Jim Hightower's Lowdown
429 episodes - English - Latest episode: 2 days ago - ★★★★★ - 303 ratingsNews and shows about the progressive, democratic populist rebellion from former Texas Ag Commissioner and NYT best-selling author Jim Hightower.
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Episodes
The Perverse Vulgarity of Book Banning
January 03, 2023 15:32 - 2 minutes - 4.94 MBExcuse me for using explicit language here, but it seems to me that today’s most vulgar expression of right-wing extremist dogma is its unhealthy obsession with banning books. It’s a political perversion that, ironically, its participants usually rationalize by claiming they are “battling vulgarity.” And, boy, are they hot to trot! There’s a surge of them these days, because stripping books out of schools and public libraries has become a favorite way for autocratic right-wingers to stimulat...
How Detestable Can Corporate Bosses Be?
December 29, 2022 05:01 - 2 minutes - 4.95 MBThere’s a new “ism” creeping into America’s vocabulary… and into our social order: Bossism. Being a boss can merely mean you’re in charge – but in this age of glaring inequality and autocratic corporate rule, bossing implies being overbearing, tyrannical… a jerk. Amazingly, then, it’s precisely those detestable qualities that are drawing a group of uber-rich, Silicon Valley executives and financiers into an emerging cult of bossism. These high-tech elites are united in a belief that America’...
If You’re “Not Woke,” Doesn’t That Mean You’re Asleep?
December 27, 2022 17:33 - 2 minutes - 4.94 MBThe craziest political word of the year is “woke,” as in “Don’t be woke!” It’s a command barked by far-right-wing fomenters of culture war and their political toadies. Their intent is to demonize and shut up school teachers, preachers, librarians, historians, musicians, students, websites, business executives, and any sensible human who dares speak (and act on) the truth that racism, sexism, poverty, environmental degradation, and such are systemic blights in America. These pious censors of ...
Building A New Politics of “Outsiders”
December 22, 2022 05:01 - 2 minutes - 4.95 MBWhy, you might ask, is there so much labor activism these days? Right-wing Republicans claim it’s the work of union agitators fomenting class warfare. Bovine excrement! Rather, it’s the accumulation of years of actual class warfare waged against America’s workaday majority by avaricious corporate executives. As labor leaders know, unions don’t create organizing drives – bad bosses do. And our economy has become dominated by self-enriching, worker-abusing, bad bosses. So, fed-up working famil...
2022: The Year of the Workers
December 20, 2022 05:01 - 2 minutes - 4.94 MB'Tis the season of gift giving – including Time magazine handing out its somewhat pompous “Person of the Year” award. My beef with this gift is that it perpetuates the fallacy that social progress comes from some wondrous individual. It diminishes the more-inspiring fact that progress (and even the “greatness” of any one person) comes from the extended family – the group, the movement, the many – who sustain the alleged Person of the Year. It’s in that democratic spirit, then, that I suggest...
The Madness of Sen. Joe Manchin
December 15, 2022 05:01 - 2 minutes - 4.58 MBIf you sometimes wonder whether Congress is obtuse, narcissistic, or just stupid, Sen. Joe Manchin is evidence that the answer is: Yes. Plus, these days, the West Virginia corporate Democrat is mad – in both senses of the word. First, he’s mad at Representatives Pramila Jayapal, Raul Grijalva, Ro Khanna, and other gutsy progressive members of the US House. They rose up against their own Party leaders this month to kill Manchin’s corrupt, backdoor effort to force his massive Mountain Valley P...
What Does Congress Think of You?
December 13, 2022 05:01 - 2 minutes - 4.58 MBDick Tuck, a political prankster who made a satirical run for public office years ago, got less than 10 percent of the vote. Conceding defeat, he quipped, “The people have spoken, the bastards.” Tuck’s jab at voters was in jest, but it exposed an awkward political truth: While people generally have little respect for today’s elected officials, many officials harbor even less regard for The People they supposedly serve. Exhibit A: Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia. A multi-millionaire coal b...
