Jim Hightower's Lowdown

Please be my Valentine! That is not only a warm, sweet, sometimes romantic sentiment people express in mid-February on a frilly, red card. It’s also the name of a third-century saint who literally lost his head, a ninth-century pope whose reign lasted only 40 days, three Roman emperors, a very good Mexican hot sauce… and a tiny town in Texas. That town has a genuinely sweet story to tell and a unique role to play in the sending of thousands of Valentine’s Day sentiments to people around the world. Valentine, Texas, population 217, was founded by the Southern Pacific Railroad in the 1880s and reportedly was named for one of the corporation’s big shareholders. Nothing romantic about that. But in recent years, would-be cupids have turned the town’s name and – believe it or not – its one-room post office into a center of affectionate expression. What happened is that romantics from distant places began to batch-up their pre-addressed, stamped Valentines and zip them to this postal outpost way out on the Texas-Mexico border. Why? Because, to give their sentimental missives extra oomph, they wanted them to bear the special touch of being mailed from an actual place named Valentine. The greatest thing about our public postal workers is that they literally deliver, and the Valentine branch goes the extra mile to provide this loving gesture – at no extra charge. Ismelda Ornelas, Postmaster of the 79854 office, handstamps each envelope herself. Indeed, the Valentine post office is now officially designated the “Love Station.” Moreover, the local school district holds an annual art contest among students to design each year’s Valentine postmark, which is then stamped on each envelope. See, while the media tells us our world is going to hell, here’s another grassroots example of loving, creative people going the other way. Happy Valentine’s Day!

Why would anyone believe anything that a big corporation tells us? Corporate powers use lies as a core element of their business strategy. I’m not even counting the tsunami of polished, poll-tested lies they call “advertising.” Rather, I mean their secret perversions of facts to hide the deadly harms they and their products cause, all pushed by top executives and elite investors in cynical efforts to keep profiteering at the expense of customers and society at large. Pharmaceutical price-gougers, Wall Street bankers, tobacco giants, gun makers, and pesticide peddlers are notorious examples – but none can top the perfidy and raw greed of Big Oil. For example, a new report reveals that Exxon Mobil’s executives not only were aware that their petro-products might soon lead to catastrophic climate change, but their own scientific analysts had proven it beyond a doubt – and told them so in 1977! Indeed, Exxon’s internal findings turn out to have been much more accurate and damning than the warnings issued by government scientists and officials. So, did Exxon’s executive hierarchy meet the scientific and ethical challenge presented to them? No. The simply lied to everyone – Congress, the media, the people. In 1999, CEO Lee Raymond tried to BS his way past the truth, snorting that global warming projections “are based on completely unproven climate models, or more often, on sheer speculation.” Exxon’s contemptable dishonesty continues to pour out of corporate headquarters today. Asked recently if Exxon has misled the public about looming climate danger from its fossil fuel profiteering, current CEO Darren Woods proclaimed that the corporation’s previous lies were “entirely consistent” with the scientific consensus of the time. Obviously, that’s another flagrant lie, which is entirely consistent with the corporation’s profiteering model. And don’t forget, CEOs are lavishly-paid liars – Woods pockets $23 million a year to prevaricate-for-profit.

People are baffled by the surreal saga of George Santos, the bizarre Republican congress critter who is a bottomless sink hole of lies. How could he think that he, a highly visible public figure, could get away with such blatant fabrications? Perhaps he thought he was a corporation. After all, these multibillion-dollar brand-name outfits routinely lie about who they really are. Crass polluters shamelessly run PR campaigns claiming to be environmentalists, price gougers pose as consumer champions, and economic downsizers glorify themselves as visionary creators. They gild their resumés for their own profit… and they get away with it. So George might’ve thought: I’ll follow the corporate model – just make stuff up. Like soulless tobacco executives do. For decades, they killed millions of people for profit, flat-out lying that nicotine was not addictive, that their cancer-sticks were not deadly, and that they did not target their ads to children in order to hook them early. But wait – today’s tobacco titans claim to be born-again public health champions! “We have an unprecedented opportunity to move beyond smoking,” said the head honcho of the Phillip Morris brand, asserting that Big Tobacco would henceforth back the public push for a “smoke-free future.” Phillip Morris garnered widespread praise for this bold stand. But it was a deliberate lie. Even as the executive’s lips moved, the tobacco giants were spending billions on lobbyists and PR campaigns to gut state and national proposals to prevent addiction and actually lead to a smoke-free future. Yes, we should be outraged that Santos, a flagrant political fake, has swindled his way into Congress, and he should be ousted. But what will Congress do about the far more destructive corporate deceivers who are George Santos’ role models? Their lies kill people, yet they’re still welcome in the halls of Congress.

