Jim Hightower's Lowdown

Let’s say you’re a millionaire. That’s a lot of money, right? Now let’s say you’re a billionaire. That’s a lot more money! But how much more? Think of all those dollars as seconds on a clock. A million seconds would total 11 days – but a billion seconds equals nearly 32 years! Rich is nice, but billionaire-rich is over the moon – and the wealth of billionaires is now zooming out of this world. There are only 2,200 of these überrich dudes in the world, but the wealth stashed away by these elites hit a new record this summer, averaging more than $4 billion each. They’ve even pocketed an extra half-billion bucks on average in the midst of the COVID-19 economic crash. Bear in mind that these fortunate few did nothing to earn this haul. They didn’t work harder, didn’t get one-digit smarter, didn’t create some new breakthrough product to benefit humankind – they could just crank back in their gold-plated La-Z-Boys and let their money make money for them. Then there are multimillionaire corporate chieftains who are cashing in on their own failure. Having closed stores throughout America, fired thousands of workers, stiffed suppliers and creditors, taken bailout money from taxpayers, and even led their corporations into bankruptcy, the CEOs of such collapsing giants as Hertz, J.C. Penney, and Toys “R” Us have grabbed millions of dollars in – believe it or not – bonus payments! The typical employee at J.C. Penney for example, is held to part-time work, making under $12,000 a year. Thousands of them are now losing even that miserly income as the once-mighty retailer is shutting 154 stores. Yet, the CEO was paid a $4.5 million cash bonus before the company filed for bankruptcy this year. And still, the corporate establishment wonders why the people consider it a club of heartless, greedy bastards.

Many Americans can’t believe that political coups are part of our country’s history – but consider from the Wall Street Putsch of 1933. Never heard of it? It was a corporate conspiracy to oust Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had just been elected president. With the Great Depression raging and millions of families financially devastated, FDR had launched several economic recovery programs to help people get back on their feet. To pay for this crucial effort, he had the audacity to raise taxes on the wealthy, and this enraged a group of Wall Street multimillionaires. Wailing that their “liberty” to grab as much wealth as possible was being shackled, they accused the president of mounting a Class War. To pull off their coup, they plotted to enlist a private military force made up of destitute World War I vets who were upset at not receiving promised federal bonus payments. One of the multimillionaires’ lackeys reached out to a well-respected advocate for veterans: Retired Marine general, Smedley Darlington Butler. They wanted him to lead 500,000 veterans in a march on Washington to force FDR from the White House. They chose the wrong general. Butler was a patriot and lifelong soldier for democracy, who, in his later years, was critical of corporate war profiteering, and he was repulsed by the hubris and treachery of these Wall Street aristocrats. He reached out to a reporter, and together, they gathered proof to to take to Congress. A special congressional committee investigated and found Butler’s story “alarmingly true,” leading to public hearings, with Butler giving detailed testimony. This is Jim Hightower saying… By exposing the traitors, this courageous patriot nipped their coup in the bud. But their sense of entitlement reveals that we must be aware of the concentrated wealth of the imperious rich, for it poses an ever-present danger to majority rule.

What is it about billionaires and multimillionaires that make them both self-entitled and clueless about the impacts of their greed? Even when they occasionally make a stab at doing something right, they tend to get it all wrong. For example, while major corporations rushed out PR campaigns at the start of today’s devastating pandemic, loudly proclaiming all-in-this-together solidarity with their workers – shhhhh – most have quietly and quickly resumed their pre-pandemic policy of widely separating their rich fortunes from the well-being of their workforce. Take supermarket giant, Kroger. Last March, as the pandemic spread across America, Kroger honchos publicly hailed grocery workers for staying on the job, despite the health hazard. They ran national TV ads announcing a $2 pay hike for employees, calling it a “heroes bonus.” Nice! But only six weeks later – shhhhh – the honchos killed the bonus pay, even as the virus spread. Not nice. Well, you might think, the economy was collapsing, so maybe the bosses had to skrimp. Hardly. Grocery sales and profits have boomed in the pandemic, and – as the investigative newsletter Popular Information now reports – Kroger’s profits have zoomed up by $1.2 billion since the disease surged last year. Where did that bonanza go? To fat-cat executives and shareholders. Last September, Kroger spent a billion dollars on a stock buyback program – a corporate manipulation scheme that artificially jacks-up stock prices, thus enriching the already-rich handful of investors and executives who own most of the stock. How rich are they? One example: Kroger CEO Rodney McMullen’s latest annual paycheck was $21,129,648. One man, one year. And, unlike the typical Kroger workers who draw only $27,000 a year, McMullen is not on the frontline putting his life at risk. And yet, those on top of America’s financial heap wonder why working families spell “boss” backwards – Double-SOB.