Who’ll Save Us from This Nutty Clique of Rich “Saviors?”
December 08, 2022 05:01 - 2 minutes - 4.95 MBThis country needs highway signs on every interstate to caution the public about an extreme danger that lies ahead – “WARNING: GENIUSES AT WORK!” The danger comes from multibillionaire capitalists who proclaim themselves the crypto-meta wunderkinds of high tech. They say their class of high-wealth geniuses are the ones to save civilization. Among these “saviors” is Elon Musk, who’s so brilliant he’s on the verge of losing the $44 billion he stupidly paid for his egomaniacal takeover of Twitt...
Why Trust High-Tech Billionaires to Save Humanity?
December 06, 2022 22:35 - 2 minutes - 4.94 MBHere’s an interesting fact: Dinosaurs dominated Earth for 165 million years – and they assumed they always would. Which brings us to... well, us. We bipedal, far-ranging, Homo sapien primates have certainly established our dominance over modern-day Mother Earth. And even though our reign has only lasted about 200,000 years, we 21st Century humans grandly assume that we’re ordained by the gods to rule ad infinitum over our planet (and beyond). But – oops! – unfortunately we’ve based our pree...
The Defrocking of Saint Ron DeSantis
December 01, 2022 05:44 - 2 minutes - 4.95 MBBreaking news: After years of failed Republican efforts to uncover any proof of widespread voter fraud by Democrats, Republican Governor Ron “Tough Guy” DeSantis of Florida has found not one, but 20 ineligible people casting ballots! Like Donald Trump and a gaggle of other GOP governors, DeSantis has used the phony bugaboo of an illegal voting epidemic as a political ploy to keep true believers believing. They spend millions of taxpayer dollars on partisan wild goose chases, and DeSantis eve...
The GOP Is Literally Going Hunting for Illegal Voters
November 29, 2022 05:53 - 2 minutes - 4.94 MBThis election year has added a new season to our country’s calendar: The silly season. Not silly as in fun – but as in asinine... and pernicious. Forget any notion that America’s elections should be about lofty ideals, important issues, and real ideas. Instead, right-wing screwballs have turned the GOP into the Goofy Old Party, running campaigns based on frat-boy stunts, horror movie scaremongering, and moronic games of hate-your-neighbor. For example, the GOP reached a new level of politic...
Which food future will you choose?
November 24, 2022 05:44 - 2 minutes - 2.98 MBAmerica certainly has an abundance of food (even though many Americans do not), yet we face a momentous choice of whether to pursue a food future rooted in the ethic of sustainable agriCULTURE - or one based on the exploitative ethic of agriINDUSTRY. What better symbol of agri-industry's vision of "food" than that ubiquitous Thanksgiving bird, the "Butterball" turkey. The Butterball has been hoisted onto our tables by huge advertising budgets and regular promotion payments to supermarkets. T...
When and where was the first Thanksgiving Feast?
November 22, 2022 05:39 - 2 minutes - 2.97 MBLet's talk Turkey! No, not the Butterball sitting in the Oval Office. I'm talking about the real thing, the big bird, 46 million of which we Americans will devour on this Thanksgiving Day. It was the Aztecs who first domesticated the gallopavo, but leave it to the Spanish explorers to "foul-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 s...
How Progressive Groups Can Become Their Own Lawmakers
November 17, 2022 05:33 - 2 minutes - 4.95 MBAmerica’s political, corporate, and media establishments were cocksure about their prognostications that a powerful “red wave” was about to hit America in this month’s elections. It would sweep Democrats out and push Republicans into office all across America, they exclaimed. How shocking and embarrassing, then, that their raging wave turned out to be just a little ripple. Republicans ran poorly, and many Democrats ran well. Still, the Dem Party as a whole could’ve done even better if its me...
