Jim Hightower's Lowdown

The chicken sh*t lobby for corporate health care

As Lyndon Johnson used to say about special interests trying to get his support to pass some blatantly self-serving legislation: "They can't make chicken salad out of chicken sh*t." Yet, chicken sh*t is all that the corporate health complex has to work with as it frantically tries to defend its current system of mass malpractice, known as corporate health care. After all, as most Americans have learned the hard way, the corporatized care of profiteering insurance giants, Big Pharma, and hosp...

Alert: Kartoonus Americanus Is Going Extinct!

Right before our eyes, an invaluable American species is fast disappearing from view. Kar-toon-us A-mer-i-kan-as. These are the newspaper cartoonists who’ve long delighted readers and infuriated power elites. And there’s nothing natural about their sudden decline – its not the result of a declining talent pool, and certainly not due to a lack of political targets. Rather, what’s happening is that their media habitat is being intentionally destroyed. Around the start of the 20th century, som...

Save the Whales! Save Polar Bears! Save Political Cartoonists!

I never dreamed of growing up to be a political activist/ commentator, but here I am, and it’s worked out pretty well for me. I’ve been lucky enough to have a voice in public matters and eke out a modest living running my mouth as an independent populist agitator. Still, I have to confess to the sin of Job Envy. Not in the sense of being resentful, but regretful about my own inability to lift the trade of journalistic commentary to the heights attained by a small, feisty collection of unique ...

Jeff Bezos Reveals His Desiccated Soul

The morning after December’s horrific nighttime tornado smashed a huge Amazon warehouse in Illinois, killing six workers, corporate CEO Jeff Bezos issued a personal video message. Was he distressed and sorrowful? No, Boss Bezos was perversely giddy. That’s because the narcissistic gabillionaire had not made the video to mourn the deaths, but instead had chosen this hour of tragedy to gloat to the world that his private space tourism business had just rocketed a small group of extremely rich ...

How Corporate Greed is Causing Tornado Deaths

Corporate America has proudly elevated good moral values to a special place. That place is the trash can. Indeed, free market gurus assert that the only ethical obligation a corporation has to society is to deliver as much profit as possible to its big investors – everybody else be damned. And they excuse any awfulness they cause by claiming that they “broke no laws.” But – hello – they write the laws, so corporate immorality is always technically legal. America experienced this corporate d...

What if antibiotics no longer work?

Can antibiotic medicines, long hailed as miracle drugs, be too much of a good thing? Yes. Two factors are at work here. First, bacteria (one of the earliest forms of life on Earth) are miracles in their own right, with a stunning ability to outsmart the antibiotic drugs through rapid evolution. Second is the rather dull inclination of us supposedly-superior humans to overuse and misuse antibiotic medicines. Every time we take an antibiotic to kill some bad bacteria that is infecting our bodi...

A curse, a blessing, and a good food movement

In 1972, I was part of a nationwide campaign that came close to getting the US Senate to reject Earl Butz, Richard Nixon’s choice for secretary of agriculture. A coalition of grassroots farmers, consumers, and public interest organizations teamed up with progressive senators to undertake the almost impossible challenge of defeating the cabinet nominee. The 51 to 44 Senate vote was so close, because we were able to expose Butz as… well, as butt-ugly. We brought the abusive power of corporate...

Daddy’s Philosophy

This holiday season got me to thinking about America's spirit of giving, and I don't mean this overdone business of Christmas, Hanukkah and other holiday gifts. I mean our true spirit of giving – giving of ourselves. 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 establi...

Merry Christmas, right-wingers, The Red Pope, and Jesus

Here's a twist on Christmas that would make Jesus weep. First, a right-wing faction in the US has been wringing its hands over a hokey cultural "crisis" cooked up by the faction itself, namely that liberals, atheists, humanists, and – God Forbid – Marxists are waging a "War on Christmas." The infidels are not accused of lobbing bombs in this war, but Words of Mass Destruction. Specifically, the right-wing purists wail that unholy lefties are perverting the season by saying "Happy Holidays," ...

