Failed Conservatives Values: Jim Hightower on Grasping Greed

Edwin:  Have conservative values failed?

Jim:   Yeah, because conservative values are essentially being expressed as an ethic of greed.  I got mine, you get yours.  You want education , go to a private school.  You want health care – buy it.  You want retirement – you make enough money during your life and retire in the South of France, or something.  What’s wrong with you. 

Rather than recognize that there will be no America if we don’t all share in the advantages that America does offer.  And I’m not talking about people on the dole, people trying to ride the coattails of successful people.  Folks are out there working their butts off.  They’ve been productive.  They have created wealth.  Enormous wealth.

In just these last eight years, the Bushites, for example.  But over the last 30, 40 years, we have been the ones creating the wealth, but we have not been the ones benefiting from that.  For example, most people’s income has gone down in real terms over that period.  Democratic Administrations as well as Republicans. 

So that’s why there’s such a rebellion in the countryside these days.  Not just political, but in all aspects of life.  People are demanding change, and they  are making change.

Edwin:  Are they are  fed up with greed?

Jim:   Oh, of course.  They don’t benefit from greed, and nobody really benefits, even those who are profiting from it.  Henry Travis, the hostile takeover king in New York City, who makes his money  by buying corporations with borrowed money from rich people to buy other people’s corporations, then selling off the assets of those corporations, firing thousands of people from jobs in that corporation – and then he pockets the money.   And he was making $51,000 an hour in 2006.

So the people who are fired didn’t benefit from that.  The people who founded the corporation didn’t benefit from that.  The people who maybe enjoyed the products of that corporation didn’t benefit from that.  That’s just raw greed, and it’s not serving America’s interests at all.