Book Review: If the Gods Had Meant Us to Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates

Title: If the Gods Had Meant Us to Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates

Author: Jim Hightower

Author’s web site: www.jimhightower.com

        

Date: hardcover 2000; revised paperback edition 2001

        

Publisher: Harper Collins

        

ISBN: 2001 edition 0-06-093209-0

        

Length: 418 pages of text, 4 pages of contact information, 11 pages of index

        

Quote: “[A]s actress Rosalind Russell once said, ‘politics makes strange bedclothes,’ and while Al wore a cloak of green, he had sewn large pockets inside it to store campaign funds slipped to him by oil, chemical, development, timber, mining, agribusiness, and other polluting interests.”

        

Jim Hightower used to be Texas’s commissioner of agriculture and used to describe his politics as populist. It’s been said, with reason, that populists are—or were, when there were enough of them to form a party—the polar opposite of libertarians. In some ways. But only in some ways. “Populist” might be the most historically accurate thing to call the kids in the Libertarian Party who think people might somehow happen to agree freely that they need a government to help them reach their full human potential. They see the same problems real libertarians see, and they react with a similar temperament. They come up with different solutions. Accordingly, what Hightower wanted politicians to promise and deliver to the nation, in response to the situations he discussed in this book, is often what I still think we the people ought to find ways to do for ourselves.

How much did it matter? If you were looking for statistics, stories, and witty quotes, not necessarily very much. As a politician and as a journalist, Hightower saw several of the things he writes about in this book firsthand.

The question that might divide readers of this book is what to do about these things. As every primary school teacher knows, Hightower says, you can’t just keep cleaning up the mess; you want to control the little brats who are making the mess. Yes, and as everyone who has graduated from primary school and gone on to high school knows, you don’t just want to go whining to Teacher for help to control the brats who are making messes with your stuff; it’s more efficient and more satisfying to hang out with a crowd of kids who agree that making messes is babyish. In these 433 pages Hightower uses very little ink arguing for bigger government to control everybody in the name of controlling the mess makers, although that does happen to be what he sees as the solution. He spends his time describing situations that can also be read as calls for individual responses from libertarians.

The Saipan sweatshop story is the one you’d expect a feminist to cite, so I’ll use the less familiar Chiquita banana story instead. Hightower accuses Chiquita corporate honcho Carl Lindner, a Republican, of giving Bill Clinton huge amounts of money as a bribe to get Clinton’s support in forcing a smaller group of Caribbean banana farmers out of the European banana market. Hightower claims Europeans, left to themselves, actually preferred the Caribbean bananas. So, do we need to spend time looking for a President with the fortitude to tell Lindner where to stick his hundreds of thousands of dollars? (If you really think that’s what we need, perhaps the best man to deal with Lindner would have been rival banana seller Robert Dole.) Or do we need to work toward the goal of becoming a nation of people who will call up newspaper offices asking for more details of this story, make the story headline news, and tell grocers we’d like to try some of those Caribbean bananas? Who are we, as a nation, anyway? How many of us belong in primary school, and how many of us are ready for high school?

At the time of writing it’s 2020, and a detailed analysis of the 2000 election, followed by several domestic political issues Hightower thought should have been better publicized during that election, hardly qualifies as news. Still, a first-time reader of this book might be surprised to realize how many of these people are still active and how many of the issues are still hot. This book provides historical background that will enrich your understanding of today’s news. 

For example, the discussion on pages 319-320 about smaller producers of food. Regular readers may remember that one of the founders of this blog, Grandma Bonnie Peters, had a business called Allergy-Ease Foods. What they packed and shipped around the Eastern States were gluten-free vegan "burgers"; what GBP sold in her "Test Kitchen" included were full meals, with the emphasis on salads and a gluten-free, soy-free, sugar-free, yeast-free, honey-free version of almost everything. Recipes were rated by Kingsporters looking for a good cheap lunch. The ones that rated high were then standardized and distributed to restaurants. (In Tennessee a Test Kitchen License and a Restaurant License were two separate things. What GBP had was a Test Kitchen.) Over seven years, GBP sold about half a dozen different recipes to restaurants; the best known was probably her Corn Soup.

