Jim Hightower's Lowdown

An old adage says, "Never buy a pig in a poke." But what about a poke hidden in a pig? That's different, say the corporate profiteers behind the startling number of our food products that now contain genetically engineered organisms, altering the DNA make-up of everything from corn to pigs. Yet – even though GE foods pose serious health, environmental, and economic dangers to consumers and farmers – the profiteers want to keep the very existence of such contents hidden from consumers. No need to put that information on food packages, insist industry officials, just trust us. Uh… no. In consumer surveys, about 9 out of 10 Americans say they want GE foods to be labeled so they can decide for themselves whether to buy the industry's hype. That's why public support is so strong for California's right-to-know initiative that would require food companies to admit using GE ingredients. So, how have the manipulators and deceivers responded? By doubling down on manipulation and deception. Bio-engineering giants like Monsanto and such food powers as Kellogg's and Kraft are putting as much as $100 million into a PR campaign to lie about the safety of these DNA-altered foods and to scare voters with false claims about skyrocketing food prices if the initiative passes. Posing as the consumers' friend, the "Coalition Against Costly Food Labeling" has sprung up in California. It's a PR front group funded by such "friends" of ours as Grocery Manufactures of America and the Council for Biotech Information – which themselves are political fronts for the usual corporate suspects. Why are these purveyors of GE food so desperate to hide the true content of their own product from their customers? Because they have something to hide. For more information, go to: www.OrganicConsumers.org.

Such energy powers as BP, ExxonMobil, Halliburton, and Koch Industries have gone crackers over fracking! Seeing huge profits from this dreadfully destructive and dangerously dirty method of forcing natural gas out of rock formations deep in the Earth, the industry is presently scurrying all over the country asking landowners to sign contracts allowing them to drill & frack on farms, parkland, playgrounds, and even people's backyards. But now, in cities and rural areas alike, this unbridled "gas rush" has become a matter of deeply grave concern. Literally. In the shriveled ethical universe of these fracking profiteers, money trumps everything, and nothing is sacred – not even graveyards, the eternal resting place of our loved ones. Yes, gas frackers across the country are out to get drilling rights in hundreds of cemeteries, promising maintenance money to caretakers in exchange for letting the corporations sink their explosive siphons down under the dearly departed. "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust… and mineral rights to Exxon." How spiritual. Oh, come on, snap the industry's impatient hustlers, the fracking takes place way underground, so it won't disturb the graves. Yeah, but what about the souls? A cemetery is a spiritual sanctuary – a place of respect, serenity, and moral decorum. But a fracking corporation has no soul, and its moral concerns penetrate no deeper than its bottom line. For a measure of just shallow corporate morality is, note that frackers even threaten the hallowed ground of some of our veterans' cemeteries. Their ethos is clear: "Hey, outa the way – decorum is one thing, but there's money under those graves!" It's not just deep rock that they're out to fracture, it's our deepest values, too – our sense of who we are as a people. To fight this, go to www.FoodAndWaterWatch.org.

Poor Paul Ryan – he successfully rammed a budget bill through the U.S. House that gutted Medicare, thus earning him the undying adulation of the far-right Republican fringe, whose unrestrained enthusiasm for him compelled Mitt Romney to name the Wisconsin Republican as his VP nominee. So far, so good – but, WHAM! – the Romney-Ryan ticket had barely debuted before Mitt started dumping on his newly-anointed running mate's budget. Curiously, that's the exact same budget that Romney had gushed about during the Republican primary this spring, calling it a "bold and exciting effort" that is "very much needed." But that was when Mitt was trolling for votes in the shallow waters of the fringe. Now, however, Ryan's budget, the very bauble that got him to the GOP's number two political slot, turns out to be so widely and wildly unpopular with voters in the deeper waters of the general election that it's already been trashed by the GOP's number one. "I have my own budget plan," Romney backpedaled the day after he knighted Sir Ryan," and that's the budget plan we're going to run on." It's kind of strange (and a bit unsettling) to see a candidate for president of the US of A straining to explain that he's the one in charge, not the young ideologue. Romney even went on national TV to tell us that, while Ryan would certainly be consulted, "I have to make the final call in important decisions." Sure, Mitt – you da man! But was he trying to convince us… or himself? Or Ryan? Indeed, at the staged event where Romney introduced his choice for Veep, he bungled his line, presenting Ryan as "the next President of the United States." Was that just another Romney gaffe? A Freudian slip? Or an eerie moment of candor? If they were honest with voters, their bumper sticker would read: "Ryan-Romney in 2012."