The Problem With Plastic… Is Plastic

In a world that’s clogged and choking with a massive overdose of plastic trash, you’ll be heartened to learn that governments and industries are teaming up to respond forcefully to this planetary crisis. Unfortunately, their response has been to engage in a global race to make more plastic stuff and to force poor countries to become dumping grounds for plastic garbage. Leading this Kafkaesque greedfest are such infamous plunderers and polluters as Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell, and other petro...

The Plasticization of Planet Earth

What does your toothbrush, a fish dinner, and your running shoes have in common? Plastic. We now live on Planet Plastic, billions of tons of waste from everyday products made of these chemical contaminants are strewn literally everywhere – on the highest mountaintops, into the deepest seabeds, in dense tropical jungles and all across barren deserts. It’s estimated, for example, that in less than 30 years, the gross volume of discarded plastic in our oceans will outnumber fish! From grocery c...

The Scam of Marketing Sports Stadiums as Corporate Billboards

Advertising has been characterized as rattling a stick in a bucket – a noisy cry for public attention. One example of this crass hucksterism is the rush by top executives of multibillion-dollar corporations to splatter their corporate names on sports venues. Responding to a blatant scam by team owners, executives are spending absurd sums of their shareholders’ money to “win” temporary naming rights to local stadiums, arenas, etc. The come-on is that this billboarding will buy brand recogniti...

“Team Greed” plays bigtime sports!

‘Tis the season, right? Traditionally, this time of year celebrates spirituality and festivities – including Hanukkah, Christmas, and Kwanzaa. In modern day America, however, the Winter Solstice signals the faithful to gather from afar in monumental temples to worship our nation’s supreme secular deity: Big Time Sports! Get ready for a non-stop frenzy of football, basketball, soccer, and more – with devout fans making tribal pilgrimages to their sacred stadiums and arenas. But whatever the ...

Making Work Work for Workers

As a writer, I get stuck every so often straining for the right words to tell my story. Over the years, though, I’ve learned when to quit tying myself into mental knots over sentence construction, instead stepping back and rethinking where my story is going. 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 ar...

What’s the “Quits Rate?” And Why Is It Skyrocketing?

Corporate bosses across America have been sputtering in outrage at you working stiffs this summer, spewing expletives about the fact that while the US economy has been coming back... you haven’t! “Labor shortage,” they squeal, lazily accusing the workforce of mass laziness. They charge insultingly that millions of workers got used to laying around during the pandemic. Noting that there is now an abundance of jobs open for everything from restaurant workers to nurses, the bosses and their pol...

Once Again Congress Exposes Its Butt-Ugly Morality

Sometimes, when watching Congress in action, I can’t decide whether to laugh, cry, or check myself into an insane asylum. Not all lawmakers are political hacks, quacks, and corporate toadies – but that contingent does seem to dominate. Most infuriating is that while purporting to represent the people, Congress routinely does what the American majority does not want done and fails to do what people do want. Take a peek at the cuts Congress is making to Joe Biden’s landmark infrastructure prop...

Why Did the Democrat Lose Virginia’s Gubernatorial Race?

Here they come again – That gaggle of Washington politicos and pundits who keep assailing Joe Biden’s package of FDRish proposals that, at long last, would begin lifting up America’s infrastructure and working class. “Too big,” screech these small thinkers and servants of the plutocratic order, “too costly, and … well, too democratic.” You would expect such adamant minginess from anti-everything Republicans – but these are Democrats! Well, sort of. They’re Chicken Little Democrats, a subset ...

Should Apple Profit By Blocking Our Consumer Rights?

At least since the invention of the wheel, people have fixed, tinkered with, and improved every device they’ve possessed. It’s been a human right. But after several thousand years, suddenly legal clauses are being tucked in purchase agreements saying that today’s owners of products MUST NOT even peek, much less poke inside the inner workings of our devices. Makers of anything with a computer chip in it (everything from your car to your toothbrush) have been especially vehement about this, re...

Repair Your Own Products? Corporations Say No!