So what happened? The market for gluten-free Veggie Burgers is limited, but it exists. The ethnic foods were authentically seasoned and popular with real Mexican- and Italian-Americans. And most of her clients never even had a chance to sample Rice Biscuit Bread, because GBP could hardly bake it fast enough to meet the demand. The health food stores through which Veggie Burgers were sold were moving Veggie Burgers, even starting to move the micro-batch soups. What went wrong? People worried about Grandma Bonnie’s health. If she was still up and about, they asked me, why did she close the Test Kitchen?

Some effects of stress have been apparent when I’ve talked to her. Please put up with a little boasting on Hightower’s part as you read the discussion of how “Some prisons have fewer walls, razor wire barriers, and armed guards than food wholesalers and retailers use to keep upstart food makers off the shelves.” It’s true.

Food City wanted to make Veggie Burgers available to the everyday hurried yuppie shopper. Locally, even a monster chain like Kroger's can’t afford to be outdone by Food City, so Kroger’s buyers were looking at Veggie Burgers too. A contract with Pal's restaurants was also discussed. Any of those contracts would have allowed Grandma Bonnie to keep on employing needy residents of Hawkins County, Tennessee, up to the present; or at least, if the contract had been signed after she let her needy Tennesseans go back to welfare, kept the Test Kitchen open for people in need of hypoallergenic fast food. The contracts weren’t signed, because protectionist policies kept placing more and more financial obstacles in the way of Grandma Bonnie and other suppliers of locally grown food. A lot of money has gone into ensuring that Tennessee residents who don’t have time to browse around Kingsport’s Wednesday Market, and don’t know the small producers personally, will find truckloads of foreign-grown, DDT-sprayed produce when they want organic Tennessee produce. And Green Giant gluten-and-yeast burgers when they want Allergy-Ease Veggie Burgers.

In order to get into the food production game, Grandma Bonnie used up her life savings and those of three friends, sold two small farms, double-mortgaged her house, postponed dental care long enough to lose four molars, let her home utilities be disconnected, took out loans, begged, borrowed, some of her relatives would even say stole, and still was never able to pay all the expenses the protectionists have made mandatory for anyone who wants to put food on the supermarket shelf. 

You might think the Green Giant Corporation, which has done so well at packaging frozen vegetables, would be glad to let its rather yucky gluten-burgers, with their bitter aftertaste, pass into oblivion. You’d be wrong. Green Giant fought hard to keep you from being able to buy (Ohio-made, gluten-based) Morningstar Farms Grillers, and continued fighting just as hard to keep Allergy-Ease Veggie Burgers out of your hands. Big-chain producers have worked out deals with big-chain stores to require small producers like Grandma Bonnie to carry big-time insurance just in case food became contaminated in the supermarket, require big amounts of specialty food to be produced overnight regardless of need (guaranteeing losses because the selling point of these specialty foods is that they're not soaked in chemical preservatives), and several other requirements that were cooked up just to make it impossible for a local store manager to offer a local food product to local shoppers.

Grandma Bonnie Peters wanted to pay her debts rather than pulling a Trump-style bankruptcy. She was still paying, and still living in poverty in a nice neighborhood, at the end of her life. Being an entrepreneur is a gamble, and there are those who feel that people who gamble more than they can afford to lose deserve to lose their homes and go bankrupt. As a general principle I agree with this. But I also think the public should know that millions of dollars have been spent to ensure that only millionaires will be allowed to supply a demand for a new, Green food product. 

Maybe GBP should have stuck to peddling Allergy-Ease Foods in the Wednesday Market until she’d saved up enough money to guarantee that selling them nationwide would be profitable. Maybe, too, the amount of money required to launch these foods on the national market should have been kept at a level that would have been achievable within the lifetime of that little girl posed on Grandma’s knee on the boxes of Veggie Burgers.

Populists want more elaborate regulation of the market to guarantee people like Grandma Bonnie a chance. Libertarians want more complete deregulation of the market to achieve the same result. Which is generally a more realistic strategy, I’ll leave you to decide based on your experience. I will say that during his term in office Hightower at least tried to solve the problem as best he could, according to his lights, and populist policies would seem more realistic to me if we met men like him every day.

According to his web site and newsletter Hightower has followed the "progressive" leftward drift of his party's leaders, as time went by. This book, however, comes from a period when the D's could reasonably be called liberal, and should have some appeal even to hard-core conservatives.