Jim Hightower's Lowdown

What is so supreme about the Supreme Court? I mean besides being housed in an imposing marble building, being the final stop on America’s judicial train, and having its nine members look photogenically authoritarian in those full-body black robes. And, yes, its existence is written into the Constitution – but so is Congress, and no one thinks of it as anything supreme. We 330 million Americans are told we must obey “the law,” as defined by a half dozen unelected lawyers on this court. Why should we democratic citizens do that? After all, these legalistic elites have no actual power to force their personal beliefs on us – there’s no Supreme Court army. In fact, their sole source of power is one that is intangible, extremely fragile, and easily frittered away: Public trust. We should go along with their rulings only if they appear to be fair and honest, not based on personal whim or partisan ideology, and not meant to extend plutocratic power over the people. As Justice Elena Kagan rightly put it, “The only way we can get people to do what we think they should do is because people respect us.” That’s where the present majority of far-right-wing appointees have failed so abjectly. Rather than meeting a lofty standard of judiciousness, all six have pulled the court down into the mire of crass Republican politics. They’ve corrupted the system and jiggered the law to decree that corporate campaign cash is “free speech,” that the state can take over women’s bodies, that the Republican Party can unilaterally shut millions of voters out of America’s voting booths… and so awful much more that enthrones the few over the many. Respect? Trust? The Republican court is already down to 40 percent public approval rating, having surrendered its legitimacy to be a governing authority over us.

Ralph Waldo Emerson told about a guest who came to dinner and spent the entire evening prattling about his own integrity: “The louder he talked of his honor,” Emerson wrote: “the faster we counted our spoons.” Today, America has not one, but six guests in our national home babbling about their integrity. They are the six extremist Republican judges who now control our Supreme Court, and it’s a bit unsettling to hear them go on and on, almost frantically pleading with us to believe in their judicial impartiality. For example, the Court’s newest members, Amy Coney Barrett, suddenly blurted out at a public forum in September that “this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks.” Whoa – better count our spoons! In fact, each of the six were installed on the court by right-wing Republicans specifically because they had proven to be devout partisan hacks. Interestingly, Barrett made her unprompted and strained assertion of judicial integrity at the McConnell Center – named for Mitch McConnell, the rabidly-partisan GOP senator who pulled a fast one last year, rushing Barrett onto the bench on a party-line vote just before Republicans lost control of the senate. Indeed, old Mitch himself, introduced Barrett at the forum where she gave her “we-are-not-partisan-hacks” speech. He grinned proudly at the pure hackery of his partisan protégé. Another hard-core partisan on the court, Sam Alito, whined in October that critics accuse the Court’s GOP majority of being “a dangerous cabal that resorts to sneaky and improper methods to get its way.” Well golly Sam, yes, we do think that, because again and again you partisans sneak up on the Constitution and We The People to twist the law to fit your political bias and personal whims. If you don’t want to be considered political hacks – stop being political hacks.

Keep On Trucking’ was an iconic underground cartoon created in 1968 by comic master Robert Crumb. Featuring various big-footed men strutting jauntily through life, the caricature became widely popular as an expression of young people’s collective optimism. “You’re movin’ on down the line,” Crumb later explained, “It’s proletarian. It’s populist.” But today the phrase has become ironic, for America’s truck drivers themselves are no longer moving on down the line of fairness, justice, and opportunity. What had been a skilled, middle-class job in the 1960s is now largely a skilled poverty-wage job, thanks to the industry’s relentless push for deregulation and deunionization, decoupling drivers from upward mobility. Trucking has been turned into a corporate racket, with CEOs arbitrarily abusing the workers who move their products across town and country. To enable the abuse, corporate lawyers have fabricated a legal dodge, letting shippers claim that their truck drivers are not their employees, but “independent contractors.” Thus – Hocus Pocus! – drivers don’t get decent wages, overtime pay, workers comp, Social Security, health care, rest breaks, reimbursement for truck expenses (including gasoline, tires, repairs, and insurance) … and, as “contractors,” drivers are not allowed to unionize. This rank rip-off has become the industry standard, practiced by multibillion-dollar shipping giants like XPO, FedEx, Penske, and Amazon. The National Employment Law Project recently reported that two-thirds of truckers hauling goods from US ports are intentionally misclassified as contractors, rather than as employees of the profiteers that hire, direct, set pay levels, and fire them. Of course, corporate bosses try to hide their greed with a thin legalistic fig leaf – “We believe our [drivers] classifications are legal,” sniffed an XPO executive. Sure they are, sport, since your lobbyists write the laws! But might doesn’t make right, “legal” doesn’t mean moral, and “boss” spelled backwards is double-S.O.B.