Question: If you mix a cocktail of "black liquor," biofuels, diesel, and a generous splash of tax subsidies – then have it shaken vigorously by Sen. Mike Crapo and served in a golden goblet by corporate lobbyists, what do you call it? Answer: Koch Brothers Moonshine. Black liquor, a by-product of the paper-making process, is an alcoholic sludge that paper mills use to fuel their operations. Fine – creative, even. But then, the paper giants turned from creative to cabal, teaming with Sen. Crapo and other practitioners of the legislative black arts to turn their sludge into a slick tax loophole. In 2007, Crapo and a covey of corporate lobbyists quietly made their "liquor" eligible for a subsidy meant to help wean America off of oil by encouraging the production of a biofuel-gasoline mix to power cars and trucks. Not so fine. One, vehicles can't use mill sludge as a fuel. Two, rather than mixing biofuel to their sludge, the paper-makers add diesel! So these sneaks are siphoning-off billions of dollars from a clean-fuels program by making a dirty fuel dirtier. Who's profiting from this load of moonshine? Right at the top are the infamous, far-right-wing Koch brothers. These secretive, multi-billionaire political extremists have long been financing everything from dozens of corporate front groups to the tea party in their relentless effort to impose their plutocratic agenda on our country. One major way they pay for this onslaught is by tapping directly into the blatant corporate welfare of the black liquor loophole. The Koch industrial empire includes Georgia Pacific, one of America's largest paper-makers – and it's the happy recipient of as much as a billion bucks a year from the perverted biofuel subsidy. A dirty windfall from a dirty fuel to underwrite dirty politics. The whole thing stinks.

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.

What's your favorite adult beverage? Some like Johnnie Walker "Black Label," and others like "Black Box" wine. However, no one drinks a product called "black liquor," even though we all pick up the tab for it. Black liquor is an alcoholic sludge. Yuck! It's a byproduct of wood processing, used as a fuel in timber and paper mills. While you wouldn't imbibe the stuff, Sen. Mike Crapo has made sure that we taxpayers have to swallow an even less-tasty, $3-billion-dollar-a-year federal subsidy for a handful of very profitable corporations that use the sludge to power their plants. This tax dodge is ridiculous, first because it benefits so few at such a high price. Second, it's especially interesting hypocritical that Crapo is the one who poked the sludge-subsidy pipeline into law, for this Idaho Republican routinely blasts other senators for making the federal deficit worse by creating tax loopholes for – hello – special interests. Third, Sen. Crapo's loophole is truly loopy, for the subsidy comes out of a program set up by Congress specifically for alternative fuels in automobiles. Black liquor definitely does not qualify, but that's no barrier for a high-stepping senator out to subsidize a home state corporation. So – hocus-pocus – alcoholic sludge was magically defined as a fuel for vehicles, letting Crapo's favored corporations hot-rod around their tax obligations. Wait, there's more. Not wanting to be seen as just another senatorial servant of industry, deficit hawk Crapo performed his black magic in the dark, working behind closed doors early this year to preserve the fuel-funding loophole for black liquor. The next time you hear Congress critters like Crapo demanding that you sacrifice to cut the deficit, demand that they show you the rabbits they're hiding in their magician's hat.

As evidenced by Ted Cruz's recent victory in the Texas senatorial primary, the Republican party's core voters have made the leap from right-wing… to right out of their minds! Cruz defeated a die-hard anti-government, anti-union, anti-environment extremist by running as such an über-extremist that the die-hard guy ended up looking almost moderate. And for the mad-dog tea party faction that dominates today's Republican Party, appearing at all "moderate" (or even slightly sane) is the mark of the devil. So, Cruz not only won the primary handily but is now celebrated nationally as "the people's choice." Partisan pundits have taken to declaring that his victory proves that the American electorate clearly wants candidates for high office to hold uncompromising "tea party values." Hog poop. In politics, the "big story" often is not the one trumpeted at us by the myopic media and political cognoscenti, but the one they don't report at all. In the Cruz case, we should step back from the hyped results, take a deep breath and look at two big, honking, neon-lit numbers that reveal a stunning truth not only about the Texas race, but also about the sad state of America's democratic process. First: 631,316. That's how small the actual vote was for Cruz and his whole kit and caboodle of far-right-wing balderdash. Many small cities across the country have more people than that. Next: 15,915,758. That's how many eligible voters there are in Texas. Do the math (which the media failed to do), and the real story turns out to be that Cruz is the choice of no more than four percent of the voters of Texas. This is what America's politics has become: so empty and asinine that a guy can win nomination to a U.S. senate seat with a pathetic four percent of the vote… and be hailed as the choice of "the people."