Lessons from the Midterm Elections
November 15, 2022 05:10 - 2 minutes - 4.94 MBWhat hit the Republican party on election day was… well, the Republican Party. Blow number one, of course, was from the party’s president and cult boss, Donald Trump, who wields his narcissism like a political bludgeon. But then Republicans got an even more damaging gut punch from the party’s own Supreme Court majority of six partisan hacks. They chose this election year to assert their personal ideological view that the government should control every woman’s birth decisions. Not popular! T...
How Money is Suffocating American Democracy
November 10, 2022 05:01 - 2 minutes - 4.95 MBAmerica exists today as a bizarre anomaly – we profess to be an electoral democracy, yet we are ruled by a governmental plutocracy. One especially gross example of this incongruity is the overwhelming power of big money over the people’s will. By a wide margin, Americans of all political stripes want to ban the distorting force of huge, electoral campaign donations by favor-seeking corporations and ultra-rich elites. Yet… nothing. National and state lawmakers take the plutocratic money and p...
You Have a Constitutional Right to Vote. Right?
November 08, 2022 17:09 - 2 minutes - 4.94 MBEvery election day, we’re told “Go Vote!” Your vote is sacred they tell us, it’s your Constitutional right. Well... yes to voting, but most people (including most politicians) would be astonished to learn that America’s Constitution contains no declaration that We The People have a right to vote! In the founding document of our democratic republic, voting is mentioned 37 times, but none of them embrace access to the ballot as a fundamental right. This is no oversight, for most of the founde...
Shhh, The Governor Is Listening
November 03, 2022 04:01 - 2 minutes - 4.95 MBAlthough we haven’t even gotten through this year’s midterm congressional elections, it’s still not too early to start examining some of the characters who hope you’ll make them president in 2024. I know, you don’t want to… but we must. That’s because corporate elites have already chosen their favorites, and they intend to use massive sums of money, lies, more money, PR slickum, and even more money to slide their toady into the Oval Office, hoping you don’t discover until it’s too late that ...
The Sunshine State’s Dark Bully
November 01, 2022 14:23 - 2 minutes - 4.94 MBHow about Ron DeSantis? The Florida governor is the new darling of the right-wing media, funders, and other establishment powers who’re pushing him to be your next president. “Ron DeSantis is the new Republican Party,” gushed one arch-conservative media maven. That’s odd, since what characterizes Ron’s tenure (and is causing a collective swoon for him within the rightist hierarchy) is his Big Government authoritarianism. Just yesterday, these same so-called conservatives said such use of gov...
Beware: The GOP Has Chosen to Embrace The Crazy
October 27, 2022 04:01 - 2 minutes - 4.95 MBPerhaps you remember Sen. Barry Goldwater, the GOP’s fringy, far-right-wing 1964 presidential nominee who famously said, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” Today, however, the core of the Republicans Party has gone so far beyond the fringe that they would boo Goldwater’s right-wingism as insufficiently rabid. Instead, their new rallying cry is: “Nuttiness in the defense of extremism is no vice.” The GOP’s mainline officialdom now proclaim themselves The Party of Extremism. The...
How Badly Do You Want A Really Bad President?
October 25, 2022 04:01 - 2 minutes - 4.94 MBIn the 1990s, renowned Texas progressive writer Molly Ivins regaled (and appalled) readers with her reports on the tragicomic awfulness of George W. Bush’s two terms as Texas’ governor. His tenure was notable for his deep ignorance, frat-boy arrogance, and flagrant servility to corporate interests. But those very qualities made America’s moneyed powers decide that–Wow!– he’d make a dandy president! Molly warned that this was madness, but in the 2000 race, W’s patrons stuffed him with money, b...
