Jim Hightower's Lowdown

In a world that’s clogged and choking with a massive overdose of plastic trash, you’ll be heartened to learn that governments and industries are teaming up to respond forcefully to this planetary crisis. Unfortunately, their response has been to engage in a global race to make more plastic stuff and to force poor countries to become dumping grounds for plastic garbage. Leading this Kafkaesque greedfest are such infamous plunderers and polluters as Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell, and other petrochemical profiteers. With fossil fuel profits crashing, the giants are rushing to convert more of their over-supply of oil into plastic. But where to send the monstrous volumes of waste that will result? The industry’s chief lobbyist outfit, the American Chemistry Council, looked around last year and suddenly shouted: “Eureka, there’s Africa!” In particular, they’re targeting Kenya to become “a plastics hub” for global trade in waste. However, Kenyans have an influential community of environmental activists who’ve enacted some of the world’s toughest bans on plastic pollution. To bypass this inconvenient local opposition, the dumpers are resorting to an old corporate power play: “Free Trade.” Their lobbyists are pushing an autocratic trade agreement that would ban Kenyan officials from passing their own laws or rules that interfere with trade in plastic waste. Trying to hide their ugliness, the plastic profiteers created a PR front group called “Alliance to End Public Waste.” But – hello – it’s not “public” waste. Exxon and other funders of the alliance make, promote, and profit from the mountains of destructive trash they now demand we clean up. The real problem is not waste, but plastic itself. From production to disposal, it’s destructive to people and the planet. Rather than subsidizing petrochemical behemoths to make more of the stuff, policymakers should seek out and encourage people who are developing real solutions and alternatives.

What does your toothbrush, a fish dinner, and your running shoes have in common? Plastic. We now live on Planet Plastic, billions of tons of waste from everyday products made of these chemical contaminants are strewn literally everywhere – on the highest mountaintops, into the deepest seabeds, in dense tropical jungles and all across barren deserts. It’s estimated, for example, that in less than 30 years, the gross volume of discarded plastic in our oceans will outnumber fish! From grocery carry-out bags to shower curtains to almost invisible bits of microplastics, the vast tonnage of this trash increases every minute, with an afterlife lasting centuries, wreaking havoc on ecosystems, destroying species, and infusing our water, air, soil, food… and us. Consider just two common products – your toothbrush and your sneakers. Until the 1930s, toothbrushes were made of degradable, natural components. Since then, though, practically all have been throwaway plastic brushes. But there is no “away,” so nearly all of the trillions of brushes we’ve discarded in the past century are still out there somewhere on the land or in our water. Moving from your teeth to your feet, consider that millions of sneakers are sold in the US each year, advertised as being athletic and “cool.” What’s uncool is that they’re made almost entirely of melded and molded plastics that are practically impossible to recycle. So, after a short time in our closets, sneakers spend an eternity as globs of toxic plastic trash. We’re being choked by our own synthetic waste – from billions of plastic bottles and cigarette filters to tons of straws and synthetic rubber tires. As the wise old saying puts it, if you find that you’ve dug yourself into a hole, the first thing to do is to quit digging. To help stop the insanity, contact the group, Beyond Plastics.

Advertising has been characterized as rattling a stick in a bucket – a noisy cry for public attention. One example of this crass hucksterism is the rush by top executives of multibillion-dollar corporations to splatter their corporate names on sports venues. Responding to a blatant scam by team owners, executives are spending absurd sums of their shareholders’ money to “win” temporary naming rights to local stadiums, arenas, etc. The come-on is that this billboarding will buy brand recognition, customer loyalty, and even public gratitude for the purchaser. Seriously? Do you fly Delta, bank at Wachovia, or drive a Toyota because their names are on a big sports structure somewhere? And what do outfits like Ameriquest, Qualcomm, and FTX even sell – and where are they located? As for public gratitude, ask Houstonians how thankful they are that global energy giant Enron slapped its name on the Astro’s baseball park in 1999, just three years before the corporation was forced into bankruptcy for being guilty of massive fraud and squalid executive greed. But the bucket-rattling name game keeps drawing new players. The latest entrants are purveyors of cryptocurrencies, the phantasmagoric, here-today-gone-tomorrow form of digital money. One of these, Crypto.com, has just laid out a ridiculous $700 million (presumably in real money, not “cryptos”) to put its occult brand name on the home arena of the Los Angeles Lakers. Why? The parties to the deal put it in grandiose terms – “a match made in heaven” exulted the arena’s giddy owner, even proclaiming that Crypto.com will “help us chart a course for the future of sports.” Huh? I doubt that this cryptic, Singapore-based money dealer can even dribble a basketball, much less direct the sport’s future! Like Enron and the rest, all it’s doing is rattling the money bucket, turning sports into just another corporate money hustle.

