Magic City Books put up a sign that rocketed through the Internet, mocking the fatuous potentates:

SUPPORT THESE DATA CENTERS

Schools

Libraries

Bookstores

Arrogantly, though, the likes of Amazon, Google, and Meta are frontloading trillions of dollars into creating a new social order managed by super-intelligent bots. This scheme, however, requires them to divert vast amounts of rural land, water, and energy to build and run their Orwellian empires. Yet, breathing the fumes of their own egos, the billionaires actually assumed that locals would welcome this dazzling bot wonderworld.

Bad assumption. Even in bastions of rural Republican rule, majorities are saying, “Uh… Hell No!” Indeed, at least 48 data centers were stopped last year by coordinated local opposition, and public fury has largely driven data center developers out of Illinois, Michigan, Oregon, and Wisconsin. In Texas, corrupt governor Greg Abbott openly takes AI cash to push data centers, yet rural counties are rejecting them – and the state’s far-right Republican Party has now voted to oppose building more of them.

Even Wall Street money managers are blinking, for there’s growing doubt that investors can get their money back. What’s happening is that the billionaire hucksters have run head-first into the rock-solid political belief that The People get to decide our common destiny, not a handful of techno-scammers.

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The scammers have varied from Big Oil’s notorious land men to peddlers of private prisons. But this one is the biggest, most important flimflam yet, with Silicon Valley billionaires and Wall Street speculators rushing through the countryside buying up vast tracts of land.

Why? Because Amazon, Google, Meta, and dozens of other tech profiteers are converting their corporations into Artificial Intelligence robotic empires, and each AI facility is absolutely humongous, requiring airport-size swaths of land.

Acreage is the least of it though, for the data centers consume Niagara Falls-levels of water. So local families, farms, factories, and businesses suddenly find their essential water supply being raided by faraway corporate water suckers.

Also, local utility bills skyrocket as profiteers drain enormous amounts of electric power from the area’s grid. Worse, corporate lobbyists squeeze local officials to subsidize this thievery! For example, a private equity predator named Apollo Global Management recently fleeced a New York county for $1.4 billion in “job-creation” subsidies for a sprawling data center that will – get this – employ only 125 people. Yes, that’s $11 million per job – with actual workers only getting a pittance of it.

You don’t need a big schnoz to smell this stink. The good news is that county officials across the country are beginning to say “NO” to AI’s money grab. Also, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have proposed a national moratorium on this corporate frenzy to impose an AI future that We the People do not want. For more information and action, go to foodandwaterwatch.org.

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Either way, they do seem to go together – as in Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, and so forth, ad nauseum. Oddly, the richer they get, the whinier they become, devolving into over-privileged crybabies.

Consider the appalling example of that California clique of Thiel, Zuck, and other Silicon super-richies. They’ve been caterwauling that if voters approve a proposed wealth tax on billionaires, By Gollies, they’ll just up and abandon the state. So? Do they not know that voters know that nearly all tax subsidies have long profited undeserving vainglorious elites like them at everyone else’s expense? So excuse us if we don’t join their pity party. In fact, most of us commoners would gladly trade that whole pack of pompous plutocrats for a dozen good kindergarten teachers.

Besides, it’s possible to be both very rich and a decent human being! I’ve known such people. For example, Texas businessman, Bernard Rapoport, who devoted millions to advancing labor, women, and our state’s progressive movement. Or my friends, Ben & Jerry, who’ve spent their lifetimes and fortunes delivering financial help – and even ice cream! – to grassroots democracy fighters. Then there’s the example of heirs to the Pillsbury family fortune – calling themselves the “Pillsbury Doughboys,” then later, “Doughgirls.” They have donated their inheritances to progressive causes benefitting the Common Good.

As an East Texas farmer pointed out to me years ago: “Money is like manure. You can’t just pile it up. It only works if you spread it across the grassroots.”

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With their hired armies of lawmakers, lobbyists, lawyers, and the like, they fix the economic rules so even-more of society’s money and power flows uphill to them. Take corporate CEOs. While the economy somewhere between a downer and devastating for most people, the CEO class made out like bandits, with each of the three top paid corporate honchos pocketing as much as a billion dollars in personal pay!

Are they geniuses, or what? What. All three of their corporations ended with big financial losses and declining value. So how can such mediocrity produce such lavish rewards? Simple – rig the pay machine.

Today’s corporate system of setting compensation for top executives is a flimflam disguised as a model of management rectitude. On its face, it sounds good – “Pay for performance,” it’s called, meaning the CEO does well if the company does well.

But who defines “doing well?” The scam at most major corporations is that the standard of corporate performance that the chief must meet to quality for a huge payday is set by each corporation’s board of directors. Guess who they are? Commonly, board members are the CEO’s handpicked brothers-in-law, golfing buddies, and corporate cronies. So, they set the bar for winning multimillion-dollar executive paychecks so low that a sack of concrete could jump over it.

This is Jim Hightower saying, well, can’t corporate shareholders just vote no on any executive excess? Yes, but corporate rules decree that votes by shareholders are merely advisory, meaning top executives can ignore them, grab the money, and run. The system is fixed and we need to break it!

Do something!

There’s a growing movement to crack down on excessive CEO pay that has us pretty excited— check out this resource guide from Inequality.org to join up!

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I mean that glorious future of The Metaverse, promised to us by Silicon Valley’s tech and financial geniuses. Just a decade ago, they were promising us that by now we’d all be playing, working, and relating as digital avatars of ourselves, living out our lives in a phantasmagoric new world of virtual reality.

They boldly proclaimed that the next Big Thing in tech, replacing smart phones and all other personal devices would be a “Metaverse,” digitally connecting everyone everywhere. They exclaimed that by purchasing goofy-looking, reality-augmenting headsets, interactions could be done without any in-person human contact. And who better to sell this future than the super-goofy gabillionaire, Mark Zuckerberg?

The CEO of Facebook, he was so bedazzled by the digital hokum of the metaverse that he even renamed his corporation “Meta.” Then he pumped a whopping $80 billion into developing and marketing his wondrous new world, including peddling a Meta brand of those magical headsets.

Not wanting to miss out on a bonanza, other tech billionaires geniuses joined the virtual reality rush. But it was just fool’s gold, for the geniuses had failed to consider an essential factor: Customers. Far from dazzled, buyers pronounced the meta-mess: goofy.

Even Zuckerberg has now pulled the plug on his fantasy of a digital, virtual, immersive, avatar world of tech “reality.” Don’t think, however, that goofy, avaricious, egomaniacal billionaires have gained any modesty from their Metaverse misadventure. They are the same ones now hurling trillions of public and corporate dollars into erecting intrusive, massive, wasteful AI data centers all across America. Why? To power their profiteering fantasy of replacing humans with AI bots.

Do something!

Has Big Tech got you down? Ensuring emerging technologies are safe, useful and accessible can feel daunting, but here are 2 great organizations who’ve been fighting for our rights for a long time:

* Electronic Frontier Foundation: eff.org

* Fight for the Future: fightforthefuture.org

On the AI data center front, our friend Clayton Tucker, who is running for Agriculture Commissioner here in Texas, has made this issue a centerpiece of his campaign— these data centers are being forced upon rural areas all over the country. Follow along with his campaign to see how the fights are being won.

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This latest one is Howard Schultz, the high-flying avaricious avian who tucked away a multibillion-dollar personal fortune as the monopolistic, exploitative CEO of the Starbucks coffee chain. Howard has recently fallen into a deep pout over the downright rudeness he says he’s received from officials in his home base of Washington State.

What’s his gripe? Haven’t you heard, he squawks, the state legislature intends to make rich corporatists like me start paying income taxes!

Indeed, Washington is one of only nine states with no income tax, even on billionaires. Instead, to fund public needs, it relies on regressive sales taxes paid by poor and middle-income consumers. So, in an overdue stand for fairness and the Common Good, the state is levying a minimal tax on those few elites who haul in more than a million bucks a year – with the money going to such crucial public needs as child care.

But damn the need, Billionaire Schultz is foot-stomping furious that he would have to pay his fair share for the upkeep of the state that has helped him thrive. So, Howard has taken flight, winging clear across the country to Florida, where the right-wing governor and legislature shields the rich from pesky taxes.

Proving that “Birds of a feather flock together,” the aristocratic chieftains of such other corporate fiefdoms as Amazon, Meta, and Google are also now nesting in Florida’s tax-evasion enclaves. When billionaires declare “We’re all in this together” – they don’t mean you me – only themselves and their tax lawyers.

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But I’m told this one is an epic disaster, so we must respond! It started in California, and one financial leader there now calls it “the greatest tragedy this state has ever felt.” Holy Titanic! What can it be?

Uh… it’s a tax. Does that mean it would add to the burden of hard-hit poor and middle-class families? No, it wouldn’t apply to them at all, or even to mere millionaires. Rather, it’s a ballot initiative to put a one-time wealth tax on the über-rich – the billionaire class. Indeed, only about 200 royally rich California folks would pay anything under this proposal.

But those billionaires are squealing like stuck pigs, and they’ve hired hoards of lobbyists, lawyers, PR flacks, and front groups to try killing the proposal. Such overprivileged plutocratic ninnies as Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg have even declared that, By Gollies, they will just pack up and leave California if required to pay a pittance of their fortunes to support the basic needs of common people.

Californians, though, seem not to care. In recent surveys, only 28 percent of the state’s voters oppose the wealth tax. Indeed, nationwide, 60 percent of us want billionaire tax dodgers to start paying their fair share.

People are sick of the greed of… well let’s call them what they are: The filthy rich. There’s a fast-spreading attitudinal shift from the right-wing’s long insistence that the rich are to be admired and coddled. Instead, majorities today are reconnecting to the eternal truth that “The love of money is the root of all evil.”

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Many someones, actually. Indeed, a coalition of dozens of progressive groups representing millions of Americans is uniting in straightforward populist opposition to the far-out right wing’s loopy assault on diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Bizarrely, Trump’s menagerie of extremist Republican politicos has been waging a furious war against these basic egalitarian ideals, trying to turn DEI into a partisan bugaboo. That’s goofy and ultimately self-defeating, for they are asking voters to reject their lifelong admiration for these positive social goals. Consider the value of D, E, and I:

One, diversity. That’s “us,” the marvelous mix of common people, cultures, and beliefs that gives America vitality and resilience.

Two, equity. That’s just another word for “fairness,” so why do they want to demonize that?

Three, inclusion. Hello – that’s what “democracy” means – we all belong and our voice matters.

Yet, the Trumpians are using brute authoritarianism to try ripping these core democratic values out of the fabric of our society. And, pathetically, many major corporate powers, universities, media outlets, and other institutions that ought to stand against these Orwellian dictates, have pusillanimously capitulated, hoping the GOP’s imperious regime will reward them with financial favors.

When institutions fail the people, We the People have to rise up. That’s the momentous rallying cry of some 70 nationwide groups of gutsy democracy fighters organized by Color of Change to stand up for the invaluable Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion that make America… America! To connect, go to ColorOfChange.org.

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First of all, you’re not a billionaire. But even a billion bucks wouldn’t buy your way onto this island in Florida’s Biscayne Bay. It’s the exclusive domain of such multi-multi-billionaires as Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Ivanka Trump… and now Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook and Instagram.

Mark, nicknamed “Zuck,” has just paid $170 million for a piece of this very special speck of turf, including a “cottage” with 9 bedrooms, 11 baths, a gym, a massage room, and a 1,500-gallon aquarium. Also, he built-in his own personal hair salon, plus a library with – get this – a secret passageway. No clue as to whether he reads any books, or just uses the passage to escape.

Secondly, you wouldn’t really be happy on Indian Creek Island, because it’s a pretentious fake. This high-value enclave was constructed for low-value hucksters who’ve amassed outrageous fortunes by screwing over masses of workers, competitors, taxpayers, and others. Even the “island” is fake – it’s a man-made landfill built in the Bay so ten very, very rich swells can isolate themselves from us commoners. Also, it’s more of a doomsday compound than a community, with each of the über-rich hunkered down in what’s been dubbed “Billionaire Bunker.”

These demigods of gross inequality can buy any piece of paradise, but then they’re so spooked they lock themselves behind $170-million walls, afraid of their own shadows. So, here’s my free advice to Zuck to soothe his plutocratic trepidations: Steal a little less, practice being slightly likable, maybe downsize to only a $70 million mansion… and live more. You’re welcome.

Do something!

Want to help force billionaires to pay their fair share? Check out Americans for Tax Fairness at americansfortaxfairness.org.

Jim Hightower's Lowdown is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

In January, paid subscribers got 45 minutes of unfiltered Hightower at our Happy Hour Q&A. If you missed it—or if you’re a free subscriber wondering what these gatherings are like—here’s a taste.

We asked readers to bring questions, stories, anything. What we got was one of the best evenings we’ve had: Hightower on organizing in red states, the horror of what’s happening with ICE, why the Democrats need big ideas, and—because it’s Hightower—some absolutely wild stories from campaigning across Texas in small planes held together with duct tape and optimism.

The clip above is one of my favorite all-time stories: the famous beer run with Melvin Lowry out in West Texas. When you're a broke statewide candidate in Texas, you get where you're going however you can. In Hightower's case, that meant farmers with planes, county roads as landing strips, and pit stops for six-packs. "The secret to the high wire is never look at the high wire. You just land."

If you thought the beer run was something, wait until you hear about the plane where Hightower’s passenger seat was a kitchen chair with a seatbelt—and the only way to get airborne was for two guys to hold up the tail and run down the runway. “I am a serious candidate for statewide office in the state of Texas.”

One last gem from that night covers while the Populist movement of the late 1800s was so successful: they knew that politics couldn’t be just a bunch of committee meetings. They created fun. Here, Hightower shares an insight that Pete Seeger once told him about how he discovered politics through the Chautauqua movement.

These are the kinds of evenings paid subscribers get—stories you won’t hear anywhere else, and a chance to actually ask Hightower what’s on your mind.

The full 45-minute video, including Hightower on why organizing together beats just calling your red state Senator, how Democratic leadership is responding to our grassroots pressure, and the vision for getting money out of politics, is is available to paid subscribers here.

If last week’s C-SPAN video was a window into Hightower’s world, this is a seat at the table. More on that next week.

Happy Friday, everyone.

Jim Hightower's Lowdown is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Instead of slipping cash-filled envelopes to individual politicos, tech giants like Amazon, Meta, and OpenAI, are putting up hundreds of millions of dollars in this spring’s midterm elections to pay for the campaigns of candidates who pledge to back their intrusive, water-sucking, energy-wasting, AI schemes. For example, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, has two super-PACs doling out $65 million to state and local politicians who will oppose any regulation of sprawling data centers he wants to impose on rural Texas and Illinois.

Why such a barrage of corporate money in local legislative races? Because the countryside is aflame with fury that arrogant, avaricious AI profiteers think they’re entitled to walk over local communities – so these locals are demanding that their legislators regulate or even ban AI data centers.

Unable (or unwilling) to win political support honestly, the corporate giants intend to overpower the democratic will of the people by effectively bribing submissive legislators with campaign cash – or by funding opponents for lawmakers who refuse to be bought.

Of course, bribers and bribees alike will piously pretend that the corporate ruse of buying government policy by buying legislative seats is technically not a bribe. But hello – rigging the system so billionaire donors can crush local democracy is not a “technicality.” If it looks, smells, and has the impact of a bribe… it is one.

Do something!

* To follow fights around the country and learn more about AI data centers, subscriber to Data Center Watch Briefing: datacenterwatch.substack.com

* MediaJustice has developed a toolkit to understand and fight data centers, and were key in forcing a major setback to a planned data center in West Texas.

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Huh? Yes, led by Sen. Chuck “Don’t-Rock-the-Corporate-Boat” Schumer, the party’s Washington hierarchy has been working to eliminate upstart Democratic contenders who are unabashedly progressive and popular! These candidates are generating new grassroots energy and hope for the party by bluntly challenging Washington’s meek, business-as-usual politics that Schumer embodies.

Pundits say Democrats need to find candidates who can appeal to workers. Well, here’s one who is full-blooded working class: Graham Platner. A 41-year old military combat veteran, Platner is a plain-spoken oyster farmer who’s running right at “the oligarchy – the billionaires who pay for it and the politicians who sell us out.” Platner’s fiery populist spirit has sparked statewide grassroots support, volunteers, funding, and enthusiasm that Maine Democrats have not had in years.

But, uninvited, here came Chuck – lugging his ponderous wet blanket of high-dollar corporate politics to the state. Trying to stop a real democrat from being the party’s nominee, Schumer recruited Maine’s lame-duck, milquetoast governor to run against Platner, knowing she would not challenge the corporate order. He raised truckloads of corporate cash for her, hoping to suffocate the oysterman’s populist uprising.

But by assaulting Platner with a barrage of out-of-state of corporate money, Schumer and his hand-picked candidate are actually assaulting the “little-d,” working-class democrats who’ve rallied to the maverick. Attacking your own constituents is an odd strategy, and sure enough, it doesn’t seem to be selling in Maine – a recent poll of likely Democratic voters shows Platner with a 38-point lead over Schumer’s choice to be Maine’s senator.

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This spring, we’re doing something a little different. Over the next few weeks, we’re opening the gates a bit — giving free subscribers a taste of some of the exclusive stories, video, and behind-the-scenes Hightower that paid subscribers get regularly. If you’ve been on the fence about upgrading, consider this your invitation to see what you’ve been missing.

And we’re kicking it off with a doozy.

Reader Elliot K. shared with us this video from C-SPAN that we didn’t know existed—and it’s a rollicking time capsule that you don’t want to miss. Hightower hosts a storytelling evening over beers with friends Molly Ivins, Ed Wendler, Ty Fain, Buck Wood, and more, plus a surprise visit (and great story) from State Sen. Gonzalo Barrientos.

Scholz Garten in Austin, the setting for this gathering, is historic for a number of reasons, but it’s long been a watering hole for politicos of all stripes. As Buck Wood, then the director of Common Cause Texas, explains:

Some of [the legislative bills] were literally hammered out right down here in the beer garden. There’s been some great political fights here, there’s been some pretty good fist fights here for years. Usually over political matters.

There are too many stories in here nail the spirit of Texas politics, but my favorite is a spicy one from heroine Molly Ivins that I’d never heard before:

One of great ongoing literary attractions of Scholz Beer Garden is the graffiti in the restrooms. And I myself have never frequented the men’s room here, no matter how serious the cause. I do remember an exchange. This was back when Frank Erwin, he was chairman of the UT Board of Regents, he was Lyndon Johnson’s man, and he really was in many ways a miserable sumbitch. I went to the ladies room one night and there was a note on the wall saying, “Do a good deed today, give Frank Erwin the clap.” Underneath which somebody else had written, “Give it to him? Hell, charge him for it!”

Happy Friday everyone—let us know your favorite parts in the comments.

PS—If you haven’t seen the documentary “Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins,” get thee to a streaming service immediately!

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Many of the worst fires have been ignited by the faulty wires, transformers, and other poorly functioning equipment of such profiteering electric utilities as Southern California Edison. The safety failures of this multibillion-dollar giant have been so awful that state lawmakers and regulators have rushed out fire-protection laws – not for the people, but for the corporate owners! A 2019 law literally protects utilities from paying for fire damages they cause, instead passing the costs to state taxpayers.

Wait, says Edison, if our annual safety record is poor, our top executives are punished with a cut in their annual bonuses. Ouch! Well, not really – the reduction is capped at 5 percent.

Take last year’s fire that destroyed nearly every home and building in the town of Altadena, killing 19 people. “It’s just a tragedy,” lamented Edison’s CEO, though he admits it was sparked by an Edison transmission line. Sure enough, the chief “suffered” a 5-percent bonus hickey. Hold your pity, though, for that means he still collected 95 percent of his 2025 performance bonus, plus pocketing his extravagant salary, stock options, and benefits. In all, the man-in-charge of this corporate-made “tragedy” walked away with nearly $14 million in personal pay.

Meanwhile, Edison went to the Public Utility Commission, demanding that its customers be forced to pay 10 percent more on their electric bills. To keep score on utilities rigging the system, go to TURN, The Utility Reform Network: turn.org.

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Indeed, Trump has demanded that our government patch his “Donald J. Trump” onto such public facilities as the Kennedy Center, the Institute of Peace, Dulles Airport, Penn Station, the Hudson Tunnel – and he might as well add the US Capitol since he treats Congress like his personal possession.

Insecurity is what’s driving his egomaniacal rebranding frenzy. As Trump candidly explains, “You’ve got to put your name on stuff or no one will remember you.”

Oh, Donald, like the demagogic Joe McCarthy and other narcissistic politicos, you’re destined to be long remembered… and mocked! Moreover, those vainglorious, gold-plated Trump nameplates you’re tacking onto every public space will soon be unceremoniously stripped off and dumped into the trash bin of history.

My friend, Fred Harris, a great populist senator from Oklahoma, told about the fickle nature of political fame. It was a true story about a governor who backed a boondoggle construction project after lobbyists promised to name the structure after him. They did, but as soon as the governor left office, his name was removed. Fred said if anyone ever dedicated a bridge or building to him, he wanted his name built into the structure itself, so if they later tried to remove his name, “the damned thing would fall down.”

So don’t despair that this president seems omnipresent. This too, will pass. Keep whacking at the autocratic, plutocratic structure of Trumpism – it’s not built to withstand the winds time, much less the winds of democratic rebellion.

Jim Hightower's Lowdown is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This state has long been ranked dead last in important measurements like healthcare, workers’ wages, and rural opportunities. In recent years, though, Mississippi has steadily been advancing to the top in one vital category: Best places for a poor child to get a good education. What a miracle!

No. It’s the product of ordinary citizens who got fed up with plutocratic state rule that lavishes taxpayer funds on corporate elites, while shortchanging the basic needs of workaday people. In the past decade, savvy grassroots coalitions like Mississppi United have arisen and spread, gaining local political punch in county after county that could not be ignored by legislators.

Early on they achieved major state investments in pre-K education, producing remarkable advances, especially by low-income children in many of the state’s poverty-stricken, rural counties.

This year, building on that success, the movement scored two huge educational victories. First, they produced a unanimous senate vote to defeat a school privatization scheme pushed by the right-wing governor, the corporate establishment, out-of-state school profiteers… and Donald Trump! Then, to emphasize and expand on the state’s commitment to quality public education, the legislature passed a $5,000 teacher pay raise.

As a legislative leader from Starkville said after the senate vote: “Our public schools are the cornerstone of every community in this state, and this unanimous rejection sends a clear message: Mississippi will not abandon the students and families who depend on quality public education – no matter how much out-of-state money tries to buy our legislators.”

To learn more about the uplifting “Mississippi Miracle” go to ACLU-MS.org.

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As a Texas politico, my endorsement of the fiery Black leader was both derided as political suicide and hailed as gutsy. But it was neither – it was just the right thing to do. As I had learned from an old-time Texas Democrat, “Every now and then, a politician ought to do something just because it’s right.”

In the 1970s and 80s, I had gotten to know and work with Jackson. A renown orator, he was an even more effective thinker and uniter. For example, he was able to link white, conservative dirt farmers in common cause with impoverished farmworkers and inner-city families battling chain-store profiteers.

So, when he ran for president, I had to ask myself: If this guy (1) is standing for the progressive populist values I believe in, (2) is standing with the grassroots families I’m fighting for, and (3) has the populist grit to stand up to the moneyed elites – why am I not standing with him?

Millions of us responded to his deliberate campaign trying to forge a multi-racial populist movement, and it’s up to us to carry that historic mission forward. But Jackson’s “Rainbow” vision was not one of fluffy hope however, but one of profound “intentionality.” That means doing the grunt-level political work of strategizing, organizing, and mobilizing to make good things happen. Especially in these dark Trumpian times, emphasizing Jesse’s deliberate determination is the best way to honor this true champion of democracy.

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Consider the old robber barons. They weren’t brilliant investors or managers, they were ruthless exploiters of government giveaways, and they routinely bribed lawmakers and other officials to permit their monopolistic thievery.

Likewise, today’s monopoly players have captured local, state, and national markets – not through honest competition, but by getting public officials to subsidize their expansion and to rig the rules against small competitors. Monopolizers buy this favoritism with the legalized bribes of dark-money campaign donations they lavish on compliant lawmakers.

Investigative digger Stacy Mitchell recently documented how this corrupt political favoritism has allowed massive retail chains like Walmart, Kroger, and Dollar Store to crush thousands of local grocers. This has left millions of Americans living in “food deserts” – worker class, poor, and rural communities with no food store.

What happened? As grocery chains spread from local to regional to national, they demanded that food manufacturers give them big discounts – a dramatic monopoly pricing advantage over independent rivals, so hometown grocers began hemorrhaging customers. This raw, anti-competitive, price discrimination was a flagrant violation of America’s anti-monopoly law – but here came Big Money to protect the monopolists.

In 1980, as Ronald Reagan was railing against “silly” consumer protection laws, supermarket lobbyists poured campaign cash into top officials of both parties. What they bought was bipartisan agreement to simply stop enforcing that “rusty” old antitrust law that had protected a competitive grocery economy for nearly 50 years.

But good news! That useful, highly-effective law is still on the books, so let’s build a long-term grassroots campaign to rejuvenate it and re-outlaw monopolization, redlining, and price gouging by food giants. For more information, go to ilsr.org.

Jim Hightower's Lowdown is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

And as Americans learned decades ago when Ku Klux Klanners covered themselves from head to toe, the bigger the mask, the greater the evil hiding behind it. Which brings us full circle to “Operation Metro Surge.”

OMS is the muy macho PR slogan for the Republican Party’s militaristic invasions of Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and other American cities they hate. Deploying ICE and other bastions of authoritarian power, thousands of massively armed federal belligerents in full assault gear have been rampaging through peaceful neighborhoods in violent and murderous mass sweeps.

This is an un-American attack by America’s own government on America’s founding ideals of liberty and openness. The defining symbol of this government repression is that its forces are all hiding behind full-face masks.

Of course, if I was doing some of the stuff ICE commandos are doing, I’d want to cover my face, too. But, like the Klan, masking up the oppressors is not merely about cloaking their personal shame — it’s an added ploy by the perpetrators to terrify anyone who might dare to stand up to them.

As usual, though, the authoritarian powers misunderstood America and underestimated the deeply rebellious nature of our gutsy, grassroots people. Some 30,000 volunteers in Minneapolis, for example, have become trained “constitutional observers” to police the police, and a citywide “whistle brigade” rushes like Paul Revere to alert neighbors when ICE agents invade their neighborhoods.

Their ethic of neighbors-helping-neighbors recognizes their power to “do what’s right.” It’s the best of America standing up to confront the worst.

Do something!

Our friends at the Working Families Party are leading the charge to pressure Democrats to vote NO on any DHS bill that does not work to stop ICE’s reckless attacks. You can text “ICE OUT” to 30403 or dial 833-636-3260 to call your Senators. Need a sample script? Here you go:

When you connect, say your name and where you live to show that you’re a constituent. Then, you could say something like:

“ICE’s reckless and illegal attacks on our communities must be stopped. But instead of ending and investigating ICE’s abuses, the DHS spending bill would empower this rogue agency to terrorize and kill even more of our neighbors. As your constituent, I urge you to vote against the DHS funding bill and stand up to ICE.”

Here’s a whole set of actions they’ve compiled to help direct your energy.

Jim Hightower's Lowdown is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Even Orwell, though, would’ve been astonished by the cacophony of swill bucket advertising currently being blasted at us by Amazon, Google, Meta, and other profiteering tech giants. What are they trying to sell?

Pure hogwash. Having spent billions to develop artificial intelligence so humanoid robots can displace workers, the tech geniuses are now rushing to build thousands of vast computer data centers necessary to power their Brave New AI World. Each center wills suck up local water supplies, drastically raise people’s utility bills, create monstrous industrial blight and pollution, and enthrone such autocratic thugs as Bezos, Musk, and Zuckerberg as absentee bosses with domineering power over each locality.

But the billionaires forgot something: You and me. “We the People” are in open rebellion against this Orwellian future, with officials in multiple states and localities “Just Saying Hell No” to the profiteers’ invasive scams.

Thus, the billionaire hucksters are frantically rattling their swill sticks. For example, Mark Zuckerberg – whose Meta goliath already operates 26 massive data centers and is now spending $600 billion to plop more of them in our communities – has launched a multimillion-dollar offensive to beat back local opponents. It’s running BS television ads in state capitol cities, financing political candidates to hype the data centers, deploying untold numbers of lobbyists to rig the rules against opponents, and hiring an army of “community affairs” agents to spread AI propaganda.

The swill bucket brigade has the fat cats, but a groundswell of us alley cats that has them on the run. To get involved, go to mediajustice.org/tools.

Do something!

The Center for Media Justice has been leading the way in fighting data centers in lots of communities around the country— here’s how they beat back one in Amarillo, TX, for example. Get involved at mediajustice.org!

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But being a both a journalist and a politician does hone in one’s ability to detect the smell of BS – and we Americans are presently getting a noxious blast of that stench from our warmongering Department of Defense.

The vast, trillion-dollar Pentagon is the ultimate Big Brother bureaucracy, literally empowered to compel thousands of Americans to die in foolish military misadventures cooked up by political partisans and profiteering corporate contractors. That’s why it’s so alarming that Trump’s “Project 2025” autocrats are now rushing to slam an iron door of censorship on reporters trying to inform us commoners about the militaristic schemes and corporate fraud that come from inside this government fortress.

In the name of defending freedom, Trump’s palace guards are banning media outlets that displease his royal highness. Also, “Pretty Boy Pete Hegseth,” Trump’s made-for-TV Pentagon honcho, has even decreed that reporters must be tightly monitored by military escorts while doing interviews, reviewing documents, and otherwise exorcising the essential Constitutional rights of our nation’s free press.

The good news is that rather than kowtowing to the autocrats, dozens of media organizations have told Pete to stuff it, choosing to do old-school outsider digging into this insider war machine.

Meanwhile, the “Project 2025” authoritarians hail their clamp down on free press rights by touting their “fresh relationship” with what they call their “new Pentagon press corps.” Right – it’s their partisan press corps, not ours.

Do something!

Our friends over at Free Press have launched a newsletter, “Pressing Issues,” to cover the future of media—and advocate for the freedoms we need in journalism. Check it out at pressingissues.org.

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I still write each piece in longhand, applying my ballpoint to paper. This has caused bewildered glances from some who see me scribbling away in local coffeeshops and bars. Recently, one fellow sidled up and whispered: “Watch out! If they see you doin’ this, they’ll haul you off to the Smithsonian.”

But we handwriters might not be as obsolete as the key-tappers assume. A fast-spreading grassroots movement is calling for schools to reemphasize the value of writing and printing by hand, instead of being wholly-dependent on machines. Already, 24 states – as varied as Mississippi and California– now require public schools to teach cursive handwriting in third-through fifth grades.

This squares with new understanding of how brains absorb information. While keyboards are faster, the slower, more tactile act of handwriting creates longer lasing comprehension of letters – and better retention of the thoughts they convey. Neuroscientists find that rote keystrokes on a computer require little mental engagement, while physically drawing out words and ideas takes coordination of multiple areas of the brain to focus memory, eyes, and fingers on creating a written product.

Just writing this piece conjured up a fond remembrance of my early childhood: Sitting on the floor of our home learning to draw the ABCs, both print and cursive, on those lined practice pads. It was both an artistic exercise and the development of a foundational tool for a life of learning.

This is Jim Hightower saying… Yes, computer literacy is an indispensable element of today’s childhood curriculum --- but so is the richer development of human thinking through putting pen to paper. So let’s teach both!

PS—Here’s a post we did a couple years ago about how Hightower’s work goes from handwritten on paper to whooshing through the ether into your inboxes:

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Then there is the nursing home industry – where rottenness has become a core business principle. The end-of-life “experience” can be rotten enough on its own, with an assortment of natural indignities bedeviling us, and good nursing homes help gentle this time. In the past couple of decades, though, an entirely unnatural force has come to dominate the delivery of aged care: Profiteering corporate chains and Wall Street speculators.

The very fact that this essential and sensitive social function, which ought to be the domain of health professionals and charitable enterprises, is now called an “industry” reflects a total perversion of its purpose. Some 70 percent of nursing homes are now corporate operations run by absentee executives who have no experience in nursing homes and who’re guided by the market imperative of maximizing investor profits. They constantly demand “efficiencies” from their facilities, which invariably means reducing the number of nurses, which invariably reduces care, which means more injuries, illness… and deaths. As one nursing expert rightly says, “It’s criminal.”

But it’s not against the law, since the industry’s lobbying front – a major donor to congressional campaigns – effectively writes the laws, which allows corporate hustlers to provide only one nurse on duty, no matter how many patients are in the facility. A humane nurse-staffing requirement has been proposed, but the profiteering “industry” furiously opposes it… and Congress is dutifully bowing to industry profits. After all, granny doesn’t make campaign donations.

To help push for sanity and humanity, contact TheConsumerVoice.org.

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Thanks to all of you who joined us last night for our first experiment with Substack’s live video feature! After reviewing the questions that you left for us last week, we got to tackling a few of them—Hightower gave advice to Maria in Wyoming, who’s frustrated with calling her Republican representatives, and the role of grassroots organizing in red states. We also got to hear some big stories about tiny airplanes (thanks, Shira!), and Hightower’s opinion about why some elected Democrats are loud and proud, while a lot of senators have not been taking strong action against the fascist invasion and occupation of many cities in the US, which was Fred’s question. Richard asked about a left-wing “Project 2025,” and as part of that answer, Hightower gave a rough estimate of how old Ralph Nader is— not to be missed.

We ironed out a few of the initial technical glitches, by the way, and I’m also working on making sure comments from everyone are enabled for the next live event, because we really missed hearing your live feedback! Let us know what your favorite parts were in the comments. Thanks again for watching!

The US military has long been an easy mark – for our own avaricious corporate contractors, that is.

During the Civil War, for example, J.P. Morgan sold rifles to the Union army that cost him only $3.50 each, but he charged the military $22 each. Worse, his rifles were defective, blowing off the thumbs of soldiers who fired them. Still, a Congressional committee ruled that Morgan had a “legal” contract and had to be paid in full.

Which brings us to the screwball contracts the Pentagon routinely signs these days with multibillion-dollar corporate con artists hawking weaponry. These gougers, though, have streamlined their taxpayer thievery by automatically inserting a corporate gotcha in nearly every Pentagon contract. It makes it illegal for the military to repair the weapons and systems they have bought!

A drone won’t fly? An AI system goes haywire? Anti-aircraft rockets fail? DON’T touch the systems! No — you must call a corporate-approved tech repair person, or take the malfunctioning gizmo to the manufacturer.

Yes, this is insane, unworkable, immoral… and the very definition of “snafu.” But corporate profiteers have made it the law. At last, though, soldiers, battleground commanders and common-sense members of both parties are rebelling, supporting Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s “Warrior Right to Repair Act.” Pathetically, Congress and avaricious contractor lobbyists recently defeated this bill, wailing contractor property rights is more important than authorizing soldiers to make lifesaving repairs in the field.

The fight goes on, though, and you can help. Two lawmakers who engineered this travesty are Mike Rogers of Alabama and Adam Smith of Washington State, both of whom take hundreds of thousands of dollars from the war profiteers. To fight their insanity, go to pirg.org/repair.

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If you’re ever asked to define the word oxymoron, just say, “Congressional ethics.” People instinctively burst out guffawing at the absurdity of linking Congress to upright behavior.

But, surprisingly, Republican congressional leaders say they’re now taking a bold stand for a little less corruption among their own members, targeting lawmakers who’ve been secretly enriching themselves through “insider stock trading.” Actually, the leaders were forced to support this bit of reform because of public outrage over the dirty dealing of Rep. Rob Bresnahan. This multimillionaire Republican was caught using his insider position last year to profit from the GOP’s gutting of Medicaid benefits for poor people.

So, last month, the party’s designated ethics watchdog, Bryan Steil, rose on his hind legs to introduce the Stop Insider Trading Act. “If you want to trade stocks,” Steil howled in operatic outrage, “go to Wall Street.”

Bravissimo! Except it was a fraud. Far from stopping the self-enriching stock scams of lawmakers like Bresnahan, Steil’s bill basically legalizes their corrupt transactions. For example, members could keep trading stocks in corporations they supposedly oversee. And, in the loopiest of loopholes, sneaky lawmakers are authorized to have their spouses buy and sell stocks on the member’s behalf.

Then, showing his party’s true colors, Steil exclaimed that we outsiders should not even push Congress to pass an honest, outright ban on insider trading – because that would discourage wealthy business executives from choosing to enter “public service.”

Hello, that gives us two reason to demand a ban – (first) to impose a minimal ethical standard on lawmakers, and (second) to shoo off self-serving monopolists and plutocrats from controlling the public’s agenda.

Do something!

If you’re fed up with rigged congressional systems of corruption, check out Citizens For Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), who call Steil’s act a “joke,” and are working to pass the Restore Trust in Congress Act.

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For example, take typical headlines on today’s environmental stories:

* Earth’s climate getting catastrophically hotter, faster

* Greenhouse pollution increasing again

* President calls global warming a “hoax”

* Fracking executive now runs Energy Department

* US funding new coal plants

* White House abruptly cancels wind-power projects.

Whew! My head hurts. The negativity in such headlines tells people that grassroots activism demanding clean energy and environmental sanity is futile, for government has been shanghaied by a political cabal of corporate executives.

But wait – while it doesn’t get front page treatment, a bracing wind of change is blowing in from the countryside! It turns out that producers, funders, and consumers of alternative energy have not rejected a brighter, sustainable future just because profiteers and politicians command us to follow them off the cliff.

Indeed, here’s a surprising development that the calcified defenders of dirty monopolized fuels could not have imagined only 10 years ago: Even in the fossilized Kingdom of Texas, solar power now provides more electricity to our people than does King Coal! Despite relentless efforts by our corrupt governor and top Republican officials to rig the marketplace against renewable energy, solar arrays and wind turbines are soon to pass Big Oil’s fracked gas as the top supplier of electricity to Texas homes and businesses.

Here’s an uplifting headline for you: Last year, wind, sun, and other renewable sources surged past coal as America’s number one source of electric power. As a leading climate scientist concludes: “We are at the end of the fossil fuel economy.” So, keep pushing.

Do something!

Want to keep pushing for environmental wins in Texas? Check out the Texas Campaign for the Environment, who have scored some great wins and continue to push for more.

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Consider the long, piteous whimper of Jamie Dimon, potentate of the powerful JPMorgan Chase banking empire. He constantly whines about laws to restrict banker greed, even toting around a Rube Goldberg-style cartoon depicting a tangle of rules that, he squeals, is choking poor Wall Streeters like him.

Before you break into tears about Jamie’s plight, though, notice that he and his bank are not choking on rules, but gorging on riches. Dimon himself pocketed – get this -- $770 million in personal pay last year.

Golly, we should all suffer like poor Jamie!

And he’s hardly alone in singing the “Talking Banker Blues,” for that elite clique has long pouted that they’re paupers compared to the billionaires of high tech. So, mounting an odd boardroom “labor action,” bankers have been getting drastic payhikes. The CEO of Citigroup, for example, recently set a new bottom line expectation for top-floor bankers: A 2025 paycheck of more than $100 million!

How can a business lavish such a windfall on one guy? Easy. The CEO slashed tens of thousands of bank employees from Citi’s payroll last year, so he got their pay.

Woody Guthrie once wrote a parody of such predatory behavior, singing “I am a jolly banker, A jolly banker am I.” Today’s Wall Street aristocrats are jolly, too, bloating their extravagant wealth by taking wages and livelihoods from thousands of their own employees. As Woody might sing, that’s how inequality “happens.”

Do something!

Wanna fight the bankers and their rigged systems? Americans for Financial Reform thinks that “the financial system should serve an economy where everyone can thrive, not just enrich a powerful few.” Sounds great to us! Check them out at ourfinancialsecurity.org.

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As New York Times judicial columnist Adam Liptak reports, each of the nine “supremes” must swear that they will “do equal right to the poor and the rich.” Yes, class fairness is not only a core element of justice, but it’s supposed out to be a formal measure of Supreme Court behavior.

Every justice is aware of this consequential, ethical requirement, since each one took the oath. How damning, then, that the Court’s right-wing ideologues feel no twinge of conscience about flagrantly and frequently violating their own word of honor! Call the roll: Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. In case after case that pits corporate power against workers, consumers, small business, voters, communities, our environment, farm families—i.e., you and me—this plutocratic cabal rules for the rich.

This month, an independent study of decisions by the Roberts Court revealed that two-thirds of its rulings favor wealthy powers over middle-income and poor people. Thus, our so-called “court of justice” is a primary pusher of inequality, especially through its farfetched decree that unlimited corporate political cash is “free speech,” and that corporations are “people.”

Chief Justice Roberts smugly proclaims that the Constitution tells him whether the corporate giant or “the little guy” should win. “That’s the oath” I took, he sniffs.

This is Jim Hightower saying… Bovine excrement! It’s obvious that plutocratic ideologues like him are using the Constitution like a ventriloquist dummy. And—hello, your honorableness—what about that other oath you took about equal fairness for the poor?

Do something!

There are groups that are working on holding the mighty Supremes accountable—what a world that will be! Check out:

* The Alliance for Justice

* Common Cause

* Brennan Center for Justice

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I was lucky to spend time during the summers on my Aunt Eula’s and Uncle Ernest’s tenant farm in Northeast Texas. With no TV or electronics, we made our own entertainment in the evenings, including “turning on” nature’s Big Show. This meant rolling an old bed outdoors as darkness fell, so we could lay back, look up, and marvel at the endless expanse of constellations, comets, the Milky Way, planets, and other wonders of the cosmos. Today, though, 80 percent of Americans never see the starry night, for the artificial glare of city lights blots out nature’s spectacular display.

But wait – billionaires to the rescue! Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and other high-tech demigods who’re spending trillions to foist a brave new world of artificial intelligence on us, claim that their scheme will actually relight the night sky!

For real? Of course not.

It turns out that they can’t get enough cheap land and energy on Earth to supply the phantasmagoric sprawl of data centers their AI hustle will demand. So, they’re going to put massive clusters of these systems into orbit, tethered to miles of solar mirrors stretching across our sky. While that means nature’s stars-and-stuff will be even more obscured, they say that instead of watching the cosmos, we Earthlings can enjoy the artificial twinkle of their corporate data centers.

This is Jim Hightower saying… Lest you think that, surely they wouldn’t do this, note that those arrogant billionaire Lords of the Night are already investing humongous sums of money in space data centers As the CEO of one called “Starcloud” bluntly says: “It’s not a debate. It’s going to happen.”

Do something!

Not surprisingly, fighting for a quiet night sky is a difficult and overlooked area of activism. Here are some folks we found working on the issue—if you know of more, leave ‘em in the comments!

