Jim Hightower's Lowdown

Hail, hail the GOP gang's all here – so let us now welcome Rep. Todd Akin back into the fold! Todd, the present Republican nominee for a Missouri U.S. Senate seat, was coldly cast aside by his own partisan flock just a few weeks ago because well, because he's truly goofy. He's the "legitimate rape" guy who put forth a theory of voodoo "science" that would prevent even pregnant rape victims from being allowed abortions. If a woman endures a "legitimate" rape, explained this member of – believe it or not – the U.S. House science committee, her body would magically generate some sort of occult hormone that would prevent her from becoming pregnant. Thus, spake Todd, any woman who gets pregnant from an unwanted sexual "encounter" – even a violent one forced upon her – has not experienced a legitimate rape and must bear the rapist's child. Oh, cried every GOP politico from Mitt Romney to the county dogcatcher, this is too weird even for us, so Todd must resign as our party's nominee, forthwith! Only he didn't. And guess what? The moral purists who so loudly reviled Akin a few weeks ago are now hugging him, tucking campaign checks in his sordid coat pockets, hoping he'll win so they – and he – can take over the U.S. Senate. What's a little rape compared to political expediency? But – whoops – Todd wasn't through with his goofiness binge. Now, a video has surfaced in which Mr. Legitimate Rape-Man doubles as Mr. Legitimate Discrimination-Man. Asked at a public meeting why a woman shouldn't get equal pay for doing the same work as a man, the guy who would be senator explains – on video – that free enterprise means that corporations are free to discriminate in what they pay women – or people of color, immigrants, older workers, or others. Keep talking, Todd – we¹re all listening.

Ah, Timmy Boy, we hardly knew ye. Tim Pawlenty, that is, the rather moderate former-governor of Minnesota. He had made a radical change in his political persona last year, deliberately yanking his views and rhetoric to the far right in the vain hope that he might become this year's GOP presidential nominee. But he didn't catch on with the Party's red-meat right-wingers, so Pawlenty was out before most Americans even knew he was in. After losing, he double-clutched and shifted again, becoming co-chair of Mitt Romney's campaign, a guy he had dissed as not a real conservative during the spring primaries. But being a Mitt bobble-head was a nothing position. Once again, then, Pawlenty departed before anyone knew he was there – or who he is. So, no doubt you and other inquiring minds are dying to know where the ever-shifting what's-his-name has shifted to now. I can help you with that: Tim has gone deeper into the political darkness, where even fewer people will see him. He's the new top-lobbyist in Washington for Wall Street! Pawlenty will head-up the powerful-but-obscure Financial Services Roundtable. And, once again, he had to shift his views dramatically to get there. Only last year, he was blasting the giant banks for their massive government bailouts and insider deals, demanding that they "get their snout out of the trough." And now, he's the snout-in-chief, in charge of filling the trough with special goodies for the Wall Street powers. Asked about the irony (or dare we say hypocrisy?) of this rebuker of Wall Street becoming its primary Washington defender, the Roundtable's former chief simply quoted an old inside-the-Beltway axiom: "Where you stand depends on where you sit." So at long last we know who Tim is: The poster-boy of Washington's "ethics of flexibility."

One of the most important elections being held on November 6 doesn't even have a Democrat, Republican, Green, Libertarian, or other partisan on the ballot! Yet, this contest in California will likely have a huge impact on national policy and on grassroots efforts to rein in the arrogance of corporate power that's running roughshod over too many Americans. That's why those powerful interests are going all out to win in California, bulldozing as much as $50 million into this one election – more than they're putting into some of the big-money battles for U.S. Senate seats. What's the name of this popular, populist candidate who's spooking CEOs of national corporations right out of their Guccis? Mr. Right-to-Know. He's on the November ballot as Proposition 37, a citizens initiative to require food conglomerates to label products containing genetically-manipulated organisms. These GMOs, developed in the engineering labs of such biotech giants as Monsanto and DuPont, have had their DNA unnaturally altered and quietly slipped into hundreds of processed foods without even telling us consumers about the adulteration. Also, adequate scientific studies have not been conducted on the long-term impacts that these manufactured organisms will have on human health, our environment, and small farmers. So, a broad coalition of these "people's interests" came up with Prop 37 – not to ban GMOs, but simply to say that We The People have a right to know if the food and biotech profiteers have put these highly-questionable organisms in the products we put on our families' dinner tables. The people's proposal is a straightforward, easy way to empower every consumer in the marketplace – and the corporate powers HATE that. For updates on Mr. Right-to-Know's California campaign, go to www.caRightToKnow.org.