Why isn't Sandy Weill treated as a crook? He not only violated the law, but arrogantly flaunted it. Yet the system treats the criminal acts of Wall Street Royals like him as the by-product of "financial innovation." Far from criminal, you see, Weill simply suffers from Narcissistic Avariciousness Disorder. NAD prompted Weill in the 1990s to create Citigroup, the Wall Street conglomerate that wired your and my bank deposits to reckless deal-making by global speculators. At the time, his too-big-to-fail model directly violated the Glass-Steagall Act, passed in 1933 to prevent another Depression. But in 1999, Weill got Congress to repeal that act, thus legalizing his house of cards that made him a billionaire – before it crashed on our economy in 2008. But having NAD means never having to say "mea culpa," much less "I'm sorry." So, while Weill now says that Glass-Stegall should be reinstated, he still insists that he was right to repeal it at the time – and that he's not responsible for any of the consequential pain that Americans are suffering. Indeed, he's even playing the victim, wailing recently that "Our world hates bankers." No, Sandy, the world hates greed and self-aggrandizement. You are, after all, the guy who has kept a four-foot-wide wood etching of yourself in your office, grandiosely titling it: "The Shatterer of Glass-Steagall." Yet, the clueless bankster who shattered that glass so he could reach in and help himself to an immense fortune, now wants us to remember him as a pious reformer. But remember this: Just weeks after American taxpayers ponied up $45 billion to bail out his once-haughty bank, the narcissistic Weill commandeered a Citigroup jet to give him a free ride to a Mexican vacation resort. This act of arrogance led a New York Post headline that will be Weill's eternal epitaph: "Pigs Fly."

At last, we have a clear sign that Mitt Romney really is "a man of the people!" The proof of his populist pudding came on his recent political foray to Jolly Old England. While in London, the multimillionaire financier and presidential hopeful showed his common touch by chowing down with about 250 local folks on a humble meal of fish and chips, served up in paper cones. Wow – down home! Well, not exactly. "Folks" mischaracterizes Mitt's crowd, since the ticket price for the chow-down was $25,000 to $75,000 per head. For fish and chips! As one somewhat surprised attendee noted, "It was the most expensive halibut in town." And the donors were not truly locals, but American financiers who're top executives working in the London financial district for the biggest Wall Street and British banks, hedge funds, and such private equity outfits as Romney's own money machine, Bain Capital. They were drawn to Mitt's political flame because, one, he hails from their self-centered and self-serving world and, two, he fully embraces their sad complaint that public criticism and the push for more regulation of elite bankers has gone too far. With tongue-clucking empathy, Romney assured these privileged ones that America's Dodd-Frank banking reforms were "unnecessary" and "overly burdensome" – and he would repeal them. However, the timing of his denunciation of U.S. policywas off, for – like Wall Street – such British banks as Barclay's and HSBC are presently ensnared in public scandals involving massive consumer ripoffs and gross ethical violations. Still, in this ornate ballroom, with millionaire's munching the food of the commoners, any outrage from actual commoners was, as one muncher said dismissively, just "background noise." Yeah, that's Mitt's crowd all right. Power to the 1%!