An old political saying notes that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing. However, given the proliferation of today’s goofball culture wars and fanatical right-wing phobias, that truism should be updated to say: Evil swarms when power-hungry leaders unleash the crazies. Which brings us to the US House of Representatives, now led by a run-of-the-mill corporate Republican, Kevin McCarthy. He’s always been a crassly-ambitious political climber untethered to any moral principle larger than his own ego, so he’s not trusted, even by GOP lawmakers. Indeed, in an almost-comical public spectacle, it took four days and 15 rounds of voting in January before Kevin cut enough desperate deals to get the slimmest majority of his own Republican colleagues to make him speaker of the House. To squeak out his win, though, he had to hand big chunks of his official power to a gaggle of extremist, far-right-wing legislators who are – in a word – BONKERS. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, and other members of the GOP’s Kooky Kaucus promote unhinged QAnon conspiracy theories, warn that Jews are firing lasers from outer space to start wildfires, lionize Vladimir Putin and Adolf Hitler, call for the execution of Democratic leaders, and insist that the government is staging school shootings as an excuse to outlaw guns. Okay, they’re nuts. And politics makes strange bedfellows. But McCarthy has not just climbed into bed with them, he’s snuggling up tightly, naming them to powerful committees, publicly legitimizing their screwballism, and intentionally bringing the evil of bigotry, intolerance, and even fascism in from the fringe of politics – to sit in the seat of power. That’s not merely ridiculous and shameful, it’s dangerous. Evil swarms whenever so-called leaders meekly give permission for crazies to use government power to rule over us.

Big news from Congressional Republicans: After years of failing to unearth any proof that America’s elections are corrupted by flagrant cases of voter fraud, the GOP has now found a whopper! Unfortunately for the Party’s voter integrity police, though, what they’ve uncovered is not some nefarious Democratic plot, but a scheme of mass deception by one of their own congress critters: George Santos. Last November, he effectively stole a New York City congressional seat. How? By making himself up. Santos invented a fictional “George” that hid his criminal record and touted an amazing storybook past he never lived. No, he is not Jewish, his grandparents were not Holocaust survivors, he was not a volleyball star at a prestigious college he never even attended, he was not a renowned Wall Street banker (though he did help run a Florida Ponzi scheme), he was not a New York City real estate baron, and the mystery money that financed his campaign apparently came from nowhere. Naturally, when Congress’ fraud-busting Republican leaders learned that this hyper-fraudster came from their own ranks, they promptly expelled him. Ha-ha-ha! Just kidding. Instead, Kevin McCarthy, the GOP’s unscrupulous congressional leader, has fully embraced this defrauder as an honorable member of his legislative team, sanctimoniously declaring: “The voters elected [Santos] to serve.” That makes Kevin even more dishonest than George. One, the people did not elect Santos, but voted for the caricature he concocted to fool them. Two, McCarthy doesn’t give a damn about the integrity of elections – he’s only clinging to George because his own support in the House is so iffy that he needs Santos’ vote to save his own worthless political hide. Santos is a pathetic congenital liar. But McCarthy is worse – a truly-disgusting, self-serving political hack. And neither one should be in public office.