* Dark Sky International works to create and preserve localities from light pollution, and they’ve started to address the impact of satellites, too. Here’s a paper they released late last year.

* On the nerdier side of things, the International Astronomical Union (IAU)’s Centre for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky (CPS) — if that isn’t a mouthful, we don’t know what is — is working to mitigate the negative impact of satellite constellations. (The image used above is courtesy of the IAU.)

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In fact, nearly all of us feel that way. While people strongly believe that representative democracy is the best system, they can plainly see that what we have today is neither democracy nor representative. Washington and most state governments routinely enact policies and budgets benefitting über-rich political donors, while cutting programs that regular people want and need.

It’s not just that the system is failing to do what grassroots America wants done, while doing what most people oppose, but that the insiders in charge, whether Republican or Democrat, don’t listen… or really care.

At the core of this dangerous disconnect is the fact that our highly-touted democratic ambitions have devolved into a moneyed autocracy, a self-perpetuating political system operating independent of the popular will. The issue of all 2026 issues is this: Money rules. Very Big Money, mostly anti-democracy, billionaire money.

Trump, Congress, the courts, governors – and especially the billionaires – know this. They wink at it, rely on it, and even cynically proclaim that giving and receiving unlimited, secret, political money is the new coin of democratic policy making – even superior to winning electoral votes.

Now, however, We the People are also clearly seeing this perversion of our fundamental democratic ideals and rights. Some 80 percent of Americans (including 72% of Republicans) say people who donate to campaigns have too much influence. Our job in 2026 is to confront the billionaire corrupters and political takers head-on, turning people’s rising awareness and anger into “little-d” democratic action.

Do something!

To fight the influence of big money in politics, check out these organizations’ work:

* Public Citizen

* Our Revolution

* Common Cause

* Brennan Center

* Move to Amend

Jim Hightower's Lowdown is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Such rank, moral corruption is hard to fathom... but it’s not hard to find. For one breathtaking example, consider Freeport-McMoRan.

This global mining behemoth is one of America’s most aggressive spoliers of land, air, water, and health – including from its sprawling copper smelter near Phoenix, Arizona. This operation is a major spreader of lead pollution, a neurotoxin that’s particularly harmful to children, causing pain, seizures, and learning disabilities.

But wait, where’s our Environmental Protection Agency? Good question. In fact, until last year, EPA was requiring Freeport to install technology to cut those poisonous emissions. The giant squealed like a stuck pig, though, crying that the $60 million cost for the lifesaving equipment was too “burdensome” – even though that wouldn’t even be a drop in Freeport’s $2-billion-a-year bucket of profits.

Sure enough, in October, Trump’s new EPA honcho rushed to provide pollution protection. Not for the children, but for the polluter! Indeed, Trump’s corporate-coddling agency “super-streamlined” the regulatory process by essentially eliminating it – no public hearing required, no presentation of facts, to chance for victims to object. All Freeport had to do was send an email requesting regulatory relief, and – BAM! – Trump promptly exempted its Arizona smelter from having to clean up its act.

Not only is this “free pass to pollute” a blunt proclamation of corporate rule, it also expresses Trump’s deep contempt for working-class people. Imagine if that smelter was in Florida, poisoning the elites in his Mar-a-Lago resort. Then, he’d jump on it like a gator on a poodle.

Do something!

The Environmental Defense Fund was one of the primary organizations working on the Freeport-McMoRan issue; they've launched a Trump EPA Pollution Pass map that shows you all the places that have applied for presidental exemptions from pollution laws. Support their work by getting involved at edf.org.

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Yes! As practically every pundit notes, Trump’s White House menagerie of billionaires, grifters, haters, prima donnas, and ideological kooks has soured even many MAGA faithful. More importantly, grassroots progressives have been organizing and mobilizing across the country, and – like eager ball players looking forward to a good season – they’re pumped up!

So, what could go wrong?

Don’t look now, but the National Democratic Party’s “Washington Club” of high-dollar donors, clueless consultants, corporate lobbyists, and old-line politicos are still controlling much of the Party’s money, strategy, and message. Possessing all the magnetism of their go-slow leader, Chuck Schumer, their game plan is the same as always: Run a Big Money, don’t-rock-the-boat, Washington-based campaign, shove-aside grassroots activists, rely on negative attack ads, and tell everyone (again) that Trump will defeat himself.

As Casey Stengel wailed when he managed the comically inept 1962 New York Mets baseball team – “Can’t anyone here play this game?”

Luckily, though, those insider losers are no longer our real Democratic team. While they’ve been piddling around in Congress playing wiffle ball with the Trumpers, Bernie-style progressives have been rebuilding the Party of the People in every state with hard-hitting, slick-fielding, big-league DEMOCRATS.

And voters are responding with an enthusiastic YES! From Coast to coast – already lifting Zohran Mamdani to victory in New York, Katie Wilson in Seattle, and state legislative races in Iowa, Georgia, and Mississippi.

Let’s keep pushing to make 2026 the year we quit moaning about the lackluster Democratic Party… and turn it into the bright new majority party.

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Of course, tongue-clucking concern doesn’t mean actually doing anything to help this majority of Americans – and most legislatures are doing exactly that: Nothing.

In fact, you’d think the ones hurting in America are billionaires, for those same tongue-clucking lawmakers have been laser-focused this year on delivering monopoly protections, multibillion-dollar government subsidies, exclusive tax breaks, and even top government positions to the richest and greediest corporate profiteers. This is personally disgraceful and socially destructive… yet it has become business as usual.

Why? What’s causing America’s so-called “representatives” to disregard the needs of a majority of their own constituents? The corrupting power of corporate money, of course, but a more fundamental cause is this: The class make-up of practically every legislative body. Millionaires-and-up now dominate. But most-telling, is who you don’t’ see: Working stiffs.

While more than half of Americans are wage workers who overwhelmingly support progressive reforms to advance economic fairness and social justice, the elitist legislative structure shuts them out. Consider America’s 7,300 state legislative seats – only one percent of Republican members and two percent of Democrats are working class! Ten states have zero working class members!

As an old adage notes: If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu. Labor laws, health care, campaign finance, AI regulation… again and again, workers are put on the corporate menu, because the lawmaking system is rigged to keep them from being at the table to represent themselves.

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More specifically, it’s about the moral teachings of the biblical Jesus, which formed the ethical foundation of Christmas and gives Christianity itself its true gravity.

The story is about a political clash some 60 years ago in Houston, when a boorish right-winger accosted the feisty mother of a renowned progressive populist lawmaker, US Rep. Bob Eckhardt. Bob, whom I later got to know and learn from, was a fierce battler for racial equality in a time when not all Texans were singing in Kumbaya harmony.

Sure enough, at a public forum where Bob’s mom was representing him, this bonehead loudly demanded to know why her son was trying to make “them [Black people] equal to whites.” Ms. Eckhardt cut off the fellow’s ugly diatribe by, of all things, offering an apology! Her son’s advocacy, she said, was not his fault, but hers: “You see, I raised him to be a Christian.”

Today, however, Mother Eckhardt’s put down might lack the clarity it had back then. This is a strange Christmas – concluding a year in which far right extremists have relentlessly perverted the profound and love-based Christianity of Jesus into a partisan ethic promising brutish rule. As we’ve seen, their “beatitudes” include repression of the poor, worship of Mammon, turning away strangers, hatred of thy neighbor… and so awful much more that rejects the values of Jesus – all in the name of establishing something they call “Christian Nationalism.”

This is Jim Hightower saying… God bless America. And please hurry! But remember, God helps those who help themselves. That means you and me. So, let’s work together to create a merrier, truer Christmas next year.

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Grandiose gabillionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos assert that they’re not merely rich, but visionary pioneers! Stand back, they bark, for we’re going to re-populate the world with a new species of artificially-superintelligent humanoids. Yet, to their astonishment, rather being hailed as geniuses, the oligarchs are being widely berated by us old-fashioned humans. Indeed, the level of public outrage has goaded lawmakers in all 50 states to enact some minimal protections for workers, communities… and humanity.

Of course, Musk, Bezos, & Company have no tolerance for the democratic will, so they jetted to Congress, demanding passage of a 10-year ban on enforcing any state law regulating artificial intelligence. Shockingly, however the US Senate, normally a total corporate toady, rose up 99 to 1 to vote against the Silicon Valley potentates. Ninety-nine to one!

So, the billionaires are now playing their trusty Trump card. Having greased the corrupt pay-to-play president with about a billion-dollars in campaign cash and personal deals, the AI profiteers got their payback this month. Quicker than you can say “quid pro quo,” Trump issued an executive order that – get this – orders himself to block our state governments from enforcing their own AI laws.

This is Jim Hightower saying… And here’s an extra fun fact: Trump didn’t even have to write the special interest executive order himself. A Silicon Valley AI profiteer generously sent a draft for the president to sign, effectively awarding more power and wealth to the profiteer. And that’s how Big Money rigs the system against you and me.

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To each of our Congress critters, I give my fondest wish that from now on they receive the exact same income, health care, and pensions that we average citizens get. If they receive only the American average, it might make them a bit more humble – and less cavalier about ignoring the needs of regular folks.

To the stockings of GOP leaders who’ve so eagerly debased themselves to serve the madness of Donald Trump, I’m adding individual spritzer bottles of fragrances like “Essence of Integrity” and “Eau de Self-respect” to help cover up their stench. And in the stockings of Democratic congressional leaders, I’m giving “Spice of Viagra” and “Bouquet du Grassroots” to stiffen their spines and remind them of who they represent.

For America’s CEO’s, my gift is a beautifully boxed, brand-new set of corporate ethics. It’s called the golden rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Going to pollute someone’s neighborhood? Then, you have to live there, too. Going to slash wages and benefits? Then, slash yours as well. Going to move your manufacturing to sweatshops in China? Then, put your office right inside the worst sweatshop. Executive life won’t be as luxurious, but CEO’s would glow with a new purity of spirit.

To the Wall Street hedge-fund hucksters who’ve conglomerated, plundered, and degraded hundreds of America’s newspapers, I’m sending copies of “Journalism for Dummies” and offered jobs for each of them in their stripped-down, Dickensian newsrooms. Good luck.

And what better gift to the Trump family – Donald, Ivanka and Jared, Eric, Donnie Jr., and the whole nest of them – than to wish that they live with each other constantly and permanently. No, really, each of you deserve it.

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So, why not make this Christmas a time for giving something that most American children, families, and communities are now denied – and desperately need: a good child care system.

This is a basic element of civilization, yet the leaders of our fabulously-rich nation have not only failed to provide a world-class care system, but they’ve left the pre-school children of working-class families with a failed, expensive mishmash that is no system at all. These are the same so-called “leaders” who’re frantically spending trillions of dollars to create a new humanoid species powered by artificial intelligence – but they lack the common sense to invest a fraction of that on an early care network to nurture the human potential of America’s human infants and pre-school children.

The good news, however, is that we do not have to sit helplessly, wishing that Congress, Trump, or Santa Claus would deliver universal childcare to us. Rather We the People can give this gift to ourselves… and to our children’s future. For inspiration, look to New Mexico.

Twenty years ago, this very-low-income state ranked dead-last in child well-being. Finally, though, agitated parents, teachers, and children themselves became the agitators. Forging a fast-growing coalition called Invest in Kids Now, they organized, protested, confronted and ran against the state’s moneyed establishment. With perseverance, their grassroots activism is now producing the change they want. 70 percent of voters approved the coalition’s constitutional amendment requiring state funding for early childhood education. And last month, New Mexico became the first state in America to offer free childcare to every family.

For more on the work of the coalition, go to InvestInKidsNow.org.

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The corporate powers try to co-opt the enterprise label, but in fact they are direct opposites and opponents. Indeed, the word “free” in free enterprise is not a benign adjective, but a fiery verb. It expresses the constant struggle by families like mine – Main Street businesses, farmers, artists, co-ops, and others – to free-up their enterprises from the monopoly control and raw political force of domineering financial elites.

That’s why I admire the spunk of Azalea Fresh Market in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s a new supermarket offering high-quality fresh foods at affordable prices to the people in a poor, inner-city neighborhood. Until Azalea opened, a few sad convenience store bananas were the only “fresh” grocery items sold in the area. City officials kept trying to entice major corporate grocery chains to open a store to serve that community. But it was always “no.” Mayor Andre Dickens says: “That totally burned me up.” So, “Screw it,” he declared, “We’re gonna do it ourselves.”

And they have! Partnering with a small local chain of enterprising grocers, Atlanta’s public development fund financed Azalea, which is now providing good food at good prices for customers long disdained by corporatists.

Corporate ideologues mindlessly bark that the public should not be involved in business. Hogwash! When the corporate establishment fails to deliver such basic needs as healthy food, housing and health care, the public can – and must – step into the void. To learn more about the benefits and potential of public enterprises, go to Institute for Local Self-Reliance: ilsr.org.

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I mean America’s corporatized, bureaucratic, profiteering medical system. It’s as though the Marx Brothers and Franz Kafka conspired to create it.

Yet, in the midst of that mess, there is one saving grace – namely the everyday workforce of dedicated nurses, therapists, hygienists, and other skilled, hands-on professionals who are the true heart of health care.

Astonishingly, though, when Trump & Co. bellowed this year that they intended to reform the medical system and slash costs, guess who they targeted for cuts? Certainly not the lavishly-paid CEOs and corporate price gougers who donate billions to Trump. Instead, they’re going after our frontline caregivers, the one segment of the system that prioritizes patient health over corporate profits.

Yet, channeling Kafka’s surrealism and Groucho’s slapstick, Trump and his GOP Congress are not only downgrading this vital workforce, but denigrating it. They’ve directed the US Education Department to decree that nurses are no longer “professionals.”

One immediate impact is that many young people who want to pursue careers in patient care will no longer be eligible for the government’s student loans for advanced medical courses. This means that non-rich students will effectively be blocked from earning specialized degrees … and higher salaries. In the bigger picture, Trump’s insult to these essential medical professionals amounts to government-enforced plutocracy, mandating inequality, as well as inferior health care.

Moreover, three-fourths of the health-provider jobs Trump wants to degrade are filled by women. Apparently, it’s part of his increasing attempts to belittle and bully women. As one nurse says of his attack on her profession: “It’s just a smack in the face.” For information and action, go to NationalNursesUnited.org.

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Easier sung than done. Plastic is now ubiquitous in toys, electronics, tools, air, water… and us. And don’t forget the plastic Baby Jesus in Christmas tableaus.

What is plastic, anyway? It’s a toxic synthetic material mostly manufactured from petroleum by such giants as ExxonMobil, the globe’s top purveyor. So much is produced by these profiteers that plastic trash is now a planetary disaster.

But not to worry, for Big Oil’s lobbyists assure us gabillions of plastic bags, bottles, and such are being recycled, keeping them out of our landfills, water, bodies, etc. Swell! Except… they’re lying.

After all, Exxon is the same for-profit contaminator that lied for years that fossil fuels were not causing climate change, even though top executives knew they were. Their ethic of deceit continues today – Big Oil knows that 94 percent of US plastics are not recycled. Indeed, they can’t be.

Faced with growing public alarm about the ever-growing glut of plastic pollution, the industry has doubled down on deceit by offering a snappy new PR slogan: “Advanced Recycling.” They say it’s a magical process dubbed “pyrolysis.” Only… it doesn’t work, it’s inordinately expensive, and it increases climate change emissions. Still, Exxon exclaims its AR will soon be processing half a million tons of plastic waste! But that’s not even a drop in the plastic bucket, for more than 400 million tons of plastic waste is discarded each year –and the oil industry is planning to double plastic production by 2040.

The only real way to stop runaway plastic pollution of us and our planet is to use less plastic. To learn more and help, go to Beyond Plastics: BeyondPlastics.org.

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This particular “cat” is the fast-metastasizing software technology called “artificial intelligence.” A cadre of multibillion-dollar high-tech giants have surreptitiously been advancing AI for a couple of decades, literally creating a new, autonomous species of thinking beings. These are computer-powered humanoid bots, increasingly-able to do the intellectual, creative, managerial, and other complex jobs that millions of human beings now do.

The billionaire pushers of this brave new bot economy know that this amounts to placing a neutron bomb in the American workplace, so they have intentionally lied about its job-obliterating impact. However, after years of hush-hush development, the AI technology is now so advanced and the corporate investment in it is so gargantuan that the perpetrators no longer care what the public thinks.

This year, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, and other Silicon Valley oligarchs have been feverishly dumping hundreds of billions of dollars each into a global corporate gold rush to supplant humans with AI bots in practically every economic sector. They expect to automate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years. And one Silicon Valley outfit (bluntly named “Mechanize”) calculates that its plan “to fully automate work” can be acheived within 30 years. Indeed, BotWorld is now urging today’s AI technology to create super-intelligent systems that can out-think humans. Yes – bots themselves are working to produce more powerful bots to speed up AI’s bot takeover of work.

This is Jim Hightower saying… If you think that, surely, this isn’t really happening, note that Trump’s GOP Congress recently imposed a 10-year ban on any state laws attempting to regulate AI. Just unleash the bots… and see what happens.

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So, this Thanksgiving season, why not shake off some of that debilitating negativity by focusing on the many, seemingly-small efforts by ordinary people who’re helping to make life just a little bit better… more connected… more joyful even! Consider, for example, a very neighborly phenomenon presently spreading across our country: “Repair Cafes.”

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The idea is simple and practical – rather than trashing that broken lamp, torn pair of jeans, wobbly chair, or blinking electronic device – repair them! Only, we’ve become a nation that doesn’t know how, and our corporate consumer economy – based on planned obsolescence – tells us to just throw it all away.

But that ignores a marvelous community asset: Grassroots talent. Every neighborhood and small town is blessed with many locals who’re “good with their hands.” So, in some 200 American communities, volunteer crews of these skilled repairers gather weekly or monthly, inviting us “under-skilled” folks to bring in practically any of our household “junk” to be fixed – for free – rather than sending it to the landfill.

There is one requirement though – we have to watch, listen, and participate in the repair, so we learn to trust our own hands… and maybe teach someone else later on. These repair cafes don’t merely provide a community service, they create community. Stuff gets fixed, but most importantly, as a café founder in East Harlem puts it, as “mostly we just spend time together.”

Why not do that where you live? For guidance, go to RepairCafe.org.

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As millions of families struggle with the ever-rising price of groceries, The Donald is bragging that his economic policies have miraculously lowered prices, just in time for Thanksgiving. As proof, he points to Walmart, America’s largest food marketer, boasting that it cut the price of its “complete Thanksgiving dinner package” by a whopping 25 percent from a year ago! “That’s a tremendous number,” Trump exclaimed.

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But wait – before we swallow that whole, let’s peek inside Walmart’s dinner package to see what’s in there… and what’s NOT. Sure enough, using a trick called “shrinkflation,” the corporate giant has quietly removed basic Thanksgiving items that were in last year’s package, including cornbread mix, sweet potatoes, and pie. Then, it shrank the size of the servings of other items, such as cranberries and soup.

By shorting the food in each package, this year’s Walmart dinner actually costs more than last year’s. How tremendous is that?

Yet (like his wrecking ball demolition of the White House) Trump keeps trying to destroy the very idea of presidential honesty. He now rants that there is no affordability crisis in America. It’s “a complete CON JOB” by the media, he barks, consumer prices are “tumbling down”, we have “the greatest economy in history.” People should stop complaining and be grateful!

The problem for politicians who peddle such lies is that people’s everyday life experiences instantly reveal the huckster’s deception. Even for MAGA believers, it must be hard to give thanks for a president who demands praise for helping one of his profiteering backers scam millions of working-class families, who’re just trying to put food on their tables.

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But occasionally, I see influential purveyors of conventional wisdom tromping into my area of real-life experience, pushing some political nonsense that is not only wrong, but delusive. That’s when I intrude.

Like now, a whole posse of pundits is bellowing these days that Democrats have only one path forward to avoid perpetual defeat by MAGA Republicans: “Shift to the right!” For example, New York Times right-wing sermonizer Ross Douthat, recently proclaimed that the wisdom of Democrats “repositioning” their issues and message away from progressivism “ought to be plain to anyone with eyes.” To which I say: Bovine excrement.

What’s plain to most voters (and especially to fed-up nonvoters) is that cynical partisan shiftiness is what’s wrong with both parties, creating a plutocratic realpolitik run by and for avaricious moneyed powers. I’m no New York Times pontificator, but my ground-level experience in Texas tells me that what common people really want is not more precisely-calculated positioning, but an honest stand on “little-d” democratic principle. Say what you believe… and do it!

On the very day that the Times ran a Douthat column lecturing Democrats on how to “play politics,” Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City. He won by running an aggressively-progressive campaign against corporate elites, exciting the city’s widely-ignored working-class and poor voters. Instead of trying to manipulate the electorate, Mamdani expanded and inspired it. That is plainly the Democratic Party’s future.

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“I’m a big disasterJust goin’ some place to happen

I’m an organized famineStudying how I can be a little bit meaner

I laugh my loudestWhen other people cry

I hate everybody don’t think like meI’m just mean.”

What a perfect theme song for Trump’s “Project 2025” – a MAGA crusade to stomp on millions of America’s poorest families, trying to deny them access to the most basic human needs.

Needs like… food. Brooke Rollins, Trump’s multi-millionaire agriculture secretary, made crude political jokes about poor people during the GOP’s government shutdown, laughing as she schemed to cut off their food stamps. She was an “organized famine,” illegally maneuvering to deny food for 42 million hard-hit American citizens.

In addition, Project 2025 operatives want to yank health coverage from the poor – and just for meanness – they propose killing the modest program that helps impoverished families afford to have heat in their homes.

Meanwhile, Trump poses as The Great Gatsby, living in tacky opulence, while ignoring the economic mess and rank inequality created by his Roaring 20s plutocratic presidency. Indeed, the inequality is widening as he doles out hundreds of billions of our tax dollars in new giveaways to billionaires (including to his own sons).

Far from “Making America Great Again,” Trump’s most tangible achievement is to have had the White House’s Lincoln bathroom remodeled. And, in a royal touch, Trump even had a chandelier installed above the toilet. Imagine how proud Honest Abe would be.

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There is, however, something decidedly distasteful that has steadily been forcing its way onto our dinner tables: Raw monopoly power. This concentration of market control in the hands of a few domineering conglomerates is decimating farm families, swindling food industry workers, and gouging consumers. Economists have a technical term for what food industry profiteers are doing to us: The term is “stealing.”

Farmers know the evil of unrestrained monopolists all too well, for they are relentlessly squeezed by two sets of them. First, everything they must buy to produce food – from seed to tractors – is controlled by non-competitive giants that charge rip-off prices. Second, when selling their products, farmers and ranchers are boxed-in by corporate cartels that only offer take-it-or-leave-it, go-broke prices.

Then, this same anti-competitive system turns on us consumers, charging grossly-inflated grocery prices that give them monopoly profits and even more market power.

This Thanksgiving dinner is a good time to tally up the ever-widening monopoly spread separating you from farmers:

* A Butterball turkey costing you $2.42 a pound, pays the farmer 6 cents per pound.

* Potatoes costing $4 a bag returns only 55 cents to farmers.

* Wheat farmers only get 13 cents from a $4.50 loaf of whole wheat bread.

* Top sirloin steak cost $16.50 per pound, but ranchers get under $4.

* Even simple lettuce is $2 to you, but pays only 29 cents to farmers.

The very idea of Thanksgiving is that We’re All In This Together. So let’s get together and bust these greedheaded monopolies. For connections, go to Family Farm Action: farmaction.us.

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Washington’s pay-to-play game has long been used by corporate powers to buy particular government favors, but now the money corruption “game” is so routine, so massive, and so flagrant that it has become the government. The likes of Big Oil, Elon Musk, Wall Street lords, and high-tech hucksters buy politicians in bulk, literally usurping the people’s authority to over public policy.

But what can we do about it, especially since Democratic Party officials also plays this plutocratic game? Well, Zohran Mamdani showed us one solution last week with his grassroots populist victory over New York’s Big Money establishment to become the city’s mayor.

He ran a true people’s campaign on progressive issues and values – which he was able to do because of a populist campaign funding option the city initiated years ago called small donor public financing. This alternative provides matching dollars from a public fund for candidates who rely on small donations from regular citizens, rather than begging for big bucks from billionaires.

In Mamdani’s case, his unabashed progressivism excited long-ignored working-class voters, who contributed a few dollars each. Then, the public match added up to $13 million – enough to get his message out and organize turnout. Though he was still outspent four to one, the small donor fund provided the margin he needed to be competitive in a big race.

So far, public financing options have been adopted in 17 jurisdictions, from Arizona to Maine, Seattle to Baltimore. Why not where you live? For guidance, go to CommonCause.org.

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It’s about “The Library of Things,” a real library, but different. Just as our public libraries share a wealth of publications – this one in Brunswick, Maine, also maintains a wealth of tools, devices, equipment, and other “things” for people to check-out, use, and return.

Hazel Onsrud, a creative, can-do spirit on the staff of Brunswick’s Curtis Memorial Library, initiated this commonwealth of some 1,500 products that locals can borrow for free. The New York Times reports that residents are flocking to this pragmatic, beneficial resource for the common good. And why wouldn’t they? After all, not everyone can afford a $350 KitchenAid mixer of their own, and a roto-tiller you might use once a year could be shared by many. Also, a bullhorn, a grain mill, a ukulele, an embossing machine – seriously, we should borrow, rather than thinking each of us must buy and store these things… or do without.

This concept reduces each family’s expenses, waste, and accumulation of “stuff,” while advancing cooperation and community. And the public library infrastructure is already in place to make it available.

This idea is not new, nor is it unique to Brunswick. In fact, America’s progressive populist movement of the 1870s built an entire economic alternative to corporate monopoly around this very concept. And today, some 2,000 “libraries-of-things” are already functioning worldwide, giving ordinary people a grassroots way to avoid profiteering, corporate consumerism.

Hazel Onsrud has issued a challenge to us: “If a few of us can do this in Maine,” she says “anyone can.” And you and I are the anyones to do it.

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Huh? Bizarre, yet this is the conclusion of the GOP’s theocratic Christian Nationalist faction. They are demanding that legislatures across the country must intervene in local educational policy to require that all public schools plaster every classroom with Christianity’s Ten Commandments. It’s in-your-face religiosity, forcing one religious dogma on students of every faith. It’s also ludicrously hypocritical – after all, legislators are notorious for committing adultery, stealing from the poor, killing in the name of the state, bearing false witness against immigrants, bowing down to false gods… and otherwise mocking the Christian religion’s own commandments. Who do these nationalists and their politicians think they’re fooling?

Certainly not America’s free-thinking students. If you wonder whether young people will just go along, take heart in the uplifting thoughts of Arjun Sharda, a high-school freshman in Round Rock, Texas. In a recent op-ed piece, he went right at the humbuggery of the state’s Republican leaders: “The same lawmakers who preach about freedom and limited government,” he wrote, “are now legislating what we must hang on our classroom walls... But faith loses its power when it’s forced. True belief comes from conviction, not compulsion… Texas prides itself in independence, yet this law enforces conformity.”

The Christian Nationalist autocrats are not only trying to turn public classrooms into their exclusive pulpits, but to establish their repressive theology as America’s official religion. As Sharda warns, “Texas should stop confusing religion with righteousness – before the wall between church and state becomes just another thing we’ve torn down.”

Do something!

To work on the fight to keep church and state actually separate, check out the Freedom from Religion Foundation at ffrf.org.

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I said to myself: “I disagree with that!”

Indeed, the untold story of today’s America is the good news that We the People fundamentally agree on more than what supposedly separates us. It is true that our daily media feed does relentlessly push political negativity and discord, and it’s true that hyper-partisan politicians grab attention by hammering their narrow views into swords of hatred. But that’s them, not the greater us.

Even hot-button issues which dominate the Internet and talk-shows are actually not all that divisive for the majority of us. For example, nearly 90 percent of Americans (including two-thirds of Republicans) oppose the right-wing attempt to whitewash our nation’s history by restricting teachers, museums etc. from addressing such realities as slavery.

More significantly, consider the real needs of ordinary workaday families. Basics like living wages, protecting Social Security, busting-up monopolies, cleaning up pollution, providing affordable housing, funding our parks and libraries, stopping price gouging. Overwhelmingly, Americans in red, blue, and purple areas agree on what government ought to be doing – and disagrees with what it is doing. But the plutocratic moneyed elites that now fund and perpetuate Americas corrupt and dysfunctional government profit by promoting hatreds to pit us against each other, praying that all of us don’t focus on them.

Don’t succumb to their self-serving lies, but seek ways to unite in what we Americans do agree on – specifically our historic commitment to the democratic values of economic fairness, social justice, and equal treatment for all. Anything less is BS.

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Branching out from their usual corrupt collusion with Big Oil, industrial polluters, and other profiteering hucksters, the governor and top lawmakers came up with a whole new batch of legalized slick-um, specifically to protect and profit a new Texas stock market for big money dealers. Who needs it? After all, beaucoup markets already exist for speculators and such. Yes – but those markets are at least loosely regulated to protect investors – plus, some states want to tax stock-trading profits.

So here come Texas politicos, pushing a cutely-named “Y’all Street” stock exchange, promising that it’ll be “speculator friendly.” Friendly means limp regulation, little public disclosure of schemes, and hostility to taxation.

For example, to spare rich stock profiteers from paying their share of taxes (like working stiffs do), Republican leaders have graciously acted to prevent state taxation on the massive profits speculators get from selling stocks, bonds, real estate, etc. And, to prove their undying plutocratic love for the rich, lawmakers plan to engrave this special tax break in the Texas Constitution, effectively closing off rich people’s ill-gotten gains as a source of revenue for the state’s future needs.

This Lone Star stock market is a cynical big-government scam to further enrich the privileged few hoping to shift the cost of basic public services away from those most able to pay onto the backs of workaday families. If you wonder how inequality happens, study the Texas example. And hurry – the right-wing intends to bring it to your state next.

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Well, yes… they’re rich!

But maybe you’re doing pretty well these days, counting yourself among the rich. That’s charming, but let’s check the latest wealth indicator: Do you have a “private concierge?” You might live in a megahouse, have a maid and a nanny, travel First Class – but having a private concierge is what separates you commonplace millionaires from the filthy rich.

What do these personal servants actually do? “We fix problems,” says one owner of a boutique firm that offers “hyper-personalization” services to select clients worldwide. Want to get a table tonight at a fully-booked restaurant in Paris? Don’t call the restaurant – call your fixer, gets it done. If you’re going to a formal ceremony in Hong Kong but – OMG you left your tuxedo back home in Oshkosh. Your concierge will find a courier to deliver it on time.

In addition to dealing with such upper-class urgencies, these “lifestyle managers” also relieve the überrich of having to cope with everyday details of real life. No need to call a plumber, plan a birthday party, shop for basics, and such – that’s why you pay about $75,000 a year to have your own handler. They’ve become such a must-have emblem of luxury that even Chase Bank and American Express now offer concierges to their high-end clients.

What’s at work here is a decadent ethic of royal entitlement. It’s a grandiose (and socially-destructive) assumption of superiority by the filthy rich – who misinterpret their wealth as worthiness. Oh, and we common taxpayers get to subsidize these personal concierges.

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Rather, most Americans are anti-establishment rebels who’ve been knocked down, kicked out, and told that they don’t matter. Indeed, our country’s true political spectrum doesn’t run right to left, but top to bottom. Right-wing/left-wing is ideology. Top to bottom is life. And most people know that they’re no longer in shouting distance of the moneyed elites at the top.

This cries out for a “little-d” democratic party that goes right at the billionaires, autocrats, and kleptocrats. Instead, we get Chuck Schumer. This Senate Democratic leader’s idea of battling right-wing extremism is to say, “I sent a letter” in protest.

Worse, the corporatized hierarchy controlling the once-proud Party of the People reserve their aggressiveness for – guess what? – battling progressive Democratic activists and candidates! Yes, they keep blocking true Democrats who can win, nominating corporate-branded centrists instead – then wondering why voter turnout plummets and an angry electorate reaches for the Trump Hammer.

They are trying to do it to us again right now in Maine, where a plain-spoken, working-class progressive is poised to defeat a Trump Republican for a U.S. Senate seat. Graham Platner, a maverick, 41-year-old combat veteran and oyster farmer is drawing huge crowds, enthusiasm, volunteers, money… and grassroots hope. He’s a winner – exactly what Democrats need to become relevant again.

Yet, rather than embracing the grassroots enthusiasm to win the senate seat, Schumer is raising corporate cash to defeat Planter! The party’s leader is its own worst enemy. To learn more, go to: GrahamForSenate.com.

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Touted as a “tourist attraction,” his museum glorifies predatory capitalists (like him), hailing them as heroic American geniuses! The infamous junk-bond scammer grandiosely labels his monument the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream. It’s located right across the street from the White House (though it’s rumored that even his buddy Trump considered Michael’s “Monument to Mammon” to be too explicitly obscene to attach it directly to the East Wing).

In a perverse bit of symbolism, the thing occupies the former headquarters of a bank that was forced to close 20 years ago because of a money-laundering scandal. How’s that for Karma? But, to gloss over such ugliness, Milken has gilded his legacy mausoleum with Trumpian gold. The rooms, draperies, furniture – and even a fake tree in the atrium – all gleam with gold leaf, emphasizing Milken’s credo that the goal of life is money… and the power to get it.

Educational exhibits include an interactive game on compound interest, as well as a display of Mike’s high school cheerleading uniform. Missing, though, is any mention of the full presidential pardon this avaricious criminal wrangled from Trump in 2020, letting the racketeer escape prison for stealing a billion dollars from people who trusted him.

Still, if you visit his Washington freak show, the gift shop offers a memento that sums up his life: A $22 Milken money clip.

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These 433 treasures – along with our rich diversity of national museums and historical sites – each have their own stories to tell. But the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, for together they express America’s egalitarian sprit and “little-d” democratic possibilities, urging us to keep pushing for economic fairness and social justice for all.

And that’s exactly why Trump and his cabal of moneyed elites and right-wing extremists are out to purge, erase and officially censor the parks’ historical presentations. After all, it’s hard to impose plutocratic autocracy if such tangible examples of historic truth and democratic rebellion are openly displayed!

Thus, as dictated by the GOP’s secretive anti-democracy clique, Project 2025, Trump’s ideological Thought Police have set themselves up as an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth” to sanitize and Disneyfy the telling of our people’s real history. For example, Trump complains that parks and museums hurt America’s self-image by telling “how bad slavery was.”

Hello, Donald – that’s not an image, it’s reality, as central to our national character as our historic commitment to equality. And the explosive conflict between ugly repression and flowering egalitarianism is ever present today. Consider the push by Sen. Eric Schmitt and others in the GOP’s Christian Nationalist movement to deny the unifying principle that “all men are created equal.”

There’s not enough whitewash in the world to cover up the deep ugliness of slavery, and it’s self-destructive for government to try. The fundamental purpose of recording our shared history is to learn from it.

Do something!

You might’ve heard about the Alt National Park Service, but they might not be quite who they say they are, as it turns out. To support park rangers fighting the good fight in their work and off-duty, check out Resistance Rangers.

On the museum front, AFSCME and the American Library Association are actively fighting to block the dismantling of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).

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Travel. Perhaps your family plans a holiday flight to visit grandma. Flying itself has become dicey, but at least the government is requiring airlines that cause long delays or cancellations to compensate us passengers for our loss. Uh… no, no more. Trump’s transportation secretary (who was previously a LOBBYIST for the big airlines!) is “loosening” the rules so monopolistic airlines owe nothing to abused customers.

Job opportunities. One of the nastiest wage suppression tactics of corporate bosses has been their collusion to make employees sign “noncompete” contracts. These amount to indentured servitude, preventing workers from quitting to take a better job with a competing firm. This corporate lockdown costs American workers some $40 billion a year in wages they could get in an open job market. The FTC was finally moving to ban these noncompete gimmicks – but Trump installed a corporate lackey at the FTC to snuff out this spark of workplace liberty.

Pollution. Corporate lobbyists and MAGA lawmakers are rigging the rules to let industrial giants escape responsibility for their massive environmental contamination. For example, the profiteering greedheads who’ve deceptively caused tons of deadly “forever chemicals” to be spread on our land, water, communities, and families are to be let off the hook by the new, corporate-hugging EPA honcho. He says we taxpayers must pay for the toxic cleanup, not the polluters.

If you’re unclear about the meaning of “plutocracy,’ there it is: Government by and for the despotic rich.

Fighting plutocracy on multiple fronts is challenging work, and that’s why we recommend getting involved with Public Citizen—they’re strategic and have a long track record of protecting Americans on many issues. Check them out at citizen.org.

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It’s almost cruel for Gov. Greg to be juxtaposed with that quick-witted duo, for he’s a dour, slow-witted, plutocratic pol, with no perceptible sense of humor. As governor, he has focused on demonizing poor people, rigging elections, and doing favors for moneyed elites. Unsurprisingly, only four out of 10 Texas voters now support him. Yet – don’t laugh – in a move of burlesque absurdity, Abbott now says he might choose to become president. Yes, of the US!

Filled with pomposity, he recently proclaimed, “I will be guided by God.” Well, maybe so, since the god he faithfully follows is Mammon. Indeed, his major credential for becoming the GOP nominee for prez is that he is a pro at the Pay-to-Play game of using taxpayer money to entice special interests to fund his political career. “You pay me, then I pay you” is his corrupt game plan, which he has used to amass a whopping $87 million for his next election.

For example, watchdog group Public Citizen has documented some $3 million that Abbott got from executives of eight corporations. In turn, those eight were given nearly a billion dollars in no-bid state contracts – a 33,000% profit on their donations to Abbott!

This is Jim Hightower saying… For high rollers, Abbott is better than a winning Powerball lottery ticket. Buy him, and the Pay-to-Play merry-go-round keeps spinning at taxpayer expense. To fight such big money corruption, go to Public Citizen: citizen.org.

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For forty years, this fiery, fourth-generation fisherwoman from the Texas Gulf Coast has battled tenaciously for the rights and very survival of the area’s hardscrabble fishing families. She and her grassroots allies have taken on Formosa Plastics, a $250 billion, global corporate beast that has routinely dumped its chemical waste around Matagorda Bay, poisoning life and livelihoods.

But in 2019, in a lawsuit based on massive evidence collected by Wilson and her armada of volunteer kayakers, she won a stunning court victory, forcing the contaminator to pay $50 million for its malfeasance.

Wilson’s fight was not just for her, and she did not get a penny from the Formosa settlement. But she won something richer than money – “It felt like justice,” she said of the court’s judgement.

Importantly, the court didn’t award the $50 million to some regulatory agency, but to a public trust administered by – guess who? – Wilson’s allies! So she has been working tenaciously ever since to make sure the money directly benefits the poor families Formosa ran over. Especially promising is the trust’s major grant to create the people’s own Matagorda Bay Fishing Cooperative. It will provide dock space, supply contracts, processing ability, local jobs… and the power for local people to forge their own future.

Why fight against overpowering odds for 40 years? Because of her strong principles… and sheer stubbornness. “It’s my home,” Wilson says of the bay and its working-class community, “and I completely refuse to give it to that company to ruin.”

Learn more about Diane and support her work:

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For decades, these chieftains of our economic order have been steadily implementing a very visionary process for establishing corporate wage levels. The essence of it is this: Let the workers set their own pay! Since the 1970s, when the idea began taking hold in Corporate America, pay levels have zoomed up by more than 1,000 percent.

Well… not for you. This set-your-own pay movement has only been available to top corporate executives, whose median paychecks now top $16 million a year! But since it’s been a boon for this test group, I say it’s time to expand the no-hassle compensation concept to all employees. This would greatly boost grassroots purchasing power, economic growth, and fairness for all.

“Omigod no!” squawk corporate apologists, rushing to say that, technically, CEOs do not directly set their pay. Rather, the bosses have attached their earnings to their corporations’ ever-rising stock prices. Thus, astronomical rewards go to those who obsessively focus on jacking-up the price of their own stock, even though that’s a selfishly-narrow and false measure of a corporation’s performance.

Also, stock price is no indicator of a CEO’s worthiness. Even bosses who’re blockheads can still get a boost simply because they’ve rigged the system to hitch a free ride on inflated stock value.

This is Jim Hightower saying… Still, if it’s good enough for them, why not an equal deal for working stiffs, who actually deliver the products and services that give a corporation some true value. I say, each worker should get the same percentage increase in pay that the top honcho takes. It’s a very simple process… and it’s only fair.

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And mine, too. I certainly don’t want to rush either one, but there is a matter we should all consider ahead of the “event.” Namely, the funeral.

The nature of one’s bodily disposal is, of course, unpleasant to discuss. So mostly we don’t. Thus, at our death, loved ones frantically try to decide between crematorium or a coffin.

Both processes are awful to contemplate, are environmentally harmful, can be exorbitantly expensive, and are often emotionally unsatisfying for survivors. I can’t say there’s any good way to go, but is there a better way?

Yes, says an interesting “green burial” movement, offering the alternative of an affordable “adios” that truly does bring life full circle. With no need for embalming, burning, or steel sarcophagus, it provides a simplicity and an organic authenticity to life’s end.

The essence of it is minimalism. The expired body is literally and gently covered with heated plant material for a month or so, accelerating the work of microbes and fungi to convert us into soil. Yes, in short order, we become about a cubic yard of compost – new nutrient-rich earth that family or others can even spread to foster future life.

Adding to the wholistic ethic, a cottage industry makes available home-made woven baskets, linen shrouds, and other organic provisions for our dearly departed. Also, rather than wearing mournful, black clothing to the funeral plot, mourners at a green burial gather in work clothes to assist in the farewell.

It’s a participatory continuum, carrying life forward. Maybe it’s not for you and yours – but maybe it is. To learn more, go to GreenBurialCouncil.org.

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Only, these are not uncouth MAGA marauders wearing buffalo horns, breaking in, and attacking Capital police. No, this is a very couth, richly-attired, well-mannered political mob laying siege on Congress. And look: Instead of fighting or fleeing, Republican lawmakers are holding the Capitol’s doors wide open for this incursion! That’s because this is a swarm of always-welcome corporate lobbyists and campaign funders. In particular, they’re an army of global pesticide giants.

Led by Bayer, the multibillion-dollar German biochemical conglomerate, they’re demanding that Congress keep us commoners from interfering with their poisonous profiteering. Bayer reaps billions of dollars selling a killer pesticide named Roundup, which scientists increasingly consider a cause of cancer, especially in children. Thousands of afflicted families have filed major lawsuits holding Bayer responsible.

Of course, Bayer honchos did the honorable thing. Ha! Just kidding. Instead, its lobbyists rushed to Trump and GOP congressional leaders, who – shhhh – quietly tucked a corporate “gotcha” into this month’s must-pass budget bill. It would effectively hand retroactive immunity to chemical manufacturers, quashing all those lawsuits filed by families of Roundup victims. Sneaky, huh? Infuriated, grassroots leaders of MAHA (The “Make America Healthy Again” movement) say the Republican Party is being corrupted by false information from the pesticide companies.