America’s economic and political inequality has led workaday Americans to exclaim: “The system is broken. Let’s fix it!” But there’s another version of this protest that I’m hearing more frequently these days: “The system is fixed. Let’s break it!” That certainly applies to such rigged systems as money in politics and voter suppression, but it’s also relevant to seemingly mundane matters that restrain our personal freedoms. One of the insidious “fixes” we need to break is the claim by brand...

Working From Home – While Your Boss Watches You on Video

If you’re a corporate employee, you know that something unpleasant is afoot when top executives are suddenly issuing statements about how committed they are to their employees, making sure that all of them are treated with dignity and respect. For example, the PR chief of a global outfit named Teleperformance, one of the world’s largest call centers, was recently going on and on about how “We value our people and their well-being, safety, and happiness.” Why did the corporation feel such a d...

Beware of “Spot,” the $75,000 Wonder Dog

Tick-tick-tick... each sweep of Big-Tech’s clock enhances corporate power – but its hands also sweep away more of our civil rights. At first, each new surge of artificial intelligence and robotic technologies can seem perfectly benign ... even playful. Take “Spot,” the robotic, four-legged “doggie” that actually has no spots, no enduring puppy eyes, can’t bark, has no tail to wag, and is very un-doggy. In fact, this electronic critter is rather creepily nightmarish, but it’s marketed by cute...

America needs a quality child care system

Nearly every nation with an advanced economy (and some not so advanced) treats child care as a fundamental public good essential to nurturing children, families, and the whole society. But not our US of A. Indeed, our so-called leaders relegate millions of working parents and 21 million kids under 5 to the tender mercies of a for-profit market, with child care facilities ranging from impossibly expensive to helter-skelter, unlicensed Kiddie Korrals. Embarrassingly, while right-wingers mindle...

Why Corporations Pay Millions for Executive Mediocrity

Most people believe the American economy is being rigged by and for bankers, CEOs, and other superrich elites, because… well, because it is! 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 2020 was 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 pocketin...

The Grand Larceny of Bank(er) Robbery

Exciting news from Wall Street: Our wealth markets are booming! Everything from the Dow Jones Average to gold prices are rocketing to new records, showering us with wealth from above. Oh… wait. Maybe you’re one of the big majority of workaday Americans who don’t own stocks or gold, so maybe you’re not celebrating Wall Street’s big boom. But just chill, because conventional corporate wisdom assures us that the wealthy will invest their good fortunes in enterprises that eventually will produce...

Let’s Create a Bank System That Serves People, Instead of Bankers

Corporate ideologues never cease blathering that government programs should be run like a business. Really – what businesses would they choose? Pharmaceutical profiteers? Big Oil? Wall Street money manipulators? High tech billionaires? Airline price gougers? The good news is that the great majority of people aren’t buying this corporatist blather, instead valuing institutions that prioritize the Common Good. Thus, by a 2-to-1 margin, Americans have stunned smug right-wing privatizers by spec...

Your Dog Knows Better Than To Let The GOP “Fix” Our Postal System

When Donald Trump declared he would fix the US Postal Service, he was using the word “fix” the same way veterinarians do when you bring in your dog. Trump wasted an inordinate amount of his presidential power and prestige in a failed attempt to neuter an agency that literally delivers for the people. Extraordinary postal workers move our letters and packages by truck, car, airplane, boat, motorbike, mule – and, of course, by foot – to any address across town or across the country. Both essen...

Can Corporate Profit and Morality Be Compatible?

Is “corporate ethics” an oxymoron? Do you have to be a jerk to be a successful CEO? Is exploitation the only path to profit? 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 emerge...

How About an Award for Sleaziest Corporate Profiteering?

We’ve got the Academy Awards, the Emmy’s, and GRAMMYs… but what should we call the award for the most extraordinary performance by a corporate profiteer? How about the “Sleazy,” with winners getting a solid gold sculpture of a middle finger? There were so many worthy contenders, but one corporation exhibited uncommon callousness, so the 2021 Sleazy goes to … Tyson Foods! The meatpacking giant has regularly run roughshod over workers, farmers, communities, and the environment – not to mention...