High-dollar corporate executives and Wall Street bankers keep telling us that it’s lonely at the top. Well, they should try toiling at the bottom of America’s pay scale. The radical rise of inequality in our society is a function of the vast political inequality separating the working class from the power structure. The elite rich have many friends in high places paying close attention to their needs, but the further one tumbles down the economic ladder the lonelier you are when your interests conflict with the bosses and big shots. As Ray Charles sang, “Them that’s got is them that gets.” Consider waiters, bartenders, and other restaurant workers. Generally these jobs are poorly paid and routinely abusive, yet lawmakers mostly ignore all that, cozying up to the abusers, because... well, they’re rich and politically connected. As a result, most of today’s restaurant workers are paid a sub-minimum wage that was set 32 years ago at $2.13 an hour! That’s not a wage, it’s an insult. Yet most lawmakers refuse to raise it, bowing to the piles of campaign cash they get through a lobbying front called the National Restaurant Association, dominated by multibillion-dollar food chains. Worse, in the past decade, this consortium of greedy wage suppressors even devised a diabolical scheme to make restaurant workers pay for the industry’s lobbying campaigns to hold down wages! The Association bought an outfit that provides hokey food safety training to workers, then it lobbied to get California, Florida, Illinois, Texas, and other states to require that all employees not only undergo the silly on-line training course, but also making them pay $15 each for the training. Guess what? NRA then uses those worker training fees to fund its lobbying efforts that let restaurants pay poverty wages. And that, kids, is how inequality happens.

I don’t usually cover sob stories, but this one is so touching it might make you cry. Or throw up. It’s about some workers who toiled all last year in the caverns of New York City, only to find at year’s end that their pay was being cut by up to 50 percent. Actually, it’s not their salaries that were cut – but their bonuses. You see, these are Wall Street investment bankers whose annual salaries total only a few hundred-thousand-dollars each (poor babies), but they always expect to double or triple that in bonus money. After all, theirs is a dirty job – they engineer multibillion-dollar corporate mergers that increase monopoly power, eliminate the jobs of thousands of regular workers, and further enrich the superrich. It’s devilish work – hence the big bonus payouts to keep them doing it. Last year, though, the number of whopper deals plummeted, the revenues of Wall Street investment banks sank… and, oh, how sad it was to hear the wails of so many poor Wall Street millionaires whose bonuses were whacked. See, I told you it was a sob story. But worse than the loss of money for these hard-hit financial toilers is the tragic crimping of their lifestyle. The New York Times reports, for example, that Wall Street’s bonus bust has already resulted in fewer of these dealmakers buying hundred-thousand-dollar luxury cars this year. Can you imagine the pain of that? The dinging of annual bonuses is even stirring radical sentiments among these restive rich workers – in one survey of financial professionals, 72 percent said they would consider quitting if their bank cut their bonus. Now there’s an enticing new source of labor activism for unions that’re organizing at Starbucks, Amazon, McDonald’s, etc. Why not a Wall Street banker union? Solidarity forever, brothers and sisters!

Growing up, I absorbed a lot of values from my Ol’ Texas Daddy – a strong commitment to the Common Good, a healthy work ethic, and a lively sense of humor. But one thing about him I’ve rejected: His determination to have a perfect yard of thick, verdant, St. Augustine grass. Lord, how he worked at it – laying sod, (watering), fertilizing, (watering), weeding, (watering), spreading pesticides, (watering), mowing… (more watering). But it was too hot, too dry, too infested with blight, bugs, slugs, and such. He was up against Texas nature, and he just couldn’t win. So, I’ve gone in the opposite direction – slowly nurturing a natural yard of native trees, drought-tolerant plants, and a general live-with-nature ethic in my little landscape. I’m hardly alone in this rejection of the uniform “green grass imperative.” A spontaneous yard rebellion is taking hold across our country as more and more households, neighborhoods, businesses, etc. shift to a nature-friendly approach. A particularly encouraging push for change is coming from school kids – elementary level through college – who’re appalled by the poisoning of our globe and organizing locally to do something that both makes a difference and makes a statement. One exemplary channel for their activism is a student movement called Re:wild Your Campus. Of course, some people consider wild yards to be scruffy, ugly… unruly. That’s their choice, but some also insist that tidy grass lawns must be everyone’s choice. So they proclaim themselves to be the yard police, demanding that cities and homeowner associations make green-grass uniformity the law, filing busybody lawsuits and running right-wing social media campaigns targeting people and groups that disobey. These attacks are silly because... well, they are silly, and also because they’re attacking the future, which is nearly always a loser strategy. To work for yard sanity and choice, go to Rewild.org.