The recent traffic-clogging protests by truck drivers in the US and Canada is about drivers being angry over COVID-19 vaccine mandates – right? Uh… no. That’s the line being put out by right-wing extremists trying to use the legitimate gripes of truckers for their own political gain. The extremists are nuts… not the truckers. My Uncle Emmitt was a highballing trucker in the 1960s, when driving offered an honest job – decent pay, union protections, benefits, and normal hours. Then came the deregulation craze of the 1980s, pushed by corporate profiteers and right-wing ideologues who cast unions aside, crashed driver pay, and turned the job into a punishment. Pay today is so abysmal that most truckers have to drive dangerously-long shifts of well over 60 hours a week (with many topping 100 hours) to make a bare-bones living. It’s a grind, too – you can’t stand up for hours, you travel alone, dinner is a gas station burrito, bathroom breaks mean pulling out the plastic jug you carry along… and you won’t get home for days. Exhaustion is a constant companion and a real hazard – drivers call these big rigs “40-tons of death.” Yet corporate, political and media elites – oblivious to all of the above – whine that America has a trucker shortage. Not so. There are plenty of licensed drivers, but – get this – nine out of 10 quit within a year of getting a job! That’s not because of a vaccine mandate, as right-wing political manipulators want us to believe. It’s because truckers are underpaid, overworked, endangered, and even dehumanized by bosses who install surveillance cameras, sensors, and other technology to record and report every twitch a driver makes. Today’s explosive truck-convoy protests are not a right-wing expression – it’s a rebellion against the plutocratic system that the right-wing has imposed on truckers… and on America.

Right-wing Republicans and corporate Democrats have become a pathetic bunch of "No-can-do Nancys." Faced with an economy reeling from the plutocratic policies that these same lawmakers pushed down upon us, they are now whimpering that America is too weak to meet the obvious needs of its own people. "We must surrender to the Gods of Economic Despair," they cry. At a time when history calls for our leaders to step forth with a bit of FDR boldness and rally grassroots people to rebuild our economy, they trumpet for retreat, giving up on America's historic ideal of the common good. A jobs program? "Everyone for themselves," they shout. Health care for all? "Go to the emergency room," they scream. Social Security? "Socialism," they screech, "run away from it!" Public education? "Can't afford it," they tell us, as they turn their backs on hundreds of thousands of teachers soon to be fired. Repair America's rotting infrastructure? "Too big for us, " they wail, "leave it to the next generation." Wagging teabags rather than picking up the tools of real recovery, the woeful voices of American failure insist that they speak for the People. Hogwash. Americans are a strong, community-minded, democratic-spirited, can-do people. Indeed, the latest Gallop poll shows that 60 percent of the public favors "additional government spending to create jobs and stimulate the economy." "But we must balance the budget," whine the naysayers. Of course we should, and big majorities say we should do that by putting people to work, taxing the superrich to pay their fair share of Social Security and other public needs, as well as by slashing the $12 billion a month we're spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's time for our "leaders" to stop whining – and catch up to the people.   "DeMarco note on budget balancing," July 2010. "Cost of War," www.nationalpriorities.org, July 2010. "Labor's New Critics: Its Allies in Elected Office," The New York Times, June 28, 2010. "More Stimulus Needed to Reduce Unemployment," www.cepr.net, June 24, 2010. "Afghan war costs now outpace Iraq's," www.usatoday.com, May 13, 2010.  

Let’s talk pills. To treat everything from allergies to heart problems, half of Americans take a prescription medicine every day, and nearly all of us reach for the pill bottle on occasion. It's perfectly safe, though, because the Food and Drug Administration regulates the ingredients that go into those medicinal compounds, right? Yes – assuming they’re produced in the USA. Uh, aren’t they? Mostly, no. Take antibiotics. The New York Times reports that ingredients for the majority of these bacteria fighters are "now made almost exclusively in China and India,” as are the components of dozens of other major drugs. Unbeknownst to most Americans (and to our doctors), China has become the world’s pre-eminent supplier of medicines. As one major drug company puts it: “If tomorrow China stopped supplying pharmaceutical ingredients, the worldwide pharmaceutical industry would collapse.” What's at work here is mindless globalization and deregulation. Our politicians threw open the US market to drug imports, while also letting foreign manufacturers go uninspected and unregulated. So, companies located in China can cut corners and undercut our own regulated pill makers. America’s last producer of penicillin’s ingredients, for example, shut down in 2004, leaving us dependent on China. FDA – our supposed watchdog – doesn’t even know where a drug’s ingredients come from. Why? Because drug companies say they don’t like to reveal their sources – so they don’t. The Times found that one federal database lists the existence of about 3,000 foreign drug plants that ship to the US, while another lists 6,800. No one knows which is correct, if either. This is ridiculous. For the sake of America’s health, security, and economy, let’s regulate all pill makers and rebuild our own industry.   “Drug Making’s Move Abroad Stirs Concerns,” The New York Times, January 20, 2009.

