Jim Hightower's Lowdown

Poor Mitt Romney. To dodge the tax payments he owes to America, the multimillionaire has for years stashed piles of his annual income in such secret offshore hideaways as Swiss bank accounts and the Cayman Islands. This has been very, very good for his personal fortune, but it's been very, very bad for his public political image. This internal conflict might explain why Romney chose Paul Ryan to be his running mate. Ryan bills himself as a big, big, BIG thinker, and last year he came out with a really big thought that must've touched Mitt's heart, for it offered a happy solution to Romney's tax shelter dilemma. In a magazine interview, Ryan complained about offshore shelters – not because they are tax dodges, but because they're offshore. His solution? "Let's make this country a tax shelter," he bubbled! How's that for a big idea? Ryan proposes to make America as small and deceitful as the Caymans, a safe harbor where the ultra-wealthy of the world can hide their loot from public need. Yes, this would still leave Mitt a tax dodger, but, by gollies, at least he'd be doing his dodging right here in the USA! With such a novel, plutocratic twist on "patriotism," I'd say ideas are not the only thing Ryan is full of. In fact, the USA is already closer to Ryan's perverse vision than even he realizes. While U.S. corporations face a 35 percent tax rate, loopholes let them pay an average of only 13.4 percent – one of the developed world's lowest. Also, look at tiny Delaware: With practically zero state regulation of corporate entities, it has become the legal "home" of more anonymous corporations than any other place in the world. So, say Mitt and Paul, "Let's turn all of America into Delaware – a tax dodger's dream world." Now, wouldn't that make the Founders bust their buttons in pride?

At my age, I thought I'd seen pretty much everything – and I've been to the carny sideshow at the Texas State Fair twice. But now comes a Houston-based, tea-party outfit calling itself True The Vote. It claims to be dedicated to sniffing out ineligible voters – in particular, your darker-skinned Democrat types. TTV claims that hordes of these undesirables are swarming America's polling places to vote illegally. Sadly, though, these self-appointed guardians of ballot integrity have not had much luck in sniffing out, you know, actual documented cases of such fraud. But, whew, what's that smell? Why it's Bruce Fleming, a Republican running for county commissioner in Sugar Land, Texas, which happens to be the home of True The Vote's founder, Catherine Engelbrecht. Bruce turns out to be a blatant, serial violator of our nation's laws to protect – you got it! – voter integrity. In 2006, 2008 and 2010, Bruce voted in person in Sugar Land, and also by mail in Yardley, Pennsylvania, where he and his wife own a home. In 2010, she also voted in both Texas and Pennsylvania – a gross double-dipping felony. So, while Ms, Englebrecht and her cadre of vote sniffers have been challenging the eligibility of voters all over America, she had a real fraud case right under her nose! While Bruce and spouse are said to have no formal role with True The Vote, he is an advocate of its witch-hunt for illegal Democratic voters. As for his own recidivist fraudulence, Fleming says: "The less said the better. Until we can determine the situation, I can't really comment." Hey, Bruce – I think you just did comment by saying "no comment." Did I mention that Fleming was named the county's Republican "precinct chairman of the year" in 2010? Now that's a powerful comment on the GOP's real concern about voter fraud. Hey, Bruce – I think you just did comment by saying "no comment." Did I mention that Fleming was named the county's Republican "precinct chairman of the year" in 2010? Now that's a powerful comment on the GOP's real concern about voter fraud.

As I trekked to my gate at the Orange County Airport in California not long ago, I stopped briefly at a newsstand to pick-up a copy of the New York Times. I was accosted there by a well-heeled, white-haired busy-body who barked at me that I should also buy a Wall Street Journal. Why? Because, he barked again, the Wall Street paper would counter the lies of the Times. Yeah… with its own whoppers. The Journal's editorial page has always been a cheerleader for corporate power, but now that it's in the grip of Rupert Murdoch, it's become a pom-pom waving, journalistic strumpet for the Republican Party. Particularly glaring in recent months has been its propensity for publishing op-ed pieces that pound President Barack Obama on everything from his health care reform to foreign policy issues. That would be fine – except, the editors have chosen not to disclose to readers a rather important credential that each of the pounders share: They're all top advisors to Mitt Romney's presidential campaign. For example, the Journal published op-eds by Max Boot in February, April, June, and August – each of them ripping Obama for alleged failures in dealing with Afghanistan and China. Boot was identified simply as a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. That established him as an expert – without mentioning his glaring partisan conflict-of-interest as Romney's defense policy advisor. The watchdog group, Media Matters, reviewed all of the op-eds in Murdoch's paper during this campaign season and found that 20 so-called "expert opinion pieces" had been written by nine Romney advisors, with not even a whisper to readers that the nine are directly tied to the Republican's campaign. Why be so shy about that tie, if not to deceive? To keep up with the deceivers, go to www.mediamatters.org.