The Selfish Depravity of Hedge Fund “Journalism”
October 20, 2022 04:01 - 2 minutes - 4.95 MBThroughout the country, newspaper subscribers are asking questions like: Hey, who took my Saturday paper? What happened to those political cartoons and columns that I liked? Why does it take two days to get election results and sports scores? How did my local paper get filled with filler? Oh... and who doubled the price of the damn thing? The cause of all of the above is a Wall Street concept called “financialization” – a euphemism for corporate plundering. Multibillion-dollar hedge funds li...
My Newspaper Died
October 18, 2022 15:34 - 2 minutes - 4.94 MBMy newspaper died. Well, technically it still appears, but it has no life, no news, and barely a pulse. It’s a mere semblance of a real paper, one of the hundreds of local journalism zombies staggering along in cities and towns that had long relied on them. Each one has a bare number of subscribers keeping it going, mostly longtime readers like me clinging to a memory of what used to be and a flickering hope that, surely, the thing won’t get worse. Then it does. Our papers are getting worse...
We’re Stuck on a Monopoly Merry-Go-Round
October 13, 2022 04:01 - 2 minutes - 4.95 MBThe problem with our so-called “free market” is that it’s not free for you and me. It’s largely controlled by monopolies, which are free to inflate prices just because they can, letting gougers gleefully extract unwarranted monopoly profits from us. This milking of consumers by tightly consolidated industries is propelling today’s surging price hikes. Brand name corporations claim they’re being forced to mark-up price tags just to cover rising costs for raw materials, labor, transportation, ...
The Inflation Blame Game
October 11, 2022 15:29 - 2 minutes - 4.94 MBToday, CEOs of big corporations are playing the tricky “Inflation Blame Game!” Publicly, they moan that the pandemic is slamming their poor corporations with factory shutdowns, supply chain delays, wage hikes, and other increased costs. But wait – inside their board rooms, executives are high fiving each other and pocketing bonuses. What’s going on? The trick is that these giants are in non-competitive markets operating as monopolies, so they can set prices, mug you and me, and scamper away...
The Virginia Model
October 06, 2022 22:00 - 2 minutes - 4.95 MBLast year’s gubernatorial race in Virginia was narrowly won by Republican Glenn Youngkin. An elite Wall Street multimillionaire, he was going to lose – until he discovered a right-wing racist bugaboo called Critical Race Theory. Glenn suddenly turned into an anti-CRT attack dog, fomenting parental fear and promising to sweep all teaching of the theory out of Virginia classrooms. But, golly, CRT was not actually taught in any of the state’s public schools. To help Youngkin dodge this inconven...
Jeff Bezos Goes to Sea
September 29, 2022 04:01 - 2 minutes - 4.95 MBIt’s been an all-time record year of runaway wealth for America’s billionaires, with this tiny clique vastly widening the chasm separating them from us hoi polloi. For example, Amazon jefe Jeff Bezos hauled in $190 billion for the year. That pays him more than $360,000 a minute, for every single minute of the year. So much taken by so few who do so little while harming so many. Bezos erected his corporate empire on the backs of non-union workers he routinely exploits, plus millions of taxpay...
ASSORTED NUTS
September 27, 2022 14:10 - 2 minutes - 4.94 MBLet me say one word to you: Nuts. Now, let me say one name to you: Ted Cruz. They’ve become synonymous, with the Texas lawmaker perennially topping national lists of goofy, right-wing political goobers. Only, Ted can’t rightly be called a lawmaker, for he’s not a serious participant in that process, instead devoting his senatorship to political stunts and picking silly PR fights with a growing list of enemies. Running out of people to attack, Ted has found another species for his vitriol: ...
Why Would We Let Wall Street “Care For” Our Pets?
September 22, 2022 04:01 - 2 minutes - 4.95 MBQuestion: What does a packet of M&M’s and your local veterinarian have in common? Answer: Both are owned by Mars Inc., the global candy monopolist. Since the 1980s, we’ve seen massive consolidations in industry after industry – from airlines to newspapers, the internet to candy. These monopolists run roughshod over consumers, workers, communities, suppliers, and our nation’s commitment to the Common Good. And now the corporate attitude seems to be, “what the Hell, why not let monopolization ...