The renowned Western Swing bandleader Bob Wills would joyously call out in mid-song, “Take it away, Leon,” bringing on a crowd-pleasing instrumental solo by steel guitar maestro, Leon McAuliffe. But now comes another Leon who’s such an off-key, screechy, Wall Street billionaire that crowds are shouting: “Go away, Leon!” He is hedge-fund huckster Leon Cooperman, who first gained public notoriety when he compared Barack Obama’s election to Hitler’s rise to power, and he later was dubbed “Crybaby Cooperman” after he got all teary-eyed during a TV interview in which he decried “the vilification of billionaires.” The sad rich man was weeping about Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s proposal to make the uber-rich pay a modest surtax on the excessive fortunes of money manipulators like him. For a while, Leon did go away. But this January the whiner was back on TV, blaming stock market gyrations on manipulations by people “sitting at home, getting their [pandemic] checks from the government.” Then he plunged again into deep self-pity, deploring the likelihood that Biden will join Sen. Warren’s call for the rich to pay their fair share of taxes. “This fair share is a bulls#!t concept,” he wailed. “It’s just a way of attacking wealthy people.” Then he appealed to the real victims of the pandemic to rally behind billionaires like him. We make the world “a substantially better place” with our donations to charity, he asserted, pleading for public gratitude, and exclaiming: “We all got to work together.” Together? While working class and poor have been knocked down, cut off, and stomped on in the past year, America’s 651 billionaires – including Cooperman – have collectively jacked up their wealth by a trillion bucks – an average of $1.5 billion each. Shall we take up a collection and buy this guy a clue? Do yourself a favor Leon – go away for good.

The Democratic Party establishment is now issuing a go-slow warning to the new president they backed. They instruct that, while Biden should undo the most repressive and regressive edicts of the Trump abnormality, he should NOT attempt the kind of big-idea, Rooseveltian structural changes that progressives advocate. They claim that it was Biden’s moderate, incremental campaign for a return to pre-Trumpian normalcy that got him elected. If ignorance is bliss, these champions of the corporate-run status quo must be ecstatic. I was out there in the thick of last year’s election, and it definitely was not establishmentarians who saved our nation from Trump II. While party insiders insisted that Biden be the Democratic candidate, they didn’t have the voter credibility or outreach to elect him. Big donors and powerful lawmakers don’t go door to door, send millions of personal text messages, or volunteer to organize mass rallies. Rather than working with insurgent grassroots activists, the old guard that controls the party apparatus largely got in the way of success, arrogantly refusing to back progressive nominees and deflating the morale of volunteer activists. And while Biden’s muted campaign of “I’m not Trump” was calming to moderates, it stamped out any spark of enthusiasm that most voters might have had if he’d been a more robust champion of people’s needs. The ones who carried Biden into the Oval Office, despite his 50-year career of political meekness, were the grassroots organizers and volunteers from unions, people of color activists, women’s networks, youth groups, and so many other rebels against the corporate order that the Democratic powers now demand we preserve. Biden’s presidential legacy – and the Democratic future – are dependent on his breaking with Washington insiders and aligning with insurgent progressive activists who would reconnect the party to its anti-establishment roots and make it an FDRish Party of the People again.

The Democratic Party establishment has a message for us progressives: Go away! That club of don’t-rock-the-corporate-boat congressional leaders and their hired political operatives keep trying to purge progressive activists and policies from the party. Even when the candidates of these old-line forces win, as Joe Biden did, they can’t seem to stop assailing grassroots progressives who supply the new ideas, energy, organizing – and votes – that are the party’s future. They’re furious that we upstarts are making gains and pushing Democrats to be… well, DEMOCRATS! Just hours after polls closed on Nov. 3, a group of timorous congressional Democrats joined in a game of “pin the tail on progressives.” They wailed that our demands for such egalitarian policies as Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, and criminal justice reform “scares voters” and caused eight centrist Dems in swing districts to lose their House seats. One of the leading complainers, Rep. Jim Clyburn, even insisted that those pushing a people’s democratic agenda would be the death of the Democratic Party – if “we are going to run on Medicare for all… socialized medicine, we’re not going to win,” he proclaimed. Never mind that we taxpayers already provide “socialized medicine” for him and his colleagues, and never mind that he happens to be a top recipient of political cash from pharmaceutical profiteers – he is also wrong. “Every single swing-seat House Democrat who endorsed Medicare for All won re-election,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted on Nov. 7. “Every. Single. One.” Indeed, of the eight soft Dems who lost their House seats, all refused to back healthcare for all. Far from scary, the idea of providing health coverage for every American is hugely popular – just days before the election, polling by Fox News(!) showed 72 percent of voters favor changing “to a government-run health care plan.” There’s the party’s future.

