michigan, and in Vermont, and about 70% in many other states as well. It is a monopoly. The farmer doesn't send a chance in that, so the price is being knocked down for the farmer and raised for the consumer. And that's because of policy. We have an agricultural policy that has gone from butts to nuts. Again, these are deliberate decisions made by our policyholders. Earl Butts, you might remember him, Uncle Earl. He was Secretary of Agriculture under Richard Nixon. And Earl stepped forward and said, this trend toward less firms is not bad. It's good that we have been able to produce an increasing amount of food with the work of a smaller percentage of our population. This releases people to do something useful in their lives. Ezra Taft Benson, Eisenhower's Secretary of Agriculture said farmers need the spur of insecurity. Ronald Reagan said farm foreclosures and bankruptcies are part of the necessary solution. My program hasn't hurt anybody. No one's been thrown out in the snow to die. That's a high standard, isn't it? And Jimmy Carter, many of you will not make it, but it will be better for those of you who survive. Now, here we are with Donnie Trump and gang, and their idea of a good farm program is He-Hall. We've got a guy who's Secretary of Agriculture now. His name is Sonny Perdue. He's out of Georgia, a peanut producing state, by the way, and Sonny is the biggest goober of them all. He enjoys mocking his constituency. What do you call two farmers in a basement? He asked in an ag industry gathering, a wine cellar he could follow. In America, he icily told hard-hit dairy farmers up in Wisconsin, the big get bigger and the small get out. Again, the Secretary of Agriculture. And then, of course, he goes even further, attacking poor people for receiving food stamps. He says government dependency has never been the American dream. This from a guy who has been dependent on a government check for two decades of his life. On and on. I mean, the thing is, ag policy today, farm policy, food policy, is being written by lawyers and lobbyists and economists. People who could not run a watermelon stand if we gave them the melons and had the highway patrol flagged down the customer's farm. But they're in charge of writing the policy, which is why it is perverse. Of course, you're right here in a fracking zone. And we deal with that in Texas as well. Indeed, here's a lovely color-coded map, which you can't see, so I'll show it to you. Anyway, which has just the blotches of fracking all across our country, including great swaths of Colorado, particularly northeastern Colorado, where we are. And the big oil frackers are just a classic example of the power and arrogance of that industry. Using preemption, which I think they did here, did they not? To have the state preempt, you're right as a local people to decide that you would like to ban fracking here. We have experienced that in Texas as well. So they extract and they exploit. And then they dodge their taxes, which you've also been fighting here in Colorado. And then they create these environmental and health problems, fracastrophies, they're called. And completely using just billions of tons of water and of sand, both of which happen to be precious resources. You know about water, generally, down in southwest Texas, the water table dropped from 20 feet to 2 feet within two years of fracking beginning down there. So farmers in that area are wiped out. Cities are wiped out, they're not cities, but they're small towns that are wiped out with good water. Sand, most people don't realize, I didn't realize until I dug into it and we wrote about it in the lowdown that sand is a we're just massively consuming sand, which is a perishable commodity. Every concrete, well this building, the streets, the high rises in Denver, the glass, every piece of glass is made of sand. And we've consumed so much of it already that it's now a rare commodity, so they're dredging oceans to be able to bring sand in. And some sand like in Dubai where they had the huge high rise buildings, tallest in the world over there, their sand is too soft to use to make cement and to make glass. So they import sand from North Carolina to Dubai. So I mean it's insanity. And then they're now on a pitch, Alec, the American Legislative Exchange Council front group for corporations to put legislation into state legislatures and do the corporate will. They are passing something called critical infrastructure bills, which criminalizes protests of critical infrastructure, which are pipelines and fracking sites and oil refineries and even hog farms and chicken farms are part of the critical infrastructure of America that if you protest it in certain ways it means you're going to do two years in jail. So it is the complete perversion of our democratic ideals. So the question becomes who's going to stand up to these forces of greed and stand up for the Galgis? The powers that be have to be confronted by the powers that ought to be. Workers, the environmentalists, the farmers, the consumers, veterans, everyday people. But yet that question of who's going to stand up is the big question in this year's democratic primaries because whoever wins the democratic primary is going to be our channel to deal with Donald Trump and to begin to reverse some of this stuff if we have somebody who is nominated by the democrats to stand up for the Galgis. The democratic establishment, unfortunately, is still controlled by what I call pusillanimous democrats. It's a clean word, you can look it up. I mean some of these democrats are weaker than Canadian hot sauce, you know, when it comes to standing up for the people they're supposed to stand up for and when it comes to standing up for the democratic principles. I mean, thank god they weren't in charge when Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt passed things like social security and wage and hour laws and right on down the line. They would have said, oh no, that's too strong, we can't do that. The people will be opposed to it. The people will be scared of it. Indeed, Medicare for all. The governor of, I think it was Delaware, rose up and said, well, we can't say Medicare for all because that scares people. I mean, excuse me, I say Medicare for all a lot and it does not scare anybody. They rise up and cheer when you say Medicare for all because you're talking about delivering the basic of health care to every man woman and child in America as a matter of human right. People are in favor of that. One of our democratic contenders said that a majority of democrats opposed Medicare for all. Hello. The latest poll in December showed 81 percent of democrats in favor of Medicare for all. Two-thirds of independents. Apple pie doesn't get 81 percent. Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax. Oh, that's too strong. That scares people. Well, 77 percent of democrats favorite, 55 percent of independents and 57 percent of republicans favor Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax. So we don't have to fear the people. There was a poll done in December, another poll by the Center for American Progress, which is essentially a democratic establishment front group. They do a lot of good work, though, and they did a survey and they found that 70 percent or more of the people, including a majority of republicans, agree that college education is too expensive and states ought to help people afford a college education without getting buried in debt. They said that rich families and corporations should pay more in taxes. They said that pharmaceutical companies should be penalized if drug prices rise faster than inflation. They said government should increase good jobs with a trillion-dollar investment in infrastructure, including production of green energy. They said we should reduce inequality with a two-percent wealth tax. And get this, eight out of ten democrats, three-fourths of independents and 49 percent of republicans say corporations have too much power and should be strongly regulated. So we don't have to fear the people. The people are way ahead of the politicians and way ahead of the media, by the way, as well. So my message to you, and I'm sure you're wondering what it is by now, is that it's up to us. It's not up to Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. It's not up to the Democratic Party. It's not up to the Congress, any governor, etc. It's up to you and me. We, the people, joining together can make the big difference. We, the people, have got to take the stand. We've got to be the ones that push back against the gougers out there who are ripping us off. And, you know, I know that a lot of people say, oh, well, I'm just a little person. You know, I can't make a difference against this. But just remember this, even the smallest dog can lift its leg on the tallest building. America can be as big as we want it to be, as big as we need it to be. We certainly have the wealth and as these polls indicate, we have the grassroots support. We have all that we need to stand up in the bold spirit of Franklin and also of Eleanor Roosevelt to do as as Franklin Roosevelt said in his campaign in 1936 to restore America to its own people. That's the fight that we're in. It's just that's straightforward. That's the importance of KGNU. That's the importance of the bolder weekly. That's the importance of an independent media, but that's also the importance of groups, of people organized into groups that are making political fights. And I can tell you that all across America we're winning those political fights. It's an astonishing story that goes untold by the establishment media, but there it is. Because we've got to form together. There's a little hardware store, not too far from where I live in Austin, called Harold's Hardware, independent place, not one of these big box stores. It's no better than this hall right here, but it's a great place. You don't have to buy the whole carton of nails. They'll sell you two nails if that's what you're looking for, you know. And they'll say, well, what are you trying to do? Well, I want to build a lectern. Okay, well, let's pencil it out and see what you need. They'll loan you a tool. You can take a power saw home and bring it back. And the slogan at Harold's Hardware is, together we can do it yourself. No, that's got to be our slogan, doesn't it? Because we can't do it ourselves, but together we can, all of ourselves, coming together. So we've got to keep reaching out to those farmers, for example, to musicians, they don't have health care, to restaurant owners, small business owners, they don't have health care. They're getting screwed by the tax laws, et cetera. They're natural allies, two evangelicals, by the way, most of which are poor people, are relatively poor people, and are inclined to our view on economic issues. So we've got to reach out to these people. As Jesse Jackson put it, we might not all have come over on the same boat, but we're in the same boat now. And that's a powerful political reality if we exercise it, if we work on it. And then you've got to persevere. Again, you don't win the first time out. I lost my first race for statewide office in Texas and came back two years later and won and was able to do quite a bit of good stuff because people came together and they formed a movement that elected me and Ann Richards and Jimmy Maddox as Attorney General, Gary Morrow as Land Commissioner. We were all young. He's had kind of differing constituencies, but we campaigned together, worked together. All of us got elected. That meant we could govern together. We could trust each other and rely on each other. You formed a movement that could actually govern. So you've got to persevere, stick with it. Again, you don't get there that first time. Willie Nelson told me that I dare the early bird might get the worm, but it's the second mouse that gets