Hey Washington: Follow The People

“Those in the know,” say that We the People should forget any progressive fantasy that – at long last – Washington might finally produce the kind of bold FDR-style agenda that America needs. They smugly lecture us that recalcitrant Republicans in Congress, not to mention a swarm of corporate lobbyists, are opposed to progressive change, so who could get it passed? Here’s an idea: Try the people themselves. Those in the know don’t seem to know it (or don’t want us to know it), but big majorit...

Forget Trickle-Down BS – Let’s Push Percolate-up Economics

The past year proves that a lot of conventional economic wisdom is neither true nor wise. For example: “We don’t have the money.” The power elites tell us it would be nice to do the big-ticket reforms America needs, but the money just isn’t there. Then a pandemic slammed into America, and suddenly trillions of dollars gushed out of Washington for everything from subsidizing meatpackers to developing vaccines, revealing that the money is there. “We can’t increase the federal debt!” Yet, Trum...

To fix the Labor Shortage, Start With the Wage Shortage

At a recent congressional hearing on America’s so-called “labor shortage,” megabanker Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, offered this insight: “People actually have a lot of money, and they don’t particularly feel like going back to work.” Uh... Jamie... most people are living paycheck to paycheck, and since COVID-19 hit, millions have lost their jobs, savings, and even homes. So, they’re not exactly lollygagging around the house, counting their cash. Instead of listening to the uber-rich class...

Should “Workforce” mean forcing workers to take crappy jobs?

A recent headline blared: “Labor shortages end when wages rise.” Gosh, Captain Obvious, what an amazing discovery! Someone notify the Nobel Prize committee, for surely this revolutionary revelation will win this year’s prize in economics. Better yet, someone notify that gaggle of Republican governors whose theory of labor economics begins and ends with the medieval demand that workers be whacked with a stick to make them do what the bosses want. At issue is the furious complaint by restaura...

There’s Rich, Ugly Rich, and Jeff Bezos

I cheered recently when the richest man on Earth had himself rocketed into space. But then he came back down. There’s nothing irredeemably wrong about being rich – indeed, one good role model for handling wealth, rather than letting it handle you, is music superstar Dolly Parton. She donated a cool million bucks to the Vanderbilt University Medical Center in 2020 to help finance its development of the “Moderna” vaccine that’s now preventing millions of people from dying with COVID-19. Then ...

How Pathetic is Jeff “Space Boy” Bezos?

When I was just a tyke, cowboy actors were marketed as role models for little backyard cowpokes like me, and we could send off to get a certificate making us “Pals of the Saddle” or some such with Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, or others. Cute for a four-year-old. Less so for 57-year-old Jeff “Space Boy” Bezos. Yet, the gabillionaire profiteer, labor exploiter, and tax scofflaw who heads the Amazon online retail syndicate, was all dressed up in July, playacting as a heroic conqueror of space...

How the corporate plutocracy works

An old political truism notes that, “Where there’s a will, there are 1,000 won’ts.” And what a hurricane of won’ts swirled out of Washington’s power centers in March to pummel Joe Biden! Corporate lobbyists and their congressional hirelings howled at him for declaring that he would seek a tax increase on corporations to pay for the essential, overdue job of repairing and expanding our nation’s antiquated, dilapidated infrastructure. Blowhard Mitch McConnell, the GOP’s senate leader, blustere...

Is America big enough to Go Big again?

It’s time for America to go back to the future – a future of true greatness created by a people united to build a strong nation for the Common Good. From the start of our United States, Americans have backed leaders who dared to do big public projects – Jefferson, Lincoln, TR, FDR, Truman, Ike, JFK, and LBJ all dared to achieve bold goals. It’s only since Ronald Reagan’s “government-is-evil” demagoguery that our presidents and lawmakers shriveled to no-can-do mediocrities, unwilling even to...

Is Your Governor Part Of The GOP’s Border Stunt?