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 petrochemical profiteers. With fossil fuel profits crashing, the giants are rushing to convert more of their over-supply of oil into plastic. But where to send the monstrous volumes of waste that will result? The industry’s chief lobbyist outfit, the American Chemistry Council, looked around last year and suddenly shouted: “Eureka, there’s Africa!” In particular, they’re targeting Kenya to become “a plastics hub” for global trade in waste. However, Kenyans have an influential community of environmental activists who’ve enacted some of the world’s toughest bans on plastic pollution. To bypass this inconvenient local opposition, the dumpers are resorting to an old corporate power play: “Free Trade.” Their lobbyists are pushing an autocratic trade agreement that would ban Kenyan officials from passing their own laws or rules that interfere with trade in plastic waste. Trying to hide their ugliness, the plastic profiteers created a PR front group called “Alliance to End Public Waste.” But – hello – it’s not “public” waste. Exxon and other funders of the alliance make, promote, and profit from the mountains of destructive trash they now demand we clean up. The real problem is not waste, but plastic itself. From production to disposal, it’s destructive to people and the planet. Rather than subsidizing petrochemical behemoths to make more of the stuff, policymakers should seek out and encourage people who are developing real solutions and alternatives.

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 carry-out bags to shower curtains to almost invisible bits of microplastics, the vast tonnage of this trash increases every minute, with an afterlife lasting centuries, wreaking havoc on ecosystems, destroying species, and infusing our water, air, soil, food… and us. Consider just two common products – your toothbrush and your sneakers. Until the 1930s, toothbrushes were made of degradable, natural components. Since then, though, practically all have been throwaway plastic brushes. But there is no “away,” so nearly all of the trillions of brushes we’ve discarded in the past century are still out there somewhere on the land or in our water. Moving from your teeth to your feet, consider that millions of sneakers are sold in the US each year, advertised as being athletic and “cool.” What’s uncool is that they’re made almost entirely of melded and molded plastics that are practically impossible to recycle. So, after a short time in our closets, sneakers spend an eternity as globs of toxic plastic trash. We’re being choked by our own synthetic waste – from billions of plastic bottles and cigarette filters to tons of straws and synthetic rubber tires. As the wise old saying puts it, if you find that you’ve dug yourself into a hole, the first thing to do is to quit digging. To help stop the insanity, contact the group, Beyond Plastics.

You can’t poke into any issue in Congress without stumbling over sacks full of corporate campaign donations – and the recent eruption of pro-Trump mob violence inside the US Capitol exposed boodles of that special interest cash to public view. Much to the embarrassment of major Wall Street banks, Silicon Valley tech giants, and CEOs of brand-name corporations, hundreds of thousands of their political dollars were traced to the mayhem in our Capitol. Specifically, their money was going into the coffers of 147 Republican lawmakers who backed the fraudulent Trumpster attempt to overthrow last fall’s presidential election. Acknowledging the damage these revelations did to their public image, the corporate interests responded forcefully. How? They issued press releases condemning violence. Wow… that’ll make things better! Okay, in fairness, quite a few firms added a bit of bite to their bark by suggesting that maybe they wouldn’t be so cavalier about tossing out political contributions in the future. Citigroup, JPMorgan, and Goldman Sachs announced they would “pause” donations to all candidates; Blue Cross Blue Shield, Marriott, and Dow said they were “suspending” donations to the 147 congress critters who voted to reject the people’s choice; and Delta, Fed Ex, and Walmart declared they were “monitoring” the situation. Notice the profusion of wiggle words in these professions of corporate principle. The executives are really not biting the system, but merely gumming it for a while… then, once public attention has drifted, the corporate-congressional complex will be back to business as usual. After all, while they deplore Trump’s racism, sexism, xenophobia, and overall immorality, they’ve gleefully taken it all to the bank, rationalizing, legitimizing – and profiting from – his corrupt presidency. It’s not armed rioters from outside the system who are the main threat to our democracy, but the insiders who keep manipulating the system to take more money and power at our expense.