Republican officials are having a major problem in their efforts to "ensure the integrity of the electoral process" by passing restrictive voter ID laws across the country. The problem is this: Their own effort is completely devoid of integrity. The real electoral fraud being perpetrated in America is the GOP's frantic claim that hordes of ineligible people are voting illegally. It just isn't true. Indeed, despite all of their squawking, they've produced practically no cases of it happening anywhere. Nonetheless, they have produced a rash of show-me-your-papers voter ID requirements that are tainting the GOP with the sleazy legacy of voter suppression to pervert our nation's election results. To their chagrin the courts have been rejecting, setting aside, or weakening every one of their repressive laws that have been challenged this year, including those in Florida, Ohio, South Carolina, Texas, and Wisconsin. However, their suppressionist claims might soon be validated by reports of a particularly scandalous outbreak of voter fraud in Colorado, Florida, and Nevada. Curiously, though, Republicans aren't jumping on this one. Perhaps that's because this fraud apparently has been committed by Nathan Sproul, one of their own top political operatives who's already been paid $3 million by the GOP for voter registration work this year in five states. Sproul, the former head of both the Arizona Republican Party and that State's Christian Coalition, is under investigation for – guess what? – tampering with the integrity of the electoral process. He and his company stand charged with putting false signatures and addresses on voter registration documents, registering dead people, and switching people's party affiliations. The lesson here is, if you're going to fight for integrity, make sure you have some.

Hoo-boy, the startling revelation that American Airlines has had some of its passenger seats come loose during flights gives new meaning to the phrase: Flying by the seat of your pants. But that's what the top bosses of this once-proud airline have been doing for months as they continue to downsize its skilled workforce, outsource essential jobs, and generally demoralize the people who make an airline successful. Having plunged the corporation into bankruptcy last year, the geniuses in American's executive suite decided that the way to fix the airline's financial mess and restore public confidence in its service was to force more cuts on the employees who provide the services. Thus, in February, it was decreed that maintenance crews in Fort Worth and Tulsa would be slashed and more than a third of their jobs would be outsourced. Tom Horton, American's genius-in-chief, blithely declared that airplanes "can be maintained in Asia or Latin America… anywhere." True – but not necessarily well-maintained. In September, when the seats started coming loose, the brass callously drove company morale further down by implying that American's maintenance crews, who are members of the Transport Workers Union, were the culprits. But TWU fired right back, pointing out that maintenance of two lines of 757s, including seats, had been outsourced to a non-union, low-wage corporation where employees don't get expert union training or regular on-site reviews by federal safety inspectors. As a frequent flier on American, I have a personal interest in this fight. I want CEO Horton to come to his senses and recognize that he can't climb out of bankruptcy by stepping on the line employees he has to count on to make the flying experience pleasant and safe. Cut the corporate hierarchy – not the people we customers actually trust to deliver a good product.

Old Mitt Romney went to a farm, e-i-e-i-o. And on that farm he came a cropper, e-i-e-i-o! At the time, his staff probably thought that putting Mitt on a farm was a good idea, since he was perceived as being completely out of touch with regular folks – more concerned with getting extra tax breaks for multi-millionaires than with helping families who're struggling just to make ends meet. So, what better way to show his down-to-earthiness than to go to the heartland for an "American Gothic" photo-op with one of those hard-hit farmers who're suffering from this year's devastating drought? Thus, to demonstrate his oneness with America's tillers of the soil, Romney jetted away to the Iowa farm of Lemar Koethe. Well… he went to one of Koethe's farms. It turns out that even when Romney tries to get grassrootsy, he still prefers to do it with fellow millionaires. Koethe owns not one, two, or merely several farms, but 54 of them. And forget the Old McDonald's image, for farming is not this guy's main business – he is a real estate developer and entertainment mogul who runs his own event center. And Koethe has something else that probably drew Romney to bond with him: a huge house with an underground garage equipped to hold multiple vehicles. It doesn't have a car elevator, as Romney's Southern California mansion does, but Koethe's garage does have its own car wash bay. And no doubt Mitt would envy Lemar's 35-foot spiral staircase that rises from the entry foyer to the main living area of his home, which is called "the spaceship house." It probably strikes Romney as normal that a "farmer" would have 54 farms, be a millionaire real estate operator, and live in a spaceship house. E-i-e-i-o – that pretty well sums up how in-touch he is with the real world of workaday Americans.