In CorporateSpeak, there are no “job cuts.” Instead, firings are blandly referred to as “employment adjustments.” Now, though, corporate wordsmiths will need a whole new thesaurus of euphemisms, for masses of job cuts are coming for employees in the higher echelons of the corporate structure. Don’t look now, but an unanticipated result of the ongoing pandemic is that it has given cover for CEOs to speed up the adoption of highly-advanced RPAs (Robotic Process Automation) to replace employees once assumed to be immune from displacement. As one analyst told a New York Times reporter, “With RPA you can build a bot that costs $10,000 a year and take out two to four humans.” Prior to the COVID crisis, many top executives feared a public backlash if they pushed automation too far too fast. But, ironically, the economic collapse caused by the pandemic has so discombobulated the workplace and diverted public attention that corporate bosses have been emboldened to rush ahead. While the nationwide shut-down of offices and furloughing of employees has caused misery for millions, one happy purveyor of RPA systems notes that it has “massively raised awareness among executives about the variety of work that no longer requires human involvement.” He cheerfully declares: “We think any business process can be automated,” advising corporate bosses that half to two-thirds of all the tasks being done at their companies can be done by machines. This is Jim Hightower saying… Conventional corporate wisdom blithely preaches that all new technologies create more jobs than they kill, but even those pollyannish preachers are now conceding that this robotic automation of white-collar jobs is being imposed so suddenly, widely, and stealthily that losses will crush any gains. “We haven’t hit the exponential point of this stuff yet,” warns an alarmed analyst. “And when we do, it’s going to be dramatic.”

Hunters have come up with euphemisms to make what they do sound… well, less unpleasant. For example, animals aren’t killed, they’re “harvested.” Corporate America is now adopting this verbal ploy, for CEOs urgently need to soften the image of their constant hunt for ways to kill jobs. Their urgency is that they’re now pushing a huge new surge in cuts – this time targeting college-educated, white-collar professionals. Their weapon is the same sort of neutron bomb they’ve used to dispatch millions of blue-collar workers: Robots. But robot is a negative term, so it’s been replaced with a nondescript acronym: RPAs – “Robotic Process Automation.” These sophisticated automatons are armed with artificial intelligence, enabling them to take over cognitive work that had been the niche of such highly-paid humans as financial analysts, lawyers, engineers, managers, and doctors. More than just an incremental extension of a long, slow automation process, this is a Big Bang. It’s presently ripping through the workforce at warp speed and most of America’s vulnerable employees have no idea of what’s coming. In a survey of corporate executives last year, nearly 80 percent of them had already put some forms of RPA in place, with an additional 16 percent planning to do so within three years. That’s 96 percent of corporate employers! McKinsey, the world’s biggest corporate strategy consultant, had calculated in 2019 that the thinking robotics would displace 37 million US workers by 2030. Now, seeing the current corporate stampede to impose RPAs on US workplaces, McKinsey has upped its projection to 45 million job losses in this decade. Returning to the hunting analogy, professional jobs requiring human-level judgement have been presumed to be beyond the range of robotic firepower. But, as one labor economists now notes, with the mass deployment of RPA technology, “that type of work is much more in the kill path.”

Last July, several GOP senators combined their 5-watt intellects to charge that inflation was rising because of the “insane tax and spending spree of President Biden and the Democrats.” Never mind that the “insane” spending is for such sensible, productive, and enormously popular national needs as childcare and jobless benefits, Mitch McConnell’s rabidly partisan flock saw the chance to politicize the public’s legitimate worries about rising prices. You poor consumers are made to pay more for basics, they squawked, because of “Socialist Joe’s” investments in grassroots people! Follow the ricocheting pinball of the GOPs logic: ONE, they say that helping hard-hit families induces them to refuse to go to work; TWO, this creates blockages in the global supply chain; THREE this causes shortages of everything; FOUR, this “forces” corporate bosses to raise all prices; which, FIVE, slams the middle class and poor; so SIX, lazy workers cause inflation. Whew! Rube Goldberg couldn’t have dreamed up a more fantastical diagram to deflect attention from what’s really happening, namely that instead of an inflation problem, we have a corporate greed problem. Of course, the greedmeisters insist that their pursuit of excess corporate profit has not driven any price surges. In our economy of free market competition, they snap, prices are established by the Law of Supply and Demand. It’s the magic of the marketplace, they explain. But magicians don’t do magic, they perform illusions. And the illusion of free market competition implodes when it hits the reality that our economy doesn’t remotely resemble a competitive marketplace.  For some 40 years, corporate-directed government policies have intentionally promoted mega-mergers and green-lighted anticompetitive business tactics. Thus, in short order and with practically no public awareness, much less discussion, America has been transformed into Monopoly Nation – letting the few gouge the many. That’s where inflation comes from.