This is Jim Hightower saying… Actually, what’s corrupting the Party’s lawmakers is the gusher of campaign money they take from the poison pushers. For information and action on stopping this capitulation to what a Bayer, go to FoodAndWaterWatch.org.

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These corporate entities receive special tax exemptions because they provide some free and reduced-cost medical services to poor families. But, as one CEO put it, many chains are now going the extra yard to serve local folks “in new and exciting ways.”

Great! Our whole health system desperately needs better quality, more-affordable care for all!

Uh… no… that’s not what they mean.

Rather, the exciting new thing being pushed by non-profit hospitals is to spend big chunks of their tax-free revenue on their area’s professional and college sports teams. For what? Get this: To buy the naming rights to the teams’ stadiums and ballparks! A children’s hospital in Fresno, California, for example, has put down $10 million to slap its name on Fresno State University’s football stadium. And a Tennessee “safety-net” hospital has committed millions to emblazon its corporate name on the ballpark of Chattanooga’s pro-baseball franchise.

Sweet Jesus, what the hell? One university marketing professor even tried to rationalize these diabolical, high-dollar transactions by comparing them to community-spirited doctors buying jerseys for a town’s Little League team! Excuse me, but this is a big-league perversion of the healthcare mission. Indeed, the Fresno State deal included special perks for the hospital’s top honchos – including a skybox suite at FSU games, food & drink for them, seats on the team’s charter plane, and a bundle of free tickets to home games.

This is Jim Hightower saying… As the Republican mayor of Chattanooga gently noted: “At a time of severe nursing shortages and quality of care concerns, this decision is hard to explain.”

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Yet, I do consider myself rich. Not like the Wall Street “richie-rich,” but in the modest sense of middle-class well-being – basically, enough to make ends meet. It’s not my good looks that puts me in this lucky zone, but one particular public asset that has long been serving the common good for decades, lifting millions of workaday Americans to some decent level of shared prosperity: Social Security.

Plutocratic elites and their political puppets constantly wail that it’s a socialist scam, a wasteful giveaway to old people. But regular folks know that’s hokum, since nearly all of us pay into the plan every month of our working lives. In short, it’s our money!

Moreover, each of our Social Security accounts steadily build up. So, consider this: The most valuable financial asset for 9 out of 10 American families, is not their houses or Aunt Tillie’s will – but their Social Security holdings. Even for rock-solid, middle-class families, Social Security provides for about a third of their total lifetime wealth.

This is Jim Hightower saying… When right-wingers screech that “fiscal prudence” demands they slash the program’s benefits, that’s bank-robber code for looting wealth you’ve banked for years in this People’s retirement system. Plus, there is absolutely no excuse for such thievery, since an honest, fair, and simple adjustment would keep the program fully funded in perpetuity: Rather than letting gabillionaires like Elon Musk put practically none of their massive incomes into this egalitarian effort to provide a decent retirement for all, make them pay Social Security taxes exactly like regular workers do.

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So what does “woke” mean? It’s become the pet political aspersion that today’s kooky right-wing hucksters hurl at liberals, but the hurlers would be whopperjawed to learn that it’s was actually coined by and for progressives! Indeed, it admonishes people to be awake to the dangers posed by hate-filled bigots and reactionaries like… well, like today’s right-wing extremists.

SURPRISING HISTORICAL TIDBIT: The first person reported to have used the word was Huddie Ledbetter, the legendary Black blues artist known as Lead Belly. Among his many classic songs was “Scottsboro Boys,” about nine Black teenagers falsely accused in 1931 of raping two Alabama white women. As a Black musician who traveled the backroads of the Jim Crow South, Lead Belly warned others to pay attention when in a viciously racist state: “Best stay woke,” he cautioned.

But—out of blind ignorance, blind arrogance, or both—today’s adaptors of the Jim Crow mentality have perverted common-sense wokeness into a verbal whip to lash African-Americans, immigrants, Democrats, women, LGBTQ+ people and all others they don’t like (pretty much everyone who looks, thinks, prays and acts different from them). How kooky? They’ve declared librarians, science, Mickey Mouse, and Bud Light to be their evil enemies. “Don’t be woke,” they bark, demanding autocratic, plutocratic, and theocratic laws to coerce compliance with their own retrogressive bigotries.

This is Jim Hightower saying… Bear in mind that this is no longer a fringe cult, but the mainstream of the Republican Party, including its top congressional leaders, presidential wannabes, and state officials. Actually, you can easily comprehend what these Humpty-Dumpties really mean by their “Don’t Be Woke” war cry. Just substitute the word “sane” for “woke.”

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How exciting, then, that a consultant to top Republican lawmakers has figured out how to make Congress better. Ready? Raise the members’ pay!

Golly, why didn’t I think of that? After all, who wants to work for only $174,000 a year (plus full health care, a really nice lifetime pension, and a flock of personal staffers to do the heavy lifting)? This congressional insider insists that such compensation is way too paltry for the best-and-brightest types Congress needs, so they choose Wall Street or corporate careers, rather than public service.

“Ask any corporate leader,” he asserts, and they’ll say “talent is everything.” And, he explains, it takes serious bucks to “attract and retain talent.” So, the answer to getting a better Congress is easy, he writes: “Let’s start by doubling their salaries.”

Excuse me, but let’s not.

While money is the reason Congress fails to represent the common good of America’s workday majority, their paychecks aren’t to blame. Rather, it’s the corrupting power of the unlimited dollars that corporations and billionaires are spewing into our elections and lobbying campaigns, literally buying the special-interest Congress that Americans despise.

The obvious problem with Congress is not that members don’t get enough money, but that they take too much. Don’t even think about raising congressional pay before outlawing congressional payoffs! Besides, anyone who’ll only commit to public service work if their pay is doubled is not committed to the public, to service, or even to work. They’re narcissists, committed to themselves – and Congress already has an excess of those.

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This, however, is definitely a throw-up day. That’s because our US Secretary of State (a once-honorable position that advocated humanitarian values) has just decreed that war-torn Palestinian children from Gaza will be denied medical visas that would let them come here for life-saving surgeries. Yes, innocent children horribly maimed by the US bombs, bullets, and billions of our tax dollars that our government sends to prop up the corrupt Israeli regime of Netanyahu, have now had America’s door slammed in their faces by Trump’s nutball extremists.

How extreme? Even bulldog right-winger Marjorie Taylor Greene is appalled that top USA officials have turned so cold as to reject common decency for “Palestinian kids who had their limbs and bodies blown apart.” But Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who reportedly once had a smidgeon of political integrity, immediately snapped to attention when someone named Laura Loomer – one of Trump’s loopy “influencers” – proclaimed that these Palestinian medical seekers were “pro-Hamas.”

Hello… they’re children! To which the Loomer lady summoned this piece of ignorance from deep within her dark soul: “They are not that sick if they can sit on a plane for 22 hours to get to America.”

Okay, she’s just a doofus, but Rubio? He’s a practicing Catholic, so he surely knows Jesus’ biblical admonition: “Suffer the little children to come unto me.” Yet, he has officially banned them from the compassionate arms of the American people, darkly warning: “It’s not just kids… a bunch of adults are accompanying them.”

Yeah – their parents, guardians, good Samaritans. Gotta watch out for those types.

To stay on top of everything happening to Gaza, and to find solid actions you can take to fight and end the genocide, we recommend following Linda Sarsour, a Palestinian-American organizer and strategist who was also a surrogate for Bernie Sanders during his 2016 campaign.

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Well, not the wacky-quacky part of that agenda, where he teeters off into the prickly thicket of medical voodoo and vaccine bugaboos. But he was onto something fundamentally important when he began to rally public opposition to the arrogance, greed, and willful destructiveness of pesticide peddlers and other Big Food profiteers.

As Secretary of Health, Kennedy pushed Trump’s “presidential commission on children’s health” to take long-overdue action to rein-in those agribusiness contaminators of our food supply and natural resources. He called for limits and outright bans on industrial ag and food processing abuses that grow corporate profits at the expense of healthy kids.

Great!

But wait – the commission’s draft report is now out, and none of Kennedy’s most meaningful stuff is in it. None! There’s no suggestion, for example, that even the most toxic cancer-causing pesticides should be outlawed, permanently removed from food products and our environment.

What happened? Money. While Kennedy was publicly talking a good game, Big Food profiteers were paying a million dollars each to have intimate talks at private dinners with Trump. And when money talks, political integrity walks.

Sadly, rather than resigning in protest of Trump’s whitewash and rallying America’s families to carry this betrayal into next year’s elections, Kennedy is hyping the report’s empty calories as a people’s victory! But he can’t make chicken salad out of chicken manure. Grassroots groups themselves call the gutted report “beyond laughable,” “profoundly disappointing” and “dangerous.”

For genuine, structural change in food policy, go to Environmental Working Group: ewg.org.

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But even at 12, I didn’t get stuck in reverse, as today’s Republican Congress has. The GOP’s autocratic ideologues and corporate toadies are spurning hard-won, economic, social, environmental, and other progress made by generations of grassroots Americans. They are trying to drive our people back to Robber Baron rule and Jim Crow law.

Indeed, no progressive advance today escapes the wrath of the GOP’s ideological swat squad. Consider the operatic political frenzy they’re now stirring up over Post Office trucks. Yes, that ubiquitous fleet of red, white, and blue mail delivery vehicles you see on every street and rural road in America.

Those gas-powered workhorses, now 35 years old, are way overdue for replacement. Sensibly, the Postal Service is buying fuel-efficient, non-polluting, electric vehicles, which include such basics as airbags and air conditioning.

But no, squealed extreme right-wingers like Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa. She condemns the very idea of a battery-powered fleet as lefty “wokeness.” So she’s demanding that Congress literally defund the purchase of EVs, forcing the Postal Service to go backward to inefficient, polluting trucks fueled by Big Oil – an industry that just happens to be a generous funder of her career.

To get a clear-eyed view of which are the best vehicles to take us way forward, don’t ask a corporate-owned ideologue; ask the postal workers who drive them. Go to apwu.com.

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That sign was the exact location the GOP had used as the pin point for slicing up the city’s one congressional district into four pieces like a pizza. Each slice radiated far out of town, merging into Republican suburbs in distant cities – thus suppressing Austin’s progressive voice in Congress.

Now here they come again, assaulting progressive voters throughout the state with a gerrymandering gang bang. At the command of Donald Trump, our so-called “representatives” are submissively shoving millions of Texans into jerry-rigged Trump enclaves, solely to serve his political desires.

Far from being just another corrupt hyper-partisan political manipulation, this GOP ploy is stripping away America’s fundamental principle of representative democracy. Instead of grassroots communities sorting out their differences and choosing their own governing representatives in local elections, political hacks in Washington and the state capital are cynically relocating people’s political “locality” (with no participation at all by the people).

Yes, instead of constituents choosing their members of Congress, gerrymandering lets members choose their constituents. So “your” representative doesn’t need to know you, much less serve you. Thus, the issues that Congress considers don’t percolate up from local communities, but are chosen by national and state political operatives and multimillion-dollar campaign donors. It’s the nationalization of local elections, ignoring the real needs of hometown people.

Why shouldn’t you have a representative who’s at least from your community, maybe even knows your name… and gives a damn about something more constructive than Trump’s anti-democratic, plutocratic agenda.

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Just a few months ago, the prancing right-winger was constantly in the news. Today, though – poof! – he has vanished from media coverage. But fret not -- Elon always finds money to take care of Number One. Indeed, this month he was handed a $30 billion pay raise by his car company. Yes, BILLION.

Odd, since his stewardship of Tesla in the past couple of years has been disastrous. Sales, profit, quality, and market share are in the ditch, along with his own reputation. Yet, in a gushing letter to shareholders, the corporation’s board of directors asserted that its $30 billion handout was a “critical” gesture to induce Elon to show up for work. Apparently, $29 billion would not have been enough.

Who are these board members who supposedly “govern” the corporation and its CEO? One is Kimbal Musk. Yes, Elon’s brother! Others are close pals and lackeys, each of whom is extravagantly paid. For example, the board member who “negotiated” that ridiculous giveaway to His Supremeness has pocketed more than half a billion dollars in profits from Tesla stock options she has been granted.

Well, declare apologists for Musk and his captive board, if $30 billion was excessive, the shareholders who technically own Tesla could’ve sued to stop payment. Uh… no, they couldn’t. Last year, Musk moved Tesla’s official residence to Texas, where the corrupt governor dutifully passed a law dictating that only shareholders owning at least three percent of the stock can sue on matters of corporate governance. Basically, that eliminates all shareholders except: Musk.

And that’s how the corporate merry-go-round is rigged to keep spinning around and around and around.

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Consider the national embarrassment of Brooke Rollins, a patrician ideologue, who is Trump’s plutocratic Secretary of Agriculture. Besides promoting a corporatized food and farm system, Rollins is advocating a program of back-to-the-future peonage for poor people. “We have way too many people that are taking government program that are able to work,” she snorts.

Bad grammar aside, she falsely asserts that “34 million able-bodied adults” are freeloading on public health care. They’re taking Medicaid benefits that they ought to have to “earn” by hard labor, she recently decreed. Her Dickensian solution: Put the moochers to work in the fields!

Noting that Trump’s militarized assault on immigrants has terrorized agricultural workers, thus creating a farm labor crisis, Rollins wants to hitch America’s poor families to the plow. Voilà – labor shortage solved, and the poor are forced to earn their medical care. What a brilliant leader!

Except for her rank ignorance. First, 64 percent of Medicaid recipients are already working and nearly all of the rest are retirees, unable to work, or struggling to find jobs. Second, she’s obviously unaware that agriculture is skilled work – you can’t just bus city and suburban people out to the country and say “grow stuff.”

And third, it is beyond arrogant for a rich government autocrat – who takes $220,000 a year from taxpayers, plus platinum healthcare benefits and a fat pension – to be pontificating about forcing “undeserving” poor into hot fields to produce a nice leafy salad for her lunch.

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Following that line of thought, it occurred to me that America could benefit mightily if the Democratic Party’s overbearing corporate contingent were to migrate to their natural domain, the Republican Party. Seriously, as Robert Reich recently wrote: “Who in the world needs corporate Democrats?”

Thomas Jefferson warned of the democracy-crushing threat of America’s emerging “moneyed corporations.” And, sure enough, here they are today – literally owning the White House, Congress, Judiciary, most state governments… and suppressing democracy itself.

They’re entrenched not because they’re championed by the Republican Party, but because the once-proud party of America’s broad working class has also yoked itself to corporate money and embraced Republican policies of corporate supremacy. Where does that leave the great majority of working stiffs on election day? Staying home, feeling abandoned as both parties cater to the moneyed elite.

While many corporate Democrats insist they’re “social progressives,” it would be a profound public service for them to carry those social values directly into Republican primaries, softening that party’s raw minginess a bit. At the same time, their departure would free the Democratic Party from being financially shackled to the corporate agenda, letting it return to its roots as the unequivocating champion of working-class, little-d democrats.

By clarifying the core policy differences of both parties, elections could matter to most people again, presenting honest choices between a democratic or a plutocratic future. Pie-in-the-sky? Maybe, or even probably. But baking a pie starts by turning on the heat.

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Only these are not shoppers scrambling for family needs – these are CEOs, lobbyists, and billionaires out to “get theirs” in the huge Trump-a-Thon sell-off of Presidential favors. Common folks need not apply, since MAGA, Inc. (Trump’s political fundraising sack) charges a million bucks or more just to buy access to his golden throne.

Once there, everything is for sale. One cryptocurrency huckster, for example, delivered his million to get into a candlelight dinner at Mar-a-Lago, where he pitched a business deal to Trump himself. Then, for an extra $200,000, the crypto-guy was allowed to “sponsor” the annual Easter Egg Roll on the White House lawn. Yes – they’ve even financialized and corporatized an apolitical, publicly-funded event for children!

Not only is Trump being bought by Big Money, but he’s also available for short-term lease. For example, rich businesswoman Elizabeth Fago leased him in April for some heavy lifting on a household chore. Her son Paul had been found guilty last year of tax crimes and was headed to prison. But a million dollar check to MAGA Inc. put her in direct touch with Mister Fix-It. Sure enough, once her check was cashed, the fortunate son was granted “a full and unconditional” presidential pardon – no jail time, no payment of restitution to his victims.

When the New York Times asked about such corrupt selling of official favors, MAGA Inc. declared that Trump treats every American the same. So, there you have Trump’s million-dollar definition of “American.” If you’ve got the million, you’re in the club. If you don’t, you’re not.

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Also, visits to these jewels are enriched by the deeply-knowledgeable Park Service staff. And, of course, there’s the extra-special bonus that the Trump regime has added to our public parks this year: Political censorship.

With Trump issuing his dizzying blizzard of right-wing executive orders, you might’ve missed the one in March commanding the Park Service to scrutinize all of its public exhibits, signs, websites, videos, and other materials. Why? To flag and delete any scrap of information that Trump’s right-wing cultural cops consider to be “negative” historical content about America.

Sure enough, the Interior Department’s political overseers promptly compelled staffs at the Park Service’s 433 locations to go on a witch hunt for ideological impurity. In particular, any suggestion that racism, oppression, autocracy, and violence have been common features of the American experience have been decreed verboten. And, to assure a thorough cleansing of history, MAGA posses have been invited to go to historic sites and tag items they don’t like. Trump operatives say that by mid-September, they will have removed, deleted, or – get this – physically covered-up the inconvenient truths of our people’s history.

They’re like one-year-olds who think if they cover their eyes, we can’t see them. Well, peek-a-boo! A rebellious coalition called “Save Our Signs,” is asking grassroots people to take photos and videos of Park Service exhibits before they’re hidden away. Then, SOS will display samples of the banned material online so We the People can see the inanity of Trump’s 1984ish Newspeak censorship. Link to SOS at jimhightower.com/SaveOurSigns.

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Happily, though, the Statesman has made a near-miraculous recovery, thanks to a small-but-feisty band of actual journalists who believe in local newspapers. They fought Gannett bosses tenaciously, gaining a voice by forming a union, striking, and finally compelling the giant to sign a union contract. Victory!

Uh… not yet. Just months later, Gannett sold the newspaper to Hearst, another massive media conglomerate. This new relationship started well, but soon turned sour when Hearst honchos abruptly refused to honor the paper’s contract with the union. Then they began firing employees and jacking around with the newsroom’s healthcare and retirement benefits. Adding pettiness to greed, Hearst honchos even refused to let Statesman journalists take a holiday that corporate managers get. What the hell?

Bear in mind that Hearst is a phenomenally profitable, $13-billion-a-year, multi-media behemoth. It’s CEO, Steven Swartz, pockets millions of dollars a year and lives in luxury. Also, Austin is a booming media market worth gazillions to Hearst! No need to be so pathetically mingy!

So, the hardy members of the Austin News Guild are back doing what working people have to do – organizing and mobilizing for a little more justice. “We’re no strangers to the petty tactics of corporate elites,” they say, so the guild is relaunching its grassroots campaign to battle the b******s, fight for fairness, and protect local news. To track progress, go to: AustinNewsGuild.org.

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No, no, that’s loser talk. Today, the name of the game is winning. You’re Number One, or you’re nothing, so forget fair play and do whatever it takes to WIN! Of course, the gold medal champion of gaming the system is Trump, and to see the master in action, look at his current electoral manipulation in Texas.

With only a slim majority in the US House, and with his job-approval rating plummeting, Trump recently realized he’s in danger of losing his iron grip on Congress in next year’s mid-term elections. Gosh, what to do? Simple – rig the election! And no place is better at that than Texas.

So, Lord Donald ordered Greg Abbott, the right-wing partisan hack who is governor of this once-proud Lone Star State, to convene a special legislative session to redraw our congressional districts. Never mind that the districts had already been gerrymandered by Abbott only four years ago, Trump is demanding that voters be herded like cattle into even more convoluted districts. The goal is to oust five Texas Democrats from the House, thus stacking the Congressional deck with more Republicans so he can keep ruling the place. It’s political game-playing at its worst, disrespecting voters and the very idea of a House of Representatives.

Of course, there is an honorable way for the GOP to elect more of its own without engaging in political perversion: Stop trying to push far-right-wing nonsense that the great majority of voters don’t want. Instead, put up decent candidates who don’t need a Trump script to know what they stand for… and don’t need a Trump map to find the district that they supposedly “represent.”

Do something!

To stay on top of all-things-progressive in Texas, we can’t recommend Michelle H. Davis’ Substack enough: Lone Star Left. Here are a couple of her recent posts:

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Indeed, let’s rage against our government’s wholly-unprincipled embrace of (and direct participation in) the Israeli government’s ongoing massacre of the Palestinian people.

* Israel’s ruthless, 2-year invasion of Gaza has already killed 59,000 Palestinian civilians – more than half of them women and children.

* That’s as many killings as our soldiers suffered during the entire Vietnam War.

* Israel’s military has forced nearly all of Gaza’s two million citizens to abandon their homes and towns, herding them into distant camps, many without food, water, toilets, etc.

* Excruciating death by starvation – especially among children – is now at epidemic levels in Gaza, creating a dystopian horror.

* When masses of desperate Palestinians rush to sporadic and inadequate deliveries of humanitarian aid, Israeli snipers and other forces have opened fire on them – just since May, more than a thousand unarmed Palestinians have been assassinated in such ambushes.

Yes, fiendish Hamas terrorists, who literally operate underground in Gaza, are guilty of sadistic brutality against Israelis. But moral retribution requires going after Hamas, not mounting an inhumane onslaught to wipe the Palestinian people off the Earth.

A majority of Israelis are now openly rebelling against their government’s barbaric abandonment of their people’s best values. But what about us? Those sniper bullets and rockets have your and my names on them; those wasted children who’re dying in the agony of starvation belong to us; and it’s our politicians who’re propping up Israel’s corrupt prime minister and war machine. To stop this perversion of our own humanitarian values, go to International Rescue Committee: rescue.org.

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During my time as a Texas elected official, I happened to witness an almost vaudevillian performance of Lord Acton’s axiom on the floor of our state senate. A multimillionaire named Bo Pilgrim, baron of a factory chicken empire called Pilgrim’s Pride, had come to the Capitol to speak against a bill requiring corporations like his to provide decent workers’ compensation benefits. Bo didn’t speak in words, however – he simply walked onto the senate floor and brazenly handed out $10,000 checks to compliant senators.

Today, corporate political money doesn’t just talk, it screams – drowning out the voices of all who oppose the special favors the corrupt “donors” buy. And these days, a $10,000 check is considered almost charming in its innocence.

Take Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a far-right-wing demagogic politico who prides himself on demonizing and directly harming poor and powerless people, while scooping up fantastic donations from the financial powers he serves. This year, after railroading a slew of corporate gimmies into law, Abbott cashed in. Last month alone, he pocketed four million-dollar checks – one each from a real estate titan, a ruthless pipeline autocrat, a Trump backing money manager, and one of Elon Musk’s corporate operatives.

Excuse me for speaking out, but this is a gross example of kakistocracy – government by and for the very worst people in society. If they didn’t shower him with cash, even Greg Abbott wouldn’t speak to them. It’s time to start calling this what the dictionary plainly says it is: Bribery.

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This is not a test, but a warning of an unnatural disaster: A plutocratic cabal of corporate elites is aiming to gut and eventually eliminate America’s National Weather Service! Yes, that’s the extensive network of scientific analysts, monitoring systems, researchers, emergency responders, and others trying to anticipate, prepare for, and protect us from the worst of storms, floods, wildfires, and other calamities.

In the name of “efficiency,” Republican politicos are now defunding and cancelling essential storm warning centers, hurricane monitoring staffs, flood rescue teams – and they’re even closing some forecast offices at night (as though bad weather checks out at sunset). Why?

Greed. Wall Street profiteers – including Trump appointees and political funders – have long lusted to privatize the weather service. While no one can control the weather, it is possible to control, commodify, and monopolize the collection, interpretation, and distribution of forecasting data. So, Trump Inc. intends to stop providing these functions as a public service for the benefit of all. Instead, weather data would become a corporate profit center, packaged and sold at premium prices to media conglomerates, insurance giants, private resorts, and others who can afford it.

These privatizing profiteers are shameful. They’re deliberately demonizing, destaffing, and dismantling a public servicethat is essential to America’s common good – just so they can steal it for their own profit. To rebel against their destructive greed, check out Union of Concerned Scientists: UCS.org

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Consider the raw obscenity of the GOP ramming its gross budget bill into law. Even many conservatives gagged at the depravity of forcibly taking food stamps and Medicaid from millions of everyday people, just so a few extremely rich elites can satisfy their insatiable lust for tax breaks.

The stench of greed in their law is so offensive that Republicans are now trying to perfume their minginess by branding all those who’re being denied access to food and health care as moochers. Get off welfare and go find a job! These shameless lawmakers even insist they’re helping the poor by “transitioning” them “from Medicaid to employer-provided health care.”

It's always instructive to hear $174,000-a-year, taxpayer-insured politicos scold hard-hit families for “taking” public aid. Apparently, it never dawns on these pecksniffs that dead-end jobs available to the poor don’t come with any health care. Well, sniff GOP leaders, that’s why we pushed through this “big, beautiful” tax cut for billionaires—it’s our anti-poverty program!

Huh? Yes, they explain, it’s simple: (1) cut spending on poor people; so (2) we can lower the taxes that rich people and corporations pay; thus (3) giving them billions to invest in good jobs for the poor.

This is Jim Hightower saying… I was born at night, but it wasn’t last night. Notice that their Billionaire Boondoggle includes no requirement at all that recipients invest even one dollar in jobs. So, they won’t. This bill is not just ugly, it’s morally revolting.

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I wondered, with so much going on, why is he busy hawking perfume? But then I saw nearly every congressional Republican cravenly cave in to White House demands that they approve Trump’s truly stinky budget plan. Ah-ha! They are the perfume’s target market! Voting to slash food and health care funding for poor families, just so those dollars can be lavished on tax giveaways for millionaires and billionaires, is extremely unpopular. So Trump was offering them an odoriferous spritz.

Some will need gallons of it. Not only did they vote to harm to millions of people, but they rushed back to their districts, loudly demanding that the humanitarian disaster they created be fixed by state and local officials.

Then, there is Rep. Rob Bresnahan, a rich Pennsylvania Republican. He owned corporate stock in a big Medicaid provider named Centene, but as a legislative insider Rep. Bresnahan knew that Trump’s bill would gut Medicaid and crash Centene’s stock value. So, he dumped that stock just one week before the House approved the budget. And, yes, after protecting himself, Rob voted for the Medicaid gut job that caused the stock price to plummet.

This is Jim Hightower saying… Even one of Bresnahan’s Republican colleagues, Brian Fitzpatrick, was appalled: “We need American leaders who are accountable, transparent, and wholly committed to serving the public—not their stock portfolio,” he said, rightly adding that members of Congress “should be banned from trading individual stocks—period.”

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Indeed, such giants as Exxon and Shell Oil have long complained that environmentalists, consumers, and other busybodies, keep using legislation and lawsuits to interfere with their environmental “innovations.” But now, top state officials in (where else?) Texas have found a solution: Just ban the public from meddling in oil industry business.

At issue is a scheme by oil barons to sell the wastewater they use in “fracking,” a notoriously destructive way of forcing oil out of the ground. It’s also terribly wasteful, requiring five barrels of water to get one barrel of oil. But, “Eureka!” cried industry profiteers – we can treat that “backwash” with some chemicals and market it as “produced water.” Letting us pump this fracking product right into the state’s lakes, rivers, aquifers, and other waterways, they say, will replenish the state’s dwindling water supply.

But is that safe? Rather than answer, the corporate powers rushed to the governor and legislature – not seeking protections for the people, but to protect themselves and their profits from the people. Sure enough, the state’s corporate corrupted politicos dutifully passed a law decreeing that companies producing, selling, or transporting recycled fracking water cannot be held liable for any “consequences” suffered by those using the product. Consequences? Yes, like poisoned crops, illnesses… and death!

When the Sierra Club demanded safety studies on the obvious dangers of spewing oil wastewater on and in everything, an industry functionary scoffed, declaring: “We’ve studied this problem to death.” Ooooo – bad choice of words!

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She didn’t mean to. She was responding to the damning revelation that Trump has just given a huge government benefit to a global corporate criminal from Brazil – after – that corporation donated a whopping $5 million to fund his extravagant inaugural party. Trying to dismiss this obvious quid pro quo, the spokeswoman declared that Trump “is not bought by anyone.”

Right. Not by “anyone,” but by many ones. The most flagrantly corrupt president in US history, Trump’s Oval Office theme song is, “If you’ve got the money, I’ve got the time.” Remember, last year he bluntly instructed Big Oil to deliver a billion dollars to him, promising he would deliver many billions-worth of government favors to them. They did… and he is.

So, now, high-tech billionaires, foreign dictators, Wall Street elites, and other oligarchs are lined up at the White House, offering personal and political gimmies to entice him to rig the system for them. Take that $5 million pay-to-play money from Brazil. It came from JBS, the global factory farm monopolist infamous for price fixing, child labor abuse, vast environmental crimes, etc. Even our anything-goes stock exchange refused to sanction JBS’ immorality. But then Trump took the money and enthroned JBS in the prestigious New York Stock Exchange.

His sellout means the Brazillian bully can now raise billions in new capital through our stock market, jacking up its monopoly power over US farmers, consumers, businesses, and environment. Doing it all with a presidential seal of approval – bought for only $5 million.

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Right where they’ve been found throughout human history: Within ourselves. Specifically, in our rebellious spirit, our willingness to confront the greedheads and boneheads who feel entitled to run roughshod over us.

For example, The Formosa Four.

You probably haven’t heard of them, since the mass media powers don’t cover something as consequential and uplifting as a nation of Davids challenging Goliath – such as “The Formosa Four.” They are members of a tenacious and scrappy coalition that has dared to confront one of the most flagrant corporate criminals on the globe: Formosa Plastics. It’s a $6 billion-a-year profiteer that constantly and carelessly spews millions of tons of plastic contaminants into our environment and ourselves.

But last summer, the bully tried to play victim. When about 70 protestors defiantly converged on Formosa’s US headquarters in New Jersey, corporate executives had four of the leaders arrested and charged with criminal trespass – a power play to prevent free speech and scare off future protestors.

Yes, a global behemoth that’s a deadly polluter and serial human rights violator had our government arrest and prosecute grassroots critics for the “high crime” of trespassing. Such is the pettiness – but liberty-busting seriousness – of today’s arrogant forces of plutocracy.

Justice fighters, though, aren’t easily spooked by bullies, and the movement succeeded last week in having all charges dismissed. As one protester said, it takes “regular people putting their bodies on the line to make these things happen. One victory today, and many more in the future.” For more information, go to Formosa4.org.

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Consider the generous billionaires who live on an island in Florida’s Biscayne Bay. Amazon kingpin Jeff Bezos lives there, as do Ivanka Trump and her hubby, Jared Kushner. Actually, their so-called island is fake, built in the bay so a few dozen absurdly rich sparklies don’t have to mix with commoners living in the adjacent town of Surfside.

Snootiness aside, though, the billionaires have literally been giving “of themselves” to Surfside’s people. Specifically, their bodily waste has long been leaking from the septic systems of their mansions, polluting the town’s environment. Yes, the rich are actually defecating on commoners.

Facing public scorn, the Bezos-Trump-Kushner clan proposed piping their excrement into Surfside’s sewer system. Okay, but when the city asked for $10 million to help cover the pipe’s cost, the billionaires squealed like stuck hogs!

Come on! Ten million for them is like 10 dollars for you and me. Of course, moneyed elites didn’t get rich by playing fair, but by playing the system. So, they dispatched their lobbyists and lawyers to Gov. Ron DeSantis. Sure enough – BAM! – Republican officials suddenly and secretly approved a new state provision decreeing that local communities like Surfside cannot interfere with or even demand payment for such special-interest sewer projects as the Bezos-Trump-Kushner hookup. Then, again with no publicity, DeSantis signed the billionaires’ corrupt law – no doubt assured that they would reward his kindness later on.

Ironically, the word “defecate” is derived from a Latin verb meaning “to cleanse.” But there’s not enough soap in Florida to clean the hands of these dirty dealers.

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Oh, wait – they’re not hailing America’s laborers, but touting the existential virtue of “laboring.” “Work,” exclaim these politicos, provides “dignity” to all who labor.

Dignity? Obviously, they’ve never been inside a meatpacking plant, done roofing jobs for a wage-thieving developer, been paid a pittance to clean office buildings at midnight… or otherwise fully experienced the “dignity of labor.”

Years ago, Sen. Fred Harris was accosted at a political event by a rich businessman who demanded that Democrats reduce taxes by cutting the wages of government workers. The guy sputtered in disbelief that “mere garbagemen” were being paid $6 an hour. Fred stopped him right there, curtly asking: “Is that too much? What would it take to get you to do that job?”

Unfortunately, the guy’s crass classism is now official policy in Washington. In the name of “cutting waste” and lowering taxes on billionaires, a gaggle of narcissistic plutocrats – including Trump, “Chainsaw” Musk, cabinet appointees, and congressional extremists – have ganged up to fire valuable public service workers and slash essential assistance for poor families.

There is no sugar coating for the vulgarity and moral depravity of such elites whupping up on middle- and low-income families for their own gain. Moreover, their disdain for the value and creativity of those who do the daily work that makes America work is stupid … and socially suicidal.

Plus, their self-esteem is ludicrous. Indeed, if you pitted social value of a sanitation worker to any of Trump’s budget-slashing cabinet czars – guess which one the public would say is overpaid… and dispensable?

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What his show needed was some of the reality-TV drama that defines this president. For example, he could’ve had a phalanx of food trucks rumbling down the street, being chased by hundreds of hungry US soldiers, waving empty plates and chanting, “Feed the Troops!”

Besides being entertaining, that spectacle would’ve brought long-overdue public attention to an outrage that really rankles rank-and-file soldiers – namely, hunger. Yes, the trillion-dollar Pentagon budget that overflows with waste and boondoggles for corporate contractors actually leaves military families struggling to have enough to eat, much less being well-fed.

Indeed, about 25 percent of service members are so poorly paid and poorly served on US Army bases that that they are officially “food insecure,” relying on food stamps and local food pantries for their bare bones nutritional needs. Last November, for example, it was reported that the base dining hall at Fort Carson, Colorado, was serving a miserly “meal” consisting of one slice of toast and spoonful lima beans. Some bases are only offering gas-station-style grab-and-go snacks.

More scandalous, soldiers have a $460 “food tax” automatically deducted from their meager paychecks each month to pay for food. But the Army brass quietly diverts two-thirds of the soldiers’ money to other purposes – which they won’t disclose.

Congress knows about this and does nothing. Trump doesn’t even want to know. And Pentagon honcho Hegseth is lost in the fog of his own incompetence. To help raise awareness and Hell, go to FeedingAmericaAction.org.

Do something

Want to support veterans and fight for justice with them? Here are two orgs we love:

* Common Defense

* About Face

Also, here are some graphics from The Poster Project that you can share and use as talking points:

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Today, the guiding ethic for top executive enrichment is to have no ethics. Grab as much as you can as fast as you can, everyone else be damned. And never mind that as chief, you did absolutely nothing to “earn” that exorbitant stash of cash.

How exorbitant? Corporations try to hide the actual numbers, but under an insider accounting measure called “compensation actually paid” reveals the obscene truth. Last year, America’s 10 highest paid CEOs averaged more than a billion dollars each in pay. One person, one year, one billion.

And the Number One highest-paid corporate honcho last year, Alex Karp, made off with nearly $7 billion! That’s $560 million a month in personal pay. With the exceptions of Jesus and Dolly Parton, no one is worth anywhere near that!

And what does Alex do? He’s the CEO of Palantir, a high-tech outfit now working for Donald Trump to collect and computerize all of your and my personal data, creating government dossiers so federal agents can monitor us. Sleazy, but in today’s Corporate America, that’s a path to untold riches.

Still, for the insanely rich, too much is not enough. So, they, their lobbyists, and Republican congress critters are now furiously pushing for what Trump calls a “Big Beautiful Bill.” It would cut Medicaid, food stamps, and other basic human needs for America’s lowest-paid working families. Why? To give a billion-dollars more in annual tax cuts to hucksters like Karp… and Trump himself. This is worse than kleptocracy – it’s sleazocracry.

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Of course, the good only comes when fed-up people openly rebel against the bad. And, sure enough, Trump’s awful tyranny is revving up a majority movement for the common good.

Soaking in self-delusion, tyrants start sipping their own bathwater, thinking it’s champagne. So, today’s Washington MAGA moguls, drunk on narcissism, are imperiously rigging the rules so their clique can grab more wealth and power from the rest of us. Maybe they thought we commoners wouldn’t notice… or care. But we did and do, so the rebellion is on and gaining steam with nationwide protests and a surge in grassroots populist defiance.

Predictably, Trump & Co. is now resorting to the same losing tactic that panicky despots always fall back on – deploying police and military to subjugate the people. He has commanded the Army and Marines to shut down public protests. Then, posturing as a “strongman,” this 1960s draft dodger spent 45 million of our tax dollars to stage a made-for-TV, Stalin-style military parade on his birthday, letting him strut around as warrior-in-chief.

These are not shows of strength, but pathetic confessions of personal insecurity and presidential weakness. Sad. Don Quixote was right – the good is close at hand. So, to all of you in the growing democracy movement, keep pushing, push harder, push further! Thanks to you, we’re getting there. And we’ll get there sooner rather than later.

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I don’t mean common price gougers, polluters, and such, but full-fledged, executive-suite mobsters. They run huge corporate syndicates, treating fraud and even murder as necessary business tools. For example, Boeing Incorporated.

In 2018, a Boeing 737 MAX passenger jet suddenly nose-dived into the Java Sea, killing all 189 people on board. A freak accident, declared top bosses of the multibillion-dollar giant, disavowing any responsibility. Indeed, even though he knew that the MAX had a fatally flawed maneuvering system, the CEO rushed out to assure fliers that the jet was “as safe as any airplane that has ever flown the skies.”

But, oops – five months later, another MAX nosedived in Ethiopia, killing 157 more people. Whistleblowers and federal investigators later revealed that the bosses had long been shortchanging safety in order to jack up profits… and their own pay. Last summer – in a rare legal victory over business-as-usual coddling of corporate abuses – Boeing had to admit that it “knowingly” defrauded safety regulators and was, in fact, guilty of the criminal violations. So, justice!

Uh… not quite. Just a few weeks later, Trump happened, and he immediately turned the Justice Department into a full-service corporate whorehouse. So, after Boeing donated a cool million bucks in tribute to the new president, Trump’s attorney generally obligingly decreed that the confessed corporate criminal could simply “withdraw” its guilty plea, pay a minimal fine for killing 346 people… and “move on.”

Politicians bark at us commoners: “Do the crime and you’ll do the time.” Unless, of course, you can buy a corporate Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card from a corrupt president.

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By “all,” I mean he is setting up one Silicon Valley “data aggregator” to collect, store, and control your Social Security number, bank codes, health records, tax filings, voting history, biometrics… and, well, the whole statistical YOU. This aggregator will vacuum up all these unconnected data points and reconstruct them into a full computerized profile of your life, behavior, and beliefs.

This mass surveillance infrastructure isn’t some 1984ish fiction, but a fast-moving reality spun from Trump’s Project 2025. In an executive order quietly issued in March, he decreed that every federal agency must dump our personal data into a new centralized computer system, effectively creating government dossiers on each of us. Like every tyrant everywhere, Trump says his order is benign, merely “streamlining” data searches to increase government “efficiency.”

But this is no paper-shuffling decree, for Project 2025 operatives have already moved into the IRS, ICE, Social Security, the Pentagon, etc. – putting the technology in place to aggregate the master file.

Trump has – with no public input – already appointed a right-wing, high-tech data espionage outfit to be America’s surveillance overlord. Named Palantir, it was created and financed by Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley Republican billionaire, anti-democracy crusader, and self-absorbed plutocrat. Palantir bluntly declares that its role in amassing and rummaging through our private information is “the finding of hidden things.”

You think you have “nothing to hide,” right? But tyrants can “find something” on everyone. To help stop Trump’s thugs from weaponizing ourselves against ourselves, go to Electronic Frontier Foundation: eff.org

Extra, extra: For more on just how lousy (and dangerous) of a human Peter Thiel is, check out the 4-part series that the podcast Behind the B******s produced on him in late 2024.

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Even if the restaurant has an ocean view and a shrimp boat out front, chances are its crustaceans come from industrial aquaculture farms thousands of miles away in India, Ecuador, Vietnam and Indonesia. Astonishingly, our country now imports 94 percent of the shrimp we eat!

Astonishing, because our oceans have an abundance of top-quality shrimp, and we are blessed with highly-skilled shrimping families. Worse, those foreign industrial operations, financed by Wall Street and global profiteers, are infamous for using forced labor, banned antibiotics, and destructive environmental methods. Then they dump their grossly-cheap product into the US market, pushing out our superior-quality domestic product and devastating entire shrimping communities.

Yet, restaurant and supermarket prices for shrimp are at historic highs, with no disclosure to us consumers of where the product is from. The import industry effectively bribes lawmakers to avoid exposing, much less punishing, this multibillion-dollar swindle of American producers and eaters alike. The bait-and-switch conspiracy is now so pervasive that at last year’s National Shrimp Festival, four out of five vendors were – shhhh – quietly serving industrially-raised imported shrimp.

Of course, corporations have no conscience, but our tough-on-crime political leaders are so pusillanimous that they won’t even stand up for their own local shrimpers. A recent Louisiana law, for example, “boldly” requires restaurants to disclose if they’re peddling imported shrimp. But, the legislature meekly provided no penalty if violators ignore the law. So… they do.

For information on real reform, connect with SanAntonioBayWaterKeeper.org.

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But look out! Here come those same politicians, putting on MAGA hardhats and firing up their political bulldozers to push one of the most arrogant and intrusive social schemes imaginable. They intend to re-engineer the American family! These “pronatalists” want families to conform to a Christian Nationalist family structure – specifically, a dominant man married to a subservient stay-at-home woman, having beaucoup children. Not a couple of kiddos but six, 12, or more!

For example, extremist MAGA senator Josh Hawley has become a cheerleader for a federal policy to entice women to quit work, stay home, and have more babies. He proposes a tax credit of $5,000 per child, gushing that this would cause working families to exclaim, “Oh, my gosh, we can actually raise our kids.”

Well, “gosh” right back at you, Josh! Just giving birth can cost more than $5,000 – and raising a child is multiples above that every year. So, you want to take away a mom’s job and her income, and add thousands in costs to the family budget – in exchange for a government tax credit? The slickest loan sharks aren’t that diabolical.