Shouldn't we be encouraging people to vote, including making the process much easier and accessible than it is now? After all, voting is a citizen's most basic act of democratic participation, and we're told by editorialists and school teachers that it's our civic duty. Yet, Republican officials in many key states have been going all out to discourage voters from casting ballots. This is un-American! Well that's exactly the problem, cry GOP politicos, feverishly warning that hordes of non-Americans are swarming into our polling places to pervert our elections with their illegal votes. Thus, say Republican partisans, we must preserve the sacred integrity of the ballot by conducting sweeping purges of voter lists, especially in Democratic areas, and we must impose a new layer of authoritarian "show-me-your-papers" impediments on darker-skinned voters. For example, the GOP secretary of state in Colorado excitedly asserted – Joe McCarthy style – that he had a list of 11,805 non-citizens who were on the state's voter rolls. To prove it, he targeted 3,900 of them, directly challenging their citizenship. The Colorado politico hoped to make a name for himself with this ugliness, but – oops – he only made a fool of himself. It turns out that only 141 of his targets had any questionable status, and only 35 of those had ever voted. Even more embarrassing, his hit list of 35 illegal voters included eight people in Denver, but an independent check there found that all eight are citizens. Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania, the Republican leader of the state house didn't even pretend that his effort to ram a voter ID requirement into law had a more noble purpose than raw partisan politics. The law, he gloated, "is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania." So much for ballot integrity.

As an exasperated Casey Stengel asked the bumbling 1962 New York Mets baseball team he managed: “Can’t anybody here play this game?” We should be asking America's newspaper establishment that question about its bungling play, not in a mere game, but in a fundamental responsibility of journalism: conducting untainted, straightforward interviews. Unfortunately, those running major newspapers and blogs these days have gone all wonky on getting honest, informative responses from public and corporate figures on important who-what-where-when-and-why questions. This is because more and more publications are ceding control of interviews to interviewees, allowing them to rewrite or outright exclude from the story anything they said, even if the response was recorded! Sheesh – can’t anybody here play this game? Yes, young journalists can – and are. Editors of student papers are beginning to reassert reportorial ethics by rebelling against the absurdity of quote approval. The editors of the Harvard Crimson student newspaper, for example, declared this fall that they'll no longer submit quotations by Harvard honchos back to them for cleansing. Calling the shift a matter of trust with readers, the editors rightly noted that quote approval defeats the ability of their reporters “to capture and channel the forthright, honest words of Harvard’s decision-makers to all those who might be affected.” Likewise, the editor of Princeton’s student paper has halted the use of email interviews favored by the school’s self-protective officials. The prevalence of email-only responses, he wrote, produces “stilted, manicured quotes that often hide any real meaning." Bingo! Now, if only some of this youthful integrity and journalistic gutsiness would rub-off on the poltroonery of America’s press elders.

Geez – does Mitt Romney's brain-bone even connect to his tongue-bone? He went haywire again in a recent TV interview, declaring that there's no need for the government to make sure that every American has health-care coverage, for there's always the ER. Launching into a little anecdote to show his connectedness to the real-world of not-millionaires, Mitt explained that "If someone has a heart attack, they don't sit in their apartment and die. We pick them up in an ambulance and take them to a hospital, and give them care." Well, actually, since many uninsured Americans don't get any preventative care, they do indeed suffer a Big One and die in their apartments. That aside, however, plenty of knowledgeable people have pointed out that emergency room care is exorbitantly expensive, so it's far more sensible to provide universal health care. One of these knowledgeable and sensible people was a guy named – guess who? – Mitt Romney. Asked just two years ago if he supported universal coverage, Romney said "Oh, sure. Look," he added, "it doesn't make a lot of sense for us to have millions and millions of people who have no health insurance and yet who can go to the emergency room and get entirely free care." The wandering presidential wannabe used to denounce the ER as "a form of socialism" and hail mandatory health insurance as the "ultimate conservatism." And don't forget that the guy who's now touting the ER as a health-care plan is the same one who passed a mandatory health insurance program in Massachusetts specifically to limit emergency room overuse. And it worked! ER use is way down and 98 percent of Bay State residents now have health coverage (including 99.8% of children). Maybe that old-but-effective 2006 Romney model could be brought back to replace this year's defective version of the Romney.