Republican politicos are all over Joe Biden for failing to stop inflation. Perhaps you wonder, though, what these squawkers would do if they were in charge? No need to wonder – just look back to 1974, when Americans were being pummeled by price spikes that topped 12%, nearly double what we’re enduring today. But by Gollies, President Gerald Ford and his Republican contingent in Congress met the challenge head-on with a new magical program of economic uplift they called WIN – Whip Inflation Now! But it was nothing – just a political slogan with no magic and no action behind it. Price controls? Antitrust action? No, no, GOP Inc. didn’t want to offend, much less punish, corporate titans for a little profiteering, so they shifted the blame for inflation to consumers, demanding that families just say no to price gouging. Ford himself went on national TV, urging fellow citizens to join him in buying “only those products and services priced at or below present levels.” The core of the Republican “program,” then, was telling hard-hit wage earners to battle the monopolistic behemoths of Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Food, et al on their own by simply refusing to pay inflated prices for the gasoline, medicines, groceries, and such that–hellllooooo–they had to have. As a reward, everyone who signed a form promising be an “Inflation Fighter” was sent a nifty WIN button, indicating their patriotic participation. Sure enough, Americans responded enthusiastically – with an avalanche of ridicule. Even Ford’s own top economic advisor, Alan Greenspan, was whopper jawed by the GOP’s idea that the substance of their policy was a political button: “It was surreal. …I said to myself. ‘This is unbelievable stupidity.’” Yet, this time, Republican leaders are more surreal, not even pretending to have solution… and we don’t even get a button.

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.

Mega-investor Warren Buffett once held a big portfolio of daily and weekly newspapers, and he specialized in squeezing out competitors so each held a local monopoly. Then he’d chop staff and news content, letting him glean annual profit margins above 30%. But alas for poor Warren, along came the internet, allowing people to root around for free to find local information missing from his hollowed-out papers. They began losing readers, advertisers, and profits, so, in 2020, Buffett sold out his entire portfolio. But rather than concede that maybe his slash-and-burn, profit-maximization approach had produced inferior products, “The Oracle of Omaha” (as Wall Street had labeled him) blasted the whole idea of local newspapers as dinosaurs. They’re “toast,” he proclaimed. But wait your Oracleness, when done right, local publications both chronicle and help shape a community’s story. And that’s a social benefit that’s as valuable – and as marketable – as ever. It’s not that people have given up on local news, but that corporate owned papers did – they’re not local, not newsy, and not of, by, and for the workaday people in our communities. For example, nearly every corporate daily publishes a business section, which mostly amounts to yesterday’s stock prices, corporate press releases, and syndicated filler. Does even 1% of the population read that stuff? Meanwhile, how about economic news of interest to the great majority of locals who’re workaday families? Where’s the regular section that digs into the area’s wages, job losses and openings, workplace conditions, childcare availability, unionizing efforts, and other real-life issues that confront this majority on a daily basis? The relevant indicator of the wellbeing of nearly every American family is not the Dow Jones Average (which newspapers cover obsessively), but the Doug Jones Average. How are Doug and Donna doing? That’s news that would sell papers.

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,  

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.

Corporate CEOs are mostly sedentary, well-heeled money people who would hardly be considered athletic. Yet, every now and then a few of these soft elites bust out as championship players of an old game called Duck & Dodge. It’s a sport of political finesse played when social conditions reach a boiling point, threatening problems for the corporate order. In such moments, executives sometimes leap forth as social activists, claiming to side with the aggrieved. Ducking and dodging their own responsibility for the grievances, these corporate players insist that they’ll fix the system. But when public attention drifts, so do the fixers, returning to business as usual. Remember a year ago, for example, when our very democracy was under siege, not only by seditious right-wing extremist groups that stormed the US Capitol, but also by a clique of pusillanimous, right-wing congress critters who joined the coup attempt. “Outrageous!” shouted members of the corporate establishment, pledging that they would save our democracy. How? By cutting off the huge campaign donations they’d been giving to those 147 Republican lawmakers who voted to overturn the election. But wait – these born-again democracy champions are the very same corporations that use special-interest cash to purchase lawmakers wholesale and steal the people’s political power. Yet they now want us to believe they’re our saviors? Sure enough, they quickly reverted to their true selves. Within weeks of so sternly chastising the seditious members of Congress, the corporate donors quietly returned to lavishing bribery bucks on them. AT&T, Boeing, Citigroup, GM, and Pfizer are among the 700 corporate phonies that slipped $2.4 million in donations last year to members of Congress they were publicly condemning as unAmerican. It’d make more sense to trust a coyote to guard your last lamb chop than to think that corporations value anything but their own profit.