Oh, wait. Right-wing pronatalists have another government incentive to jack-up birth rates. Incredibly, Trump officials have proposed a “National Medal of Motherhood” for women who have six or more children! Wow, what should that medal look like, be made of, and say? And when and where should it be worn? Also, will un-medaled women socially ostracized?

If right-wingers actually wanted to help families, they’d be backing family-level wages, free child care, and Medicare for all. Everything else is political BS.

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Son of a South African diamond dealer, Elon glided from a life of privilege all the way to being filthy rich, transported by extravagant taxpayer subsidies and government favors. And now he’s back at the trough, demanding a blank government check for his biggest boondoggle of all: Rocketing to Mars.

Not him (unfortunately), but you and me. A flaming megalomaniacal flimflammer, Musk says he’s a genius rocket scientist who will “save civilization” by relocating our human species to the Red Planet. Proclaiming that our Blue Marble is doomed to a hellish future, he is already using millions of earthly tax dollars to fund his fever dream.

Getting there, however, would be the cheap and easy part. Mars is already hellish, with killer levels of surface radiation, toxic dust, and so-called air that analysts say “will boil the saliva off your tongue before it asphyxiates you.”

The only real question is why the hell anyone is listening to this narcissistic flimflammer. He can’t run a government waste project, much less a planet. Speaking of waste, why is he so eager to throw away Earth? Our salvation lies not in the stars, Musk, or other techno-profiteers, but in our democratic values, connection to nature, and down-to-Earth creativity.

Let Musk go to hell – I’m sticking with the home team.

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That’s because these wise creatures have figured out how to make egalitarianism central to their society, with a diversity of birds actively supporting each other. When bringing food back to their chicks, for example, adult starlings commonly share some with hatchlings of an unrelated flock. In turn, those birds repay the good deed in later breeding seasons.

Contrast this bird-nest ethic of the Common Good with the culture of right-wing minginess now being pushed furiously by Trump’s kakistocracy of billionaires and despotic ideologues.

Four of his overprivileged cabinet appointees, for example (Bobby Kennedy, Mehmet Oz, Brooke Rollins, and Scott Turner) recently ganged up on hard-hit poor families who receive modest public help for essential human needs, like food and health care. The four politicos piously wailed that welfare programs are an intolerable burden on wealthy taxpayers, so they intend to slash spending by forcing the poor to take jobs before getting any public help.

But their claim that hordes of worthless sponges are living high on food stamps and Medicaid is the same BS such plutocrats always spread when trying to keep our society from being as smart, decent, and ethical as starlings. Their scolding dictate that “you must work” is pointless grandstanding. Nearly all Medicaid recipients, for example, already have jobs – or they are children, seniors, or disabled.

There’s a four-letter vulgarity that fits Kennedy, Oz, Rollins, and Turner: “Mean.” Okay, technically, “mean” is not an obscenity, but when powerful tax-paid elites like them are mean to poor people for political gain, they are, in fact, obscene… and disgusting.

Do something!

Medicaid cuts don’t just affect people on Medicaid— they hurt us all. For example, many hospitals, especially rural hospitals, rely on the revenue they receive from Medicaid reimbursements just to survive.

A number of people around the country are encouraging everyday folks to share the facts about Medicaid in their areas, and are creating infographics for you to use to tell your stories. Calling your representatives is always good, but we’re also finding that local media coverage is having a huge impact (in part because your representatives deeply care about how they’re perceived in your local media).

Here’s where you can find all the Medicaid graphics for each state; additionally, activist Dani Cook has created a series of Medicaid graphics for states with large rural contingents here.

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I refer to our society’s callous treatment of AI bots.

Who? AI bots are not an ethnic group, but the rapidly-evolving species of advanced “artificial intelligence beings,” spawned in recent years by the high-tech demi-gods of Silicon Valley. Unbeknownst to most of us natural-born humans, profiteering corporations are already deploying millions of these “thinking machines” across our country, taking an ever-widening array of jobs that require a measure of cognitive, human-level abilities – from architects to therapists, lawyers to journalists.

However, rather than focusing on the deep ethical and pragmatic questions that this techno-corporate displacement poses for real-life people, the developers of AI’s Brave New World are trying to divert social concern to the bots. A recent headline urgently asks, “Should AI Systems Have Rights?” And a leading maker of those systems is proclaiming that society must be concerned about the “mental welfare” of bots. Meanwhile, corporate owners are urging that their machine creatures be given a moral status to assure that they are “ethically treated.”

Excuse me, but who are these greedmeisters to set ethical standards? The billionaires of tech have enriched themselves, not by any genius, but by ruthlessly exploiting workers, carelessly polluting our environment, arrogantly violating our laws, stealing from their competitors and consumers, and bribing government officials. They are sleaze.

Besides, corporate bots need to go the back of the line! Before we give rights to machines, let’s secure the rights that moneyed elites have denied to women, the poor, nature… and democracy itself.

Do something!

To learn more about AI, ethics, privacy and more, and to support sane advocacy around technology in general, check out the Electronic Frontier Foundation at eff.org.

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Well… actually, I only lasted a week-and-a-half in law school. Still, you don’t need to be a legal scholar to see that these butt-kissing, billion-dollar firms are – to use a judicial term – scuzz.

It’s certainly true that Trump is a vindictive, petty president who routinely turns his office into a weapon of personal political revenge. And he especially despises lawyers who have defied his many blatantly-illegal power grabs, so he’s been deploying the crushing force of big government to punish such prominent Democratic firms as Paul Weiss. Trump stripped security clearances from Weiss lawyers, barred them from entering federal buildings, and threatened to cancel their clients’ government contracts.

No one said battling a despot would be easy. But, as Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor recently put it, “If you’re not used to fighting and losing battles, then don’t become a lawyer.”

Rather than fight, the Weiss firm pathetically tucked tail and ran whimpering to Trump, begging forgiveness for challenging his unconstitutional acts. They even made a $40 million payoff to get in Lord Donald’s good graces!

Senior partners in the Weiss firm, each of whom are paid some $20 million a year, are not only gutless, but greedy as well. They sold their integrity to a mobster like Trump, so he would “let them” keep drawing that fat check. It shows that the opposite of courage is not merely cowardice, but conformity.

If lawyers will so meekly abandon their own democratic rights, why would any of us pay them to stand up for ours?

Do something!

To find and support lawyers who actually support The People, check out the National Lawyers Guild at nlg.org.

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Yes – lo and behold: Texas!

I’ll bet you were not expecting that answer. Well, for sure, the Republican clique of arrogant billionaires and Christian supremacists who thought they owned Texas politics didn’t expect the comeuppance voters delivered to them in this month’s local elections.

In city and school board contests across the state, Texans bluntly said to right-wing operatives and officials: We’re sick of you – your constant attempts to divide and dictate, ban and bully, privatize and profiteer at the expense of the common good.

For example, in the flashing-red suburbs of Fort Worth, where GOP front groups have spent millions in dark-money to take over school boards, Democratic challengers won 11 of 11 races! In Mansfield, the county’s third largest city, all five right-wing extremists running for mayor and school board lost. “Mansfield has gone to Hell,” screeched one of the Christian Nationalist activists!

No, it’s being yanked back to its senses, rejecting hyper-partisan nutballism and church dictatorship in favor of, you know, educating children!

Also, voters in Katy, Fort Bend, Plano, Richardson, and other big suburbs – long written off as solid red bastions – produced sweeping progressive victories.

This grassroots turnaround is no accident. It’s largely the product of a young generation of progressive activists revitalizing the tried-and-true practice of “little-d” democratic organizing – which means showing up in-person, day-in and day-out to connect with workaday people, focusing on their real problems.

This is Jim Hightower saying… Of course, this doesn’t mean Texas is suddenly blue – but it’s on the right path, and that offers hope in other red and purple areas. Remember: The first rule of politics is to show up.

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I hope no one thinks me blasphemous, but I go to a church nearly every Saturday that is not denominational, nor is it held in any sort of ornate cathedral, temple or mosque. It’s a plain wooden, open-air shed with a metal roof and a loose brick floor—but it’s filled with goodness, joy and a diversity of devotees who share in the bounty of nature. It’s the Boggy Creek Farmstand, one of more than a dozen farmers’ markets flourishing in my hometown of Austin, Texas.

Indeed, thousands of these secular-but-soulful gathering places that nurture body and spirit have cropped up all across America. From big city neighborhoods, to rural towns, they provide a genuine grassroots alternative to factory food and monopoly megamarts.

The spread of this good food movement has been neither “miraculous” nor the product of some corporate conclave. Rather, it’s the organic result of hundreds of local coalitions—small farmers, consumer advocates, environmentalists, community officials, and others dedicated to real, lasting progress of, by and for workaday people.

When organizing a Texas network of these cooperative ventures in my years as state agriculture commissioner, we followed a path blazed by (shhhh, don’t tell anyone) New York City. There, a pragmatic visionary named Barry Benepe and his can-do cohort were showing that small farmers could bypass the corporate system and profit by selling directly to consumers in the city.

This is Jim Hightower saying… Our friend Barry passed away last month at 96, but what a legacy—45 Greenmarkets in New York City alone, and a national farm-to-table movement! To help extend its reach into your town, go to farmersmarketcoalition.org.

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It’s a corrupt-money sleazefest with lobbyists blatantly offering high-dollar political donations in exchange for presidential and congressional favoritism. Hundreds of these corporate requests are so selfish and unfair that it’s been hard to single out any one as exceptionally sleazy. Until now.

Meet the “Coalition of Recyclers of Residual Organics.” Well, recycle and coalition sound sorta positive, right? But what are “residual organics?” Uh… poop. Specifically, sewage sludge, including human waste. Piped from our homes, it goes through sewer systems to utility plants, which treat it and filter out the water, leaving a thick sludge of “biosolids.”

And what does “recycling” mean? Corporate giants like Synagro (which is owned by Wall Street financier Goldman Sachs) buy it and simply rebrand the stuff as “fertilizer.” They reap huge profits selling the sludge to unsuspecting farmers and ranchers, not mentioning that it can contain deadly levels of “forever chemicals.” Millions of acres across America have already been contaminated – along with water sources, livestock, and families.

So now, lobbyists for sludge peddlers are demanding that Trump’s government intervene. Not to help victimized families, but literally to take away the legal right of those families to sue the corporate profiteers that poisoned them.

Unsurprisingly, Republican lawmakers are siding with the poisoners. Meanwhile, Synagro continues to sell sludge as fertilizer, and Trump officials are even pushing EPA to stop designating “forever chemicals” as hazardous.

Has everyone gone crazy!? No. To find sanity in this mess, go to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility: peer.org

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Remember his promise to end Russia’s war against Ukraine on Day One of his presidency? No joke, he bragged: “It’ll be done within 24 hours. You watch.”

Well, here we are at Day One Hundred, with the war still raging. So Trump either lied… or failed. But The Donald had a Joker up his sleeve – he now claims that, “when I said [Day One] it was in jest.”

Horsefeathers. First it was a core campaign promise, which he talked about at length in at least 53 of his widely publicized events (including two nationally-televised) debates. Second, he repeatedly assured his MAGA devotees that he was not joking, but literally would end Putin’s war in a day.

He became the joke, because he knows nothing about war and has surrounded himself with Fox News blowhards who know even less. I don’t mean that as an idle put-down, but as a screaming civil-defense warning of incoming danger. Unbeknownst to nearly all of us, Commander Trump and his menagerie of macho ne’er-do-wells are quietly-but-rapidly pulling America once again into the Big Muddy.

They’ve blundered into another “forever war,” dumping billions of our dollars into high-tech bombing raids against Houthi militia. Who? Houthis are tenacious guerilla fighters in the small impoverished nation of Yemen. Like the Viet Cong some 60 years ago, they are clever and resilient – and they’re confounding arrogant White House and Pentagon autocrats who keep thinking they can bomb their way to world domination.

As Pete Seeger put it in his Big Muddy song, “The big fool says to push on.” But we don’t have to obey. To push back, go to PeoplesAction.org.

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How odd. The cheers were for a federal court that had just ruled in favor of letting big banks gouge us with exorbitant feeds when we’re late making a credit card payment. Bizarrely, agency officials joined jubilant bank executives in declaring, “This is a win for consumers.”

Huh? The court’s blatantly plutocratic ruling lets financial giants slap us credit card customers with punitive fees of $32 or more for every late payment. The court is legalizing their consumer robbery, allowing credit card lenders to pluck an extra $10 billion a year in excess fees from our pockets. Adding to their shame, the profiteering bankers will mainly squeeze this windfall from low-paid working families who’re living paycheck to paycheck, having to rely on credit to make ends meet.

So why in hell are the government’s consumer protectors cheering this? Because these officials are no longer “ours,” but corporate operatives been installed by Trump’s brigade of billionaires. The supreme goal of their autocratic government is to further empower the rich over the rest of us.

Indeed, displacing consumer protectors with agents who’ll protect corporations from consumers was an explicit goal of Project 2025. That extremist manifesto was co-authored by Russell Vought, a fanatical right-wing politico from the Christian Nationalist cult. What’s he doing now? Trump has put Vought in charge of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Thus, a national agency meant to help average consumers have a bit more of a fighting chance against financial greed has been perverted by Trump into just another tool helping moneyed elites rip off working families. How great does that make America?

Do something!

Consumer Reports and the Consumer Federation of America are both working to save the CFPB; additionally, a lawsuit has been filed by Gupta Wessler, a high-stakes litigation firm in D.C., on behalf of the National Treasury Employees Union, National Consumer Law Center, NAACP, Virginia Poverty Law Center, Pastor Eva Steege, and the CFPB Employee Association.

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Which brings me to, of all things, our nation’s Farm Bill. This sprawling piece of legislation, updated every five years, is intended to combine the interests of farmers with consumers, production with conservation, grassroots cultures with corporate systems… etc. It’s not easy. In fact, downright messy.

But now, with plutocratic ideologues and culture warriors dominating their caucus, Republican lawmakers have not even been able to produce an agreement among themselves, so the comprehensive farm bill America needs is a year overdue and no longer being pursued by the party in charge. Instead, the GOP’s ag committee chairman, Rep. Glenn Thompson, is jerry-rigging a stripped-down sham of a bill limited to the two spending priorities of MAGA Republicans:

One: Hand out many billions more of our taxpayers’ dollars to subsidize agribusiness giants and rich speculators who own the biggest farms, mainly because they’ll then keep funding and voting for Republicans.

Two: Whack America’s poorest families. Thompson is banking on the minginess of extremist Republicans who oppose the Ag Department’s hunger programs. Those programs help 40 million poverty-stricken Americans (including 1 in 5 children) afford the groceries they need.

So, there we have the GOP’s farm bill ethics—cut the poor to give more to the rich in order to buy votes for more of the same. The word for this is “corrupt.” Also, “cruel.”

Indeed, it takes an exceptional level of political shamelessness to steal food from the hungry in order to fatten some of the richest people in our country. To fight their depravity, go to ruralorganizing.org.

Do something!

The House GOP leadership has been making noises that they’re looking at the House Ag Committee’s meeting on May 8 for the Farm Bill’s reconciliation markup. You can help put pressure on the committee itself by contacting its members, and demanding that your own representatives support small family famers and the programs our most vulnerable communities depend on.

There’s also a great tool from The Democracy Labs showing where kids will go hungry and farmers will be bankrupted: check out the MAGA HUNGER MAP and use it to call your representative.

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Raise the best crop you can—but be sure to store enough of the seed you produce this year to plant next year’s crop. Even with the razzle-dazzle computerization modern-day agriculture, seed savers are as essential as ever. Maybe more so, given climate change, mass pollution, species collapses, genetic loss, etc. Seeds are our future.

Luckily, a local, national, and global movement arose decades ago to say: “Let’s not be stupid.” Noting that new diseases, pests, blights, etc. continually break out around the globe, wiping out entire varieties of essential food crops, pioneers of this movement set up a system of “gene banks” for future needs.

Established in the Ag Department in 1898, these banks collect, store and keep alive vast reserves of seeds containing the genetic diversity of our entire food supply. They are literally a human survivalist resource. For example, if a devastating fungus infects a variety of wheat, scientists can search 62,000 other wheat varieties in the gene bank to find seed with a natural resistance to that fungus.

With a shoestring budget and a small staff of scientists, this network of 22 regional gene banks is government at its best, doing invaluable public work, efficiently.

But then, stupid showed up. Elon Musk, Trump’s thuggish whacker of the common good, has stormed into the seed saver community with his cartoonish chainsaw roaring. He summarily fired the network’s top plant scientists, slashed its meager budget—and is playing God with our food future.

This is Jim Hightower saying… Just as rats should be kept out of America’s seed bins, so should Elon Musk.

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This explains a lot about his crude approach to Greenland, demanding that the Danish territory simply succumb to him. Even though proud Greenlanders have repeatedly said, “Go away!” to Trump’s uninvited advances, their emphatic rejections have only heightened his sadistic lust for dominance. Indeed, rebuffed again this month, he turned downright sinister, declaring, “One way or another, we’re going to get it.”

Why push so fiercely for a frozen Arctic island that has a population smaller than Greenville, South Carolina? First, because Donald is an overprivileged child with an insatiable need to assert power over others. The pragmatic reason though, is money. Beneath that thick covering of ice, Greenland has a trove of oil, uranium, precious metals, etc., that Trump and his billionaire cohorts desperately want to plunder.

Initially, Trump & Co. tried macho American chauvinism to get their way: Leave dull old Denmark, they propositioned, and we’ll make you a sort of American sub-state. People snickered at that, so Trump tried his usual pay-off ploy—give in to us, he told the islanders, and “we will make you rich.” Rightly insulted, “We Are Not for Sale” protests erupted across the land, and “Trump” became a curse word in the island’s Danish, Inuit and English languages.

This is Jim Hightower saying… But “no” means “go” to him, so he has now directed the National Security Council to develop plans for subjugating Greenland’s resources, even by force. In a blunt order, he barked, “Let’s get it done.”

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That could be humorous, except that DOGE—a creature of the right-wing Project 2025—has been devastating to millions of people. And it’s about to get worse. Elon Musk—the flighty überrich autocrat put in charge of “efficiency” by his buddy Trump—is now going after the Social Security deposits of 73 million senior citizens.

But wait, hasn’t Trump himself promised (loudly and often) that he would not ax this essential retirement program? Yes… but Elon is his “gotcha.”

Rather than an honest kill, Musk is strangling the program with (believe it or not) bureaucratic red tape. Claiming to cutting waste, he’s eliminating 7,000 people who administer the program, shouting, “Bureaucratic excess!” Except, Social Security is actually a renowned model of government efficiency, spending less than 1 percent of its revenue on administration.

So by whacking the people who do the work, Musk is actually whacking the people who’re due to receive their earned benefits. For example, he’s decreed that the public no longer apply for benefits or resolve questions by phone, but now, must now travel in person to some distant Social Security office. But the staff there has also been decimated, so people who’ve come from afar are told to go back home and call for an appointment. Yes… a call that will not be answered.

This is Jim Hightower saying… What’s at work here is a Musk-Trump ploy to wreck Social Security’s remarkable record of efficiency. Their intent is to make the service so bad that they can then let profiteering corporations can privatize your retirement.

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But no need to swat frantically at their every assault. Their blitzkrieg against everything at once is an intentional ploy to divide us into small, separate scrambles to save this and that, rather than rallying a unified, furious opposition to them. The evil is not in the budget cuts, but in the cutters.

Second, let’s be clear that their war-on-waste is NOT about eliminating useless taxpayer expenditures. Note that Elon Musk, Trump’s silly “efficiency czar,” ignores such walloping waste as Pentagon boondoggles and tax scams for überrich hucksters… like him.

But—by gollies!—those budget-whacking plutocrats are fearless when it comes to killing essential benefits for regular people. A longstanding energy program, for example, helps very-low-income families across America pay to heat their homes in bitter winters, and to cool homes in areas of brutal heat. It saves lives—efficiently!—being administered by a staff of only 25. But this month, Trump’s government reform thugs stormed in, fired all 25, and shut down the program. As Sen. Ed Markey said, “This isn’t reform. It’s sabotage.”

This is Jim Hightower saying… Exactly! Soft words like “efficiency” are their knives for castrating government of, by, and for The People, allowing a cabal of Trump, Musk, and allied financial elites to impose a moneyed monarchy over America. But remember our history—we democratic rebels won all-out wars in the 1770s and 1860s to defeat them. So, toughen up, here they come again.

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Mercifully, Gramm is gone, but political hot air is still gushing from the likes of Rep. Pat Fallon, an Elon-Musk-hugging, plutocratic congress critter from Texas. Lately, however, Pat has been learning the hard way that folks back home don’t share his fan-boy crush on the South African billionaire, who is gleefully chainsawing crucial public programs that even Republican families count on. So, Fallon’s own constituents are howling at him to do something!

He is: This aloof and clueless “public servant” has erupted in a mad dog attack on the locals! At a recent town hall event in his red district, voters were furious that Musk is targeting the Social Security benefits they’ve earned. Fallon barked that “no one has said they’re cutting Social Security.” But one of his voters shot back: “Elon says it every day.” Indeed Musk is trying to kill it with lies, falsely attacking it as “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.”

Then, Fallon stumbled into the GOP’s briar patch of class bias, curtly proposing “a different deal” to replace Social Security. “If you want to retire,” he instructed, plan when you’re young and “work two jobs.” Of course, millions already do—and the pay still doesn’t cover basic expenses, much less provide savings for retirement.

This is Jim Hightower saying… Now that’s a raw deal! Did I mention that Fallon, a multimillionaire congressman, gets a lavish, paid-for-by-you-and-me public pension?

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Fun? The farm economy is in the ditch, with crop prices at depression levels and bankruptcies surging. Plus, Trump Inc. is now rigging the law to give agribusiness monopolies more power to run roughshod over farmers and rural communities.

Well, yes, say the billionaire “geniuses” and partisan hacks who’ve seized control of farm and food policies, but our phantasmagoric laissez-fairyland ideology will open up new agricultural markets here at home, so see? Fun!

Those ideologues, however, can’t make chicken salad out of chicken manure, and that’s what their promises are. While Brooke Rollins, Trump’s corporatized ag secretary, babbles about “new” markets—but she actually shut down a nationwide market last month that provided a billion dollars a year to family farmers who produce for local schools, food pantries, etc. In reality, Rollins’ goal is an industrialized, globalized food economy, so she coldly dismissed these local sales as “nonessential.” Of course, that says to all of the people involved that her government considers them nonessential.

Combining arrogance with ignorance, Trump’s aloof plutocrats carelessly wiped out this market right at spring planting time! Each farm family has already taken out thousands of dollars in bank loans to buy seeds and other essential supplies to make this year’s crop, but—WHAMMO!—Trump & Co. slammed the door on the family’s most reliable market, shoving them to the brink of broke… and beyond.

This is Jim Hightower saying… This is what happens when clueless billionaires are brought in to make our public programs “efficient.” Corporate rule is never efficient—and it sure ain't fun.

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Not the political dark ages being pushed on us by today’s regressive right-wing forces, but nature’s own pure darkness of night. Unfortunately, we Homo Sapiens have largely blacked out nature’s billions of beacons in the night sky, which have both dazzled and guided Earth’s creatures for eons.

Ironically, the tool used to wash out natural light… is light! In all cities and most towns, the glare of artificial lighting has pulled an impervious curtain across our sky. Especially garish (and entirely useless) is the lighting of corporate skyscrapers throughout the night with blinding spotlights that keep us from seeing the genuinely majestic view beyond.

I was lucky as a child to spend summer evenings on my Aunt Eula’s farm, entranced as darkness fell and the celestial show began. But today, most children don’t even know it’s there. Indeed, 80 percent of Americans never see the stream of the Milky Way galaxy that is our home – much less seeing the spectacular cosmic beams shining from trillions of miles beyond.

This doesn’t mean we should just stumble around in the dark. Of course we need light, but try a little common sense. One, stop spotlighting buildings. Two, don’t point outdoor lighting up at the sky– shine it down on our streets, parking lots, stadiums, and porches where the illumination is actually needed. Three, remember that there’s an off switch. And even small steps can make a big difference. After all, all we’re giving up is bad lighting.

This is Jim Hightower saying… We can have the light we need and still let nature’s sky be the star. The good news is that towns, cities, and even countries have begun adopting such sensible lighting policies. To help do this where you live, go to DarkSky International: darksky.org.

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Once again, my state’s GOP hierarchy is leading the nation in creative ways to increase corporate power over people’s rights. This time, lawmakers are rushing to protect corrupt executives from legal challenges by their own shareholders!

Their law would ban rank-and-file owners of corporate giants from suing their CEOs and other top officials for financial malfeasance. In particular, it’s a heavy-handed attempt to prohibit shareholders from suing bosses who lavish shareholder funds on extravagant pay and luxury perks for themselves.

But leave it to Lone Star Republicans to make a bad law worse. Indeed, they say they only want to bar suits by “pesky” small investors—people who own less than three percent of a corporation’s stock. But that’s a flimflam, since almost no one owns more than three percent of any big corporation. And the few who do are huge Wall Street operators and multibillionaires—and they’re not about to sue a fellow-richie for being greedy.

So the Texas law would effectively institutionalize a corrupt, closed-loop protection racket, freeing self-serving executives from internal accountability.

Speaking of corrupt, who wrote this boondoggle? It’s sponsored by Dustin Burrows, the top official of the Texas House, but he doesn’t write bills—he totes bills written by big campaign donors, corporate lobbyists, and right-wing extremists. In this case, he’s working for all three.

This is Jim Hightower saying… Burrows brags that his scam will be a boon for our state, because it’ll prompt CEOs everywhere to move their corporations here to take advantage of this law. Sure—corporations up to no good! Who needs ‘em? And if they set a precedent in Texas, I guarantee you they’ll be pushing it in your state next.

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Trump & Company’s budget-whacking crew even brandished a big ol’ chainsaw to show us hoi polloi that they’re serious. So goodbye to those ridiculous, multibillion-dollar giveaways to politically connected corporate elites, right?

Uh… don’t get silly. The chainsawers-in-chief are Elon Musk, Trump and a mess of ultra-rich GOP cabinet appointees, and their fortunes are built on fat checks from the government, so they will NOT be targeting any of their boondoggles. Instead, they’re aiming at programs offering modest help to middle-class and poor families.

For example, the Agriculture Department regularly mails out billions of dollars in “farm subsidies,” but most real farmers don’t get a penny, while about 80 percent of the taxpayers’ money goes to the richest 10 percent of agribusiness owners, including city-dwelling billionaires and corporate giants.

But rather than touching their giveaways, the Ag Department has just made a political show of zeroing-out a very successful farm-to-market program that enables small producers to sell their fresh goods to local school districts and food banks. This is government at its best—serving as a catalyst to “free up the enterprise” of small businesses by allowing them to bypass monopolistic middlemen and provide top-quality fresh foods to their communities.

Big Food, however, hates competition. Thus, Brooke Rollins (a corporate-hugging, far-right-wing lawyer who is Trump’s new Ag Secretary) summarily cancelled this enterprising local food initiative, announcing on Fox News that it was “nonessential” waste.

This is Jim Hightower saying… So there you have their guiding ethic of these “waste warriors.” Programs helping regular Americans are just waste to be eliminated—but giveaways to the rich are “essential” waste to be protected.

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Mike is Speaker of the House of Representatives, which used to be a vital part of America’s national government. The Constitution empowers the House to oversee the federal budget, public policies, and the actions of presidents. But Johnson has meekly surrendered these core powers (and his own relevance) to Trump’s autocratic executive branch.

Mike even failed to be Squeaker of the House, for he issued no peep of protest as the authority of elected lawmakers was seized and pocketed by a corrupt chief executive claiming that he’s the law of the land. As Rep. Jamie Raskin put it, instead of standing against imperious one-man rule, Johnson applauded, reducing himself to Trump’s “little buddy.”

Even more pathetic is seeing Johnson and the GOP’s entire congressional caucus kowtow to Elon Musk, sheepishly obeying the right-wing dictates of an over-privileged, South African finagler who’s never been elected by anybody to anything. Having bought his way into Trump’s golden orbit of billionaires in the last election, Musk is now prancing around as America’s acting president, while Johnson cheers.

But Trump, Musk, and Little Buddy have a problem that they don’t seem to grasp: “We the People” simply don’t support what they’re doing to us. It’s now obvious that they’re waging a billionaires-know-best, chainsawing rampage against public programs that benefit us commoners—especially any program that protects us from the unbounded greed of billionaires like… them.

This is Jim Hightower saying… These corrupt, wannabe monarchs have been sipping their own bathwater, thinking it’s champagne. But the public is onto them… and on the move against them.

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That might explain the calamitous mess that President Trump-Musk is making of our government today. Clearly, Don and Elon know nothing about four-legged farm animals, but they certainly know how to squeeze government to fatten their own two-legged breed of corporate swine. Thus, the billionaire hucksters are bulldozing agencies that serve people’s real needs, while preserving those that subsidize corporate greed.

For example, the U.S. Department of Agriculture. A once-proud agency created by Abraham Lincoln to serve tillers of the soil, but USDA today has become a bottomless feeding trough for agribusiness giants and other financial powers that “till” taxpayers.

Our country’s Farm Program, meant to be a safety net for hands-on dirt farmers, is now a $20-billion-a-year subsidy that pays zero to the vast majority of farm families. Instead, 75 percent of our money goes to the biggest and richest 10 percent of corporate fiefdoms, including billionaire speculators who never get any dirt under their fingernails.

Actually, the Trump-Musk chainsaw crew is whacking some USDA programs—such as food stamps for poor families, helping school districts buy from local farmers and ranchers, and other efforts providing modest help to grassroots people and communities. But not a peep from the duo about the bales of taxpayer cash hauled every year to their own class of rich elites.

This is Jim Hightower saying… A Department of Agriculture is as needed today as in Lincoln’s time. But an honest overhaul is necessary to return it to its democratic roots of serving the workaday people of rural America, freeing it from the corporate interests now running roughshod over those same people. For more information, go to Environmental Working Group at ewg.org.

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What we’re in today is an Orwellian basket to political hell, propelled by Trump himself. He has assembled a cohort of anti-democracy zealots, who are autocratically cutting off people’s fundamental freedoms—including speech, press, travel, and even thought.

The first Trump term unleashed a gaggle of right-wingers promoting mass ignorance by demonizing books, librarians, teachers, scientists, and our own people’s history. Next came a maniacal MAGA assault on America’s most essential, unifying democratic value: The reality that we are a proudly diverse bunch of people, striving to achieve the ideal of equality for all. “Heresy,” shouted Trump’s GOP, demanding that the pursuit of such goals literally be outlawed.

And now comes all-out, Kafkaesque crazy, with Trump going on a binge of mass censorship and goofy executive dictates. Consider just two of his recent commands. One bans government cafeterias from using paper straws! Another suspends a law that made it illegal for US corporations to bribe foreign officials. There’s the new morality: Paper straws, OUT; corporate bribery, IN.

More dangerous for our freedom, though, is the MAGA regime’s purging of words and ideas it doesn’t like, trying to force its government-approved Newspeak on America. Trump’s minions are now going through every agency’s documents and websites, literally deleting hundreds of common words to be officially verboten—including: Equality, injustice, pollution, transgender, race, women… and, of course, Gulf of Mexico.

This is Jim Hightower saying… These are not just words, but values and people. A president that starts by censoring our freedom of expression is a weakling, admitting that he’s afraid of free-thinking people.

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Even egomaniacal tech billionaires like Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg are publicly debasing themselves with a cringey eagerness to kiss-up to The Donald. Indeed, CEOs in practically every industry – from oil to food – have suddenly converted to MAGA nuttiness. And to prove their devotion, each is loudly pledging to sacrifice all of their corporate programs that advance such core American values as equal rights, workplace fairness, and environmental protection. Parroting Trump’s decree that DEI egalitarianism is “immoral,” the barons piously insist their reversals is a matter of ethics.

Hogwash. Their morality starts and ends with money, and as the Bible points out: “The love of money is the root of all evil.”

Consider the case of Paramount, the multibillion-dollar media giant. Although much of its wealth now comes from diversity programming on its MTV and BET networks, the top brass is bowing to TrumpSpeak, obediently killing Paramount’s diversity policies – and even scrubbing the word “inclusion” from its corporate vocabulary!

Why? M-O-N-E-Y. Paramount is presently pushing a multibillion-dollar merger with another entertainment giant to extend its control over our media market, empowering it to gouge more cash from you and me. But the merger had to be okayed by a federal commission headed by an anti-diversity, Trump political hack – so top executives cravenly heaved Paramount’s principles overboard.

This is Jim Hightower saying… That is now what passes for corporate ethics, with smug honchos abandoning all pretense that they’re guided by any higher morality than the love of money.

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Traditionally, when a president arrives to address Congress, a bipartisan escort committee leads the dignitary to the podium. But, by gollies, Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries showed their toughness by – get this – refusing to have Democrats join the escort committee.

Wow – imagine how that uplifted the millions of people being stomped on by Trump’s rampage!

Is this feeble response better than nothing? Believe it or not – “do nothing” is another “strategy” proposed by former Bill Clinton operative James Carville. He says the “smart” thing for Democrats to do is to roll over and play dead. Seriously. Carville actually declares that fighting Trump is futile, so just “allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight and make the American people miss us.”

Excuse me, but wasn’t that the party’s theory in 2016 and 2024 – let Trump rant, and he’ll defeat himself?

Instead, how about this? Literally get out of Washington. The party’s lawmakers should spend most of their congressional time away from the capital—out where masses of people are already agitating and organizing. Get with them, listen to them, roll up your sleeves, and serve them.

This is Jim Hightower saying, this is not just another legislative tiff we’re in, but a grassroots rumble, and the usual partisan name-calling and parliamentary nitpicking won’t win it. Inside Washington, the deck is stacked for Trump’s Autocratic America. Out here, though, the numbers and political dynamic favor democracy fighters. This is where the Democratic Party belongs.

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And the voices are telling him to do something truly stupid. As he puts it, “There is a lot of talk about the Postal Service being taken private,” adding that “It’s an idea that a lot of people have liked for a long time.”

Hmmm, I haven’t heard even one voice say our phenomenal public mail service should be privatized. Indeed, it is a widely popular government agency because it works for everyone – rich and poor, urban and rural.

When he claims that “a lot of people” like the idea of postal privatization how many? Six? Six million? And what kind of people? Working stiffs, poor people, rural residents… who? He gives a coded answer to that when he refers to the Post Office being “taken” private. Oh? Taken by whom? Of course – by the corrupt profiteering billionaires who funded Trump. Their business plan is to have him hand the agency to them in the name of instituting “corporate efficiency” – meaning the privateers will go to three-day mail delivery, cut-off service to unprofitable poor and rural communities, raise prices, and fire legions of experienced postal workers.

They’re out to steal an essential public treasure, but they’re also trying to censor opposition to their political control of government. The Postal Service was created in 1792 in part to prevent royalists and oligarchs from controlling communications. If you think that’s not a problem in modern America, reflect on the blunt media censorship being imposed right now by Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and other petty potentates of corporate plutocracy.

To learn more, visit the American Postal Workers Union: apwu.org.

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While top Democratic Party lawmakers are hunkered down in their Washington bunker, immobilized by the Trump-Musk oligarchic coup on America’s democracy, the feisty “little-d” democrat from Vermont is out in grassroots America, rallying workaday people with his National Tour to Fight Oligarchy. His effort has even caused the lethargic Democratic establishment to speak out. Against Bernie!

The party’s clueless cadre of insider consultants mocked Sen. Sanders’ for focusing on Trump’s clique of profiteering oligarchs: “Americans don’t understand the word oligarchy,” they clucked.

Excuse me, smart ones, but once again, you’re wrong. The oligarchy has become quite well-known to us commoners, who’ve suffered from their healthcare outrages, voter suppression, anti-union greed, rampant price gouging, etc. To the shock of elites in both parties, Sanders has even taken his “Fight Oligarchy” campaign into red congressional districts, drawing thousands of mad-as-hellers in such Republican states as Iowa and Nebraska.

In a symbolic rejection of Bernie’s on-your-side populist rebellion, Hakeem Jeffries – the Democratic leader in the US House – rushed out to Silicon Valley to hug the billionaire oligarchs of high-tech! Far from confronting the rise of monopoly power, Jeffries assured the Tech Bros that the “Party of the People” is there to serve them.

Meanwhile, Democratic congressional leaders held an internal “gripe-fest” last week. Not griping about Trump’s authoritarian assault – but about their own grassroots constituents inundating them with calls and emails demanding that they grow spines and start fighting the rising oligarchy.

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Start with this month’s catastrophic floods in Appalachia. If you’ve never had a river gushing into your home and town, you can’t imagine the destruction, muck, stench, injuries, death, and despair. Yet, various numbskulls who profess to be progressive have posted taunts online, chortling that these devastated victims are red-state, small-government Trump voters who don’t deserve government’s helping hand in their time of dire need.

Likewise, right-wing MAGA squads, including some GOP congress critters, routinely jeer at wildfire victims in blue states and cities, gloating that hellfire is righteous punishment for “ungodly” people who oppose Trump’s “divine mission.”

Hello—this is not politics, it’s disgraceful inhumanity. And those who engage in it are skuzz, insults to America’s democratic ideals of the Common Good.

Happily though (even as divisive and violent political rhetoric is being spewed by some of our highest officials), the ingrained ethic in practically every community is to rush to the aid of anyone and everyone in times of disaster. I saw this up close when Hurricane Harvey slammed Houston in 2017. Washington officials played politics for weeks as the city was drowning—but hundreds of working people showed up, even from far away states, bringing their small boats and power tools to organize ad hoc rescue teams, not asking anyone their party affiliation.

This is Jim Hightower saying… That’s our truest selves—and it’s why it’s essential to swat down the malignant ethic of anyone who tries to pervert fundamental humanity into their red-blue morass.

This post from No Elegy Needed was part of the inspiration for this commentary, and they’ve shared resources where you can support the people affected by this latest round of climate disasters:

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The Senate’s top Democrat says he’s getting “furious” about the GOP’s oligarchic coup attempt. Wow, he might even fire off one of his strongly worded letters to the White House! So far, though, the Democratic “leader” is meekly urging a horrified public to just weather the storm, predicting that, “Trump will screw up.”

Hello, Chuck—history clearly teaches that to fight totalitarianism, you actually have to… fight.

People are asking: Why the hell is the party’s top leadership AWOL? The good news is grassroots people themselves—the little-d democrats—have taken to the streets, leading the charge to STOP this plutocratic, autocratic power grab. So, “leaders” ought to at least follow! All Democratic national officials (including former presidents Clinton, Obama, and Biden) should literally come out and stand together, demonstrating solidarity with the majority of Americans fighting this far-right, un-American assault by rampaging billionaires.

Most encouraging is the fact that workaday people—in red states as well as blue—are erupting in spontaneous protests and unity actions. Ironically, Don & Elon’s self-serving plutocratic thuggery is rallying workers, veterans, schoolchildren, seniors, immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community, main street businesses… and, well, Americans—against them! The GOP assault on all of us reveals that we commoners really are in this together, and it will take all of us to defend the Common Good for one and all.

This is Jim Hightower saying, to get involved in some of the actions in your area, check out resources we’ve listed below.

There are loads of actions happening around the country, and it’s hard to collate them all! Here are just a few we’ve seen—leave us your recommendations in the comments, too.

* The newly-founded Federal Unionists Network (aka, “FUN,” we love it) had a day of action on February 19th. Follow along with their fight:

https://www.federalunionists.net/

* Stand Up for Science is back and hosting a day of rallies and action on March 7th. Get in on that here:

https://standupforscience2025.org/

* If you’re interested in defending veteran’s services of all kinds, check out Common Defense, who has a Project 2025 fight guide, too: https://commondefense.us/project-2025

* Indivisible has also lit up again—and we like that there are local groups you can join, not just national actions: https://indivisible.org/groups

* We also just found this Bluesky account that’s trying to track What Democrats Are Doing: https://bsky.app/profile/whatdemsaredoing.bsky.social

Oh! And let’s have some fun too—someone hacked into the monitors inside the Housing and Urban Development office yesterday:

And many more! We’ll do our best to keep track of what we’re seeing out there.

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Yes, they concede, AI’s new generation of “thinking robots” will transform many jobs, but – like magic – they’ll also create better career opportunities for “the human element.” Really… like what? Well, like taking care of all those machines! But wait – can’t a robot do that, too?

What’s playing out here is corporate hide-and-seek from the public. Having poured hundreds of billions into developing the technology for their dream of a workerless workforce, CEOs and tech investors are now desperate to deflect workers’ fury over the joblessness that awaits them. Thus, moneyed elites have mounted a soothing PR campaign, asserting that the AI bots will only replace repetitive, drudge jobs, “liberating” those human employees to do higher-value work.

That bubble of lies, however, is already being popped by reality. Many renegade CEOs and profiteers brag that their advanced bots are taking over sophisticated thinking jobs and doing top-level creative tasks. For example, the New York Times reports that Klarna, a multibillion-dollar company, says it’s replacing more than half of its 5,000 employees with new robotics. Its CEO is not coy about the future of work, declaring “AI can already do all of the jobs that we, as humans, do.”

The designers of this Brave New World bluntly say their AI creatures are fast-coming for a wide variety of our jobs – and big investors are betting billions on them. Yet, politicians and the media blithely accept the corporate deception that there is no need to talk about it – much less consider what to do about it.

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Now comes Trumpty Dumpty, asserting that he and his government redefiners are our linguistic masters. For starters, they unilaterally exed out three hallowed words that have historically expressed our people’s proud democratic purpose – diversity, equity, and inclusion.

This month, investigative journalist Judd Legum uncovered dozens of words that partisan Trump functionaries are perverting and purging in a bizarre authoritarian frenzy. Legum even found that NSA, a non-partisan security agency, has now banned its staff from using 27 common words, including “bias” and “injustice.” It’s as though Trump’s word police think censoring language will hide the ugly realities the words express.

In fact, the control of language is central to the entrenchment of totalitarian regimes, as George Orwell laid out in his bleak novel, 1984. He wrote about “Newspeak,” “doublethink,” and other linguistic twists as mass propaganda tools that eliminated inconvenient ideas and provided new “truth” for the party faithful to spread. Such manipulation, Orwell says, creates “loyal willingness to say black is white.” Thus, we see the spectacle of Trump blindly signing an executive order titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship” – even as he blatantly censors speech and stomps on our freedoms.

So come on – speak up against such thuggish Orwellian tyranny! For information, go to National Coalition Against Censorship: NCAC.org

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As the Trump administration attempts to erase Black history all over the country, we wanted to share this video from a 2022 interview with Hightower, where he talks about why he endorsed Jesse Jackson in 1988. At that time, Hightower and a certain mayor of Burlington, VT that you might have heard of were two of the only prominent white Democrats to, as …

Huh? What would cause any town or city to run short of this essential piece of its community infrastructure? Answer: old-fashioned greed, coming from a modern-day monopolistic construct called “private equity.”