What 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! Then, like a karate chop to the party’s own neck, its congressional leaders let loose with a pre-election announcement that, if put in charge, the Grand Old Party would go after people’s Social Security and Medicare benefits. But Republicans also got hit with something beyond their control: A bevy of new, unabashedly-progressive Democratic candidate running on real populist issues that matter to workaday people, backed up by legions of energized grassroots activists. Candidates like Summer Lee, who’ll be the first Black woman elected to Congress from Pennsylvania. Championed by Working Families Party, Our Revolution, and other little-d democratic groups, she beat back concerted attempts by corporate powers in both major parties that tried to demonize and defeat her, including a last-minute dump of $1 million into her GOP opponent’s campaign by the American-Israeli SuperPAC. Another is Lina Hidalgo, the feisty people’s advocate who is the top county official in Houston, Texas. She faced down a pack of ultrarich oil magnates, developers, and other corporate interests who put up $9 million in a failed effort to boot her. The Republican Party has put its future on the rutted road of right-wing extremism and corporate sovereignty. Grassroots progressives, however, showed in this election a promising path to democratic rejuvenation: Run aggressive campaigns offering real change from the business-as-usual politics and policies of both parties.

America 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 promptly bury democratic reforms that could stop the gusher of corrupt cash. An analysis of donations in this year’s congressional races shows that this plutocratic perversion of our politics and government has reached absurd levels. Historian Nancy McLean and public interest advocate Frank Clemente have documented that the two main SuperPACs trying to put Republicans in Congress got about half of their $188 million election fund from just 27 billionaires. Also, a corporate front that backs GOP candidates, Club for Growth, got nearly $35 million from only three billionaires. Thanks to years of congressional stonewalling and the steady partisan stacking of our top courts with corporate idealogues, there is essentially no limits on this purchase of lawmakers. Indeed, the biggest donors are even allowed to undermine democracy in secret, not revealing their identity. The money-dealing in politics translates directly into anti-democratic public policies. Lawmakers elected with this money not only support the billionaires’ special-interest agenda (which the people don’t want), but also are fierce opponents of any reforms to increase voter participation in our governing process (which people do want). That’s why, for example, efforts to guarantee every eligible American a Constitutional right to vote have not moved forward in Congress – even though the great majority of people favor it. It’s a simple political equation: Plutocratic money quashes democratic will, producing plutocratic public policies.

Every 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 founders of the 1780s were unabashed plutocrats who wanted suffrage restricted to White, male property owners, fencing out the “democratic rabble.” James Madison himself, author of the Bill of Rights, insisted that only the wealthy be allowed to vote, calling them “the safest repositories of republican liberty.” He warned that poorer classes could be swayed by populist anger at the propertied elites. Among the prominent founders, only Benjamin Franklin had the temerity to dissent from Madison’s institutionalization of plutocratic rule, pointing out that the vast majority of those who had fought, bled, and died to establish the new nation were landless commoners. He also rudely noted that the wealthy were at least as corruptible as the poorest of the poor, so disenfranchising the masses would do nothing to improve a government’s virtue. Slowly, painfully, generations of grassroots commoners have inched open the American ballot box to more of us, extending the legal possibilities of democratic participation. But as we see in this year’s blatant, violent, mob efforts by the right-wing minority to shut out millions of legitimate voters, the few can still overrule the many in America. Meanwhile, bills calling for a Constitutional Amendment to affirm every citizen’s fundament right to cast a ballot have been introduced in Congress for years. None have even been given a hearing, much less a vote.