The Odd Virus Attacking Republican Governors

Can GOP Autocracy Outlaw American Democracy?

Are You a “Low-Quality” Voter?

Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and You. Which One Pays Taxes?

Will Jeff Bezos Return to Earth a Better Human?

BONUS: Join me at the Hightower Lowdown Happy Hour at the Chat & Chew Cafe

Hidey-ho, folks! Thanks for tuning in to and sharing my weekly commentaries. Also, I hope you’ll join me for a live webshow I host every other Tuesday. It’s the Hightower Lowdown Happy Hour at the Chat & Chew Cafe. You can join the action live online as I chat with grassroots leaders and progressive sparklies from around the country. Go to hightowerlowdown.org/chatnchew to find out about upcoming guests and watch past episodes.

Banker Greed That Would Even Shock Woody Guthrie

Woody Guthrie had a lot to say about the greed of bankers who made crop loans at usurious interest rates to hardscrabble farmers, then foreclosed on them when they couldn’t pay off the loans, leaving thousands of farm families homeless. Woody mocked them with a sarcastic anthem, singing “I’m a jolly banker, jolly banker am I.” He also penned a stinging verse about their thievery: “Some’ll rob with a six gun/ some with a fountain pen.” But even this populist poet of the people would be aston...

What’s Under Sid Miller’s Thousand-Dollar Hat?

The agriculture commissioner of Texas, Sid Miller, is the one top official in our state willing to take a bold stand against racial discrimination. Miller proudly went to court in April, challenging a new government program that he considered discriminatory against a particular group of disadvantaged agriculture producers. Namely, his group – White farmers and ranchers! Yes, Sid asserts that the program – which directs some long-overdue loan relief to Black, Latino, Native American, and oth...

The Plutocrats Cry, People Cheer

“Outrageous,” screeched the US Chamber of Commerce. “It doesn’t feel fair,” whimpered a top corporate executive. The wailing by those who run corporate America is not for the plight of the workaday families who’ve seen their incomes stagnate and even plummet to zero during the past months of the coronavirus pandemic. Rather, this chorus of woe comes from powerful plutocratic interests that have been enjoying windfall profits. Why? Because, they cry, that meanie in the White House, Joe Biden...

What floats Jeff Bezos’ Boat

Not only are the rich different from you and me – they’re getting more different than ever. I’m not referring to mere millionaires, but to the billionaire bunch. In the past year, while ordinary Americans have lost jobs, businesses, and homes due to the pandemic economic crash, America’s 664 billionaires have found themselves nearly 40 percent richer than before COVID! These fortunate few collectively added more than a trillion dollars in 2020 to their personal stashes of wealth. And practi...

What Floats Jeff Bezos’ Boat

Not only are the rich different from you and me – they’re getting more different than ever. I’m not referring to mere millionaires, but to the billionaire bunch. In the past year, while ordinary Americans have lost jobs, businesses, and homes due to the pandemic economic crash, America’s 664 billionaires have found themselves nearly 40 percent richer than before COVID! These fortunate few collectively added more than a trillion dollars in 2020 to their personal stashes of wealth. And practi...

Are CEOs Really “Worth” Millions of Dollars?

These days, the haughty rich in our country have developed such an arrogant sense of self-entitlement that they’ve gone from being merely irritating to infuriating. Unsurprisingly, their plutocratic greed and rigging of the system has generated a political backlash, including a widely-popular push to tax the massive stashes of wealth the upper-upper class has amassed by stiffing the middle class and poor. Alarmed by this uprising, the rich have launched a major effort to defuse public anger...

Rich Whites Trying to Suppress Native Americans. Again

It’s tough being rich. For one thing, you have to be on constant alert to keep commoners from encroaching on your turf and upsetting your sense of proper social order. Consider the angst of the swells who summer in the Hamptons, an ultra-toney seaside enclave of New York City’s old-wealth families and Wall Street elites on the eastern tip of Long Island. For generations they’ve used local ordinances to keep us riffraff out of their exclusive communities. But now, they find themselves besieg...