the cheese. Might want to pencil that out for some of the slower ones. And mainly, we've got to stay strong, recognize the strength that we have and recognize the justice for which we are fighting and be bold about it. Thomas Payne said, let them call me rebel and welcome. I feel no concern from it, nor should we. Let them call us radicals. Let them call us agitators. Let them call us crazy people. Let them call us whatever they want, but we are actually the majority and we have the potential to put America, to restore America to its own people again. And just keep agitating, agitating, agitating. I'll leave you with this thought and we'll get to some questions if you have them, comments. And it's from Louis Grzard, the late great Southern humorist who said something that we in the South have always known to be true. And that is that there's a big difference between being naked and being naked. Naked means you have no clothes on. Naked means you have no clothes on and you are up to something. So let's get naked together. I have two asks tonight. I came to Colorado in 1972 to look at Colorado College and I went down to Acacia Park and there was an anti-war protest. Anyone have an idea who was leading the protest? 1972. Fort Carson Soldiers. There was a draft. The coolest coffee shops, everyone, this was a whole different world back then, but the Air Force Academy had a 40% dropout rate. It's a whole different world. Okay, I'm telling you this because Colorado Springs, John Kerry was there when he was head of Vietnam Veterans Against the War and he made his comment, which is famous for saying who wants to be the last soldier to die for this misguided, whatever, he went on more eloquently than me. But it was so powerful and he was talking to soldiers. So one of the asks I have is Colorado Springs is changing. We are the fastest growing city in Colorado right now because we have cheap land, we have lots of water, and we have very little regulation. So it's a lot cheaper to expand down in Colorado Springs than other places. There's a huge movement afoot there. Right now, there's a majority of moderates and progressives have taken over the city council. We have, okay. I know it doesn't sound great, but of our 16 elected representatives to the legislature, three are Democrats. And Pete Lee is doing an amazing job of head of the Judiciary Committee with the Restorative Justice. I'm saying this because you need to start thinking differently about Colorado Springs and we need the support of the rest of the city. And so, but I do want to just go back in the day. I was wearing a t-shirt when after I went to the first rally, the anti-war rally in Acacia Park, I went to Hibbert's department store. And I said, I was just waiting while I had gone to the bathroom and a woman, I was with a girl, I was using the bathroom, and somebody came up and asked me where they could get flatware. And I didn't even know what flatware was. And then somebody else asked me where they could buy a toaster. And I said, I didn't know. Well, I was wearing a t-shirt and it said that these words on it, they thought I was a question authority. Okay. I mean, you know, I knew the answers. So my first ask is you believe in Colorado Springs and don't write us off and work with us. We need infusions. We had the largest gain of any city in the country of people between 21 and 34 last year. That's because they can't afford Denver. So they're coming to Colorado Springs and they're changing our, are changing our community. So that's the first ask. The second ask is, Jim is the best investigator of reporter now that Molly Ivins has died. No, but he's really, really good. He's, sorry, his newsletter is on a range of topics. They're incredible. It's a one-man machine. Okay. He, we need subscriptions to his newsletter. He's not charging for this event. We would like, we would like for you to invest $15, get that newsletter once a month. It will make you laugh. It will make you angry. There's always a take action what you can do because Jim is positive and we need subscribers. Right now we have about a hundred thousand subscribers. It's pretty good, but we, we need more and this is not something I should say, but some of us, every year we lose some subscribers because they pass on. Okay. Literally, he's got an older readership, but we need new subscribers. I gave a, we had 500 subscriptions card. We have 18 left. If you would like those, you can go online and order it there. It's just 15 bucks or if you want to save your stamp, you can come and see me, but please subscribe. We really need it and you need the information. With no further ado, Mr. Hightower for questions. Thank you, John, an unpaid commercial message. Yeah. All right. So questions, comments, observations, keen insights, human. We had about a half a conversation a dozen years ago. Somebody cut us off. A friend of mine who is Texas journalist, Dick Revis. I don't know. He wrote this book, If White Kids Die, about him and me in Alabama 55 years ago and really, I mean, what really goes on in the world, I got masters in philosophy and history and I've never been able to get a job because of my role in the movement and being a historian. I'm trying. Let me say it, please, please. I just gave a Black History Month talk today at Second Baptist in Boulder, but just the point is history is crucial. Could you speak about, they're abolishing it in the school system, colleges, high school, everything. Could you speak about the importance of real history? Thank you. Yes. That's a very good point. Yes. We either don't teach our history or we trivialize the history by doing the great man notion of where America came from, for example, rather than it came from grassroots people just like us. And that's the only thing that has ever changed the country. It's never come from the top down. It's always boiled up from the grassroots. So one we had to push, as you're suggesting, in the