‘Tis the season, right? Traditionally, this time of year celebrates spirituality and festivities – including Hanukkah, Christmas, and Kwanzaa. In modern day America, however, the Winter Solstice signals the faithful to gather from afar in monumental temples to worship our nation’s supreme secular deity: Big Time Sports! Get ready for a non-stop frenzy of football, basketball, soccer, and more – with devout fans making tribal pilgrimages to their sacred stadiums and arenas. But whatever the sport, the name of the game these days is the same: M-O-N-E-Y, for the people’s sport franchises are firmly in the grip of a self-regulating handful of secretive, überrich, autocratic, corporate owners. We might worship the team that actually plays the sport, but our money mostly goes to this ruling clique of billionaire barons. Consider those gargantuan houses of worship where the games are played. We The People (including non-worshipers) paid for nearly all of them with tax dollars, usually with no chance to vote on the giveaway. Yet, a few dozen profiteering team owners are given control of the venues. They set and collect the outrageous ticket prices and are even allowed to gouge the faithful by charging $15 for one small beer! Most insulting, these rich public welfare moochers pocket millions of extra dollars a year by turning these huge edifices (even those built with the people’s money) into private billboards by selling off the so-called “naming rights” to the highest corporate bidders. Thus, dozens of our major sports facilities don’t honor the cities they’re in, the citizenry, or even the team. Instead they’re gaudily plastered with brand names like FedEx Field, Minute Maid Park, RCA Dome, and Toyota Center – as though they’re corporate owned. The money game is yet another corporate swindle, made even more corrupt by its expropriation of America’s sporting spirit for private greed.

Let's talk Turkey! No, not the Butterball sitting in the Oval Office. I'm talking about the real thing, the big bird, 46 million of which we Americans will devour on this Thanksgiving Day. It was the Aztecs who first domesticated the gallopavo, but leave it to the Spanish explorers to "foul-up" the bird's origins. They declared it to be related to the peacock – Wrong! They also thought the peacock originated in Turkey – Wrong! And, they thought Turkey was located in Africa – well, you can see the Spanish were pretty confused. Actually, the origin of Thanksgiving is confused. The popular assumption is that it was first celebrated by the Mayflower immigrants and the Wampanoag natives at Plymouth, Massachusetts, 1621. They feasted on venison, furkees (Wampanoag for gobblers) eels, mussels, corn, and beer. But wait, say Virginians, the first precursor to our annual November Food-a-Palooza was not in Massachusetts – the Thanksgiving feast originated down here in Jamestown colony, back in 1608. Whoa, there, hold your horses, pilgrims. Folks in El Paso, Texas, say it all began way out there in 1598, when Spanish settlers sat down with people of the Piro and Manso tribes, gave thanks, then feasted on roasted duck, geese and fish. "Ha!" says a Florida group, asserting the very, very first Thanksgiving happened in 1565 when the Spanish settlers of St. Augustine and friends from the Timucuan tribe chowed-down on "cocido" – a stew of salt pork, garbanzo beans and garlic - washing it all down with red wine. Wherever it began, and whatever the purists claim is "official," Thanksgiving today is as multicultural as America. So let's enjoy! Kick-back, give thanks we're in a country with such ethnic richness, and dive into your turkey rellenos, moo-shu turkey, turkey falafel, barbecued turkey...