The Corporatization of Pet Care: Animal Cruelty?
September 20, 2022 14:31 - 2 minutes - 4.94 MBFor many people, the animals they adopt and love become more like family members than pets. We have deep relationships, with cats, dogs, parrots, goats, horses, and other fellow critters – who at least pretend to love us back, providing comfort and joy all around. Sadly though, life for all of us animals is a spin around the wheel of fortune, so illness and injuries happen. That’s why one of the most valued members of every community are the staffers in our local veterinarian office. Practic...
The Embarrassment of Modern Corporate Managers
September 15, 2022 04:01 - 2 minutes - 4.95 MBWhat makes a newspaper great? Many say it’s having street-savvy reporters and editors with the integrity to shine the light of investigative journalism on the power structure’s abuses. But, no, says Fred Ryan, top executive of the Washington Post – the secret is attendance. Ryan, a corporate manager and former Ronald Reagan staffer, was handpicked to be CEO of the legendary paper by Jeff Bezos in 2014, when the Amazon billionaire bought the Post. But on Ryan’s watch, readership is in decline...
Welcome To Our Future of “Digital Productivity Monitoring”
September 13, 2022 15:50 - 2 minutes - 4.94 MBFor generations, workers have been punished by corporate bosses for watching the clock. But now, the corporate clock is watching workers! Called “digital productivity monitoring,” this surveillance is done by an integrated computer system including a real-time clock, camera, keyboard tracker, and algorithms to provide a second-by-second record of what each employee is doing. Jeff Bezos, boss of Amazon, pioneered use of this ticking electronic eye in his monstrous warehouses, forcing hapless,...
What Do Truckers and Librarians Have In Common?
September 08, 2022 04:01 - 2 minutes - 4.95 MBIn the world of work, what two occupations might seem to have the very least in common? How about long-haul truck drivers… and school librarians? Yes, an odd pairing, but solidarity forever! Start with truckers, The job is literally a grueling haul. You’re wrangling massive 18-wheelers some 500 miles a day for 2-3 weeks straight, putting up with traffic jams, storms, bad roads, lunatic drivers, helter-skelter scheduling, truck stop food, sleeping in the truck – and battling fatigue, aches, y...
Clueless CEOs Confused By Workers Quitting
September 06, 2022 04:01 - 2 minutes - 4.94 MBFor more than a year, America’s corporate chieftains have been moaning about “The Great Resignation” – the recent phenomena of workers just up and quitting their jobs. And now comes “Quiet Quitting,” workers who don’t leave their jobs, but only do what they were hired to do, quietly rejecting the endless extra (unpaid) tasks and weekend assignments that bosses try to pile on. What’s at work in the heads of all these workers? Simple, barked one taskmaster way back in 1894, “nobody wants to wo...
Where’s the “Dignity of Work” When Work Kills Workers?
September 01, 2022 04:01 - 2 minutes - 4.95 MBCorporate acolytes and right-wing moralists constantly preach to laboring stiffs about the uplifting dignity of work. Of course, that’s “dignity” as defined and controlled by corporate elites, not by workers, and the reward for it frequently includes on-the-job injuries… and death. Not that CEOs and well-heeled investors intend to sicken, maim, and kill thousands of laborers every year – but they certainly do put them in positions that assure such unhappy results. For example, they demand th...
Work, Sweat, Die: The Price of Really Hot Jobs
August 30, 2022 23:10 - 2 minutes - 4.94 MBHere’s a hot topic for Labor Day: Heat. It’s been a hell of a hot summer, exploding the top off thermometers with triple-digit readings across the country. As we’re learning, week after week of this debilitating heat intensifies wildfires, causes electric grids to fail, kills millions of wild animals (including fish!), burns up crops, and concentrates toxic air. But there’s another impact that draws little notice: Heat kills workers. Indeed, searing days of 95-100-110 degrees are killing an...