school systems, both the local school systems and state and national, that we do a real history job for our people. But then we can't wait on them because there's going to be a long time. So we've got to do it ourselves. We have to be the teachers and you suggested today you went to a Baptist Church in Denver and you taught some history. We can all be teachers. You don't have to have a degree to be a teacher. In fact, some of the best teachers are just those who have personal experiences and share them. And I would urge you also, as particularly those of you who have organizations, to do a lot of oral history within your own group. There are so many people who have been a part of this movement, this little d-democratic movement for decades. And we need to take their stories down, make them as touching as they possibly can, and then get them out to young people. And luckily we have something called the internet now that bypasses a lot of the established blockages in the system. So go at it. Thank you. Hey, thanks for coming. My question is that I would like to go down to the corner and have a poster to stir up some rabble resin. What kind of slogans did I put on that? It might be influenced the undecided voters that make a difference, not just a sort of matter. He's asking that he'd like to go down on the corner with a poster and make a political statement of some sort. What would be an appropriate slogan to put on that poster? I think question authority would be a good one. And you can get it off a John's t-shirt here. But that's the core. Question authority and then question authority's answers. That's what it is to be a democracy. Here we go. Right here. I've got a unique experience being a lifelong Democrat up until the election of 2016. I went to four rallies. Actually, I was a Bernie guy. And after I saw what the DNC did to Bernie and what they're doing now to, my choice would be Tulsi Gabbard. And Michael Bennett was a good choice too. But I see that the DNC has been hijacked. I'm what you call a walk away. And there's a unique experience that I bring to this because I don't know how many people voted for an orange man bad or whatever you call it. But it's a bizarre experience to pick up any printed material to go to any of the mainstream media, watch all of your keyboard journalists being censored from YouTube being demonetized. The latest example of a more discussed with what used to be my party was watching these politicians sit on their hands and watching this Speaker of the House embarrass the entire country by tearing up a speech. All like when I get into critical conversations, I'm sorry, my question is you talk about fracking Obama was the ones that put us on the map and Trump's getting credit for it. Obama had a policy. The question is, how can you as of the left of the Democrats rationalize what happened for eight years and now blame it on Trump? Well, the Democratic Party establishment is a corporate establishment. It doesn't want Bernie Sanders. It doesn't really want Joe Biden. It doesn't want Kovachar. It doesn't want Gabbard. It doesn't want any Democrat there. They want the weakest that they can choose for us. And so that's why in addition, when Bernie said run, go run for office, he didn't just mean for state legislature and Congress and et cetera, he meant for be a Democratic precinct chair, but be a Democratic county party chair, take over the Democratic Party and make it what it is supposed to be. That's our job to do. I can pretty well guarantee that if you took 10 of your friends to the precinct elections coming up within the Democratic Party, you would be the precinct chair. It doesn't take that much of an organizing effort to make that happen and then begin to change those policies. We have to do that. We are doing that in Texas. There's the our revolution group in Texas, which I was a founder of. We target those places and we are winning county chairmanship and all across the state as well as winning elected offices for public offices as well. So it's a matter of just being in the game. And yeah, you can be dissuaded because they're not responding to you, but just being angry about it and going to get it done, organize, do something. I'm very concerned about the fractious nature that we have in the Democratic Party or the progressives area. So I'm wondering how you think we can all come together and get this guy out of office because that's really the most important part to me. And so I'm just looking for some answers from you. Yes, well, that is the first task, of course, but we're in a democratic process and it's messy and we do not have a democratic cohesion on a candidate or not even really two candidates, but we have very strong philosophical, but more importantly, issue-based, principal-based directions to proceed. That's why we have elections. And so it's going to work out. The media, for example, keeps saying, well, Bernie or Elizabeth Warren, they can't win. And Bernie, oh my God, Bernie is getting all these votes, but still he's only getting 25 to 28% of the vote. But if you add Elizabeth Warren's vote to that, the progressive wing of the party, then you're getting 40 to 45% of the votes. So you're getting up there and they say, well, having Bernie would hurt the general election chances. Well, having a moderate or a corporatist in particular would hurt the democratic chances in the general election even worse because people would not go vote. So we've got to not be afraid of our principles and not be afraid to stand up for what we believe in and it'll settle out. We might not win this time, as I say, but we're building something bigger. We built something bigger in 2016 and here we are now even bigger. In 2018, we built even more, particularly in the Congress, and then this year and then on down the road. It's a long-term movement that we're building. So don't fear it. Just engage in it. I look around this room and I see mostly gray