Sometimes, when watching Congress in action, I can’t decide whether to laugh, cry, or check myself into an insane asylum. Not all lawmakers are political hacks, quacks, and corporate toadies – but that contingent does seem to dominate. Most infuriating is that while purporting to represent the people, Congress routinely does what the American majority does not want done and fails to do what people do want. Take a peek at the cuts Congress is making to Joe Biden’s landmark infrastructure proposals. This is a monumental, long-overdue undertaking to reinvest in America’s physical house and social underpinnings (everything from roads and broadband networks to child care and paid family leave). The package would deliver real, tangible benefits across our nation, especially for low- and middle-income families, so it is enormously popular. Yet, when the first half of the plan recently came to a vote in the House, Republicans turned it into a partisan mudwrestling show, loudly voting “NO” on such obvious needs as fixing decrepit bridges, providing clean tap water in every community, and opening pre-school education programs to all three- and four-year-olds. Cynical Republican gamesmanship aside, even more infuriating is the clique of self-described “moderate” Democrats who pose as champions of workaday Americans, but constantly scuttle public policies that would make their lives better. For example, the GOP and corporate Democrats have jointly demanded a trillion-dollar “compromise” in Biden’s national investment plans. What’s being compromised? Not proposals to fund the corporate wish list, but long-postponed needs of everyday Americans, including home health care, free community college, affordable housing, wage hikes, environmental justice, etc. The wealthy and their political enablers complain that America can’t afford such projects. But, hello – these aren’t “projects,” they’re people! And permitting politicos and lobbyists to leave them behind yet again would be an abominable moral failure of our society.

Here they come again – That gaggle of Washington politicos and pundits who keep assailing Joe Biden’s package of FDRish proposals that, at long last, would begin lifting up America’s infrastructure and working class. “Too big,” screech these small thinkers and servants of the plutocratic order, “too costly, and … well, too democratic.” You would expect such adamant minginess from anti-everything Republicans – but these are Democrats! Well, sort of. They’re Chicken Little Democrats, a subset whose members fastidiously call themselves middle-of-the-road moderates. Actually, though, you can almost always find them hugging the right-hand lane, clucking that the Party of the People is scaring the people with policies that – get this – directly benefit the people. This was their excuse when one of their own political adherents, Terry McAuliffe, recently lost the Virginia gubernatorial election. It’s their fault, cried the mods, pointing their blamethrowers at the Party’s progressive forces, claiming that poor Terry lost because progressives refused conservative demands to slash key democratic reforms from Biden’s infrastructure bill. They claimed that cutting the bill’s proposals to raise wages, lower drug prices, etc. would’ve made it more acceptable to Virginians. As one Washington political columnist wailed, “Had congressional Democrats given voters a reason to turn out, that could well have made the difference.” But wait – isn’t it the job of the candidate to motivate voters? McAuliffe, a lackluster peer of the business-as-usual Washington power structure, ran.a lousy campaign, basically assailing his own Republican opponent for being a less blustery political clone of Donald Trump. True, but besides not being Trump, what was Terry offering to grassroots families to excite them about voting for him? This is Jim Hightower saying… And guess what would’ve been a winning issue for him? That big progressive version of Biden’s infrastructure bill! It happens to be very popular among the voters McAuliffe needed.

At least since the invention of the wheel, people have fixed, tinkered with, and improved every device they’ve possessed. It’s been a human right. But after several thousand years, suddenly legal clauses are being tucked in purchase agreements saying that today’s owners of products MUST NOT even peek, much less poke inside the inner workings of our devices. Makers of anything with a computer chip in it (everything from your car to your toothbrush) have been especially vehement about this, rewriting human nature by outlawing our right to repair. Yes, they assert, you own the thing, but we own the intangible ideas that make it work, so if the product malfunctions, you must return it to us – and pay us a premium – to repair it. Plus, they prattle, you could hurt yourself trying to do-it-yourself, so trust us. Bovine Excrement, barks Steve Wozniak: Companies inhibit your rights so they can have “power, control, over everything.” Is he, some consumer radical? No, Wozniak is the co-founder of Apple, the multibillion-dollar global goliath that is the world’s biggest producer of consumer electronics. He’s appalled that Apple has now become a fierce opponent of self-repair. He says “We wouldn’t have had an Apple” except that early innovators like him grew up “in a very open technology world.” From the start, Wozniak point out, openness helped spread innovation and consumer demand. “So, why stop... the self-repair community,” he asks? Two big reasons: Besides letting corporations lock in monopoly profits from the repair industry, it also dissuades customers from bothering with repairs – just throw the thing away and buy a new one! If you wonder where such massive, deadly levels of pollution by bead, mercury, plastic, etc. come from, look to the gross throw-away ethic of big tech profiteers like Apple.

