Jim Hightower's Lowdown

Listen now (2 min) | Here’s an embarrassing turn of events: The six right-wing ideologues now controlling the Supreme Court recently decreed that helping some students get into college through affirmative action programs is henceforth unconstitutional.

Watch now (2 min) | It’s been 35 years since Jesse Jackson’s landmark presidential campaign, and an important gathering of progressives is taking place in Chicago this weekend. In tribute to Jesse Jackson, in celebration of progressive advocacy—and as a call to re-energize Jackson’s democratic model of leadership. The Jackson family will be there, Bernie Sanders, too—and you can be there, via a Word Network cable broadcast and internet streaming.

Listen now (2 min) | About 150 years ago, Gen. Philip Sheridan was sweltering in the relentless heat of a Texas summer. He was not happy: “If I owned Texas and all Hell,” he groused, “I would rent out Texas and live in Hell.”

Happy Friday, y’all! Today we’re launching a new weekly feature for our premium subscribers: the Friday Open Thread. If you’ve never heard of an “open thread” before, it’s a term from the early days of blogging, where writers would ask their communities to share what’s on their minds (as related to the topic of the blog, at least, heh). Hightower is always looking for stories—especially stories of strong grassroots success!—that might not be on his radar, and we want you to help shape the work we’re doing here. You can also use this space to ask Hightower questions, and we’ll be answering the best ones. Other ideas to share: recipes (we’re huge foodies, unsurprisingly), music, films, shows, other culture on your radar. Try to keep your rants to a minimum—there’s plenty to rant about, but we want to make sure no one overwhelms the whole conversation.

Listen now (2 min) | Two pieces of good advice: (1) “Never sign nothin’ by neon,” and (2) “Never negotiate with snakes.” But Joe Biden violated both rules this year, getting out-negotiated by Senate Republicans (and their tag-along Democrat, Joe Manchin). As a result, Biden completely surrendered an urgently-needed program for America: Universal child care.

Listen now (2 min) | The political extremists demanding that government control every woman’s personal reproductive decisions claim that they are “pro-life.” But that’s a rhetorical fraud. Look at their overall policy agenda and you’ll see that they are merely

A quick bite of Texas history for your holiday weekend

Listen now (2 min) | When you think of Americans whose music has made a lasting difference, you might think of Scott Joplin, Woody Guthrie, Maybelle Carter, Harry Belafonte… or Roger Payne. Who? I came across Payne in a June obituary, reporting that he’d died at age 88 (yes, I occasionally scan the obits, not out of morbid curiosity, but because these little death notices encompass our people’s history, reconnecting us to common lives that had some small or surprisingly large impact).

Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio is a “Hillbilly Hero.” We know this, because the Republican lawmaker keeps telling us it’s so, regularly bragging that he rose from hardscrabble rural Appalachia to become the political “voice of the Rust Belt,” the champion of America’s working class.

Listen now (2 min) | In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Humpty Dumpty scornfully declares that, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean.” So what does “woke” mean? It’s become the pet political aspersion that today’s kooky right-wing hucksters hurl at liberals, but the hurlers would be whopperjawed to learn that it’s was actually coined by and for

Listen now (2 min) | Years ago, a Texas lawmaker got caught using his official position to enrich himself by taking money from special interests, in exchange for voting their way. The culprit did not deem this as corrupt, but just the normal ethic of an enterprising business transaction: “I seen my chances,” he explained, “and I took ‘em.”

Listen now (2 min) | As Scottish literary giant Robert Burns wrote, “The best-laid schemes of mice and men/Go oft awry.” His 1785 poem, titled “To A Mouse,” could be directed today at the right-wing sloganeers who’ve been scheming so furiously to turn their hokey “woke” snobbery into a winning political stratagem. “Your local librarian is woke!” they screech. “So is Disney, Inc.! Some of your churches, too, plus all Democrats, and – OMG – even Bud Light!!!” Creeping Wokeism is the new Red Scare, Welfare Queen, and Willy Horton political bugaboos rolled into one, forming the main “issue” of Republicans now running for President, Congress, and dogcatcher.