hairs. I'm one too, but I've been best friends with Ms. Clarell for 30 years, so I don't look it. But that concerns me that we don't have teenagers in here. We don't have college kids in here. We don't have parents of young children in here. How do we get this message to them, including the most apathetic Americans out there who are not enraged by anything that you're saying today because they have their walmarts and they've got their cell phone? How do you reach them? How do we reach them? Well, the most apathetic are not worth reaching. So let's deal with the real possibilities here of what we can get. And you go to people who are persuadable, who do have interest, and I suggest that they have more concern than you're giving them credit for. And young people are getting this message. They're not getting it in meetings, but they're getting it in podcasts. They're getting it on the web. They're getting it in various electronic forums and their own meeting places. So you can't keep saying to African Americans, Latinos, people of color, young people, why don't you come to our meeting rather than going to their meetings? We should be going to them and saying, how can we help you? We want you to join us, but we'd like to join you. What issues are our concern for you? There was a woman organizer in Texas, a Democratic organizer. She went out to a suburb area with a meeting of the Democratic Women's Association. And the president of the association said to her, we can't get these Mexican Americans to come to our meetings. And the organizer said, you're meeting in the country club. So we need to use a little common sense. There is a rally in Longmont every week on Saturday. It starts at one o'clock. People just show up because they want to. There were 23 of us there last Saturday. There's a counter rally across the street. There was 21 of those. We want to outnumber them, come and join us, and help us show them who's who. Thank you. Six in Maine every Saturday, one o'clock. Jim, thank you for being here. 10 miles north of us is Weld County, and we have over 25,000 fracking wells up there. And it's supposed to be an existential threat to our public health. We got a governor, and we got a Democratic majority in the House and the Senate, and they're not doing the damn thing to help us. What do you suggest? Embarrass them. You have to get in the face of power, and particularly that when the power is ostensibly on your side. They are embarrassable. Republicans, mostly, are not embarrassable. But those Democrats are, and to be confronted on the grounds that they are standing for corporate powers, money powers, that most likely funnel some money into those campaigns, and that the people expect more, and then if they don't do it, and a good number of them won't, then run against the son of a bitchess. We have time for two more questions. Who has a question? And we're happy also to go drink beer. That's the last question right there. Hey, Jim. Joe Ritchie from Alternative Radio, with a quick one. Hey, Jim, why is American football like US foreign policy? Well, they both consist of organized violence interrupted only by secret meetings. What can we do about Pentagon spending in the next decade? Well, you have a chance right here because you're about to become the space force of America. This is beyond ridiculous and almost beyond ridicule, but it is being ridiculed. Trump's, it's not like we don't have enough wars already that we have to create a sixth branch of the armed forces, which he's proposed to call the space force, because he saw something on television that suggested that would be a good idea. And so he's put it forward. It is a joke. It doesn't have, it's not a sixth branch of government at all, of armed forces at all, but all that aside, it is just the foot in the door that the military contractors want, because they will then make something of it. Trump just tossed the idea out there, but they will pick it up and run with it. And we've got to confront that because they're now asking for many billions of dollars more, and it will be an endless amount of money, because space is infinite, right? So that we can go fight as Ted Cruz said, space pirates. So I think he should be the first one to go up. Okay, we had a question. When Pete Buttigieg returned to the United States from Oxford, he joined the McKinsey corporate group, 7,700 employees, one of the most powerful and conservative consultant groups in the world, spent three years there. I'm concerned that he, that's where he's getting this money and he was groomed for what he's doing now. Do you have any thoughts about Pete Buttigieg? Yes, I do. I think there are many, many good things can be said about him, and there are plenty of good people who support him, but you need to look, you need to follow the money, the old story, because it's not just McKinsey, that's one thing, but he is the Wall Street candidate in the Democratic Party, and he's getting most of it, well, I don't know if it's most of it, but the biggest chunks of the money is coming from Wall Street, and he's spent an enormous amount of time in those hedge funds and centers of money up there dragging the sack and trying to load it up, and I can tell you from political experience in Texas, I know that if you take the corporate check written on the back is the corporate agenda, and you're not going to cash the check, they're going to cash the check, so that is a real danger, and we need to get clear from him what he's intending with that money by taking that money. Hello friends, I actually have a poll I'd like to share. I wrote this during the second Bush flag, but it still seems appropriate. I pledge a grievance to the flag of the divided state of America and to the republicans for whom we can't stand one nation under their God money, reprehensible, denying liberty and justice for 99% of us all. We're done, but let's go socialize outside, thank you so much for coming.