America’s economic and political inequality has led workaday Americans to exclaim: “The system is broken. Let’s fix it!” But there’s another version of this protest that I’m hearing more frequently these days: “The system is fixed. Let’s break it!” That certainly applies to such rigged systems as money in politics and voter suppression, but it’s also relevant to seemingly mundane matters that restrain our personal freedoms. One of the insidious “fixes” we need to break is the claim by brand-name corporations that we consumers must be banned by law from repairing the products they sell to us! The weak battery in your cell phone, the fuel sensor in a farmer’s tractor, some gizmo in the toaster you bought, a fuse in your business’ delivery truck – you could fix all of these yourself or, with little hassle, take the problem to a local repair shop. But, no, such manufacturing powerhouses as Apple, John Deere, and Panasonic assert that only their corporate technicians are authorized to open the product – which you own! – to make it work again. So, you are expected to deliver it to their distant facility, wait however-many days or weeks they tell you, and pay an inflated price. They’ve literally fixed the “fix” for consumer products. They impose their control by making the products as needlessly complicated as possible, then claiming that the complexity is their patented proprietary product. Thus, they say they don’t have to provide repair manuals or sell repair tools to consumers or independent shops. Gotcha. To give their closed profiteering system the force of law, the giants have deployed armies of lobbyists and lawyers to legislatures and courts, arguing that self-repair people really are scoundrels trying to circumvent safety and environmental rules. This is Jim Hightower saying... For information and action, go to the US Public Interest Research Group: USpirg.org.

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.

If you’re a corporate employee, you know that something unpleasant is afoot when top executives are suddenly issuing statements about how committed they are to their employees, making sure that all of them are treated with dignity and respect. For example, the PR chief of a global outfit named Teleperformance, one of the world’s largest call centers, was recently going on and on about how “We value our people and their well-being, safety, and happiness.” Why did the corporation feel such a desperate need to proclaim its virtue? Because it’s been caught in a nasty scheme to spy on its own workers. Teleperformance – a $6.7 billion global behemoth that handles customer service calls for Amazon, Apple, Uber, etc. – saves money on overhead by making most of its 380,000 employees around the world work from their own homes. That can be a convenience for many workers, but a new corporate policy first imposed in March on thousands of its workers in Columbia, is an Orwellian nightmare. Teleperformance is pressuring them to sign an eight-page addendum to their employee contracts, allowing corporate-controlled video cameras, electronic audio devices, and data collection tools to be put in their homes to monitor their actions. “I work in my bedroom,” one employee noted. “I don’t want to have a camera in my bedroom.” Neither would I, and I doubt that Teleperformance’s $20 million-a-year CEO would allow one in his mansion. Uglier yet, the privacy-obliterating contract requires that even the children of employees can be spied on at home. Nonetheless, the Columbian worker signed, because her supervisor said she could lose her job if she refused. Of course, Teleperformance Inc. assures us that the data it collects on children is not shared elsewhere. But how do we know that? Trust us, they say. This is Jim Hightower saying... Do you?