And now, for some happy talk – by which I mean a non-corporate, "little-d" democratic, and altogether-pleasurable economic development that's spreading across our country. In a word: Beer. More specifically, craft breweries are flourishing from Maine to Oregon, with happy hopheads in town after town now able to boast of their own local, unique, zesty, and fun batch of suds. While Anheuser-Busch (now owned by a German conglomerate) and MillerCoors (partially-owned by Canadians) still dominate America's beer market, sales of the nondescript national brands have soured in recent years. But innovative, small-batch, hometown yeast-wranglers have tapped a burgeoning market of brewski lovers reaching for the real gusto. Since 2004, craft beers have doubled their share of the U.S. market. Some 250 upstart breweries opened last year alone, bringing their total number to nearly 2,000. This has been a true populist economic phenomenon. Consumers and artisans have found each other and spontaneously crated an alternative, locally-based economy that helps sustain themselves and their community, rather than having their money siphoned out by far-away profit-takers. Of course, the big boys are slyly trying to sink their own taps into the craft success of the small guys. Budweiser and Miller, for example, are now marketing pretend-craft beers, having bought such once-local brands as Chicago's Goose Island and Wisconsin's Leinenkugel. Unabashed by this consumer deception, however, a Miller spokesman sniffed: "We don't concern ourselves with what [someone else] defines as a craft brewer?" Wow – sounds like Miller's man quaffed one too many mugs of a genuine local beer from San Diego called "Arrogant Bastard"! When in doubt about whether a local beer is really local, ask the locals.

Let us now assess the state of the free press in this land of... well, of press freedom. The assessment? Pathetic. Not because of some government clampdown, but because of increasing press pusillanimity. The latest decline in hard-nosed, investigative reporting is something called “quote approval.” It began with PR flacks for public officials and political candidates demanding that reporters agree – as a price of being granted an interview – to submit any quotes they intend to use from the interview to the interviewee’s staff for approval. Thus, when Mr. Big blurts out something shocking, stupid, or actually newsworthy, Mr. Big’s staff of bowdlerizers can tidy it up, or even erase it: zzzzzzzztt, it’s gone, as though it was never uttered. It’s not surprising that today’s media-sensitive political figures (including Barack Obama and Mitt Romney) would demand this extraordinary editorial control over what comes out of their own mouths. But it’s utterly despicable that media bosses and reporters have so gutlessly caved-in to the demand. It reduces reporters from hard-nosed diggers to brown-nosed beggars, and it makes a mockery of our democracy’s need for a free press. Yet, many of America’s major publications have meekly surrendered their reporters’ freedom to this restraint. And now, corporate executives have realized that – hey, we can emasculate the press, too. Wall Street barons, Silicon Valley hot shots, and even the bosses of media conglomerates are demanding (and getting) quote approval for stories about their operations. The media columnist for the New York Times admits that he’s also succumbed to these demands: “If it’s [a quote] I feel I absolutely need,” he recently wrote, “I start negotiating.” Never mind that it’s his independence and journalistic integrity he’s bargaining away.

We should not be surprised that a magazine named Fortune would be empathetic to the feelings of the 1%, but – good grief – how embarrassingly sycophantish of the editors to hustle out a piece just before the presidential election entitled: "Stop Beating Up The Rich." Written by Nina Easton, the timing of Fortune's article was less than fortunate, for it came out just as the infamous video surfaced showing Mitt Romney "beating up" the poor and the middle class, while his audience of fellow multimillionaires laughed, cheered, and shouted encouragement. Despite the timing, Mitt and company undoubtedly appreciated the writer's disdain for those who so insolently dare to criticize and even demonize those worthy ones at the top who, as she explained, "gained their wealth through their own efforts." Also, you can almost hear the rich applaud appreciatively as she scorns the divide between the 1% and the rest of us as a "flawed prism, marred by hyperbole, half-truths, and unnecessary pessimism about what it means to succeed in America." Passionately deploring "diatribes against the 1%," Ms. Easton assails critics of America's widening wealth inequality as being people who want "to raid the gold pot." On behalf of the pampered rich, she issues her own emotional "grito," wailing that critics must "stop the name-calling." Does Easton propose any specific remedies for the rising inequality that's shutting out the many? You betcha, and it just happens to be one that's a favorite of Mitt and the millionaire's club – one that they prescribe for any and all of our nation's economic woes: "corporate tax reform." It's unclear why Fortune felt the need to print this piece of fluff, or why Easton got the assignment, but her credit line does mention that her husband "is senior strategist for the Romney campaign." Curious, huh?

