Back behind the mike.

Austin, Texas

Jim Hightower is back on the air. The Texas populist and jokester now hosts a daily, two-hour talk radio program that runs on more than 100 stations "from Maine to Maui," he says.

Hightower used to have a show on ABC Radio, until Disney bought it. "I blasted Disney, and said, `I now work for a rodent.' Mickey didn't have a sense of humor at all," Hightower recalls. He was canned six weeks later.

But his new show started up last Labor Day. It now runs on the United Broadcasting Network, which the United Auto Workers partly owns.

"Instead of hate radio, shock radio, attack radio, I have a more laid-back notion," he says. "People want to talk. They can't talk to politicians. They are props, photo-ops at best. They can't talk to the media. Ted Koppel has town meetings with no town and no meeting."

So Hightower lets people talk. He doesn't write people off who don't share his progressive views: "I get calls saying, `It's those welfare mothers....' And I say, `I think it's the welfare kings we've got to be worried about."'

The United Broadcasting Net work also carries shows by rightwing populists like Bay Buchanan, but this doesn't bother Hightower. He says they agree on a lot of economic issues, and he wants to offer "a progressive alternative that is not only speaking to people's economic radicalism, but also to the great American value of tolerance."

Hightower has a weakness for folk heroes, like Sylvia Stayton, the woman in Cincinnati who was arrested for plugging other people's parking meters. He had Stayton on for an entire show. The callers loved her.

But he also invites progressive stalwarts, like Ralph Nader, Howard Zinn, Jesse Jackson, and Molly Ivins.

And he favors musicians. Taking advantage of his Austin location, he brings on musical guests every Friday. Among the guests: Michelle Shocked, Asleep at the Wheel, Willie Nelson, the Fore men, Iris DeMent, Wynton Marsalis, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and James McMurtry. "The culture is always ahead of the politics," he says.

For Hightower, radio seems to be a natural career, though it's not his first. He edited The Texas Observer in the 1970s, and he was elected Texas agriculture commissioner several times during the 1980s. His name even surfaced as a possible leftwing Presidential challenger back then. But he says he no longer has any interest in electoral politics.

"I've been cured," he says. "One thing we need right now and have too few of are messengers who can reach a lot of people."

For more information, contact Hightower Radio at (512) 4775588.