Essentially, this is a fast-money Wall Street scheme, encouraging very wealthy investors to buy up established businesses and either plunder their assets or consolidate several of them into a monopoly. It has targeted everything from healthcare to newspapers… and now, your local fire department.

Until recently, making and selling fire trucks was a competitive business, with family-owned manufacturers operating in every region of America. However (as detailed by BIG, a unique newsletter investigating monopolies) about a decade ago a private equity outfit began an industry “roll up,” consolidating independent truck companies into a national conglomerate named REV Group. It now controls nearly half of US fire truck sales.

What REV mainly revved up was its profits by doubling the sticker price for trucks to more than a million dollars each. Worse, REV increased delivery time for a local department’s order from about a year to as a long as four years, meaning old trucks break down and can’t respond to catastrophes. For example, the Los Angeles fire chief reports that in this month’s horrific wildfires, more than 100 of the city’s 183 fire trucks were out of service!

Fires are inevitable. Letting a handful of private equity speculators profit from fires is not. National and state antitrust laws already prohibit such greedheaded monopolization. So, here’s an idea: Enforce those laws! Learn more at the American Antitrust Institute: AntitrustInstitute.org.

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That’s what today’s grassroots Democratic Party activists are saying to their aloof campaign generals, who stay ensconced in Washington, refusing to deploy their ground troops in the field of battle.

The great strength of the Democratic Party is its army of volunteer door-knockers across the country who have the local knowledge, connections, and lingo to relate to local voters. Yet, in the past 30 years, fat-cat donors and high-dollar consultants have taken over the “People’s Party” and abandoned high-touch organizing for high-tech “digital outreach.”

Thus, the Democrats’ passionate army of local campaigners is unused, only called on by emails to send more donations to fund Beltway consultants and negative political ads. As a friend of mine recently said in exasperation: “I wish the Democratic Party would stop asking for money and start asking me for ACTION.”

Well, change is coming, for the grassroots Democratic army has been taking charge in many areas and mobilizing itself! And in a huge advance, the Party’s new National Chair and its new chair of State Democratic Committees were both elected this month on a bold program to move the Party’s focus back to year-round, grassroots activism. After all, voters aren’t mere consumers of politics, they should be valued as the whole purpose of politics and its primary producers.

To get involved with this grassroots rebellion, and to hold the leadership accountable to their word, sign up with your local or state Democratic Party committees— a list of state parties’ websites can be found here.

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Years ago, laissez-faire ideologue Ayn Rand hailed them as society’s supermen, comparing them to Atlas, the mythological Greek god who “holds the world on his shoulders.”

But look, here comes one of her modern-day gods now – Timothy Wentworth! He stands astride Walgreens, the multibillion-dollar drug store conglomerate. Last month, Wentworth demonstrated his corporate prowess by offering a stunning insight. He noted that, with shoplifting on the rise, chains like his had reacted by moving much of their merchandise into locked display cases. But the ever-alert Big Boss has now deduced that this impacts sales, “because when you lock things up, for example, you don’t sell as many of them.” Wow… pure genius!

Did I mention that Walgreens pays Timothy $13 million a year? Or, that his monopolistic chain is closing some 1,200 of its “less-profitable” stores, which will leave entire communities with no pharmacies to meet their crucial needs?

My point is not to disparage one silly corporate boss, but simply to say: Hey, why are the so-called “leaders” of both of our political parties kowtowing to the painful ignorance, arrogance, and avarice of the most self-serving group of egos in the world: Billionaires! Look at them – Elon Musk is a jabbering jerk, Mark Zuckerberg is a pathetic whiner, and Jeff Bezos cluelessly floats around on a garish yacht he financed by underpaying and mistreating his workers.

These are our giants? What about schoolteachers, family farmers, mechanics, cooks – and other everyday people who really make things work? America needs to start listening to them… and reinvesting in their genuine genius.

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Diversity, Equity, Inclusion. Guilty on all counts! But it’s not my fault. From childhood, I was fed a steady diet of that kind of all-in-this-together thinking by my parents, teachers, and ministers. So next thing you know, I was doing DEI on my own. Then, when I was elected to be Texas Agriculture Commissioner, I shamelessly promoted all three as agency goals (particularly for women and minorities who had long been excluded).

But I now see that such egalitarian concepts are out of step with the moral precepts of Trumpocracy. Thus, I’m an outlaw. You might be, too, for the MAGA minority now ruling in Washington is thuggishly expunging DEI values from our schools, corporations, libraries, churches, etc. You have two choices, they bark: Comply… or be forced to comply.

Sure enough, even corporate powerhouses like Amazon, Disney, Facebook, Target, and Walmart are sucking up to the new regime by cravenly surrendering DEI principles and promises without a fight. Well, they whine, we have no choice.

But wait—this is America! The choice has always been clear: Don’t just comply, defy! Even corporations can stand for the people’s democratic principles, as Costco recently did. The popular retailer was assailed by a right-wing group demanding that shareholders terminate its DEI efforts. But Costco executives didn’t cower, and guess what? Ninety-eight percent of Costco’s shareholders stood with them, emphatically endorsing diversity, equity, and inclusion as core American values.

This is Jim Hightower saying… 98 percent! That, Mr. Trump, is a real mandate.

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They might, however, want to ponder a cartoon I recently saw. It pictured one of these pious flimflammers demanding entry to heaven, bragging that he had been God’s personal messenger on Earth. “Really,” said God, “You don’t look at all like Dolly Parton.”

But now – GreatGodAlmighty! – here comes a gaggle of these lordly pretenders proclaiming that Yahweh has ordained their narrow religious sect to be America’s governmental rulers. This month, a flock of these “chosen ones” descended on the Texas state capitol, announcing that God has instructed them to transform our government into an authoritarian arm of their own fundamentalist churches. “We take charge and authority of [this] legislative session,” one of their leaders declared, informing the rest of us that his cult has “been given spiritual jurisdiction over the affairs of men.”

Unfortunately, this is not just another case of Crazy Texas. The extremist Christian nationalist show at the Texas Capitol was fully-embraced and coordinated by the extremist Republican governor, attorney general, legislative leaders, and state party hierarchy. More pointedly, it’s all part of a messianic crusade by two Bible-thumping, West Texas oil billionaires, Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks. This plutocratic/theocratic duo is pumping unlimited sums of crude political cash into the GOP to “Christianize” elections and all public policies.

So don’t laugh – pay attention. This right-wing, religious, anti-democratic power play is unfolding all across America. Ludicrous as it seems, they’re out to crucify our freedoms and force their state-run theology on everyone– all in the name of Jesus.

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Yet, 238 years later, watching Trump’s inaugural week, it was both awful and comical to see the royal pretentions of King Donald. There were silly gestures, like him waving around a ceremonial sword (made more ludicrous by the fact he was a cowardly rich-boy draft dodger). Plus, the staged spectacle of him imperiously signing stacks of orders, proclamations, and pardons in a show of “Kingliness.”

Petty pomposity aside, though, he is an untethered megalomaniac whose inaugural speech re-asserted such monarchial concepts as “the divine right of kings” and “manifest destiny.” And let us not naively dismiss Trump’s flat-out claim that the Constitution gives him “the right to do whatever I want as president,” or that he previously suggested “termination” of the Constitution to return him to the White House.

Indeed, he now contends that he can unilaterally terminate a bedrock Constitutional right: The 14th Amendment provision guaranteeing citizenship to everyone born in the USA. He has royally and unconstitutionally decreed that children born here whose parents were undocumented immigrants are not citizens, but “aliens.”

This is Jim Hightower saying… Well, at least there’s the 22nd Amendment, which makes clear that he can’t be president again, right? Uh… maybe. Trump is already suggesting his royal court might find a way to keep him in power, just as they’re now contriving to void the clear citizenship protection of the 14th Amendment. Despots don’t obey Constitutions – they pervert them. And We the People must reject the perverters.

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For forty years, this fiery, fourth-generation fisherwoman from the Texas Gulf Coast has battled tenaciously for the rights and very survival of the area’s hardscrabble fishing families. She and her grassroots allies have taken on Formosa Plastics, a $250 billion, global corporate beast that has routinely dumped its chemical waste around Matagorda Bay, poisoning life and livelihoods.

But in 2019, in a lawsuit based on massive evidence collected by Wilson and her armada of volunteer kayakers, she won a stunning court victory, forcing the contaminator to pay $50 million for its malfeasance.

Wilson’s fight was not just for her, and she did not get a penny from the Formosa settlement. But she won something richer than money – “It felt like justice,” she said of the court’s judgement.

Importantly, the court didn’t award the $50 million to some regulatory agency, but to a public trust administered by – guess who? – Wilson’s allies! So she has been working tenaciously ever since to make sure the money directly benefits the poor families Formosa ran over. Especially promising is the trust’s major grant to create the people’s own Matagorda Bay Fishing Cooperative. It will provide dock space, supply contracts, processing ability, local jobs… and the power for local people to forge their own future.

Why fight against overpowering odds for 40 years? Because of her strong principles… and sheer stubbornness. “It’s my home,” Wilson says of the bay and its working-class community, “and I completely refuse to give it to that company to ruin.”

Learn more about Diane and support her work:

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Sad to say, the “Party of the People” is mired in Washington, controlled by a cadre of high-dollar consultants, corporate lobbyists, big donors, and meek political leaders who’ve decide that “red” and rural American voters are lost causes. But grassroots progressives who live in those areas say: Bovine excrement! After all, you damn sure can’t win if you don’t bother to show up.

So, party inertia aside, progressive advocates for working class values, policies, and people must become the ground-level organizers to build a “little-d” democratic majority. Not by writing position papers, but by “going there” in-person, online, or otherwise. Let’s tap grassroots savvy to find ways to reach and move millions of people (just a few at a time) who’re now not being reached or motivated.

Who will do this? Maybe you! Or someone you know: People (young or old) with talent-skills-ideas that are now not being fully used should consider this chance to make a difference. George Goehl, one of our nation’s best organizers of community organizers recently issued an Open Call for creative dedicated people to do new working-class organizing all across our country.

Don’t know how? It basically involves learning to listen to local people. Goehl, with his team of seasoned organizers, will train and provide essential support for people whose organizing ideas are accepted. Happily, project positions come with a full-time salary, benefits, and a start-up budget. The whole idea is to try new things, invest in what works… and win!

Want to throw you hat and ideas into the mix? No charge to apply. You can fill out an application at georgegoehl.substack.com.

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Except, of course, when the corporate honchos profiting from cheap immigrant labor are billionaire funders of Trump’s campaigns – or, hello, when Trump himself is doing the hiring!

A work-permit program called H-1B actually allows corporate giants to import foreigners to take US jobs. Trump loudly denounced this in his first term, but that was pre-Elon. When gabillionaire Elon Musk became Donald’s campaign Sugar Daddy last year, he turned out to be a mass abuser of the H-1B loophole – apparently even firing workers in his Tesla corporation and replacing them with cheaper foreign imports.

Yet, far from scolding his new Best Buddy, Trump did a full-body flip-flop. Now hailing H-1B as “a great program,” he admits that he, too, has long used it, even when he was denouncing it as a shameful rip-off of American workers.

Trump’s use of the foreign hire scheme is even chintzier than Musk’s for he uses a companion H-2 loophole to import hundreds of low-paid foreigners to take jobs as cooks, waiters, housekeepers, and farmworkers in his luxury resorts and hotels – including at Mar-a-Lago.

Amazing. These are lordly billionaires reducing themselves to sleaze by exploiting a corporate scheme to shortchange American and foreign workers alike. Moreover, whether trying to import engineers or waiters, the law requires these über-rich applicants to lie. They must swear that there are no American citizens available who can do these jobs.

This is Jim Hightower saying… Welcome to Don and Elon’s phantasmagoric wonderland, where nothing is a lie if they say it’s true.

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Why cancel her drawing? Because it lampooned Jeff Bezos, the multibillionaire boss of Amazon – who also happens to own The Post. The cartoon depicts Bezos and other media titans (even Mickey Mouse!) groveling at the feet of Donald Trump and offering sacks of cash. She was mocking Bezos and the others for recently sucking up to The Don by giving a million dollars each in celebration of his election.

Top Post executives not only abandoned the paper’s journalistic integrity by censoring its prized cartoonist, but they then tried to cover-up their suppression by calling it a technicality. “We had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon,” weaseled a top manager, claiming he cut Telnaes’s drawing merely to avoid “repetition.”

But hello, read any paper, watch Fox News, listen to talk radio – and you’ll see that mass media relies on repetition. Moreover, cartoonists don’t merely repeat a story, they add journalistic impact by literally drawing a picture of it!

Ann Telnaes resigned on principle over this affront. Imagine Billionaire Bezos acting on any principle (besides advancing his financial principal). Yet, solely because he’s rich, he can compel a paper once renown for political courage to conform to the current plutocratic order. That’s how journalism dies. Democracy, too.

This is Jim Hightower saying… Yet, genuine journalism and democracy itself remain resilient, specifically because scrappy champions like Ann Telnaes – armed with integrity and a sharp pen – don’t quit. She’s still cartooning. Find her at anntelnaes.substack.com.

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This process is essentially what millions of American working families are going through this year as record numbers of them are shocking bosses, politicians, and economists by stepping back and declaring: “We quit!” Most of the quits are tied to very real abuses that have become ingrained in our workplaces over the past couple of decades – poverty paychecks, no health care, unpredictable schedules, no child care, understaffing, forced overtime, unsafe jobs, sexist and racist managers, tolerance of aggressively-rude customers, and so awful much more.

Specific grievances abound, but at the core of each is a deep, inherently-destructive executive-suite malignancy: Disrespect. The corporate system has cheapened employees from valuable human assets worthy of being nurtured and advanced to a bookkeeping expense that must be steadily eliminated. It’s not just about paychecks, it’s about feeling valued, feeling that the hierarchy gives a damn about the people doing the work.

Yet, corporate America is going out of its way to show that it doesn’t care – and, of course, workers notice. So, unionization is booming, millions who were laid off by the pandemic are refusing to rush back to the same old grind, and now millions who have jobs are quitting. This is much more than an unusual unemployment stat – it’s a sea change in people’s attitude about work itself… and life.

Bonus: one of our favorite memes from the last few years. More info from Snopes.

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You chose last month to grab the global political spotlight once more to make a statement with the only Earthly move you had left: Checking out. What better way to make people ponder the state of political integrity in America than to reflect on Carter just the Trump Kakistocracy is moving its arrogant billionaires, corporate grifters, and ideological tyrants into our White House.

Sure enough, media coverage of Carter’s death highlighted his modest life in Plains, Georgia, plus the personal values of fairness and honesty that led him to a lifetime of roll-up-your-sleeves humanitarian efforts. What a damning contrast to the tawdry greedfest on display at Mar-a-Lago, with supposedly-respectable corporate executives flocking to “get theirs” in Trump’s sell-off of government favors and public offices.

And how amazed Carter must have been to see the gilded Trumpers flagrantly rejecting any pretense that theirs is to be a government of and for The People. He even saw Elon Musk – the prancing prince of plutocratic pomosity – practically move into Trump’s Florida mansion to shape the new government. To put a gloss of legitimacy on Elon’s self-serving role, Trump grandly named him head of an imaginary federal office he calls the “Department of Government Efficiency.” This DOGE should be pronounced “dodgy,” for it doesn’t actually exist and has no authority. But Musk is nonetheless flitting about officiously announcing that he will eliminate major programs that benefit people, while increasing government funding for – surprise! – corporations like his.

Even in death, the light of Jimmy Carter’s public integrity exposes the public corruption coming from Trump’s darkness.

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I drafted one for the GOP’s whole ultra-rightist gaggle of lawmakers who keep blocking passage of health coverage for poor people. “Resolved: We will forego the gold-plated socialized health care we now take from taxpayers, because it’s only right that we be in the same leaky boat as our constituents.”

Then there are America’s 735 narcissistic billionaires who obviously need to find a moral compass. They’re so self-absorbed they keep wasting their money and “genius” on phantasmagoric plutocratic schemes to separate their fortunes from the well-being of the rest of us. Then they wonder why they are not beloved. So, rich ones, let me help. Resolve in 2025 to demonstrate a little less hubris/a little more humanity, less strut/more sharing. Practice in front of a mirror – try seeing beyond you to the Common Good. It’s a beautiful and deeply rewarding place if you can find it.

And I didn’t overlook you Washington operatives and Big Money donors of the Democratic Party. Please resolve to camp out in grassroots America this year – where everyday little-d democrats want and need your attention and support. Not just in safe Blue districts, but especially in rural, purple, and even in red areas. You’ve abandoned them in recent years, but they still yearn to build a progressive governing majority for America’s future.

Of course, the problem with New Year’s resolutions is keeping them, and my honorees can’t be counted on. So, we have to keep pushing them to do what’s right.

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Hello, numbskulls! From 1776 forward, being wide awake to oppressors and exploiters is literally what made America… and continues to advance it. Our diversity, our national striving for equity, and our persistent struggle to include all in our historic democratic experiment are three core pillars that sustain the USA. My workaday father expressed this unifying reality to me in these profound words: “Everybody does better, when everybody does better.”

But a group of self-proclaimed “Anti-Woke” crusaders has surged from the fringes of autocratic, xenophobic, racists politics, demanding that schools, corporations, churches, and families shut our eyes, ears, and minds to our own DEI values.

All this would be a depressing end to this political year, EXCEPT that people across the country are rebelling, openly scoffing at the “Don’t Be Woke” hokum. Even the petty autocrats governing states like Florida and Texas can’t stop local school officials from looping around official “bans” against teaching the obvious virtues of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Also, while a few corporations have bowed to the right-wing drumbeat, nearly all have continued their DEI programs this year… or even increased them. Why? Because the programs make sense, their workers and shareholders support DEI values, and not all CEOs are suck-ups to right-wing goofiness.

So let us not head into 2025 with political fear, but with a recommitment to the persuasive power of democratic ideals.

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Yes, we are a country of rugged individualists, yet there's also a deep, community-minded streak in each of us. We're a people who believe in the notion that we're all in this together, that we can make our individual lives better by contributing to the common good.

The establishment media pay little attention to grassroots generosity, focusing instead on the occasional showy donation by what it calls "philanthropists" -- big tycoons who give a little piece of their billions to some university or museum in exchange for getting a building named after them. But in my mind, the real philanthropists are the millions of you ordinary folks who have precious little money to give, but consistently give of themselves, and do it without demanding that their name be engraved on a granite wall.

My own Daddy, rest his soul, was a fine example of this. With half a dozen other guys in Denison, Texas, he started the Little League baseball program volunteering to build the park, sponsor and coach the teams, run the squawking P.A. system, etc. etc. Even after I graduated from Little League, Daddy stayed working at it, because his involvement was not merely for his kids . . . but for all. He felt the same way about being taxed to build a public library in town. I don't recall him ever going in that building, much less checking-out a book, but he wanted it to be there for the community and he was happy to pay his part. Not that he was a do-good liberal, for God's sake -- indeed, he called himself a conservative.

My Daddy didn't even know he had a political philosophy, but he did, and it's the best I've ever heard. He would often say to me, "Everybody does better when everybody does better." If only our leaders in Washington and on Wall Street would begin practicing this true American Philosophy.

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These starry-eyed worshippers are not religious seekers, but überrich CEOs of Wall Street banks and corporate giants. Abandoning any shred of principle and self-respect, they rushed to Florida this month on their private jets to suck-up to The Donald, crassly trying to cash-in on the plutocratic rule of his incoming Trump Taliban.

Especially embarrassing is the sight of avaricious high tech titans seeking favors. These self-proclaimed paragons of “laissez-faire” economics are largely funded by us taxpayers, and they’re now trying to get more government giveaways the old-fashioned way: Bribery. Such billionaire tech elites as Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, have greased their appeals by paying a million dollars each to Trump’s coronation committee – just to get a meeting with him!

Interestingly, both Bezos and Zuckerberg had previously condemned Trump’s flagrant xenophobia, racism, and misogyny. But now, their repulsion has turned to adulation. After all, billionaires don’t let ethical principle get in the way of their financial principal.

Do you have a million dollars to buy a meeting with His Lordship? What are today’s young people to make of greedheaded creeps like Bezos and Zuckerberg, who insist that not only can they openly buy government favors… but mock our people’s democratic ideals? Young people are right: The system is corrupt. Trump aside, our Number One political goal must be to ban corporate money from politics.

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Of course, many providers deliver honest, truly-caring service (especially non-profit and publicly-owned community centers). But as a whole, this essential service has fallen into the clutches of money-hustling corporate chains and Wall Street speculators. Their goal is not to maximize grandma’s care, but to minimalize her cost to faraway rich shareholders.

Their most common profiteering ploy is to understaff their facilities, leaving vulnerable residents unattended… and often, dead. Federal law, though, lets corporate owners define “sufficient” staff levels, which is why so many are grossly-insufficient. One profit-padding tactic is called “tunneling” – the chain sets up a dummy staffing agency to provide employees for the chain’s nursing homes. That agency then charges greatly inflated to provide employees. But the chain doesn’t complain, since it owns the agency… and since unknowing customers end up paying the jacked-up tab.

President Biden has proposed new rules to stop the gouging and improve care, including a requirement that each “nursing” home actually keep at least one nurse on staff. One! But, oh the squeals by billionaire owners! “Cost prohibitive” they howl! So, instead of hiring nurses, they’re hiring high-dollar lobbyists and lawyers to kill this little bit of health care fairness for people who’re near the end of life.

These multimillionaire executives and billionaire investors are not only gouging families, but profiteering on the health of people’s loved ones. In case they care, that is why the public despises them.

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Consider the old robber barons. They weren’t brilliant investors or managers, but ruthless exploiters of government giveaways and bribers of officials who permitted their monopolistic thievery.

Likewise, today’s monopoly players have captured local, state, and national markets – not through honest competition, but by getting public officials to subsidize their expansion and to rig the rules against small competitors. Monopolizers buy this favoritism with the legalized bribes of campaign donations they lavish on compliant lawmakers.

Investigative digger Stacy Mitchell recently documented how this corrupt political favoritism has allowed massive retail chains like Walmart, Kroger, and Dollar Store to crush thousands of local grocers. This has left millions of Americans living in “food deserts” – poor and rural communities with no food store.

What happened? As grocery chains spread from local to regional to national, they demanded that food manufacturers give them big discounts, giving them a dramatic monopoly pricing advantage over independent rivals. So, hometown grocers began hemorrhaging customers... and going broke.

This raw, anti-competitive, price discrimination was a flagrant violation of America’s anti-monopoly law – but here came Big Money to protect the monopolists. In 1980, as Ronald Reagan was railing against “silly” consumer protection laws, supermarket lobbyists poured campaign cash into top officials of both parties. What they bought was bipartisan agreement to simply stop enforcing the “fusty” old antitrust law that had protected a competitive grocery economy for nearly 50 years.

But good news! That useful, highly-effective law is still on the books, so let’s build a long-term grassroots campaign to rejuvenate it and re-outlaw monopolization, redlining, and price gouging by food giants. For more information, go to Institute for Local Self Reliance: ilsr.org.

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Easier sung than done. Plastic is now ubiquitous in toys, electronics, tools, air, water… and us. And don’t forget the plastic Baby Jesus in Christmas tableaus.

What is plastic, anyway? It’s a toxic synthetic material mostly manufactured from petroleum by such giants as ExxonMobil, the globe’s top purveyor. So much is produced by these profiteers that plastic trash is now a planetary disaster.

But not to worry, for Big Oil’s lobbyists assure us gabillions of plastic bags, bottles, and such are being recycled, keeping them out of our landfills, water, bodies, etc. Swell! Except… they’re lying.

After all, Exxon is the same for-profit contaminator that lied for years that fossil fuels were not causing climate change, even though top executives knew they were. Their ethic of deceit continues today – Big Oil knows that 94 percent of US plastics are not recycled. Indeed, they can’t be.

Faced with growing public alarm about the ever-growing glut of plastic pollution, the industry has doubled down on deceit by offering a snappy new PR slogan: “Advanced Recycling.” They say it’s a magical process dubbed “pyrolysis.” Only… it doesn’t work, it’s inordinately expensive, and it increases climate change emissions. Still, Exxon exclaims its AR will soon be processing half a million tons of plastic waste! But that’s not even a drop in the plastic bucket, for more than 400 million tons of plastic waste is discarded each year –and the oil industry is planning to double plastic production by 2040.

The only real way to stop runaway plastic pollution of us and our planet is to use less plastic. To learn more and help, go to Beyond Plastics: BeyondPlastics.org.

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For example, he once refused to back a bill pushed by loan-shark lobbyists – but, he pledged that it if the legislature passed the thing, he would sign it. Well, the bill did pass… but Bruce vetoed it! The lobbyists swarmed him, crying that he had given his promise. Yes, the governor conceded, but “we all know that a promise is not a commitment.”

Apparently, Coca-Cola executives have been studying Gov. King’s verbal backflip, for the multibillion-dollar corporate behemoth suddenly announced this month that it was adopting his “a-promise-is-not-a-commitment” ploy. The beverage barons are using King’s dictum to squirm out of the widely-ballyhooed promise they made just a few years ago to curtail the corporation’s contamination of our planet with plastic waste.

Coke has been the world’s #1 plastic polluter six years in a row, so its previous pledge to cut its plastic trash in half by 2030 would’ve had a major impact. But, oops, the honchos now say that was never a commitment – just a “voluntary environmental goal.” That goal, they explain, has “evolved,” so now they’re focused on imposing “efficient resource allocation to deliver lasting positive impact.”

You don’t need a BS detector to translate that corporate gobbledygook. Coke’s “resource allocation” will defund its environmental efforts to further enrich its wealthiest shareholders, delivering a “lasting positive impact” for those few. And for the many who will continue absorbing the deadly petro-polymers that Coca-Cola carelessly discharges into our air, water, soil, food, and bodies – well, tough luck.

Don’t be fooled by voluntary anti-pollution requirements. I promise you, they are hoaxes.

Do something!

Sick of the plastic lies and pollution? Check out Break Free from Plastic, who are working with more than 13,000 organizations and people worldwide to end the scourge once and for all.

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The good news is that many companies, big and small, in the food economy are blazing a different path through Wall Street’s jungle of greed, demonstrating that money and morality can be compatible. Texas supermarket chain HEB, for example, has drawn an intensely loyal customer base by (1) investing in good wages and benefits for employees, (2) showing up in such emergencies as pandemics, hurricanes, freezes, etc. to give essential supplies and hands-on help, and (3) being an involved and supportive neighbor to the hundreds of unique communities it serves.

Also, Maine Grains is “relocalizing” the business of milling grain by working with local farmers who’d been abandoned by global grain marketers like Ardent and Gold Medal. They’re producing nutrient-rich flours from heritage grains, boosting the local economy in the process. Then there’s Bob’s Red Mill, which also artfully mills its products from diverse, natural grains–and it’s 100% employee-owned.

These are part of a rising business alternative to the selfish, profiteering ethic of Fortune 500 titans. Called certified B Corporations, they definitely exist to make a profit, but they are equally focused on having a positive social impact, prioritizing fair wages, environmental protections, and healthy communities as core elements of their missions, even making those goals legal requirements of their corporate charter.

Ben & Jerry’s, Amy’s Kitchen, King Arthur Baking, and New Belgium Brewery are just a few more of some 3,800 other businesses now organized as B Corps. Though not pretending to be perfect, they’re at least striving to be more than money grubbers, instead trying to contribute to the Common Good. For more information on the products and practices of B Corps, go to BCorporation.net.

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Perhaps the most stunned, though, are many Trumpers who had cheered his anti-immigrant, send-em-back-where-they-came-from tirades. They assumed he only meant the murderers, rapists, and cat-eaters he frantically warned about – not their own son’s wonderful Honduran wife; not the beloved family running the popular Mexican café in town; and surely not their hardworking landscaping crew! Just the “bad” migrants, right?

Wrong. Trump says he’ll declare a national emergency, ordering America’s military to conduct a mass round-up and deportation operation, including police agencies making workplace raids and neighborhood sweeps. They even expect they’ll make “collateral arrests” of US citizens. Surely, you might think, such indiscriminate, unAmerican, mass incarceration can’t really happen here! But Trump is already putting thuggish right-wing enforcers in place to make it happen.

Moreover, a network of Trump’s big corporate funders is gleefully rushing to cash-in on this new capture-and-jail industry. Meet GEO Group, for example, a multibillion-dollar private penitentiary conglomerate that has been a profiteering house of horrors for inmates and workers across the country. But its top executives were huge donors to Trump’s ascension, and they now tell Wall Street investors they expect to gain $400 million a year in new business incarcerating Trump’s immigration suspects.

There’s a name for a government based on xenophobia, demagoguery, and greed: “Kakistocracy” – government by the worst persons in society.

Do something!

Looking for organizations who are already working on the coming immigration fights? We love these, for starters:

* United We Dream

* Mijente

* RAICES

Also: look for local immigration organizing groups in your area—often these are the groups on the front lines of doing ICE raid defense, legal support and more. (For example, DRUM in NYC or Voces de la Frontera in Wisconsin.)

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Let’s talk Turkey!

No, not the Butterballs in Congress. I’m talking about the real thing, the big gobbler – 46 million of which we Americans will devour this Thanksgiving.

It was the Aztecs who first domesticated the gallopavo, but the invading Spanish conquerors “fouled-up” the bird’s origins. They declared it to be related to the peacock – Wrong! They also thought the peacock originated in Turkey – Wrong! And, they thought Turkey was located in Africa – well, you can see the Spanish were pretty confused.

Actually, even the origin of Thanksgiving Day in the US is confused. The popular assumption is that it was first celebrated by the Mayflower immigrants and the Wampanoag natives at Plymouth, Massachusetts, 1621. They feasted on venison, furkees (Wampanoag for gobblers), eels, mussels, corn, and beer. But wait, say Virginians, the first Thanksgiving Food-a-Palooza was not in Massachusetts – the feast originated down here in Jamestown colony, back in 1608.

Whoa there, pilgrims! Folks in El Paso, Texas, say it all began way out there in 1598, when Spanish settlers sat down with people of the Piro and Manso tribes, to give thanks, feasting on roasted duck, geese and fish.

“Ha!” says a Florida group, asserting the very, very first Thanksgiving happened in 1565 when the Spanish settlers of St. Augustine and friends from the Timucuan tribe chowed-down on “cocido” – a stew of salt pork, garbanzo beans and garlic – washing it all down with red wine.

Wherever it began, and whatever the purists claim is “official,” Thanksgiving today is as multicultural as America. So, let’s enjoy! Kick-back, give thanks we’re in a country with such ethnic richness, and dive into your turkey rellenos, moo-shu turkey, turkey falafel, barbecued turkey… and so on.

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Convenient, huh? This is what Trump & Company mean by saying they’ll make government “efficient.” Instead of corporate powers having to lobby regulators to get special favors, corporate officials will become the regulators. That is so much smoother for Lutnick and his ilk, who look forward to four free-wheeling years of devouring our economy.

In choosing those who are to police corporate price gouging, workplace rules, bank rip-offs, and such, Lutnick has been calling Wall Streeters, Silicon Valley tech bosses, corporate giants, and billionaires, telling them to send their best operatives to Trump’s regime. “Let’s get them into government,” he exults! Notice that he’s not calling any union leaders, consumer protectors, or other real public interest watchdogs.

By the way, Lutnick himself is in line to profit from the corporate feeding frenzy he’s now staffing. He is invested in everything from health care profiteers to cryptocurrency flimflams, and while he’s been doing Trump’s work, he’s simultaneously been pushing Congress to do favors for his personal holdings. But he insists that there is no conflict of interest in his efforts. After all, he says with a straight-face, he holds his government policy meetings in separate rooms from his own business pleadings.

This is Jim Hightower saying… And that paper-thin wall of separation is Trump’s new ethical standard for protecting us from raw corporate greed.

PS—We know that our regular Do Something boxes, where we shout out activists and organizations that are working on the issues discussed in the post, are very popular, and will be especially critical for battling Trump. We’re working with a number of groups to get you the most effective actions out there, and we’ll be sharing as many as we find as they come in. Don’t hesitate to recommend your own to us in the comments, too!

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Candidate Trump had loudly proclaimed that he would force US corporations to move their Chinese manufacturing jobs back to America. How? By imposing a whopping new tariff on all of the made-in-China products they sell to us.

Even he must have been surprised, though, when one major American corporation promptly shouted “Yes, sir!” Only one day after Trump’s election, the Steve Madden shoe manufacturer announced it would leave China, where nearly all of its footwear is made. Amazing – a victory for Trump policy even before he takes office! And a morale boost for American workers.

So, where would Madden relocate? Maybe in the hard-hit industrial Midwest, or maybe such former shoe-making areas as New England and the Southeast. But no. In a less-pleasant surprise to Trump, Madden executives said they would not replant their factories in the USA – but in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Brazil.

Despite appearing to succumb to Trump’s anti-China tariff, Madden is making an end run around it, “leaving China” by taking China with it. The corporate trick here is the structural reality not only are US factories located in China, but so are the suppliers of materials manufacturers must buy to make their products. So, Madden can scoot down to Vietnam, thus escaping Trump’s China tariff. But the shoe’s components, from laces to soles, will still be Chinese-made. And contrary to Trump’s bragging, his policy will not create a single Made-in-America job.

This is Jim Hightower saying… Let’s remember that corporations are the most aggressively-selfish elites in our society, and we should not be duped into thinking that running job-creation policy through them will benefit anyone but them.

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Why can’t the Democratic Party grasp this basic reality when it comes to producing votes? This year was going to be different. Pressed by progressive rural activists, national party leaders agreed to open a network of get-out-the-vote offices in rural areas of battleground states. SPOILER ALERT: Kamala Harris won fewer votes there than Biden harvested four years earlier.

What happened? Very little. And too late. Opening a campaign office is hardly the same as being there for the long haul, building trust and nurturing local support. Harris was behind from the start, though, since Joe Biden’s Democratic Party operation had not bothered to hire any rural staffers or even prepare an agenda. Apparently, their idea of a good rural program was Hee-Haw.

The Harris campaign did put out a plan, but in September – just two months before the vote! Also, they had too many “rural strategists” and too few ground-level organizers at campaign headquarters. Those organizers did their best, but were mostly disregarded by campaign consultants. For example, a good list of rural surrogates was recruited, but never used. Worse, Harris herself was absent – she was never scheduled to visit a farm, or even pay a culturally-symbolic visit to a state fair.

This is Jim Hightower saying… The Democrats’ real problem is not any one campaign, but more than a decade of policy and political abandonment of rural communities. Do the “smart” political honchos in Washington think that people out here don’t notice the party’s absence and disregard for them? Again, any farmer knows you can’t harvest a crop if you don’t plant one and cultivate it.

Do something!

Want to get in on rural grassroots politics that are effective and meaningful? Go check out our friends at RuralOrganizing.org!

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But don’t get your hopes up looking into barrels labeled “private equity investors.” These esoteric, multibillion-dollar Wall Street schemes rig the marketplace so “high-net-worth individuals” can grab fat profits and special tax breaks to buy up doctors’ offices, hometown newspapers, child care centers, etc.

Consider America’s humble-but-beneficial mobile home parks. Homeownership has become so pricey that these affordable manufactured units now make up 10 percent of all single-family home sales. But while the buyers own the houses, they must rent lots from mobile park owners. This has generally been a square deal, when park owners live among the renters, providing decent services at reasonable rates. One such is Linnhaven Center with some 300 mobile home residents in Brunswick, Maine.

But what is home to millions of people has become a quick-buck target for Wall Street’s equity profiteers. Waving cash at longtime trailer park owners, they’ve been snatching up thousands of these lots. Without warning, people’s home places are literally being bought out from under them. The absentee predators then raise rents to drive out residents, clearing the spaces for high-dollar renters or buyers.

But wait, good news for a change! A new law in Maine gives mobile home residents a chance to buy their park, and community cooperatives exist to help arrange financing. That’s what the modest-income people of Linnhaven have now done. Such a big leap is not easy, but give people a fair chance, and they can make it work. As one Linnhaven woman put it, the community effort was much more than a property deal: “[It felt like] a chance to control your own destiny.”

Do something!

Interested in learning more about how mobile home owners can organize together? Check out Resident Owned Communities at rocusa.org.

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Indeed, the data shows impressive job growth, rising wages, slowing inflation, etc.  – all indicators of a solid economy. Nearly every pundit hailed this as meaning Harris’s campaign could glide on rising prosperity, while focusing her main message on what a dangerous bumbling buffoon Trump is.

The problem is that “objective economic data” often deceives. For example, consider economist John Kenneth Galbraith’s sad tale of the six-foot-tall statistician who drowned crossing a stream with an average depth of two feet.

Millions of Americans are drowning in today’s economy – even workaday people with college degrees – are struggling to make ends meet and feeling pessimistic about their future. Happy talk by economists, pundits, and politicians doesn’t pay the rising bills for rent, child care, groceries, insurance, medicines, etc. Everything is moving out of reach… except a protest vote. About half of Trump voters say high prices were “the largest factor” in their vote.

Democratic Party officials were dazzled by the soaring Dow Jones Average, ignoring the Doug Jones Average, which showed that Doug and Donna are struggling, anxious, angry… and even open to a bull goose demagog blustering that he’ll “fix” the rigged system on Day One.

Few of these hard-hit men and women actually believe in, agree with, trust, or like Trump – nor are they stuck on supporting him. But they will be, unless and until some progressive party decides to side with grassroots people in an unabashed fight for economic fairness and social justice. To help push in that direction, go to WorkingFamilies.org.

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But no more than that, for this is a long-term battle, and we have enormous democratic strength to give us heart and hope for a progressive future. Yes, yesterday’s Trump surge is depressing and dangerous, but the message of that surge is not for progressives to sulk and surrender. Rather, a workaday majority is fairly shouting for the Democratic Party to get out of the corporate boardrooms and Washington salons, standing unequivocally, FDR-like, with that majority, focusing intently on the very volatile, central issues of power and powerlessness in our nation.

Election analysts hurl a blizzard of election statistics at us, but here’s one that I think tells the real story: Despite the intensity and importance of this year’s presidential election, some 20 million FEWER people voted than in 2020. Kamala Harris drew 14 million fewer votes than Biden did back then. And, despite Trump’s grandiose claim of unprecedented popular support, he actually got 3 million fewer votes this year than in 2020.*

A big reason for Harris’ defeat, I think, in addition to the sexism and racism values that still raises its ugly head in our society, is that her campaign focused on how awful Trump is, rather than bringing a clear message of economic hope for hard pressed families. She bought into the establishment’s assertions that “objectively” the economy is doing great. While they exclaim that the Dow Jones Index is booming, most people say: But a boom for whom? Check the Doug Jones Index, and you’ll find Doug and Donna are struggling—and feeling some compatibility with Trump’s constant refrain that “the whole system is rigged .”

And when Harris did strike populist gold with her plan for Medicare to provide home health care  to help families who are struggling with the high costs of care for seniors, people with disabilities, and more, few people even knew she said that, because she didn’t hammer that popular message every day at every step.

Trump’s core message (magnified by X and a gaggle of other far-right media propagandists) is avowedly plutocratic, xenophobic, racist and sexist. But I believe that America as a whole is better than that.

So our challenge is not to try appeasing MAGA extremists, but to buck-up and recommit to the hard, steady work of grassroots organizing, directly challenging what I call the 6Bs: Bosses, Bankers, Billionaires, Big Shots, B******s, and Bullshitters who’re running roughshod over America’s workaday majority. 

True progressivism has had to endure many downs, but it’s the ups that define us. So the fight continues, with renewed vigor. See you there. 

* Number of votes is as of midday on November 6th, 2024.

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But in this year’s truly momentous national election, we saw such giants of corporate media as the Washington Post, LA Times, and USA Today cower from taking their own stand on the presidency. Worse, the papers shamefully insisted that ducking their duty was itself a principled stand. Readers are smart enough to make their own decisions, they barked piously. Well, yes, but are you?

And who, exactly, are “you.” Take the Washington Post, a paper with a rich history of courageous journalism. But it wasn’t the paper’s knowledgeable reporters or editorial staffers who elected to be silent this year. Rather, one guy – Jeff Bezos – unilaterally chose to mute the paper’s voice.

Bezos, the gabillionaire founder of Amazon, bought the Post a decade ago, promising not to impose his financial self-interest over the staff’s journalistic integrity.

But that was then. Today, the notoriously weaselly Bezos is drawing some $13 billion from federal taxpayers, and he’s eager to get more. So, realizing that the next president can determine who gets those piles of money, Bezos abruptly stopped his paper from endorsing Harris, putting his financial principle above journalistic principles. The Post would’ve exploded, however, if he had dictated a Trump endorsement, so Boss Bezos tried the backdoor maneuver of no endorsement.

The Post exploded anyway. Star reporters either resigned or howled at the crass sell-out, while more than 250,000 readers cancelled their subscriptions. As one reader posted about the billionaire’s self-serving manipulation: “If you don’t have the guts to run a newspaper, don’t buy one.”

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Swart is a for-hire politico who’s been hailed as a “visionary” and a “business rockstar” for launching an outfit he calls: Crowds on Demand. His entrepreneurial concept is as simple as it is devious. Rather than the tedium of strategizing and organizing people into grassroots campaigns, just pay his COD team to stage a “movement” – you know, like Hollywood would do. Indeed, Swart’s operation is even headquartered in the center of Hollywood make believe, Beverly Hills.

But let him sell his own product. He says he can create and staff a turn-key political front group for clients. “We provide everything,” exclaims COD’s website, “including the people, the materials, and even the ideas… We can help you plan the strategy and execute it.”

How happy – if you’re a corporate schemer needing to win or defeat a proposal, but you don’t have any grassroots base of support, Crowds On Demand promises to fake it for you. “We can set up protests, rallies, demonstrations… and even create non-profit organizations to advance your agenda.” It’s basically an Astroturf campaign operation, but with even less turf and more plastic.

If there is one thing the American majority would agree on today, it is that the last thing our political system needs is more PR trickery, issue fakery, and political hustlers. How about we give a little more honesty a try?

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For decades, these chieftains of our economic order have been steadily implementing a very visionary process for establishing corporate wage levels. The essence of it is this: Let the workers set their own pay! Since the 1970s, when the idea began taking hold in Corporate America, pay levels have zoomed up by more than 1,000 percent.

Well… not for you. This set-your-own pay movement has only been available to top corporate executives, whose median paychecks now top $16 million a year! But since it’s been a boon for this test group, I say it’s time to expand the no-hassle compensation concept to all employees. This would greatly boost grassroots purchasing power, economic growth, and fairness for all.

