Jim Hightower's Lowdown

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-name corporations that we consumers must be banned by law from repairing the products they sell to us! The weak battery in your cell phone, the fuel sensor in a farmer’s tractor, some gizmo in the toaster you bought, a fuse in your business’ delivery truck – you could fix all of these yourself or, with little hassle, take the problem to a local repair shop. But, no, such manufacturing powerhouses as Apple, John Deere, and Panasonic assert that only their corporate technicians are authorized to open the product – which you own! – to make it work again. So, you are expected to deliver it to their distant facility, wait however-many days or weeks they tell you, and pay an inflated price. They’ve literally fixed the “fix” for consumer products. They impose their control by making the products as needlessly complicated as possible, then claiming that the complexity is their patented proprietary product. Thus, they say they don’t have to provide repair manuals or sell repair tools to consumers or independent shops. Gotcha. To give their closed profiteering system the force of law, the giants have deployed armies of lobbyists and lawyers to legislatures and courts, arguing that self-repair people really are scoundrels trying to circumvent safety and environmental rules. This is Jim Hightower saying... For information and action, go to the US Public Interest Research Group: USpirg.org.

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 desperate need to proclaim its virtue? Because it’s been caught in a nasty scheme to spy on its own workers. Teleperformance – a $6.7 billion global behemoth that handles customer service calls for Amazon, Apple, Uber, etc. – saves money on overhead by making most of its 380,000 employees around the world work from their own homes. That can be a convenience for many workers, but a new corporate policy first imposed in March on thousands of its workers in Columbia, is an Orwellian nightmare. Teleperformance is pressuring them to sign an eight-page addendum to their employee contracts, allowing corporate-controlled video cameras, electronic audio devices, and data collection tools to be put in their homes to monitor their actions. “I work in my bedroom,” one employee noted. “I don’t want to have a camera in my bedroom.” Neither would I, and I doubt that Teleperformance’s $20 million-a-year CEO would allow one in his mansion. Uglier yet, the privacy-obliterating contract requires that even the children of employees can be spied on at home. Nonetheless, the Columbian worker signed, because her supervisor said she could lose her job if she refused. Of course, Teleperformance Inc. assures us that the data it collects on children is not shared elsewhere. But how do we know that? Trust us, they say. This is Jim Hightower saying... Do you?

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 videos, including one of Spot mixing margaritas (admit it, that beats training your real dog to bring your slippers to you). But you can’t just adopt a Spot at your local animal shelter. Each artificial canine – manufactured by Boston Dynamics, which is owned by Korean auto giant Hyundai Motor Company, sells for about $75,000. So, who’s buying them? Mainly, such big corporate outfits as oil refineries, mining operations, and electric utilities that want an unblinking eye to monitor and record workers, visitors, protestors, and all others who approach their facilities. Just one more layer of our cycloptic surveillance society. But the point at which Spot loses all cuteness and turns into a menacing beast of authoritarianism is when it’s turned into a police dog. There’s been quite a public backlash, for example, against the Honolulu police department for deploying one of the robotic canines in a tent city for homeless people. In addition to outrage at the obvious class bias in siccing Spot on the homeless, the public outcry grew hotter when it was revealed that the police had used federal pandemic relief funds to buy their Spot! As usual, corporate and government officials assure us that this latest tech marvel won’t be used to spy on innocent people, be weaponized, or otherwise bite us on the butt. Trust us, they say. No.

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 ignorance of Dimon (who pocketed $35 million in pay last year) Congress ought to be listening to actual workers explain why they’re not rushing back to the jobs being offered by restaurant chains and such. They would point out that there is no labor shortage – there's a wage shortage. More fundamentally, there’s a fairness shortage. It was not lost on restaurant workers, for example, that while millions of them were jobless last year, their corporate CEOs were grabbing millions, buying yachts, and living large. Yet, more than half of laid-off restaurant workers couldn’t even get unemployment benefits, because their wages had been too low to qualify. Then there’s the high risk of COVID exposure for restaurant employees, an appalling level of sexual harassment in their workplace, and demeaning treatment from abusive bosses and customers. No surprise, then, that more than half of employees said in a recent survey that they’re not going back to those jobs. After all, even a dog knows the difference between being stumbled over and being kicked! So rather than demanding that government officials force workers to return to the old exploitative system, corporate giants should try the free-enterprise solution right at their fingertips: Raise pay, improve conditions, and show respect – create a place where people want to work! For a straightforward view from workers themselves, go to the advocacy group, OneFairWage.site.