Mark Hanna, the Karl Rove of the old Robber Baron era, explained a century ago that, "There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money, and I can't remember the second." In just the past decade, corporate cash has moved from merely "talking" in our elections to "shouting"… and now to "sliming." A new report by two public-interest organizations, Demos and US PIRG, documents that the people's voice was shouted down in this year's presidential primaries by a "tsunami of slime" – an unprecedented wave of negative SuperPAC ads financed by a few plutocratic super-donors. How few? Only 1,082 (a mere 0.0004 percent of the U.S. population) put up 94 percent of the cash for all of the SuperPAC ads. Well over half of that money came from – get this – only 47 special-interest funders putting up a million bucks or more each! Far from providing electoral enlightenment, a staggering 70-percent of this year's presidential ads have been negative attacks – mostly vitriolic, depressingly-nasty ads. That's up from only 9-percent four years ago. Count on this ugly money assault growing more extreme this fall, as unlimited cash floods directly from corporate coffers into secret front groups run by the likes of Karl Rove and the Koch brothers. In July, the Senate debated a modest bill to require that corporate donors who're spreading this slime and perverting the process at least have to tell voters who they are. But a Republican filibuster shut down the debate and prevented a vote from even being taken. GOP leader Mitch McConnell rose on his hind legs to defend the clandestine corporate purchase of the people's democratic authority, bizarrely blathering that disclosing the names of the purchasers would amount to "donor harassment." To see the full report go to www.demos.org.

One of the curiosities of life in these curious times is that millions of Americans are enjoying the benefits of government – but are either unaware of it or in denial. A 2008 study found that 40 percent of Medicare recipients, 44 percent of Social Security beneficiaries, 53 percent of people with student loans, and 60 percent of homeowners with taxpayer subsidized mortgages answered "no" to the question of whether they are using a government social program. But, at least they’re not running to be the chief executive of the federal government. Mitt Romney, on the other hand is, and he's been disparaging Americans who turn to government to get what he calls "free stuff" to meet some of their needs. He cites his experience as a private sector executive as a more virtuous model and proof that he has the managerial chops to run the government like a business. For example, Romney's campaign has broadcast TV ads hailing his successful stint as CEO of the 2002 Winter Olympic games in Salt Lake City, Utah. Unmentioned by this heroic free-enterpriser, however, is that his gold medal success was largely the result of "free stuff" he got from Washington. Grossly over budget and unable to attract enough private-sector investment, Romney dashed for a taxpayer handout that ballooned to $1.5 billion before he was done. That's a lot of stuff! In fact, it was one-and-a-half-times more government money than had been thrown into all seven Olympic games held in the U.S. since 1904. Sen. John McCain called the level of federal subsidy "a disgrace," made all the more disgraceful by later exposés documenting that much of the loot went not for the games, but to enrich wealthy Utah developers. Remember Mitt's Olympic haul of government gold the next time you hear him assail poor people for getting food stamps.

You can put earrings on a hog… but it won't hide the ugliness. A huge coal conglomerate learned this lesson the hard way in Eastern Kentucky's sixth congressional district, represented by Democrat Ben Chandler. In Mid-September, a TV ad suddenly appeared featuring a coal miner denouncing Chandler on behalf of the Republican lawyer running against him. The miner was decked out in bib overalls, T-shirt, and a hard hat – but the outfit was nothing more than earrings on a hog. This "miner" didn't have a speck of coal dust on him, had soft hands and an unlined face, and looked like a guy who'd be more comfortable in a suit. In fact, Heath Lovell is a suit – a coal company executive and Republican campaign funder from corporate headquarters in Western Kentucky. Yes, they couldn't even get a bossman from the district to wear the garb and do the dirty deed, instead importing Lovell. "You have a pencil pusher acting like a coal miner," hooted a union representative for real coal miners. In fact, the United Mine Workers have endorsed Democrat Chandler, particularly because of his stand for stronger mine safety rules – something the company has fought. In the ad, Lovell poses as a local and, standing along an empty train track, declares that Democrats in Washington "are killing us." Us? He's an outsider who can't even vote there. He adds that Chandler and Barack Obama "are putting the coal industry out of business" – yet his corporation pocketed some $300 million in profits last year. Later, he couldn't even remember the name of the small town where his political stunt was filmed. But he is said to be tight with Karl Rove and Mitt Romney, two other guys who are happy to compromise miner safety for mine company profits. These honchos seem to think that these hoaxes are a plus for them – but, then, every hog thinks it's good looking.