Billionaires Playing Cowboys… At Our Expense
August 25, 2022 04:01 - 2 minutes - 4.95 MBLet’s all gather ‘round the campfire, Buckaroos and let Ol’ Cactus Jim here tell you about some of today’s hardy, hard-working cowboys. Yes, those manly men who live free-spirited, yippy-ti-yi-yo, cowboy lives out in the rustic ranch country of the Rocky Mountain West. Oh, wait – that was a century ago. The “cowboys” who’re now humming “Home On The Range” across Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming are multimillionaire and billionaire corporate titan and celebrities like Rupert Murdoch, Bill Gates, a...
A Tear-Jerker About the Housing Saga of Some Rich Jerks
August 23, 2022 16:04 - 2 minutes - 4.94 MBThe “old homeplace” is a classic theme of Americana, expressed in everything from Norman Rockwell paintings to Woody Guthrie’s powerful folk lament, “I Ain’t Got No Home In This World Anymore.” But for a heart-rending, modern-day version of the emotional pull of home, you can’t beat the poignant wail of a new song entitled: “The Low-down Down-home Atherton Rich Man Blues.” Warning: You might need a box of tissues to get through this sad saga. Atherton, California, is a very small town of so...
Bringing Democracy to the Democratic Party
August 18, 2022 04:01 - 2 minutes - 4.95 MBSen. Joe Manchin – a one-man political steamroller in Washington – is a Democrat. Except when he’s not, which is most of the time. A multimillionaire, West Virginia coal executive, he’s the darling of fossil fuel and pipeline lobbyists, as well as Republican opponents of progressive Democratic policies. Indeed, he’s funded by Republican billionaires. But Washington lobbyists and billionaires are not the only source of personal political power that allows him to hold office and block “little-...
Good News: Small Groups Can Defeat Corporate Giants
August 16, 2022 04:01 - 2 minutes - 4.94 MBFrom corporate polluters to political bosses, power elites try to create a myth of inevitability, trying to make workaday people feel helpless, too small to change the injustices of the system. Don’t bother is their message. But the feisty residents of Boxtown, Tennessee, definitely did bother when they learned that a couple of profiteering fossil fuel giants were targeting them. Boxtown, a historic Black neighborhood of Memphis settled by former slaves 160 years ago, was considered by Valer...
Happy Hour at the Hightower Chat & Chew Cafe: Rep. Ro Khanna
August 13, 2022 17:28 - 54 minutes - 79 MBWe're trying something new here at the Lowdown! We've been having a blast with our live talk show, so we're dropping the audio from the show right into the podcast feed, so that our audiophile friends can easily join in the fun. Let us know what you think! Urgent alert to top Dem party poohbahs: Too many would-be Democratic voters are disillusioned by your tone-deaf, wishy-washy incrementalism! On our next Chat & Chew Happy Hour, progressive champion Ro Khanna joins Hightower for a lively di...
Why Should Work Be Life-Sucking?
August 11, 2022 13:44 - 2 minutes - 4.95 MBAmerica’s stringent system of corporate capitalism keeps carving out new depths of worker exploitation. Take Chick-fil-A, a right-wing, Atlanta-based, fast-food operation boasting that it follows “biblically-based” principles. Like slavery? Well, Chick-fil-A hasn’t gone quite that Biblical yet, but one of its franchises recently pioneered a novel labor compensation innovation that comes close – literally paying some workers “chicken feed.” This outlet of the $11-billion-a-year chain called o...
Should Making a Living Mean Selling Your Life?
August 09, 2022 16:20 - 2 minutes - 4.94 MB“Work your fingers to the bone - whadda ya get? Boney Fingers.” This 1960s song mocking the vaunted virtue of working hard is being sung today with new meaning by all kinds of employees – from factory workers to teachers… and even a few upper-floor executives. The rebellion here is not merely over low pay, but particularly about the unrelenting nature of work itself – the all-consuming “job imperative,” as if that’s your life: Go 40 to 60 hours a week 50 to 52 weeks a year for half a centur...