“Omigod no!” squawk corporate apologists, rushing to say that, technically, CEOs do not directly set their pay. Rather, the bosses have attached their earnings to their corporations’ ever-rising stock prices. Thus, astronomical rewards go to those who obsessively focus on jacking-up the price of their own stock, even though that’s a selfishly-narrow and false measure of a corporation’s performance.

Also, stock price is no indicator of a CEO’s worthiness. Even bosses who’re blockheads can still get a boost simply because they’ve rigged the system to hitch a free ride on inflated stock value.

This is Jim Hightower saying… Still, if it’s good enough for them, why not an equal deal for working stiffs, who actually deliver the products and services that give a corporation some true value. I say, each worker should get the same percentage increase in pay that the top honcho takes. It’s a very simple process… and it’s only fair.

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Woody’s song could be sung today by Bharat Masrani, CEO of the TD Bank empire. Investigative digger Judd Legum reports that Masrani has long profited from a jolly scheme by his bank to launder $670 million in drug money from criminal networks. Federal prosecutors found that top TD bankers knew they were engaged in illegal drug dealing, but—shhhh—they “chose profits over [legal] compliance.”

So – POW! – The Feds socked it to TD Bank with a $3 billion fine. That’ll teach ‘em… right?

No. Banks don’t commit crimes; bankers do. But pointedly, none of TD Bank’s top officials were charged with the crimes they committed or sanctioned. Masrani, who now admits his culpability, simply says, “I apologize.”

That’s it. He faces no consequences! He got $10 million in pay last year – and no one even says: Give it back. Also, he’s now retiring but expects to get a multimillion-dollar farewell package and become a paid consultant for the bank. How is this supposed to deter other bank honchos from turning criminal?

Meanwhile, even though the bank must shovel out three billion Big Ones for its executives’ illegalities, that’s no deterrent to executive criminality. Banks today reap such excessive profits that losing $3-billion is just written off as the cost of doing business – freeing executives to create new ways to rig the system for their own profit.

This is Jim Hightower saying… The message to us commoners is plain: “Do the crime, and you’ll do the time – unless you’re a jolly banker.”

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Lilly Ledbetter, who recently died at 86, was one such trailblazing rebel, and it’s worth remembering her gutsy stand for “paycheck fairness.” After 20 years as a supervisor at Goodyear Tire in Gadsden, Alabama, Ledbetter was stunned in 1998 to learn that she had routinely been paid about 40 percent less than men doing the same job – robbing her of some $200,000. She promptly sued Goodyear for backpay… and won. Justice!

But Goodyear unleashed a pack of lawyers to drag Lilly through spirit-sucking years of legal appeals, including to the Supreme Court. There, Sam Alito, the far-right judicial extremist absurdly decreed that she should have filed her claim of sex discrimination when it first started 20 years ago. Never mind that she had no way of knowing back then that she was being gouged, Alito is not one to let reality interfere with his political agenda. So, she lost.

But sometimes you win by losing. Stung by the injustice, Ledbetter became a modern day Mother Jones, launching a fiery national campaign for workplace fairness. Backed by women’s groups and labor, her tenacious organizing finally compelled Washington to enact the 2009 “Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act,” eliminating the sex discrimination loophole exploited by the likes of Alito and Goodyear.

Ledbetter never got a penny of the money the system cheated her out of, but with the passage of this law, she rightly said: “I have an even richer reward.” Yes… and so does America.  

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Consider some very hard workers busting their butts going up and down our residential streets – Amazon’s army of delivery drivers, hauling tons of packages right to our doorsteps. Their exhausting, corporate-mandated hustle is a key source of Amazon’s enormous profits – making Amazon boss Jeff Bezos a cartoonishly-rich global playboy.

Yet Bezos – who’s entire career has been built on rigging the system against employees, competitors, and taxpayers – even refuses to acknowledge that those hundreds of thousands of drivers work for him. He disavows them because many are attempting to unionize over the autocratic and abusive working conditions he imposes on them – including having such dehumanizing delivery schedules that drivers can’t even stop to pee. So, they commonly carry bottles so they can “go on the go.”

Not my problem, says Jeff, pointing to a perverse, corporate-written gotcha in American labor law. It rigs the system by letting Amazon contract with thousands of local front groups called DSPs – “delivery service partners.” They then hire drivers to deliver Amazon’s packages. This lets Bezos deny responsibility for how the workers are treated since, technically, he doesn’t employ them.

Cute, huh? Worse, his DSP ruse further rigs the system by proclaiming that unions cannot even try to organize Amazon itself. Instead, they must go place to place, trying to organize each of the 3,000 DSP fronts that provide Amazon’s workforce.

These legalistic manipulations disempower workers, enrich bosses, and enforce the Corporate Golden Rule: “Those who have the gold, rule.”

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This is Wall Street’s abbreviation of mergers and acquisitions, which are acts of self-gratification practiced by top corporate executives. Such financial couplings can also be judged as socially perverse, since they eliminate economic competition, slash jobs, raise consumer prices, shrivel markets for local suppliers, stifle innovation, and dramatically increase inequality. Despite all this, M&As are cheered by the moneyed establishment as wholesome corporate friskiness to be tolerated because they produce gushers of wealth.

Yes… but wealth for whom?

Consider the brazen merger now being hotly pursued by Kroger and Albertsons – two supermarket giants that themselves are spawns of multiple mergers, having consolidated dozens of previously independent competitors like Safeway, Ralphs, Vons, and Randalls. Thousands of employees were punted, hundreds of stores closed… and grocery prices soared. Yet, the two remaining giants now want anti-monopoly regulators to believe in a “magic math” theory that subtracting competitors adds competition.

Bear in mind that neither chain is on the skids – both are making billions in profits, their CEO pay is astronomical, and investors are reaping fat dividends. But, too much is not enough, and mergers are a profiteering freeway that paves its way to a bonanza of monopoly pricing. And that’s why these two are frantic to cozy up, having already paid nearly a billion dollars in fees to lawyers, bankers, lobbyists, and PR agents to consummate their merger.

Oh, there’s one more crude incentive that stimulates these corporate trysts: Executives quietly pocket merger payments if their deals go through. Albertsons’ CEO, for example, is set to receive $43 million for merging with Kroger.

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Unless you live in Oklahoma.

There, a fanatical Christian Nationalist named Ryan Walters is the appointed superintendent of schools. But he’s confused on the concept of “instruction,” viewing it not as teaching, but as a commandment to implement his own personal theology.

In June, he pompously instructed all public schools to put the Christian Bible in every classroom and to use them for teaching every subject. He’s also demanding millions of dollars from taxpayers to buy Bibles.

But not just any Bible. This month, Walters went from kooky to corrupt, issuing bid requirements that effectively narrowed the state’s purchase to one particular edition of Christianity’s Holy Word – the “God Bless the USA Bible.” It’s a MAGA-approved compilation promoting the dogma that America is meant to be governed by Christians. Marketed by right-wing country musician Lee Greenwood, the volume is being hawked in commercials by presidential flimflammer Donald Trump, who is avidly supported by Walters.

Oh, coincidentally, it turns out that Trump gets a cut of every one of Greenwood’s sales. So, a chunk Oklahoma’s big Bible purchase would be pocketed by The Donald, enriching the most unholy president in history with manna from above.

The stench of this scam was even too much for Oklahoma’s aggressively partisan GOP leaders, who’ve now rewritten Walters’ purchase order to eliminate the Trump bid-rigging bias. Still, regular citizens are asking why the hell their state is trying to indoctrinate schoolkids, putting one religion above all others. To follow this Bible Story, connect with the nonprofit news group, Oklahoma Watch: OklahomaWatch.org.

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One held 50 copies of The Age of Reason, Thomas Paine’s 1794 treatise ridiculing the myths of Christian theology and the Bible. Hot, forbidden stuff! In Paine’s day, the book had been widely banned. Charlie and I each took a copy to read, found Paine’s thoughts mind-opening, and then did something that would be dangerous today: We gave the box of books to our town’s library for public distribution.

Amazingly, no one’s head exploded and no gaggle of fanatics demanded that our town’s librarian be fired. The library just quietly and gladly received the books.

Today, though, a few right-wing extremist groups roam our country trying to foment panic over books that critique everything from Christian Nationalism to the corporate order, as well as books written by or about women, people fighting racism, or the LGBTQ community. Such maniacal book bans nearly tripled in the last school year, taking some 10,000 titles off school bookshelves.

But these ideological pecksniffs now face blowback from a growing “freedom to read” movement, with gutsy local activists defying the screeching, self-appointed censors in communities across America. Especially impressive are young people themselves who’re attending local library and school board meetings, telling officials they will not obey political dictates on what not to read or believe. They’ve even launched a movement urging people to read  “Read Banned Books.”

This is Jim Hightower saying… To join the grassroots “freedom to read” rebellion, go to the American Library Association: ala.org.

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The partisans piled on Harris, sputtering like old Joe McCarthy that she was pushing “Soviet-style” government price-setting. Of course, these latter-day McCarthyites were either lying, ignorant, or both. Far from promoting price-setting, Harris was blasting price gouging. Big difference.

The ugly truth is that most public officials have quietly been pro-gouging for decades. By refusing to enforce anti-trust laws, they’ve helped conglomerated food giants steadily amass monopoly power over the production, processing, and marketing of food in nearly every American community. Big brand names then use that brute force to crush independent competitors, cheat customers, and consolidate even more power for themselves.

That is illegal. We have national laws, like the 1936 Robinson-Patman Act, that prohibit corporations from rigging the rules to control markets and rip off consumers. But, since unlimited corporate campaign donations have flooded into our elections, monopolists have essentially bought off officials in both parties who now ignore antitrust law, rebranding such market thuggery as “free enterprise” efficiency.

Thus, local and state governments routinely hand out millions of our tax dollars to subsidize big name supermarket chains, meatpacking factories, dollar stores, and other giants – all in the name of “consumers” and “competition.” No one mentions that these public giveaways provide the monopolistic market clout that allows the national outfits to clobber independent businesses, shrivel local competition and – voilà – gouge consumers.

This is Jim Hightower saying… So, Harris is right to call out grocery gouging and to push stronger actions to stop it, but action number one is to enforce the anti-monopoly laws already on the books.

Do something

Want to fight monopolization and the centralization of markets? Here are a few places to start:

* The American Economic Liberties Project is part of a growing, cross-ideological movement to combat monopolistic corporations and the systems that entrench their power.

* The Institute for Local Self-Reliance has a thorough resource for starting in your town, from banking and broadband to pharmacy and food: Fighting Monopoly Power: How States and Cities Can Beat Back Corporate Control and Build Thriving Communities

We also love our friend J.D. Scholten’s newsletter, You're Probably Getting Screwed, and Zephyr Teachout’s “Break ‘em Up: Recovering Our Freedom from Big Ag, Big Tech and Big Money.” Here’s our interview from 2021 with her:

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It’s the “Great Man” theory of history, trotted out periodically by plutocrats, patricians, royalists, and assorted other proponents of an elitist social order. They insist that great progress does not come from political movements, unions, and other grassroots forces, but from the genius and benevolence of individual, derring-do, capitalist innovators.

In a declaration this month, for example, a group of laissez-fairyland hucksters asserted that it wasn’t labor’s long bloody struggle that advanced worker rights, but industrial America’s generous bosses! These befuddled revisionists of corporate history proclaimed that “unions did not create weekends, the 8-hour work day [or] a living wage.” No? Who then? “Henry Ford did [it] in 1926,” they say, adding emphatically that “CAPITALISM & COMPETITION creates higher wages and better working conditions.”

Excuse me, boss, but capitalism constantly tries to destroy any competitive market, and it thrives by holding down wages, repressing worker rights, and eliminating jobs.

Forget the right-wing’s cartoonish portrayal of Henry the Great as a working-class savior. He was a Nazi-admiring, antisemitic, industrial magnate. Contrary to the revisionists, unions did indeed create their own progress, having fought for wage and hour protections since the 1860s. They rallied popular support with this slogan: “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will.”

This is Jim Hightower saying… And here’s an inconvenient fact that causes the hair of today’s corporate myth makers to burst into flames: It was not some genius capitalist who first established the 8-hour day as our national standard – it was government! President Ulysses Grant instituted it for all federal workers in 1869 – half a century before Ford finally trailed behind.

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Perhaps you’ve noticed from the shrinkage (or total elimination) of your local newspaper that this source of hometown journalism has become monopolized, nationalized, and trivialized by conglomerate owners.

How uplifting then, to see a national consortium of saviors rallying to reestablish a “thriving news media” for our democracy. How? Well, say the saviors, by promoting “brand stability” for potential advertisers. Huh? Who are these “saviors?”

Unfortunately, they are predatory media giants such as the USA Today chain and other national news conglomerators and shrivelizers. Hello—they are the cause of the real instability in local news! These powers are using the people’s cry for media decentralization and localization as a ruse to goose up their own ad revenue, allowing them to further monopolize and trivialize print journalism.

But here’s a better idea: Advance true media democracy by creating your own local, non-corporate newspaper. Ha, scoff the barons of Big Media, that’s impossible! But as an activist friend of mine puts it: “Those who say it can’t be done should not interrupt those who’re doing it.”

Across the country, communities are taking charge. Here in Texas, the Caldwell/Hays Examiner was launched in 2022, with a focus on rural issues up and down the I-35 corridor. In Western Iowa, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Art Cullen has co-founded a nonprofit that supports local news efforts through grants. And in Colorado, a group of folks mobilized to buy a local newspaper chain before a hedge fund operation could sweep in and snatch it up.

This is Jim Hightower saying… To learn more about how you can rebuild your local news outlets, visit the Institute for Nonprofit News at inn.org.

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For Guthrie, “politics” meant more than voting, since both parties routinely cough-up candidates who meekly accept the business-as-usual system of letting bosses and bankers control America’s wealth and power. It’s useless, he said, to expect change to come from a “choice” between Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber. Instead, common folks must organize into a progressive movement with their own bold change agenda, become their own candidates, and create a politics worth voting for.

Pie in the sky? No! Periodic eruptions of progressive grassroots insurgencies have literally defined America, beginning with that big one in 1776. Indeed, we could take a lesson today from another transformative moment of democratic populism that surged more than a century ago, culminating in “The Omaha Platform of 1892.” This was in the depths of the Gilded Age, a sordid period much like ours, characterized by both ostentatious greed and widespread poverty, domination by monopolies, rising xenophobia, institutional racism – and government that ranged from aloof to insane.

But lo – from that darkness, a new People’s Party arose, created by the populist movement of farm and factory mad-as-hellers. They streamed into Omaha to hammer out the most progressive platform in US history, specifically rejecting corporate supremacy and demanding direct democracy.

That platform reshaped America’s political agenda, making the sweeping reforms of the Progressive Era and New Deal possible. As one senator said of the Omaha rebellion, it was the start of robber baron wealth flowing “to all the people, from whom it was originally taken.” And that’s what Woody Guthrie meant by “politics.”

Note: Due to Hightower’s travel schedule last week, this is a re-release of this commentary, if you’ve feel like you’ve heard it before. 🤠

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I think of this refrain when I behold today’s right-ring proselytizers wailing that the blessed rich should not be taxed to assure that everyone has the most basic human needs. Seems very un-Jesusy to me.

One bizarre focus of their religious wrath is a wholly sensible and Biblically sound national policy: Subsidizing school districts to assure that every child has healthy meals to fuel their daily learning. Yes, in the Christian Nationalists’ book of public abominations, government feeding of children is a holy no-no. Project 2025, the Republican blueprint to impose theocratic rule over America, proclaims school meals a socialist/Marxist evil to be eradicated.

The extremist cry that if there is any free-lunch “giveaway,” it must be narrowly restricted to truly-destitute students. But wait – publicly singling out those children would stigmatize them. Plus, how odd to hear Republicans demanding an intrusive, absurdly-expensive, bureaucratic process empowering government to decide who’s eligible to eat!

In fact, the student lunch subsidy runs as low as 42 cents a meal, so it’s far cheaper, fairer, and (dare I say it?) more Christian simply to offer it to all. Indeed, the program is akin to the Biblical story of Jesus providing fishes and loaves to the multitude. He imposed no income test – everyone got a fish.

Interestingly, the same lawmakers opposing 42-cent meals for kiddos today routinely and enthusiastically feed billions of our tax dollars to corporate ethically-challenged profiteers who love money above all. As I recall, Jesus couldn’t stand people like that.

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This outfit spends a fortune painting itself as an environmentally sensitive purveyor of healthy products – like “POM,” its brand of pomegranate juice and its bottled “Fiji Water.” Moreover, its billionaire owners, Stewart and Lynda Resnick, have marketed themselves as generous philanthropists and powerhouse donors to the Democratic Party.

Wonderful.

But the corporation’s rap sheet includes false advertising, hogging of the public’s scarce water supplies, massive fossil fuel pollution, and – most abhorrent – exploitation of the low-paid farm workers who produce the crops that enrich the Resnicks.

Stewart, hailed as “the wealthiest farmer in the US,” has been spending lavishly on high-dollar lawyers and lobbyists, furiously fighting the United Farm Workers, who’re seeking fair wages, decent treatment, and simple respect from him. Worse, the politically-connected land baron is going all out to bust the entire union by pushing activist judges to outlaw California’s “card check” system. This is a democratic process enabling widely dispersed farm laborers to vote in unionization elections.

By trying to kill it, Stewart is engaged in a massive voter suppression effort to deny a smidgeon of justice to poorly-paid oppressed workers. It’s a raw power play by Stewart and his brotherhood of billionaire agribusiness barons, to further enrich themselves by taking away hard-won fair labor laws – and re-subjugating workers to the autocratic whims of owners.

What’s wrong with the Reznicks? They’re fabulously rich, and their company is enormously profitable. Yet they’re trying to nickel and dime one of the hardest working and poorly treated groups of workers in America. Nothing wonderful about that… or them.

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The Baraboo spectacle is one of several now playing across the Badger State, produced by health care profiteers trying to privatize county-owned nursing homes. These locally-controlled public entities get 5-star ratings and are treasured by families in rural Wisconsin – so people overwhelmingly oppose privatization. Thus, to somersault over local democracy, corporate tricksters have joined with right-wing county officials to impose autocratic control.

Back in Baraboo, for example, people lined up at the tent to speak against any move by supervisors to sell the People’s senior nursing center. But terms of the sale had already been negotiated in secret, supervisors had decreed that the buyer would not be revealed until after the sale was approved, and the board’s discussion about the sale was held in closed session.

Adding to the mayhem, Wisconsin’s Republican nominee for US Senate astonished people by declaring that old people in nursing homes should not even be allowed to vote, since they “only have five, six months life expectancy.”

Crazy, yet the right-wing’s Baraboo sellout succeeded, right? Not so fast. One, any maneuver affecting the county budget requires a two-thirds vote of supervisors – not the bare majority this clown trick got. And, two, while devious supervisors arrogantly blocked the democratic will of the people, feisty locals are not surrendering to corporate greed and devious politicians. The Battle of Baraboo continues! Stay tuned!

Do something!

Interested in learning about how locals in Baraboo are fighting this fight? Our good friend George Goehl is releasing a new season of his podcast, “To See Each Other,” next week. In it, you’ll find some heart-pounding moments of intrigue, along with what it takes to fight a good fight. You can subscribe here (ITunes), here (Spotify), or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Trying to make a living as a farmer is not for the fainthearted. You have to take out high-interest loans from cold-eyed bankers to put in a crop and buy supplies. Then you’re also at the mercy of everything from bugs to monopolistic middlemen. And here’s a cruel twist: If you defy the odds and produce a great crop, you lose money!`

This is happening right now. With unusually-good weather this year, corn and soybean harvests are expected to set records. But this abundance creates a market glut, allowing middlemen to knock down prices paid to farmers. A bushel of Illinois corn, for example, costs farmers $4.30 to produce, but they’re only getting $3.70 for it.

Meanwhile, the cost of such basics as seed, fertilizer, and tractors are skyrocketing. High costs coupled with low crop prices means that farmers’ income is expected to drop by 25 percent this year.

You might call this good crop-bad price phenomenon “ironic.” But it’s deliberate – an inevitable product of America’s perverse agricultural policy that pushes farmers to over produce in order to keep commodity prices low for giant processors and retailers. Little known fact: Our national “farm policy” is not written by farmers but by corporate lobbyists, lawyers, and economists – people who couldn’t run a watermelon stand if we gave them the melons and had the highway patrol flag down the customers for them.

That has got to change. To join an effort to demand a farm bill written by and for farmers, consumers, workers, and our environment, go to: FarmAid.org/Take-Action.

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This disconnect is the source of a lot of the arrogance, stupidity, and inequality afflicting our society.

Consider the huge, very troubling takeover of US Steel by the Japanese conglomerate, Nippon. This buyout was being quietly hustled to conclusion by both giants. But – boom! – suddenly the deal hit a steel wall, specifically the furious opposition of America’s United Steelworkers union. The corporate elites had smugly cut a backroom deal without ever mentioning it to the union! Thousands of workers had their livelihoods arrogantly treated as irrelevant. So, the union just said uh-uh, and the executive boneheads’ big buyout went from done to life support.

The stupidity gene has also imbedded itself in the brains of Christian authoritarians. They are hell-bent on forcing their holier-than-thou church dogma on all of us – without, of course, asking whether we want to be “saved” by them. So here comes one Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s hyper-Christian superintendent of public schools. In a Burning Bush moment, Ryan felt God ordained him to decree that every classroom must henceforth display a Bible, and all teachers must alter their lesson plans to teach from it – even math teachers!

But a funny thing happened to this un-elected flaming theocrat: Local school boards and teachers simply ignored him. Ryan, brimming with ego, had not bothered to consult parents, school boards, teachers, or legislators – so no Bibles have been purchased and no curriculums have been changed.

However, his dictatorial theatrics did get the attention of one major group: Oklahoma’s GOP lawmakers are now investigating his “rogue behavior.”

Do something!

If you also feel queasy about the encroachment of Christian nationalism into our schools, check out the work from the Freedom from Religion Foundation.

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Many generous artistic souls support good causes – and bless them for that! But there are a few who put the public interest at the center of their professional calling, and it’s been my joy to know a couple of them. We just lost a special one: Phil Donahue.

For 30 years, he brought a high-energy mix of unscripted fun, freewheeling grassroots democracy, serious issue exchanges, and public purpose to the unlikeliest of venues: Daytime TV talk shows. “Donahue” – the person and the show – defied studio bosses and conventional wisdom about what would appeal to “the great unwashed.” His crazy idea was to confront biases directly, with the audience as the stars. He put big issues in front of mainstream audiences before most TV bosses knew they were issues – abortion, medical price gouging, gender identity, atheism, NAFTA, Native Americans, AIDS, nuclear power, prison reform, family farmers, and so much more. And he did it daily, not talking to a pre-selected audience of like-minded people, but engaging disparate viewpoints directly in (often fiery) broadcasts.

Moreover, he brought genuine activists (not just sparklies) onto the show as guests. Even I made a couple of appearances. We were not invited to peacock and pontificate, but to provide a bit of insight and, most importantly, offer ways for viewers to fight back for fairness, justice, and a little more sanity in our world.

Phil Donahue is the model of what democratic media ought to be – an open exchange with regular people to promote the Common Good. See some Donahue for yourself at jimhightower.com/donahue.

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My money is on Musk. Yes, Trump has built his entire career on the art of high-profile betrayals, from real estate scams to marriages. But Elon’s crass duplicity is even more naked (please excuse that image). He routinely shifts his core beliefs from one “rock-solid principle” to the opposite, coldly turning on trusting partners and allies, all for personal gain.

Take his 2022 denunciation of Joe Biden’s climate change proposal, which promised massive support for the electric vehicles sold by Musk. Just two years earlier, the Tesla CEO had proclaimed himself to be “super fired up” about Joe’s plan. But his ego got ruffled by some perceived slight by Biden, so he called for killing the entire climate initiative, smugly declaring Tesla didn’t need public money.

Ha! Far from being some bootstrap, up-from-nothing corporate genius, Musk is the fortunate son of a South African emerald dealer. He didn’t create Tesla, he bought it, then enriched himself by extracting giant subsidies from American taxpayers and ruthlessly cheating workers and suppliers. Tesla’s first factory was built with half a billion federal dollars, he has been milking a public regulatory fund for $9 billion so far, each car he sells gets up to $7,500 in federal subsidies – and he continues to draw about a billion a year in tax breaks from that Biden law he condemned.

Musk says it’s all ethical, because the money is there for the taking. Yeah – and so is his integrity.

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First, they tried to demonize our public retirement program as a socialist horror. That hasn’t worked, since this pension literally works, allowing millions of workaday American families to escape old age poverty.

So, in Lie Number Two, they shriek: “Social Security is bankrupt – you future retirees will be left penniless in old age!” Uh… no. The bulk of retiree benefits are covered by payroll taxes, which continue to flow in, so the program is in no danger at all of folding.

Well, they exclaim in Lie Number Three, even to keep the program on life support requires gutting it by raising people’s retirement age to 70 or older and slashing monthly payments to retirees.

Uh… gosh, no again. Such a gut-job would be immoral – half of America’s workers get no retirement benefits except Social Security. Plus, such callousness is totally unnecessary, because there’s an obvious, easy, and fair fix: Apply the Social Security tax to everyone!

While working stiffs pay this tax on every dollar they earn, millionaires and billionaires are taxed only on the first $170,000 of their astronomical pay. Take Elon Musk, the richest man in America, who claimed a $45 billion paycheck last year. But under current law he only pays Social Security taxes on $170,000 of that – meaning 44 billion, 999 million, 830 thousand dollars of his income goes untaxed. Why shouldn’t he pay like everyone else?

Tax everyone equally – the rich as well as the working class – so everyone can have a secure, dignified retirement. That’s what the American concept of the Common Good means.

Photo by Timothy Krause on Flickr.

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That working-class-lament is from an old bluegrass song, but millions of working stiffs are singing it today. While many workers have finally seen an uptick in their paychecks, they’ve been dismayed to see the increase quickly gobbled up by jacked-up grocery prices. What the hell?

Kamala Harris has had the honesty to call it what it is: Gouging. And, to put some bite in her bark, she’s proposing a long-overdue, national ban on rip-off pricing by food giants. Of course, this produced outraged squeals by corporate functionaries. But some of the most furious squealing is coming from a supposedly unbiased corner of America’s economic structure: Economists.

A little-known secret of this occult profession is that most economists are schooled by and working for the corporate order, generally hostile to consumers, workers and other competing interests. One absolute rule they learn is that NONE of the inequities and iniquities of America’s laissez-fairyland economy are to be blamed on corporate greed.

Thus, a whole pack of mainline economists raced to poo-pooh Harris’ price-gouging charge, asserting that grocery prices have naturally surged due to what they benignly call “price pack architecture.”

Bovine excrement! Price gouging cannot be perfumed by semantics – it is mass swindling, and people can detect it by its stench. So, let’s follow that stench to its anti-free enterprise source: Monopoly. For the past half century, economists in both Republican and Democratic administrations have looked the other way, allowing food giants to consolidate and conglomerate, shut out competitors, monopolize every aspect of the food economy… and steal.

It’s that theft that Harris is daring to challenge, and Americans will cheer her on – no matter how furiously establishment economists squeal.

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You got me workin’, boss man, working round the clockI wanna little drink of water, but you won’t let Jimmy stopBig boss man, can’t you hear me When I call?

But then, Reed urges workers to see how small the boss man really is:

Well, you ain’t so big, you just tall that’s all.Well, I’m gonna get me a boss man, one gonna treat me rightWork hard in the day time, rest easy at night.

That could be the anthem of millions of Americans today, who are rebelling against soulless corporate jobs and layers of bosses demanding longer hours doing tedious tasks. These workplace uprisngs are not about another dollar a day – rather the idea of work itself is being confronted.

People are realizing that their time, energy, and their very lives are being consumed a day at a time to profit faraway Big Boss Men. It’s also dawning on more and more workers that their jobs are BS – generating paperwork that no one sees, babysitting computer systems, making electronic downloads that are silly, etc.

Thus, large numbers of workers are saying: Who needs it? Is this my “life?” What’s the point? My “job” could – poof! – disappear tomorrow, and it wouldn’t matter. How am I to take any pride or find a smidgeon of personal fulfillment in surrendering the biggest chunks of my life to that?

This is Jim Hightower saying… Big Billionaire Bosses like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos bark that it’s time for employees to double down on the “work ethic” – yet there’s no ethical core to the work they demand. Bosses don’t get it, but what’s happening today is not merely a labor rebellion, but a revolution for humanity to be valued for itself… and for workers to become their own bosses.

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Within the confines of Trump’s MAGAworld, some are appalled by Walz’s wealth. Wealth? They’re claiming this former high school teacher is rich? No… and that bothers them.

Walz gets a gubernatorial paycheck and a modest public pension. That’s it. No portfolio of Wall Street stocks, no deferred payouts on corporate bonuses, and he doesn’t even own a house, much less a vacation home. While this pegs him as a regular middle-class American, it seems to put off a covey of moneyed Trumpsters who see his lack of riches as a personal weakness.

The Wall Street Journal recently featured one such partisan, who says he prefers “a high net worth” politician, like JD Vance. Being rich, explained the partisan, means a candidate “has financial acumen, business and investment savvy….” Righto! For example, Vance was savvy enough to kiss-up to right-wing Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, who has pumped millions into the fictional “hillbilly,” turning Vance into a pretentious “Hillwilliam.” And please stop pretending that rich candidates are less corrupt since they aren’t dependent on special-interest funding. Trump himself put the lie to that, when he recently begged a BigOil group. to give a billion dollars to his campaign – in exchange for his promise to slash their taxes.

This is Jim Hightower saying… Most bizarre is the assertion by Walz critics that his failure to be invested in Wall Street stocks means he’s out of touch with the financial concerns of “the average American.” Hello, nearly all stocks are owned by the superrich, like Trump and Vance. In fact, the average American family owns zero stocks – just like Walz.

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In recent times, there’s been an unfortunate tendency for some scientific hot shots to send society off on techno-tangents to “remake” nature, promising miracles. About 70 years ago, for example, a so-called ag-science genius promised that dumping synthetic pesticides on monoculture crops across the globe would end hunger. Chemical giants and governments rushed to do the dump, but the “fix” ultimately resulted in the ongoing poisoning of Earth’s land, water, food, and people – while enriching agricultural monopolists and allowing hunger to rage.

Unfortunately, insistence by technologists and profiteers that they can outsmart and overwhelm nature is now being pushed with cosmic vengeance. A covey of arrogant academics and billionaire backers are saying: “Trust us, we can handle that little global warming issue.”

One is named David Keith, running a $100 million “stratospheric solar geoengineering” scheme named SCoPEx. Keith proposes to solve global warming by – get this – dispensing volumes of sulfur dioxide into the Earth’s stratosphere to “regulate” the amount and location of sunlight around the globe.

Gosh, what could go wrong with that? Never mind the unknown consequences of tampering with basic nature, argues Keith, for his bold techno-fix to global warming bypasses the political difficulty of ending our fossil fuel addiction – so we should just do it.

Keith does admit he can be “inappropriately forceful – I’m intense,” he says. Well then, let’s all chip in a for some therapy sessions to help him overcome his megalomania before he makes an irreversible mess of the only planet we have that sustains life.

Do something

Looking for real environmental change? Look no further than the youth! I wrote about them in this post, but we recommend teaming up with and supporting the following groups:

* Gen-Z for Change

* Zero Hour

* Black Girl Environmentalist

* Our Children’s Trust

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High-finance finaglers of Wall Street and Silicon Valley are quietly demanding that Kamala Harris commit to appointing their designated toadies to oversee America’s so-called “free-enterprise” structure. Their primary target is the Federal Trade Commission, a little-known agency meant to protect and extend economic competition.

The FTC is now headed by Lina Khan, a tenacious opponent of anti-consumer, anti-worker mergers and takeovers. She rightly recognizes that the “free” in free enterprise is not an adjective, but a verb, requiring aggressive public action to free-up the enterprise of people who’re now routinely shut out of the market by monopolistic giants. So, says Khan, if we really want free markets, let’s free them.

Oh, how the money vultures screeched! “She’s a dope,” raged takeover bully Barry Diller in a dopey fury. And, since many of the monopolistic titans who’re offended by Khan’s otherwise very popular progressive populism are from the Democratic Party’s high-dollar donor class, they have undue clout. Thus, they are bluntly demanding her head as their price for financially backing Harris’s presidential run. Commissioner Khan, they exclaim, simply does not understand “the way the Washington game is played.

Oh, yes, she does – and she’s flat out rejecting it! She’s the first real anti-trust champion America has had in years – but will the party’s higher-ups have the guts and integrity to defend her? Or will the business-as-usual powers be ushered back in? The answer to that will be an early measure of Harris’s commitment to economic democracy.

Do something

Want to fight monopolization and the centralization of markets? Here are a few places to start:

* The American Economic Liberties Project is part of a growing, cross- ideological movement to combat monopolistic corporations and the systems that entrench their power.

* The Institute for Local Self-Reliance has a thorough resource for starting in your town, from banking and broadband to pharmacy and food: Fighting Monopoly Power: How States and Cities Can Beat Back Corporate Control and Build Thriving Communities

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Well, which JD? He keeps flipping his bio, politics, and persona, trying to advance his fortunes. A decade ago, he was posing as a Kentucky hillbilly spokesman – only, he’s not from Kentucky and expresses disdain for actual hillbillies.

Still, he did go from a hardscrabble childhood to an Ivy League  law school, later boasting that he’s a self-made success, with no rich daddy pulling strings for him. Well unless you count his Sugar Daddy. From those Ivy League days forward, “just plain JD” has been a protégé of a Silicon Valley multibillionaire right-winger, Peter Thiel, who put Vance in cushy, high-tech jobs, then arranged $120 million in funding to make him a rich vulture capitalist.

Suddenly, the “hillbilly” was a “Hillwilliam” – a full-fledged, rich man’s Republican. But he was not yet a right-wing nut, even denouncing Donald Trump in 2016 as “America’s Hitler.” Then, JD decided he should be a US Senator, and Daddy Thiel promptly put up $10 million to buy the seat. But oops – Trump owned the Ohio GOP, so Vance grew a MAGA-macho beard, and squirmed down to Mar-a-Lago to beg The Donald’s forgiveness for that Hitler faux pas, obsequiously pledging to be a Forever Trumper.

So now, Vance is Trump’s VP nominee… but with a wandering eye, looking to establish himself as the anti-democracy, Christian nationalist champion of the authoritarian Project 2025. Kookier yet, Vance embraces a new McCarthyism cult supporting a violent purge of progressives from our society, saying that such Americans are “Unhumans,” who must be treated as prey.

Absurd? Yes! But there he stands, the new public face of extremist, right-wing nuttiness that surpasses even Trump’s monarchial fantasies.

Having a hard time keeping up with Vance’s chameleon forms? We are, too! Thank goodness Ohio activist Rachel Coyle is keeping track. Check out her work at shillbilly.info.

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Yet, bizarrely, Donald Trump’s humorless gaggle of strategists decided that their first point of attack on Kamala Harris would be: Her laugh. No, seriously! Donald himself launched the offensive – “I call her Laffin’ Kamala,” he snorted. “You ever watch her laugh?” he implored listeners, declaring, “She’s crazy. She’s nuts.”

Uh… no. Like normal people, she laughs – often, naturally, and joyously. So do I. Maybe you do, too. But, one GOP outfit sniffed that this is “inappropriate” for a woman running for president. And a Republican senatorial doofus from Louisiana even barked that Harris should act more like Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s former right-wing prime minister, pointing out that she “didn’t giggle.” The sour old senator then mansplained that Harris’ laughter made people think she’s “a ding-dong” – even though the dinging seems to be coming from his own head.

Interestingly, though, Trump’s orchestrated snark attack on Harris’ laughter is working. For Harris! By repeatedly pointing out that she has unscripted moments of laughter, Republicans actually make people feel positive toward her. I can attest from my own time politicking in a supposedly conservative state that laughter unites people – I quickly learned that humor is a key that can unlock the mind.

Moreover, the GOP’s churlish demonization of laughter only highlights the fact that, in contrast to Kamala, Trump is a grump! Note that we never see him laugh. He smirks, gloats, and often puts on a smarmy grin – but he never has a joyous belly laugh or shows any genuine sense of fun. Sad for him… but sadder for us if we let his dour demeanor define our America.

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A summer camp for kids – but with a disturbing corporate twist. Some outlets of Chick-fil-A, the fast food chicken chain, are promoting a summer camp where children as young as 5 can learn “how to be a Chick-fil-A worker.”

Isn’t this fun? The corporation says that while the chickadees won’t actually be doing the work of regular employees, they will learn how to “take orders, deliver orders, make drinks, and be a hostess.”

Of course, the little campers don’t get paid – indeed their families must pay to let the company give them an early dose of the good ol’ American work ethic and a “behind-the-scenes look” inside the hierarchal corporate order. You can’t start ‘em too young on these life lessons! The kiddos do get compensated, sort of, with their very own Chick-fil-A nametag and t-shirt.

Okay, this is not the Dickensian dystopia of 19th century England – but is that our modern standard? There is nothing wrong with young kids working… but 5-year-olds? And – as was the case in the pre-teen tasks I had in my father’s small business and on my Aunt Eula’s farm – the objective ought not be indoctrination into the corporate culture of low-wage franchises. Rather, I was learning to help the family and how to contribute to the larger community. My reward was not merely a token stipend, but a recognition that I belonged – that I had a role and was valued as part of that community.  People didn’t need a corporate name tag to know who I was.

This is Jim Hightower saying… There’s so much more that an $11 billion nationwide giant like Chick-fil-A could do for the communities that provide its profits. Can’t they think of anything less selfish than promoting a fast-food future for children.

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As one of the domineering right-wing extremists on the Supreme Court, Gorsuch routinely supports enthroning plutocracy, autocracy, and his own brand of Christian theocracy over people’s democratic rights. But he also uses his unelected, unchecked judicial position to take power and justice away from America’s least powerful, most vulnerable people – including the homeless.

For example, he ruled last month that an Oregon city’s ban on homeless residents sleeping outdoors was NOT cruel and unusual punishment. Never mind that the city provided nowhere else for homeless individuals and families to bed down, Gorsuch saw no problem with penalizing people who have to sleep or camp out in parks, on the street, etc. After all, he blithely explained, it was not a ban on homelessness, but merely on sleeping outdoors.

“It makes no difference,” exclaimed His Supremeness, whether the violator is homeless… or “a backpacker on vacation.” Or, I suppose he’d say, a Supreme Court justice sleeping under a bridge. To punctuate his cluelessness, Gorsuch actually asserted that the law applied equally to everyone. Except, of course, that the homeless can’t just go home after being kicked out from under the bridge.

This is Jim Hightower saying… It’s rank injustice for Gorsuch – a child of a politically-powerful and rich family, product of Ivy League schools and high-dollar law firms, possessor of enormous personal wealth and multiple homes – to dictate “let-them-eat-cake” rules for homeless people he’ll never know or understand. Yes, homelessness is a complex social scourge, but cavalierly criminalizing its victims is itself a judicial crime that solves nothing. Neil is not morally fit to judge poor people – so how about replacing him with a homeless person who actually knows something about real life.

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Appropriately enough, the case involved garbage trucks. A smalltown mayor had funneled a million-dollar contract for new garbage trucks to a local seller, which then made a $13,000 payoff to the mayor. Obvious graft. But no, the six supremes decreed that the payoff was not illegal, because it was given to the mayor after the garbage truck contract was issued. Taking money before would be a bribe, they babbled, but money given afterwards is an innocent “gratuity” – like tipping a waiter for good service.

The court’s distortion of kindergarten-level ethics was written by Brett Kavanaugh, infamous for his own frat-boy moral contortions. In his formal opinion, Brett rhetorically asked if such after-the-fact kickbacks should be considered bribes. “The answer.” he proclaimed,” is no.”

Of course, as any reasonable person would tell the black-robed fabricator, the obvious answer is: “Hell yes!”

Kavanaugh even tried to trivialize such official bribery, calling it no more sinister than parents sending a gift basket to thank their child’s teacher for a job well done. Hello, Mr. Clueless, this was a $13,000 gift basket!! The truck dealer was obviously rewarding the mayor for handing out a million taxpayer dollars to it!

Do something!

We’re collaborating with friends to build out fresh actions you can take, and in the meantime, check these out:

* Share the Justice Can’t Wait updated website.

* Share Stand Up America’s Supreme Court Voter website, which aims to educate and mobilize voters on the impact the next president will have on the future of the U.S. Supreme Court.

* Join United for Democracy in calling on Congress to rein in the out-of-control Supreme Court.

* Demand Justice has been advocating for the Judiciary Act, which would expand the court by four seats. They’re asking people to call their representatives, and to join their rapid response team. 

Jim Hightower's Lowdown is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

SCOTUS is meant to be the impartial arbiter of legal disputes over what our laws mean. Yet, who are these arbiters, how are they elected, why don’t we even know their names, and if they go rogue, imposing their personal autocratic beliefs on our nation’s democratic ideals… what then?

Well, structurally, SCOTUS is undemocratic, a relic of monarchial rule. Unlike the 535 members of the legislative branch, who are elected from diverse districts across America, there are only nine supremes, and none of the current bunch have ever faced the people, even in an election for dogcatcher. They are hand-picked by political and moneyed elites, and most blatantly lie to win approval for their lifetime appointments. Once enthroned, they have no accountability to us commoners, who are expected to blindly obey their edicts.

Today, out of 330 million Americans, six right-wing SCOTUS members have seized control of the court… and our government. They claim supremacy over the People, the President, and the Congress – arbitrarily dictating what is “legal” for elected officials and the public to do. Indeed, they are now making up laws on abortion, presidential power, voting rights, environmental protection, and much more to suit their personal political and religious biases. Moreover, they operate behind closed doors, with no disclosure of their conflicts of interest.

This is Jim Hightower saying… Call this what it is: A right-wing extremist power grab. And it is fast supplanting our people’s historic democratic progress with a kleptocracy of autocratic, plutocratic, theocratic rule. The only remedy is a head-on people’s rebellion to democratize this totally unAmerican court.

Do something!

We’re collaborating with friends to build out fresh actions you can take, and in the meantime, check these out:

* Share the Justice Can’t Wait updated website.

* Share Stand Up America’s Supreme Court Voter website, which aims to educate and mobilize voters on the impact the next president will have on the future of the U.S. Supreme Court.

* Join United for Democracy in calling on Congress to rein in the out-of-control Supreme Court.

* Demand Justice has been advocating for the Judiciary Act, which would expand the court by four seats. They’re asking people to call their representatives, and to join their rapid response team. 