The ransacking and terrorizing of Congress by violent Trumpeteers is an outrage, right? Even Republican congressional leaders have rushed to assail the mob invasion, calling it a desecration of America’s democratic ideals. For example, the GOP’s Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, denounced the invading outsiders as “thugs,” lecturing that self-government “requires a shared commitment to truth and shared respect for the ground rules of our system.” But wait… what about the insider mob – the lawmakers who routinely run roughshod over our ideals of equality and justice? So many of the pious members who are now so prissily crying out for decorum and respect for the process openly solicit special interest cash to do favors for the donors, while ignoring the basic needs of workaday people they supposedly represent. Excuse me, Mitch, but for the past four years weren’t you Trump’s most destructive Machiavellian monkey-wrencher in Congress? Yes, you were, relentlessly stomping on truth and rigging legislative ground rules to ram his plutocratic, autocratic agenda into law. You even stoked his depraved narcissism – for weeks after it was clear that Joe Biden had won the presidency, you cynically fed Trump’s fantasy that he had won, helping spread a furious disunity across America. The mob that you deplore for rampaging into your inner sanctum of power and privilege is of your own making – they’re your angry political chickens coming home to roost. It’s a scream (and a disgrace) to see not only McConnell but also self-aggrandizing icks like Ted Cruz now posing as righteous statesmen. Cruz unctuously proclaimed: “We must come together and put this anger and division behind us.” Yes, legal authorities should investigate and prosecute the orchestrators and perpetrators of the mob violence, but let’s also shine the light of justice on the mob of insider elites who so selfishly continue desecrating American democracy.

Are we back to the jungle, an animalistic society with roaming packs of foam-at-the-mouth beasts howling for the enthronement of their king? As witnessed in the ugly collapse of Donald Trump’s presidency, his furious animalism was unleashed on America, revealing a soulless selfishness that he had written about years earlier in a book on corporate deal making. In a “great deal,” he explained, winning is not enough – “You crush the opponent.” But wait, that’s not fair to animals! In the real animal kingdom, the species that are the most successful survivors are not the beastliest, but the ones that work together in a sharing society. From ants to elephants, animals in the wild organize to hunt together, build homes, nurture and teach their young, spread their available food throughout the community, mourn lost ones, etc. They even vote! The real “king of the jungle” is the group, as has been found in communal societies as varied as meerkats, baboons, and bees. Whether primates or insects, such decisions as where to live and which direction to go forage are made by democratic consensus reached in a sort of caucus system. When several thousand honeybees, for example, split from a hive to form a new colony, they dispatch a few hundred scouts to find a new home. One by one, the scouts report back, doing unique waggle dances that describe what each found. Gradually, scouts decide what bee’s site is best and synchronize their waggles accordingly. Once the scouts are doing the same dance, the whole swarm flies off together and settles into their new hive. America has more to learn from bees than from Trump and his lifelong enthusiasm for a social order based on corporate power plays. The great hope for our society is not domination by the strong, but cooperation by all.

What’s wrong with people? Has the savagery, selfishness, and raw, animal hatred within the human species finally come out of the darkness to devour our society?! Fanatics in MAGA caps rabidly cheering a tyrannical, lying, insane president. Gangs of “Proud Boys” strutting around in militia costumes beating protesters whose politics they dislike. Wackadoodle extremists who advocate violence by promoting the group hallucination that Nancy Pelosi is leading a fiendish Democratic cabal of child sex traffickers and cannibals. But is that really who we are? Given the media and political focus on all thing awful about people, you would think so. But consider a couple of little discussed TRUTHS about humanity – two maxims might help all of us get a grip, step back from hopelessness, and push ahead in our political work with a fresh perspective on what is possible. Warning: These truths are so contrary to present-day conventional thinking – and so at odds with our recent sojourn through the dark jungle of Trumplandia – that when some people are first exposed, their brains whiplash. So, brace yourself. Here goes: #1 Truth Most people are fundamentally fair minded, kind, and generous. #2 Truth The basic human instinct is not dog-eat-dog selfishness, but social cooperation and sharing. You might holler in disbelief: How can such happy “truths” jibe with the litany of horrors we are experiencing? Well, although there are obvious exceptions to the rule, decades of behavioral studies, recurring surveys, in-depth conversations, cultural histories, real-life experiences, and every other kind of group observation have by and large produced the same finding: The great majority of people are guided in their daily actions and relations by deep values of fairness and sharing. It turns out that humankind is, well, overwhelmingly kind. That’s the deep, promising virtue that we should highlight, making people’s innate desire for an equitable, cooperative society the basis for every one of our economic, political, and social policies.

