JIM HIGHTOWER

Politics isn't about left versus right; it's about top versus bottom.

So now is the time, more than ever, for those who truly value all the principles of democracy, especially including dissent, to be the most forceful in speaking up, standing up and speaking out.

The only difference between a pigeon and the American farmer today is that a pigeon can still make a deposit on a John Deere.

This is a matter of public health. The public was sick and tired of DeLay and his corruption.

But the good news is that out in the countryside, just about every place that's got a zip code has somebody or some group of people battling the economic and political exclusion that Wall Street and Washington are shoving down our throats.

Democracy is not something that happens, you know, just at election time, and it's not something that happens just with one event. It's an ongoing building process. But it also ought to be a part of our culture, a part of our lives.

When I entered politics, I took the only downward turn you could take from journalism.

The middle of the road is for yellow lines and dead armadillos.

If you can't be a populist in Arkansas, you ain't going to be a populist in Washington.

The opposite for courage is not cowardice, it is conformity. Even a dead fish can go with the flow.

What created democracy was Thomas Paine and Shays' Rebellion, the suffragists and the abolitionists and on down through the populists and the labor movement, including the Wobblies. Tough, in your face people... Mother Jones, Woody Guthrie... Martin Luther King and Caesar Chavez. And now it's down to us.

Even the smallest dog can lift its leg on the tallest building.

Populism is not a style, it's a people's rebellion against the iron grip that big corporations have on our country - including our economy, government, media, and environment.

If you don't speak out now when it matters, when would it matter for you to speak out?

The good news, though, is that I find in my political travels that people, as regular citizens, are more interested than ever in getting together and having discussions. They want to hear about other viewpoints that differ entirely from what the administration is putting out.

But, as my mother used to tell me, two wrongs don't make a right. But I soon figured out that three left turns do.

There's enormous progressive activism and, more often than not, success at the grassroots level - everything from living wage campaigns to efforts to finance our elections are having terrific success.

The Bible declares that on the sixth day God created man. Right then and there, God should have demanded a damage deposit.

You can't do progressive government from the inside. You have to rally those outsiders and make them a force.

The issue isn't just jobs. Even slaves had jobs. The issue is wages.

Little ol' boy in the Panhandle told me the other day you can still make a small fortune in agriculture. Problem is, you got to start with a large one.

What's new is that the White House itself has now been corporatized. It's not politicians working for the corporate interests. They are the corporate interests. That's where Bush came from, and Cheney and Rumsfeld.

The corporations don't have to lobby the government anymore. They are the government.

Do something. If it doesn't work, do something else. No idea is too crazy.

It's hard to believe President George Bush gave a speech in New Orleans about disaster recovery and failed to mention the word 'farm' or the word 'rural.'