Should “Sudden Death” Be A Part of Professional Golf?
August 04, 2022 16:44 - 2 minutes - 4.95 MBIs it a good deal to sell out your personal integrity for cash from notorious scoundrels? Depends on your sell-out price, chortle some 48 ethically-stunted professional golfers who’ve peddled both their honor and honesty to the murderous moneyed monarchs who rule Saudi Arabia. The golfers, who are already millionaires, rushed to grab money thrown at their feet by the royal kingdom, which oddly thinks it can launder its public image by sponsoring a money-soaked global golf tour. Of course, a ...
Whip Inflation Now!
July 26, 2022 04:01 - 2 minutes - 4.94 MBRepublican politicos are all over Joe Biden for failing to stop inflation. Perhaps you wonder, though, what these squawkers would do if they were in charge? No need to wonder – just look back to 1974, when Americans were being pummeled by price spikes that topped 12%, nearly double what we’re enduring today. But by Gollies, President Gerald Ford and his Republican contingent in Congress met the challenge head-on with a new magical program of economic uplift they called WIN – Whip Inflation N...
How Can Democrats Save the Party… From Their Own Leaders?
June 23, 2022 04:01 - 2 minutes - 4.95 MB“It’s over.” “Biden’s numbers are in the ditch.” “Democrats are doomed.” “Call the priest.” These are Democrats talking! Even before November’s congressional elections are run, many conventional-thinking Democratic operatives are surrendering to a presumed Republican sweep. You don’t need a political science degree to know that if you start out announcing that you’ll lose, chances are you will – after all, who wants to vote for a party that shows no fighting spirit, no confidence in the appe...
Come On, Biden, Be A Real President!
June 22, 2022 16:29 - 2 minutes - 4.94 MBPresident Biden recently flew off to Taiwan to assure allies there that he will fight for them. And next he’s headed over to Saudi Arabia to “repair ties” with those oil monarchs. This flurry of foreign travel might be strategically important for international realpolitik, but – Hello – another strategically important piece of real politics is looming right here at home: The November congressional elections! Taiwan and Saudi Arabia don’t get a vote, but Texas and South Carolina do. So how ab...
Enthroning Corporate Power Over America
June 09, 2022 04:01 - 2 minutes - 4.95 MB“Equal Justice Under Law.” That’s the noble principle carved into the marble façade of the temple-like Supreme Court building. Today, though, six right-wing, corporate-dominated activist judges control the present Court, and they’re implementing an elitist creed mocking that ideal. By putting the interests and power of the wealthy over the rest of us. They’re turning “justice” into an antidemocratic concept of “just us.” In ruling after ruling, today’s supremes are political operatives takin...
The Corporate Conspiracy on The Court
June 07, 2022 16:07 - 2 minutes - 4.94 MBUsurping the fundamental rights of women to control their own bodies. Authorizing corporate giants to buy our elections. Nullifying the right of organizers to talk to workers about unionizing. Who is rigging America’s legal system against workaday people? The Supreme Court’s right-wing extremists, that’s who. Just a handful of aloof, unelected judges have been turning what’s supposed to be a citadel of justice into an unrestrained political instrument for instituting autocratic, plutocrati...
Supreme Court Secrecy: Who Needs it?
May 19, 2022 04:01 - 2 minutes - 4.95 MBWhen Supreme Court member Sam Alito’s secret plan for canceling the constitutional right of women to end their pregnancies leaked out to the public – Republican politicos went ballistic! Over the leak, that is. The Court’s Republican Chief Justice, John Roberts, called the unauthorized disclosure an “affront” to the majesty of the Supremes. Likewise, Republican congressional leaders have furiously demanded to know who dunnit and why! Way beyond their political screeching and posturing, howev...