Populist author Jim Hightower recently visited the Citizen Times newspaper in Asheville, North Carolina, where he called upon his fellow citizens to demand publicly funded elections.

In his new book, "Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow", Hightower challenges the average person to create the change we need:

"Don’t underestimate how much power plain ol' citizens actually have if they get organized behind a good idea,” Hightower writes in "Swim Against the Current."

"That's what happened in North Carolina in 2000, when a coalition of Tar Heel groups, assembled under the banner of North Carolina Voters for Clean Elections (NCVCE), determined to break the iron fist of money in state politics."

The positive results of the judicial campaign reform law Hightower cites include the election of four women, including the first African-American woman to be popularly elected to North Carolina's top court, and the first woman elected chief justice.

Hightower writes with humor, but only to better deliver sincere intentions:

The whole point of "Swim Against the Current" is that ordinary people are not powerless. The book is full of stories of people...who bucked the political status quo and changed the way their state and local governments do business.

Candidates of all stripes have chosen to accept public financing "rejoicing that doing so liberates them from the necessity of going around incessantly rattling a tin cup for donations," Hightower writes. “It has also meant that more women and people of color are running and winning, more incumbents are being ousted...more issues are seeing the light of day, and more people are paying attention to elections...and to voting."

During his visit to the Citizen-Times, Hightower noted that polls show that 70 percent of the American people support public campaign financing.

We couldn't agree more. The time for publicly funded elections has come, and it's going to take grassroots pressure on our elected officials to make it happen. Sign up today at the top of this page to enlist in the citizen's movement.