Jim Hightower's Lowdown is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

As we crank up our air-conditioners, however, let’s pause for a moment to consider some 50 million workers in your and my communities who are exposed throughout the day to the full intensity of the sun’s power. They are roofers and landscapers, warehouse workers and farm laborers, street pavers and letter carriers. These have always been hot jobs, but now they’re deadly—heat kills more Americans today than hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes combined.

So surely there are basic workplace rules assuring that these exposed people get water, shade breaks, etc. No…. and when such humanitarian codes are proposed, industry bosses coldly reject them. For example, after several Texas cities began enacting worker protections, corporate lobbyists rushed to their hireling, Gov. Greg Abbott, who obediently snuck a state pre-emption into law, banning local officials from setting their own heat standards. That year, a record 450 people died of heat exposure in Texas, but Abbott just snarled that his preemption “increases economic liberty.”

Mercifully, President Biden is pushing national heat rules. Of course, industry lobbyists are out to kill his anti-killing reforms, calling them “unreasonably complicated.” Really? Providing water and shade is too perplexing for our corporate geniuses? Why don’t we put them on roofing jobs in August – and let them think about it?

Jim Hightower's Lowdown is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

But suddenly, Louisiana’s demagogic Christian officials have surged past Texas on the far right. The Pelican State’s governor, an Elmer Gantry wannabe, has decreed that every single public school classroom must henceforth prominently display the Ten Commandments to indoctrinate the tykes in his religion. That way, babbled a legislative backer of the state edict, students can “look up and see what God says is right and what he says is wrong.”

Actually, the Christian bible itself is a little wobbly on that, offering three different versions of holy commandments, including this: “Thou shalt not seethe a kid in it is mother’s milk.”

Wobbliest of all, though, is the moral authority of depraved politicians hypocritically preaching to school kids about such sins of adultery, stealing, and (hello MAGA zealots!) worshiping false gods. Plus, their piousness doesn’t work. Young people are not so dull and docile that they’ll mindlessly obey what some self-serving, immoral politicos put on a poster.

Louisiana could have consulted Texas on this. For some 60 years, a 6-foot-tall granite slab engraved with the Ten Commandments has stood outside our State Capitol building. Yet, those inside, the Capitol – including our governor – routinely violate those engraved moral sentiments.

If so-called “leaders” don’t give a damn about honoring the values they put on classrooms posters, why should students?

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In an astonishing twist, some far-right-wing Republican groups and politicians are demanding that their longtime corporate allies – such as Walmart, the Koch brothers, GE, and Wall Street banks – stick to their business and stop interfering in the people’s political decisions. One group, the National Center for Public Policy Research, bluntly declares that it now prefers “corporate behavior without partisan influences.” It’s even urging corporate shareholders to pass resolutions requiring top executives to halt their overbearing political intrusion. What an unbelievable breakthrough for progressive reform!

Well, it would be… if true. But it’s a fraud. NCPPR only wants corporate powers to stop politicking against right-wing issues. Specifically, the tricksters demand that corporations cease all efforts to advance diversity, equality, and inclusiveness in American society. Also, they oppose any corporate embrace of Pride events, or corporate acknowledgement of America’s history of institutional racism. And, they say, corporations should stop all efforts to combat climate change, since right-wing orthodoxy says global warming is a hoax. Forget head-in-the-sand politics, NCPPRers want to bury political reality itself in the sand.

Now for the Good News: They’re buffoons. Even profiteering investors aren’t buying their hokum. Their “anti-WOKE” resolutions are being rejected by 98 percent of shareholders’ votes! Even in the rigged system of corporate voting, that’s a stunning rejection. Meanwhile, shareholder proposals to support progressive ideals and policies have been gaining ground, now winning a fourth to a third of the vote. That’s three times better than the support that such proposals got 20 years ago.

This is further proof that the fundamental political barrier to right-wing extremism is that the vast majority of Americans actually believe in economic fairness, social justice… and reality.

Photo via Dissent Pins.

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Greg Steube of Florida, is a run-of-the-mill, extremist Republican specializing in such partisan slapstick as trying to nullify Joe Biden’s election and install GOP loser, Donald Trump, as president.

But Steube went full-tilt ridiculous when he excitedly announced that, “Tomorrow I will introduce legislation to rename our coastal waters after… Donald Trump!” This would brand all the seas round America’s entire coastline with “TRUMP” logos – like trapping all of America in a big fat Trump bear hug.

But – isn’t it rather blah to “honor” an ex-president with obscure boundary waters? It’s like a town council voting to put the ex-mayor’s name on a drainage ditch. Still, Stuebe hoped that this would charm the MAGA demi-god, prompting him to smile on Greg’s future election ambitions. Believe it or not, this is what is considered serious congressional business by the GOP!

Republican congress critters are in a frenzy to kiss up to their convict-in-chief, proposing multiple government gifts for him. Arizona’s Paul Gosar, for example, is demanding that the US treasury print $500 bills bearing a portrait of the Donald. And Florida’s Anna Paulina Luna proposes to tarnish the Congressional Gold Medal by bestowing it on the political mad dog who launched the January 6 mob attack on – yes, Congress! How cynical – especially since Steube and other Donald worshippers had opposed giving the congressional medal to police officers who had risked their lives to protect them from Trump’s rampaging mob.

Meanwhile, how about a more fitting honor for the huckster: Name a federal prison “Trump Tower.” Put it in big gold letters!

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Instead, imagine if working stiffs themselves took hold of this day, putting it to work rallying and reinvigorating a rebellious labor movement to achieve economic fairness and social justice for all in America. This was, after all, the purpose of the original Labor Day, held in 1882. Thousands of bricklayers, machinists, piano makers, longshoremen, and other unionized workers in the New York City area defied corporate bosses to declare their own day off. They were not taking a vacation, but making “a public show of organized strength,” energizing labor’s demand for an end to the tyranny of 12-hour days, 6-day weeks, and $2 a day in pay.

In an audacious affront to the plutocracy, a miles-long parade of common workers marched six abreast, accompanied by union floats, and boisterous bands. They pointedly traversed right in front of the gilded mansions of robber barons living along Fifth Avenue, the most ostentatious corridor of wealth and power in America. The day culminated in a sprawling picnic and festival, with 25,000 union celebrants enjoying food, beer, dancing, each other… and a shared sense that the working class was on the move.

Why not again? Auto workers, flight attendants, fast-food workers, and others are clearly on the move, so why not make a new “public show of organized strength,” directly confronting the corporate greedheads and political boneheads who’re stealing our democracy. Ralph Nader called for this two years ago – to see his ideas for “A Workers Action Day,” go to: nader.org.

Do something!

In addition to Nader’s article, here are more resources for staying up to date on labor’s resurgence in the US:

* Labor Notes, a media and organizing project that has been the voice of union activists who want to put the movement back in the labor movement since 1979

* Cornell ILR School’s Labor Action Tracker

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Well… by “our taxes,” they don’t mean yours. Rather, here they come with another absurd sob story about giant corporations and the super-wealthy suffering unbearably from excessive taxation. Claiming to feel the pain of these multibillionaires, the GOP is riding to their rescue, promising to extend the trillion-dollar tax boondoggle Donald Trump handed to the rich in 2017, and vowing to add an extra trillion-dollars-worth of new breaks for them.

Ludicrously, the lawmakers, lobbyists, and corporate front groups pushing this garish plutocratic giveaway loudly insist that the real beneficiaries are not the privileged few, but [cue the patriotic music] America! Lowering taxes on the corporate rich, they exclaim, will let those elites invest more in new jobs and enterprises, expanding the economy for all.

 Of course, that’s the same ball of dung they keep rolling up Capitol Hill again and again, and it gets stinkier every time, especially now that monopolies control everything from high tech and health care to oil and food prices. Why reward them? Far from creating jobs, they’re frantically automating them, and rather than increasing competitiveness, monopolies buy up or squeeze out competitors. Plus, if they get another tax windfall, the oligarchs will just use it to jack-up their stock prices, artificially making them richer and more dominant over us.

Another “gotcha” in the GOP’s giveaway would gut the IRS’ ability to investigate and prosecute these filthy rich scofflaws who annually cheat us out of billions of dollars they owe for the upkeep of America. For information and action on this massive ripoff, go to AmericansForTaxFairness.org.

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For example, here’s a mouthful that’s been gaining popularity among manufacturers of food products: Price Pack Architecture. It’s a bit of gobbledygook meant to obscure the profiteering practice of – shhhh – ever so quietly shrinking the size and contents of their packages – without lowering prices. Economists dubbed this “shrinkflation,” but that too clearly implied gouging. Thus, corporate image-makers invented the incomprehensible nonsense phrase of PPA to cloak their anti-consumer trickery.

This convoluted codeword also allows the tricksters to brag openly about their cleverness to their Wall Street investors. Here’s Coca-Cola’s CEO, for example, doing corporate-speak to bankers in February: “We are leveraging our revenue growth management capabilities to tailor our offerings and price pack architecture to meet consumers’ evolving needs.”

English translation: Consumers will need to pay us more for less Coke. You could almost hear the bankers weep for joy over Coke’s sneaky scheme to stiff its customers.

Perhaps you’ve wondered what big-time corporate CEOs actually do to rake in their exorbitant salaries, now averaging more than $8,000 an hour! Well, there it is: The CEO’s main job is to keep workers’ pay low, monopolize markets, and constantly invent slick ways to squeeze another dime from each consumer’s pocket.

It’s not honest work, but it does pay well. Coca-Cola’s CEO James Quincey, for example, hauled in $25 million in pay last year. That’s 1,800 times more than the annual income of the typical Coca-Cola worker, who’ll now pay more for a sip of Coke, thanks to Quincey’s “price pack architecture.”

Photo courtesy Alley of Ashes on Flickr.

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I don’t mean looks, but the deep inner ugliness of character that keeps oozing from this so-called “supreme” judge. Start with the unabashed lies he told senators to win his lifetime appointment to America’s powerfully-undemocratic judicial branch. Lie Number One was his promise not to mess with women’s constitutional right to reproductive freedom. But, once he put on his authoritarian black robe, he wrote the Court’s edict ripping that right from every woman.

Later, Alito got caught secretly accepting a freebie trip to a luxury fishing lodge, paid for by a billionaire vulture capitalist. Far from embarrassed, he haughtily asserted that as a Supreme he has no ethical duty even to report such gifts of “personal hospitality.” Indeed, he’s led the Supreme Court’s corrupt refusal to adopt an enforceable code of ethics (which every other public office must do).

Which brings us to Alito’s current flag flap, revealing a clownish show of tone-deaf arrogance. Abandoning any pretense of judicial impartiality, he’s had flags flying at both his home and beach house, ostentatiously trumpeting his embrace of MAGA extremism and his opposition to President Biden. How, then, can he be a fair judge of upcoming cases concerning Trump’s anti-democratic power grabs?

No problem, said Alito, imperiously waving off proper demands that he remove himself from ruling on these cases. Trying to deflect a tsunami of criticism, the black-robed scoundrel resorted to the classic “gentleman’s dodge”: He blamed his wife. “My wife is fond of flying flags,” he said, insisting that the never even noticed them flapping in front of his houses for the world to see.

That’s not just ugly, it’s supremely stupid.

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In 2016, candidate Trump promised to end the grubby money corruption of American politics. “The special interests, lobbyists, donors,” he rightly and righteously noted “make large contributions to politicians and they have total control of those politicians.” Asserting that he knows the political rot better than anyone, he said he’d “fix that system, because that system is wrong.”

Eight years later, here comes the Donald again – but the swamp is bigger and suckier than ever. And instead of bold talk about draining it, Trump is auctioning off the swamp, flagrantly offering direct presidential benefits to Big Oil, Wall Street hucksters, high-tech tycoons, and all other moneyed interests that “make large contributions” to him.

How large? The Washington Post reports that one businessman asked to have lunch with Trump, promising a million-dollar check. “I’m not having lunch,” Trump retorted. “You’ve got to make it $25 million.” He has also demanded a cool billion bucks from a covey of Big Oil executives. Promising to cut their corporate taxes and deliver an array of other special benefits, the presidential wannabe punctuated his itemization of political goodies with an unsubtle monetary nudge, saying, “be generous, please.”

Since a Supreme Court majority of extreme partisans opened the floodgates 14 years ago, corrupt corporate cash has gone from merely polluting American democracy to now swamping it. Trump is not the only bribe huckster, but he is the most blatant, shamelessly nuclearizing the going rate for buying public policy, mocking the ideal of a citizens’ government. Trump himself is fond of telling fatcat donors that he doesn’t spend 10 minutes with anyone who can’t give $10 million. Hello – where does that leave you and me? And our country?

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I speak, of course, about the tragic plight of our nation’s downtrodden multi-billionaire class. While it’s true that Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and these other Silicon Valley sad sackers and weepy Wall Streeters have vastly increased their wealth under Joe Biden’s presidency, they wail that he has not properly courted and coddled them. Indeed, Biden set their hair on fire this March by calling out their outrageous tax-dodging ploys, demanding they start providing their fair share of support for America by paying a “billionaire tax.”

Thus, these poor, put-upon moneyed elites have been jetting around to Hollywood, Palm Beach, and other posh enclaves, holding secret strategy sessions and rallying the über-rich class to defeat Biden this fall. Of course, since self-centered, plutocratic billionaires are less popular than bed bugs, they can’t win with their ideas and votes, but only by buying elections – and these gilded conspirators intend to do just that, amassing billions to bury Biden.

But, oops, one money confab in April exploded into public view when some 20 poobahs of such oil giants as Chevron, Exxon, and Occidental conferred with Trump himself. In a straight-out bribery offer, he pledged to repeal environmental protections the industry dislikes –if they pony up one billion dollars for his presidential campaign.

This sordid palace intrigue is the product of the right-wing Supreme Court’s 2010 edict letting selfish wealthy interests secretly dump unlimited sums of corporate money into our elections. They’re turning our democratic ideals into a kleptocracy.

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Last year, backed by a covey of billionaires, Governor Ron was all set to be our next president until national voters discovered he has the personality of a dirt clod and the political sensibility of a tin-pot totalitarian.

Even in the GOP primaries, most voters gagged at his ruthless anti-abortion absolutism, his Fahrenheit 451 book bans, his vigilante rampages against local librarians, his dictate that textbooks whitewash American history, his cruel toying with desperate asylum seekers, and so awful much more.

Thus, the Potentate of Tallahassee limped back home. But far from chastened, Ron has doubled down on political goofiness, frittering away his remaining prestige and gubernatorial credibility on right-wing hokum. For example, he has banned the sale of alternative meat products in Florida. Also, in a bizarre commandment he calls “Freedom Summer,” he has decreed that Florida’s bridges can only be lit up in hues of red, white, and blue – no “liberal” colors like green or purple.

His latest tilt-at-windmills stunt is to repeal state efforts to fight climate change! He’s reversing state policies encouraging agencies to switch to electric vehicles, prohibiting several wind and solar-powered projects, and eliminating state incentives for energy efficient homes. As sea levels rise all around Florida – flooding its coastal cities – DeSantis rants against “the agenda of radical green zealots,” maniacally declaring: “We’re restoring sanity” to energy policy.

If Republican Party strategists wonder why voters think the GOP has gone nuts, look no further than Florida’s authoritarian governor, who’s busy dictating people’s meat choices – and the color of bridges – while his state sinks into the sea.

Do Something!

There’s a lot happening in progressive Florida politics these days—no, really! Check out FloridaRising.org to get involved.

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But now, I’m reassessing, because Cruz keeps descending deeper into self-pity and self-destruction. For example, he’s recently been trying to gut a consumer-friendly rule requiring airlines to make automatic, hassle-free refunds to passengers when their flights are unduly delayed or cancelled. However, kissing up to his airline political donors, Ted’s amendment would put the hassle back in refunds, requiring abused passengers to file written requests to the various impenetrable corporate bureaucracies of airlines to get their money back – maybe… someday.

In fairness, though, Cruz has been working hard to make air travel much easier for one class of travelers: US senators and House members, plus their staffs and families! He wants to make us common taxpayers fund “airport security escorts” for him and other privileged ones, moving them ahead of everyone and zipping them through the screening and boarding process. This, Ted explained, will help in “keeping the flying public safe.”

He really means keeping the public from seeing or interacting at airports with public officials like him. You might recall that, while hundreds of Texans were literally dying during the state’s power grid’s failure in 2021’s calamitous deep freeze, Ted was photographed in tropical attire at Houston’s airport, waiting to board a flight to Cancun, fleeing the cold and his constituents. By getting special airport escorts, though, so-called public servants like Cruz won’t be exposed to public view.

Hello – of all the public needs crying out today for taxpayer funding – where would you rank providing an airport escort for Ted Cruz?

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An extremist right-wing Texas lawyer, Mitchell is actually creepier and all-together more diabolical that your average serpent could think of being. Jonathan slithers around the country as a self-appointed anti-abortion vigilante, terrorizing women’s advocates, health clinics, and doctors. And now (turning truly creepy), he’s singling-out individual womenwith his bullying legalistic theatrics.

By perverting an obscure judicial procedure, called Rule 202, Mitchell threatens to publicly expose and sue women who make an entirely-legal, out-of-state trip to terminate a pregnancy. Moreover, he threatens to sue any of her family, friends, and others who aid or encourage her pursuit of reproductive freedom. Moreover, even without actually suing them, Mitchell proclaims that he can use the coercive power of government to compel each of them to be interrogated.

This gross assertion of theocratic power, wielded by a religious partisan with zero public authority, goes beyond mere tyranny. He is resurrecting the hysterical demagoguery and satanic extremism of Cotton Mather and the Puritan fanatics who fomented the Salem witch trials and executions of the 1690s. Mitchell and his theocratic clique are trying to weaponize Rule 202 so any woman who suffers a miscarriage or is accused by a scorned lover of having an abortion can be subjected to a hostile court-ordered grilling. Mitchell’s witchcrafters don’t need to win or even actually file such frivolous and venomous legal actions, for their goal is raw intimidation. Simply accusing vulnerable women of being abortion witches would force them to hire lawyers and endure public inquisition – or surrender their liberty without due process.

This is Jim Hightower saying… Vipers are not this vicious! To help reject Mitchell’s misogynistic scheme, go to Abortion Access Front: AAFront.org.

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Really – even above the holy Wall Street mandate that medical and insurance conglomerates must squeeze every last penny of profits out of America’s corporate-care system? Well, gosh, they say, let’s not go crazy with this religious stuff! There’s morality… and then there’s business.

Consider how today’s monopolized and financialized hospital networks treat nurses – the high-touch frontline people who do the most to put care in “healthcare.” Paid a pittance, thousands of nurses across America are now organizing and unionizing against the inequities of this system. The nurses core grievance, however, is not their pay, but the gross understaffing imposed on them and their patients by profiteering hospital chains.

In a national survey, more than half of nurses feel “used up” and “emotionally drained.” Why? Primarily because executives keep goosing up profits by eliminating care providers, making it impossible for the remaining, stretched-out staff to meet their own high moral standard of care. That’s demoralizing for nurses… and deadly for patients.

Yet, corporate-care lobbyists loudly squawk that hospital chains can’t afford to pay fair wages and fully staff-up. Ironically, one of the loudest squawkers is the hospital mega-chain, Ascension, a Catholic church offshoot proclaiming to be “rooted in the loving ministry of Jesus as healer.” Some healer. In a devilish partnership with a Wall Street huckster, Ascension has been slashing nursing staffs while paying its CEO $13 million a year, hoarding $18 billion in cash, and allotting a pitiful two percent of its budget for charitable care of the poor.

What the hell! To help battle health care greed, go to NationalNursesUnited.org.

Photo courtesy National Nurses— Austin nurses locked out after a strike.

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The state’s prevailing ethical standard was articulated several years ago when a powerful legislator (nicknamed “Bull of Brazos”) was caught personally profiting from a bill he was pushing: “I’d just make a little bit of money,” he explained dismissively. “I wouldn’t make a whole lot.”

Before rolling your eyes at Crazy Texas, though, consider the sneak attack that Corporate America is now making to legalize the wholesale bribery of every public official in America. Their ploy is a cynical effort to redefine bribery. Paying officials to do corporate favors, they insist, should only be considered a bribe if the payoff is arranged before the favor is done. Yes, with a straight face, these finaglers claim that if the payment comes after an official delivers the goods, it’s not a bribe, but simply a “gratuity.” Like tipping a waiter for good service.

Even the flimflammers Congress would balk at voting for such a blatant perversion of language and public integrity. So, the corporate connivers have slinked over to the corrupt plutocratic partisans on the Supreme Court, beseeching them to – Hocus Pocus! – autocratically decree that wrong is right. And they probably will, since a majority of the Supremes have themselves accepted corrupt freebies from corporate patrons. Take Clarence Thomas, please! He’s been given millions in corporate bribes (excuse me, “gratuities”), so he’s hardly an unbiased judge of official corruption.

To fight the stench of this legal freak show, go to Campaign Legal Center: campaignlegal.org.

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Now, apparently having run out of freedoms to ban, here they come with a twisted attempt to politicize another of our inalienable rights: The pursuit of happiness! They’ve launched a campaign of psycho-babble, preaching that those who embrace progressive ideas and causes are doomed to a life of perpetual unhappiness. “Don’t go there!” they squawk.

This babbaloney is even being advanced by such self-proclaimed “serious” conservatives as New York Times pundit, Ross Douthat. He recently opined that “The left-wing temperament is, by nature, unhappier than the moderate and conservative alternatives.” Yes, Douthat insists that we progressives are hampered by “a refusal of contentment,” unlike the joyful serenity enjoyed by right-wingers.

Golly, Ross, how could we have missed the conservative blissfulness inherent in Donald Trump’s perpetual glower and nastiness? And that snarling, right-wing gaggle of quacks, prima donnas, and haters in Congress sure offers a fine public example of intrinsic conservative conviviality.

But Douthat plunges deeper into his dark rabbit hole, theorizing that “youth unhappiness” increases “the further left you go.” Not sure how many progressive youngsters he’s actually met, but I’ve been lucky to meet and work regularly with young champions of environmental justice, union organizing, women’s rights, etc. They have continuously lifted my spirits with their optimism, sense of fun, and jubilant camaraderie.

And, by the way, young progressives don’t need me – much less an aloof, dour conservative – speaking for them. They have their own voice and are on the way up – laughing at the likes of Douthat.

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Woe is us (the American people) for having our jewel of a national Postal Service saddled with a corporate-minded Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy. Formerly CEO of a private shipping contractor, DeJoy’s chief qualification for running this invaluable public service is that he’s been a major donor to Republican politicians – including Donald Trump, who appointed him to the post.

In 2020, the new honcho put forth a 10-year scheme to “save” the people’s post office by imposing boilerplate corporate tactics – downsize staff, cut service, and raise prices. He gave his plan a zippy PR slogan: “Delivering for America.” But delivering less for more is a hard sell, and people soon started rebelling against absurdly late delivery, closure of local branches, long lines at understaffed postal counters, and relentless price hikes, including another 8-percent increase this year.

Excuse my bad play on words, but there is no joy in seeing an essential public service needlessly gutted. Millions of us rely on timely mail delivered by the amazing network of public postal workers. Their linking of any one zip code to all others is a pillar of our democracy, not only servicing the well-off and corporate elites, but crucial to small businesses, rural communities, people getting medicines by mail – as well as to millions of us wanting to vote by mail this November.

Four years of DeJoy’s corporate gimmicks to “improve” our postal service by shriveling it have proven disastrous – and the harm is spreading. Enough! This is a time when your voice can matter, for a bipartisan outcry is demanding that Congress and/or the postal board of governors step in pronto to terminate DeJoy’s political meddling. For information and ACTION go to: TakeOnWallSt.com.

Photo: Rachel Bradshaw and Norwood News

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Agreed. Yet, losing in politics is sometimes a prelude to winning, calling not for despair, but a doubling down on principle and organizing. Take the revolutionary presidential platform put forth by the upstart, unabashedly progressive People’s Party in 1892. It was stunning in its little-d democratic boldness, directly challenging corporate power. The populists became the first to support an 8-hour day and minimum wage for labor, women’s suffrage, graduated income taxes, government farm loans to bypass bank monopolies, veterans’ pensions, direct lawmaking by citizen initiatives… etc.

Wall Street and the two-party duopoly soon conspired to crush the People’s Party. But they could not stop its ideas, which grew in popular support and were largely enacted by state and national governments. This democratic reformation occurred because (1) the populists were unabashedly bold, (2) their ideas were solid, benefitting the Common Good, and (3) their political heirs were organized and persistent.

That same rebellious spirit remains at the heart and soul of today’s people’s politics. For example, while 2011’s Occupy Wall Street uprising was autocratically crushed, resurgent labor progressives are now carrying its ideals forward… and winning! Likewise, America’s scrappy democratic soul is being expressed every day by grassroots groups of rural poor people battling corporate polluters, child care workers struggling for decent pay, local people standing up to Silicon Valley arrogance and Wall Street greed… etc.

Americans are on the move against plutocratic and autocratic rule. They need a party to move with them.

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For Guthrie, “politics” meant more than voting, since both parties routinely cough-up candidates who meekly accept the business-as-usual system of letting bosses and bankers control America’s wealth and power. It’s useless, he said, to expect change to come from a “choice” between Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber. Instead, common folks must organize into a progressive movement with their own bold change agenda, become their own candidates, and create a politics worth voting for.

Pie in the sky? No! Periodic eruptions of progressive grassroots insurgencies have literally defined America, beginning with that big one in 1776. Indeed, we could take a lesson today from another transformative moment of democratic populism that surged more than a century ago, culminating in “The Omaha Platform of 1892.” This was in the depths of the Gilded Age, a sordid period much like ours, characterized by both ostentatious greed and widespread poverty, domination by monopolies, rising xenophobia, institutional racism – and government that ranged from aloof to insane.

But lo – from that darkness, a new People’s Party arose, created by the populist movement of farm and factory mad-as-hellers. They streamed into Omaha to hammer out the most progressive platform in US history, specifically rejecting corporate supremacy and demanding direct democracy.

That platform reshaped America’s political agenda, making the sweeping reforms of the Progressive Era and New Deal possible. As one senator said of the Omaha rebellion, it was the start of robber baron wealth flowing “to all the people, from whom it was originally taken.” And that’s what Woody Guthrie meant by “politics.”

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But here comes Coke again, pushing an even worse product: “A Better Plastic Bottle,” trumpeting it as “100% Recycled.” Coke really needs an environmental PR goose-up, because today’s consumers know and care a lot about the massive plastic contamination of our planet – and Coke has been ranked as the globe’s number one plastic polluter for six years in a row!

Problem is, the corporation’s recycling hype is a fraud, for plastic is a fossil fuel polymer that essentially is forever. Even though most of us dutifully put throw-away containers in recycling bins, the industry’s dirty secret is that 95 percent of plastics can’t be recycled, so they’re simply burned, dumped in landfills, or tossed “away.” In a February report, The Center for Climate Integrity reveals that the plastics-industrial-complex has been like Big Tobacco and Big Oil – intentionally fabricating, promoting, and profiting from a mass-market scam for decades. As the Climate Center commented, “The only thing the plastics industry has actually recycled is their lies, over and over again.”

But, taking another lesson from tobacco and oil, Big Plastic figures that if one lie stops working, tell a bigger one. So, Coca-Cola is presently gushing about “better” plastic bottles, while plastic manufacturers are so desperate to keep peddling environmental contamination that their new media blitz frantically insists, “Recycling is Real!”

Of course, their “new” claims are nothing but re-fabricated prevarications. Meanwhile, the industry is planning to dump 300 percent more plastic on us in the next few years. Hello, let’s get real – the only way to stop planet-choking plastic contamination is to stop making the stuff.

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It comes from Hizzoner Eric Adams, the present mayor of New York City. Like mayors everywhere, Adams is routinely expected to respond to city council members, state reps, members of Congress, and other elected officials who ask for help on city issues and problems affecting the people they represent. After all, that’s how it’s supposed to work – local folks have an issue needing city attention, so they go to officials in their local community who can carry this issue to the top level. Most of these matters are resolved by – hello – relevant officials simply having a phone call, a quick meeting, or even an email exchange.

But no – the Big Apple’s mayor has decreed that elected officials needing to discuss concerns of their constituents may NOT speak directly to him. Nor may they simply speak with his staff, meet with, or engage with agency heads, or other mayoral personnel who could help the people. Rather, Adams has decreed that supplicants wanting to approach the city’s public servants must submit a seven-page, online “engagement request.” The mayor’s intergovernmental office will review each one, then decide whether to grant or deny any official engagement.

An Adams gatekeeper hailed this bureaucratic intake process as a “new and exciting tool” to “impose operational efficiency and streamline requests.” Golly – even George Orwell couldn’t have conjured up a statement as soul-sucking as that!

Streamlined efficiency is the ultimate virtue for automatons and authoritarian regimes – NOT for public officials in a democratic society. Democracy is necessarily slower-paced, deliberative, and inclusive. And it does not require – or accept – filling out a seven-page form to “engage” with your mayor.

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It’s widely known, of course, that Ted Cruz, Greg Abbott, and most other top Republican officials here are obsequious Trump acolytes. Thus, Texas is infamously racing against Florida to be declared the stupidest, meanest, most-repressive state government in America, constantly making demonic attacks on women’s freedom, immigrants, voting rights, public schools, poor people, and so on. But I’m confident Texas will win this race to the bottom for one big reason: GOP crazy runs extraordinarily deep here.

We have a county-level layer of ultra-MAGA cultists constantly pressing the state’s far-right officials to march all the way to the farthest edge of extremism – then leap into absurdity. Therefore, the party officially supports abolishment of labor unions, elimination of the minimum wage, privatization of social security, legalization of machine guns, and… well, you get the drift. Now, though, local mad-dog Trumpistas are pushing their party straight into the abyss of autocracy by declaring war on H-E-B.

What’s that? H-E-B is a Texas chain of supermarkets beloved in communities throughout the state. “Beloved,” because the stores fully embrace the rich diversity of all people in our state, has affordable prices, values employees, and supports community needs.

Nonetheless, county Republican zealots screech that H-E-B violates their party ideology by accepting food stamps, opposing privatization of schools, and (horrors!) sponsoring some LBGTQ pride events. So, they’re demanding official condemnation of the grocery chain for – GET THIS – “advocating for policies contrary to the Republican Party of Texas platform.”

Yes, violating the party platform is to be criminalized. It’s the reincarnation of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: Be MAGA… or else.

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An odd rhetorical twist, but it would be helpful if today’s ego-bloated, high-tech billionaires and corporate profiteers had a bit of self-restraint, rather than thinking their money equals genius. For example, such doofuses are presently pushing convoluted schemes to “solve” our globe’s technology-caused climate crisis with – what else? – technology.

Their latest box of Pandoras includes a grandiose plan to “geoengineer” carbon dioxide, the destructive gas spewed into our air by the production and use of fossil fuels. The geniuses say they have the techno-knowhow to suck-up that bad gas and pump it a mile deep into the Earth. See, problem gone! All they need, they say, is for taxpayers to put up trillions of dollars.

Who’s behind this hustle? Oil giants. Yes, the same prevaricating snake oil salesmen who cause most of the suffocating CO2 pollution that’s rapidly cooking our planet! Such petro-peddlers as Occidental Petroleum are now trying to re-brand themselves as “carbon management” experts, asking us to trust them to re-engineer our atmosphere. But they’re frauds – their magical “Vacuum Cleaner in the Sky” won’t remove even one-percent of the new carbon emissions released every year.

Worse, Occidental says it intends to keep much of the CO2 it vacuums up, using the gas to force more oil out of the ground – thus creating more global warming! As Occidental’s CEO gleefully puts it, geoengineering “gives our industry a license to continue to operate for… 60, 70, 80 years.”

Razzle-dazzle technology is not a climate solution. It’s a business-as-usual lie told by profiteers desperate to keep burning fossil fuels – and our globe.

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Hello Lowdowners! DZ here. Apologies for the delay getting the recording of last week’s Happy Hour out to you all— there was a problem with the audio which took a minute to find a fix. You’ll hear that Hightower still sounds a little distorted here and there, and I apologize for that! I figured out what went wrong when we recorded, so, fingers crossed, it shouldn’t happen again.

We covered a LOT of ground in this session: breaking the two-party duopoly, poor people’s food, Netanyahu versus Gaza, how Texas turned red, who’s doing good grassroots organizing, Thomas Paine, and much more. Plus a lot of laughs (and a few extra tech snafus) along the way! Below you’ll find the links we put into the live chat, as well as a full transcript of the video. Enjoy, and we’ll see you at the next one!

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But it’s important to realize that, for 250 years, this invaluable public service has delivered more than mail. It was – and is– a core element of our national unity. Its network of local employees go door-to-door, coast-to-coast, six days a week in every zip code, physically linking America’s widely dispersed, wildly diverse people into one country. It is a universally-popular and essential government service that works!

Yet – as we’ve seen with such other valued public assets as our schools and parks – no flower is so beneficial to the Common Good that selfish corporate opportunists won’t try to pluck it for their private gain. So for years, corporate profiteers and laissez-faire ideologues have been plucking apart the budget, staff, branches, and historic mission of the Post Office.

Their scheme is to shrivel service, foment public dissatisfaction with the agency, demand evermore cuts in staff and branches – then push for a corporate takeover and downsizing of this universal, nationwide delivery network. It’s not just a piece of government they’re trying to eliminate, it’s the core idea of America itself, namely our people’s can-do democratic spirit and commitment to the Common Good.

Rather than meekly accepting this corporate retreat from our egalitarian ideals, let’s reassert our rebellious spirit. For starters, we can help the feisty American Postal Workers Union push a “People’s Postal Agenda.” It outlines ways to reinvent and expand the public services that this grassroots network of employees and local branches is uniquely able to provide. For info and action go to apwu.org.

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That’s a lyric in Bob Dylan’s “Oxford Town,” a 1962 song deploring the relentless murdering of Black people and civil rights activists in the Deep South. The line mocks the refusal of racist officials to punish the White murderers, instead cynically covering up atrocities by promising do-nothing “investigations.”

Six decades later, the depraved ethic of Oxford Town is allowing Israel’s indiscriminate carpet-bombing of Gaza, wreaking horror at a genocidal pace on the Palestinian people. So far, some 33,000 Palestinians have been slaughtered, with another 75,000 horribly injured – and two-thirds of these victims are children and women. Hundreds of thousands more face imminent starvation because their homes, cities, and entire economy have been blown to smithereens. Adding to the depravity, Israel’s fanatical ruler, Benjamin Netanyahu, restricts humanitarian aid from reaching the Palestinian people.

Yet our government is Netanyahu’s biggest international apologist and enabler! Oh, for sure our officials condemn each of his atrocities, loudly demanding “a full investigation.” But even when investigations happen, they produce no punishment… and no change in our shameful open-ended policy of annually supplying the billions of US dollars and mega-weapons he’s now using to exterminate the innocent men, women, and children of Gaza. Thus, the horrendous 2,000-pound bombs he’s dropping on Palestinians bear our US flag.

President Biden said last week that he’s heartbroken by the relentless killing of innocent Palestinians, calling it “unacceptable.” Then he accepted it! Even as he expressed anguish, Biden authorized a shipment of another $18 billion-worth of US bombs and jets to Netanyahu.

Washington keeps sending killer weapons to – then, when they’re fired at innocents, we piously demand useless investigations and request (pretty please) that Netanyahu “bomb responsibly.” Gosh, why isn’t that working?

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This nasty toxic (widely used in construction materials, car parts, and even water systems), infiltrates lungs and kills some 40,000 Americans a year, especially firefighters. For the last 30 years, victims, health advocates, and others have been pushing to stop using the deadly stuff – but chemical profiteers and the politicians they pay kept defeating these efforts.

In 2016, though, Congress finally empowered the EPA to ban it.

Great! But that same year, Trump happened. With his usual deep analysis, concern for workers, and respect for science, he mindlessly proclaimed asbestos “100 percent safe,” even declaring that the movement to ban it was “led by the mob.” Thus, his EPA did nothing… and deaths continued.

Then came Joe Biden, and – Hallelujah! – EPA has now announced that it is “finally slamming the door on manufacturing, importing, and using chrysotile asbestos.” When? Twelve years from now. What? Yes, that’s a very sloooow-motion slamming. Biden wanted the ban to take effect in two years, but industry lobbyists screeched. So, our government chose not to “rush” to aid firefighters and others who’ll be killed by this policy of putting corporate profits over their lives.

Remember this whenever political hucksters demand that you vote to eliminate “regulatory burdens.” Burdens for whom – asbestos peddlers or firefighters? And beware: Here comes Trump again, promising to eliminate public regulations if he’s elected. Really? Who will benefit from that?

Do something!

To learn more about fighting toxic chemicals and to advocate for sound policy, check out the Environmental Working Group.

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Consider their far-fetched of Laissez-fairyland tale that by allowing corporate giants to dodge the billions of tax dollars they owe to our country, the top executives of those corporations will plow that money into new jobs, products, and services for the Common Good. The ideologues assure us innocents that this is the “magic of the marketplace.”

But remember: Magicians don’t perform magic – they perform illusions. In this case, since the law does not require that such tax windfalls be invested for the public good, they aren’t. Instead, the corporate barons simply pocket the money.

A diligent watchdog group, Institute for Policy Studies, recently documented this by analyzing financial data of 35 enormously profitable giants, including Tesla, T-Mobile, and Duke Energy. Over a four-year period, these 35 lavished pay of $9.5 billion on their honchos. Even for giants, that’s an extravagant payout. Where’d the money come from? Tax dodging. Combined, these outfits paid zero in federal taxes, and even extracted nearly $2 billion in refunds.

To rationalize this handout, free market ideologues clam that corporations are just like ordinary taxpayers, merely taking a few legal deductions to lower their tax bill. But wait – tax laws aren’t handed down on stone tablets, applying equally to everyone. When’s the last time Congress asked you to help write one law? Instead, America’s tax code is an arcane work of gobbledygook literally written in back rooms by corporate lobbyists – which is why powerful corporations get special breaks to evade taxes… and you don’t.

To see through such corporate scams and help end this corruption, connect with Institute for Policy Studies: ips-dc.org.

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What is this miraculous substance? Oil.

Huh? Yes, that filthy scourge of our planet and health, is being ballyhooed as our globe’s energy and environmental salvation! By whom? Of course: The American Petroleum Institute, the powerhouse lobbying front for ExxonMobil and other petro-profiteers. API recently bragged that it will pour tens of millions of dollars into a PR Blitz during this year’s presidential election to demonize clean energy sources and demand that government promote more fossil fuel production.

API’s campaign slogan is “Lights On Energy” – but the luminosity of its media message is mighty dim. Start with the fact that Big Oil has zero public credibility, having routinely gouged us on prices for years and knowingly lied to us for decades about not causing climate change.

Second, the demand by oil barons that government “quit intruding into the free market” by encouraging alternative energy is a whiney embarrassment. Hello – for more than a century, oil corporations have gorged on billions and billions of dollars in taxpayer handouts – and they are in line to keep getting $2.5 billion a year in corporate welfare for the next decade! (Didn’t their mommas ever teach them not to talk with their mouths full?)

Also pathetic is their partisan wail that President Biden is restricting their production and profits. Hello again: US oil production reached a record high last year, Big Oil’s profits are soaring, and they’re now jacking up our gas prices again. Meanwhile, 2023 was the hottest year our globe ever recorded.

Let’s reflect the heat back on these greedheads. For facts and action items, go to fossilfree4health.org.

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Two Supreme Court justices say it is. Elevating collegiality above social justice, right-wing extremist Amy Coney Barrett and progressive jurist Sonia Sotomayor have jointly been hailing America’s top Court as a model of genteel political discourse, claiming that the six Republicans and three Democrats disagree agreeably. “We do not interrupt one another, and we never raise our voices,” Barrett primly lectured to a recent conference of civics teachers. Sotomayor chimed in that Court decorum frowns on any internal comments that “could be viewed [by other justices] as hurtful.”

How sweet that the Supremes are so judiciously cordial inside their marble sanctuary. But how bitter that the Court’s lockstep Republican ideologues are so crudely slapping down women’s rights, running roughshod over our environmental protections, stomping on voting rights, enthroning plutocracy, imposing theocracy… and so awful much more. Yet, when any of the three progressive justices do publicly assail these blatantly partisan, anti-democratic edicts, Barrett decorously decries their “stridency,” demurely chiding that “the Court should turn the national temperature down, not up.”

Yoo-hoo, Madame Supreme, can you even hear yourself? Your very elevation to the High Court was a strident affront to our democracy and to the very idea of justice, rammed through in a flagrantly partisan power play by a lame-duck president and a corrupt Republican senator. Please, spare us your phony lectures on judicial propriety!

America would still be an English colony if the rebels of 1776 had not “stridently” risen up and impolitely confronted the kind of elitist governmental authoritarianism that Barrett & Company wants to re-impose on us. Come on, progressives – get rude! Democracy demands that we be confrontational… not courtly.

Do something!

We love to recommend FixTheCourt.com for ideas and resources on overhauling the Supreme Court. If you’ve got more organizations or people to recommend, leave them for us in the comments!

Photo by Michael on Flickr.

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But wait… those aren’t real newspapers, aren’t local, and aren’t even American. They are Russian fake-news outlets, created in recent weeks by Putin’s propagandists to interfere in our presidential election. They are web publications with names and designs that mimic real US news sites, but have no reporters or local newsrooms. Rather, they exist solely to fabricate “news reports” that appear legitimate, getting picked up and re-reported as fact in under-staffed, chain-owned newspapers, then promoted on right-wing social media sites.

This is what happens to people and democracy when local journalism is stripped away or hollowed out – no one is on regular watch, allowing charlatans, profiteers, and propagandists to dupe unsuspecting residents. Not only have hundreds of papers been eliminated, but half of the remaining dailies are now owned by Wall Street predators like SoftBank, the Japanese hedge fund that controls the huge USA Today/Gannett chain. Their interest is not in your town or quality journalism, but in slashing news coverage to jack up their profits. Such absentee owners have eliminated nearly 60 percent of America’s reporters and other newsroom staff in just 20 years.

Let’s be clear: Real journalism is labor-driven. No reporters on the ground, no local news. Hello – “news” is the lifeblood of democracy, so why hold it hostage to a handful of corporate profit-seekers? Are we such unimaginative clods that we can’t figure out how to finance honest, non-plutocratic news for our democracy?

For ideas on how to revive local news in your town, contact rebuildlocalnews.org – and give news democracy a boost.

Do something!

In addition to Rebuild Local News, check out these groups working to save local news and newsrooms:

* National Trust for Local News

* Cherry Road Media

* Institute for Rural Journalism

* The News Guild

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Sadly, her moment in the national limelight was widely panned, even by Republicans, for her presentation was overwrought and – well, cringey. But the visuals pale to insignificance when you consider that her partisan presentation was based on an intentional, abject lie – exacerbated by her shameful exploitation of a woman who had been brutally raped.

