Politics & Power Quote by Jim Hightower

Hightower’s line lands like a spit-take because it hijacks a familiar American icon - the farmer - and drops him beneath a city pigeon on the economic food chain. The joke isn’t random. A “deposit” is both the harmless euphemism for bird droppings and the earnest down payment that buys machinery, land, a future. In one twist, he collapses rural dignity into financial humiliation: the farmer can’t even afford the first step of ownership, while the pigeon, at least, can still “make a deposit.”

The intent is blunt-populist: expose how agricultural policy and corporate consolidation turned independence into dependency. John Deere isn’t just a brand here; it’s a symbol of modern farming’s capital trap. The subtext points at the machinery treadmill - bigger equipment, bigger debt, thinner margins - where farmers work more to own less, and where the winners are lenders, input companies, and agribusiness middlemen. By choosing Deere, he also nods to the cultural mythology of the green tractor as a badge of competence and stability. If you can’t even get near that badge, you’ve been pushed out of the story America tells about itself.

Context matters: Hightower built a career in the late-20th-century backlash to farm crises, foreclosures, and the hollowing out of rural towns. The line isn’t pleading; it’s shaming an economic system that treats farmers like quaint mascots while pricing them like disposable labor. Humor becomes the knife that makes the critique hard to ignore, and harder to dismiss as mere “politics.”