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 restaurant chains, nursing homes, Big Ag, and other low-wage employers that they have a critical labor shortage. It seems that millions of workers today are hesitant to take jobs because there’s no affordable childcare, or the jobs they’re offered expose them and their families to COVID-19, or the work itself is abusive and demeaning… or all of the above. Business chieftains wail that they’ve been advertising thousands of jobs for waiters, poultry workers, nursing assistants, and such, but they can’t get enough takers. So, corporate-serving governors have rushed to their rescue. Shouting “Whack ‘em with a stick,” these mingy politicians are stripping away jobless benefits, trying force workers to take any crappy job they’re offered. It gives new meaning to the term “workforce.” But wait, there’s an honest way to get the workers they need: Offer fair wages! As the owner of a small chain of restaurants in Atlanta notes when he stopped lowballing wages he not only got the workers he needed, but “We started to get a better quality of applicants.” That translated to better service, happier customers, and more business. The real economic factor in play here is not wages, but value. If you treat employees as cheap, that’s what you’ll get. But if you view them as valuable assets, that’s what they’ll be – and you’ll all be better off.

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 there’s ugly rich, like Amazon kingpin Jeff Bezos, who keeps spending gobs of his unsurpassed net worth on vainglorious purchases that end up revealing his essential worthlessness. Last month, combining cluelessness with callousness, he actually ran a global media campaign to glorify him for spending untold billions on an 11-minute ego trip up to the edge of space. Back on Earth, he publicly blurted out that Amazon’s underpaid and abused workforce should be applauded, because “you guys paid for all this.” Meanwhile, Wall Street speculators keep bloating his personal fortune. On just one day last year, his wealth was jacked up by $8 billion! One day! For doing nothing – didn’t work longer, harder, or smarter. Well, he has been diligent about one task: Tax dodging. Even though his wealth now tops $162 billion, he’s had years in which he’s paid zero income tax for the support of our nation. But this year Jeff suddenly became a philanthropist! Increasingly ridiculed as a self-indulgent rich jerk, he loudly announced he was giving $200 million to charitable causes. Wow – how generous. Except… that’s no sacrifice for Jeff, it’s pocket change – doling out two big bills means he still has his $161 billion, 800 million in his vault. We don’t need his self-serving “charity,” we need a wealth tax to restore a bit of fairness and to support America’s Common Good.

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. Little Jeff took an ego trip on his very own rocket ship, publicizing it as some combination of Wright Brothers innovation and Apollo moon landing. But the whole thing took only 11 minutes, barely made it to space, achieved no scientific purpose, and did zero to enhance American prestige in the world. As for personal genius or heroics, Bezos didn’t invent or build the spacecraft, didn’t have any role in flying it, and he faced no cosmic unknowns (he didn’t even have to wear a space suit). All he really did was to buy the spacecraft. But he did get to dress up in a sort of space-style jogging outfit, with his name and his corporate logo emblazoned on it. Then, like a little boy getting a cereal-box certificate proclaiming him a cowboy, when the diminutive magebillionaire floated back to terra firma he held a fake ceremony at which some former NASA official pinned a set of phony “astronaut wings” on him. More pathetically, his corporate lobbyists are said to be appealing to Washington officials to award official astronaut wings for what amounted to a rich man’s carnival ride. So, there you have the new pantheon of America’s flight heroes – the Wright Brothers, Amelia Earhart, John Glen, Neil Armstrong… and Jeff “Space Boy” Bezos. Did I mention “pathetic”?

Our local newspapers are being merged, purged, shrunk, shut down, and looted by Wall Street profiteers – yet there’s good news. In the towns those media vultures are torching, a phoenix is rising! Hundreds of determined locals, often led by people of color, are finding new ways to pay for and revive top-quality, local journalism. For example, the Ferndale (CA) Enterprise moved to an old Victorian home, renting upstairs rooms to vacationers to subsidize the paper. Also, while aloof Wall Street owners have no connection to us or our towns, the scrappy new community papers are stressing their grassroots connection by moving into friendlier, more central, street-level spaces – such as public libraries and community centers – so that regular people can see them and have direct access to their reporters and editors. Then there’s the editor of the Sahan Journal in Minneapolis, who moves his weekly editorial meeting to the offices of various grassroots groups so their members can help shape the paper’s coverage. And in Marfa, Texas, the Big Bend Sentinel is literally serving the public, not only with a good weekly, but also with The Sentinel – a combo coffee shop, cozy bar, cafe, event space, and hangout for locals to meet and greet. In ways big and small, dedicated local journalists are experimenting with funding, structures, staffing, etc., to produce the news that democracy requires. Note to Wall Street vultures: These newspaper ventures aren’t interested in “scaling-up” to maximize investor profits. As they know, it was corporate cost-cutting, consolidation, and “scaling” that got us into today’s mess of journalistic collapse. Instead, by sharing ideas and resources, these local innovators help each other succeed. And, unlike the Wall Street model, their success is not measured simply by financial return, but also by how they do at keeping citizens informed and engaged. Now that’s real journalism.

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