As we know, the government can't do anything right. We know this not only because a menagerie of right-wing media yackers and anti-government politicians ceaselessly bleat this message at us, but also because it's often echoed by such basso profundo media voices as the New York Times. For example, The Times recently went after the U.S. Postal Service – a favorite target of political forces eager to privatize our nation's mail agency "Distress Deepening, Postal Service Defaults," screeched the headline, with the article's opening sentence assailing the hapless agency for sinking "deeper into debt," having missed for the second time this year a deadline to pay $5.6 billion "for its future retiree health benefits." This reinforced the right-wing claims of gross bureaucratic inefficiencies, suggesting that no private corporation could stay in business if it was so slipshod. But wait – while the Times did the who-what-when-and-where part of this story – it conveniently evaded the crucial question of "why." The unmentioned truth is that in 2006, the forces of privatization got Congress to shackle our Post Office to an absurd requirement that it must, by 2015, set aside funds to cover the health benefits of all workers who'll retire in the next 75 years. Hello – that includes workers who're not yet born! No corporation could or would shoulder such a crushing burden, yet our corporatized Congress has piled this multibillion set-aside on the back of this public service, demanding that the huge sum be paid out of current postal revenues. This is "Enron accounting" in reverse, forcing the Postal Service's books to look bad when they're not. It's a deliberate effort to bankrupt an invaluable public asset so it can be cannibalized by privateers. That's the BIG news that the Times doesn't see fit to print.

In Mitt Romney's videoed "Boca Moment" in a Boca Raton mansion, he candidly revealed his nasty little inner-millionaire. Glibly disparaging 47 percent of his fellow Americans "Who don't pay income taxes," Romney chided them as moochers who're living the Life of Riley on Social Security, Medicare, and other government benefits. "My job," Mitt assured his audience of fellow millionaires in the mansion, "is not to worry about those people." Indeed, "those" people are now deemed "The Takers" by the right-wing corporate class, while the Mitts among us naturally consider themselves "The Makers." That's a convenient construct by the 1%, invented to rationalize their grabbing of 90 percent of the nation's income gains. But it's a plutocratic fantasy. The big takers, by far, are the Mittites – the corporate barons and private equity hucksters at the pinnacle of the income pyramid. They don't merely take a hundred bucks or so a month in food stamps to help make ends meet; each of them can milk the tax code and sup at the subsidy trough for millions of dollars in annual government largesse. We saw this in action recently when Romney begrudgingly released a second year of his tax returns. Heavily obscured and manicured by his political henchmen, the amended filing shows that the privileged class is allowed to dodge its tax obligation to America by using loopholes and back-alley routes that subsidize their wealth. "Structured income," "trust shifting," "estate planning," "offshore havens," and other tricks are not even known about by regular citizens, much less available to them. This outlandish government largess is reserved exclusively for the very, very rich. These plutocratic welfare takers, living in glass mansions, should not be throwing rocks at the rest of us.

My job as a free-range commentator and political yackety-yacker requires very little heavy lifting. But – as a Texan – I do have the occasional burden of having to explain Rick Perry's periodic eruptions of volcanic inanity ¬– or, is it insanity? Perry – the now-famous "Governor Oops" – went off again in a recent conference call to promote a right-wing politico-religio electioneering stunt dubbed "40 Days to Save America." The 40 days terminate on November 6 – Election Day – and the whole silly thing is nothing but a – "Come-to-the-GOP-Jesus" alter call, orchestrated by the partisan pulpit-pounder Rick Scarborough. Of course, it's a call to "save America" from Barack Obama. Los dos Ricks were trying to gin-up turnout among evangelicals, who're less than enthused by a Republican nominee who's a multimillionaire Mormon from the Cayman Islands, so Perry laid it on thick. He declared that America is in the midst of "spiritual warfare" forced upon purist Christians by Obama's "effort to remove any trace of religion from American life." Really, Rick? When did he say that? Never mind facts, the governor claimed that, "We truly are Christian warriors, Christian Soldiers," battling "this separation of church and state, which has been driven by the secularists." Yeah, satanic secularists like Thomas Jefferson, who wrote in 1802 about the Founders' determination to build that "wall of separation" to forestall an American Taliban. Oh, pay no attention to history, cried the Right Reverend Rick, it's onward Christian soldiers to take "the decisive action we need to spread God's grace throughout the United States." Geez ­ Mitt Romney is the spreader of God's grace? That's one vicious god! So, how to explain this burning flow of political magma from Preacher Perry? It is what it is: He's insane.