Britt told about a 12-year-old Mexican girl who was the victim of multiple rapes, implying the girl’s horror was caused by “Biden’s border crisis.” Unfortunately for the senator, an alert investigative reporter blew the whistle on her political lie. Yes, the grotesque rapes happened – but 20 years ago, not on Biden’s watch. Indeed, Republican George W. Bush was president! Also, her nightmare occurred in Central Mexico, far from the US border, and it had nothing to do with migrants.

Britt knew she was lying as she dramatically concluded that Biden’s Latino “invasion” (as Republicans demagogically brand desperate refugees) is “almost entirely preventable.” Yes, but guess who helped negotiate a bipartisan bill to end the border crush – then cynically voted to kill the bill because Donald Trump told her to? Katie Britt.

And what about that Mexican woman whose trauma Britt cruelly exploited? She’s now working in Mexico for a non-profit trying to stop human trafficking. Yet, Britt and the GOP didn’t even have the grace to tell her they were going to pervert her story for partisan politics. “I thought it was very strange,” she said when later informed of Britt’s crude re-exploitation of her – adding pointedly that, “The work I do is not a game.”

Do something!

To get involved in the fight against actual human trafficking, and to support survivors, check out organizations like GEMS and the United Way.

Be extremely careful when getting involved with organizations claiming to work on human trafficking; many are fronts for right-wing conspiracy theorists and exploit their communities themselves.

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He was Thomas Paine, a prolific, profound, persuasive, and widely popular pamphleteer in the movement for American Independence. With plain language and genuine passion for the cause, Paine’s 47-page pamphlet, Common Sense, was so compelling in its support of the Revolution that it was passed around from person to person – and even read aloud in taverns! But Paine wasn’t content with democratic rhetoric – he actually believed in an egalitarian society, and his post-revolution writings (including Age of Reason, and Agrarian Justice) unabashedly demanded that the new hierarchy of US leaders fulfill the promise of democracy.

Even before the War for Independence, Paine called for slaves to be freed and slavery prohibited. After the war, he terrified most of the gentlemen of means who’d signed the Declaration of Independence by insisting that non-landowners be eligible to vote and hold office (John Adams was so appalled by this that he decried Common Sense as a “crapulous mess”).  But Paine just kept pushing, calling for women’s suffrage, progressive taxation, state-funded childcare, a guaranteed minimum income, universal public education, strict separation of church and state, and adoption of some of the democratic principles of the Iroquois Nation.

This is Jim Hightower saying… Don’t tell small-minded, right-wing demagogues like Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott – but Thomas Paine was WOKE! Some 250 years before their push to impose autocracy, plutocracy, and theocracy over us, this revolutionary founder championed social justice and economic fairness. As one historian noted, “we are today all Paine’s children,” for he imbued America’s destiny with democratic impulse and aspiration.

PS, from the staff— Hightower was recently given the Thomas Paine award by the Florida Veterans for Common Sense, where he learned a ton about Paine that he never knew. Hence the inspiration for this commentary! Thanks FLVCS!

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We so-called “woke” people have been the target of far-right politicos and front groups that are frantically trying to ban us and our ideas from America’s political discourse. In the past few years, such thuggish gubernatorial demagogues as Ron DeSantis have perverted the power of Big Government to attack teachers, librarians, public agencies, and even beer. Beer!

Why? Because such people and organizations make educational efforts to reduce bigotry, hatred, and exclusiveness in our society. “That’s woke,” screech the ultra-rightists, demanding that any talk about racism, sexism, gender discrimination, or other ugly realities in America must be suppressed.

Like the witch hunters of old, today’s pious puritans of ideological conformity have demonized such basic values as diversity and equity, calling them “toxic.” DeSantis outlawed any teaching of them in Florida universities, and then he cut sociology from the core curriculum of the state’s educational system – essentially cutting out “us,” the study of humanity.

If ignorance is bliss, the DeSantis clique must be ecstatic, for they are eliminating crucial lessons in the art of tolerance, community, sharing, collaboration… and getting along together. You can have a society that works for the benefit of all – or a DeSantisWorld, where the few rule, and everyone else is forced to conform to their biases.

This is Jim Hightower saying… But wait – the great majority of Americans are rebelling and saying: “We are woke!” Even Republicans flatly rejected DeSantis’ presidential campaign that promised to “Floridize” America with anti-WOKE nonsense. And far from wanting to reverse efforts to increase diversity and inclusiveness, a recent poll found that 70 percent of Americans (including half of Republicans) say our country “needs to do more to increase social justice.”

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Sunglasses? Check. Beach umbrella? Check. Tinted car windows? Check. A huge, multi-trillion-dollar parasol floating in outer space to reduce global warming? Uh… huh?

Ready or not, here come the corporate hucksters and techno-fantasists with a dazzling scheme to prevent climate-change without requiring any actual change in human behavior. Amazing! It’s easy, they exclaim: Simply put a massive SpaceBrella, between us and El Sol, and – voila! – it will block enough of those bad ol’ sunrays to lower the planet’s temp enough for us to keep trucking.

This is indeed simple – as in “simpleton”. It reminds me of the 1950’s atomic bomb drills we had in elementary school, when we tykes were instructed to protect ourselves by crouching under our desks.

Today’s SpaceBrella hawkers offer the same sort of approach: Since political and corporate powers aren’t doing near enough to prevent cataclysmic climate disaster, they cheerfully say we can hide under their phantasmagoric space shield. That way, we won’t have to bother Big Oil, Big Coal, and other money powers with our demands to convert from an exploitative fossil-fuel economy to climate-friendly fuels and sustainable systems.

It’s embarrassing that this clique of profiteers, politicians, and so-called scientists should be so frivolous as to propose that humanity dodge reality and fritter away our future on such a gimmick. The real solution is right here on Earth, basically requiring that we STOP THE STUPIDITY!

These techno-money schemes are like Icarus, the mythological Greek character who created wings of wax and feathers so he could fly – but he flew too close to the sun, and his wings melted, so he plunged to his death in the sea.

Do something

Here on Earth, there are loads of environmental justice organizations taking serious action on climate change—and many of them are led by young people, to boot. Here are a few of our favorites:

* Gen-Z for Change

* Zero Hour

* Black Girl Environmentalist

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But sometimes a product really needs no hype – like this new one I’ve learned about that’s damn-near magical! It’s a non-polluting, affordable, natural, job-creating, alternative to plastic stuff. No, seriously – come back here – this is real!

The only fib in my pitch is the word “new.” Actually, this product is ancient. It’s cork, used for thousands of years by Persians, Egyptians, Greeks, and others to make shoers, fishing gear, etc. But now, it’s a sustainable, regenerative material that all sorts of enterprising outfits are using for home construction, clothing, electric cars, spacecraft… and more.

Maybe like me, you’ve pulled many a wine cork without thinking where does this thing come from? Trees! In particular, the bark of evergreen, Mediterranean cork tress that live for some 200 years. But how sad to cut them down for wine stoppers! No, no – the bark is carefully harvested by skilled workers… then it grows back over about nine years and can be harvested again… and again, creating steady income for small farms. The tree is climate friendly, drought-tolerant, and fire resistant, and the cork itself is renewable, reusable, and biodegradable. Even cork dust is used to produce energy.

Before we let corporate profiteers turn Earth (and us) into a throwaway plastic dump, let’s recognize that nature is the greatest technologist ever. So maybe cooperating with her can be more beneficial than constantly trying to overpower and trash her.

Do something!

To get involved with recycling cork, check out the work of Recork.com.

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A classic case is now unfolding around last year’s derailment of a 2-mile-long Norfolk Southern freight train in East Palestine, Ohio. The community’s air, soil, water, and people suffered a massive spill of toxic chemicals.

So, following the corporate crisis script, Step One was for the CEO to offer “thoughts and prayers” for victims. Step Two: Reject corporate blame, but promise a “thorough investigation.” Three: Magnanimously pledge to work with lawmakers to prevent future disasters. And Four: Quietly unleash your pack of lobbyists to gut any effective change in the law.

Norfolk honchos are now pushing hard on Point Four. CEO Alan Shaw recently reiterated the corporation’s promise of reform, but – shhhh—he quietly orchestrated a $17 million increase in the rail industry’s Congressional lobbying to kill or drastically weaken safety proposals that Norfolk had publicly embraced after the wreck. But he keeps talking reform, slyly assuring locals that Norfolk would be “continuing our engagement” with lawmakers.

“Engagement” is a euphemism for payments. Rail executives have poured beaucoup bucks into such compliant congress critters as Troy Nehls, the Republican chair of a rail safety subcommittee. He recently wailed that Congress must not impose “more burdensome regulations and all this other stuff” on the poor multibillion-dollar giants. Also, Sen. John Thune, an industry-financed asset who formerly was a lobbyist for railroads (!), has tried to derail even modest safety proposals following last year’s derailment, callously calling them a “stalking horse for onerous regulatory mandates and union giveaways.”

May I just say the obvious? These people are disgusting excuses for human beings.

Photo by Paula R. Lively on Flickr

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Cheap meat! Ethical meat! Animal meat you love – beef, chicken, pork, fish, etc. – all produced without animals! It’s the miracle of “meatless meat” – a viscous mass derived from “fetal bovine serum,” then grown not on ranches, but in huge vats in corporate factories. Science marches on!

Until it meets reality. Just three years ago, lab-meat hucksters had bedazzled high-tech investors, and gullible media commentators into believing the food future was now. Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Peter Thiel, and other tech billionaires had jumped in with big bucks, as did Tyson Foods and global hedge funds. A New York Times editorialist exulted, “This isn’t just science fiction,” demanding that President Biden “supercharge this industry” by putting our government’s “money and muscle” into “a moonshot for meatless meat.”

So… years later, where’s the beef?

Still on the hoof. The wondrous claim that food futurists could “grow” millions of tons of meat in only 15 days from a single drop of cells was just another pile of bovine excrement. They were raising money rather than doing science, so their billions of dollars and industrial vats of “cell slurry” have only produced a few sad strands of cultured protein. That’s not a hamburger… much less a future.

Even if these monetized technocratic “geniuses” could eliminate animals from animal agriculture, that’s not real change, for it leaves the monopolistic industrial structure and the profiteering anti-democratic ethic of today’s food system in place. Moreover, agriculture is not a technology, it is a rich blend of culture, history, family, and community. Change will not come from the hubris and dull imaginations of plutocratic tech billionaires, but from long term cultivation of these organic, grassroots sources of progressive policies.

Photo by Ivan Radic on Flickr

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It expresses a sketchy legal theory asserting that rulers in one state have a right to enforce their laws in another state. The most prominent use of it was in the infamous Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, requiring officials in Northern anti-slave states to capture and return escaped slaves to their plantation “owners” in the South, thus applying Southern slave laws in Northern jurisdictions. This abomination was finally repealed in 1864.

But, 160 years later, here comes another faction of right-wing zealots trying to revive the slave-law concept of extraterritoriality – this time applying it to any and all American women who dare to make their own reproductive health decisions. I’m ashamed to say that this repressive use of the doctrine is being led by my state’s misogynistic governor, Greg Abbott, and our corrupt attorney general, Ken Paxton – two tyrannical men who’ve already saddled Texas women with the most draconian abortion ban in the country, including piously forbidding abortion in cases of rape and incest.

Thus, for women to obtain their inherent right to control their own bodies, they’re forced to travel to nearby states. Uh-uh, bark brutish Texas’ political extremists, we’ll ban that, too! Thus, they’ve pushed a flagrantly-unconstitutional scheme to outlaw the use of public roads to drive out-of-state for care, and they’ve even sanctioned right-wing vigilantes to follow suspected medical travelers to doctors beyond our borders. And, going full-tilt totalitarian, the Abbott-Paxton posse has demanded that out-of-state-care groups hand over the names and addresses of Texas women they’ve helped to get out-of-state care.

Talk about government overreach! Big Brother isn’t just watching… he’s stalking you. To oppose this brutish repression – and to keep it from coming to your state – visit RewireNewsGroup.com/abortion.

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Oh, the paper still comes, but it’s just paper, minus the news part – news that our community once counted on to keep up with local government doings, corporate shenanigans, citizen actions, and other critical features of our city’s democratic life. What happened? Wall Street profiteers swept in a few years ago to conglomeratize, homogenize, and financialize, the Statesman.

It’s now a money cog in the Gannett/USA Today chain of some 200 major dailies that the syndicate seized. Indeed, Gannett itself is wholly owned by SoftBank, a Japanese hedge fund. Those distant bankers are not interested in local news, but in slashing news staffs to fatten their profits. In Austin alone, Softbank has cut two-thirds of the paper’s journalists since taking over – and coverage of local stories has also plunged by two-thirds.

Interestingly, the Statesman recently ran a front-page piece about a local union protest by flight attendants demanding fair wages. On that same day, the paper also reported that Uber and Lyft drivers were striking in Austin. But wait – at the same time, the Statesman journalists were picketing right in front of the paper’s office, protesting the greed of SoftBank/Gannett and the demise of local news. Curiously, Statesman editors did not consider this local news about our newspaper to be news, so they cravenly kept this important information from the people.

Austin was not alone in this news blackout by the chain’s managers. Journalists at a dozen other Gannett papers – from Akron to South Bend – were picketing, yet, none of those papers ran a peep about their journalists’ defense of local news. Nor did Gannett’s flagship paper, USA Today, mention this nationwide union rebellion by its own journalists.

To support journalists and real journalism, go to newsguild.org.

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In this case, King’s linguistic backflip was virtuous, for it killed a bad bill. But now come banking giants themselves doing a shameful backflip on their widely publicized scout’s honor promise to do the right thing for humanity on a true life-and-death issue: Climate change.

It was only two years ago that Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and other Wall Street behemoths loudly proclaimed their conversion to environmental responsibility. In ads, interviews, and speeches, they solemnly vowed they would no longer finance new coal, oil, and other fossil fuel projects which are the major cause of global warming. The bankers promised to protect the “fragile ecosystem and the rights of Indigenous Peoples.” Hooray!

But that was so yesterday – way back in 2022. Today, the prevailing political winds are coming from howling right-wingers denouncing environmental values and “woke capitalism.” So, the pusillanimous bankers are now saying that a promise is not forever (or even two years) – as they default on their enviro responsibility. Instead, they’re refocusing on a messy mix of fossil fuels, and – maybe – they’ll toss in a few clean energy projects. Or not.

Chase Bank weaseled out of its latest climate action commitment with corporate claptrap, declaring that reducing fossil fuel investments “will not successfully achieve the necessary transition of the global energy system.” Yeah, so why bother? Forget what we promised way back when.

Then Wall Streeters wonder why people distrust and despise them!

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Photo: Bob Simpson on Flickr

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That is not only a warm, sweet, sometimes romantic sentiment people express in mid-February on a frilly, red card. It’s also the name of a third-century saint who literally lost his head, a ninth-century pope whose reign lasted only 40 days, three Roman emperors, a very good Mexican hot sauce… and a tiny town in Texas.

That town has a genuinely sweet story to tell and a unique role to play in the sending of thousands of Valentine’s Day sentiments to people around the world. Valentine, Texas, population 217, was founded by the Southern Pacific Railroad in the 1880s and reportedly was named for one of the corporation’s big shareholders. Nothing romantic about that.

But in recent years, would-be cupids have turned the town’s name and – believe it or not – its one-room post office into a center of affectionate expression. What happened is that romantics from distant places began to batch-up their pre-addressed, stamped Valentines and zip them to this postal outpost way out on the Texas-Mexico border. Why? Because, to give their sentimental missives extra oomph, they wanted them to bear the special touch of being mailed from an actual place named Valentine.

The greatest thing about our public postal workers is that they literally deliver, and the Valentine branch goes the extra mile to provide this loving gesture – at no extra charge. Ismelda Ornelas, Postmaster of the 79854 office, handstamps each envelope herself. Indeed, the Valentine post office is now officially designated the “Love Station.” Moreover, the local school district holds an annual art contest among students to design each year’s Valentine postmark, which is then stamped on each envelope.

See, while the media tells us our world is going to hell, here’s another grassroots example of loving, creative people going the other way. Happy Valentine’s Day!

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Originally published February 14, 2023.

Only, this “invasion” (as Donald Trump’s MAGA crowd likes to call it) was not by Latin Americans, but by Anglos descending on Eagle Pass from the North! Indeed, it was an invasion by Trumpista partisans claiming to be “God’s Army.” Organized as a Christian Nationalist crusade, they boasted that a mighty convoy of 700,000 trucks from all across the US would be streaming toward Eagle Pass to “Take Our Border Back.”

What a show of strength! But just when you think the whole country has gone full-tilt bonkers, reality shows up. “God’s Army” actually consisted of about 20 trucks, a babbling rant by Sarah Palin, and a forlorn crowd of… maybe 200 people. Seriously. That was it. The greased pig contest for children at a small county fair in Texas draws more than that.

And, very significantly, many of the Trump “patriots” who came from afar were stunned to find that his frantic claims of hordes of rampaging criminals flooding into the US didn’t exist. “That’s kind of eye-opening,” said one who’d made the long trek to repel the “invaders.” And a 29-year-old local resident expressed the rude truth about the loudly ballyhooed caravan: “What is all of this for? For show,” he exclaimed!

Adding to the sleazy spectacle, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott had convened a dozen other immigrant-bashing GOP governors in Eagle Pass to take advantage of the caravan’s political glow. Imagine their chagrin that their number of high-powered governors, political staffers, and media entourages outnumbered the crowd.

For an honest depiction of God’s Army, go to Vote Common Good: votecommongood.com.

Photo: Truthout

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Unfortunately, this is not a novel, but modern-day reality taking place in 15 states, where rightwing officeholders have scorned a federal program to provide food this summer for millions of children mired in poverty.

No! bark these political ideologues. Seeking to punish poverty, they piously demonize public aid… even for hungry children! This program hardly lavishes luxury dining on anyone, offering only $40 per child in groceries. Not for one meal or even a week, but $40 a month – about a buck-thirty a day. Feast on that!

Yet, the politicos in such deeply impoverished states as Mississippi and Louisiana have arrogantly shunned this minimal assistance their people so desperately need. Worse, so have the mingy governors of super-rich states like Florida and Texas, where millions of children need this food. Also, note that these elitist governors are personally wealthy, yet they have no ethical qualms about taxpayers picking up the tab for their pricey meals.

Then there’s the pathetic duplicity of Iowa governor, Kim Reynolds. She rejected the grocery benefit for her state’s children, asserting that it “does nothing to promote nutrition” and could contribute to childhood obesity. Well, gosh, Gov, providing food has actually proven to be nutritionally beneficial for children. On the other hand, she’s right that denying food to children definitely can cause them to lose weight! Thanks, Kim.

Turning down food assistance for poor children is shockingly callous, just plain mean… and politically stupid, even for right-wing puritanical ideologues. The good news is that 35 states, five US territories, and four Native American tribes have welcomed the summer program. Learn more at FeedingAmerica.org.

Do something!

Fed up with childhood hunger? Take action and learn more with these great organizations:

* Food Research and Action Center

* Center on Budget and Policy Priorites’ Food Assistance work

* Healthy Eating Research

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The latest ploy of this right-wing cabal is to gut the ability of public agencies to issue regulations protecting people from health care rip-offs, consumer price gougers, labor abusers, toxic polluters, and other corporate profiteers. The six-person Republican majority controlling the court is about to decree that when reigning in corporate abuses, public agencies can only take specific regulatory actions that Congress puts into law.

Sounds good in theory, but in real life, Congress has no ability to itemize the ever-changing list of actions needed to stop the abuses. Thus Congress (and “We the People”) rely on the diligence and expertise of agencies to make the law work. So, the court’s sneaky maneuver is just judicial smoke and mirrors, benefitting… well, who?

“Overregulated small businesses,” wailed the court’s six laissez-faire ideologues. Indeed, to make their legal ruling, the six had handpicked a case involving a couple of small fishing companies complaining about federal rules to prevent the overfishing of herring. But wait – look who’s steering those little fishermen’s legal boat: Charles Koch, the ultra-billionaire, anti-regulation extremist! His secretive political operation recruited the herring fishermen to be his corporate pawns and is orchestrating this judicial flimflam.

Moreover, Koch’s surreptitious network also funded and orchestrated the political placement of today’s corporate majority on the Supreme Court.

Yet, America’s corporate media establishment papers over this judicial coup. A recent AP headline, for example, meekly reports that “Conservative Interests Take Aim at Regulations.” No – Koch forces are not conservative, they’re corporate supremacists. And they’re not aiming at “regulations” – but at you and me.

Do something!

We love to recommend FixTheCourt.com for ideas and resources on overhauling the Supreme Court. If you’ve got more organizations or people to recommend, leave them for us in the comments!

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But then there are the pests – such as invasive bugs, monopolistic profiteers… and a new, exceptionally destructive plague: Billionaires. Yes, flocks of predatory ultra-billionaires, wanting not just to gouge farmers, but to take away their farms.

The crassest example of this land grab is happening now in Solano County, California, a bucolic agricultural area just north of San Francisco. A gaggle of narcissistic Silicon Valley tech titans with maximum bank accounts and minimal ethics has arrogantly (and surreptitiously) been spending nearly a billion dollars in an investment hustle to buy out and pave over every farm in the county.

Led by a former Wall Street huckster literally known as “Golden Boy,” the titans pose as altruistic futurists intending to turn this rural county into a magical technetronic haven of urban affluence and sophistication. Agriculture, they say, is the low-yield economy of yesterday, wasting valuable real estate on farming. So, farmers must sell out and get out of the way, allowing so these capitalist visionaries to grow a new “Mega-City of the Future.”

But not everyone in Solano was charmed, with many refusing to sell to Golden Boy. So, flush with self-entitlement, the Silicon Valley Money Lords are trying to muscle the uppity rural holdouts by suing them for – Get This – refusing to sell their farms! The lawsuit is BS, of course, but it’s meant to crush the farmers with legal fees.

Altruistic visionaries? In a note soliciting others to invest in this thuggish thievery, one of the billionaires bluntly touted the syndicate’s real motivation, gushing that the Solano land grab can be spectacularly profitable for investors.

Do something!

A coalition of community and environmental groups has formed Solano Together— visit their website to stay up-to-date on the fight and support their efforts.

Photo by Kiddo27 on Wikimedia Commons

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But Fromholz – a popular singer-songwriter and renown political sprite – was ahead of his time in the political sport of wallbuilding. Instead of steel barriers and miles of nasty of razor wire, Steve proposed preventing Yankee refugees from entering the Lone Star State by planting a 10-foot high, 10-foot thick wall of jalapeño peppers along the length of the Red River. Eat your way through… and you’d be accepted as a naturalized Texan.

I thought of Steve’s impishness when I read that Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, and other Republicans were concocting a whole new xenophobic bugaboo to goose up their anti-immigrant demagoguery. We can’t just fear the “invasion” coming across our Southern border, they cry! Indeed, Haley wailed: “It’s the northern border, too” – adding ominously that we must “do whatever it takes to keep people out.” And then DeSantis piled on, saying we should wall off America’s Canadian border.

Meanwhile, nearly all residents living along that 5,500-mile boundary fear the political wall-mongers more than the imaginary threat of foreigners surging across illegally. “People have always been coming through Canada,” says a clerk at a general store in far-north New Hampshire. Scoffing at the silly political hype, she says: “I don’t think the residents are really worried.”

But Chicken-Little politicos won’t be shooed off by reality. After all, they still have the east, west, and gulf coasts to shut off – so expect them to propose razor wire for the entire US shoreline. Their ridiculousness makes Fromholz’s satire seem rational!

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But – hallelujah! – responding to the outrage of rural neighbors, environmentalists, and animal rights advocates, Oklahoma’s political honchos have since stepped in with regulations to eliminate 90 percent of those CAFOs. Wow! How’d they do that?

The old-fashioned way: Political fraud. At the behest of chicken lobbyists for factory farm giants like Tyson Foods, state lawmakers – Hocus-Pocus! – let CAFOs rebrand themselves as PFOs, “Poultry Feeding Operations.” It’s the same old stink by a new name – only worse. The state’s PFO designation let’s corporate profiteers get away with providing fewer protections for Oklahoma communities they subject to the overwhelming stench, contamination, flies, disease, and other nasties inherent in caging more than 300,000 birds at a time in one spot.

For example, merely switching a factory’s registration from a federal CAFO to a state PFO lets these industrial polluters locate right across the road from family homes, bringing such constant odor, debris, and disease that people can’t open their windows or play in their yard. The PFO scheme also eliminates a requirement that neighbors have to be notified when a chicken factory proposes to locate next door, and state officials even outlawed legal protests against their rubber stamping of water permits for these polluters.

This is Jim Hightower saying… Here’s a solution: Require that a PFO chicken factory be installed next door to the Capitol building—share the stink!

Do something

* Our friends at Farm Aid are working on reforming and restructuring industrial agriculture in a number of different ways— check out their full archive of actions, resources and news.

* Need local inspiration? The people of Pierce County in western Wisconsin are currently fighting a CAFO expansion— and winning, so far. Learn from their work here, and check out the Friday Signpost we wrote about them.

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You and I are never invited to this confab, grandiosely titled “World Economic Forum.” That’s because (1) we’re not corporate or governmental VIPs, and (2) we might raise rude questions like, “Who the hell elected you plutocratic know-nothings and screw-ups to solve world problems – which you largely created?” See? We the People can’t be trusted to be polite.

Indeed, the theme of this year’s forum is, “How Can We Rebuild Trust?” By “we,” they mean the Davos clique itself – the Wall Street bankers, Silicon Valley speculators, various oligarchs, industrial barons, billionaire campaign donors, labor abusers, war mongers, mass polluters, high-tech futurists, and other architects of… well, the mess we’re in.

In our country, only about 10 percent say democracy is working for most Americans today, with the Powers That Be not even trying to serve what the majority believes in, wants, and needs. Economic fairness, social justice, and equal opportunity – our society’s fundamental, unifying values – are being trampled by the greed of moneyed elites and the fear and hatred of small-minded ideological extremists. They squabble over even keeping our government operating and fritter away their time and credibility on crap that undermines public trust.

This is Jim Hightower saying… So, no, Davos crowd, you cannot “rebuild trust,” for no one can trust you. You could gain a real measure of credibility if your elite forum would do something truly significant for democracy, like taking corporate money out of our politics. That would make Davos historic. Otherwise, you’re just partying… and stroking your egos.

Photo by Evangeline Shaw on Unsplash

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The systemic denial of support and general exploitation that Black farmers in America have endured remains a relatively unexplored topic when it comes to progressive social justice stories. The New York Times’ 1619 Project exposed the evolution of Black land ownership with a two-part episode tracing both its roots from the end of slavery (part 1) as well as modern-day injustices like loan discrimination from the USDA (part 2). When Hightower became Agriculture Commissioner, he aimed to create structures supportive of marginalized farmers, especially Black farmers, as corporate agribusiness threatened the livelihoods of farmers across the state. This short documentary from People's History in Texas explores the collaborative, mutual process that the Texas Department of Agriculture (TDA) deployed to make gains for people who had traditionally been left—or pushed—behind.

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What’s at work here is the relentless financial shove of high-dollar gentrification. House by house, block by block, moneyed interests suddenly (and often secretly) buy up properties, bulldozing modest family homes to erect sprawling edifices for the rich. It’s a profiteering money grab that intentionally prices out regular homebuyers. Worse, it also artificially skyrockets property taxes for the area’s longtime homeowners, forcing them to sell out and leave town.

This financial whirligig is enormously destructive to a community’s crucial sense of fairness and… well, community. For one glaring example, look at who likely does NOT live in your city: School teachers, fire fighters, police, nurses, utility crews, and others who’re essential to making any city work.

If the so-called “free-market” can’t (or won’t) provide affordable spaces so these families can “come home,” where they belong, then the community itself must step up to meet the need with creative public initiatives.

The good news is that many cities are doing just that, including where I live. Fed up with losing teachers who endure spirit-sucking hour-long commutes from distant suburbs, Austin’s school board recently created its own affordable housing arm. It’s starting to build hundreds of rental homes affordable to teachers, cafeteria workers, bus drivers, and other school employees. In addition, the district has formed a “public facility corporation” that partners with local developers and groups like Habitat for Humanity to build and sell family homes at prices within reach of the city’s school employees.

Housing is not only a basic human need, but also a community essential that can’t be left to the whims and greed of developers.

Do something

Fighting gentrification requires collaboration across many sectors and issues— here are a few organizations that are working strategically to make things happen:

* The Center for Popular Democracy has affiliates in over 30 states working on a variety of community issues— find one in your state here.

* Right to the City’s national alliance encompasses over 90 community-based racial, economic, gender, and environmental justice organizations.

* Renters Rising is a national alliance of renters working to shift the balance of power between renters and corporate landlords to guarantee that renters are able to live with dignity.

* Learn more: This report from the Center for American Progress on localized anti-displacement policies gives background as well as suggested effective policies in the fight to keep communities intact.

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Oh, wait – that’s the right-wing’s current whitewashed version of King’s dream, scrubbing out his condemnation of brutally-racist White leaders and institutions (which still repress Black progress and foment racial hatred). And far from meekly waiting on “the arc of history,” King rallied people to take immediate action, calling it “the fierce urgency of now.”

He sought “a grand alliance of Negro and White [to] eradicate social evils [that] oppress both White and Negro.” At the time of his assassination, he was actively forging that populist coalition to battle plutocratic wealth.

Indeed, King knew the history he sought to revive. The post-Civil War Populist Movement, he said, “began awakening the poor White masses and the former Negro slaves to the fact that [both] were being fleeced by [Southern aristocrat interests].” That movement, he noted, intended to write a Black-White voting block “to build a great society of justice where none would prey upon the weakness of others; a society of plenty where greed and poverty would be done away.…”

But the unifying, democratic promise of Populism, King rightly explained, so terrified the aristocracy of wealth that its leaders made it “a crime for Negroes and Whites to come together as equals at any level.” Thus moneyed elites effectively killed the people’s Populist party in the 1890s – but not the people’s Populist spirit.

So rather than merely celebrating a birthday, let’s recommit to King’s real dream of a multi-racial, democratic Populism.  

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Hightower isn’t too enthusiastic about celebrating birthdays, but when he turned 80 last year, Laura and Deanna decided to risk it all and get a bunch of his friends and co-conspirators to send him birthday messages. We were blown away by all the wonderful memories and love folks that from different parts of his life shared! Hightower noted in his thank you video (below) that what struck him the most is that folks weren’t just referencing a person, but the efforts to build a real movement over the course of these many decades together.

Our friends gave us permission to share their videos with you, so for your Friday enjoyment, we’ve got them all here for you.

Fortunately, though, we large-brained hominids have evolved an almost-magical resource that promises to be our salvation: Billionaires!

One of the priceless benefits of amassing a multibillion-dollar, self-regenerating pile of wealth is that it automatically establishes you as “A Genius.” Never mind that you’ve most likely acquired your stash through some combination of inheritance, grift, rank exploitation, tax dodging, and such – you’re suddenly treated as a savant whose most fanciful nonsense is now taken seriously by the establishment.

Thus, we presently have two overstuffed money hogs, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, preaching that Earth is a lost cause. But, no problem, for they are designing space technologies that will let a cadre of select humans escape doom by colonizing the Moon and Mars. Using untold billions of our tax dollars, the two are in a PR race to land their spaceships first. But – Hey Bozos! – what then? You think our blue-green planet is hell, try living with no air, water, soil, little gravity, and zero protection from the incessant bombardment of cosmic radiation.

Well, postulate the billionaire space cadets, “we” (actually meaning us taxpayers) will just geoengineer Mars and the Moon, terraforming them into an Earthlike oasis. But wait – as astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson pointed out a decade ago, “If you had the power to terraform Mars into Earth, then you have the power to turn Earth back to Earth.”

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I saw its impact 30 years ago in Austin when a group of young, irreverent democracy activists decided to try limiting corporations that were drowning our local elections in their special-interest campaign cash. The upstart group named their grassroots effort a name that was a bit whimsical, yet pointed: “Austinites For A Little Less Corruption.”

It caught on. Even though the entire corporate, political, and media establishment united in furious opposition to the reform, 70 percent of voters rather joyously shouted, “YES!”

Now, more than ever, we need to rally grassroots Americans in a high-spirited, openly-rebellious campaign to save our people’s historic democratic values. An autocratic coterie of plutocratic supremists with unlimited corporate funding already dominates our elections, public policy, agenda, and our highest courts. It’s not a secret conspiracy – they’re quite open about it!

But forget the days of million-dollar donors – the arsenal of the systemic corruptors has now been nuclearized. For example, Charles Koch has just injected $5 billion in his 2024 political operation. Tim Dunn, an ultra-right-wing Texas oil baron and extremist GOP sugar daddy has just sold his fracking empire for $12 billion, gaining a new gusher of cash to weaponize his intention to impose laissez-faire rule over America.

It’s hard to visualize how much more anti-democratic firepower one gets by spending billions instead of mere millions. Think of the difference not in terms of dollars, but time. If you have a million seconds, that’s 11 days. But a billion seconds – that’s more than 31 years!

We can have no progress – no democracy – without getting corporate money out of America’s political system. For info and action, go to citizen.org.

Do something

To fight the influence of big money in politics, in addition to Public Citizen, check out these organizations’ work:

* Common Cause

* Brennan Center

* Move to Amend

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A corny joke, yet the current US Congress has traveled that same nowhere road all year long in a fruitless attempt to reach agreement on a rewrite of America’s basic Farm Bill. This failure is a very big deal and wholly irresponsible. The bill is a five-year, $700 billion package that not only doles out federal crop subsidies (which have largely gone to huge agribusiness operations), but it also provides food stamps for millions of poor families, money for vital ag conservation programs, and economic development work in thousands of rural counties.

So why the dead end? It’s caused by the same plutocratic/theocratic nuttiness of Republican lawmakers who put their extremist right-wing ideology and corporate servitude above all the other needs of regular people and our country. Because of their internal chaos and political grandstanding, the old status quo Farm Bill had to be extended for another year. Yet, that’s not all bad news, for a whole new constituency has begun rallying to write a truly innovative, forward-looking farm-food-labor climate bill that fosters the Common Good above the exploitative greed of today’s monopolistic, narrow-minded agribusiness complex.

Let’s turn the dead-end year into a positive opportunity to build public support in 2024 for fundamental democratic change in America’s food direction. The way to get there is not through more back-room Washington deals, but by going straight to the people, mobilizing family farmers, food workers, consumers, climate activists, and others behind a revitalized system that works for us.

Photo by Aurora Borealis on Unsplash

Do something

To learn more about the Farm Bill, we recommend Farm Aid’s Farm Bill 101 guide, and their regular updates. (They’ll also give you actions to take when it’s time!)

We’re also fans of RuralOrganizing.org for getting involved in rural support all over the country— after all, the Farm Bill is not just a food bill, it’s a rural infrastructure bill.

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I drafted one for the GOP’s whole ultra-rightist gaggle of lawmakers who keep blocking passage of health coverage for poor people. “Resolved: We will forego the gold-plated socialized health care we now take from taxpayers, because it’s only right that we be in the same leaky boat as our constituents.”

Then there are America’s 735 narcissistic billionaires who obviously need to find a moral compass. They’re so self-absorbed they keep wasting their money and “genius” on phantasmagoric plutocratic schemes to separate their fortunes from the well-being of the rest of us. Then they wonder why they are not beloved. So, rich ones, let me help. Resolve in 2024 to demonstrate a little less hubris/a little more humanity, less strut/more sharing. Practice in front of a mirror – try seeing beyond you to the Common Good. It’s a beautiful and deeply rewarding place if you can find it.

And I didn’t overlook you Washington operatives and Big Money donors of the Democratic Party. Please resolve to camp out in grassroots America this year – where everyday little-d democrats want and need your attention and support. Not just in safe Blue districts, but especially in rural, purple, and even in red areas. You’ve abandoned them in recent years, but they still yearn to build a progressive governing majority for America’s future.

Of course, the problem with New Year’s resolutions is keeping them, and my honorees can’t be counted on. So, we have to keep pushing them to do what’s right.

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That made me think of Rep. Jim Jordan, the GOP’s rattiest, far-right-wing congress critter. There is no documented proof that this extremist partisan was raised on Vangunu, but he sure keeps gnawing on Joe and Hunter Biden, desperately trying to crack open a scandal that simply doesn’t exist. Vikas are powerful, but they’ve not been accused of being smart.

Jordan, the former coach of a boy’s wrestling team, now has his team of House Republicans in a choke hold, draining national media attention to his goofy obsession with impeaching Joe. Impeach him for what? Well, says Jordan, we’re looking for a reason.

He has it bassackwards – real impeachment proceedings start with specific charges of an official’s “high crimes and misdemeanors.” But Coach Jordan is perverting that Constitutional requirement by first accusing Biden of high crimes, then holding hearings in hopes of finding one. But poor Jim – it turns out to be easier for him to bite through a coconut than to fabricate a Biden crime.

But Jordan keeps gnawing, wasting Congress’ time, staff, and credibility (plus millions of taxpayer’s dollars) scuttling down trails that go nowhere. Meanwhile, as he and the GOP House prioritize their clownish political agenda, they can’t perform the basics of government, which is simply to keep essential public services funded and functioning.

Unable to govern, Republican leaders abruptly stopped working in the House in early December, saying they’ll get serious next year. But, uh-oh, the vika congressman has just announced he’ll hold more impeachment hearings next year so he can keep gnawing at the Biden coconut.

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Recently, however, teenagers and 20-somethings have turned that snide sentiment into a positive challenge directed at doomsayers of all ages who claim nothing can be done to stop runaway global warming: “OK, Doomer,” these young climate activists respond. It’s their shorthand way of saying to do-nothing fatalists. Give up if you want, but please step aside while we organize and mobilize for climate sanity.

Our globes’s fast-warming, catastrophe-creating climate is more than just another issue – it has become a generational cause for young people. Indeed, 62 percent of young voters support totally phasing out fossil fuels, and they’re channeling their anger about official inaction toward both political parties. Such feisty grassroots groups as Gen-Z for Change, Zero Hour, Black Girl Environmentalist, and Our Children’s Trust are on the front lines – in the face of power, and on the move.

As in all progressive struggles – from civil rights to labor to environmental justice – progress comes from sticking with principle, building incrementally on local victories, and persevering against moneyed reactionaries. Already, one breakthrough by these young climate activists was made this year in deep-red, rural Montana. In a case filed by Our Children’s Trust, 16 children, ages 2-18, charged that a state law took away their right to challenge energy projects that increase global warming. Noting that Montana’s constitution establishes a right to “a clean and healthful environment,” state Judge Kathy Seeley ruled for the children… and for a clean, healthy climate future.

Progress is not made by spectators and cynics, but by activists. And those who say that activism can’t produce change should not interrupt those who’re doing it.

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Easier sung than done. Plastic is now ubiquitous in toys, electronics, tools, air, water… and us. And don’t forget the plastic Baby Jesus in Christmas tableaus.

What is plastic, anyway? It’s a toxic synthetic material mostly manufactured from petroleum by such giants as ExxonMobil, the globe’s top purveyor. So much is produced by these profiteers that plastic trash is now a planetary disaster.

But not to worry, for Big Oil’s lobbyists assure us gabillions of plastic bags, bottles, and such are being recycled, keeping them out of our landfills, water, bodies, etc. Swell! Except… they’re lying.

After all, Exxon is the same for-profit contaminator that lied for years that fossil fuels were not causing climate change, even though top executives knew they were. Their ethic of deceit continues today – Big Oil knows that 94 percent of US plastics are not recycled. Indeed, they can’t be.

Faced with growing public alarm about the ever-growing glut of plastic pollution, the industry has doubled down on deceit by offering a snappy new PR slogan: “Advanced Recycling.” They say it’s a magical process dubbed “pyrolysis.” Only… it doesn’t work, it’s inordinately expensive, and it increases climate change emissions. Still, Exxon exclaims its AR will soon be processing half a million tons of plastic waste!  But that’s not even a drop in the plastic bucket, for more than 400 million tons of plastic waste is discarded each year –and the oil industry is planning to double plastic production by 2040.

The only real way to stop runaway plastic pollution of us and our planet is to use less plastic. To learn more and help, go to Beyond Plastics: BeyondPlastics.org.

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He’s not asserting the fairly common belief, held by many Christians, that the Almighty plays a direct role in shaping people’s lives. No, no – Mike’s claim of divine selection is more singular, grandiose… and spooky. In a recent speech to a sect of Christian Nationalists, he confided that just prior to being chosen Speaker, God Hizownself had been awakening him every night for three weeks “to speak to me” about campaign strategy. Johnson says that while 13 other Republicans vied for the office, “the Lord kept telling me to wait, wait, wait.” Then God finally said, “Now step forward” and claim the gavel of power.

Why him, you might ask? Well, explains the ultra-right-winger, American culture has become “so dark and depraved it almost seems irredeemable.” So, says Mike, God needed a Christian purist to be “a new Moses” willing to lead America from the wickedness of abortion, gay marriage, and what the religious nationalists call “the ungodly effort to undermine our culture by Leftists.”

Mike went further, explaining that “[God] had been speaking to me about this, and the Lord told me very clearly to prepare and be ready.” But, says Mike, he was told not merely to take the nation’s third highest political office, but ready to guide the nation, Moses-like, through “a Red Sea moment.” So, all of us should get ready, for we now have a Trump-supporting, holy-rolling congress critter who actually believes he’s been chosen by God to part the perilous waters and take us from a diverse democracy to his theocratic Christian wonderland.

God help us – and please hurry!

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Welcome to corporatized, consolidized, and bureaucratized “healthcare” – a rigid system in which nurses, pharmacists, and even doctors are no longer independent health professionals driven by a moral mandate to provide their best care to patients. Instead, all are treated as cogs in a monopolistic structure driven by an imperative to provide maximum profit to Wall Street owners of the corporate-care chains. This financial hierarchy demands factory-like cost-cutting – including cutting the numbers of nurses, pharmacists, and physicians who actually provide the care.

The cutbacks leave remaining caregivers stressed to the breaking point, and “care” is regimented to such time-motion metrics as limiting doctors to only 10 minutes per patient. Next!

Even when professionals complain that corporate cutbacks are endangering patients, the hierarchy responds with irrelevant financial statistics. For example, when Walgreens’ pharmacists recently revolted against constant staff cuts, the chain’s corporate bosses coldly retorted that they were investing $400 million in new pharmacists. Sounds like a big number, but really? Walgreens is pocketing $27 billion this year in profit! So, investing under 2% of one year’s profit will not make a blip in service to patients. Instead, the bulk of the billions that consumers pay goes to enrich top executives and Wall Street investors.

This enrichment of the rich few at our expense is why health care providers are unionizing – not for themselves, but for us patients. For information and action, go to doctorscouncil.org.

Photo: Joe Piette on Flickr

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Jim Hightower's Lowdown is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.