We humans have got to get a whole lot smarter, says Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Tesla automobiles and CEO of SpaceX rockets. Musk is not merely reacting to humanity’s recent tendency to elect lunatics to lead our countries. Rather, he’s trying to warn us about the rapid rise of a radical new technology: Artificial intelligence. In common parlance, he’s referring to robots, but these are not the clunky, somewhat cute machines performing rote tasks. AI essentially has evolved to become an electronic brain – a web of evermore-complex super-computers interacting as one cognitive unit that can program itself, make decisions, and act independently of the humans who’re creating them. These thinking machines are rapidly increasing in number and geometrically advancing their IQ, prompting Musk and others to view AI technologies in apocalyptic terms. As algorithms and systems inevitably grow more sophisticated, he says, “digital intelligence will exceed biological intelligence by a substantial margin.” In graphic terms, Musk warns that profiteering humans are “summoning the devil” by creating a new superior species of beings that will end up dominating humanity, becoming “an immortal dictator from which we would never escape.” What’s weird is not his dystopian prognosis (other experts confirm that runaway bot intelligence is a real threat), but his solution. The way for us human beings to compete with AI says Musk, is to merge with it – not a corporate transaction, but a literal merger: Surgically implant AI devices in human brains with “a bunch of tiny wires” that would fuse people with super intelligence. Uh-huh… and what could go wrong with that? It’s good to have technological geniuses alert us to looming dangers, but maybe the larger community of humanists ought to lead the search for answers. “Musk: humans must merge with machines,” Washington Post, November 26, 2018.

The rich are different from you and me. For one thing, they’re rich. Among the super-rich, though, there tends to be a peculiar sense that their net worth is a testament to their true worthiness. Thus, they seem to cling desperately to the very idea of being extremely wealthy. This leads to one specific difference between them and us: Most of us favor a wealth tax to help bridge the gaping chasm of inequality in our society; the rich do not. Indeed, we hear shrieks of abject horror and cries of doom coming from corporate board rooms and other defenders of the plutocratic order. It would be comical if they weren’t so pathetic. They exclaim that such a tax will “destroy” entrepreneurial motivation, “sap’ innovation, “punish’ success, and – get this – “spur” a wave of divorces! The psyches of the rich are so fragile, goes this line of bull, that a tiny tax on people with more than $50 million in wealth would keep them from getting out of bed in the morning. Jamie Dimon, a billionaire Wall Street banker, disingenuously asserts that super-wealthy people like him would “be happy to pay more in taxes.” But he fears the government would just squander it on giveaways “to interest groups and stuff like that.” I have to admit that Jamie does know his “stuff” – after all, he weaseled billions of dollars from us taxpayers to bail out his bank during the 2007 Wall Street crash. Far from squandering revenues on such welfare cases as Dimon, those supporting the wealth tax specifically call for the money to fund universal access to higher education, free healthcare for All, restoration and expansion of our national infrastructure, and other direct efforts to restore the common good. To help advance passage of the wealth tax – and our nation’s democratic ideals – go to Citizens for Tax Justice: www.ctj.org.   “For or Against, Taxing the Rich Rouses Passion,” The New York Times, October 2, 2019.

Jesse Jackson ran a strong populist campaign for president in 1988, advocating bold new policies and programs to address inequality. This prompted establishment skeptics to scoff, “Where ‘ya gonna get the money?” Jackson answered directly: “Get it from where it went.” He meant from corporations and the rich, which had long been rigging the economic system and government policies to shift income and wealth from the workaday majority to themselves. Thirty years later, that shift has become an avalanche: Just three men – Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett – now own more of the nation’s wealth than the 165 million Americans who make up the bottom half of our population. This extreme (and expanding) separation of the few from the many is why progressive policy makers today are calling – as Jackson had – for big, forward-thinking populist solutions. But again, the smug forces of the status quo scoff, “Where ‘ya gonna get the money?” The answer is the same one Jackson offered decades ago, but this time two new factors are in play: (1) from Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, we now have specific, easy-to-understand proposals to tax multi-millionaires and billionaires to pay for the structural changes needed to open opportunities for the poor and middle class; and (2) the public now enthusiastically supports such a tax – a recent poll found two-thirds of Americans (including a majority of Republicans) favoring Sen. Warren’s plan for a tax on those who have fortunes above $50 million. This is Jim Hightower saying… Inequality will not fix itself. As the American majority has had to do periodically in our history, We The People must intervene to keep greed and wealth concentration from suffocating our society’s essential democratic values of fairness, justice, and opportunity for all. A wealth tax is the place to start. “For or Against, Taxing the Rich Rouses Passion,” The New York Times, October 2, 2019.