As they drill for quick corporate profits deep inside our Earth, such natural gas frackers as ExxonMobil and Halliburton are not only causing enormous harm to people's health, the environment, and local economies all across the country – but they're also fracking something essential to a properly-functioning democratic society: truth. They are hailing themselves both as exemplars of free market success and as the "virtuous ones" in our society – the producers and makers, as contrasted to the mass of Americans that the far-right corporatists are now openly calling "moochers" and "takers." The current natural gas boom, the frackers exclaim, in a self-serving narrative fabricated by their PR departments and political front groups, is a victory over those wimpy and undeserving producers of wind and solar power who are dependent on government subsidies to get up and running. The shale gas boom, wrote the oil-and-gas-funded American Enterprise Institute this year, has occurred "away from the greedy grasp of Washington." AEI's laissez-faire fabulists snidely added that "surely Washington would have done something to slow it down, tax it more, or stop it altogether" had the bureaucrats realized that private enterprise was making such progress. Indeed, crowed an industry PR group, "The free market has worked its magic." Sheesh ­ their BS goes deeper than their fracking gas wells! First, magicians don't perform "magic," they do illusions. Second, for three decades, the federal government has pumped more than $100 million into research for the frackers, finding ways to make the technique work. And, since 1980, the Big Bad Government they now badmouth has paid frackers more than $10 billion in a subsidy written specifically for them These oil giants aren't the virtuous ones, they're liars, fracking their own integrity.

National brand-name food conglomerates are coming a cropper over California's Proposition 37. Actually, it's a double cropper. First, they're frantically scrambling to defeat this citizens' initiative, which would establish a state right-to-know labeling requirement on any food with genetically-manipulated organisms in it. The giants fear that consumers (damn them!) will reject products containing risky GMOs, so they want to keep such contents a secret. Since the California market is huge, passage of a labeling law there would effectively become a national provision. Thus, the corporations are mounting a massive PR campaign against Prop 37. But – oops! – this media blitz is causing a second cropper for them by revealing way more about their conglomerated empires than they want people to know. Another of their carefully-constructed consumer frauds is that many multinationals have quietly bought-up dozens of popular organic food firms – they've but kept their conglomerate name off the labels, hoping that customers will think the organic brands are still scrappy independent businesses. Now, though, the public is learning that Kashi organics, for example, is a subsidiary of Kellogg, which is spending a ton to defeat Prop 37. Other mega-buck donors to the anti-consumer campaign include General Mills (owner of Muir Glen), Dean Foods (owner of Horizon organic milk), plus such giant deceivers as Campbell Soup, Coca-Cola, ConAgra, Hershey, Hormel, Nestlé, Ocean Spray, PepsiCo, and Sara Lee. The fun part is that the organic subsidiaries of these giants support the Right-to-Know labeling law, and some of them are the ones who've outed their corporate parents for financing legalized consumer deception. Nothing like a feisty family squabble to air out the dirty linens and expose some ugly truths.

It's out! This year's list of American success stories has just been published, and, according to its compiler, it "instills confidence that the American dream is still very much alive." Maybe you are one of these success stories. You might be a great public school teacher, for example, who motivated students to achieve new heights, or an inventor who came up with an energy-saving device and got it to market at a fair price, generating a profit for yourself, the environment, and society generally. No, no, no. Not that kind of success. We're talking money ­ the flow of mammon beyond regular people's wildest dreams. That's how Forbes magazine measures not only "success," but also a person's value: You are what's in your Swiss bank account. And, just to rank last on this year's "Forbes 400" listing of America's wealthiest people, you need more than a billion dollars in financial wealth. The magazine gloated that these 400 swells jacked-up their cumulative haul last year by $200 billion over the previous year – an average of half-a-billion each! Now that's success, baby, especially when the typical American family's income dropped by four percent. These ultra-wealthy, goes the Forbes narrative, are the "deserving rich," for they are our economy's makers and producers – as opposed to being takers and moochers, like those commoners who get Social Security, Medicare, and other government help. Before swallowing that, however, note that roughly 40 percent of these "achievers" on the list "achieved" their wealth by being well-born – they inherited the money. And all of them have indeed been takers, not only enjoying government programs, but also subsidies and tax advantages available only to the rich. The Forbes list really says you got special treatment – not that you are special.