Your doctor is out and unable to see you now. Not out for lunch or out on vacation -- but out of medical practice. America’s perverse health care system, which sublimates care to the profiteering demands of Wall Street speculators who essentially own today’s system, has been driving out hordes of nurses, pharmacists… and now doctors. These practitioners take their Hippocratic Oath seriously: “First, do no harm.” Yet, again and again they see corporate managers of hospital chains, physician clinics, etc. doing severe harm, routinely slashing staffing levels, eliminating services, rejecting low-income patients… and raising prices. All to prop-up the profits of rich, absentee investors. A prominent physician recently wrote that in 2021 alone four times more doctors quit the profession than joined. He says his colleagues are demoralized by “the diseased systems for which we work.” The disease is money. The primary measure of “care” is now how much profit the system generates for its uncaring corporate owners, so one’s health is largely dependent on one’s wealth. The morally abominable result is that hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths are occurring each year. Yes, profit-based health care is a killer. This is Jim Hightower saying… It’s time to be blunt: For-profit health care is the creation of profiteers and the politicians they buy. It’s insane to let their greed dictate the allocation and quality of this essential human need. Luckily, a better way is right in front of us: Medicare. This enormously-popular public program of universal coverage for each and every American over 65 has proven to be an effective and fair system that is far cheaper and much, much more caring than Wall Street’s privatized scheme. So, let’s eliminate the profiteers by extending Medicare to all of us – every woman, man, and child in our society. To help go to: ourrevolution.com/issues.

No one needs another outrage to worry about, but here’s one that could literally be your last worry. Our hospitals are killing us. Not that the staffers are going room to room snuffing our patients, of course, but hospital owners and top executives are nonetheless killing thousands of ill Americans entrusted to their care. They are doing by deliberately short-staffing their facilities and shortchanging sick and injured people they’re richly paid to serve. At the core of this outrage is a fatal structural flaw in our healthcare system, namely that these are no longer “our” hospitals. Instead of being public or non-profit entities for the Common Good, focused squarely on patients, hospitals today tend to be private operations controlled by corporate profiteers. Pitting patients against profits is no way to run a hospital, for it means money will ultimately rule over health (and over life itself). Ask a nurse. These dedicated professionals are the solid pillars of American health. More than doctors and way more than administrators, nurses make a hospital function, providing the primary care and constant, on-site monitoring that are the essence of an ethical, healthy system. Yet, thousands have already fled the work they love, another third plan to leave this year – and thousands more are going on strike. Why? Because the profit system demands massive staff cuts, leaving way too few nurses to meet the basic needs of patients, causing burnout among nurses… and unnecessary deaths of the people they care for. A damning 2021 study revealed that forcing fewer nurses to tend to an ever-larger caseload effectively killed more than 4,000 New York hospital patients in the previous two years alone. This is Jim Hightower saying… Yet, the corporate powers insist on treating nurses just as a cost to be cut, arguing that hospitals must have “staffing flexibility.” In other words: Cut nurses/Raise profits.

There are industries that occasionally do something rotten. And there are industries like Big Oil, Big Pharma, and Big Tobacco – that persistently do rotten things. Then there is the nursing home industry – where rottenness has become a core business principle. The end-of-life “experience” can be rotten enough on its own, with an assortment of natural indignities bedeviling us, and good nursing homes help gentle this time. In the past couple of decades, though, an entirely unnatural force has come to dominate the delivery of aged care: Profiteering corporate chains and Wall Street speculators. The very fact that this essential and sensitive social function, which ought to be the domain of health professionals and charitable enterprises, is now called an “industry” reflects a total perversion of its purpose. Some 70 percent of nursing homes are now corporate operations run by absentee executives who have no experience in nursing homes and who’re guided by the market imperative of maximizing investor profits. They constantly demand “efficiencies” from their facilities, which invariably means reducing the number of nurses, which invariably reduces care, which means more injuries, illness… and deaths. As one nursing expert rightly says, “It’s criminal.” But it’s not against the law, since the industry’s lobbying front – a major donor to congressional campaigns – effectively writes the laws, which allows corporate hustlers to provide only one nurse on duty, no matter how many patients are in the facility. When a humane nurse-staffing requirement was proposed last year, the lobby group furiously opposed it… and congress dutifully bowed to industry profits over grandma’s decent end-time. After all, granny doesn’t make campaign donations. So, as a health policy analyst bluntly puts it, “The only kind of groups that seem to be interested in investing in nursing homes are bad actors.” To help push for better, contact TheConsumerVoice.org.