Recently, I was astonished by a letter to the New York Times that expressed the writer's astonishment that Mitt Romney is perceived as "out of touch and indifferent," insisting that, "a person of Mr. Romney's caliber [is] a rare visitor to the world of politics." Rare, indeed – Romney keeps demonstrating that he's a rare visitor to reality. Take the infamous video in which he cluelessly derided the "forty-seven percent of Americans [who] pay no income tax," apparently unaware that nearly all of them have incomes too low to be taxed. But that was not the presidential contender's only comment in the video that seemed to come from some cold, warped, far-away universe. He also babbled on insensibly about how impoverished Third World people love working in sweatshops. "Back in my private equity days," he explained to his audience of fellow millionaires, "we went to China to buy a factory [that] employed about 20,000 people… almost all young women between the ages of about 18 and 22. As we were walking through this facility, seeing the number of hours they worked per day, the pittance they earned, living in dormitories with maybe ten rooms. And the rooms, they had 12 girls per room, three bunk beds on top of each other." "And around this factory was a huge fence with barbed wire, and guard towers. And we said, 'Gosh, I can't believe that you keep these girls in.' They said, 'No, no, no – this is to keep other people from coming in. Because people want so badly to come work in this factory that we have to keep them out, or they'll just come in here and start working and try and get compensated.'" See, in MittWorld, even life in a Chinese sweatshop is beautiful. The astonishing thing is that Romney just swallowed the factory manager's malarky whole, without questioning him – or any of the workers. And this guy wants to be president of the United States?

It's always refreshing to hear a multimillionaire tax dodger smugly disparage poor people who "pay no income tax." Mitt Romney is the multimillionaire's name – the man from Bain who says he should be our president. Well… not everyone's president. At a $50,000-a-plate fundraiser in the tony town of Boca Raton, Florida, Romney heaped scorn on the "forty-seven percent of Americans [who] pay no income tax." These shirkers, Mitt declared, "believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it." This from a man with three houses, 12 tax shelters in the Cayman Islands, and at least one secret Swiss bank account. He then asserted contemptuously that "my job is not to worry about those people." And who are "those" people (who were dubbed "lucky duckies" by the Wall Street Journal for avoiding income taxes)? The poor! Mostly, they're Social Security retirees whose benefits are too low to be taxed, poorly-paid soldiers in Afghanistan and single moms whose meager paychecks entitle them to a child tax credit, disabled veterans, and workers who've been maimed on the job. Luckie duckies, indeed. Yet, despite their poverty and Romney's snarkiness, they do pay lots and lots of taxes – payroll taxes, federal fees, sales taxes, local and state assessments, etc. In fact, the poorest Americans pay a higher percentage of their income in state, local, and other federal levies than the richest pay. People making under $20,000 a year, for example, pay nearly a fourth of their income in such taxes – a far bigger percentage than Romney himself pays. Meanwhile, Mitt didn't mention that there's one special group in the No Tax Club he mocks: millionaires! Last year, some 4,000 households with income above a million dollars paid zero federal income tax. Where’s his scorn for these real tax dodgers?

Food fight, everyone – let's all join the fun! Actually, this is neither fun nor a fight that America's consumers and organic food producers wanted to be in, but we've been forced into it by a cabal of corporate profiteers and their government enablers. For 20 years, they've plotted to hurl fields-full of "spoiled" food at us, including corn, soybeans, cereals, bread, and snacks. These foods have been spoiled by corporate geneticists rejiggering the very DNA of our foodstuffs. They've taken genes from other species (including animals and bacteria) and artificially slipped the foreign material into nature's own healthy products. The industry asserts that these genetically engineered crops increase farm yields and make food cheaper, but in fact GE yields are down and grocery prices are up. The real purpose of DNA engineering has simply been to create plants that absorb more pesticides. Excuse me, but if these tampered products are so great, why are the big food manufacturers who use them not bragging about that wonderful fact to shoppers? They should be running ads shouting: "Hey, we've got GEs in here!" Instead, they've conspired behind closed doors with lawmakers and regulators to keep consumers in the dark about any GE ingredients inside the products. This brings us to the big food fight. A coalition of consumers, organic advocates, nutritionists, and others have successfully put the "Right to Know Genetically Engineered Food" initiative on California's November election ballot. It would require food from GE crops to be labeled as such. Spooked by the very thought of consumer disclosure, an array of corporate giants are now flooding money and lies into the state to defeat the people's fundamental right to know what's in their food. To join the fight for honesty, go to: www.caRightToKnow.org.