Hallelujah and Holy Smokes – the biggest sinner on Wall Street has repented! He is Sandy Weill, the deal-maker who turned our banks into financial "supermarkets" that tie us everyday customers to the profiteering schemes of global speculators. In the late 1980s, Weill went on a decade-long merger binge, taking over Travelers Insurance, Smith Barney, and several other powerhouses of high finance, culminating in 1998 with his grabbing of Citibank. The empire was named Citigroup, Weill was paid a king's ransom, and he was hailed as a genius. Only one problem: His conglomerated entity was illegal. After the financial collapse of 1929 led to the Great Depression, the Glass-Steagall Act was passed to protect people's deposits by prohibiting banks from also gambling in stocks, insurance schemes, etc. Picky-picky, said Weill, who simply hired a hoard of lobbyists to get Washington to legalize his illegal structure by repealing the pesky law he was blatantly violating. In 1999, Congress dutifully nixed Glass-Steagall, and Wall Street promptly rushed to amalgamate more Citigroups, thus creating the "too-big-to-fail" system that – only eight years later – did indeed fail. Weill's "genius" forced a multitrillion–dollar bailout on us taxpayers (including $45 billion for Citigroup itself). By then, though, the genius had retired with so much money he could afford to air-condition hell. But now – approaching 80 and perhaps hoping to avoid that destination – Weill has suddenly become a born again convert to the gospel of Glass-Steagall, calling for today's megabanks to be "split up" so they are "not too big to fail." Wow – redemption! Note, though, that Saint Sandy is not returning any of the millions he pocketed from his devilish scheme – just in case he really does need to buy that air conditioner.

If you thought that right-wing politicos couldn't get any goofier – take a peek at "Texas on Cruz Control." Ted Cruz is America's latest tea party darling. He just pulled off a contortion in Texas that few would've thought humanly possible: he got to the right of Gov. Rick Perry – himself a former tea party darling who's such a far-out know-nothing that he's best known for putting the goober in gubernatorial. In the recent Republican primary, however, Cruz squinched himself Houdini-like into even-further-out political positions than Perry has taken, thus defeating the guy whom Perry wanted to be the Party's nominee for a seat in the U.S. Senate. How far out is he, you ask? One of the white-hot talking points Cruz used to fire-up the narrow extremists who now control the Texas GOP is that he will, by God, defend America's golf courses! You might not have realized that golf course defense is a burning national issue crying out for U.S. Senate attention, but such deep vigilence is apparently what makes Cruz a tea party fave. He says that he has ferreted out a diabolical United Nations plot to "abolish 'unsustainable' environments, including golf courses." Attention Patriots: grab your putters and rush to your local links, for the UN is coming! To burnish his crazy bonafides, Cruz adds that, "The originator of this grand scheme is George Soros." While Cruz promises to save American golfers from this tea party boogeyman, he says he also intends to save all of us from Social Security – by turning our retirement money over to the altruistic geniuses of Wall Street. Oh, let's get rid of unemployment benefits, too, because, explains Professor Cruz, helping the jobless increases unemployment. Cruz is what's happening to the Republican Party nationally – veering off from conservative… to crazy.

One of the juiciest ironies of Tampa’s newly-minted law to suppress protest at the upcoming Republican National Convention is that it bans the carrying of water pistols by protesters. However, thanks to Florida’s nutty right-wing governor, anyone with a concealed-weapon permit is free to tote an actual bullet-firing pistol! Apparently, the authorities really do consider blood to be thicker than water. Even nuttier is the fantasy of convention organizers that they can lock down the feisty and essential American spirit of political protest with a rash of ridiculous liberty-repressing laws. Among their ordinances is a directive that thousands of demonstrators squeeze their public expressions into short “parade routes” and out-of-the-way “viewing areas.” This is as futile as King George III demanding that American revolutionaries march into battle by lining up in neat rows to be shot down by his Redcoats. A spokesman for one protest group says flatly that its members will pick their own spots to assemble and have their say: “We [Americans] were born with the right to move freely from place to place and speak our minds,” he rightly points out. Also, a poor people’s coalition is setting up a “Romneyville” on private property in Tampa, providing what it calls “a kind of refuge” against the government’s attempt to box-in its protest of policies that are increasing poverty all across America. The opposite of courage is not cowardice – it’s conformity. What makes America great are courageous folks like these who refuse to go along with authoritarians and elites who always demand that we surrender our most basic liberties to protect them from speech they don’t want to hear. To keep up with this never-ending battle of rights versus wrong, go to the National Lawyers Guild’s website at www.nlg.org.