Although 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 their chosen one really is a toad. Take Ron DeSantis. The GOP’s far-right, power hungry, narcissistic Florida governor promises to be the next Donald Trump – only more effective and not as nice. For example, his favorite gubernatorial hobby is the Orwellian practice of monitoring and censoring people’s speech and thoughts, culling out ideas he deems objectionable. “Don’t Say Gay,” is his most infamous dictate to the state’s teachers, but he has also outlawed any teachings that might “denigrate the Founding Fathers.” Nor will he tolerate the study of institutional racism in America. Indeed, he has even mandated that social studies textbooks (Get this!) must not include concepts of social justice. Ron adamantly opposes what right-wingers call a “woke” society – he wants one that’s asleep. Sound asleep. He recently rallied his right-wing cadre to ban some math textbooks. Yes, Math! They screech that some real-life topics like wage disparities are being used to make math problems relevant to today’s students – so it was Fahrenheit 451 for those books. Thus far, DeSantis’ censorship binge has nixed 42 math books for “incorporat[ing] prohibited topics.” Imagine what he could ban as president! Did I mention that DeSantis is also forming his own gubernatorial military force – a state army he can deploy in “emergencies”? What’s an emergency? He says he’ll decide.

How 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 government power was evil. But here comes DeSantis, who puts the bull in bully – bellowing “culture war” hooey, demonizing immigrants, fabricating claims of voter fraud, promoting Covid lies, and so forth. Then he imperiously asserts government power to bully local communities, workers, the poor, Florida’s environment, truth, fairness, honesty, and democracy. Consider one of his recent maneuvers to overturn the people’s democratic will. Like most other Republican-run states, DeSantis’s Florida keeps trying to block African-Americans from the polls. In 2018, however, Floridians themselves rebuked the suppressors by approving a ballot measure to expand the electorate. A whopping 65% said YES to eliminating a vindictive lifelong ban on voting by ex-felons – people who had served their time. This long overdue measure of simple justice (approved, in fact, by a much bigger margin of voters than DeSantis got that year) re-enfranchised about 1.4 million former felons. But wait – DeSantis had old Jim Crow up his sleeve! In 2019, he rammed a technical gotcha into state law, preventing former felons from voting until they pay in full all court fines (many arbitrarily and unfairly assessed years ago for things like marijuana possession). The fines can run thousands of dollars, so DeSantis’ new law created a partisan poll tax to price a big percentage of these newly eligible voters out of democratic participation. Remember, he’s the “new” Republican Party.

Perhaps 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. They are openly embracing The Crazy, including conspiracy theorists, neo-confederates, and Q-Anon cultists, hoping to harness the fanatical horsepower of these antidemocratic groups to the party’s true purpose of entrenching the supremacy of corporate and moneyed elites. Now, this extremism is about to erupt in the GOP’s presidential primary, for a whole covey of these cooing right-wingers have fantasies of taking the groups’ radical agenda to the White House. All of them are trying to out-extreme each other with raw meat bigotry and autocratic posturing, but two wannabes have emerged as both the most bullish and bullying: Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida. For months, these big state governors have been locked in a far-right kook-off including outlawing free speech, banning books, viciously attacking immigrants, preempting local elections and governments, and denying health care to poor people. Bear in mind that Abbott and DeSantis are not merely pontificating, posturing, and promising what they might do in the White House–as governors they’re actually practicing it right now! I don’t know if Abbott and DeSantis are the worst that the GOP will try to put in the Oval Office in 2024, but please pay attention now, for today’s Republican elites intend to pull our democracy down into the plutocratic, autocratic, and theocratic maelstrom they are creating.

In 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, buffed him up with PR Shinola, pulled off a post-election political heist… and squeegeed him, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, and that whole regime of horrors into office. Americans soon began expressing astonishment at how shallow, imperious, and dangerous Bush & Company were proving to be, leading Molly to say: “Next time I tell you someone from Texas should not be president of the United States, please pay attention.” Don’t look now, but another Texas gubernatorial goober, named Greg Abbott, is coming at you, insisting he should be your next president. Sadly, Molly is gone, but I think I can speak for her on this matter of national import: Hell No! Excuse the redundancy here, but right-wing extremism has become extremely extreme, and Abbott is vying to be the “extremiest” of all. A clue to his loopiness is his vituperative anti-abortion absolutism, forcing victims of rape to give birth to their rapists’ spawn. Not a problem, proclaimed Abbott, for he’s the Lone Star Wizard. He declared that he intends to go out and arrest all rapists – get this – before they rape anyone! Abbott, a governor with no talent for governing, has run up a record noted for spectacular program failures, corporate bootlicking, widening inequality, corruption, political buffoonery… and so awful much more. If that’s your idea of a president, there he is.