Some statements by corporate chieftains tickle my funny bone – but more often they torture my cynical bone. Take the hoary claim that today's extravagant level of CEO pay is the natural product of the magical free market. To attract top executive talent, goes this line, it's simply essential to lay out a feast of big bucks. Not mentioned is another "magical force" bloating the big boss' paycheck: you and me. Specifically, us taxpayers. In a case of the rules being rigged by-and-for the elite, America's tax laws conveniently provide that the more the chief is paid, the bigger the tax break the corporation gets. So, naturally, they get a lot. In its annual report on executive excess, the watchdog Institute for Policy Studies recently documented 26 corporations that lavished an average of $20 million on each of their CEOs last year, including CBS, Citigroup, Discovery, Motorola Mobility, Oracle and Viacom. In every case, the compensation loophole and other special breaks meant that the corporation paid more to their top guy than they paid in federal income taxes. In addition, thanks to the Bush tax giveaways to the uppermost upper-income takers, more than half of last year's 100 top-paid CEOs were able to dodge at least a million dollars each in personal income taxes they otherwise owed to support the public services that benefit them. The honcho of oil & gas fracker ConocoPhillips, for example, got nearly a $7 million tax subsidy from us on his 2011 pay of more than $145 million. It's bad enough that top bosses have grossly inflated their pay while relentlessly slashing the wages of employees – but it's grotesque that they've perverted our tax laws to underwrite their excess. To see the IPS report and recommendations for reform, go to www.ips-dc.org.

A message from our corporate-governmental-media establishment: Your future is on Mars. They're referring to "Curiosity," NASA's lovable robot that's now probing and analyzing the Red Planet with human-like dexterity and abilities. Meanwhile, back on Earth, 128 similarly-sophisticated robots are making electric shavers for Phillips Electronics – work that would take ten times that many humans. A New York Times article marveled that the robot's arms "work with yoga-like flexibility… well beyond the capability of the most dexterous human." Plus, exclaimed the Times, "They do it all without a coffee break– three shifts a day, 365 days a year." Corporations have hundreds of fully robotized manufacturing plants already in operation or planned, and Philips' manager says, "[With these robots] we can make any consumer device in the world." Indeed, Apple's iPhone maker in China plans to install more than a million robots to displace untold numbers of workers. Likewise, robots are now assembling Boeing's wide body jets, packing California lettuce in shipping boxes, making Hyundai and Tesla cars, and operating our nation's largest grocery warehouse. The Times says flatly: "This is the future." Oh? So, what are millions of displaced human workers to do? No one knows. Worse, no planning for or even thinking about the human future is underway. Instead, we're getting balderdash and BS about how "This is the march of progress" that'll "make America more competitive." "More competitive" for whom and to what end? Too often, we've seen the power elites wave the flag of "progress" as they march right over the well-being of the many. Now is the time to start a national discussion about their autocratic and avaricious reach for robotic profits, making them address the crucial human issues involved.

At last, someone has stood up for America's downtrodden. I mean, of course, the downtrodden Wall Street banks. This defender of fat cat bankers moans that public anger at the behemoths is "unprecedented." He wails that poor Wall Streeters, publicly assailed as "greedy," are having to fend off "the misguided idea that we should break up the nations largest banks." And who is this champion of the goliaths? William Harrison, the guy who engineered the mergers that created the JPMorgan Chase goliath and became fabulously rich as the conglomerate's CEO, before retiring in 2006. But Harrison sprang out of retirement this August to write an op-ed piece in the New York Times, pleading for public appreciation of bank gigantism. He called the consolidation of financial businesses a natural, market-driven evolution toward efficiency, citing Starbucks and big box retailers like Walmart as models. Bad examples, Bill – both are relentless predators that profit by devouring the economic vitality of local businesses, employees, suppliers, and whole communities as they stamp their sterile brand of uniformity across the land. Then, the poor guy tumbled head-first into credibility gulch with a patently preposterous claim that Wall Street does not have "inordinate influence... on the political process" – nor he added, does it get "huge, implicit subsidies from the government." As for his cry that today's public anger at too-big-to-fail banks is "unprecedented," Harrison needs a remedial course in American history. Avaricious bankers have always been despised – my own state's first Constitution even outlawed banks! Of course, people are angry today – the very banks he's defending (including his) are lawless entities that admit to rigging interest rates, money laundering, fraud, and careless speculation. So, yes, bust 'em up!