The high-rollers who run Wall Street's top hedge funds essentially gamble with other people's money, betting billions of dollars on such stuff as whether XYZ Corporation's third-quarter profits will be one point lower than forecast. Doing this, they assert, is genius work, entitling them to be paid more than anyone else. Two years ago, for example, each of the top 10 hedge fund dealers averaged $175 million in pay – or about $84,000 an hour! Sure enough, their bets on corporate performance usually turn out to be winners. How do they do that? Are they really Einsteins – or is something else in play? Something else. The New York Times reports that a handful of big hedge funds have been systematically receiving insider tips from corporate analysts working at Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, and other Wall Street stock brokerages. These analysts, who are experts on the inner-workings of particular corporations, have quietly been sending periodic insider updates on corporate performance to a few favored funds. The under-the-table updates reveal such key information as whether XYZ's corporate profits are heading up or down, or whether management changes or other corporate surprises are in the works. The insights of these analysts are supposed to be released only on a set date to the public at large, so no one investor gets an advantage. But the internal documents of the big hedge funds show that they’re getting an early peek, allowing them to make their investment bets before ordinary investors know what's going on. With these tips, the funds make a killing, while non-privileged small investors often take a hit. Like Las Vegas hustlers, high-strutting hedge fund whizzes aren't brilliant or deserving – and certainly not ethical. They're getting rich by gaming the system.

Ah, it’s August – time for the presidential nominating conventions! This grand testimonial of our citizens’ rights and liberties will begin with the Republicans in Tampa. Flags are being mounted, majestic music is being arranged, uplifting speeches are being scripted – and, as has now become normal for these spectacles of democracy-in-action, heavily-armed police repression of our cherished First Amendment rights is being ordered. Of course, the delegates, candidates, lobbyists, and billionaire funders inside the GOP’s convention bunker will be perfectly free (as they should be) to gild the promises and lies that will frame their presidential campaign. They will not be bothered by the 4,000 riot-geared police that authorities will deploy around Tampa. However, any outsider citizens who come to practice the hallowed freedoms of public assembly and speech at the convention will be welcomed by a thoroughly un-American police state. In May, at the behest of national Republican officials, Tampa’s mayor and council passed a temporary ordinance to suspend our First Amendment and authorize a crackdown on protesters. Warning ominously that a few vandals might get out of control, the ordinance tries to force all citizen demonstrators into a few restricted parade routes and what amounts to “protest pens.” Preemptive detainments, indiscriminate mass arrests, and police infiltrations of peaceful protest groups can be expected. Ironically, that’s the kind of autocratic excess that led to the American Revolution itself. The city’s top lawyer recently barked that, “troublemakers… will not be tolerated.” But the real troublemakers are those inside the hall – and inside a police system that’s being used to stomp on the very freedoms that America is supposed to embrace and encourage. What's coming down in Tampa this month is not what Madison, Jefferson, and the others meant by liberty.

Bizarrely, the CEOs of America's highly-conglomerated news sources keep trying to jack up profits by shedding the editors and reporters who actually create their product. Not to worry, though, for a new breed of political editors has arisen to guide reporters. Who are these new, green-eyeshaded overseers of what's allowed in our daily dose of political news? The candidates and officeholders whom the media supposedly cover. Yes, newspapers are outsourcing a key part of their political coverage to the coverees! For example, both Obama and Romney insist that their staffs be allowed to edit any interviews or quotations that are to appear in print. Holy Joseph Pulitzer! What reputable news source would ever agree to giving politicians the right to delete, rephrase, and otherwise sanitize their public comments? Answer: Bloomberg News, National Journal, New York Times, Politico, and… well, just about all that claim to be the "legitimate" press. The Romney campaign even requires reporters who interview any of Mitt's five sons to use only quotes censored by his press office. For these public figures to demand such Orwellian control is outrageous, but for the media to go along is disgraceful. "It's not something I'm particularly proud of," says a National Journal reporter. Proud of? How about ashamed of? How about turning in your press pass? "We don't like the practice," weaseled the New York Times' managing editor. How pathetic! If a powerhouse paper like the Times doesn’t like it, then just refuse to do it. Luckily, some – such as the National Journal – have now been embarrassed into finally saying "no" to this blatant censorship. To help stiffen the Jello backbones of other so-called "news" sources, connect with Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting: www.fair.org.