Tick-tick-tick... each sweep of Big-Tech’s clock enhances corporate power – but its hands also sweep away more of our civil rights. At first, each new surge of artificial intelligence and robotic technologies can seem perfectly benign ... even playful. Take “Spot,” the robotic, four-legged “doggie” that actually has no spots, no enduring puppy eyes, can’t bark, has no tail to wag, and is very un-doggy. In fact, this electronic critter is rather creepily nightmarish, but it’s marketed by cute videos, including one of Spot mixing margaritas (admit it, that beats training your real dog to bring your slippers to you). But you can’t just adopt a Spot at your local animal shelter. Each artificial canine – manufactured by Boston Dynamics, which is owned by Korean auto giant Hyundai Motor Company, sells for about $75,000. So, who’s buying them? Mainly, such big corporate outfits as oil refineries, mining operations, and electric utilities that want an unblinking eye to monitor and record workers, visitors, protestors, and all others who approach their facilities. Just one more layer of our cycloptic surveillance society. But the point at which Spot loses all cuteness and turns into a menacing beast of authoritarianism is when it’s turned into a police dog. There’s been quite a public backlash, for example, against the Honolulu police department for deploying one of the robotic canines in a tent city for homeless people. In addition to outrage at the obvious class bias in siccing Spot on the homeless, the public outcry grew hotter when it was revealed that the police had used federal pandemic relief funds to buy their Spot! As usual, corporate and government officials assure us that this latest tech marvel won’t be used to spy on innocent people, be weaponized, or otherwise bite us on the butt. Trust us, they say. No.

Question: What does a packet of M&M’s and your local veterinarian have in common? Answer: Both are owned by Mars Inc., the global candy monopolist. Since the 1980s, we’ve seen massive consolidations in industry after industry – from airlines to newspapers, the internet to candy. These monopolists run roughshod over consumers, workers, communities, suppliers, and our nation’s commitment to the Common Good. And now the corporate attitude seems to be, “what the Hell, why not let monopolization go to the dogs?” This change has been led by “private equity groups.” They are corporate-takeover sharks that borrow billions of dollars to buy out, plunder, then sell off the remnants of established businesses. They target enterprises that can be grabbed on the cheap but have assets like a loyal customer base. Then the sharks raise prices on those customers while cutting staff and quality of service. This has been happening to thousands of local vet practices and hospitals, which have quietly been plucked by Wall Street entities bearing non-descript acronyms like IVC, JAB, KKR, and VCA. At first locals don’t notice the takeover, because the corporate outfit not only buys your friendly “Dr. Barry Bones” vet service, they also buy the Doc’s name. As an IVC takeover consultant confided: “People like to take their dog to local vets and not feel like it’s a corporate machine.” But increasingly, it is. Solo practitioners who became veterinarians to provide friendly, community-based service now must answer to bean counters at headquarters – and, foremost, they must serve profit over animals. Veterinary Center of America (VCA), for example, is one of the most aggressive monopolizers, controlling access to and prices charged by 1,000+ vet facilities in 43 states. In 2017, VCA was taken over by Mars Inc. One feisty group battling monopolizers is the National Veterinary Professionals Union – Get info at natvpu.org.

For many people, the animals they adopt and love become more like family members than pets. We have deep relationships, with cats, dogs, parrots, goats, horses, and other fellow critters – who at least pretend to love us back, providing comfort and joy all around. Sadly though, life for all of us animals is a spin around the wheel of fortune, so illness and injuries happen. That’s why one of the most valued members of every community are the staffers in our local veterinarian office. Practically all vets, nurses, technicians, and support staff are there chiefly because they love animals and get personal satisfaction from providing care for them. When I say they are “there,” I not only mean 9 to 5, but this group of independent health providers are committed to being there when needed – including off hours and days off, for animal misfortune and suffering don’t go by clocks and calendars. Local practitioners also try to be there for low-income people, offering deferred payment plans and even discounted fees so their animals can get the treatment they need. But wait – sound the ambulance sirens! Something is going horribly wrong! This venerable profession has recently been collapsing into a corporate model of Wall Street owned chains. They are monopolizing markets, reducing staff, gutting service, and prioritizing the love of money over the love of animals. It’s not uncommon these days for franticly-worried customers to bring an ill or injured pet into their old reliable vet office only to find it has quietly come under chain ownership, is understaffed, and is unwilling to accept the patient, forcing a desperate scramble to find emergency care, often out of town. This is Jim Hightower saying... The same profiteering corporate mentality that has proven disastrous for human health care is now rapidly locking down pet care – and that’s an act of animal cruelty.